WARNING BULB

I realised yesterday that I get grumpy and anxious when my phone is out of battery and I’m not in a position to charge it up.

Uh oh. That’s one of those wake-up alarms isn’t it? It means my emotional state is actually linked to an iPhone, and I didn’t notice. My eyes stung with tears and the switchboard of my heart was flashing with a dull red warning bulb. This can’t be good.

It’s the connection, I think. I am a sucker for being in-touch, for knowing I can chat to friends, or learn new things about the world. I love a community and I don’t like the idea of being unreachable, especially when it’s out of my control.

It’s also the easiness of looking things up. Moments before, we’d been googling Smokeless Fire Pits. Not essential, but it was access to the info we needed there and then, for some reason, over mac ‘n’ cheese. At the Harvester.

That is a good thing. Connection and information are positives in a dark, lonely world.

My chemistry though, was telling me that too much of a good thing can trigger something else. And that something else (I’m not going to slow down to say it) is addiction.

Now then. I’ve read Stolen Focus, and I’ve read John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. This warning bulb isn’t a surprise - even to the big tech companies. And it shouldn’t be to us. But still, as Sammy pulled out her phone to check her messages, I was noticeably distracted by the window, twiddling my wedding ring and watching the trees.

What can I do? I’ve tried screen-free Saturdays. While we’ve been dealing with estate agents and house stuff, the sabbath has become harder - I was waiting until we moved to get back to the routine. But here I am with a chemical dependency on dopamine, drip-fed to me by social media and the super-computer in my pocket.

We don’t even have a garden yet, let alone a smokeless fire pit. But is it naive to imagine Friday nights with toasted marshmallows, under the stars? Is it hopelessly romantic to think of those evenings with friends, in winter coats and scarves, chatting about nothing around the fire?

Or will I miss it all because I’m lit up in blue light, eyes on a screen?

MIDDLE NAME MASTERMIND

“I came up with a new game,” I said. The lights were out but I could still somehow hear her rolling her eyes.

“Go on then,” she sighed.

“Well. It’s so simple. But when I played it in the car it made me laugh out loud. And then I thought, she’s not going to think this is fun at all, Matt. But oh well I’ll tell her anyway.”

“What is it?” she asked. I stared at the ceiling. I really like our night-time chats.

“All you need is Siri.”

“Go on.”

“I think of a celebrity, then you have to guess their middle name, or predict that they don’t have one. Then we ask Siri, ‘who is so-and-so’ and we find out whether you were right.”

Even I have to admit that this sounds rubbish. But honestly, the euphoria I got when Siri had read out the first few lines of David John Tennant… was unbelievable. Pure joy! Not to mention the tension. Then there’s the underlying reasoning that went into Alexander Armstrong (I got him wrong) and trying to guess whether certain celebrities were using their actual middle name as their professional identity. Thrilling. But probably not for everyone.

“I don’t want to play that,” she said, rolling over, “That sounds terrible.”

I smiled. I’m totally going to start a game on our next long journey. Middle Name Mastermind. Honestly, get one right and you’ll see what I mean. Or. You’ll see what Sammy means. I really like our differences, almost as much as I like our similarities.

Though I think she’ll come to love it when she plays it.

PLANET OF THE ANTS

Today I read that there are quadrillions of ants. 250 million, per person. That’s a lot of ants. Say what you like about us being the pinnacle of creation but honestly, God really loves ants and spiders.

I wonder if I could get my 250 million ants working for me? They could fetch my slippers, club together and build me a shed. Perhaps they could all march past, military style, and I could pretend to be king of the ants. Hmm. I don’t think Sammy would like that much.

Anyway. There are lots of ants. This is basically Planet of The Ants. Gosh. Imagine if they were bigger, like the size of horses or something. They’d be terrifying.

Actually don’t imagine that; it’s kind of horrible. And they’re really tiny anyway, so there’s nothing to worry about.

I wonder why God made so many of them. Well. Perhaps he didn’t; perhaps he made two at the start and they went crazy. I’ve never quite got my head around whether he built the universe to tick over like a machine, or whether he’s actively involved in sticking bits of baby ant larva together in the egg. If he is, that’s a lot of fiddly work. Whichever, you’ve got to say he liked the design! 22,000 species, from fire ants to ghost ants, red ants to pharaoh’s ant. Quadrillions of brilliantly strong, super quick and clever little biters.

I like them. But come to think of it, I wouldn’t really want 250 million of them following me round, waiting for my next instruction. I’m very happy to let them just get on with being ants.

THE SIX O’CLOCK NEWS

Good evening, you’re watching

The six o’clock news

So tuck yourself hidden away

We’ll bring you the latest

Political views

To worsen your terrible day

Our headlines tonight

Will bring you despair

And show you the world is on fire

Then just when you think

There’s no more to bear

We’ll bring on a terrible liar

Economy now, and you’d

Better be scared

As inflation is stupidly high

Rough times ahead for

The poor unprepared,

As you’re waving your money goodbye

Unrest in the west, and out in the east,

The war and the winter of doom

We’ll bring you the latest

Reporting unceased

As it flickers dismay round your room

We’re killing the planet

And choking the poor

We’re polluting the earth and the sea

So turn up the volume

Stay with us for more,

As you’re watching it live on TV

And just to recap, here’s

Those headlines again,

From all of us here with the blues

If you’ve had your fill

Of seeping despair, then

Why not just switch off the news?

THE TRAIN MEN

“I’m actually quite glad the age of steam is over,” said Dan, twinkling. George, the train enthusiast to whom he was talking, flared his nostrils and wiped black grubby fingers down his overalls.

“Yeah, I wanted to be a train driver,” Dan continued, “But apparently you had to be a fireman first, and that meant shovelling five tonnes of coal a day! I couldn’t have done that.”

I watched. George didn’t think it would be that bad. Dan was unaware that he was trampling on George’s one and only dream in life. The awkwardness puffed into the air and in a moment, the sky was blue again.

 

I’m not sure that was the thing to have said to someone who lives for steam trains.

I was at the home of a centenarian who used to own a company that made fine cast models. In the 50s and 60s, if you didn’t have Hornby, you probably had Wills Finecast, and from the models I saw, you’d have had quite an exquisite product around your model track.

Bob Wills, an old man now, sat in a comfortable chair looking out across his garden. Beyond his green grass and distant pond, beyond the outhouses and farm sheds, and above the far away fence, waved the trees of Ashdown Forest. And every now and again, Bob’s view must have been interrupted, or perhaps completed, by a cloud of glorious white, and the cheery poop of his 18-inch-gauge steam engines.

“You’re a music man then?” sparkled Bob, looking back at me.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” I said, clearly. I’d never really felt embarrassed by that before.

“Not a train man then!” he chuckled.

Bob is, obviously. Over the years, he’s built the little railway line that circles his house. And until he needed George, I imagine he ran those engines to polished perfection himself. I rather liked how he implied that being a ‘train man’ rather meant there could be no space in your heart for anything else. I like trains, I wanted to say, but no, I could not claim to be a train man.

Most of the others, like me, were along for the ride. Tim (the friend who had invited me) was happy to steam round in the cab of the little blue tank engine. George sat full square behind the smart red engine, and spent the afternoon pulling passengers around Bob’s fields, while Bob and his wife enjoyed the view.

There is something delightful about steam - even in miniature. My highlights were the distinctive sound of the engine as it built up speed. As we rattled around the fields, the steam chuffed into the air, chugga chugga chugga chugga over the sleepers. The boiler sang happily in the sunshine. Then there’s the excitement of the whistle - a sort of timeless, fulsome sound, a poop-poop of purest joy. And then the hiss of steam at the stopping point. It billowed out under the wheels, rushing along the grass and gravel, just as it must have done on station platforms up and down the land. Beautiful.

The age of steam isn’t gone at all for the likes of George and Bob. It lives on wonderfully in nostalgic afternoons by Ashdown Forest, when in the distance, over the hills, a white puff of steam shoots up against the green, ready to linger for a moment in a long wispy cloud.

I had a really great day, and I drove home with a smile on my face. I might not be a train man, but I think it’s okay to say I like trains. Because I really do.

I HAD DONE THE BEST THING

It worked out alright with the duvet. In a stroke of astonishing luck, it turned out I'd actually done the right thing! (I'm kind of hoping I can repeat it).

I was so tired though that I must have fallen asleep in the small hours of the morning, still clutching slightly damp rolls of duvet cover. I had a vague recollection of Sammy bringing me hot water with honey, and maybe someone kissing me on the head and telling me gently that they were going to work, but by the time I woke up, the room was flooded with mid-morning sunlight.

I patted the duvet. Dry as a biscuit. Then I messaged her to tell her what had happened, and how miraculous it had been that she hadn't rolled over. That's when she told me that she thought I'd done the best thing I could have done, and that everything was alright. I was so relieved! I flopped back on to the pillow and closed my eyes for a while.

I think it's confidence-boosting to know you're capable of making decisions. One of the reasons for being indecisive is that we fear other people's reactions. That fear then slows down our ability to think through the problem. Worse, sometimes we abandon the decision-making, knowing that someone else will take over and make that decision for us. That's fatal indecisiveness because it causes a dependency-link on a person who probably doesn't deserve it and will come to resent it.

But every now and again, we're faced with problems we have to solve alone, and it's good to know we can still do it, albeit slowly and with a little trepidation. The more I think about it, the more I think that I've always been fairly good at that - given my own time and my own pace. I wasn't certain what to do, but I chose a pretty good course of action, I think, especially as it had been the middle of the night and my brain had clouded up.

I opened my eyes to the sunlit room. Everything seemed warmer and dryer than it had in a while. Although it seemed likely that my drink had gone cold by now. I reached a hand out from under the duvet to grab the cup of cold honey-water for a quick sip before getting up and facing the day, and then, almost immediately, chuckled and thought better of it.

TO ME, TO YOUM

Why isn’t it ‘youm’ like it’s whom? I mean whom is ebbing out anyway, and common usage lets you off the hook currently by using ‘who’ instead. The trend is to make English as simple as possible, which is fine. It’s a little bit like turning fine art into cartoons, but if that’s where we’re going, fine.

But was ‘youm’ ever an option? You know, for when we use ‘you’ as the object.

“Oh Mr Darcy, to whom might you be referring?”

“Why no less of a lady, Miss Bennet. I mean only to refer to youm.”

“To whom?”

“To youm.”

Come to think of it, ‘you’ does a lot of heavy lifting in the modern cartoon language. We use it to refer to more than one person sometimes, and other times it just means one person.

In other languages, the distinction is clear: tu peux chanter, mademoiselle! Mais, monsieur et madame, ne pouvez-vous pas écouter la mélodie fantastique?*

In Northern Ireland and some parts of Scotland, they get around this by saying ‘yous’ - which is a neat trick. Yous’ll have had your tea. I quite like this.

I think that’s the ebb and flow of the language actually - that balance between being complex and beautiful, or understandable and simple. That’s why I hope ‘whom’ is stuck in a holding pattern. English is so elegant and ornate because of its complexity, its fine brush strokes. But you can still use it to draw cartoons. Flexible. Brilliant. Changing.

All that being said, I’m not sure I’ll take up using ‘youm’ as the object pronoun for the second person. It occurs to me that when the candles on the birthday cake are lit and your face lights up in the dark, the last thing you want is me singing ‘Happy Birthday to Youm’.

*You can sing, miss! But sir and madam, can’t you hear the fantastic melody?

SOPPY PRINCE CHARMING

It is the middle of the night. I am awake because I accidentally spilled water in the bed. Yeah. I fell asleep with a cup of water on my lap and woke up suddenly with a wet arm. The duvet is wet. My wife is still asleep. She’s in the dry bit, thankfully, while I’m awake, hoping beyond hope that my natural body heat evaporates the water before she rolls over.

I don’t think this was the right option. She’ll definitely tell me in the morning. Waking her up to tell her I’ve wet the bed seemed like a good call at first, but she’s sound asleep and so far, unbothered. It would have been impossible to change the duvet without waking her up, and so my choices were a bit limited. I switched the lamp on, wondering if that might wake her up gently. It didn’t. It did give me opportunity to survey the flood, mop up what I could, which I did, straighten everything out, and then get back in, hoping for the best. 

Thankfully, it was only a cupful, and even more thankfully, it was only water. And now I’m lying here, trying to work out exactly what I should have done.

These are the situations I wish I could talk about when people think I’m wise.

I guess my logic is that if she’s not currently woken up by it, she’s probably alright - and by morning (still five hours away) we’ll be home and dry, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Although, I now don’t know whether I’ll be able to go to sleep. The dampness is on top of the duvet, rather than underneath it, and I can’t really move without disturbing either the tented, drying arrangement or Sleeping Beauty over there, so I’m sort of sleepless. And I’m less than 50% sure I’ve taken the best course of action.

However, if I’m awake all night, ready to see the grey morning seep through the curtains, it will have been worth it if it was done out of love. I will tell her, even if she would have no clue. She might be cross; I’m ready for that.

I still feel sure there was a better solution…

TWENTY-THOUSAND FOOT SILENCE

Sometimes I’m alright; sometimes I’m not. Some days I’m okay with the adventure, other days I feel like outright panicking.

To tell you the truth, today is a panicky day. It isn’t helped by me feeling a bit poorly - you know, weak chest, sore throat, coughy cough: a cold, basically.

I’m also waiting to hear back from a few people, and once again choosing the most generous explanation as to why everything is stalled. No news from the jobs I’ve applied for, and no forward motion on the house. The silence is unnerving, like the silence you get if both your twin prop engines have failed at twenty thousand feet.

The cold sits on my chest. I can feel it, heavy on the lungs as though there’s permanently a cough brewing. Coughing doesn’t help though; it just gives me a headache.

I don’t know what that twenty-thousand feet silence feels like. I imagine it’s a pinpoint moment of serenity. For the smallest, stillest amount of time, the world is perfectly far away, perfectly quiet, perfectly beneath you. If you could freeze it, capture it, bottle it for just a while longer, you would.

It’s the uncertainty that follows that’s what I don’t particularly like.

THE LONG ROAD TO WINDSOR

I guess I should reflect on the day, here at the end, with my portion of microwaved shepherds pie.

The news is on, recounting the events - the procession from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey; the London streets - forty, fifty people deep, sombrely watching; the three thousand members of the armed services who marched, and rode, and played, and the beautiful, bold service of faith and thanksgiving.

Then the long road to Windsor: the Queen’s home, so poignantly close and familiar. We watched it all, especially closely when the orb, the crown and sceptre were removed from the royal-standard-draped coffin, and placed on the altar. Those symbols of state and authority glittered with rainbow light, returned symbolically to God.

It was an emotive day. I understand why we need days like this, though they can be uncomfortable. Grief needs working through, even when that working is in the magnificence of British ceremony as seen today in the September sunlight, or the tenderness of a family who’ve lost their grandmother, or the nation who, as one weepy TV presenter put it, have been cloaked in a veil of sorrow.

At the end of the Windsor service, the trumpets fanfared through St George’s Chapel, and the National Anthem rolled into song. The camera lasered in on the new King, steely-eyed, braided and clutching his sword above his uniform.

He looked broken. Every voice around him was singing ‘God Save the King’ but his tired eyes and quivering lips were holding in something only he could know - perhaps that this was all somehow wrong, an anxiety dream of grief and terrible duty - it should be God save the ‘Queen’, I’m the Prince of Wales; perhaps he just missed his Mum, knowing that she would have been the only other person who could have known the burden and how to carry it.

Or it might have been the sudden realisation that his life of Highgrove, Poundbury and the Duchy of Cornwall really was over. Stuffy Buckingham Palace awaits, and this will be the rest of his days. Is that it? Like us, is he grieving for his old way of life alongside losing his mother? Or perhaps his mind was fast-forwarding to this moment, this destiny, this ceremony of his own.

I found today cathartic but deeply sad. The new world will be so different and so difficult to navigate. It’s true that the old world passes with Elizabeth II, but it’s good to remember that there is actually a constant that carries us, and Charles, into the new.

And that constant has far more to do with the orb, sceptre, and crown, and why they are where they currently are - given back to God, in whom power, glory, and authority rest. The Queen knew that. I think Charles will need to know it too.

IN THE QUEUE (NOT THAT QUEUE)

Sainsbury’s. Day before The Funeral. It is probably about as busy as a Christmas Eve, though of course, a lot less cheery. I’m in the long queue for a checkout.

The lady ahead of me has exactly what I would draw if I were drawing a conveyor-belt-load of shopping - lemons, upright bottles of wine, boxes of cereal, spring onions, peppers, and a massive pineapple.

Anyway, it’s this busy because tomorrow pretty much everything will be shut down out of respect for Her Majesty. And you know what people are like when the shops are closed. I imagine this crowded pastiche is currently repeated up and down the land.

I’m close to the till now. The pineapple lady is very healthy: shiitake mushrooms, a root of ginger, cherries and bags of garlic. I like her style - my combination of ‘items required for a shepherds pie’ looks like a poor selection of browns next to her rainbow spread.

We’re making the shepherds pie for tomorrow, after we’ve gathered for the big funeral watch. There’s a strange symmetry I think between tomorrow and the coronation day in 1953: everybody gathered, the nation glued to their TVs in one of those lifetime-defining moments. Different circumstances of course, but probably no less patriotic.

There’s a weak smile from ‘Debbie’ on the till. It’s my turn. I’m at the front of the queue.

HECTARES

I realised today that I have no idea how big a hectare is. No clue. Size of a park? Could be. A large garden? Bigger than an acre, surely. How big’s an acre? Not a clue. I decided to ask Siri.

“Hey Siri. How big is a…

“Uh huh?”

“Every time…” I tutted. Why does Siri do that?

“Okay I found this on the web for how big is it every time bro. Check it out.”

Man alive. Deep breath. Bro.

“Hey Siri.”

Wait for it.

“Mm hm?”

“How big is a hectare?”

“Hector has an area of 1.8 square miles.”

(Hector, it turns out, is a place in Minnesota. I doubt many people need to know how big it is. If you’re in it, you know already and if you’re not, you’re probably not bothered.)

“Right.” (Determined this time) “Hey Siri…”

…

“Mm hm?”

“How big is a hectARE?”

“One hectare is 2.47 acres.”

“Thank you. Oh. Wait. How big is an acre?”

Nothing from Siri, who of course is playing a weird game of Simon says.

“Hey Siri. How big is an…”

“Uh huh?”

…

“Hey Siri.” (Wearily)

“Mm?”

“How big is an acre?”

“One acre is 0.0016 square miles.”

How does that help me? I don’t have much concept of how big a square mile is either, other than obviously it’s a square with sides of the square-root-of-one mile. The only I can think of is maybe… aha!

“Hey Siri. How big is Hyde Park?”

“Hyde Park, Utah, has an area of 4.33 square miles.”

I don’t know where Siri lives, as in where the server is with all its information, but wherever that place is, had better be further than a hectare away from me.

Turns out that Hyde Park (London) is 143 hectares, which is about 350 acres. Oh, and an acre is not quite two football pitches.

And a hectare is a square with sides 100m long.

I don’t know why Siri couldn’t have just told me that.

GARDEN LEAVE

Okay bye then. To be fair, the email did use phrases like ‘take this opportunity to thank’ and ‘sorry to see him go’. Hmm. Thankfully, end of the week is official speak for ‘basically today’ - which I am interpreting as now.

So. At 11:30, I closed my laptop and wrapped up my headphones. This is the second job I’ve left not on my own terms. The first was a disastrous failure to support me through probation, and I had been let go after not having much clue how to do the job.

That wasn’t the case this time. This time I built the road, the process, the highway for a whole organisation to work on documentation together. This time I took hold of what I was doing and made it my own, so successfully it turns out, that I wasn’t needed in the end. But, as I pointed out in my final chat with Neil, it had been a significant leap in my career, and I made sure I thanked them for that.

And now? Now I’m on gardening leave. Which is great, except this is the one time in my life when I don’t have a garden. I think the idea is that I log out of work while they disable my access to all the stuff they consider important. I get exiled to the garden - which, actually is quite a pleasant thought.

Fair enough. I could be grumpily adding German insults to the translation files, or mud-slinging in a corner of the docs where it would take months to find. I could be spreading dissent among my colleagues or wailing about the injustice of it all on Teams.

I’m not, of course. I did get some nice messages from colleagues though. They were sorry to see me go and said I’d been a pleasure to work with. I sent a message round about how work had always only ever been about people, and about how much I’d enjoyed chatting about Croatia, or guitars, or British culture. The subtext was of course, that people are more important than stuff - one of my long-term sayings. True though, no matter what managers try to tell you.

So what next in the garden? Well the first thing I did was go out for a walk and a celebratory coffee. I’ve got a few projects to work on, but my main goal is probably going to have to be figuring out what’s next. Do I want to be a technical author? Do I want to do contract work for a bit? Do I want to focus more on content design? Perhaps I can write that book I’ve been pondering for years?

I have a few deeper things to think through, and at least a few weeks to breathe. I have a feeling that in the long run, God has given me a truly wonderful gift in this short season, and I don’t want to miss out on it. I think there’s a lot of joy out here in the garden.

CARROT CAKE

“So I thought, I know, I’ll help Malcolm out,” I said, “By eating a little of the leftover carrot cake.” Libby laughed. Sammy’s dad, Malcolm doesn’t like carrot cake. I was doing him a favour.

“But then,” I continued, “A moment or so later, I realised…”

“You’d eaten the whole thing?” chuckled Libby.

“It’s okay, Matt,” chimed Malcolm. “It’s not a problem.”

“It might be with my wife,” I said, making a face. She was out at the time, doing something else, but she was due back at their house any moment. We were planning on going back to where we’re staying, putting in some jacket potatoes, then nipping to the shops for baked beans. I was full of carrot cake but I thought maybe I could make it through the hour before the potatoes were ready.

I forgot all about it. Half an hour later, the rain was pattering onto the car roof, and Sammy and I chatted about house-stuff and work-stuff and whatever else. We arrived at the Co-Op and had a discussion about which yoghurt to get and whether it was better to get a four-pack of baked beans or two little ones. There were newspaper headlines to skim by and cans of Big Soup to observe, not to mention the question of what to get in the absence of Philadelphia cheese.

There was a lady standing by the ice cream freezer, transfixed by WhatsApp, apparently unable to stop texting. In searching for the soft cheeses, I accidentally said, “unbelievable” out loud and she flicked up for half a second. It’s funny how much can be communicated by half a second of eye-contact.

We paid up, wished the green-t-shirted young man a good evening and headed for the rain-speckled car.

“And we’ve got to eat that carrot cake tonight,” said Sammy, out of the blue.

My heart ran ahead of itself a pace.

“Erm. Which carrot cake?” I asked nervously.

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that she actually meant a different cake to the one I’d scoffed an hour before. When we got in and shook the rain off, she suggested I had a little slice before dinner. I’m in so much trouble, I thought.

TURNED-DOWN LUXURY FACTOR

Here’s a small thing I find annoys me out of proportion: when you get a tea or a coffee at Costa, say, then you sit down and accidentally knee the table leg, and spill the tea into the saucer.

That makes me triple-cross: one for spilling the tea, two for it being an embarrassing faux pas, and three because it hurts - like only a blow to the knee can.

It’s cold today. Cold and rainy. I’ve gone to Costa for lunch and as a rare treat, I’ve elected to sit inside. It’s not too noisy, thankfully - sometimes it’s cacophonous in here. It is chilly though.

I’m starting to think we’ve been duped. I’m sure these places used to be more comfortable; I mean sofas and jazz music, warm lighting and books, and board games on oak-beam shelves. Did they slowly turn down the luxury factor?

This one’s arctic. A quick look around shows most people in coats. Two middle aged women look quite serious, one with pen-in-hand. An older gent sits alone with a packet of crisps. The conversation level is on the cusp of loud but not quite unbearable - it’s closer to canteen-acoustics than it is to lounge room.

There’s no music either, unless you count the rushing steam from the barista machine behind the counter. The payment machine makes a periodic and all too loud bleep every time someone swipes their reward card. That’s the Costa soundtrack. Whoosh: bash, bash, bash. Beep!

“Sorry but she can’t turn around and say..”

“And it was seventeen pounds! Seventeen pounds!”

“I said I’m not doing that, no matter how much you pay me.”

So much for a treat then. But am I right? Were coffee places nicer twenty years ago when they were a newer idea in the UK? Do we still convince ourselves that this experience is something of a treat? For reference, a cup of tea here today costs £2.25 and they charge extra for oat milk. I’ve talked about this before, but it strikes me again as interesting what we’re prepared to pay someone to pour boiling water onto a tea bag.

Anyway. It’s time for me to pour the contents of my saucer back into my cup, rub my sore knee, and polish off the dregs of my tea-flavoured posh-water.

They really do see us all coming, don’t they?

I JUST WANT TO GO HOME

I broke down into tears this morning. As we drove by all the school children on their way through the grey morning, an old feeling resurfaced: I just want to go home.

And thanks to redundancy, I'm not entirely sure we're going to make it to our new house. If we don't, it won't be my fault, but I feel like I'd collapse into despair: shame that I'd let down my wife and my self. I can't take many more weeks of this Unsettling Adventure; the thought of months and months living out of a suitcase with no income, is terrifying.

I'm okay. I just need a day to cry it out, I think. I really have to stay positive and try to find opportunity to be kind to people. Sammy says home is wherever we are together, and she's right, but I think it's also where you make others feel at home too. That being said, I'd still like somewhere to put my feet up.

STILL

We drove to Windsor the other night. Sammy wanted to be there, to be connected to the Queen and pray over the castle. For some reason we thought the quietest time to do that would be a Saturday night.

The bars were depressingly full and bustling. Girls with tight calves and cleavage bulging from their ribbon dresses tottered along the pavement; boys in white trainers held them up by the arms. Pint glasses chinked in the night air and bouncers in hi-vis stood outside each pub, resolute, round, statuesque almost. It made us feel sad.

There were police vehicles of course in blue, white and yellow check - and barriers across the main entrance. There were cones too, and flashing lights. And there above it all, serene as the moon, was the uplit Round Tower of Windsor Castle.

We rumbled over the speed bumps. Behind, a police van bounced headlamps into our car, and ahead the streets of young people parted for us as we made our way in search of a parking space.

We found one eventually, by the river. It took some angling into, but we squeezed in. The river is a little way down from the hill on which the castle was built, so naturally it was also a bit quieter down there. That’s where we took this photo - right by the Diamond Jubilee Fountains. I really loved the way they were lit up with the castle behind them.

This poem (I posted it on instagram) is based on the picture. I really like the way a photograph catches a single moment, a still from a moving, noisy, world. You can’t tell the fountains are bubbling or that the moon rises slowly overhead. You can’t hear the distant sound of restaurants, and you can’t see the way grief and loss sits so heavily above it. It’s all frozen. It’s all still.

Still

So quiet in a photograph,

So motionless and still.

So lifeless seems the image 

Of that castle on the hill 

So frozen are the moments 

Where the fountain waters gleam 

So still is now the memory 

Of our departed Queen 

But we were there to see the dance 

Of water, lamp and light 

And see the tender moon above 

The castle in the night 

Where thankfulness and sorrow 

Tumbled heartfelt on the hill 

We look upon the photograph 

And we shall hear it still