THE MUG TREE INCIDENT

I am so tired of being tetchy.

I've complained three times to different people this week about my tiny kitchen, after the Mug Tree Incident. It so often launches into a rant, but of course, it is a rant of my own making. And you're welcome to point that out.

Now today I'm sleep-deprived and irritable. I was up at 3am twitching in the hot, scratchy sheets. I'd have had a hot milky drink but you know. Mugs.

It's worked out too, that I'm gigging tonight in Wallingford with the barn dance band. Last time I tried driving home after one of those, I could barely see. Tonight might be an endurance test, from the Dorset Four Hand Reel right through to the End Polkas. I might not even survive the Nottingham Swing Set if we do it.

There I go again, complaining. What happened to 'do everything without complaining or arguing'? I feel like maybe I missed the 'how' part of that suggestion from Philippians, though undoubtedly scholars would tell me where it is. As I mentioned the other day, the person who wrote that was shipwrecked three times. Reaching up to get kitchen roll and knocking your mug tree over, smashing all your mugs into the cooker then bashing your lower back into the door handle while clearing up the broken china and then not being able to have a cup of tea afterwards... isn't really in the same league.

But it is annoying.

THE FIFTH EYE TEST

I’m now familiar with the entire layout of the hospital eye clinic. I had a test in every room of it today.

“I’m just going to get a particular book I need,” said the nurse in the first. I was left with the illuminated board of ever decreasing letters and the loud ticking clock, again.

I sighed. I knew which book she’d be getting. It could only be one, a book I’ve been familiar with since I was five years old, a wordless novel of nightmares, a recurring reference of rounded ridicule. It was Ishihara’s Color Vision Book - the book of coloured circles they use for colourblindness tests. I got to page 6 this time before the numbers disappeared. The same old inadequacies didn’t blend out of sight with them.

After that I waited for a bit while my notes went for a wander. Then a lady shone lights in my eyes and made me look at a picture of a canary. She was looking for my eyes reacting differently as I trailed her flashlight around the room.

In the next room I used a wand to point to circles on a board like it was part of some weird quiz show.

And in the next round, the ‘quizmaster’ gave me a buzzer and told me to push it whenever I saw a flashing dot in my peripheral vision. 

I was quite tired after that so I waited out in the corridor for a while and listened to a family trying to download Fortnite on to a Samsung Galaxy. Then I got taken into another room by a nurse who gave me eye drops and poked my eyeball with a pressure pen.

The drops have massively dilated my pupils. They’re still like dinner plates, hours later. I look like I’ve been drawn in anime. After the stinging subsided I realised that I couldn’t focus on anything. Good job I wasn’t driving home - the world was a myopic fog.

“Focus on the green cross,” said a guy who purported to be a medical photographer. A green cross wobbled into view down the lens. The world flashed with lightning and I was blinded as though I’d been goggling at the sun.

Eventually, tired and partially-sighted, I stumbled into the doctor’s room and sat in the examination chair.

“The good news,” she said, “is that there’s no damage to the optic nerve, the muscles are all healthy and the retina is fine.”

... which points the finger once again, at stress-migraines (unless the MRI results say something else). I was weirdly relieved, though I do need to figure out how to de-stress, obviously. Meanwhile, the NHS have been brilliant to me over the last month. And I can absolutely live with failing the Ishihara Color Vision test. Again.

COLUMBA PALUMBUS

For some reason I’ve dressed all in grey and blue today. Grey jeans, grey t-shirt, grey jumper, dark blue trainers with white laces, and my long navy coat.

I look like a pigeon.

Years ago, my Mum got into that old dress-like-a-season thing. It was popular for a while: if you were a ‘summer’ person, you could wear yellow and orange and white and you’d look like you just breezed off the plane from Acapulco... all-year-round. Winter and Autumn people though had to make do with browns and dark greens and icy blues, to match their pale cheeks and bring out the best of their tones. It all came from a book, as I recall, that trod a very fine line when discussing skin colour.

It wasn’t in my mind this morning to deliberately match my face with the colour of the sky, but there I was, greyer than Gandalf in Grimsby. And with shoes and coat on, the Columba Palumbus was completus.

Stephen Fry once said he thought Oscar Wilde would always have been famous, regardless of his plays or his sparkling wit, for how he dressed at Oxford. Wilde was a whirlwind of colour and style in a way that Victorian sepia photographs can’t capture. These days, he’d blend into the sea of individual exhibitionists at University, I’d wager, but back then it was almost scandalous to be so colourful.

Of course, his outrageous brilliance helped in the end. I’m afraid my own genius is much less outrageous and, as a lot of people will tell you, so deeply and expertly hidden as to be questionable in the first-place.

As a case-in-point, I’ve accidentally dressed myself as a pigeon.

AFTER EIGHTS AND ROYAL TEA

Dinner with the Intrepids and my sister tonight. Between courses, they decided to move a repainted chest of drawers into the spare room.

“Shouldn’t this be the point when we chill out with a cup of tea and an After Eight?” I asked.

“Quite right,” said my sister, while my Dad bashed the chest into the corner of the sofa. “Put the kettle on!” she beamed. I trudged out to the kitchen.

I bet this doesn’t happen in the Royal Family. I can’t imagine William making the tea while Camilla and the Duke of Cornwall start assembling flat-pack furniture on the carpet. It’s quite possible of course, that those people don’t even know that flack-pack furniture exists, let alone the pain of hunting for scattered screws, or accidentally kneeling on a screwdriver!

Anyway, I warmed the teapot.

“These drawers don’t fit!” called my Dad from the other room.

“They have to; they came out!” came the reply. I heard the sound of the drawers clattering out in the next room, and my Dad sighing exasperated. Meanwhile, the tea glugged out of the pot and into the cups.

I’m sure Prince William can make tea. It might not be tangy-tea in a Kit-Kat mug with a squashed tea bag floating in it, and it might be posher than my Mum’s Sunday-best floral cups, but I bet he can, even if he doesn’t often. I like to think that they all can really, but of course, don’t have to.

I carried in the tray and sat down.

“Any After Eights then?” asked my sister, cheekily.

“Not unless you brought them,” I said.

EMERGENCY TWIX

I’m eating a Twix, wondering whether technically that should be some Twix. But then, I’m not eating them both together, so perhaps I’m just eating a unix, one unix at a time. Unix. That sounds weird.

Well thankfully, I’ve got another ‘unix’ left in the packet. They come in twos you know. Twix.

I’ve gone weird. It’s all the travel, I reckon. I’m waiting for the last train of the day to take me home from the airport. I know from experience that this will take ages (it’s the slow train), so I was quite grateful to reach into my bag and pull out the emergency Twix I’d resisted eating earlier in the week. Well done, Younger Me! You may blow my own trumpet in the future, you hero, you.

There was something uncluttered and unfussy about Edinburgh airport. It took me a while to realise that it was empty of people, and the tranquility of that was suddenly seeping into my soul, like fresh water. Earlier today, someone had asked me whether I liked being alone or spending time with others, and I had paused and talked about the need to alternate. Introverts (I supposed) favour time alone (though not for long) and extroverts like time with people (though not for long) and as such, we all sort of alternate and bounce between the two, like an alternating social current of people who need space and social in equal measure. Well I do. And that’s what I said.

Later, I was dipping and weaving through Edinburgh, shuffling and brushing into strangers’ shoulders, and shimmying out of the melee with a ‘sorry’ every time I accidentally touched a human. I didn’t like it.

I squished onto the tram, bouncing my rucksack into somebody’s armpit and staring up at someone else’s chin. I didn’t like that either.

So it was that the airport turned out to be a weird oasis from the festival crowd. Not many airports are less busy than the city they serve. I had a drink alone at the bar. I mooched through security with the six other people who were flying anywhere from Scotland tonight, and I swept coolly and calmly to my gate, where the huge glass windows gleamed with the last golden rays of the setting sun. Lovely.

And now I’m here back in England, eating a, some, one of two, this, these... lovely Twix and waiting for the last train to pull out. You know, I don’t think a single unix would be enough at moments like this. You need the balance that two give, all the biscuity and chocolatey goodness. I think that’s it: it’s not two unixes in a packet. It’s two halves of a thing that’s whole in two pieces. Deep. And I’m sleep-deprived. And a bit weird.

Sometimes you just need a Twix.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

“So in August, Matt, the population of Edinburgh literally doubles from 500,000 to over a million!” said my host.

“Where do they all stay?” I asked, incredulously. Of course, the spare rooms of large houses are Air-B&Bd, and of course all the hotels are happily packed, all the time, throughout the festival period, presumably charging whatever numbers they like. No doubt the streets were full today, not with international connoisseurs of culture and comedy, but also some very happy restaurateurs and shopkeepers, for whom the crowds of August are annually the most rewarding.

I found myself walking along those same streets I had visited when I was here last, some eighteen months ago.

The bitter wind had been replaced with a summer breeze, and the Autumn gentleness had gone, in favour of the festival buzz and chatter. There are now pop-up bars and fairy lights in the parks where I’d sat quietly under golden trees. There are bouncers outside the museums I’d happily wandered into, and burly guards stand cross-armed beneath coloured banners, deafened by loud and live music.

And most noticeably of all, there are people; thousands of people, milling and mulling and swarming and pushing as they shuffle along the heaving streets. Today, Edinburgh had almost out-Londoned London.

Meanwhile, enthroned in his ridiculously tall monument, Sir Walter Scott looks, if anything, even less impressed with it all than usual. He’d not wanted a fuss, had Walter. In August in Edinburgh, it seems there’s not much else.

So this raises an interesting question: if this had been my first impression of Edinburgh, would I have liked it as much? How much difference is made by the people? And what does that say about me?

I think I would have excused it actually. After all, it’s clear that for eleven months of the year, this city is a little quieter, and perhaps a little more suited to introverts. And in any case, I’m not here for that reason.

I had some free time yesterday, so I thought I might walk up Calton Hill and overlook Edinburgh from the Dugald Stewart monument. I did that before and loved the aspect of the city, the castle, the Forth Bridge and the estuary that stretches silent and blue out to sea. I didn’t go though; I could see crowds of people up there. Then it started raining, so I zipped up my hood and headed for shelter.

So, is this a different city? Kind of. It’s a snapshot of a city at a moment, and festival-time is a huge part of what makes Edinburgh Edinburgh, even if it makes it hard to walk anywhere. But look up, Walter, look around, see the black and grey stonework and the grand old buildings of the Athens of the North. It’s all still there.

A TECHNICAL ISSUE

So, this morning I looked up where I was going on Google Maps. Edinburgh. It said it would take 6h17m to get there by driving.

I’m not driving. I left the house at 9:30am and walked to the station, where two trains took me to the airport. Currently, I’m four hours into my journey and I’m stuck in the queue inside the tunnel bit that connects the gate to the plane. It’s a weird kind of limbo.

I’m not sure what the holdup is.

Scratch that. A Scottish man in a yellow vest and lanyard has just shepherded us back to the lounge (the wrong way up the tunnel) due to a ‘technical issue with the aircraft.’

What a great phrase! That could be anything: the pilot’s locked himself in the bathroom, one of the wings fell off, a non-specific alarm is flashing, a bird nested in one of the engines. Or perhaps there are just more people than seats.

After I wrote a blog on thankfulness the other day, I can’t help thinking that this is an interesting moment to focus on some gratitude instead of my attitude. Great practice!

So, I’m thankful for the technical issue. I don’t want to get on a plane with one wing falling off, with a spurious alarm, or with a pilot who’s incapacitated. In fact, whatever it is, I’m grateful that somebody somewhere had the forethought of adding it to a checklist.

What’s more, I’m grateful that we can travel this way in the first place. If you rewind time a hundred years, this really is quite the miracle. But I’ve written about this ‘magic’ before.

The pilot has just bing-bonged through to give us more information. Apparently it was an issue with the sensor for the landing gear (see! Quite important!). We’re going to be bused over to another plane in about twenty minutes.

These things happen, right? I’m weirdly non-anxious about it. In fact, I’m weirdly non-anxious about arriving on time, about getting there... at all. I guess I’m subconsciously learning something at least. No stress.

Though I’ll eat my hat if I get there quicker than I could have driven it.

SUPER-CHARGED FREEZING-MODE

The office air conditioning is fixed, and for some reason, it's gone into super-charged freezing-mode. We're all sitting here in jackets and coats as though we're being forced to work inside some sort of fridge.

Seems like an odd thing to happen in August, I'll grant you. Especially when last night was baking. My phone says I slept for one hour and seven minutes - and from my calculation that was probably between the hours of 5:23 when I angrily threw the duvet onto the carpet, and 6:30 am, when my alarm went off.

Then I did a sweaty routine at the gym, which felt terrible, then great, then terrible again, then amazing, as often these things do. You'd think I'd appreciate the chance to cool off after that.

Anyway, there are icicles forming on my fingers and my nose is going blue.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but yes, it is cold.

I'm starting to wonder whether these huge changes in temperature affect stress-fractures in us, like they do in buildings. Cracks appear in our moods perhaps; grumpy moments of thermal expansion.

I wish St Paul had made it a bit clearer how to 'take every thought captive', how to learn the 'secret of contentment', how to 'do everything without complaining or arguing'... when you're hangry, or freezing, or exhausted. It's so much harder! Maybe he did and I missed it. I always imagine him in the lovely Mediterranean sun with sandals, a pen, and a toga. But of course, he did get imprisoned and beaten and stoned and shipwrecked a few times. And I think even he asked for a coat once. None of that has happened to me today; I've got nothing to moan about.

Though if it's all the same, I might just pop outside to warm up.

LIVE IN THE MOMENT

I’m back in the park, with an egg and tomato sandwich, a Bounty, and a can of limonata.

I’m trying to ‘live in the moment’. Hippyish isn’t it, but if I really am suffering from stress and migraines, I at least ought to try switching off the frustrations of the past and the worries of the future. Some think it impossible to live ‘in the moment’ of course, because it’s already the future by the time you’ve thought of it, and the time you thought of it is in the past. Time ticks in infinitely small fractions of a second, and therefore you can never capture ‘now’ because your brain just won’t be fast enough.

But let’s not get too scientific. The moment must be a window, or we could never enjoy it, or find freedom in it. So get that window open.

They’ve changed the recipe of limonata: less sugar (a good thing) but it’s less tasty (not a good thing). Perhaps I should stop drinking it (on the whole, a good thing). Perhaps today, I should just enjoy it for what it is (living in the moment).

It’s sunny and windy. The trees are on the move; close my eyes and they sound like the sea, teeming over the stones as the tide races. The leaves are fluttering inside out, and from a distance, the green and silver could be the sparkling of the sun.  

Sun, sea, and... maybe I could sink my toes into the late-summer grass and pretend it’s the cool, flat sand of a long beach at sunset. I’d like that.

It’s a lot about breathing, I suppose. A lot of stuff has happened, many things are about to happen, but only one thing right now actually is happening. Breathe it in. Breathe it out. Enjoy the moment. There’s no story in the moment, no drama, no tension, no resolution, but that’s okay. It’s all okay. At least for the moment.

BACK TO THE FOX & HOUNDS

It’s been another of those Saturdays of not seeing other humans (apart from the early morning radiologist and nurse of course) so I’ve decided to go to the pub for dinner.

I’m in the Fox and Hounds, which is so far much more hound than fox. It’s one of those dog-friendly places, out in the countryside near the canal and the network of lakes that used to be quarry pits. This is definitely the place to come if you have a dog and you’ve moored up your narrowboat on the Kennet and Avon Canal. There are possibly more dogs than people here.

It’s probably for the best. Let a fox loose in a place like this and everyone freaks out. I don’t even want to think about applying the same eponymising logic to The King’s Head (gruesome), the Gardeners’ Arms (terrifying), or the Horse and Coaches. Chaos.

Anyway, here I am, comfortably eating on my own, and watching little dogs get tangled in each other’s leads. More thinking time.

Back in the old days, and even in the not so old days, mounted hunting parties would use dogs to chase and destroy foxes. It became a posh tradition, with pomp and colour and fanfare, an essential part of village life in England. Not great for the fox though. It came to symbolise a type of Englishness, one  that would put on a red tunic, almost as a diversion to the inevitable bloodshed. Either the fox would run riot through the farms and land, or the hounds would rip the fox to pieces. Either way, there would be blood.

As far as I know, fox hunting with dogs is currently illegal, but I know certain parties would like that law reversed. Perhaps those people should be dressed up as foxes and chased across the countryside with shotguns on a freezing December morning before they get to decide that.

Well in this pub anyway, the hounds have won. It’s getting late. The staff are collecting glasses and discussing how and why Sundays are a ‘smart day’. I would not want to be the guy who turns up in a polo shirt on a Sunday. Seems strange that it’s simultaneously the pub that welcomes muddy dogs on a Sunday afternoon. Smart staff, dogs itching to get racing round the lake and not a fox in sight. Still it’s safer than eating at The Red Lion, right?

THE FOURTH EYE TEST

After seeing the neurologist this week, it turned out that my MRI scan would be today. This morning in fact.

“Any piercings, any implants, any tattoos?” asked the radiologist, making sure I’d filled out my form correctly.

Are tattoos magnetic? I wondered, thinking about the multitudes of people out there who’d got tattoos and never realised. Piercings and implants I can understand - you don’t want those things being ripped out of your face and ears by a giant magnet.

I said no to all. I am thankfully unpainted and metal-free.

The scan itself is a bit like preparing to go into space. They made me lie on the sliding bed, gave me two yellow ear plugs and then sandwiched my head between rubber pads. There will be no moving. The nurse gave me a squeezer to hold, presumably an emergency stop, though I couldn’t quite hear what she said once the ear plugs were in. Then she clasped a plastic mask over my head like Darth Vader, and through the two eye holes I saw the roof of the machine as I was slid into it. 

I decided to close my eyes. I figured that was the best way to get through, rather than looking at the strips of electronic lighting that ran lengthways down the machine. And so I did.

It is loud, the MRI scanner. Even with ear plugs in, I was deafened at first, by the thumping, the thudding, the buzzing and the clicking. There is no way I could ever be launched into space. Any longer than fifteen minutes and the sound and the claustrophobia would have got to me. As it was, my eyes were shut, and I was determined to somehow be somewhere else. Somewhere peaceful, far away, where the sun breaks through the clouds in beams, and sparkles its way across the lake. Somewhere, where I can sit at the water’s edge and watch the tiny waves ripple in, and I can breathe: breathe in and out, and in and out, and in. I dug my fingernail into my thumb.

“Hey,” says a voice. He sits next to me on the bank, watching the sun and the lake. “It’ll be okay you know. Whatever happens, it will be okay.” He scoops up a handful of earth and dusts off a stone from the crumbly soil. I smile and watch for a while. He catches my eye and he grins.

I laugh. I can’t tell why, but my face suddenly feels tight, as though those muscles haven’t been used in a while.

He sits there, gently blowing the mud and rubbing the smoothed-out stone. It just catches the sunlight and glistens wet for a moment.

“Is it ready?” I ask. “Is it time?”

He pauses.

“It is always time,” he replies thoughtfully, holding the pebble between a grubby thumb and forefinger. “Some the biggest things can be achieved with the smallest things in time. Often the tiny, hidden stone is enough for the largest and loudest of giants, in time, wouldn’t you say?”

Thud went the machine. It tapped loudly for a while as it fired the last batch of radio waves at my head. One final loud crunching beep, and I slid out feet-first, back into the bright world of the mobile radiotherapy unit at the Bracknell Healthspace.

“There you go,” said the nurse, smiling sweetly. “Pop your ear plugs in the bin and you’re free to go.”

And so I did. And so I was. Hopefully, the results will come through next week. Though of course, it will be okay. It really will.

FURTHER DECISION MAKING

Do you know what the biggest problem is, with walking to work in soggy shorts, t-shirt, baseball cap and rain-mac?

Yes. Home-time came, and with it, the lovely prospect of walking back up the hill in still soggy shorts, t-shirt, baseball cap and rainmac. Thankfully, the evening sun had broken through and gold-tinged white clouds hung in a Septemberish sky. It was dry, at least.

My head is full of thoughts. Something happened today that has made me stop and wonder. What if the most honourable thing to do in a situation is also the most painful? What if it’s evident that a decision is the right one, one that must be made, perhaps one that’s not even arisen of your own making, but will secretly be a costly one?

Being a grown-up is tough sometimes. You do your best to simplify things and they still end up tangled, mostly by everyone else trying to simplify things. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We are all responsible for the tangle.

That was one thought up Pincents Lane. Then my friend messaged me about her horse, and in a ‘delicious’ twist of irony I trod in some horse poo while trying to reply. She’d find that too contrived a coincidence and assume I’d made it up, I expected, so I couldn’t even tell her. It genuinely did happen though. I spent the rest of the ascent scraping my right sole against the path.

This type of decision-making is probably where faith is at its most useful. I have to trust that my choice is honourable because it feels right, according to my faith in God’s promises. The selfish path looks happier, but I can’t always trust my eyes. Maybe in some unseen way, the Potentate of Time has it all worked out for us. My worldview reminds me, along with my battered old Bible, that I can trust the narrow path.

Just as long as I keep my eyes open, and no horses have been there first.

DECISION MAKING

I'm not famous for my brilliant decision-making. In fact, a quick look back at my history and I'm staring, at best, at a mixed report card, with quite a few incomprehensible blotches.

"What was I thinking?" I ask myself. What, indeed. But Older Me has more hindsight and less emotional mist to see through. Plus, you can't apply learning you acquired through error, to yourself before you made it. Those two things are cause and effect.

What Older Me doesn't have an excuse for, is walking to work in the rain this morning.

I peered out of the window and saw the trees waving in the breeze against the grey sky. There was a smattering of drizzle and the pavements were wet. I would risk it. I would walk it.

And so, seventy minutes later, I arrived, looking as though I had been pushed face-first into a swimming pool. Every bit of me was wet, from socks to baseball cap. I had a change of clothes in my rucksack, so I was okay, but drenched. Walking had turned out to be a poor choice.

How ever...

I also really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the sound of the rain, the feel of it, the smell of it. I enjoyed the cars swooshing past while I was alone with my thoughts, and I enjoyed the gorgeous tunnel of dripping trees, that arches over the top of Pincents Lane. I enjoyed the glistening roof-tiles of white-plastered cottages, and I enjoyed the mist over the valley. It felt like being on holiday in many ways. And weirdly, I didn't even mind that work was at the end of the journey. My mind was focused on hot tea and porridge, rather than emails and projects.

A few of my poor decisions in the past have been impulsive. Emotions take over in the middle of a situation, and it's hard to see what the wisest thing to do is. We are consumed by what we want sometimes. That's why we need friends, I suppose - people who annoy us when we ask them for advice, and then we thank much later when we realise they were righter than right.

I got to work, changed, and heated up my porridge in the semi-reliable microwave. I wonder if that porridge would have tasted so sweet if I hadn't walked through the rain? I guess some decisions are what they are, but when you're half-way down the road, you can always make the best of it.

And learn! Next time, if it's raining at all, I think I'll take the bus.

BEN LOCKED OUT

I got an email from Apple today. Apple customer services, no less.

“Hi Customer, your Apple ID has ben locked...”

I feel sorry for Ben, but I have no real idea how my Apple account could have imprisoned him. Who is he? Where is he? Inside a high-tech basement somewhere in San Diego, waiting for my Apple ID and password, like a trapped member of a team doing The Crystal Maze?

Oh. Don’t panic, Americans. I don’t mean a weird drugs ritual in a posh garden: The Crystal Maze was a show in the UK in which teams of enthusiastic people had to solve puzzles in a locked room before they could get out - like a sort of 90s escape room, but on actual TV, and hosted by an elf in a velvet leopard-skin jacket.

Ben, if you’re reading this, I can’t help you. You’re just going to have to keep shouting for help down there in Apple HQ. Maybe if you can find a button that says ‘force quit’ or something, some blue t-shirted genius will let you out without having to tattoo the logo on your forearm and make you swear allegiance to Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive forever. I suppose they could give you an Apple ID of your own instead; of course a lot of people think that’s pretty much the same thing.

That aside, I hate these phishing emails. Anything at all these days that tells me there’s a ‘problem with’ my ‘account’ gets my hackles up. Even more so if it addresses me as ‘dear customer’ - don’t even know my name? Really phishers? Really? People fall for that?

Well I guess they must do from time to time. I sometimes wonder whether the quest to make life super-convenient and easy for everyone has had a proportional effect on the ease with which thieves and anarchists can disrupt all our lives. I can’t imagine conmen in the 50s knocking the doors of housewives up and down the land, doffing a trilby and wishfully asking about that ‘accident’ they’d been in recently, or telling them that their mangles need a factory reset or their husbands will have to go to work in crumpled shirts forevermore.

Needless to say I forwarded it unclicked, to the phishing report at Apple, along with the comment.. “‘ben’! Lol”

And that was that.

Unless I really have been locked out of my Apple ID! But I doubt it.

THE FLEETING WEEKEND

What is it with weekends? One minute you’re feeling the relief and the joy of a Friday evening, then you close your eyes, do a few chores, close your eyes again and suddenly it’s Sunday night and Monday looms up out of nowhere.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve said before, I quite like a Monday - typically it’s planning meetings and a retrospective, and half of it’s gone before most people are awake enough to be stressed with you. No, it’s Tuesdays you’ve got to watch out for; they’re the real office tricksters.

But anyway. Where was this weekend? Granted, I slept through a lot of Saturday thanks to my uncomfortable time with my eyes. And yes, of course, for me, church takes up a lot of time on a Sunday. It felt like a whirlwind today because I woke up late and had to spin to church in a cloud of toothpaste and raincoat. Nonetheless, there ought to be a lot more weekend left, I think.

It was my niece’s birthday, so we had a family celebration. I don’t quite understand why the conversation goes where it goes but I hid my face in a cushion again. I do not wish to know about some things. Meanwhile, my sister is still selling her JFK conspiracy book online, and I concluded that I would like to avoid spas, someone pejoratively called ‘Gypsy Keith’, and colonoscopies... at all costs, where possible.

I got home and went for a walk in the park. I wondered whether maybe the trees would help rest my eyes and bring the world back into a little focus.

It started raining so I stood under a tree, looking dodgy. Rain gently tickled the leaves and ran along the twigs and branches. Thick, clear droplets of water caught the light as they cohered into glistening spheres and teardrops, before dripping to the ground. There is something elegant about rain, I think - from its soothing sound to its gracious cascading journey into the earth, into the rivers, the seas, the clouds and then back to rain again. My friend Sammy pointed out to me the other day that every drop of water has always been here on the planet in one form or another. I made some smart comment about comets with ice, but she was right really. Ancient, unending, unbreakable rain. Beautiful.

Weekends are not nearly so long-lasting are they? They are fleeting. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a world of four days on and three days off seems a much better idea to me. I’d take that in a heartbeat.

IN THE DARK

Eyes aren’t great today. However, I somehow now have two hospital appointments in two different hospitals.

I’m still having trouble describing it. It’s not a focus thing (and of course, the optician would have picked that up). It’s more like the world is wobbling. It’s as though my eyes are trying to do two different things at the same time. It’s not constant, but today it’s so frequent that I don’t feel good about keeping my eyes open. I haven’t left the house. I’m just lying here, listening to the cricket, And yes, this has taken me ages (40 minutes) to write so far.

One scan is a brain scan. That’s on Tuesday, inside some sort of a machine from the future I suppose. The other is a more detailed eye test at the end of the month. There are a lot of things to try to see before then, and a lot of tricky questions to answer.

For today, when I should be sorting my flat out, I’m lying in the dark with England playing India at Lord’s, feeling sorry for myself.

DOODAH

Family games night was going so well until a trivia question had us discussing the shape of a pig’s doodah.

“Is it... a) corkscrew?” asked my Aunty, holding the card as studiously and closely to her face as was possible. “b) wider at the base than the tip? or c) cloven in two?”

I admired her shaking persistence. I think I would have read out a different question, played it safe, or excused myself from reading it at all. Within a few moments of ‘hilarity’ I was being subjected to the worst type of hypothetical questions; the ones that trail off into wordless imagination...

“But what would the female’s...”

“How does it...”

“Well that must be...”

I must remember to say nothing in these situations. Nothing is good, nothing is prudent, nothing is wise, Matt. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

And specifically this time, ‘nothing’ would have been about a thousand times better than what I actually did say in a sort of vain attempt to win the point. However, as it happened, two days ago, my Twitter-feed had indeed shown me an artist who had recreated animal appendages as sculptures for an installation somewhere, made out of bronze - had the caption not said anything, I would never have known. The quizzer in me likes little coincidences that crop up like that. So I blurted out...

“Oh it’s definitely corkscrew; I’ve seen it!”

Stunned faces round the table.

“No, I mean I’ve seen it... on the Internet...” I protested.

That did not help.

I then had to explain incredibly carefully that I had not been surfing ‘niche’ websites, despite being correct about the ... details. As my dad later sagely pointed out, ‘a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.’

I think it speaks a lot though about our family, that in the very same evening we found time to pray for each other, and specifically it seems, for me, while I try to balance the key areas of my life that are so tense at the moment. That was nice, if a little embarrassing. Though, to be honest, once you’ve been discussing the improbable mechanics of porcine copulation with your rather British and reserved family members who (understandably) want to know how you know so much about it, there’s not much room for further embarrassment to catch you really, is there?

THE COCONUT RIDDLE

I won a coconut yesterday. Well, actually someone else won a coconut and then gave it to me for some reason.

Either way, I've now got an oversized, hairy coconut on my desk, looking like a shrunken head or a giant furry cricket ball.

I don't know what to do with it. Someone else bashed theirs with a rock and chomped their way through. I wasn't ready to do that. Someone else decided they would draw a face on their coconut and call it Wilson. I couldn't do that either. So I did the only thing I could think of and wrote a poem about being a coconut...

The Coconut Riddle

Hard on the outside
Tough in the middle
Tricky to crack
The coconut riddle

Sweet at the centre
Bitter at the skin
Desert island bounty
That is thicker than it's thin

I am a coconut, long
Toppled from the tree
Watered milk and solid shell
A coconut is me

Hard on the outside
Tough in the middle
Tricky to crack
The coconut riddle

FUNDAMENTAL FORCES

Science has brought us

A singular truth

That life is a quartet of forces

There’s gravity first

Which needs no more proof

Than people who fall off their horses

Electromagnetics,

The physics of light!

Diffracting the colours we see

The reason the sun

Is incredibly bright

And there’s music on Radio 3

Deep in the atom

The protons are stuck

And the strong nuclear force is the glue

It binds them together

Through physics and luck

To keep you remaining as you

And sometimes the atoms

Are off on a mission

The weak nuclear force is in play

They split into bits

In a show of great fission

And radioactive decay

And these are the forces

That govern our lives

From tiny to huge and above

But I don’t think any

Of us could survive

If it weren’t for the power of pizza

STOPPING DRIVING

I wore myself out driving everywhere at the weekend, and slowly my body's catching up on the sleep it thinks it needs. I woke up at 9:15 this morning.

There was a time when I would have leapt out of bed as though it had been electrified, knocking over the bedside water and the alarm clock in the process. Being late is never desirable. But this morning, I just lay there, sighed at the ceiling and then slowly got up, got ready, and got to work, just before 10 without a worry.

My eyes are still broken, and there's no sign of my referral.

"Should you even be driving?" asked my sister. It's a fair question: I got to this point last week and decided I was just about okay. But it is true that driving back the other night after the gig, was troubling at best. Maybe it is the right thing to do after all.

What a miserable thought - giving up driving. What if this is forever? What if my eyes never get better? I'm already trapped enough and tired enough.

I'm too tired to process that question well. Who knows what happens when I'm exhausted from having to walk everywhere!

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

I went out to the park last night and lay on a bench, looking at the clouds.

It was nearly sunset and the wispy purple cumulus clouds of summer were spread across the enormous sky.

I saw one that looked like an angel blowing a trumpet. She drifted slowly by, chased by a whale and the head of a unicorn.

It's always amazed me how quickly clouds change, and yet how slowly they move. Before long the angel had become a mermaid, and the whale looked like a fat aeroplane chasing a rabbit.

The sky changed too. Very slowly, the deep silhouetted clouds turned from purple to a soft white as the sky deepened and darkened behind them.

My Dad thinks this is the last of the hot weather. He's adamant that it will thunder overnight and rain tomorrow. I don't mind that, as long as it's cooler to sleep in. When I got back from the park, I tried sleeping with a frozen water bottle resting on my forehead, but of course the inevitable happened and I got first a headache, and second, a wet face.

I hope though, that that wasn't the last sunset. I really enjoyed just lying there carelessly, my trainers sticking out at the end of the bench. I could have stayed there watching the clouds change for ages, wondering what they mean and whether they were there for me. I could definitely do that again before summer fades.

There is a change of season though, just out there in the air. There's something on the breeze, imperceptible and different - just beyond the angel, the trumpet, and the fluffy white rabbit in the sky.

I hope I'm ready.

SCONE V SCONE

"There are scones upstairs!"

"Phew."

"Phew?"

"Well, you didn't call them scones."

"Ha! You should be shot if you call them scones. It's definitely scones, not scones, never scones; who says 'scone'?"

This is the second time this debate has emerged this week. It is of course, unsolvable: people from the North (particularly Yorkshire) grew up pronouncing everything that ends in 'one' to rhyme with 'gone' or 'gun' and people from the South cherish that magic E that makes it a 'pinecone' and not a 'pinecon'. So as long as there are families and accents, this interminable debate will rage tediously on. Does it matter that there are thousands of English words like 'cone' and hardly any like 'gone'? Does it matter at all, that that old fastest-cake-in-the-world joke just doesn't work unless it's... gone?

Let me nail my colours to the mast as a descendant of Northerners and a dweller of the Home Counties: it is definitely 'scone'. It has to be! Saying it the other way doesn't make any sense at all. I kept my head low beneath the parapet today, just in case my colleagues suggested I be frogmarched out at gunpoint.

Phew. Hope that clears it up. You know me: not one for sitting on the fence. Though I won't be suggesting persecution for you if you say 'scone' instead of 'scone', obviously.

"So is it cream first or is it jam then?" asked one of my colleagues.

I rolled my eyes.

OUT OF PLACE AND OUT OF SKITTLES

“Aston Martin, Mercedes something or other, is that a Bentley? Er, another Aston Martin, a golf cart, Porsche, Porsche, BMW, ah! There we go - unwashed Ford Focus with a bit of trim trapped in the door, plus an empty packet of Skittles, a bottle of water and a phone charger on the passenger seat...”

Ever feel ridiculously out of place, knowing that you probably just won’t ever fit in? That’s exactly how I felt, standing in the lobby of the golf course hotel with my keyboard stand. It was proper fancy. High chandeliers, delicate uplighting, stylish art, fountains with sculpted horses, long mahogany panels behind an enormous bar of shiny gold taps and optics. An enormous mirror ball hung from the ceiling, glittering like the posh sun.

A handsome wedding party bustled through a door as though they’d just tumbled out of a magazine. One of them looked at me. I caught myself in the giant gold-framed mirror at the end of the lobby. I was wearing jeans, trainers, a lumberjack shirt and a baseball cap. Beneath my tired grubby face, my beard bristled out like a chimney brush.

We were there for our next barn dance gig - this time, a couple’s golden wedding. I didn’t know it would be here; typically these things are in dusty village halls or social clubs: the kind of places with tea urns and avocado crockery, and maybe a picture of the Queen (circa 1977) above the door. There’s often a tattered stage curtain covering old bits of cardboard am-dram scenery and a locked and scuffed upright piano. This was not that. This was a fancy posh do. And we, the barn dance band for the evening, were out of place, in every way.

I was tired too. I’d been away in Kidderminster for a conference, had had two nights of not sleeping, and had already driven over a hundred miles to get to the gig. I was skittled out.

By the way, I think I’ve worked out how Skittles work (I thought about it a lot on the motorway). They’re double-flavoured aren’t they, like bait and switch sweets: the first flavour is juicy, sweet and refreshing; the second (presumably when you get into the middle of a Skittle) is hidden, tangy, sour, and makes you believe that only the first flavour will relieve it. Clever, isn’t it? The one thing you need after a handful of Skittles is another handful of Skittles. There are probably a lot more sugary things in the world that work exactly like that.

So anyway, I’d eaten a family of bag of Skittles. By myself. On the M5. And I’d arrived at the fancy hotel looking like a bedraggled sort of grizzly woodcutter... with a keyboard.

Thankfully, I had my band shirt with me (we always wear plain black shirts) and I was able to make myself look reasonably presentable. I still felt out of place though. I think it’s a class thing - I could dress up and act the part, maybe even learn the way to talk, but I will probably always be an outsider. I will probably be the guy who ends up using the wrong spoon, pouring water into a wine glass, or eating a consommé with a dessert fork or something. It’s intellect too - I remember feeling so outwitted by laser scientists that they would simply ignore me as though I wasn’t clever enough to keep up. They were right of course, but then, as now, the loss was completely theirs. I’m afraid I have no time for snobs these days.

Well. The gig was good. I went off-score a few times, missed an ending, very nearly hit the transpose button, and also very nearly offended a partially sighted man, but apart from that it was good. Waltzes, jigs and reels, and a little bluesy at times. Even the dancing was okay.

I drove home, exhausted, the road twisting and turning in the headlamps. I might not always be classy, but I’d hope at least that I find myself avoiding unkindnesses. Spoons, forks, cruise ships, golf stories, holiday-envy, coffee-talk and cuisine-etiquette all come second to enjoying someone’s company, I reckon. Though, at that point I was on my own, listening to late night talk radio and trying to stay awake. My eyes were all over the place too. And I was out of Skittles.

THE SECOND EYE TEST

Last night, I peered into the mirror while cleaning my teeth. It was late, I was tired. The toothbrush buzzed and grated while my face did its usual contorting and the tap did its usual burble. I wasn't even bright enough to do my hummed rendition of Nessun Dorma in the same key as the buzz. I just looked at myself.

My eyes went funny again, swirling in and out, trying to resolve the image of me trying to resolve the image of me. I stared, glumly.

I've never been sure what colour my eyes are. I think they're sort of brown-green; I used to say they were 'muddy puddles' but they're a bit too misty for that, more like boring marbles, or perhaps dried-out sunflower leaves. Definitely not blue, anyway, and very ordinary.

Anyway, while lost in the weird recursive loop of staring into my own uninteresting eyes, I suddenly realised something...

One pupil is bigger than the other.

I know. They are supposed to dilate in low-light, and yes, of course they can change size. But aren't they supposed to change together? The more I gazed at myself looking at myself looking at a mirror image of me with one eye wider than the other, the weirder it looked.

I pulled the light off, then back on again. My pupils wobbled back into size, once again with the left one wider than the right.

Could this explain why I've been struggling to see properly? Is one eye not functioning like the other? Am I going to have to wear an eye patch to correct it? Is this just an aperture F-number problem, while these two different pinholes try to resolve the same image in parallax?

There's one easy test, I suppose, before I get my hospital appointment: figuring out whether dramatic light-level changes make the symptoms noticeably worse. I could run indoors and outdoors a few times. It would look weird, but maybe slightly less weird than sitting here, trying to work with an eye-patch. That theory might also explain why it's hard to fix an image in the mornings when I wake up.

No news on the appointment by the way. If you're the praying type like I am, send one up for me - if only to help me not look like a desktop pirate.