SUFFOLK TIMING

We’re on holiday this week in Suffolk, where time seems to slow down. I think, like the sky, there’s just more space, more room to breathe. Lazy mornings and cosy nights, stars and sunrises, sand and salty air.

I always feel as though the purpose of holidays is to remind ourselves that this pace, this deceleration brings us much closer to how life should actually feel. I’m not saying life can move at holiday pace - of course it can’t. But it should be closer to this than it is to the breakneck running around we all try to do, plate spinning in a working week.

Anyway, we’re having a lovely slow time. It’s rained a bit, sunned a bit and winded a bit, but that’s all to be expected. Yesterday (though it feels like several days ago) I went to see the sun rise over the sea and had an amazing experience, watching the waves and clouds and foam and spray. It’s all been lovely.

So, how do you hold on to this pace? How do you grasp the slowness of Suffolk and use it to pull back the clock hands back home? Can it be done?

Early nights, early mornings might help, I thought as I stood there on the glistening beach. Perhaps consistent meal times actually at the table. And perhaps just focusing on one thing at a time.

Does it sound like wishful thinking? I think probably, yes. Is there anything wrong with wishful thinking? No. It seems like a good place to start. Will we get back and feel the pulse of the clock pushing us faster? Yeah, sigh, almost certainly. Ask me in a week.

Until then, we’re enjoying the moment.

THE FALLING B

… ought to be. I don’t feel bold. I feel as though the b fell off the bold like an autumn leaf.

The trains were messy yesterday. At Paddington, where crowds of people were about to squeeze their way onto the Elizabeth Line, I stood there scanning the board for the next train going my way.

Trespassers on the line, apparently. No trains. I hoped it wasn’t kids, but then I suppose I hoped it wasn’t anybody - I can’t imagine too many reasons why people would trespass on railway tracks. Anyway, I was in the crowd of commuters.

I’ve never been in a pressing crowd before. As the doors of the only viable train slid open, it felt as though an invisible hand was pushing me forwards. I could have lifted my feet from the floor and let the current take me, rucksack wedged into someone’s overcoat, elbows squeezed against someone else’s back. It was quite frightening actually.

Before long I was on the train - to be fair, my only goal at that point - clinging to a pole with the tips of my fingers. The train ground its way through the twilight tunnel and then out to the night-time world of dark shapes and track.

I’m tired. Weary, I suppose. It took another two and a half hours to get home. When I finally got off the bus at 8pm, it was raining - raining in that soggy way that only autumn knows. Inky puddles, cold rain and yes, yellow leaves that spin and tumble and float and squelch.

There really ought to be more boldness, more bravery, less caring about what anyone thinks. There should be a caution-to-the-wind carelessness, yellow and red and purple and orange. I didn’t feel it. I just felt exhausted last night - tonight too, as it goes. Perhaps sleep will help. Perhaps. Falling on the October breeze above a deep, dark puddle as the rain pockmarks the pavement and the street lamps shimmer.

YELLOW LEAVES

Yellow leaves on the tree by the bus stop. I don’t think they were yellow last week, but it was dark, early morning so… hard to tell. I’m going into London much later, today.

I miss Oxford. I think it’s over a month now since I’ve been into that other, more familiar office. I could of course, go any time, but I’m ‘needed’ far more in London these days and my energy being what it is I don’t think I could do them both in a week.

I sound old when I say things like that. I don’t revel in it, I just feel it. Little snapshots remind me of it - the white hairs that fall at the barbers, the overheard conversations of teenagers, the memories that pop up unannounced on social media. And of course the inexplicable aching that somehow goes deeper than bones and stomach.

Yellow leaves. You know, the colour was there all along. To conserve energy, the tree stops producing chlorophyll and it’s that chemical that typically turns leaves green. When it’s gone, all that’s left is the yellow, red, and orange of autumn - no longer hidden. Fire, wisdom, courage unfiltered. There ought to be a boldness when youth turns.

ENCOUNTER WITH A YOUTH

The other day I met a young man I hadn’t seen for a long long time. I think I used to teach him piano. 

Now tall and confident, looking like he’d just been in some cool music video, he beamed at me, shaking my hand.

“Matt,” he said, “You look great.”

Now I know what you’re thinking. It was a nice thing to say. And it was, especially as it seemed so spontaneous and sincere. You don’t often hear things like that unless you’re some sort of fresh-faced starlet. Well I don’t anyway. The trouble was he didn’t stop there. He went on about how I looked healthy, didn’t have wrinkles yet, must be moisturising, had good genes, looked so young. I think he overdid it.

But my question is, what am I supposed to do? The longer he rattled on, the more he chipped away at the sincerity of it. There comes a point, my polite young friend, when you really must stop. Even if you’re genuinely overawed by the unbelievable youthfulness emanating from the miraculously ageing Adonis before you, you’ve really got to know when pointing it out gets sarcastic.

I bumbled my way through the awkwardness. You see now, confident people? You see how hard it is! I left believing I’m shockingly ancient and this young model of a man in his prime had covered up his shock with OTT quick-thinking obsequious flattery, thinking that a bucketload of sugar might just improve the taste of the old wine skin.

Well, I thanked him and moved on. What else could be done? Hit the town? Slick my hair back and buy a cool motorbike? No. I just take it with a pinch of salt and hope that at least a little bit of it was actually genuine.

And then not give two hoots if it wasn’t.

THEME HOSPITAL

I’m in the hospital, thinking about how I would design its layout. Not my job, I know. More complicated and expensive than I could imagine, I know. Nevertheless, the hospital, it occurs to me, is a windowless maze of blue and beige.

I’m notoriously poor at finding my bearings. I’ve always known it; I think it’s something to do with light. If I emerge from a door, I can generally turn towards or away from the light, depending on what my subconscious worked out when I went in. But if both directions are lit the same way? No idea which way. My brain won’t have clocked the difference, so I’m left with pure 50/50 guesswork.

So. What would I do for my hospital? If no expense were too much, I think I’d colour code it. Maybe the floor, maybe the fittings. Red for A&E, green for outpatients, maybe blue for oncology?

I’m aware, I know next to nothing about the way hospitals work, so if you do, my apologies for trivialising your field. It could be that colour-coding would be way too confusing and disorientating. After all, I have more than a sneaking suspicion that these corridors are blue and beige for a very good reason, and not green and purple.

I think I might use gradations of colour too, depending on how far away from the entrance you are. Or maybe number markers. There’s a lot of walking required, so how about minute markers showing how far away you are from different places?

I definitely think windows help. Perhaps significant trees or sculptures could help people find their bearings too.

As I sit here, waiting at the hospital pharmacy, I can’t help thinking that actually, they have done a pretty good job. There are signs with arrows, and there are maps posted in the corridors. It probably is about as good as it could be. I am pontificating again - prattling on about something that probably can’t be fixed, and also, is not at all anything to do with me. Sigh.

The problem is me. I’m directionally unintelligent and I need better awareness. By the way, you should see Sammy at this; she’s like a hyper-aware grandmaster at navigation - I am continually impressed, though she of course, thinks it’s quite ordinary. She isn’t with me today, which is why, I’m trying extra hard to find my way back to the main entrance. Or at least, I will be, once the pharmacy releases my medications. Can I be fixed, I find myself wondering? Is this something hardwired into my brain? Ironic to ask, given where I am.

SICK DAY AND A POIROT

I was off sick yesterday. It’s weird when you work fully from home; the boundary lines get blurry - so it’s much harder to be ‘ill enough’ not to do any work.

Am I really too poorly to open a laptop? Am I so feeble that I can’t check Slack on my phone?

Well actually… yes and yes; I was. Would it have been enough to stop others? Probably. But they’re not me.

I was curled up watching Murder on the Orient Express and solving puzzles, and trying hard not to think about it.

I slept a bit too. I have a strange relationship with sleep at the moment - it doesn’t quite hit the mark. Yesterday, as Hercule Poirot was twiddling his magnificent moustaches, I drifted into sleep, but it was the shallow film of lucid water on top of the ocean, not the deep dark stuff where all the nutrients are. Hercule agreed, distantly, I’m sure.

I’m much better today. Sammy does not think it was the flu. But she’s not me either. I still have a tickly throat and the feeling of having all the energy drained from my lungs, but I was able to get on with whatever it is I do behind a laptop.

At the end, Poirot got them all gathered on the tracks for the denouement. That moustache really is magnificent; I think it grew more elaborate throughout the movie. He twirled and twiddled as he explained precisely how the murder had taken place. No evidence. No smoking gun, just an intricate structure of calculated suspicion that turned out to be (sigh, Agatha) completely correct. I must have missed a bit, I thought.

Probably asleep.

ELIZABETH LINE

Green hedges and stones fly past in a blur. Under a bridge, past a golf course, along an embankment of an old industrial estate, complete with rusty-looking trailers. Then shiny cars, stacked Lego-like into a station car park. A voice proclaims that we’re arriving at a station. The train slows. The doors beep open.

I’m on the Elizabeth Line today. It goes all the way to where I need to be but it takes forever to do it - which feels today like a tidy old metaphor for pretty much everything else I’m trying to do. I do worry about being a massive frustration. You know sometimes you’re around people and they start gossiping about how awful so-and-so is, how slow and maddening they are, and how dreadful an attitude they have. It’s never truly malicious; just irritated. And I always wonder what those people say about me when I am out of the room myself.

It bothers me, that. So it probably should, but perhaps not to the extent that it actually does. Got to be thicker-skinned sometimes. As long as we do our best and we show love and kindness to those around us. I still worry I’m a problem though.

An old factory with broken windows. New factories with no windows at all. Progress. Grey sky now between the trees and the red bricks. Bicycles in a rack, flats overlooking the railway with balconies six inches wide and clothes draped over the railings. Then more rooftops and chimneys and lorries and pipes and offices. The smell of weed wafts down the long carriage. It must cling to clothes, swirling with every flap of fabric. That ubiquitous vile scent. I find myself wondering whether I’d mind so much if it smelled of lemons and pears. Same stuff. Same ruined young minds. What am I really objecting to?

“Get the UK’s best 12-month free easy-access savings rate,” says an ad on the back of a newspaper. It’s the Metro, being held by a passenger opposite. The smaller print says I can ‘reach my savings goals sooner’ - though I still maintain I can also do that by spending less on things we don’t exactly need. It’s another thing on my mind. I don’t need a new coat, yet I’ve still been searching for one online. Twice I’ve pulled up and said I think it’s indulgent.

That’s the capitalist world, I suppose. Indulgence for all! It leads to cannabis filling the Elizabeth Line rattling its way into London. It leads to smartphones and AirPods (both of which I’m using right now) and the unspoken etiquette of none of us on this carriage ever really looking at each other. How did eye contact, a basic human function, the window to the soul, the doorway to connection, become a faux pas? How did we do this to ourselves?

Graffiti. Poplar trees. Pylons and steel, a concrete flyover, street lamps above an empty road and high rise flats looming up into the grey sky. History flashes by the windows, telling a story all of its own. I shuffle in my seat, knowing that the Elizabeth Line takes me to a quiet office where people have quite probably been talking about me. London gets ever nearer.