QUANTUM RAILWAYS

You’d better sit down. And you’ll need a cup of tea, probably, to cope with the shock (I went for my seasonal favourite of rum and hot chocolate, but you might find something stronger will steel you suitably for what I’m about to tell you).

So, while I wait for the headline writers to get back to me, and the news to spread round social media faster than a skateboarding hamster, I thought I should take a deep breath, still my beating heart, and let you know that tonight, I (fanning myself, as I still can’t quite believe it) actually did do a bit of multitasking.

I know. A quick scan through my diary shows me that the last time I unlocked this ‘hidden superpower’ was March 2016, and of course it’s only been a month or so since the famous toast-bathtub-smoke-alarm fail.

Anyway, tonight I somehow managed to keep my head focused on lots of simultaneous things - I did a load of washing, a stack of putting away, a pasta dish, and the washing up, all while listening to the audiobook of The Chronicles of Narnia. More to the point, I did not put my socks in the fridge or wash a packet of linguine with my light-coloureds. Win!

I’ve often thought of the brain like an engine moving down a complex series of tracks, a deep network of thoughts and avenues and branches that take it somewhere. The train can only be in one place at a time, so to leap from station to station it has to rapidly back up and then speed down the nearest route to get where it’s going, all within a half-a-second!

For me, some tracks are easy (flags, science, music, words) while others are uphill, or seem to have leaves on the line (social, selecting food in a restaurant, putting my keys somewhere findable). It is true then, that I’ve always considered having a single train in lots of places at the same time, just impossible. And yet, at least one of you will be doing that right now while reading this with multiple trains, I guarantee it! And you know who you are.

So, what’s the secret? Quantum railways? Multi-dimensional thinking? Or do you clever people just have trains that are so fast and so deep that you can take them anywhere you like in the network and back, without missing a beat? How’s it done? And why can I only do it in two-year intervals?

I wonder whether the relaxed period of Betwixtmas has taken some pressure off the thought-network for me too? Perhaps there’s a balance, a limit to how busy that matrix of interconnected topics can get. I must confess, I haven’t even thought about work for ten days! I’m as much of a technical writer as I am an astronaut right now! Though, to be fair, neither would be advisable after a rum-soaked hot chocolate. Could that be why I cracked next-level-multitasking tonight?

No news from the papers yet. No ‘Man Completes Five Simultaneous Tasks Shocker’ headlines. Oh well. I can take some solace in the fact that my jeans are folded and ready, I ate well, and the dishes are stacked inside the cupboard. I should take more time off from work I reckon. Either that or figure out a way for all of me to be in two places at once.

BEYOND THE SNAPSHOT NATIVITY

I sat in the car, waiting for the windscreen to clear. The condensation was on the inside, as it often is at this time of year, and I don’t like squeegeeing it from the driver’s seat. Like a slowly receding fog, it crept back across the glass. I was waiting to go home.

Out there, on the other side of the windscreen, the night itself was also foggy. It loomed between the balls of lamplight, suspended invisibly, above the fences and the gardens. The gothic mist swirled around them like a silent potion.

So it had been on Christmas Eve too, as I walked to the church for that midnight service - a sort of Victorian fog around the quiet village. That seems ages ago now, that midnight communion: the carols around the tree, the bishop in his gold-edged robes and the choir in their festive blue. It was lovely, though tough to keep a straight face in, when one of the readers asked God to ‘eliminate our hearts with the light of [his] presence’...

My heart was intact of course (thank you God for not answering every prayer) and full of both life and hope on Christmas Day. We exchanged presents in the time-honoured tradition. For those of you wondering, this year was a hit when it came to my Dad’s gift. I got him a waterproof radio, which he said was ‘excellent’... so there’s that. Then we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and I had a little chuckle to myself when the Nazis got their hearts literally eliminated by the presence of God bursting out of the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the movie.

We spent the rest of the day with my Aunty and Uncle and my cousin, eating food and doing the latest ‘quiz-about-the-town-we-all-live-in’ which had been a present for one of us. Turns out I don’t know very much about where I live at all, especially not how many locks there are in the borough, which roads are listed ‘historically important’ because of the brickwork, nor where the first ‘Little Chef’ opened in 1958. I’m not too bothered.

We got back late, my Dad munched through his bag of pina colada popcorn (“How does it taste of cheese?”) and I went to bed feeling content. Which I think is just as well for a Christmas Day.

Boxing Day of course, is a different story. We piled round to my sister’s house, where my nephews jumped about in their pyjamas, clutching their new iPhones. I got shot with nerf pellets before I’d fully taken my coat off. One Nibling seems to have a sort of plastic, semi-automatic affair that rapid-fires the things, faster than you can say ‘no sugar thanks, just milk’ towards the kitchen, and wonder once again how your own sister can keep forgetting it. Oh well. 

Somehow my Dad managed to sleep through it all - even the controversial moon-landings-discussion (yearly, unresolved, and many still unpersuaded) didn’t rouse him to discussion! He did ask the conspiracy sister whether or not she was considering writing yet another book. After last year, when she told us we might all be covertly investigated by the CIA, I was keen not to know anything at all about it.

The rest of Boxing Day was quiet. We watched The Snowman, and played a geography game in the evening. I was disconcerted by the fact that the little boy is supposed to be David Bowie. 34 years we’ve been watching that; it changes everything.

It’s been an okay sort of Christmas. I feel as though we’ve done all the usual things, said all the traditional things we do without realising, and we’ve reached the other side of it, where Betwixtmas begins and the New Year looms.

I do have a sort of sadness though, and I can’t quite explain it.

I certainly couldn’t work it out while sitting in the drive, watching the mist clear from the windscreen. I didn’t want to stay, but neither did I want to go home. I was peopled-out, but also very afraid of the lonely click of my front door and the dark, empty stairs behind it. The sadness lingered like the fog: I was ready to go, but not quite ready to arrive - perhaps the deeper story of my life! I was lost, somehow between the points of a journey.

The real magic of the season isn’t trying to recapture the sparkly, warm feeling of Christmas long ago. It isn’t even feeling tingly about the family, food, chocolate, wine, and gifts of next year either, I suppose, although those things are certainly part of it. The gold-edged Bishop was right: it’s about finding a joy in the journey - a theme that gets so missed in the snapshot nativity. Everything moves, everything changes, all those characters faced turmoil, whether fleeing like refugees to a new country, or returning home against the wishes of a murderous king. Yet the presence of God is there to light the way, every turmoil, every sadness, every step.

I flicked on the headlights and pulled out of the drive, into the fog.

Illuminate my heart, I prayed silently. I really meant it.

THE THIRD-BEST SCROOGE

Well so. I’m signing off for Christmas. The Intrepids are watching the Third-Best Scrooge, I’m drinking loose-leaf tea and munching my way through a homemade mince pie, and pretty much everything’s alright with the world.

Even Tiny Tim is beaming. And he’s on crutches. For some reason he’s wound up with a cut-glass RP accent in this one: seems unlikely. “The whole goose, Father? Oh this shall be the finest Christmas!” Hmm.

So, I dropped off my neighbour’s Christmas card, bade a Merry Christmas to the other set who were just togged up to walk the dog, and then I set off through the twilight.

“What time’s midnight communion?” I asked. My Dad laughed and then told me to check on the Internet. Once the Third-Best Scrooge is over and we’ve had what my Mum has just described as a ‘light supper’ I’ll finish off the last bit of wrapping and then later I’ll be off for that little oasis of tradition, one more time.

A lot of these Christmas stories are tales of redemption, aren’t they? The cold-hearted miser comes good, the broken family pulls together, the townsfolk rally around the transformed hero. Tiny Tim asks God to bless us (every one) as though auditioning for a job as a continuity announcer on Radio 4, and everything’s okay in the end. It’s as though the redemption story flows through this season like vintage wine.

And yet my suggestion of watching the original Star Wars trilogy isn’t Christmassy enough. Apparently.

Oh well. On with the wrapping. The cherry brandy’s open now too, so a dark glass of contentment sparkles on the coffee table while the reformed Scrooge dances about in 60s monochrome and his dressing gown, ‘giddier than a schoolboy’. 

Merry Christmas everyone.

THE THIRD PHASE OF SECRET SANTA

The experts on these things say there are five love ‘languages’ - five main ways people naturally show, and accept love, from people around them. A lot of you will know this already, but to keep it simple, they are: time, words, service, touch, and receiving gifts.

For some reason, Christmas seems to be set up for the gifts people. I sometimes think it would be nice to have an annual festival for each of the other love languages too, but then I imagine being invited to ‘Hugfest 2019’ and I realise it could get complicated.

Still, while the gift-givers are in their element from November onwards, us time, service, words, and tactile types have to go along with the flow and do our best every year.

30,000 steps around town and I am done, though typically nervous and unsure of my selections for my folks. Some of them are excellent gift-givers, and the pressure is on in a way some nice words in a card (my primary language) might not cover, should I have misfired.

Speaking of tactile contact, town is packed. I squeezed through queues of people today, apologising as I went. I constantly had to turn, or nose a shelf to let other people by behind me. There are London-levels of overcrowding out there, and some of the queues snake round the shops in such convoluted ways that it makes browsing almost impossible.

Well. Maybe there’s an opportunity to be strategic. If even our personalities tell us that we all prefer to transmit and receive love differently, it could be a great opportunity to spend time hanging out with people, being encouraging, giving someone a hug, or even offering to do something you don’t want to do. And all that on top of the decided art of giving and receiving presents. After all, the wise men travelled, they knelt, they worshipped and they played a part in the story. And we never found out what happened to the gold, the frankincense or the myrrh, did we?

Anyway, I’d better go home and let the festive season begin, as well it might, with a glass of Ribena, and a viewing of a Christmas movie to celebrate.

See you all at Hugfest.

BEER AND CAROLS 6

It’s fair to say that I’ve not done as much carolling as in previous years. No outdoor-Winchester this time (I’m assuming that dropping my music in the mud mid-Calypso-Carol last year was enough to avoid the nod this time). Also, I suspect that a few places have found more local piano players to step up to the keyboard. That’s great!

One fixture though, that has been in the diary for a long long time, is the annual Beer and Carols event, a good opportunity for a church not too far away to do something fun in their local social club. Tonight was my sixth outing, playing carols on the piano for them.

There’s so much to say about the social club culture! It’s probably the closest thing to experiencing church as a newcomer that I’ll ever have without actually being in one: confusing rules of engagement, all the generations there from the very young to the very senior, everyone seems to know everyone, and they all throw around the inside jokes about each other; some are very quiet, some are clearly ‘characters’, the PA system sounds like it’s been overdriven every week since 1997, and there are cliques of people sitting together... everywhere! As a yearly visitor, I feel strangely out-of-place in the middle of all of that familiarity, despite a group of people who very clearly wanted to be together and considered each other as family. It made me think a lot.

Of course unlike church, this community flocks around the trinity of the bar, the pool table, and the big screen TV. As we kicked off the hearty old carols with a blast of Once in Royal David’s City, I glanced over my shoulder to see Sky Sports coverage of the bright green pitch at Molineux, where in the strangest juxtaposition, Wolverhampton Wanderers were playing Liverpool in the Premier League.

“Mary was, that mother mild,” I sang. The ball went out for a throw in, “Jesus Christ, her little child.”

They appreciated the sing-song. I was slightly disappointed that Mr Ding-Dong-Merrily-On-High-The-Holly-Bells-Are-Ringing wasn’t there to repeat his famous line over that particular carol. There was some gusto in the glorias though, and a huge cheer went up, right after the final triumphant ‘Hosanna in Excelsis!’ Though I think that was mostly for Liverpool, who had just gone one nil up.

If you’ve read about Beer and Carols from me before, you’ll also know of course, that no such evening goes by without the customary raffle. Sure enough, out it came.

There were two tonight: a meat raffle, and then a general Christmas one, featuring bottles of Prosecco, and other gifts donated by local businesses.

And they took forever. Personally, I think the rules are a little complicated: you buy your line of tickets from the bar, they record your name next to your number-range instead of giving you a raffle ticket. Then the rafflemaster (it’s too grand but I can’t think what else to call him) pushes his fancy randomator (also too grand, but imagine a foot-long digital alarm clock display which generates four digit numbers at random) and then calls out the number, one digit at a time.

“Three... five... four... one! That’s three, five, four, one, everybody. Three five four one: three-five... four...one. Anybody got threefivefourone? Anyone at all?”

Have you won? Nobody knows. The bar will tell you, but they’re busy serving drinks so they’ve printed out the rows and names and given it to someone to check. I couldn’t help but think the traditional system might have been faster. But I am an annual nobody, right on the fringes of this community. That made me think a lot too.

In the end, ‘Chunky’ won the grand prize (two hundred n fifty ‘pand’), the rafflemaster was genuinely gutted that he didn’t, and someone else went home with a lot of meat.

Not me. I stopped off at the Asda garage and picked up some milk and some eggs, happy that once again I’d been able to be part of something very different, singing about hope and light in dark places, and having my cultural lenses shifted a bit by stepping into an unfamiliar culture. Seems Christmassy to me, any road.

Oh and Liverpool won as well, which I’m sure helped with the atmosphere. Though... I’m not sure why... Liverpool is 200 miles away! Maybe I’ll stick to understanding Christmas and carolling.

THE SECOND PHASE OF SECRET SANTA

Halfway there then. I’ve ducked out of the crowded Christmassy streets for an intermission in Starbucks.

This whole thing is clearly easier online. I headed into town with a definite list of people and a vague list of ideas, only some of which have worked out. It’s a nice feeling when it’s a winner though. Once again this year, I found myself in a shop that made me feel uncomfortable, looking for a thing I’d never seen before. Found it. Got out of there.

Would I have preferred to browse online and click a button? Of course! But I’d also prefer Amazon to pay more than 6% tax on their UK profits without reducing the high street to a cluster of discount outlets and coffee shops.

But I can’t stay on that high horse for long; I’m in a town-centre Starbucks with an irony panino, and a cup of hot hypocrisy.

THE SIXTH EYE TEST

It turns out that I failed the ‘fields test’ during last time’s intensive visit to the hospital’s eye clinic. So I went back today to try to pass it.

Just to recap: in July my eyes went funny - as though the world was jiggling around. It was less than pleasant, and through the long hot summer, it didn’t seem to be improving. So I ended up having lots of tests, including having bright lights beamed into my retinas, poking a stick across a whiteboard, focusing and de-focusing on a picture of a parrot, and pretending I was an astronaut inside the MRI machine.

The fields test measures peripheral vision. You put your head in a box and focus on a spot, one eye at a time. Then you have to click a button whenever a bright dot flashes in your peripheral vision.

My appointment didn’t get off to the best start when I responded to the nurse calling someone else’s name, thinking it was mine. I was sure she’d said my name. Perhaps I need my hearing checked also.

Anyway, it didn’t take long to do the fields test, and even though I’m pretty sure I missed some flashes at the edge of my peripherals, and imagined some others that weren’t there at all, I think I did okay. Crucially, my eyes have settled down anyway and I haven’t had any episodes for quite some time now.

Perhaps it was stress migraines after all, brought on by the heatwave. I clearly have an upper-operating temperature and stress limit, beyond which I start to shut down, and will be of no use to anyone.

I have to go back in February to find out, especially whether my peripheral vision has been affected. Either way, I don’t want to get to next Summer and go through all this again.

THROUGH THE WORMHOLE

“Have you been out in the sun?” he asked. “How have you got a sun tan?”

Sometimes I wonder whether work exists in the same universe as everywhere else. The revolving door might just as well be a wormhole, through which texts and emails and data can flow, but only staff can actually travel. And on the other side of that Einstein-Rosen bridge? The palest man in the real world suddenly has a sun tan in the middle of winter.

I don’t of course. What’s happening is that my face is once again falling apart, due to poor diet, lack of sleep, stress, and huge changes in temperature between indoors and out. It looks like sun burn, especially combined with the reddened nose and cheeks of a classic winter’s day. But it’s not.

Stress eh. I’ve not exactly got anything at all to be stressed about. Whatever it is, it’s deeper than I know.

Meanwhile, the weird dreams continue. I reluctantly pranked someone’s parents by dressing up as a clown and hiding in a cupboard. In the dream, a real friend of mine persuaded me that they would find it hilarious, and I went along with it. They didn’t. I had to walk home in the rain with soggy red shoes on.

Then there was the quiz show where I knew the answers but my mouth was taped up. Plus the now recurring dream I have, where my phone is playing music and I simply can’t turn it off. In the latest instalment I dunked it underwater. It just sounded exactly the same. Previously I’ve taken it to pieces, stamped on it, smashed it with a screwdriver, turned it off (including off-off) and thrown it out of the window. On it goes. Infuriating.

Anyway.

“No I’ve just been out in the cold,” I said, and we moved the conversation on. I should do better at looking after myself, I thought. Low stress, good diet, dreamless sleep, proper routine: these are all achievable goals in this reality, I would have thought.

I do however, have the sneaking suspicion that rolling in and out through the space-time-continuum every day to work and back might not be helping.

TOMATO WISDOM

For reasons I’m not going into, I did an emotional intelligence test the other day. It just involved reading facial expressions and selecting which emotion they were displaying.

I scored 16/20, which is apparently, above average. I missed compassion, interest, shame, and disgust though, interpreting those faces as I did as happiness, surprise, fear, and pain, respectively.

Let’s not overanalyse. It was only a very simple test, and not in-depth in any way. I’m just fascinated by the idea of social situations where we can use our emotional intelligence, just as we use our other intelligences to solve problems every day.

What it didn’t cover of course, was what to do. How to spot anger is one thing, especially when objects aren’t flying at your head and a person is shouting in your direction. My guess is that analysing their eyes, their downward head tilt, and their tense-lipped grimace like a computer, and then explaining to them that they’re angry... won’t help a great deal.

What would be great would be a test where your reactions to emotions are measured! An Emotional Wisdom Test if you will, rather than an intelligence quiz. My friend Graham says that ‘knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting one in a fruit salad.’ Indeed.

But it’s hard to test that stuff isn’t it, because every one of the trillion, billion permutations of people and situations is different! We’re all tomatoes, and we’re all struggling along in our own bowls of fruit, all the time.

I want to be better at this. When someone is upset, my brain picks it up (well, 16/20 times anyway) but I’m not always clever enough to know how to react. So it must look like I haven’t detected it at all! When someone is joyously happy, it’s a bit easier, but even then, I’m so rarely like that myself, I have to remind myself how to be a child almost, or I run the risk of being a deflator, a squisher, a joy-killer.

Compassion, I missed. But for me it comes through words and time, hugs and cups of tea, not pictures. Interest I think I miss from disbelief sometimes, as, even now I find it tough to believe that a person would be interested in me. Shame and disgust are so similar, it’s no wonder I didn’t identify those two. If you’re interested, disgust comes with a nose-wrinkle; shame is all about the eyes.

So, how do we bolster our empathy, our EQ, and our e-wisdom? How do we get better at knowing what to do with tomatoes and fruit bowls? Practice and kindness, I guess. And for me, at least for me, the lack of worry about whether or not I’m overanalysing everything.

I suppose maybe we need to be honest as well as letting the silence do some work. I don’t often hear myself say things like: ‘When you said that, it really hurt my feelings’ or ‘That was really lovely’ or ‘Next time would you mind doing it this way?’ - these are tricky for British people, these vulnerabilities. But I’m not entirely sure I’m going to learn without some candour. In fact I’m more likely to write about it and then furiously delete the blog post.

And I know for a fact, I can be a better tomato than that.

OUTSIDE CAFÉ ROUGE

I left the Christmas Do early. Well, just around the time when all the party-minded people were slipping out to the pub round the corner for further merriment.

“You’re not feeling it?” asked Erica. I reiterated that it wasn’t my scene, and folded up my paper hat onto the table. She was off home too, so that was okay.

The truth is that for some reason, for the whole day, I’ve actually been feeling really close to tears - not sad, not necessarily, but just right on the edge of it, as though it’s out there in the atmosphere and my tuning has been picking it up. My eyes were stinging on the coach, and despite trying to get Jonathan involved in the ‘wacky Christmas fun’ I was still feeling very sensitive at the do. The pub was the last place I wanted to be.

So, I hit the twilight streets, under the sparkling lights and the warm glow. The town centre was alive with people - shopping bags, rucksacks, pushchairs, suitcases, carry-cases, handbags, man-bags, mobility scooters, high heels, work boots, high boots, trainers, smart shoes, scuffed shoes, flat caps, posh hair, tousled hair, sleek hair, no hair, everywhere - a crowd of strangers.

The other truth was that I had a few hours to kill before meeting my friend Paul for dinner at Café Rouge. And so I found myself milling for a while.

“It’d be really nice to see someone I know,” I said to myself, “maybe someone I haven’t hung out with in a while.”

I can’t say it was a prayer, not in the conventional sense - but it was a desire at least. I’ve often wondered whether God hears those things just as loudly, and therefore whether it makes any difference. I could easily have said ‘amen’ either way but I’m not sure what that truly means from His perspective.

I still had no idea what He was about to do.

So there I was, anyway - just sort of hoping for a convenient friend to run into, to chat to for a bit, and I was still somehow inexplicably emotional in the middle of a shiny town with an hour or so to go.

“On way, but bus running late,” texted Paul, a little later. He asked me if I could head over to Café Rouge and reserve a table for two, just in case.

So I did.

It was shut. Well, not quite. The proprietor poked his head round the door and told me they’d run out of gas. I doubted it, as there seemed to be a party of twelve inside tucking into some lovely French cuisine. I was in the middle of texting Paul back to tell him the unfortunate news when I heard a voice:

“Is that Sherlock?”

“What?”

I span round, and there, right in front of me like the Ghost of Christmas Present, was my very real, very present friend, Gerard, whom I’ve not seen since he moved to Brisbane six years ago! We’d lost contact when I gave up checking flippybook every day. And there he was. Literally a friend I haven’t seen in ages.

He stood there grinning, an apparition on a mission. Had I imagined it? Was this another of those weird dreams I’ve been having? I didn’t say anything for a while. I just stood there, computing.

Then, I pinched his overcoat, and I said “Wow,” and, “Are you definitely real?” which made him laugh out loud, and made the Café Rouge man do a tssk as he retracted his head back into his closed-for-the-evening-and-definitely-not-a-private-party-restaurant.

Gerard smiled. Then the rest of his family, his wife and their impossibly eight-year old son appeared (last seen aged two) and I just hugged them all like family. 

They were here for one day for Christmas before going to Liverpool where the rest of their folks live. One day. One moment, one afternoon in a town centre they had no real need to be in, all the way from Brisbane, standing outside a very shut Café Rouge! Unbelievable!

So that’s how God answered that half-baked prayer of mine from the other side of the world. We all went to Starbucks and had a catch-up over teas and a coffee, until it was time for me to meet Paul for dinner. I was so grateful for that hour! Who’d have thought it?

He calls me Sherlock by the way, because years ago I was very fond of repeating the same lame Holmes and Watson joke to him. It was the kind of thing he found funny at the time - that’s how he rolls. It amused me today of course how the act of teleporting him halfway round the world because I was feeling weepy in my home town-centre after a Christmas Do, suddenly seemed like the opposite of any definition of elementary I’m aware of. I am thankful to God though. There’s an audacity to a miracle sometimes, a laugh-out-loud, outrageous, over-the-top bit of incredible engineering. I can only be thankful. Ridiculously thankful.

“Amazing eh?”

“You can say that again, Watson,” I mused.

SOMEONE ELSE’S IDEA OF FUN

“You’re not into the whole whacky, forced fun thing then?” I nudged Jonathan, being, as I was, seated next to him at the Christmas Do. Meanwhile Ant (paper-hat, back of his head towards us) stood booming out the answers to the 85-question ‘table’ quiz that had accompanied our dinner. A shower of paper aeroplanes flew past him like heckles in a comedy club.

“No Matt, not really,” laughed Jon. He’d gone one better than me though, I noted, and had worn a flashing Christmas jumper. I suspected it was twinkling with irony.

There’s an element of that forced-enjoyment thing in a lot of Christmas though, I suppose - going along with someone else’s idea of fun: it’s okay, sometimes the fun finds you just the other side of embarrassment, and sometimes just the other side of a Ribena, but fun of one sort or another is usually always there, even if it were someone else’s idea.

I tried to look for it on the bus this morning. 

I was bussing in today because I knew the Christmas Do would leave me in town, and it’s always much easier and cheaper to get home from there if you don’t have to collect your car first.

So, bleary-eyed this morning, I climbed onto the freezing bus, asked for a single, and sat down in the surprisingly empty seats.

You know the drill. The phone comes out, you check the news, your feeds, reply to an email or two, maybe write a snotty one and quickly delete it, or play a soothing game of Tetris or whatever, for a while... and the distraction of the brightly-coloured digital universe makes the world of screaming kids, exasperated parents and people complaining about their doctors, a whole lot more tolerable.

But then two intolerable things happened, threatening both to return me to reality.

First, my phone died. It blacked out - low battery. Blip, and then nothing. I always feel a bit cheated when that happens, as though my phone has tricked me somehow, but of course, it’s my own fault, every time. So I shook it (I don’t know why) sighed, slipped it back into my pocket and peered out of the window into the cold morning sky where the bright golden sun tickled the bare, brittle trees.

It was about then, in a dawning moment of truth, that I realised the second thing that had happened. My face fell open.

I was on the wrong bus.

It was heading exactly in the wrong direction! I groaned outwardly. It was already too late to get off (I knew where I was) - there would be no way back, not without being super-late to work. My only hope was to stay on the bus as it rumbled into town, then catch the train back the other way, to rush to work hopefully before my line manager looked at her watch and wondered (1) where I was, and (2) why I hadn’t emailed/phoned/texted in to let her know.

I rolled my eyes, phoneless and annoyed. There above me was the map of the bus-route, a long snaking line of wrong stops, grinning at me as though it had known all along.

There is a certain irony to having to walk past the place where you’ll be going later to catch a train to somewhere where a coach will bring you back and leave you. I grimaced as I strode by the Christmas-Do venue en-route to the train station.

I’ve always thought that unexpected journeys can include something to learn, something to see, something to do, or something to miss. That (I reasoned to myself) is what I’d probably (pompously) tell anyone in this situation. It would have annoyed me at the time though; I hadn’t been up for learning, seeing, doing or missing anything this morning - even if it really ought to have been the bus numbers, the timetable, getting on, and the wrong bus.

This was not my idea of fun.

I sighed.

“Probably not mine either,” I reassured Jonathan, while Ant explained the “Christmas-anagrams” round, and “which-employee-was-hidden-behind-a-Santa-mask”. I gazed out of the window at where I’d walked hours before.

“Anyone for a glass of Ribena?” I asked.

TOO MUCH YEAR

It feels today as though there's way too much 2018 at the end of the year.

I don't mean that it hasn't gone quickly, they all do these days, don't they - and this one's gobbled through the months like Augustus Gloop's advent calendar - I think I just mean that I've kind of had enough of it.

I'm really tired, and, had I already finished my Christmas-shopping, I'd be absolutely ready, even tomorrow... to sit back in an arm-chair, with a skewiff paper hat, that post-prendial-glow that you only get after a Christmas dinner, and a smooth glass of something rich, red, and silky, and I'd not do anything at all until the fireworks explode over the Houses of Parliament on New Year's Eve.

I've not scoped the end of 2018 well then; I've not paced myself. And as usual, there's much to do and somehow not a lot of time to do it in. It makes me wonder whether there's a better way to do it all.

I woke up late this morning. I'd been dreaming I was walking through the Andes with some geography teachers, and so I was a little tardy getting to work. Then, as I clambered out of the car, I somehow managed to fall backwards back into it (I don't know how), injuring my arm on the gear-stick and the handbrake. Good job I didn't do that en-route to Macchu Picchu! The geography teachers would have laughed their socks through their sandals. Oh, and also I might have tumbled to my death.

So anyway, there are still a few days to go.*

The fabled Christmas Do is tomorrow, which I will navigate cheerily. I will. I'm telling myself I will. Then the weekend... looks like a flurry of carolling, decorating, tidying, arranging, and festive joys, interspersed with hunting for My Secret Santa and Other Animals, in the twilit melée of Salvation Army tunes, and long queues in warm shops.

Next week, work winds down, there are two more 'you-sing-it-I'll-play-it' carol-events, and then I'm home and dry with my Christmas jumper, my skewiff hat, and my festive glass of Ribena.

Well. Of course, it won't quite work out like that will it. Sigh. Still, as long as there's some joy and some hope around, maybe the peace will follow as the tail end of this slightly-too-long year fizzles out. Ah you can but dream.

Just hopefully not about geography teachers in South America.


*I of course, mean of the year, and not of me.

DUNEDIN

“So Matt,” he said in his thick Kiwi accent, “How does the sun go down in your country then?”

“Well it just sort of slowly... sets...” I said, sounding more incredulous and more British than ever, “It doesn’t just switch off like a light bulb!”

My driver laughed at me. The street lamps of Dunedin flicked on, strange and white, one by one, illuminating the rain-washed concrete and lamplit bungalows that flew by. It was all so familiar, yet somehow far away, all at once, together. The telegraph wires, the postboxes, the wide pavements and the damp night air. And moments before it had been broad, overcast, daylight.

“Slowly?” he carried on, chuckling. Who doesn’t understand the sun set? I wondered. He just gripped the steering wheel. “That’s hilarious,” he said, still grinning.

Apparently, my brain is better at conjuring a New Zealand accent than I am. For some reason, I also seem to have the subconscious idea that when you’re that close to the South Pole, there’s no twilight; the sun just drops out of the sky and it’s night before you have chance to flick on your headlamps. Day, click, night. That can’t be right, can it? And why Dunedin? Why am I dreaming about Dunedin? I’ve never even been to New Zealand!

I looked it up later, hours after I’d swept the bleary night out of my eyes and had gone to work. It’s a real place, Dunedin, a city on the South Island! It was founded by Scots and is named poetically enough, after Edinburgh. But it’s obviously nowhere near Scotland.

In fact, Dunedin is just about as far away from here as it’s possible to get. It’s statistically the farthest city from London, and, according to the antipodesmap.com, Dunedin is the closest city to the point that is exactly on the other side of the world to me, where I am... right now. I’m literally dreaming of being on the other side of the world.

I had no idea.

It does have ordinary sunsets though, so my dream-driver was quite wrong to laugh at me whoever he was, just as my brain was wrong to paint it. However, with its proximity to the International Date Line... it does turn out that Dunedin is one of the first places anywhere on the planet that you can see the sunrise on a particular day.

I have no idea what any of this means. Sunset, sunrise, the end of one thing far away, the start of another? Why the car journey? Where was that driver taking me? And how has my brain imagined a place I have no memory of?

How does the sun go down in my country, I wonder? I could spend a long time guessing what that means, what hidden things are there in the subtext.

Tonight, it went down behind the dark December clouds as the lights across the lake rippled over the water. The grey afternoon faded into a deep blue and a rich purple. Then the night went starry black, and I followed the trail of brake lights home. That’s how, here.

Maybe I need to start living out of this world then, and let go of a few things here. Maybe so that just as quickly, somewhere crisp and alive and beautiful, the sun, the real Sun... can rise up, and show me the morning. And then maybe everything will be okay.

THE SAD LAMP

"You could always just put a blanket over yourself," joked Mat from the other side of the room. Someone else over there suggested that they all needed to come in wearing sunglasses from now on.

Here's the problem. The SAD-lamp that HR recommended for me... is so blindingly, brilliantly, blisteringly BRIGHT, that it's as though I've harnessed the power of the sun itself and positioned it star-like in the centre of my desk! And it's lighting me up like Gandalf in the caves of Khazad-dum.

I tried angling it; it blinded Tim. Tim wasn't backwards about saying so. I put it between my monitors so that my head would block the light for everyone else. That had the effect of casting a massive shadow of me behind me, and silhouetting my screens to a near pitch black, in much the same way as the moon goes dark during a solar eclipse. Call me old-fashioned, but I reckon I need to be able to see what I'm doing.

Positioning it the other way illuminates me in ghostly white (hence Mat's 'helpful' suggestion of the blanket) and, over the row of monitors, makes me look like some sort of spectral meerkat, popping up angelically for any passers-by and company visitors to do a double-take before guffawing into the kitchen. And I'm pale enough (and laughed at enough) already.

So, it seems the choice is between filling the office with the light of a 10,000-lux Hertzsprung-Russell-main-sequence yellow-dwarf star, and coming in super-early every day to radiate in an hour of sunlight before everyone else gets in.

One thing's for sure, my seasonal-affected-disorder will definitely not be improved in any way at all by irritating my colleagues, blinding myself, or illuminating my desk with the kind of theatrical spotlight you might expect for the Angel Gabriel.

Oh the irony. 

ODD DREAMS

I've been having really odd dreams recently. I'm afraid I can't remember last night's, and I knew, first thing this morning, that the more I tried to remember it, the further away it would slip. Fresh dreams are like butterflies or the smoke from candles; blink and they're gone.

I do remember sitting bolt upright and saying out loud, "Well that... was weird," whatever it was.

And that is about all I can say about it. Whatever the dream was, it was just weird - not frightening, not a nightmare, not a thing that was out of my control: weird.

I do remember the previous night's though. In that one, I nearly drowned. For some reason, I was driving through a flood and got to a hill that was cascading water into a river. I revved the engine, backed up a bit and then before I had a chance to accelerate uphill, the back wheels thudded over the bank and the car was slipping backwards into the water.

I woke up trying to work out whether it had been best to open the door, unbuckle the seat-belt, or smash a window in the few seconds I had. It was interesting to me that I was unafraid and pragmatic in the dream - resolving the situation into a handful of logical solutions. I had the feeling I'd be neither if it actually happened.

I think I'm going to start writing down the peculiar dreams if they continue. It's wholly possible of course that I've got 'ongoing emotional anxiety', that somehow I have a fear of being 'overwhelmed or out-of-control'. I'd quite like to dream about something nice though - like Jelly Babies and museums, or picnics with friendly dinosaurs or something.

The early mornings are grey and damp at this time of year too. The park was dreary, the rain glistening from my neighbour's shed roof, and the trees looming misty in the distance. It's no time of the day to be waking up feeling weird, is it?

Of course, the other thing I could try to do is to jam-pack my head with more positive things. Whatever is true, noble, admirable, and so on. If my brain is any sort of processor, hopefully it will start pushing all the anxious drowning stuff out as it fills up with more lovely things. The hope would be that all the good stuff doesn't squeeze the anxiety out through my dreams, like soft cheese through a grater.

Speaking of cheese, I've also started wondering whether several slices of pan-fried halloumi on toast, followed by hot-choc-navy-rum is also the most sensible of suppers.

YULETIDE CAROLS

Every day it gets a little more Christmassy, doesn’t it? Today’s bit of festive acceleration is a charity choir, singing carols in unison in the foyer of Sainsbury’s.

I miss the choir at lots of times during the year of course, but more-so in Advent. Joy and hope collide so beautifully around those familiar old harmonies and eloquent words. I kind of wish I were still bringing some of that into this dark old world.

The acoustics are helping them out. They’re singing very brightly and confidently, and very well - albeit still in unison. It’s lovely. And it’s lovely to have something so familiar and so understandable in my world.

I’ve felt this week as though there’s very little about the world I really understand at all. I got upset about a thing that really baffled me. I got lost in a whirl of stylesheets and skins and CSS and divs and classes. I also said some things that somehow caused the strangest of reactions and I’m too tired to calculate the wiring path of cause and effect. It’s been a humbling week.

But music, Christmas music at that, with all its matin-chimes and Babel sounds and glorias in excelsis ... I know where I am with that lovely old stuff.

ADVENT CANDLE

So the Advent Candle (the real Advent Candle) is six days down, and it’s generating more than just smoke and a countdown.

The Intrepids light it every dinner-time, so tonight (I’m there on Thursdays) is no exception. It’s wobbling away, steadily burning down towards number 7, when, presumably it’ll get snuffed out by Dad in a pirouette of spiralling candle-smoke.

“How many times have you fallen asleep in front of the telly and let it burn through more than a day?” I asked, cheekily.

“Oh, twice, I think,” said my Mum, seriously. I smiled.

Every year.

But this time, there’s some controversy about measurement. What do you do if the wick is lower than the outside edges, and consequentially lower than the numbers? When do you blow it out? How can you tell it’s burned beyond the requisite level?

In the end, after some intense discussion about cohesion of liquid in tubes, the meniscus in thermometers, and the way to measure rounded values, we concluded that it doesn’t matter. And indeed, it really really doesn’t.

Meanwhile, my sister has a nifty way to count down to Christmas. Every window in their Advent Calendar contains a chocolate (naturally) and a small velvet figurine. Today’s was apparently, a tiny white dove. The idea is that you build up all the felt characters of the Nativity Scene until you get to Christmas Day, when you finally pop the Baby Jesus into the manger. Lovely. Only, due to a mix-up when packing it away last year, they’ve ended up with two Josephs... and no Mary.

“Not exactly theologically right,” I mused.

“... but very PC” she said, comically. One Christmas debate was enough for me today so I left it there. Probably for the best.

NO-ONE LIKES A SOGGY SANTA

Rain again, and I’ve had to park a hundred miles down the road from where I live.

The windscreen swims. Flashing blue and yellow lights wobble from the porches and the eaves of my neighbours’ houses, celebrating the Christmas yet to come. I’m not ready to move.

Christmas decorations don’t seem right in the rain, do they? Silent snow, cold starlit nights, even a frosty breeze, but not the noisy old, dreary old rain! I think rain belongs in a different season, when things have more permission to be soggy and miserable.

No-one likes a soggy Santa.

That could almost be a children’s book: Father Christmas gets tangled up in a chimney because he forgot to collapse his umbrella. Then, bedraggled and covered in sticky old soot, he gets mistaken for a burglar and arrested for breaking and entering on Christmas Eve. So the two little kids who saw the whole thing (because the rain was keeping them awake) have to work with Rudolph to deliver all the gifts in the rain, including to the prison, where they break Santa out of jail and give him a bright red raincoat as a Christmas present. Forgive me if I missed any clichéd ideas there.

I suppose I’d better make a move, and start the long trek down the road to my flat. I can’t stay here forever, listening to the rain and gazing at the brightly lit houses - I still have a sleep deficit after all. Just got to throw up my hood over my head, grab my bag from the back of my vehicle, and plod on, dreaming of the warm cookies and hot milky drink that doubtless await me at the end of the journey. 

Ho ho ho.

NAVY RUM

I feel a bit like collapsing into the earth and just sinking out of the conscious world: falling and tumbling from significance - out of time, out of memory, out of action, and out of history altogether.

Or just ‘going to sleep’, as most people call it. Yes, that’ll do - instead of worrying about how to write this ridiculous key change, or figure out why I cycle through highs and lows so quickly. Instead of trying desperately to prove I’m not a nerd by using quantum physics, I should be fast asleep, washed over by silver dreams, and the gentle songs of the stars!

Yet here we are.

I’ve gone back to my winter tradition of spicing up my nightly hot chocolate with a dash of navy rum - and it is just a dash before you say anything; I’m no hardy pirate, and there need be no question of what to do with me ‘erly in the mornin’ 

It does however, leave me feeling ‘strangely warmed’ from the inside out. This concoction is like central heating! I hardly feel the cold at all nowadays when I run round the garden singing sea shanties at the moon.

Anyway, the key change ought to be simple. It’s for a Christmas thing where the band come hurtling out of an audio track and straight into a carol. But the keys won’t match and the first key is so resolutely defined by the track, I’ve got no time to modulate it up to the second key without it sounding forced and awkward. We can’t run the carol in the first key because it will be completely unsingable. It’s a puzzler.

The thing is, I know there’s a solution, I just can’t find it! And now it’s too late to be bashing out Christmas music on the piano. Yet I’m still awake and thinking about it, silently in my head.

And the nerdiness? It’s got to me a bit, if truth be told. I can’t explain why without breaking the THINK test, but I probably shouldn’t complain too much. After all, I clearly did think it appropriate to use quantum physics as a justifiable reason why that ‘nerd’ label doesn’t apply to me. I don’t have a wave-function to stand on there, do I?

Yup, I need to collapse, to sink deep under the cool waters of a good night’s sleep. Either that or chuck me in the brig until the navy rum wears off.

THE MAN WITH TWO WATCHES

Well would you believe it. Yet another day of nothing interesting or noteworthy happening at all.

There is precious little to write about. I was contemplating about describing in detail how my wheelie bin got blown over by the wind. But that is pretty much the whole story.

I also discovered this week that I don’t actually even generate enough rubbish for that bin to be given the full tip-up-into-truck treatment by the council. Nope, the yellow-jackets just flip open the lid, reach in, pull my two meagre black sacks of refuse out, and then throw them into the back of the trash-compacter. One of my neighbours, down the road at TwoBinsNumberThirty, came out and wheeled his brace of empty wheelie-bins back to his garden, just after the flashing yellow truck had rumbled off down the road. I bet we pay the same council tax.

Meanwhile, work is still like calculating the balance between the type of people who share cat-pics on Slack, and the type of people who demand a thing by email but never say thank you when you send it to them.

I did solve a tricky problem this week though! I tried explaining it to the Intrepids over our Pre-Advent-Candlelit-Dinner tonight, but I quickly realised I didn’t have the skill to simplify a complex piece of content-management and technical writing to make it understandable or interesting to a wider audience. Oh the irony.

The Pre-Advent-Candlelit-Dinner by the way, is when we have dinner by candlelight, just before Advent. Instead of an Advent Calendar (like any normal family might have), the Intrepids have an Advent Candle, which they light every dinner-time throughout December, until it fizzles to a smoking stub on Christmas Eve. Only, it’s obviously not December yet, so they burned through a bit of the reserve, backup Pre-Advent-Candle tonight while the actual Advent Candle stood waiting expectantly on the mantelpiece.

Also, I met a man wearing two watches today - one on each wrist! I didn’t have the social forwardness to ask him why, though it was (and is) a perplexing mystery. They were very different, but both chunky enough to be classified as classic men’s analog watches, plus, I noticed, both simultaneously suggesting that it was 8:17pm - which, in this hallowed time zone of GMT, it exactly was. Why?

And that’s it. Not much else to write about at all - just a wheelie bin, a slow-burning candle, and the Man With Two Watches. Maybe he just likes watches? Perhaps he’s a fan of time, the passage of the moments, the steady, gentle ticking seconds, the months, the years... as the candle flickers down and the half-empty wheelie bins get blown over by the wind like a treat for local foxes.

I must ask him next time I see him.