In some sort of lyrical mood one day, I found myself writing about the cracked skin at the corner of my thumb, which I had pressed into a tiny ball of deep red blood.
"Do you think maybe that's how pain works? Slowly the wound begins to heal under the blood? I rather like that idea. My heart is rather broken at the moment. Stones in ponds. Maybe it will take a while, but perhaps that process has already started?"
- Weird Hope, 15/7/14
The summer also brought with it some long lazy days and the hope of a holiday in the Peak District. I put my tent up in the garden (the birds used it as a toilet), wrote about ice cream tumbling down my hands, watched Eastbourne Pier go up in smoke and went on a night walk.
As August dawned, we leaped into our camp, which was a lot of fun. Early morning chats with Winners watching the sun poke through the fog were a highlight. So was hanging out with Emmie and Sammy, and the adorable collection of small children roaming the campsite while their parents assembled picnic tables and barbecues. I think next year I will try to write more about The Gathering.
From there, it was straight up north to Buxton.
"Thunder rumbled above. The trees moaned. I doubled over, hands on my knees, catching my breath, soaked and now exhausted. It would be a short walk back from here, I supposed and I set off down the path into the tree tunnel."
- Solomon's Temple, 13/8/14
It did rain. But it was also glorious, walking through the silent hills. I did sketching, a bit of climbing, wrote some poems, thought I'd died, came back looking like Grizzly Adams... that kind of thing. Magnificent.
Returning to work though after those two weeks, wasn't quite so much fun. They'd knocked down walls and moved everything around. Then I spilt a whole bottle of milk and had to clear it up. August was also the month when the Vending Machine (I'm telling you this happened) said my name and persuaded me to buy a KitKat Chunky. I wrote about it in The Vending Machine Gains Sentience.
House-sitting followed in The Museum of Someone Else's Life and soon the weather carried a chill. The skies held more rain than sunshine. September had arrived. It did have its pleasant moments though - a work conference in Falmouth, mingling on the beach and avoiding going to London for a scrum masters training thing. It was also quite a relief to see Scotland wanting to stick together with the rest of the UK.
"I came to work humming Land of Hope and Glory this morning. The Scots have voted to preserve the 307-year-old union of Great Britain, this blest isle, this 'mother of the free' and the land made mighty and mightier yet by God himself; this United Kingdom of four great nations, beating together at the heart of the Queen's Commonwealth."
- Land of Hope and Glory, 19/9/14
Equally thrilled, the Intrepids decided to go on holiday (again) while having their bathroom refitted. That corresponded of course with me being ill and Gary Lineker messing around with pipes.
"We have tiles anyway. One wall is a checkerboard of smooth-finished, ungrouted bathroom tile; the other three, still plaster. There is no sign of a shower. There is no sign of a basin. The toilet remains but is off its hinges and now angled against the wall by the front door. I had to wait for Gary Lineker to nip off for his crisps before I could fly down the hall and relieve myself. You would be surprised how difficult it is to go to toilet without a bathroom door. I was ninja-speed."
- The Sick Day, 2/10/14
Gary Lineker did finish the job in the end, with a little help from Gazza the Sparky and Gary Lineker's Dad, who showed up at the end. The Intrepids returned to a fully-fitted bathroom complete with fully tiled walls, all the usual appliances and no knowledge at all of the horrid concrete floor, the crumbling plasterboard walls or the freezing ninja dashes of an off-colour technical author with man-flu.
My colleague Steve, left in October but not before a few games of table football. The weather went crispy, I wrote a kind of late-October ode to the season called Autumn Fair and pretty soon the Christmas machine was rolling into view, ready to spew out the first whispers of Santa's elves tinsellating the merry cash bells of the retail sector.
The Intrepids 'borrowed' an industrial tarmac compressor, I dressed up in a pac-man rain mac and discovered the reason why the Queen faces different ways on stamps and coins. By the time November came splurging out of the grey with its soggy leaves and damp air, I was just about ready for something different.
Handy then, that my friend Chris and I were able to go to Eastbourne for that conference. It has occurred to me that I was far happier drinking tea, overlooking the grey, choppy waves than I was in some of the meetings. I have yet to figure out what this means.
"My next favourite moment of today was a little stolen moment on the seafront. I was in a seminar room at first, when I suddenly had a deep longing to be on my own for a bit. So I got up, swung my rucksack over my shoulder and went down to the Promenade. I was there for ten minutes, drinking in the sea air, letting the coolness of the afternoon wash over me and chatting to God about stuff that's going on in my head and heart. It wasn't a long time, it was just enough."
- Music, Words and Cheesecake, 23/11/14
I wrote a story in November, The Unpredictable Machine which isn't very good but was better when I read it much later. Somehow, the longer distance there is between writing something and reading it, the better it seems. Future Me thinks that's probably because I don't have a very good memory. I say I should keep going.
Soon it was time for Secret Santa, The Christmas Question and pondering the insides of the Nestle 3000. The choir pushed through their festive pieces and proudly sang them out at the Calcot Carol Service. I turned the moment into a thought about the way events converge on a single point, how everything comes together at the right time. It led me to thinking about my friends, struggling to rebuild their marriages and I realised too that sometimes a detonation point can lead to a whole host of things diverging away and out of control.
"I'm actually feeling OK with the way things are converging at the moment. True, the angle of convergence is slight and the vanishing point is quite impossible to spot. I'm alright though, with ploughing along the tapering track, wondering how the great Designer will bring these lines together at just the right time..."
- Convergence & Divergence, 8/12/14
A whole bunch of carol events followed throughout December. Beer and Carols, The Christmas Do, thinking about Christmas Typos and the lyrics to Jingle Bells.
And then, just before Christmas Eve... my Mum falling ill in The Transient Attack
She's making a steady recovery. I went to see her today but she was being wheeled off for another MRI scan. I think we're going to take in some Appletiser and balloons tomorrow to help her celebrate New Year's Eve... at 8pm.
It's always a bit of an anti-climax, New Year's Eve.
So ends 2014. Some horrid things, some great things, some fun things and some thoughtful things. It's been a bit like a packet of Revels - dipping into a bag of unknowns, pulling out coffee, orange, hazelnut...
I know, I know, but what Forrest Gump was terrible at realising was that you can know what you're 'gunna' get with a box because you have a little book of words that tells you, not to mention the array of shapes spread out in a handy two-tiered plastic tray. Revels would have worked much better in my opinion.
The older I get, the more I realise that this life is so much more about the journey, the companions, the fun and the adventure. You have a little time to treasure the people around you, to see the best in them, the things that were sown into them from the beginning. You have time to treat them well, to honour and respect them, to look after them and show them a whole lot of love. What's more, you get all that back if you give it away. This hasn't been a great year, but it's not been terrible, not really. If you've been reading as I've been writing, then thank you for sticking it out, for reading between the lines and for peering through this window into my life. It's a bit like a series of snapshots of me have been framed by the contexts, the reactions, the ramblings, rantings and random rhymings I've chosen for myself.
Maybe it really has been the Year of the Selfie.
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