This morning I took a rare, indulgent browse of this blog and scanned some posts from around a year ago.
All had a dour, fairly miserable, nervous tone about Christmas. The walking into a lamppost thing was unfortunate and painful but I wouldn’t disagree now with anything written then.
Comparing year ago me with today me reveals marked changes. Most significant is the fact that I am no longer as lonely and frustrated about humans in the most general sense. There is now a special person who I am extremely fond of. Oh go on then, who I love. And, to paraphrase a romantic musical, that does quite considerably change stuff.
This year Christmas won’t be the same as last, because I’ll be with somebody. Hopefully I shan’t be out drinking alone watching dour bottom of the table Premiership clashes or walking into lampposts. Not that I can totally rule out those possibilities.
Indeed, the spirit of the loner remains and I doubt will ever leave. I still regularly take solo trips to the cinema and walk alone with a camera for some distance. I still hanker for a dog. I still have many of the same professional frustrations, perhaps even more than a year ago. I’m certainly in an even more uncertain professional place now, in that precarious blurry limbo between self-employment and unemployment, with little idea what the coming few months will hold. I doubt I’m alone here.
But I’m also relaxed about everything; sporadically scared and fearful of the future, but a little more fatalistic. Having a person who believes in you can help with that.
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We took a cross-country roadtrip to visit her distant aunties this past weekend. They are particularly close to her after she lost her mother several years ago, and her father a couple of years later. The three sisters were very close.
It was a whirlwind weekend of different experiences, environments and people. Much discussion, mostly about family and relationships. A considerable amount about spirituality – it seems to me the need for such belief grows stronger with age. Perhaps it gets harder with old age to admit that it might just be this life and no more. I listened and smiled and learned the names of lots of dead people and disagreed with things in my head (anti-euthanasia, spirituality and reincarnation, three and a half thousand pounds on an operation for a dachshund). I voiced nothing, remained polite, kept smiling.
After two days staying with one auntie we packed up. Heading back west, we stopped to visit an old family friend at a chaotic but cosy house with large dogs and a deviant lingering cigarette scent throughout. A 70 year old party girl had her 30ish year old affable goddaughter visiting, and our coincidental quartet worked agreeably well. Two hours of weak champagne, bruschetta, tea, dogs and bawdy laughs, then we headed off again.
The final scene was a pretentious, dimly-lit ‘exclusive’ hotel where frantic James Bond scenes may have been filmed in the corridors. There we met her mole-ish Scotland-based half-brother for discussions about their father’s estate.
It felt in turns like a film as we bickered loudly over SatNav directions and mock-fought at service stations, the glowing winter sun casting long shadows across car parks and motorways. It struck me at one point like a specific film, 2009’s charming and funny Away We Go, where a young couple go on a north American road-trip looking for a place to live.
Though her employment seems more secure, my girlfriend is not particularly fixed to our current region; she’s open to the idea of exploring or moving away, however far. Travel is particularly appealing at the moment but only a pipe dream. I have little motivation to ‘work’ in the conventional sense of finding a regular office job – although that is exactly what I’m seeking out of pure obligation.
Finding each other in 2012 was enough. Hopefully there will be more discoveries in 2013 and hopefully they will be equally pleasurable and not lampposts to the forehead. Not knowing is kind of ok for now.
Boshsuckled 