TABLE FOOTBALL BATTLE

"Alright?" asks Adam as I fish a Coke out of the beer fridge.

"Not bad," I reply.

"Wanna play?" He nods toward the table-football table. He's young, tall and quiet, maybe 21 years old. He carries that same remarkable combination of insecurity and confidence that I remember - a sort of unspoken maturity and strength that's hidden just beneath his youthfulness.

"Sure," I reply. "Maybe you can give me some tips?"

Adam laughs and puts a beer down. My Coke is unopened, heavy and cold. I take hold of the handles of my team. My hands are sweating.

"I normally lose," he says, diffidently.

"So do I," I reply.

The ball slams into the back of my goal before I've blinked. I slot it back in, spinning it with my thumb. It bounces around for a while. Then slam, rattle, and goal. 2-0.

All my concentration goes into the next few seconds. I save a few attempts and the ball flicks between my players, I spin them for all their worth, but fail to connect them with the ball.

My efforts are feeble. The ball gently rolls towards his defence line. He pounds it. It bounces uncontrollably from the sides, pinging off the players and the walls at lightning-speed. I can hardly see the ball, zipping past my men. Are they men? That's a bit sexist, I think. But there's no time for political correctness. With a thud, it spins into my goal for 3.

I am a limping gazelle on the plain now. Young Andy is a lion, steely-eyed, bloodthirsty, and determined. Again he strikes. 4-0. 5-0. Then I accidentally back-heel it. He laughs. 6. It will be a miracle if I even get a shot on target.

Flick, twist, slam, goal. 7. I sigh. We're maybe 60 seconds in.

"What happened to the tips?" I protest, trying to laugh it off. But ever the Felix Leo, Andy tells me to concentrate. I make a face.

I get the ball. It turns between my players and bounces close to his goal-keeper. He slides the keeper across and bounces it into midfield. I block, he shoots, I save and fire it back. He pounds it back downfield where I miss it completely as it passes beneath a defender who mysteriously has his feet in the air. I twist my left hand and the goal-keeper punts it. It hits his attacker and spins straight back into the goal. 8-0.

I try a different spin when putting the ball back in this time. The ball curves towards his goal and he smashes it with a defender. The familiar rattle of the ball in the goal strikes me as suddenly very wearing. Andy has scored 9 goals in the space of just a few minutes. My hands suddenly feel like hooves trying to evolve into opposable thumbs.

"No advice then?" I ask as I slot the ball back onto the field. Winning has not been an option for some time, but if I could just score, I know I would feel like doing a victory lap. But the lion does not concern himself with the opinions of gazelles. He deftly twists and turns the ball across the table, it bounces into the air, lands between two of his strikers and while I'm still calculating which way to move my keeper, the ball fires cleanly into my goal for the tenth and final time.

I over-dramatize my disappointment by shaking my fists at the ceiling and grunting like a caveman.

Andy smiles at me.

"I normally just hit it and hope," he says, "Works for me."

"What did you think I was doing?" I laugh back, apparently outraged, as I swish open my Coke.

I've always thought football was a ridiculous game.

TRYING TO BE A STARFISH

I can’t shake the tension. I feel cramped up inside my clothes, one knee jammed against a table and an uncomfortable itch all around me. Every joint feels stiff, out of place as though twisted into a locked formation of curled fingers and aching limbs. I am trapped inside myself.

What I’d like to do is spread out. Like a starfish, every tingling nerve-ending extended and relaxed against the sand and the sun. I feel like this would ease this congested conglomeration of lungs, stomach, heart and chest.

I want to feel the wind, as though I were a kite stretched tight against the blue sky, with only a tiny ribbon of bright yellow bunting and a string that bounces with the breeze.

My neck is locked from screen-glare. My eyes are tired. My back is pushed into this faux leather, and hot tea swirls uncomfortably through me. I’m an automaton, like a meccano frame draped in skin and ligaments and jeans and a shirt and a hooded jacket.

I read an article about mansplaining today. I can’t tell you about it because within a sentence I’ll be actually doing it - mansplaining mansplaining. I’ll say this though: gentlemen need to get better at listening, respecting and not assuming.

It’s made me feel tense, much like my hopeless conversation yesterday. I know some stuff, I have a tough time working out what others do and don’t know, plus I really like explaining things: it’s my job. I’m highly likely to be a mansplainer. I sincerely hope not though. I want to be so much better at listening.

My feet feel hot, like they’re ballooning inside my trainers. Music I didn’t choose rings in my ears and the closeness of people suddenly bothers me. I don’t wish to hear conversations. I wish to think and dream. I wish to lie alone at the water’s edge and feel the waves crash, cool and calm over me, blocking the stars and the sun for a while and then seeping back into the great ocean.

I don’t think it’s totally down to me reading an article about mansplaining. I expect it’s other things. Nevertheless, I don’t want to be pompous. Sometimes I read my writing, or I hear myself talking and all I hear is pomp. It’s so pompy, my soundtrack may as well be a tuba. But I don’t want it to be. And the easiest way to do that is to stop talking and to start listening... or reading better. I need to chill and unwind all this tension.

So if you think I’m being a mansplainer, or a boring, bombastic old bloater, feel free to tell me to be a bit less of a pompadour and a bit more of a starfish.

EXHAUSTED AND UNASSERTIVE

I am exhausted. I think I mean it too - drained of all useful resources, and not just physically, but in my brain and in my heart too.

I woke up at 4:30 this morning. It was still dark. Outside, somewhere in the park, a fox was howling. The noise had interrupted my dreams like a weird siren, and now I was blearily fumbling for my phone.

It is physical exhaustion then; at least partly. I lay awake thinking everything through, trying not to worry. Then it was bright and time to get up.

I got stuck in the traffic again. Sunlight caught the edges of metal bumpers and gleamed from wing mirrors. The radio was full of talk of Brexit and babies, and whether or not you should flush wet-wipes down the toilet. I vote no.

I'm emotionally exhausted too, I reckon. I can't exactly explain why. I just know that I don't have a lot left in the tank. I tried to give advice to a very cynical person yesterday, and quickly realised that there was nothing I could say to help that didn't make me sound like I was part of the invisibile conspiracy that apparently is making the world so specifically evil for them. That hopeless conversation reminded me that these days, the hardest thing to change is a person's mind - even face-to-face.

I'm also caught in the unexpected-assertiveness-loop. I've been here before - it's when you start being assertive with people all of a sudden, and they're so shocked by it, they start interpreting it as coarse and abrasive, when actually it's just unusual for someone who isn't normally assertive. Then, instead of being cautious, I make bold decisions... which are often rash and wrong, and need unpicking.

It must seem as though I'm on a sort of grumpy mission to frustrate the people around me... which is so unlike me, they all assume there's something wrong.

Which there is. And so I back out of the unexpected-assertiveness-bravery and kick off the problem all over again by being soft, sheepish, compliant and nice, yet quietly thunderous with myself.

So, I need a little replenishing. That's okay, I think I know what to do, or at least kind of where to start. I might not be able to be change minds, but I can change my own. And I can be determined to put kindness first, even though I sometimes forget.

And maybe I need to land somewhere that's comfortable, between sheepish and arrogant - right in the middle of that tricky assertiveness triangle, instead of veering outside of the lines like a toddler doing colouring-in during a tantrum.

I also need to sleep better, and I definitely should try to ignore the foxes out there at 4:30 in the morning.

TWO CLANGERS

Well. I had the potential to make a whole load of massive mistakes today, and I only made two! That’s quite a result.

Oh certainly, there were many medium-sized errors, and the usual host of tiny ones cluttering up my output, but, remarkably, only two clunkers.

I’m not going to go into details. One is my attitude problem, and the other was not eating anything at all until 6:30pm. Literally no breakfast, no lunch. That, is foolish, and now, at the other end of the day I feel a bit sick.

But I’m not going into details. No sympathy required or deserved.

Unfortunately, you don’t get plaudits for preventing disasters. At least, not to the same level as you get the blame for letting them happen. Gargantuan efforts to save the world go unrewarded every day, I have no doubt - just like (well not just like, obviously) my potential clangers. I saved the world, my world, many times over today, and nobody knows.

Yet my attitude problem is something I have to apologise for, and my stomach rumbles late at night like a passing tube train. I am irascible and offended and a terrible role-model, and I am hungrier than a plastic hippo, and it’s too late to cook anything.

Oh well. I can always do better tomorrow. I really must have breakfast though.

SEE-THROUGH ELEPHANTS

Want to know what winds me right up?

Hmm. That is a broad category, I agree. It seems to contain everything from noisy-eating,  radio-DJs talking-utter-nonsense-to-fill-up-the-time, and passive-aggressive-kitchen-posters; to ice-cream-vans-that-don’t-finish-the-tune, kids playing Chopsticks on pianos, and of course... the use of multiple exclamation marks at the end of a sentence.

I’ll narrow it down.

Today, it’s see-through elephants.

Hands up if you were expecting that! Well who could blame you. I’m talking about elephants-in-the-room, of course, but... not your normal, bog-standard, solid, shadow-casting, bulky (yet wholly ignorable) elephants in the room! I mean the see-through ones.

A see-through elephant is one that’s been let in, and perhaps into all the rooms, but you’re never quite sure whether everyone else can see it. An opaque elephant, oh for sure, you can dance around that one; you can be diplomatic with a nudge and a wink, or some sly comment about tusks and trunks if you like! The rules are clear, the air is calm and everyone knows it. They’re just not going to mention it.

But with the transparent old stompers, with the see-through, bulbous masses of lumbering unmentionables, you can never be sure. And that winds me up.

The most common examples of see-through elephants I suppose, are things like someone being in the early stages of a pregnancy, or perhaps a person who’s got another job but it’s not common knowledge yet. They get clearer and less visible, when the news is gossipy - as though... I know this thing (or at least I think I know this thing), and you might know this thing too, but I don’t know whether you do know this thing, and if I ask you whether you know this thing, and this thing is definitely not mine to tell you, then you’ll make me tell you (because how could you not?), and I can’t. I just can’t.

See-through elephants are the most dangerous, I’d wager.

The last time I encountered one, it took all my deductive skill (admittedly that is not a lot) to calculate whether to risk exposing it. Thankfully, I got it right and it was okay.

“How did you get on chatting to [so-and-so]?” asked the other person in the room.

I raised an eyebrow, inquisitively.

“Oh... good...” I said, picking up half a signal of light refracting through ivory...

“Wait... do you... do you know?” I asked.

They confirmed that they did, smiling, at which point I lapsed into a ‘phew’ and the elephant sulked off, visible and suddenly discussable to everyone.

I don’t like it. I don’t like having to work out whether or not an elephant is there. And in Britain, our culture seems to squeeze those blighters in sometimes, in some sort of acrobatic avoidance of proper intimate and honest conversation... which, as any unwitting foreigner knows, makes us squirm like nails down a chalkboard.

There you go. That’s what winds me right up - see-through elephants. Maybe we should promote a society where it’s okay for everyone to talk to anyone... about anything.

Then again, I’m not sure I’d want to encourage those radio DJs, and I certainly don’t think I could live in a world that was full of them.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR SHAKESPEARE

Well, happy birthday, Shakespeare, you impossibly English old codger.

I mean, to be born, and to 'shuffle off the mortal coil' both on St George's Day! 'Twere a wonder thine origins were not constructed in a flight of fancy.

Anyway, he's 454 today - a ripe old age by anyone's measure.

I always think he looks a bit like a pirate. He's got a sort of a swarthy glimmer about him, peering out from the canvas (or the woodcut) with his pointy beard, his gold earring, and his steely eyes. He has those mustachios too, neatly clipped above a knowing half-smile, contrasting with the bright dome of his middle-aged forehead. Does he look like the kind of character who would sneak ideas from his contemporaries and then slap his own name on them? Yes. Did he do that? I don't know, and I don't think it matters.

In an ironic kind of snobbery, Robert Greene, a playwright himself, once attacked the young Shakespeare in a pamphlet, accusing him of being an 'upstart crow' and a conceited 'Johannes Factotum' (jack of all trades) for reaching above his station and trying to mix with the educated circles of 'university wits'. It's interesting that that paragraph of attack is now Greene's most famous work, isn't it? Or maybe not, but then, do you know any plays by Robert Greene?

You should always be kind.

By the way, I just looked it up and it looks like 454 candles would generate about the same output as ten small electric heaters. Shakespeare's cake would melt before you got it out of the kitchen. Presumably someone would then make a joke about whether that's a tragedy or a comedy, and the old wit would remind them that the same is true of asking someone that ancient to blow them out.

Only more eloquently.

Happy birthday, old Bard.

THE VALLEY OF THE FOUR GIANTS: THE WHOLE STORY

I’ve been writing this over the last eighteen months. It started as an allegory for where I was at at the end of 2016, but it soon became a wider story I had to finish. Congrats if you followed it all the way through!

I thought I’d link back to all twenty chapters here, just in case you wanted to read the whole thing from the beginning. You’ll undoubtedly find errors, typos and threads I forget about, but that’s okay. A lot of this was in and of the moment.

I think it’s a story about carrying hope in the most difficult places. It was fun to do as a side project! I enjoyed writing it piece by piece, chapter by chapter.

Here’s the table of contents. Enjoy...

The Valley of the Four Giants

1. Trumpet
2. Her 
3. Hope
4. Stolen
5. Courage
6. Photograph 
7. Ivy 
8. Return 
9. Thunder 
10. Arrows
11. Music 
12. Apothecary
13. Boot
14. Rescue
15. Surrender
16. Battle
17. Flicker 
18. Smoke 
19. Double
20. End

TESCO CAR PARK

Any idea why I’m sitting in my car in the Tesco car park listening to the FA Cup semi-final?

Me neither. The commentators and the thousands of fans are excited, whipping themselves into a frenzy over the fate of a leather ball. I’m not sure I care.

I’m reticent to complain about my Saturdays; I strike a lonely figure when I do that, and I run the risk of becoming someone else’s project. Nevertheless, they are what they are. And this one is what it is.

I suppose football is a sort of escapism - yet it brings people together at some tribal level. It’s the be-all and end-all, a driving loyalty underpinning millions of people’s identities. As far as I can see though, it’s great at being, and not so great at ending.

I don’t want to get into that debate again. It’s important, clearly, even if I don’t truly get why.

How did I end up here? Hunger drove me. Why am I not going home yet? I don’t quite know. Probably should soon though eh?

Maybe after injury time.

THE VALLEY OF THE FOUR GIANTS: END

In an instant I'm alive.

I duck, move and roll across the grass, my head spinning with fire.

An arrow zips through the air behind me. It thuds into its target. I scramble to my knees, just in time to see the Photographer fall backwards to the ground, one giant arrow protruding.

Her double throws down the heavy bow and runs towards me. We stand and watch.

First the hands. They balloon into bulbous fingers. A leather boot creaks and pops as a foot expands out of it. Then the whole body inflates, wheezing into a growing mound of ugly giant, her head morphing and expanding into the dead and grubby face of Lustfulness.

A small bottle rolls into the grass from her open fingers.

Her eyes flicker at me for just one moment, and then as though trying to whisper one last thing to me, one last question... but Lustfulness is already gone.

The Photographer looks at me.

"How did you know?" she asks, breathlessly.

"Boots," I smile, "She was wearing both boots."

The Photographer lifts her skirts daintily. One stockinged foot is caked in mud. She laughs.

-

"NOOOOO!" cries Hopelessness. The balloonists are rounding on him again as he backs towards the burning trees. He slices as they dart between his legs.

"Uselessness! Look!"

Uselessness swings his staff and peers over the brow of the hill.

"Find Loneliness. This is not over!"

"It is over!" cries a balloonist. "You've lost!"

Hopelessness roars.

-

"We have to get out of here," she cries. "They'll soon come for you."

"Where are we supposed to go? Look at the forest - it's burning everywhere, all of it!"

"You're right," says the Photographer. "But they'll find you. And if they bring... it... back, we won't be able to hold them off."

Her eyes flash. "Yes. They have a maker too - a kind of a king, a monster from the earth. He's too strong for any of us, and if they call him..."

"But they already..."

"What?"

"They already did. I saw him. He's already here."

"Impossible."

"He had a sword that was bright like the sun, and he came out of the ground. I saw him."

"The flash of light, the green smoke. Of course. Matt, we have to run. Now."

We run.

-

"No use old bean," says one of the balloonists. "It's wedged in."

"We can pull it out!"

"I don't think so. It's as though it's part of the tree. Leave it."

"We can't leave it! If that thing comes back, it'll be unstoppable with that!"

"There's no time."

A shadow falls. The smoke swirls. From nowhere, a great claw of a hand swipes and roars out of the fumes. Spindly, earthy fingers latch around the hilt of the bright, burning sword. The air sizzles with electricity.

Then the creature stands, ripping the sword from the broken tree as it cracks loudly into splinters. Balloonists scatter in all directions.

"Run!" they cry. And over the hill, they are gone.

-

"There!" cries Hopelessness. The creature bellows into the air, making the burning trees tremble with fear. Uselessness thumps the earth, Loneliness slides an arrow into her bow, and Hopelessness grips his sword and runs. The earth-creature, the great and terrible maker-of-giants raises his shining weapon into the air. From somewhere, a familiar but awful trumpet sounds as the Giants run towards the burning forest.

-

She's ahead of me. My heart pounds in my throat. The heat sears into my face as we approach the fire. I hear it whoop and crackle.

Thud.

The staff thumps into the earth.

She stops. Then she turns. I turn. The great shadow of Uselessness towers over me. Hopelessness and Loneliness are behind them.

"Matt," she calls. "You can do this."

"He can't!" laughs Uselessness. "He can't do nothing."

The staff thunders the ground again.

"You can," she says. "As long as you have... hope."

"And there is none of that," booms Hopelessness. He's limping but still clutching his sword. Behind him Loneliness stands, gripping the last of her arrows as she scoops up the bow.

"Now finally, surrender your hope. Give it to us. You cannot win this. Even your Maker has abandoned you, fool."

The sky bursts. The Photographer clutches my hand and I feel hers trembling in my grip. Standing around us are the three remaining giants, their shadows cast through the smoke. There, with them, brighter than a thousand suns, is the vast creature from the earth, the terrible maker of giants with his sword glittering above his head.

"Give me your hope." he rasps slowly. The earth under my feet feels as though it is retreating in terror. The foul breath swirls through the air.

The Photographer looks at me. I feel her grip tighten, words passing unspoken between us. Her eye glistens with tears. I look down at the floor.

"I shall not ask again. Give me your hope."

My bag slips gently from my shoulder. I reach inside. So far I've come, I think. So far. And I have failed. She has failed. Even the Maker has failed. There is nothing which can be done.

My fingers clutch the edges of the photograph. It feels smoother than it did. The corner feels stiff, newer somehow than when she first gave it to me. So long ago, this nebulous hope - so long it has been growing, changing and developing... and so long have I held on to it, fought for it, clasped it with all my strength. Now, finally, I had no choice. I had to give it up.

I look up at the faces of my adversaries. Like stone towers they soar into the sky. They had always been taller, stronger, more powerful than I could have imagined.

Hopelessness, with his sword, so often slicing between my emotions - what I thought I deserved, what I knew I didn't, what I believed and what I couldn't. He stands growling like a lion against the smoke-filled sky.

Uselessness, forever thumping the ground of my failure with the staff of despair. I had beaten him, but he had returned, and now would convince me that victory would never be possible.

And Loneliness - she who had whispered through the night and fired her silent arrows one by one into my heart. My arm still bore the wound, and my spirit had been pierced by her lies. She stared at me, silhouetted but bristling with power.

Lustfulness. Dead, but not forgotten. Her poison seeped into the earth where she had fallen. She was beaten, but to what end. My Hope is lost.

The Giant-King growls at me. Electricity seems to ripple around me as I bring the photograph into whatever remains of the daylight.

I close my eyes and hold it out. The Four Giants have won.

-

"Matt," whispers the Photographer. "Open your eyes."

I do.

"Look," she says. "Look at it."

I do.

I quickly glance at her in disbelief. She glances back at me. There's the faintest hint of something in her eyes, a far-away feeling of an emotion I recognise, a face I... know. She flickers, looking away, up at the Giant-King, determination upon her face.

I feel the corners of my mouth twitching, perhaps into one final, desperate smile.

Then with a trembling hand, I hold out the Photograph. I take a deep breath.

"This," I declare quietly, "This is not for you."

He sneers.

"I'm surrendering my Hope. But I am not surrendering it... to you."

"At last! Foolish!" he spits, ignoring me. The others cackle into the air. A rush of wind sweeps around the circle and the burning forest is swept into a fresh burst of crackling fire.

The creature bows, thrusts the spindly fingers of his left hand towards me and snatches the photograph from my shaking grip. It's ridiculous in his fingers - tiny, like a postage stamp! He pinches a corner of it between two muddy talons and swings it near to his gleaming yellow eyes. The other giants raise their hands triumphantly to the sky.

The Photographer looks at me.

I look at her.

She grips my fingers.

I dig my boots into the earth.

-

At once, suddenly from nowhere, there's a flash.

The Giant-King recoils.

"What?" he cries, incredulous. His eyes are wide.

Hopelessness raises his sword.

"It can't be!" screams the creature. His mouth opens in shock. Then, before any of the others can react, the photograph, the hope, the same Hope I have carried, explodes into life; sparks of electricity in all directions fly like lightning bolts, flashing, burning, dancing around between his terrible fingers.

He panics. His eyes land upon me with hatred, terror and disgust. But it's already too late! He can't let go. The blinding lightning leaps from hand to hand, from finger to finger. A bolt jumps out and strikes him in the chest. He stumbles backwards, causing the earth to shake as he roars in agony.

In a rush the other giants race to help but as they grow closer, the light strikes them. Uselessness gets a bolt in the eye, Loneliness lets her bow fall once more the to the ground, and Hopelessness shouts in agony. From giant-to-giant the photograph strikes, rippling blue lightning around the circle.

"Aaaagh! How can it... argh," they cry. Fire leaps between them, a storm of hope, blackening and charring their terrible forms, again and again, bolt after bolt.

We stand and we watch.

Thunder claps loudly above us and we roll to the ground.

One-by-one the earth shakes as the four final giants tumble and roll to the floor, burned from the inside out, screaming in pain as the lightning streams.

For the longest time, the noise is unbearable. Thunder, fire and smoke. They writhe, each of the four great carcasses shuddering in final despair and agony.

And then nothing.

They are.

Gone.

We stand.

A small square of old photographic paper flutters from the sky and lands on the earth near my feet. I scoop to pick it up, and rise, shaking my head in disbelief.

"You will always have hope, Matt," whispers the Photographer. And she throws back her head, her hair tumbling behind her, and laughs into the sky.

"What... happened?" I say bewildered.

She smiles, sweetly and kisses me once on the cheek.

-

The rain falls steadier now, from the downpour that followed the storm. We wander through the blackened stalks of the trees where the forest once was. Steam rises as though it were the misty morning of a new dawn.

"So, the Maker knew... all along?" I asked. Rain drips through the scarred branches.

"Of course! He knew that Hope was in you. He put it there!"

"And I was trying to hold on to... something," I said, laughing. She slipped a wet hand into mine.

"We all are, Matt," she said. "But when you surrender Hope to the Maker of Hope, then He'll always be with you. It's who He is. That's why you couldn't see the photograph until the end. You had to give up the thing that you were clinging on to."

The rain is stopping. A delicate smell of earth and ash fills the forest and somewhere, for the first time in what has felt like forever, a bird begins to sing.

A shaft of sunlight falls through the trees. It catches the Photographer and lights her face and her hair with a golden glow. Her eyes glisten as she turns and smiles at me.

In the distance, we hear the balloonists cry to each other through the woods as they find each other. "What ho!"... "I say, you made it!" they beam, their voices carrying through the trees.

The Photographer and I laugh together and hold hands as we pick our way through the trees.

"Is it time then?" I ask.

She nods silently. Then with the softest of glances, she looks back and beckons me to follow her.

There, walking through the smoldering trees, bathed in the evening light of the cool of the day is a figure I know, whom I instinctively know somehow from the deepest of my dreams. The sun, now beaming through the canopied wood falls upon him as though he were drawing it towards himself, and reflecting it throughout the recovering world.

He smiles.

Together we walk towards him, and together, the Photographer and I, we leave the Valley of the Four Giants finally, behind us.

ADMIN DOJO

Right. I’m not going to go on about The Matrix again. Won’t even mention it today.

I am however, interested in how we download information and skill into our lives. Here’s a thing I’ve noticed:

I’m naturally rubbish at admin. Like, super-terrible. I forget to pay bills, I don’t email people back, and I double-book my self all the time. I’m the kind of person who continually baffles and irritates the organisational beavers.

I’m more of an otter, when it comes down to it. But... I love people. And I hate letting them down! So in teams of lovely friends, where I can’t delegate to the super-switched-on-planning gurus, I have to be extra careful, and much more attentive to the admin.

So I try to be more organised. I texted my pal Chris today, once we’d sorted out some dates for a thing we’re doing.

“... Admin is not my thing. I’m learning though.”

“Cheers bro,” replied he. “You do fine.”

And there you have it. In an effort to focus on a weakness, I’m slowly turning it into a strength. I’m forcing myself to ‘download’ the administration module I need because I’m conscious I wasn’t born with it. Soon, I won’t be able to say I’m rubbish at admin because it won’t be true any more. Right?

It occurs to me that this is exactly like learning anything, from pastoring to rock climbing to helicopter piloting. Musical instruments are my thing: a few of them I found I could just play without thinking about when I was young. People would be amazed but I wondered why most people couldn’t do the same. However, for some of those early instruments, skill and training are still essential. And you won’t hear me teach anything else.

All this reinforces what my Year 6 teacher taught me: there’s no such thing as ‘can’t’... and, as George McFly later reminded me in Back to The Future... if you put your mind to it...

Well anyway. I’m not sure I necessarily enjoy the admin. And that might continue to be a difference between me and those organisational beavers. I would hate to be labouring over a thing that’s someone else’s passion.

That’s another great reason for finding out where everyone is at! What makes you tick? Are you doing it? Would you like to?

Otherwise, you’ll find me downloading the next Kung-Fu-level admin module straight from the code and into The Matrix.

Bother.

LUNCHTIME HOLIDAYS

It’s glorious. Sunlight sparkles from the lake like glittering diamonds, the sky is cloudless and free, and the sun is finally hot.

I’m in the shade, sipping a Diet Pepsi. A gentle breeze tickles my arms and cools my face. I could be anywhere I guess: a balcony overlooking Sorrento and the bay, the verandah of an old house on a Caribbean island, a seaside ice cream parlour. The warm weather reminds me.

Of course I’m not ‘anywhere’. I am as usual, a definite somewhere. Work. Well the café by the lake by work. And to wander over here in the sunshine, I’ve somehow managed to duck out of the alternative - a technical demo in a meeting room with the blinds down and the projector up.

Have I chosen wisely? I believe so.

This weather though, seems to also bring with it a kind of laissez faire freedom. At least three people today thought it was Friday. If we all agreed, I suppose it could be. Meanwhile the grass is a green beach of sunbathers in rolled-up shirt-sleeves and pale, shoeless feet, all putting that freedom to work on their lunchtime holidays.

Lunchtime holidays. Why not? Micro-breaks where all you do is switch off from the day job and enjoy the freedom. Still though, this café is filled with dazzling white shirts and coffee cups and lanyards and laptops.

I wonder whether I too should switch my brain off for a while. Recently it’s felt like an engine, processing a gazillion thoughts and ideas - some ludicrous (touring Iceland in an ice-cream van), some exciting (writing songs), and some just deep. The engine has been sparked into life by a few things, and maybe it needs a rest.

So here I am. In the shade with a Diet Pepsi while the fountain burbles and streams into the glistening blue water. It is glorious.

PLATO’S CAVE

It’s taken me (almost) twenty years to see it, but The Matrix is essentially Plato’s Cave isn’t it?

Plato’s Cave is a hypothetical construct, where individuals who are bound to a cave, see shadows on the wall, cast by the sun behind them, and perceive those shadows to be their reality. Plato wondered how freedom would affect those prisoners’ sense of what reality is. What, for example, if they saw the sun and realised the ‘true’ nature of the world?

I’m sitting here by the lake tonight. The birds are going crazy, flapping and squawking and croaking into the dusk. I’m quietly processing.

Plato suggested that we’re only capable of processing the world with our senses, and that there might be a higher plane, or planes, of pure reality that we’re ill-equipped to deal with. I think I might agree with that - we exist in the three dimensional construct of a universe that’s thermodynamically restricted itself that way. But there is so much more...

And not just out there in the realm beyond mathematics! Deep inside of us too! Buried in every fold and starburst of the elegant reality of who we are.

I don’t want to get pompous or intellectual about it, but I’d quite like to study a bit more about philosophy! Philo-sophy, the love of wisdom, the equity of discovering knowledge. At university, the maths students used to say that the deeper you go into the rabbit hole of mathematics, the more it starts looking like philosophy. I can quite believe it.

“Let me show you,” says Morpheus implacably, behind his reflective glasses, “How deep the rabbit hole goes...”

These birds are really noisy. I like it - reminds me that life flows through all of us. I can sit here in silence; that’s part of my design. They can cause a ruckus on an island in the middle of a lake. It’s what they do.

Somehow or other, each of us operating according to our design, letting life find a way, is really rather a beautiful thing.

A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX

I’m in Starbucks waiting for my friend Matt. I’m feeling on edge - not because of Matt - something portentous in the atmosphere out there. But I go on about that feeling too much.

What more could put me at ease than three millennials loudly chatting about what they think deja-vu is?

This guy thinks it’s memories writing themselves. The other has a weird theory about people synchronising their dreams somehow. I’m not really clever enough to get my head round that.

“You know it’s just a glitch in The Matrix, right?” asks the third, who’s slightly older.

“It’s a what?”

“Never mind.”

The other two have no clue what he’s talking about. I catch my reflection in the glass. I am grey.

Perhaps this edgy feeling is a similar thing to deja-vu. It lasts a little longer though - and I’m never really sure what it’s all about. No tidal wave looms over Starbucks today. As far as I know we’re clear of inbound comets too. Or perhaps that’s just what the robots want us to believe?

HYGGETOPIA

I’m in Stockholmhaven again. I’m people-watching. This is definitely the place, it seems, for horizontal striped jumpers, hipster glasses, and posh coats worn by young, attractive couples who’ve brought their toddlers along.

What in the world am I doing here?

Observing. I’ve come to realise, I think, that most of us are after that sustained feeling of cosy warmth, wherever we are. And the thought of it is comforting: the soft glow of downward lamps or the smell of freshly baked bread; there’s hot coffee, cinnamon buns, plush seating, and neat storage. There are old books in Swedish and new books in English, and plump cushions and fake grass up the wooden wall, and the Interminable Loop of Impossible Swedes on the big screen by the sofas.

I’ve gone on about the loop before, I know.

It’s 20 minutes and 41 seconds long (I sat here timing it) and for some people, it could easily be a window into a Scandi-paradise, a sort of Twenty-First Century Asgard, in which the lingonberries flow wild and free, and the net-caught salmon is beautifully lit pink against the backdrop of a crystal, sparkling lake. In Hyggetopia, no-one is late, angry, sad or upset; everyone laughs and loves and eats and cooks together until the sun goes down, and they all sit on the beach wearing warm jumpers under fairy lights, dreaming of hashtags and likes on Instagram.

I’ve got nothing against it. I’m here too, remember, trying to fit in.

My guess is that as the world out there gets darker and more frightening, we, but particularly young people, are drawn in to the warmth and the light of all that is the opposite. A war is brewing far away, in a land that’s already had its share of that. We can’t stop it, but we can curl into a nook or a hammock. Terrible forces are at work, polarising everyone from left to right and race to race. We can’t depose them on our own, and arguing is painful and pointless sometimes, but we can switch off fakebook and light a candle or two. We have those we love. They have us. That’s what matters in Hyggetopia.

I’m not knocking it. I’d love to create it in my own home too - or at least a bit of it. And maybe I can, if I actually go there instead of hanging around in Stockholmhaven on a Friday night. But there is a part of me, sitting here in front of the Interminable Loop, that wonders whether I’ll ever make it to the land of rosy out-of-focus backgrounds on my own. And there’s another part of me too, that wonders if it’s real at all, or if it ever was.

PETRICHOR

Darkened clouds

That spit with rain

And rumble distant

Storms refrain

Where silent air

Still lit by sun

Takes pause before

The music comes

And shadows fall

Where whispers die

As summer clouds

Obscure the sky

Darkened clouds

A flash of light!

Electric forks

Of blue and white

The heavens crack

The ancients roar

As giants strike

The Earth once more

O strike, then silent

Arrows fly!

And terror fills this

Earthbound sky

Darkened clouds

That thunder pain

And beat the ground

With pounding rain

Where anvil chimes

And sparks ignite

The sword refined

In cracks of light

And here am I

With love alight

For day will

Overcome the night

And as we stand

With hope once more

We too

Shall be the petrichor

THE TCP MYSTERY

Here’s a mystery. The last few times I’ve got out of my car outside my flat, the whole street has smelled of TCP.

Bandages, those little scissors, a box of randomly-sized sticking plasters, a tube of Germolene, or maybe Savlon antiseptic cream... you get the picture... it’s like stepping into a first aid box.

Why? Where is that coming from? It fills the street! At first I thought it might have been me: I don’t know, somehow TCP got stuck up my nostrils or something... but you’d think I’d remember that. I mean, I once got a full snortful of Vix vaporub and I definitely recall it. TCP would burn holes in my sinuses, surely.

The only solution I’ve got is that Thames Water are doing something in the drains, maybe cleaning the pipes underground or something, and the waft is reaching the surface and leaking through the manhole covers. It’s either that, or one of my neighbours is turning a maisonette into a cul-de-sac mini hospital.

Or, wait... Isn’t there some awful syndrome when you start smelling strange fragrances just before your body shuts down and you collapse into a coma? There was something about smelling strawberries, I think, someone told me once. Then, that might have been a practical joke played on me by someone with a friend who was vaping round the corner, now that I think about it.

Anyway, it remains a mystery. And it could just be that the other day, someone accidentally spilled a bottle of TCP at the end of my road. And that must have been far more annoying than the subsequent mystery that that unfortunate event produced.

GRUMPY RED ARROWS

There are different types of grumpiness, I reckon. Much like the way aerobatic displays have planes swooping and diving, there are lots of things that look like a plummeting-mood, which you may, or may not be able to pull out of before you hit the floor.

I was doing alright first thing at worship practice this morning. I’d been to the gym, pushed myself further and felt more alive than my bleary-eyed drive in, and I was ready for anything.

Almost anything. The music stand I use for my MacBook was gone. My microphone, also missing. All the music stands at the back were broken (weirdly in the same way). And no-one knows where the microphone went.

So... I carefully, diplomatically, politely... asked a few gentle questions - which, somehow betwixt my lips and the ears upon which they fell, came across as grumpy. Then, when everyone thought I was grumpy, it was near impossible to pull out of the swoop and convince them that I wasn’t. And that of course, actually made me grumpy. And then it was pointless to argue the difference.

We made a make-shift music stand, by attaching the head of one of the broken ones to the body of a spare microphone stand, and I balanced my laptop on it. Then we all prayed, I apologised for being grumpy and we pushed through it.

Perhaps it’s possible to ‘fall with style’ and make it look like flying. Perhaps, like the narrative point in Toy Story, it makes no difference at all which it is, to the spectators. Or perhaps, as all creatives know, the best stories always involve a twist of expectation when the hero somehow pulls out of that fatal plot-dive at the last minute and soars into the air with the sound of sweeping strings and a glorious fanfare.

I certainly hope that’s possible the next time I’m grumpy, I thought to myself as we cycled through the chord-shapes and checked sound levels, whether it looks like that or it actually is that.

Some time later, mid-song, mid-service, and mid-moment, my MacBook wobbled off the makeshift-music-stand and clattered loudly to the wooden floor, landing upside down on the stage.

Wind whistled, black smoke plumed and the spinning ground swam closer as the engine spluttered.

I closed my eyes and held on tight.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM SONIC THE HEDGEHOG

What relation are your cousin’s children? I want to say they’re ‘second’ cousins... but that was surprisingly controversial the last time I floated it with someone! I don’t want to get into an argument.

So, let’s call them kiblings. Same generation as niblings, just another branch over.

I don’t know how many kiblings I have on my Dad’s side. On my Mum’s side though, there are definitely two. And yesterday, one of them spent twenty minutes breathlessly telling me about Sonic the Hedgehog.

I now know about rares and super rares, about Tails and Knuckles, and emerald chests, and rings, and the thing that freezes you with ice. I know about boosts and fireballs, about shadow hedgehogs and epics and special moves. In wide-eyed excitement, he lectured me and I listened intently, trying to grasp a world I haven’t seen since I was thirteen.

“My friends and I had a Sega Megadrive,” said I. I might as well have told him I had a trebuchet and a bucket of apples. It even amused me how ancient those words seemed - a ‘mega drive’. That’s what you need to get from one end of the M4 to the other, I suppose. What would it have to do with a cartoon hedgehog?

I remember Sonic being a game that messed with my senses. You had to be quick, and there were always things happening, bright, flashing events, everywhere on the screen, all the time. I was never any good. I would speed into obstacles deliberately and laugh like a hyena, just to wind up my friends and amuse myself when they then got really grumpy.

I wonder what happened to them? They stopped talking to me after a while, as I remember. Life is full of mystery, when I think about it.

Anyway, it brought back a few bewildering and funny memories. And also, a thought. 

The human brain can remember a frightening amount of stuff when it wants to! I had been impressed by a non-stop twenty minute exposé of Sonic the Hedgehog - a reasonably complex and confusing world that I didn’t understand and could only barely grasp. What if it had been special relativity? Or capital cities? Or maths, or music theory? Would I have been even more impressed by my kibling’s capacity for learning? And is it any different?

Another thought struck me too: my Sonic expert didn’t once pick up a clue from me that it might not be quite as interesting to me, as he found it. And that’s understandable; he’s eight. But... how often do we stop ourselves as adults, from talking passionately because we presume that it’s boring for others? Why?

Too often perhaps. And I don’t know why. I made a mental note to think about neat ways of explaining how relativity gets you to energy-mass-equivalence (E=mc²), without using any of those words. I also made a stronger note to self, to remind me never to squash someone else’s passion because I might be bored.

Einstein once said that if you can’t explain something simply, then you haven’t fully understood it.

Then, would he have come up with that if he’d spent his days playing Sonic the Hedgehog instead of postulating that light travels at exactly the same observable speed, regardless of how fast you are moving when you measure it, leading to physical effects such as time and space bending, and matter consisting of energy?

Ha! There you go. Always look for the passion and the person first, even if the detail makes no sense at all. At least, that’s what I think.

THE NEW LISTENING

Two ears, one mouth. Yeah, heard it all before. Twice as much listening as talking blah blah blah.

That’s the problem though isn’t it. I really do need to get better at listening. I know I’ve said it before. But it is still true. Only these days it’s true in a different context. The world has changed.

In fact, sometimes, it seems like the whole world (lost in our own digital daydream) has extended that old logic: instead of two ears, one mouth, now it’s two eyes, one brain, ten fingers.

Yeah! Do ten times as much typing as thinking. Don’t bother reading that message! #oldschool. The world’s way too quick for all of that. You know the drift so just comment on what you think they’re saying, yeah? Too long; didn’t read, that’s the zeitgeist. Between the lines? Stuff that. I’ve got a million chat windows flashing. Flipping replied though. And they’d better read it!

As usual, I’m talking mostly about myself again. I’m a terror for not reading things properly. And yet, if more than 50% of my communication happens over the Internet (which sadly might just be true these days) then reading, for me, perhaps for a lot of us, ought to be the new listening.

And there is so much value in slowing it all down! There’s nuance, there’s deliberate phrasing, there’s pacing, there’s heart. Plus you run less of a risk of causing offence by accidentally replying to the surface skim-read instead of the subtlety of what was actually intended.

Yep. I did that. I do that. I will probably do it again, though I sincerely hope not.

But hey, if you skipped down to this paragraph from the top because you got bored at around “digital daydream” and you knew where I was going, that’s alright. Let me summarise: I’m trying to get better at reading, really properly, slowly absorbing, in the same way as a  live conversation ought to grab my fullest and deepest attention. Because although I too have ten quick-fire foolish fingers, I do have one complex brain, two good eyes, and a heart that would rather shun all this tech and meet people face-to-face. And so do you, probably. So between us I think we can do better whenever the reality of all that isn’t possible.

With me?