Trainspotting and Irvine Welsh

Trainspotting was Irvine Welsh’s breakthrough novel, but I’d never given it a go until recently.  It was the book that was cool and popular to read around the time of university, and a film which was great and very popular – it spawned a culture all of its own, those posters from the films adorned many bedroom walls.

1996 seems like it was a rich year for many things: film (Trainspotting and I’m sure others), music (off the top of my head Underworld’s smash hit Born Slippy which featured in the Trainspotting film), football (a trip to Wembley with my Dad to watch Plymouth Argyle beat Darlington 1-0 in a PlayOff final, shortly followed by the European Championships in England where England reached the semi-final and lost to Germany on penalties): all vivid in memory.

Some years or seasons seem to write themselves more keenly, helped by arts, football: momentous seeming stuff that matters, things you care about.

Yet I consciously didn’t read Trainspotting and I’m not sure why.  Perhaps the film had ruined any chance I had to impose my own interpretation.  I read and enjoyed his books which followed closely after.  Porno was especially fun.  His more recent thriller-esque novel Crime was functional and entertaining enough – if a little needy in its brutal violence; while a short story collection Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs was a surprisingly amusing romp.

Now he’s releasing a prequel to Trainspotting, Skagboys, which I will want to read at some point.  So I thought it was time to give Trainspotting a chance.

It’s a different kind of reading, reading Irvine Welsh.  That thick Scottish dialect actually is a different kind of language and possesses a rhythm and flow of its own.  You let your eyes wash over the words and only compute them together at the end of the sentence, when miraculously it does make sense.  You find the dialect injecting itself into your own stream of consciousness.  You find yourself swearing much more.  If not out loud, then at least inside your head at fuckin dozy cunt shop assistants.

After a while it doesn’t even feel like proper reading.  It feels like you could read it just as efficiently and derive just as much pleasure when really quite drunk.  And it is tremendously funny, the dialogue and internal monologues and candid honesty of the characters.

You have to beware of projecting the characters you’ve seen numerous times from what’s become a cult film.  You’re applying the now world-famous Ewan McGregor to Rents (Renton), and Robert Carlyle as Begbie and.. the other slightly less famous lot.

But still.  It’s still very funny, shocking, intimate, a total joy of a ride.

abstract expressionism

We push open the heavy gallery doors and step back out onto the museum’s first floor landing.  It had been different speaking about art out loud to you, hearing someone else’s interpretations, not being trapped in the confines of my own brain, wondering if these thoughts were ridiculously pretentious.  Surely a point of art is to unlock that part of your brain, to allow it to freewheel and riff like that?

The door swings back behind us, clumping closed.  Now the marble and stone creates a wave of echoing acoustic which jars against the sealed art space quiet.  Louder voices, chatter from downstairs, squealing children, pandering parents.

You’re saying something about that last painting but I’ve stopped listening.  I’ve stopped listening because out here there’s a sound, a voice here which unsettles me, a blurry familiarity I can’t place, I don’t want to place, I’m scared by.

His voice slices in like a real world sound cutting into dream, like a sound which may initially be part of a dream before becoming real.  Worlds collide with his overfamiliar voice, a voice which has also sliced into consciousness from radios and televisions, but those can at least be switched off.  Shit, a second glance.  Definitely him.  I need a remote control to just..  No, that wouldn’t work.  What’s he doing here?!  What’s he even doing in this city?  Shit.

You’re still speaking and I’m still nodding, pretending to listen, but this nervous hinterland returns me to dreams of a few hours before.  Afterwards I interpreted them as being related to you, to us, to our, to this; but I didn’t tell you that or explore in any depth.

(I told you the one, where you’d decided not to stay and had caught a bus, literally, the rear pole of an old London Routemaster, just as it was taking off, and you had flown away.  I had been left standing there watching it go, disappointed, confused and yet slightly relieved.  I thought this a reflection of feelings about relationships, their general here today, gone tomorrow transience – however seemingly long-term solid or briefly flaky.  Anything can happen.   In the next I sat on the top deck of a bus or a van, not that vans usually have decks, as it sped too fast down country roads.  I felt giddy and sick and couldn’t bear to look, although the roads were scenic.  Everything was moving frighteningly fast.)

Now I peer around a pillar and over a stone bannister to a small mezzanine area containing a statue.  The man and boy are about to climb the small flight of steps up to where we’re standing.

“Do you want to meet my brother?” I ask you.

He doesn’t know about you, of course.  None of my family do; not yet.  It hasn’t been that long.   “..saw him with a girl” I can already hear him telling his wife in an incredulous mocking tone.

Now he’s climbing the steps in this direction.  I’m semi-paralysed, feet cemented.  Run away?

“What? Why?” you reply, now looking scared too.
“Um, because he’s here, he’s just down there, with his son.  He’s coming up this way, now.”
I feel my face pallid, lacking blood.
“Do you want me to meet him?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t mind either way.  Do you want to run?”
“Yes.  A bit.”

Although I feel I shouldn’t.

He arrives at the top of the stone steps, a few feet away from us, still talking to his whining 5 year old. I remain frozen. We could still run. He still hasn’t seen us.

He looks up to get his bearings, glances straight through me once, twice, maybe three times.  We’ve been given ample opportunity to run, to turn our backs and walk away.  Still could.  But somehow I can’t.

Now he registers the unusualness of my unmoving shape, a man so rigidly and weirdly staring at him.

“Oh hellooo!” his smarmy voice peels up into the domed ceiling and he smiles broadly, walks towards us.  I smile nervously and he steps into my embrace.  I introduce you.

he aint heavy (he’s my dickhead)

Brother called the landline telephone yesterday evening and, given that we hadn’t spoken in a short while – not this side of his birthday – we opened with jolly greetings.  He thanked me for my gift of an Xbox controller, another way to exert his dominance over his wife, ho-ho-ho.

We were both bound for our childhood home for the Easter weekend – although his stay would only be a brief, lip-service visit on the way to the more oft frequented in-laws in Wales.  He would of course bring his family entourage and I would bring myself.

“Mum has this idea of taking the kids to this thing,” he explained.  Mum had told me about it too.  It sounded like a nice idea.  “It’s one of these typical things,” he continued, a patronising exasperation cutting into his voice, “when she, you know.. gets an idea in her head of a Thing To Do with them.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” I asked, genuinely curious, not seeing where he was coming from.  She loves spending time with his kids.  Why shouldn’t she?

“Oh nothing, nothing,” he replied, suddenly defensive.

“Right,” I said, thinking him a dickhead, remembering how he always gives the impression of knowing our family much better than we know ourselves, like we’re all his inventions, without individual consciousness.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, changing the subject in his masterful controlling way, as if this next thing was much more important: “can you bring your Xbox back at the weekend?”

“Ugh, do I have to?”

I find it tedious, unwiring everything, wrapping it up, packaging it in a box, connecting it up to our parents’ haphazardly set-up television, doing the return trip – particularly when I’m not nearly as bothered about playing the damn thing as he is and he’ll often revel in his victories like he did when we were kids.  For someone so insanely busy with a wife, two kids and an important, high-pressured job, his Xbox form is always good.

“Well no, you don’t HAVE to,” he replied, employing his well-used haughty patronising exasperated tone again.  I was clearly being impossible.  He was being a dickhead.

“Alriiight,” I jabbed back with my own patronising, deliberately unfazed tone.

“Right, well, I’ll see you at the weekend,” he said.

He’d had enough.  I had too.  It was a sub-three minute call.

“Right, bye then.”

football first

“If it’s going well, do you think you might sack off the football match?”

A friend asked this before a date and I blanched.  No!  Of course not you idiot, I replied in my head.  The football match was the main reason for my being in London.

It was a fair question, I suppose.  Although I never entertained it as a realistic possibility – because I wanted to go to the game, I’d paid a substantial amount of money, was looking forward to the game and don’t go to matches much – it was indeed possible.  I could have sacked it off.  And who knows?

“Actually, you know what?  Hell, it’s cold, my back hurts.  Let’s just stay here in the warm.”

It would have enabled a longer time together, more conversation, a shared experience of something – a gallery or film – perhaps the added relaxant of an alcoholic drink or two, which could help boozy goggles; more stuff.  And who knows?  Probably not of course..

But no.  I went to the football, which was half-ruined as a result of the previous two hours.

You ideally want to arrive a while before the match, get into the zone for a game, find out the team news, absorb the atmosphere, grow nervously excited.

You don’t want to travel up painfully overanalysing a date, be irritated she’d done that defensive girl thing of shoving a cheek in your face at the end.  *Kiss Me Nowhere Except Here On My Cheek Then Fuck Off*.  You don’t want to be very cold and overchew a piece of gum as you walk to the stadium and only find your seat as the players exit the tunnel onto the pitch, and have half a mind on your mobile as the game kicks-off and barely be able to stop shivering and have serious back-pain each time you stand up to watch an attack over a few thousand heads.  You don’t want to feel disappointingly little as your team play remarkably well and race into a commanding 4-0 lead, strangling the life and drama out of a game.

Even far back in the distant midst of a serious relationship I instinctively put Tottenham first.  A Sunday afternoon in bed was curtailed by a text from a friend reminding me about a televised cup tie against Chelsea which I’d forgotten was kicking off in 15 minutes.  Virtually mid-coitus, I had unapologetically leapt from the bed, collected strewn items of clothing, got dressed and headed to the pub.

We lost 4-0.  Eidur Gudjohnsen scored a hat-trick.

I guess my long term relationship with football and Tottenham, while often rife with angst and heartbreak, has been longer, more constant and more reliable than any relationship with a woman.  Barring one or two horrible summer months, football is always there.  Football always makes me feel something, it always gives, even if it gives shit, even if gives Jason bloody Dozzell.

Trying to explain football to non-football fans I say it’s a story which you’re part of.  It could be a dull story or an exciting story, but it will be a story of some kind, and each match is an isolated narrative of its own and part of something broader and longer: a competition, a season, a career.  You invest in the characters of players, or your perception of their characters.

It helps if there’s some instinctive appreciation of the artistry of ball-play, team movement, the skill involved, the ballet of a beautiful diving header or a perfectly executed bicycle kick.  That makes a story memorable.

This is heightened when you’re playing the game, when you’re living the story, even if there are no spectators at all, even if you’re being embarrassed by the skill of an adolescent half your age or intimidated by the aggression of a maniac clearly more intent on doing harm than playing fotball; it’s enlivening if not always enjoyable.  It makes you feel.

Above anything sport can give out outlet for displaced emotions which you might like to express in other parts of your life, but can’t, because right here right now there’s nothing as important as winning.

I like to think I’d be capable of prioritising a woman above football, in the right circumstances, but it would demand a reciprocal certainty I’ve rarely experienced.  Maybe if she could pull off a slick Cruyff turn..

empty nests

One consequence of living an alternative loner lifestyle is the struggle to empathise with Normal People Issues.  The ‘being busy’ and need to broadcast ‘being busy’ is a frequent bugbear which I might have mentioned once or twice here.  The truth could quite possibly be that many people are substantially busier than me.  I have always been time-rich.  But the compulsion to broadcast the fact every which way, thereby justifying existence at every turn, is a separate issue.

Also brought home to me recently by my mother, in what developed to be a disconcerting series of ‘open conversations’, was the impact of children leaving home.  My Dad often emits a sense of apathy towards children generally, and certainly has seemed to, towards me.  He’ll usually help if asked to do something, if it doesn’t conflict with other plans, but he will need asking and will seldom volunteer support unbidden.  This is teamed with a sporadic, general fumbling awkwardness.  He also battles with depressive demons which can have a distressing impact upon my mother, as well as upon himself.  (I privately, perversely enjoy this fact.  Yay!  I don’t think I’m *quite* as much of a mental fuckup as him!)  He’ll whine and growl and hit things (never his wife) and verbally abuse himself in the most crazy untamed fashion.  It’s little short of a fit.  While this has been far from easy over the years, Mum has grown stronger in dealing with him and forcing him to seek help – medical or otherwise.

In telling me of his latest trauma, and responding to my gentle probing about his medication and whether he’s ever spoken freely about a dysfunctional relationship with his long dead father, that my Mum told me about how he’d responded when my brother and I left home.

On both occasions of returning from dropping us and leaving us at university for the first time, he apparently took longer than necessary to find his way home.  Of course the cynic could say this might be cover for any reason: but he told mum he needed time out, that he stopped the car in a layby and wept.

Wept for what?  She said she was loathe to use the word ‘jealousy’ – if you can be jealous of your kids, but she did.  Jealous of having the education and opportunities that he never had.  For seeing us grow up and leave the house.  I wasn’t sure if jealous was the right word.

My greatest experience of physical loss and grief is the impact of the first family dog dying, the gaping hole of one less figurative and literal heartbeat lumbering around the place.  Multiply that to the noise and impact of children.  I never really had before.  Particularly the effect of my louder, boisterous brother, was and is still, now when he enters or leaves the house with his entourage of family, profound.  Extracting that first, and then me, to leave just my parents and a dog.  It must throb for a while, take some getting used to.

Things like this that are difficult to appreciate, living alone.  Having nobody actually physically there for so long – whether housemates or even a pet – means although you’re lonely you don’t actually miss anyone or anything either.  You pine for the idea of something, which is quite different.

My mum’s telling me that about my Dad, the stolid, emotionally illiterate fool, unexpectedly moved me as I sat in my lounge chatting to her on the phone.  Briefly I found myself leaking.  Partly through disbelief.  Really?!  Dad gives a fuck?!  Fuck off..  But I didn’t let on.

I was doing nothing, as usual that Sunday.  And it was Mothers’ Day.  So I decided to buy a bunch of flowers and drive home.

Over a short visit, in part bonded over a shared experience – something she had done in the past which I was now doing, I spoke more openly with her about myself.  She never asks questions so I volunteered information and she appeared to listen and engage, which isn’t a common occurrence, as I’ve bemoaned here before.  It has happened before, (Nov 2010 post); it’s just rare.  I spoke a little of loneliness, general rejection, shit first dates, unrealistic ambitions, an aimless career – because if I had a career which occupied me and which I cared about, that would squeeze other things away.  While I knew my brother would have scorned such openness to our mother, the fragile character of his conception who would merely worry and be too childish to cope, and although it wasn’t a comfortable experience – I’m dreadful with eye contact when it comes to speaking about such things – it wasn’t one I regretted either.

“You’re in a bit of a pickle, aren’t you?” she pityingly deduced from her armchair that evening.

“Yes.  But I have been for years, Mum.  It’s not exactly new.  Just never seems to change or get easier.” I shrugged from the floor, semi-distracting myself from My Feelings by antagonising the dog.

at a loss

In a large shopping centre you glance below at a man on an escalator with a similar hair-loss pattern, perhaps a few years further down the line.  Shit, you think, that looks crap.  And you wilt, newly dismayed at your bald predicament.  The man has done nothing ostensibly wrong in his styling but it still just patently looks crap.  Especially from up here.  Clumpy and jagged and misshaped and crap.

You don’t want your hair to look crap.

Your hair is almost certainly going to look crap.  Even more crap than it does at the moment.  (And it does look pretty crap at the moment).  How unfair.  As if you’re not resistible enough to women anyway..

What to do?  Bite the bullet and go with a half blended-in buzz cut effort?  They can look surprisingly ok, but usually above more weathered, tanned heads, perhaps with a fleck of distinguished grey to make it look more interesting.

Or to say hang-it and not care, to carry on as you are and stick with the painful striptease of that ridiculous eggy white crown.  Devoid of any colour, you worry about looking like a cancer patient if you were to shave it.  Is it possible to fake-tan a whole head?  That could get labour-intensive. Plus your ears: not extraordinarily massive or stuck-out but hardly discreet either.  They would be even more pronounced.

You’re not horrendously hung up or you’d have better explored all the medications, shampoos and treatments, or at least googled more than you have.  Perhaps laziness.  It’s not too bad, you tell yourself from time to time. You don’t notice anything from the front – which is what kind people say too, as they struggle against broad smiles.

Catching changing room reflections, seeing photographs – that massive crescent shine in a church at a wedding; or a video – a horrific slab of head whilst playing with your nephew on a zipline.  It’s inexplicably galling.  Being nervously aware of new people’s ignorance when you’re sitting down and they’re standing up, or if they’re following you down steps or a slope.  Even if they say nothing, you know they see it and comment in their head.

It’s been on the cards for a good number of years.  Your Dad was bald from a fairly young age – his lusty Beatles fringe dropping away to almost nothing by the time you started school.  Although they say it skips a generation and your hair was never as lusty thick as his seemed from those pictures.  You envy strangers their hair: middle-aged and older gentlemen on the street, particularly older ones who seem to have never markedly suffered.  Also anyone man at all over your age with a decently covered crown.  In his latest book Julian Barnes mentions how alcoholics don’t lose their hair, something in the alcohol keeps it strong.  An option?

If only you’d receded from the front to the back, rather than back-front.  That looks infinitely preferable.  Much less crap.

You’re bemused by those young footballers who may have a good, full head of hair but choose to shave it.  Having perfectly good hair is clearly better than not having hair.  Lee Clark, Newcastle United’s former combative midfielder of the late 1990s sported a completely bald pate for the entirety of his playing career.  Now a young manager with a remarkably solid head of hair he looks much less of a thug, almost a completely different person.

You’re still scared about doing it, going to a hairdresser and giving the instruction.  You still could easily bottle it again, like you have for years.  It’ll grow back, they say, no big deal really.  But it is.  Of course it is.  It’s shedding youth, another resignation, another defeat, nothing can ever be the same again.  This is what it feels like.  And what if the shape of your head is totally unsuited?  What if you look like a legoman, like journeyman defender Paul Konchesky?

Your eyes stay glued on the top of the man’s crap looking head until he reaches the bottom of the escalators and walks away.

keeping sane

Leaning on a gate in a currently unused field, which would probably home livestock a few months of the year, I felt the unseasonably warm sun on my face, stared out across the landscape of Welsh mountains and listened.  Birdsong, the occasional dog bark, mostly nothing at all.  I was inflated with a rare inner peace, which was sort of embarrassing at first, you “hippy” wanker, but sank in undeniably.  Fuck it, whatever..  God it was beautiful here.

I tend to idealise being part of a couple, over-romanticise what it could be like.  Plenty of people in relationships are in shit relationships.  These can be lonely too.  It might be pushing it to say they’re as lonely or more lonely than someone who is literally very alone for much of their existence.  Although maybe some of them are.  Young mums in a mess.  Senior females who have lived out whole lives feeling little, in an empty shell, mainly because they were asked and it seemed like the right thing to do back then.  Senior males who feel similarly hollow, the subject of a cultural puppeteer.

Perhaps it’s a different kind of loneliness, a loneliness which also comes with the frustration of being trapped, straitjacketed, imprisoned: something I should be grateful to have never suffered.

While I bemoan and angst and warble over my perennial singledom,
While I tire of dating and all the plastic artifice which comes with it,
While I get sick of the necessary enforced optimism before every first date,
While I grow frustrated at rejection from females I wasn’t sure about either,
While I become painfully bored of being alone, seemingly all the fucking time:
At least I have my freedom, independence.

Plus the inclination to go and do and see stuff, alone if necessary – which it is.  It’s easy to have freedom and not use it.  You can sit on your arse in your lounge and watch crap television and sink deeper.

To get in the car on a nice Sunday and just drive
To fumble my way up the steep side of a mountain after several U-turns,
To seek solace in mournful tunes which fill the shell of my car,
To absorb the beautiful diagonal slanting light, how it illuminates giant slabs of Springtime land:
To take a zigzaggy unplanned walk:
The ability to do this probably keeps me just about sane.

There are worse places to be.

If this sounds like a self-congratulatory back slap, it sort of is.  As well as a pragmatic mental defence against Hollywood tinted notions of love and romance.  (Although I know it can be good, great, incredible too, for some people – which is why I still hope, why I still put myself through the dating bullshit).  The shining landscape winked back its well-done appreciation at me and I accepted.

Slicing through the tranquil soundscape of nothing, the anomalous jarring engine dirge of a passenger plane, not too far overhead.

what you can hope to achieve

Stuff in this next post or two is backdated from, like, ages ago, so if any of it was remotely true it wouldn’t  even slightly chafe anymore.

The score was level at two all, one minute into stoppage time at the end of the match.  Manchester City’s hapless centre-back lost the ball in midfield and Gareth Bale was released to attack down the left wing.  Spurs had men over on them.  We could win it here.  As Bale collected the ball and ran, you edged forward on your armchair, alone in your flat.

Could we win it?!  It could change everything.  Turn us into real title contenders.  If we beat Manchester City there could be a great chance of winning the league.  This season Spurs looked so strong but it all felt so transient too; a team at their pinnacle, a good blend of experience and youth, a manager who might easily not be there next season if offered the England job, a sense of now or never about everything.

Bale galloped around the defender and whipped the ball across goal towards Jermain Defoe, who charged hungrily into the middle of the penalty area.

“FINISH!” you wailed at the television screen, sinking theatrically to your knees.  Defoe lunged towards the ball, only managing weak contact with the studs of his boot.  The ball drifted impotently wide of the goal.  Your hands covered your face.

In their next attack Manchester City won a penalty through a player who should have been sent from the pitch for kicking one of our men in the head, twice – for which he was retrospectively punished the following week.  He calmly slotted in the penalty kick.  Manchester City 3, Tottenham Hotspur 2.

Title aspirations all but over.

That afternoon in a crushed beery haze, you exchanged messages with her for the first time.  She looked stunning, well out of your league, as much of a fantasy as Tottenham winning the Premiership.  But the messages snowballed.

Over the course of the following week, correspondence turned to emails, a telephone call and text messages.  This was ridiculous.  She was exceptionally attractive, arrestingly smart, laugh-out-loud funny, beautifully written.  She ruled your thoughts.

She’d seen one image of your face but still continued chatting.  Why?  The attention on her words?  She MUST have had loads of better looking, more successful blokes vying for her attention.  Maybe there was a wealthy, unpleasant married businessman who gave her functional sex and nice shiny things and put her up in hotels but wasn’t all that interested in her.  Maybe she had loads of blokes she played off against each other.

Who knew?

- Stop thinking about her anyway.  Don’t do this again.  She’s just one female, remember.  Nothing to get all sappy over.. Just one female.

..who is, you know, actually a really fucking incredible female.

STOP IT, BRAIN!

[It always pales in hindsight, how besotted you become for a period: a few weeks, a few months.  You look back several months to a year or so down the line and ask: can I really have been that fussed? It feels sort of distant now, like I couldn’t have possibly been that headfucked.  Well know this, Future Self: said female properly dominated your brain for a good number of weeks.]

STOP THINKING ABOUT HER!  Think about football instead.

Yes.  Come on, don’t get ahead of yourself.  Rein it in.  Be cool and casual.  Even if you did meet she’d quickly notice that you’re ordinary looking, forgettable, that you have a gaping harrowing bald spot; you’d inevitably leak weird stuff about your perpetual lonerdom and dreary void of ambition; her interest would understandably dwindle.  Then you’d get all moody and depressive for allowing yourself to hope.  You know that’s what happens.  While there’s the mystique of not quite knowing, you’re little more than an idly amusing Tamagotchi.

Whatever you do, try not to hope and try not to care.  Caring is, like.. SO uncool dude.  Nowadays everyone is flippant and casual and frivolous and throws their hands in the air like they just don’t care.  Caring too quickly makes you look desperate and needy and like you’re not still the 26 or 27 year old you hope to appear and imagine you are in your head.  So no, you mustn’t care or be impatient or honest or want everything immediately.

You knew how this worked.  It had all happened before, sort of.  You were building yourself up to fall.  And yet still, STILL you audaciously dared to hope..   You gigantic anus.

Gareth Bale had galloped beyond the defender once more, his left foot primed to whip the ball across the penalty area, as tantalisingly close to exhilarating glory as to agonising defeat.  You were both on the edge of your armchair and Jermain Defoe, charging into the penalty area; about to lunge for the ball in a stadium full of fifty thousand people, ready to sink to your knees alone in your flat, dagger to the heart.

*

Empty glumness is hard to shake off when hope fades, despite self-talking-tos. You told yourself not to do this and you’ve no right to miss something you never had. This is precisely why investing hope is so dangerous, you mug.  It’s possible to grieve for hope, although it feels considerably less respectable, more lame, this undignified permanent sense of embattled disappointment you haul around with you.

It’s involuntary though, which almost makes it excusable. Consciously choosing to invest hope is impossible.  “Yes, I will choose to hope about this thing”.  No.  Hope is more subtle, gradually sliding into you before you find you’re freakishly possessed.

It was worse after meeting and seeing that holy fucking shit yes, she IS that attractive.  Extremely attractive.  GOD you wanted to sleep with her so badly.  So what if you thought with your dick a bit.  What man in that position wouldn’t?  Your admiration extended further than that.

Pangs of bitter regret recurred long after you realised there was nothing doing, her interest had died, the frequency of messages had dwindled, her replies grown shorter, questions apparently outlawed – inquisitive ‘did you’s clipped to rhetorical ‘hope you’s.  After pinning your colours to the mast, brave and unambiguous and punchdrunk, her gently subverted response of I’m Not Really Into You So Leave Me Alone Now appeared clear enough.  Perhaps there was different, newer attention.  Perhaps not.

What had previously been a busy junction of two-way traffic – meaty email marathons, semi-regular texts, quickfire instant message chats – was no longer.  It was a transient confection rapidly scaled down to a one-way street; little returning besides token tumbleweed acknowledgements. With it came a slow dawning realisation that now she sincerely gave not even the faintest of shits.

It was fine.  You got over it then lapsed into gloom, then got over it again and then lapsed again.

You angrily reprimanded yourself: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING OF ANYWAY!?  Someone like her: sure, some layer of pretence but still ostensibly an intimidating preening glamour-puss with expensive tastes and talent and drive. And you, who usually goes to work wearing slippers, doing something just about tolerable, albeit unchallenging and boring?  To entertain the notion of any kind of ‘match’ was tantamount to self-harm.  Although it demonstrated a level of perverse ambition too.

At least you could take comfort in its brevity, the small mercy that it wasn’t a protracted period.  Usually it’s only ever a short matter of time between discovering that Yes, oh no, oh shit, you suddenly hope – Bale galloping; and learning that you are of course once again doomed to fail – Defoe missing.  Hope then slips away once more, like a tidal swell dictated by a sadistic god.

Dissolving LTRs and knowing

Well jeez.. I thought, upon listening to my friend tell the latest sad tale in the pub.  I wonder if I’m more messed up from my general dearth of serious long term relationships, or if are they by having them and screwing them up so royally?  Realising this was a self-involved moment happening inside my head, I refocused on what he was saying.

It seems that there’s a time between the ages of, say, 25 and 35 when shit has to get real in long term relationships (LTRs).  Females invariably take the lead in wanting to reproduce and men get scared.  They either grasp the nettle and realise this woman probably / definitely is the one.  Or they don’t.  Confidence can falter at these crunch decision times; paralysing fear isn’t uncommon.  When one party doesn’t know or has cause to doubt, all the cards can come crashing down.

Over the past few months I’ve learned that two couples who I and most of the world considered to be solid couples of a good number of years, were actually no longer couples at all.  Yes they lived together, maybe even slept in the same bed from time to time and who knows what else, had been going out for around ten years previously; but in their heads at least, they were no longer a couple.

Case One is the captain sensible of our school friendship group, one of these guys who always seemed to glide pretty effortlessly through life, education, a career and love.  As far back as school he was pegged as the guy who could be depended on to get married and settle down first.  They got a mortgage together reasonably early, then nothing else happened.  She was awkward to be around.  Nice enough, but flighty and unpredictable.  “ISSUES” almost imperceptibly stamped above her sunken defensive eyes.  After a year or so living together under the pretence that all was rosy, they’re now fumbling off in separate directions.

Case Two was only revealed to me yesterday in the pub.  He is possibly the most hypersensitive and indecisive guy I know, whilst being handsome, clever, able and acidly funny – happy to dish out but rarely take.  They also got together young: he in his early 20s, her in her mid 20s.  With a couple of years on him, she seemed to care less for marriage but has been crying out for kids for some time.  He has been indecisive, nervous, scared.  In more ways than one it requires a set of balls he’s never demonstrated.  Her clock is now ticking with more urgency.  He has admitted to depression but is only just beginning to seek help.  Now it transpires that in their own heads they too haven’t been a proper couple for several months.  They are, my friend believes, on the cusp of probable separation with tangible consequences.

While the guy of the latter couple never won my sympathy and from my limited experience in recent years I’ve often considered him hugely selfish, these are all fundamentally decent people.  Of all parties, it’s him I fear for the most.  From a privileged background, he’s arguably always been used to a bubble of protection, mollycoddling, mothering and dependency.  Not having the courage of my convictions and giving up too easily is something I loathe myself for, but this guy makes me look like some kind of Richard Branson impresario.

It seems to me that rational, clear-cut decisions need to be taken in LTRs, however difficult they are to make – although I’m clearly no expert in such matters.  Otherwise the festering stench of malaise can become heartbreaking and send people mad.

“How do you ever know?” is a regular question, one memorably discussed with another friend (and represented somewhere in these pages) before he separated from his wife and emigrated to Australia with the female subject of an office affair.  He was more confident of knowing after being intoxicated by everything about a new colleague, than he was when he was obliged to marry his young wife.

*

We parted outside the pub in the early evening, my comparatively happy married friend and I.  His reasoning about knowing was typically pragmatic and well-reasoned:  I knew I never wanted to be apart from her for the rest of my life.  It sounded so simple.

He hadn’t been persuaded to buy a few more minutes by asking his wife to simply pick him up from the pub, steadfast about walking back across town to meet her at the multi-storey car park.  It reflected his easy-going nature and antipathy towards any kind of confrontation: something we’ve sporadically argued hard about over the years.  Maybe his way was best.

We mumbled halfheartedly about dinner sometime, took a brief manly clinch and pushed each other away before fuzzily pacing in opposite directions.

It was a sorry state, those disintegrating relationships, but probably not untypical of people our age.  As our friendship group begins to nibble into the 30s, I came back to my earlier question and wondered at our relative baggage.  Is it harder to be optimistic about domestic life after going through a traumatic failed LTR of nearly a decade, or harder having been alone for more or less that whole time?  Is less baggage more baggage, or is it less baggage?

I was drunk.

bringing healthy back

“Y know.  Got my health.”  People casually say this when the chips are down, acknowledging if not properly crediting the importance of health.  Only when health goes awry do we tend to fully appreciate it.

Although I feel my appreciation is generally above average.  I enjoy my health, fitness and mobility.  If I lost it I would rapidly grow less healthy, as much in the mind as in the body.  Enlivening chemical releases which come with physical exertion are difficult to replicate.

A couple of weeks ago, an innocuous crouching movement ten minutes into a freezing Tuesday night football training session led to me jarring my back.  It was painful enough to know instantly that the evening was over for me.  Away I awkwardly hobbled, hoping it would just take a few days to right itself.

We often seem trust our bodies to just do stuff and get on with it, in a way we trust little else.  Sorry I abused you with alcohol, body.  Just sort it out for me now please.

The next morning was acutely painful and distressing.  Pulling on socks was slow and embarrassingly undignified; my skeleton simply refused to move as usual.  Over the coming days I experienced several moments of what it must be like to be infirm and old.  I was irritated to be overtaken on the pavement by people I wouldn’t usually get overtaken by; I was embarrassed that standing up in public places was slow and looked ostentatious, as if I were proudly exhibiting the results of my injury; I hobbled awkwardly from any stationary position, taking a good minute to gather fluency in my walking gait; standing room-only tube carriages proved more of a challenge than usual but sitting down was rarely worth the pain of standing up.

Eighteen months ago, during my last episode of serious back pain, I visited a therapist local to my parents.  Encouraged by persisting symptoms and compounded by the contribution of a heavy cold which saw coughs and sneezes rifle pain through my creaking skeleton, I booked another.

The weekend with parents was reasonable.  My interest had been piqued in my Dad’s family history after rediscovering a couple of very old black and white photographs.  I daresay while I discussed this with Dad, Mum sat in her armchair affronted that her family history was for once out of the limelight.  But thanks to Google Streetview walks around the neighbourhoods of their respective youths, it led to Things To Talk About –often a struggle with parents.

There were even a couple of brief moments when I felt confident enough to chance speaking about myself to my parents.  In time-honoured tradition though, Mum nipped them in the bud, effortlessly deflecting attention back to herself.

*

On the morning of my appointment with the sports therapist my back was feeling a little better, as if the pain would desist entirely of its own accord given a couple more days.  I went for a long walk with the dog.  The forest’s late winter mulch glowed under a clear blue sky and brilliant sunshine; lungs were filled and photographs taken.  Fifteen minutes from home we encountered traffic on the pathway of a popular walking spot.  The dog rubbed noses with one other dog, walked on, did the same with another, walked on.  A man with a bad tempered dog on a lead had to be carefully steered around.

There are photographs of my mother, father, brother and myself being ‘looked after’ by dogs at very young ages.  We are dog lovers.  I want a dog of my own.  Yet there remains an awkward, discomforting grain of doubt about all of them, particularly upon seeing my two year-old niece closely petting and climbing over my parents’ hound.  That slender possibility that the dog could suddenly turn and snap and something horrific could happen to literally mark a young life forever, if not worse.  A prickling sensation of what if..?

Next along the popular path approached an elderly couple with a small black terrier.  Both dogs off their leads approached each other, dropped their sticks like soldiers downing weapons, sniffed noses and behinds.  Then my parents’ usually mild mannered Labrador turned.  They leapt up at one another, both growling and snarling, scuffling hard and firm.  Mine pushed the smaller terrier onto its back and went at it with its teeth, definitely not playing.  Compelled to act I leaned down to haul her off, pinned her to the ground, cuffed her across the nose and angrily yelled in my most masterly tone.  (It was still some distance off my Dad’s livid lunatic tone.  One which suggests he might be at risk of keeling over from stress).

Standing up almost straight, one hand still on the dog’s collar, apologising to the curiously unfussed elderly couple, I realised the damage I’d done to my back, the repairing which was now newly ruined.  Pain crackled up in waves from the base of my cemented spine.  My resentment of the fucking dog escalated in direct correlation and she remained on a lead in disgrace for the rest of the walk.

*

Paying a man to expertly knead the top of your buttocks isn’t something I do often, but have done once before.  As 18 months earlier, I lay on my front, looking out of the window at the pleasant rural panorama, allowing the bald, stocky man in a sporty polo neck to explore me with his hands.  Under his spell those oiled fingers danced along glutes and muscles.  He squeezed and kneaded spinal points which pranged, made me flinch and tighten, unlock and relax, explaining everything as he went.

Now approaching a stage it was before the ill-fated walk, I’m impatient to return to full fitness, to walk freely, to not fear standing up or dressing myself, to run and work and sweat and breathe heavily, to physically exert and to not feel pain.  It shouldn’t be rushed, I know.  But surely it can’t be long until I can casually utter those words again.

I want my healthy back.