I do not remember the last thing I wrote about on here. And I will not check! There doesn’t have to be any narrative consistency to these dairies. That’s not life! This is life! This! LOOK AT IT.

Alright I regret starting this article that way but I’m not going to delete it because that would mean I have to think of another intro and I just… don’t want to do that right now.

So: I’m employed!

I decided to start looking for in-house roles around six weeks ago. Basically, although I love teaching, forces beyond my control have made it nearly impossible to continue earning a full-time income through teaching alone. I get paid in dollars, and the dollar has dropped massively against the pound over the last six months. There are wars everywhere. There is yet another worldwide economic recession. There’s a housing crisis in the UK and rents are triple what they used to be, like, ten years ago. And as always, my students come and go with the seasons.

I just couldn’t hack it, man. I gave it two years of my life. I worked insanely hard. I’m really proud of what I built – the community of it, the good it did, the wholesomeness, the breakthroughs, the friendships, and the enormous amount of guffawing and smiling. All of these things are forever in my heart, and I have many new friends across the world because of it. But it’s time to put myself first, and that means moving teaching into ‘side hustle’ territory (I won’t ever quit completely – I love it too much), and re-entering the workforce.

I was conflicted about the decision to job-search for some time, because part of me wasn’t sure whether I’d be better off living somewhere that isn’t London. But I thought about it long and hard (for months, in fact), and I decided that here is as good as anywhere. London is very much what you make of it, and the only reason I wasn’t ‘making’ much of it was because I was perpetually stressed with trying to run a very small business, without guidance, as compassionately and competently as possible, in a market that is very fickle, during a global financial crisis.

I didn’t realise how stressed I’d been, in fact, until I got the news that I’d been given the job. I was in Leeds last week when I got the call – went up for a week to visit family. And when the phone rang and I received the good news, I got off the phone after thanking the recruitment company and simply sat on my bed, quietly. After a minute or two I stood up and went to brush my teeth, passing my brother on the landing, then went downstairs and quietly told my mum I’d got it. She burst into a big tearful smile and hugged me, as did my stepdad, but it wasn’t euphoria as much as a feeling of sudden release. It felt as though I’d suddenly taken off a very heavy backpack I hadn’t known I’d been wearing for the last two years. Stability – security – safety. A viable future.

Buzzin.

My mind has been pretty quiet since I got the news. I’m enjoying the peace. It’s Sunday today and I went bouldering in the gym this morning. I’m getting better – hands are much stronger after three months – but I fall off a lot and bounce with a hoarse ‘GUH’ on the big soft crash mats. Some of these seasoned climbers are nuts. They defy physics. You should see some of the moves they pull – calloused frog fingers splayed across a chalky handhold the size and texture of a glossy beach pebble, their entire body weight balanced on a nubbin of plastic one-inch across sticking out one centimetre from the wall*.

*Yes I do use metric and imperial together. Metric is good for when you go jogging or hiking. Makes you feel like you’re making more progress. Imperial is good for exaggerating and for giving quick approximate visualisations of height. 187cm = meaningless. 6 foot 2 = Got it.

Climbing people are the sort of people I want to get in with – and eventually morph into through osmosis. Pub people are fun and good for chats but they don’t do anything. Rave people are nice but I find raves impersonal and dull. Runners are a bit too clean for me, writers are too navel-gazey (yes yes I’m aware), hikers are nice but a smidge too twee, starry-eyed backpackers get on my wick (not going to unpack that thought too much for fear of what I would find), and spiritual people – well, despite all my attempts at reinventing myself and expanding my mind over the last decade, I still retain a substantial enough amount of call-a-spade-a-spade Yorkshireness to blow mental raspberries whenever anybody starts talking about star signs.

But climbers – they’re right on the money. They have muscular shoulders and grubby hands and they are strong and wiry and tough – and this goes for the girls every bit as much as the guys. They like a drink, they like to play, but it’s not the be-all end-all. They wear baggy old clothes like skaters and they drink coffee and they talk about interesting things while they sit and assess routes. Routes? I still don’t have the lingo down. That’s yet to be osmosed. I asked a guy what a climbing route was called one day and he didn’t know what I meant.

“What?”

“Like, the way up. A specific climb. What do you call that?”

“What do you call a climb?”

“Yeah like you know, when you follow a certain colour to the top of the wall. Is it like, a set, or a route, or a pitch, or a run, or whatever.”

“Oh. I think it’s just called a climb.”

“A climb? Like, I just climbed a climb?”

“Yeah. I think.”

On reflection he may not have known the lingo either. If you’re reading this and you know what the hell the thing I’m talking about is called, email me!

I like the slang though. I’ve picked up a few little bits so far. There’s a ‘jug’ which is a big, comfy handhold that you can get all your fingers in – the easiest holds, which everyone starts out using (and I am still mostly using). Then there’s ‘crimps’ which are smaller holds where you’ve got to cling on more with the ends of your fingers. A ‘pinch’ is a hold that you’ve got to pinch (which feels like the same thing as a crimp, if you ask me (which nobody has yet)). A ‘sloper’ is a curved, bosom-like hold with no purchase whatsoever. I learned ‘sloper’ from an older guy at the gym, because I kept trying to hang from them and sliding immediately off. I asked him for advice; he was topless at the time and went to demonstrate for me across a few different routes, and I spent the next 20 minutes watching the muscles in his back and shoulders coil around one another like snakes under a tarp.

“So there you go,” he said, hopping down from the last run (set?). “Just keep practising like that.”

I thanked him and walked away to the other side of the gym, because I was embarrassed for him to see me get back on the wall and immediately get into the exact wrong positioning he’d just spent 20 minutes telling me not to do because I’d been too occupied with wondering what his diet was like and how I could get my shoulders to look like that.

Much like marijuana is supposedly a gateway drug, climbing, I think and hope, is a gateway activity that leads to other, wilder activities. You hear it in the changing rooms:

“I finished working on the bed for the van this weekend. Just need to install the sink and we’re all set for the Europe trip.”

“My brother’s invited me out to the coast to go kitesurfing this weekend. We’re gonna set up a yurt on the beach.”

“My capoeira sensei said I’m almost ready to move up a level, but first I have to demonstrate a flawless spinning crane toss.”

“Forest surfing is cool, but I’m more of an urban tunnelling kind of guy.”

There’s a certain genre of human out there who quite enjoys getting breathless and ragged about and mangled (skaters sit proudly athrone at the top of this pyramid), and climbers are among them. It may seem odd that I’m determined to worm my way into this niche, given that I’ve always been really scared of getting mangled, but I think it’s just the outdoorsiness that I find alluring. I’ve never really belonged to any clique, though lord knows I’ve tried. The nearest I ever got to consistent membership of any clique was ‘borderline alcoholics’ during my year in Australia and ‘disenfranchised self-loathing hipsters’ in Berlin – so it makes sense that I should be drawn to one that’s a healthier form of a similar vein of madness. My hope is that one day soon I’ll make a friend with a van, and they’ll invite me out for weekend escapades – fishing trips, woodland trails, that sort of thing.

I think there’s a certain sense of something-to-prove in all this, too. That most likely stems from the northernness again: the ingrained-from-birth sentiment that a man ought to be manly. I don’t apply this to others, of course – I couldn’t care a fig what my friends are into, or how they present themselves – but for some reason I’ve always had this weird inner need to prove that I’m tough. Or – if not tough (because let’s be real here, in a hunter-gatherer society I would not have been slaying elephants; I’d have been the one in the caves drawing pictures of other people slaying the elephants, which is EQUALLY VALID AND IMPORTANT THANK YOU), then at least capable. Competent. Solid – a reliable, non-flimsy dude who you can put your faith in if it all goes tits-to-the-wind.

I tried football as a kid. I found it tedious because the other kids took it so seriously. Rugby too. Why was everyone so angry? Who gave a shit which no-name team won at 8am on a wintry Sunday morning? Why did it matter how many times the ball went into whichever net? Could we not thrive better as one familial human unit? Hast not thou heard of poetry, my lads?!  This hyper-non-competitive attitude always caused my dad to exhale slowly through his nose and my teammates to fling curses in my general direction, and I suppose it affected me somewhat: since then I’ve always thrown myself – or at least, gingerly lowered myself – into any situation which I believe might make me a tad more manly in the long run. Since I started climbing I keep looking at my hands: they’re starting to look like man hands. They’ve got big veins and thick skin over the joints. I feel good about it. I think many office-based people – keyboarders – feel that on some level: the slight embarrassment, when shaking with a meaty-handed stranger, that they will notice the softness of your palms. It’s no bad thing to get roughed up a little every now and then.

Enough about my hands!

I’m going to France on Friday. I’m flying into Carcassonne because it was too expensive to fly to Toulouse, and from there I will use my spectacular French language skills to purchase a train ticket for Albi, there to seek out my friend Seth. I will meet his baby daughter for the first time, which I think will be lovely and also very surreal, and then Seth and I will head out on a two-day, one-night hike, camping. Last time we did that we found a dog skeleton and Seth almost burned the whole forest down: this time will be milder. I’m excited for it; my New Year’s resolution this year was ‘Spend more time outside’, and I’m hoping that, now I don’t have to fret about the unpredictable rise and fall of my business endeavours anymore, I can get out there and get some really good adventures in.