ZERO FRESH AIR

I’ve not been out of the house today. I was working and not stopping, and that has ended with a day of zero fresh air.

It always affects me when I get no fresh air. I get moody and stuffy and cranky and sullen - and none of those things are good adjectives. What I need to do is make sure I go for morning walks again, breathe out the moody, the stuffy, the cranky and the sullen.

Actually what are the opposites of those words? I guess pleasant, open, calm, and maybe joyful? Could I manage those things tomorrow, do you think? Would a brisk stroll around the park help?

I hope springtime is soon. After yesterday’s little glimpse of shirtsleeve-weather, it all went back to grey and dreary today - blanket cloud and cold wind. I almost feel as though I ought to be seeing snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils! You know, a little colour! But not yet.

Probably because I haven’t been out there.

HINT OF A NEW SEASON

There was a hint of spring in the sunlight today. It might have been that the taxi driver had loaded my coat in with the suitcase and rucksack in the boot so that when I got out at Oxford station, I was wearing a jumper and, amazingly, surprisingly, it just wasn’t freezing.

The light was pale and the sun barely warm. Perhaps that’s what made me feel hopeful for spring - sharp shadows and blue sky, weak sun and a lull in that bitter wind I often get outside that particular railway station.

Every now and then you need a change of season. You need a shunt out of the last thing, a push into the next one. I like markers. - first day when a coat isn’t needed, barbecues and matches in the foyer of Sainsbury’s, green leaf on the car, dappled sun.

A pigeon chased a bit of a Greggs pasty around the platform. It stepped and bobbed in and out of its own long shadow, pecking at the pastry, feathers glinting with a crescent of sunshine on its back.

It’s still January of course. Nevertheless, change is coming.

ANALYSING COMPANY

It was a long day yesterday at the work thing. By the time we all got to the pub for dinner, my brain was so tired that I span into oversharing.

“I go deep quick,” I explained apologetically. I don’t need to apologise for being myself of course, but sometimes deep can be a bit awkward for people.

I did a lot of analysing yesterday. I couldn’t help it - I was in a room full of people, and people are always interesting to observe. Really interesting.

However, I’m now just looking forward to going home. I’m tired, yes. I’m in danger of turning grumpy, absolutely, but also - I’d like to be back with Sammy now please, sitting on the sofa, watching something comfy with a cup of tea, a few biscuits, and no work to think about.

I was thinking during a sales presentation, about the ‘company’ and the words we tend to use for it. A firm (solid, reliable, unmoving), a business (unrelentingly busy), an organisation (structured, efficient), and of course a company - a com-pan-y, where you eat bread together. When I heard it used by an American, the word stood out.

It reminded me of actors. They travel in companies too - a group of like-minded people, pretending to be other people in order to convince further people of a story, resonating with the human nature in all of us. It’s a great word to use for work, I thought, looking around. Together, on a stage in a strange hotel world, convincing each other that they would choose this, that they have chosen this, and now for some reason of capitalist economics, their house literally depends on it. Hey fair enough, mine too. I’m not knocking it.

Actually it’s time to go find it. I’m exhausted.

MEN IN PLASTIC BOXES

Loads of thoughts today. The first one’s about how dismissive some people behind glass windows can be. In the early morning darkness of the train station, the lightly-moustached man in the ticket office was up first.

“Can’t give you an open return if you travel today,” he sighed. His eyes were fixed on the screen in front of him. “Two separate tickets.” Still no eye contact. A price flashed up on the till facing me and I paid. Two tickets came sliding out under the plastic screen, pushed by indifference.

“Thanks,” I said. Nothing.

Next was the information guy. Now, the information guy lives in a different plastic box. He has ‘information’ - that’s his thing. I needed to know the fastest way to get to Oxford. It seemed to me like information he could provide.

“Should I wait for the 7:32 or is it faster to get the 7:18 and change at Didcot?” I asked him.

“Wouldn’t have thought so,” said he, raising an eyebrow. He tapped away on his computer while I waited. I checked the booth to see if I hadn’t accidentally gone to the opinion kiosk instead of the information desk, but no, there was a big floating i. Perhaps the information would flow. Perhaps I needed to rein in the inner sarcasm.

“You want the 7:18 to Worcester. 8b.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Nothing.

The 7:18 rolled in at 7:50. It had been delayed outside London. I figured I still had plenty of time to get to Oxford and to the venue by 9am.

At about 8:40am, I was on a bus. The bus driver had confidently told me which stop I needed, and I was looking out for the sign.

It’s funny isn’t it. In cartoons and things, the bus driver’s often a sort of jolly soul, someone who hums to himself and doffs his cap as you climb aboard. He might wave to Mrs Cogsworthy or whistle a tune, stopping only to smile at you in the rear view mirror.

“Yeah this one,” he snarled as the bus slowed up. I pushed my suitcase to the front and waited.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“This one!” said he, perhaps even less patiently. He pushed the button that opens the doors and a blast of cold air came in. “Get off the bus here,” he said, pointing at the pavement. I did so. A few moments later the sat nav confirmed that it was a) two stops too early, and b) a 15 minute walk.

I was late. It wasn’t a problem, other than I don’t much like being late. But a train journey of 20 minutes has been surrounded by so much waiting around and agitation from dismissive men behind plastic screens, that the whole thing had taken two hours.

Forgiveness then. I didn’t much like the fact that I had to exercise quite so much of it. But, I suppose, that is kind of the point. Sigh. Sometimes I think I still have a long way to go.

ELECTRICAL STORM

So a few things happened in quick succession this morning.

First, the sky went weird. I mean it went the colour of neon soup - sort of bright, green, and sickly. That kind of thing, I thought, happens in War of the Worlds just before the aliens arrive. In that movie, the sky starts flickering with lightning as the ‘Martians’ prepare to ride the lightning bolts down to la…

Flash! The second thing that happened was a quick volley of silent bursts of electrical energy. Yes, lightning. Uh oh. I mean I’m probably the same height as Tom Cruise, but there the similarity kind of ends. And the last thing I want today is to be sucked into the bowels of an alien tripod with a hand grenade in my mouth…

Thankfully there was thunder. It rumbled across the valley as the storm approached. Good old earthy thunder and lightning, the nitrogen cycle doing its thing, and not (as it turned out) heralding an invasion. Even the sky calmed down, and turned a deep but familiar, moody grey colour. Well, it calmed down in shade, but the storm itself was a lot closer. Lightning flashed, the air filling with tingling static. And that’s when the third thing happened…

Just as a particularly brilliant bolt of lightning ripped through the air, my phone charger blew up.

A loud pop, a bright spark - “Yaaaah!” I shouted, jumping out of my skin - orange and blue flames from the corner of my eye, then a small cloud of smoke from the blackened plug socket.

All the lights went out. And I was left with a dark grey sky, hail pounding the window and the smell of charred plastic.

Sammy had already gone to work, but she phoned me later to ask if I’d seen the storm. I sure had.

The weirdest thing was that it was just coincidence. I went out to check - no damage to the roof, nothing on fire, no smouldering remains. In fact, the fuse had blown only one circuit; everything else still worked (apart from the alarm system which started whining after a while). I propped open the garage and flicked open the fuse box to reset the circuit breakers.

It can’t really have been lightning can it? It wasn’t a huge explosion, and to be honest, my phone charger hasn’t been charging properly for a while. Surely just one of those things? Faulty electrical glitch leads to surge? Could have happened at any time?

The sky brightened and the rain swept on. The alarm system stopped moaning, and I popped some toast in. You know either way, I said to myself, I probably shouldn’t keep my phone next to the bed. My hairs stood on end as I thought about it. Like the sleepy world before the first tripod, or the original Woking countryfolk and church-goers of HG Wells’s novel, you might not ever really know what’s about to blow up in front if you - even if it doesn’t turn out to be aliens.

“Yaaagh!” I screamed suddenly. The toast had popped.

NOT IN SAN FRANCISCO

I have to go to Oxford this week - all week. Well Tuesday to Friday. It’s okay. It’s a work thing.

It was going to be San Francisco, which, while it sounds great, would probably not have been. I mean not in January - who goes in January? And what would I have actually seen? Fog? The inside of a hotel?

Anyway, Oxford it is. At least the inside of that hotel is only an hour away.

It could be a tricky week. You know, having to be socially ‘on’ for four days. I’m not much of a networker, and certainly nobody thinks I’m an extrovert. Plus, after last September’s antics, if there’s a piano… well. I doubt they’ll poke me with sticks, but I’d feel the pressure.

It’s funny how we end up with our jobs isn’t it? I’m sure a lot of people are driven by a career or vocation, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were a lot more people who just ended up doing what they do by accident. I have to wonder whether there‘s some secret mission, some purpose in me being around people for four days this week. I wonder what my learning will be, what my reason is?

Well. I’ll do what I usually do: listen and observe. Then I’ll come home and hurrah hooray it’ll be the weekend again. Always something to look forward to.

DIMINISHING RETURNS

We went to town yesterday. It was alright - other than the ludicrous decision they’ve made to force people to pay for car parking online.

It seems amazing to me. Town centres are declining thanks to online shopping, yet the rents shops pay to landowners are going up. So it’s literally becoming more expensive to do so something less desirable. On top of that, you can’t put coins in a machine and get a parking ticket out any more. You can’t even swipe a contactless card and get your bank to do it for you either. No, you have to use an app, or the Internet. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s just annoying, isn’t it?

I saw a man who looked exactly like Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park - you know the computer guy who turns off the power and gets eaten by a dilophosaurus? He was having a coffee in Starbucks, not, it turned out with Dodgson. Dodgson! Dodgson! We got Dodgson over here! No. His companion was a lady. I found myself wondering whether other people had ever told him the likeness. I bet they had.

Some of the larger shops are turning into flats apparently. One day, town will just be flats and coffee shops, I reckon. Flats, coffee shops and gyms, for those who’ve done all their shopping from their sofa and (ironically) need to lose a few pounds. Progress.

STORM EOWYN AND THE EROSION OF NUANCE

I got woken up by the storm this morning. It was howling out there, raging through the darkness, throwing rain at the window, chucking wheelie bins up and down the street. I was lying in bed listening and worrying. What would happen if one of our fence posts cracked up and smashed a neighbour’s windscreen? Is that covered by our home insurance? Is the roof of the shed okay? What about the side gate? What would I do if rain started pouring in through the ceiling or the window suddenly shattered?

I tried to think about literally anything else. The wind, the skirting whip of Storm Eowyn and her handfuls of icy rain were too loud for me to go back to sleep.

It’s interesting how it happened. All that cold air that was over Washington DC and New York and the rest of the Eastern Seaboard kind of pushed its way over the Atlantic, eventually creating its own low pressure anticyclone - Storm Eowyn. So you could say that the reason why the 47th President’s inauguration had to be held indoors on Monday… was also the exact thing that kept me awake worrying.

Who’d have thought it - Trump led to a night of sleepless worry. Unbelievable.

For a lot of people though, the new Prez is not for worrying about at all, but ought to be celebrated! Honoured, revered even! Not just over there in the States either! I mean here! Seems there are a few pockets of people cock-a-hoop that this straight-talking action-man is going to absolutely tick off their wish list. I get it. I’m fascinated. But I’m not quite so sure.

Life, I thought to myself in the stormy early hours, is supposed to be nuanced. Sometimes it feels as though we just don’t want to stop and look at the context before we repost or share something. The nuance is missing. And I think that might be the most dangerous thing of all, because the echo-chamber then reverberates with this spectacularly bad/great thing someone said or did. But you can’t judge it properly without the full picture - it’s already been spun - tribalism continues, and with it the reinforcing of extreme views. And that man, like him or loathe him, isn’t exactly nuanced.

The room grew light eventually and I creaked up to take a look out of the window. Sunlight, weak but true was already soothing the world after the storm. Perhaps that’s how those people feel? Like sunlight in the Oval Office, springtime after a dreadful liberal winter.

The day’s uncertain though isn’t it? And uncertainty is itself nuance - the potential for things to go any number of ways, and worse perhaps, to be interpreted through a lens I don’t think I can bring myself to look through.

DISNEY DOBBLE

We played Disney Dobble tonight. It’s like normal Dobble but with Disney characters.

I don’t know how popular Dobble is. I mean if I’d said ‘chess’ I’d be confident that you could imagine the Disney characters lined up on the chequered board. But it wasn’t chess; it was Dobble. It’s like snap, but about twelve times harder.

I don’t know why it is, but I am absolutely terrible at Disney Dobble. I can never see which character I’m looking for and by the time I’ve found the match, it’s way too late. I think my brain might be wired up differently.

Plus, I’m not even sure I know all the characters’ names! It’s doubly difficult if you don’t know your Luisas from your Lilos (you have to call out the matching characters as you go). You’re trying to remember who’s who, on top of who’s matching who in front of you. If you think about it, it’s actually quite difficult, computation-wise.

Doubly Difficult Disney Dobble. She was ace at it (of course she was). Still fun though.

RETURN OF THE JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES

And then the Jehovah’s Witnesses came round. I was expecting the mechanic so when the doorbell went, I ran downstairs and flung open the front door.

Young man and old man, black jackets, smart shoes, white shirts poking, clipboard, leaflets. I knew at once who they were.

The young man was a boy really. He was nervous, twitchy, a little bit afraid of what he was doing but glazed with eagerness and innocence. The older man, a Caribbean chap with a smile, was more at ease with himself. It’s been this way since time immemorial; the elder and the student, the Jedi and padawan. I knew who would get the job of speaking first too.

Sure enough, the youngling went for it and politely introduced himself. I smiled.

“Do you worry about your future?” was the opening gambit. It’s such an interesting question! My mind was already racing. Mostly with ‘What would my Dad do?’ - he was always the master at this conversation, bringing that excellent combination of knowledge (he knows their faith inside out), wisdom (he knows when to talk and when to listen) and compassion (he never forgets that people are real human beings).

“No,” I said, “ Not really. Have you read Jeremiah 29:11?”

It’s funny how pressurised this situation feels. I know, I know, most people just politely shut the door on them. But I’ve always found this kind of thing really difficult - like a test, almost, and it’s always one that comes out of the blue. Will my faith hold up? Will I be able to say the right thing? What would *everyone I know* be thinking? The same questions led me to debate some Mormons in the park once, and I kind of wished I hadn’t. I felt inadequate then, but I did want to help, even if they nearly tangled my faith into knots. So this time I kept it to the Bible.

The Witnesses looked the passage up on their phones and then read it out to me - at which point, I was able to share a bit more about what I think the future holds, and why I’m not worried. Hello doorstop Bible-study.

“It’s nice to meet someone with strong faith,” said the older man as they left. I looked at the young one and smiled. He looked like he wanted to ask me a question, but the older guy was already heading back to the road. “Hope and a future!” I called to them. I said a prayer, quickly and quietly, then gently pulled the door to.

DISS TRACK

I was having a chat with someone in their twenties today. Early twenties I think, 23 max. He was telling me how he’d felt old because the kids in his class (he’s a TA) thought that the definition of music was Mr Beast putting a ‘diss track’ up on YouTube.

I really really wanted to ask him what a diss track was. 

I worked it out. And don’t worry if you’re wondering about Mr Beast either, I’ve got you my Gen X buddies. He’s a YouTuber. In fact he’s probably the most successful YouTuber there’s ever been, and someone wealthy enough to be very silly with stunts, insane cash prizes, his own Amazon Prime show, and yes, ‘diss tracks’.

Time plays tricks on you my young Z friends. Don’t be surprised if the alphas suddenly treat you like millennials - it is the way of the world, and trust me, your time will come.

I can’t imagine making a diss track. Who on earth would I diss? The Amazon delivery guy who keeps leaving our parcels in the rain? The chancellor of the exchequer for the ballooning interest rates? Well. Remember in the 90s when church youth leaders would write raps and perform them with a baseball cap turned backwards? It would probably be about as embarrassing as that.

What do you mean you don’t remember? You were born… when?

Man alive.

INAUGURATION

I’m a bit tense today. No particular reason, just one of those things I suppose.

Watching the inauguration didn’t help. You know the USA fascinates me for so many reasons, and on this pomp and purpose day, there’s an awful lot to be fascinated by. And yet, it weirdly made me feel a bit stressed.

It’s a bit like watching a half-time team talk. It’s not your team, but you know that what this coach says could impact the way your team and you are going to have to play. So in troops the marching band and the locker room goes wild to the sound of what’s essentially the music of an Edwardian steam fair. Then someone slaps someone else on the back and chants ‘we are the champions’ or something bombastic.

Then someone, the chaplain probably, says a prayer that reinforces how great God thinks their team is and how it’s his divine will (obviously) that they’re going to win. More whooping, after a sombre amen of course.

Anyway, there it is. I watched with eyes wide and question marks hovering. Will he really get hold of Greenland? Is he really going to send troops to reclaim the Panama Canal? Does America first mean everybody else second? And are they going to Mars? Elon Musk grinned behind him and stuck up two thumbs.

At one point, several uniformed soldiers marched in singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It’s from the civil war, sung by the victorious Union forces as a patriotic symbol of the ‘glorious’ United States. As the men marched into the Rotunda, each stomp to the beat, they had to bash into the arms of the folks on the end of the rows. The aisle wasn’t big enough.

Shoulder after shoulder got barged out of the way by the song, whether faithful republican, disappointed democrat or just your average American. On went the singers, bashing and belting out the lyrics stamped into their proud hearts and voices, regardless of their wake.

That, I thought, just about sums it up for me.