I continue my slow, sensual crip walk into eccentricity. I’m certainly going through a bit of a ‘phase’, but I’m not really sure how to define it. I’m just sort of… exploring things. Finding new pursuits.
My bedroom is the evidence of it: strewn with the detritus of a million hobbies. A book of French verbs! Bouldering shoes! Running shorts! Vape oil (admittedly more of a vice than a hobby)! Swimming trunks! Journal! Flyers from plays! Look at me go – look at me whiz along, collecting things. I am like a pigeon, picking up little twigs and building a wonky nest. I’m bedding down – here to stay, at least for a while.
I do keep toying with the idea of fucking off, obviously. It’s always there, that urge: to pack it all in, sell everything I own, save three or four t-shirts and some pants, get a job teaching in a school in Vietnam and vanish from the lives of my loved ones for another year. And I’m sure I’d enjoy it! It would be tremendous fun; I know it would. I’d like as not find a wonderful gang of miscreant vagabonds over there, spending my evenings in cool tiny-plastic-chair cafes chatting to oddballs, maybe even buying a cheap old motorcycle for trips to the beach. That would be good! But— what gives me pause is the question that arises more and more frequently as I get older: and then what?
I’ve never been scared of going away – of going anywhere, trying anything. It’s the coming back that concerns me. To start over; to build from scratch, again, what it has just taken me some 20 months to build from scratch: home job friends habits life. And then there’s my family. It makes me sad to think that another year (or more) might go by where I don’t see them. I love them so much that sometimes I just sit and think about them and miss them, even while I’m here in London, only a two-hour train ride away. I’m always scared of taking them for granted. Vanishing again – after ten years of vanishing – feels like playing my luck a bit faster, a bit looser than I can stomach at the moment.
I don’t know: perhaps my view will change. Perhaps my family would want me to continue gallivanting. I don’t know. I never know anything! GUH.
I watched Hamlet the other day, you know. It was the 1996 version, with Kenneth Branagh sporting a fantastic beard-and-moustache combo (along with a dashing hairdo that is making me seriously consider bleaching my own). I watched the whole massive brilliant four-hour film over two days, and the whole way through kept thinking ‘my word, this Hamlet fellow certainly is relatable!’ Then at the end I read a few essays on the play and found, with some surprise, the invariable conclusion: that Hamlet’s fatal character flaw is his indecision. The fact he never commits one way or another – spends all his time staring at skulls and pondering the world, his fate and the appropriate course of action to take – ultimately leads him to ruin (spoiler).
Drat.
~
See that squiggle above? The tiny caterpillar going about his morning business? I’ve decided to use it to space out different ideas when I write these diaries. I used to put five stars in a row, but they typically denote time passing, and no time has passed (or at least, not more than a couple of minutes while I stare out of the window at aeroplanes and sip coffee with a blank expression).
So! I went to a London salsa class a couple of weeks ago. I’ve not taken a salsa class since, ooo, I don’t know, maybe October last year? I was shitting myself to go to the London one (over at Elephant and Castle), because I was going alone – but that’s just what you’ve got to do sometimes if you want exciting new things to happen. I wrestled my fearful heart and won, and it paid off: the class took place in a beautiful, cavernous dance studio, all decorated with polished wood like a high school gymnastics hall except a lot less shit than that sounds. You do feel like a bit of a wally at first, during the warm up: there’s no introduction, no hand-shaking — they just say ‘right then!’ and everybody forms up into lazy vague ranks with a teacher at the head, and they blast music while the teacher begins shimmying and sashaying this way and that, and you copy as best you can.
It came back quick enough. In all my fear over going, I’d quite forgotten why I even wanted to do it. My brain – the reptile part of it, the bastard idiot chunk of it that tugs at me to be impulsive in bad ways – was hissing to me all the way there: go home you, you fool! You don’t even like salsa. You don’t dance. Who are you trying to deceive? Imagine what the rugby team in Wetherby would think if they knew you were attending a dance class! You softy; you oddball. And going alone? Who does that? You’re just desperate for human connection, aren’t you! Pathetic!
I ignored this voice all the way there, telling it to shut up, and thankfully, when I began the warm up and I felt the corners of my mouth lift helplessly into a smile, I remembered: oh yeah! This is why I wanted to come! It’s just fucking fun.
Everything went swimmingly except at one point I clapped an elderly lady in the boob while trying to spin her around. Whatever! We chuckled it off.
There’s a stark difference in anticipatory feeling, I’ve come to learn, between things that are good for me and things that are bad. The bad things – I want to do them, and they’re generally quite easy to do, but long term they are detrimental. The good things – they scare me, because they’re hard and they lie in unknown territory, but long term they boost me up. Like choosing between, I don’t know, a stalk of broccoli and a bag of Tangfastics. Long term rewards vs short term pleasure. I’ve been trying damn hard this year to make the mental switch – to permanently change my attitude to one that favours the long-game. I fail still quite a lot – sack off the gym and eat a vat of ice cream – but less and less as the months go by. And when I fuck up, I forgive myself: you’re doing well, I say. This is a setback, you numpty, but you’re still making progress.
Numpty, by the way, should be taught in therapy. I used to insult myself when I made mistakes: call myself a twat, a knobhead — all those sorts of things! But I don’t do that any more. Instead I berate myself only lightly, jovially and warmly, in the way I sometimes tease my students if they get something wrong: you silly sausage, you numpty, you divvy. I scold myself gently, like an old friend. And it really makes a lot of difference to how I feel about failure! Who knew.
Last night I attempted another new thing and failed. It was a running club: there’s one that meets on Wednesdays at Tooting Common to run 5K. Around a hundred people usually show up; I discovered the club while searching for new ways to expand my London friendship pool. I have friends in London, obviously, but most of them are friends I either live with or have known since high school. I want to prove to myself that I can make new connections, as well as relying on old ones.
Without giving the more insidious, Gollum-esque segment of my brain a chance to argue or talk me out of it, last Sunday I booked a space (for free!) at the Weds evening run, and the week passed in slow anticipation. On the day, however, several factors aligned to make me nervous:
- It was 30 degrees outside.
- I have been vaping too much and am worried my lungs will be shit now.
- I haven’t run a 5k in almost a year, and have no idea how I would fare.
- THIRTY FUCKING DEGREES? OUTSIDE?! ARE YOU HAVING A LAUGH.
Before heading out I went upstairs to talk to my flatmate. I said I was nervous.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked. “Worst case scenario, you—”
“Get heat stroke, shit myself from exertion, collapse in tears, and have to be stretchered off in front of fifty disgusted women,” I said.
“Okay, wow,” she said. “I was gonna say ‘worst case, you don’t talk to anyone and just get some exercise’. How does your brain work?”
“I know.”
The hour arrived. I planned my journey, put on the new running shorts I’d bought from Primark (six quid!), filled a bottle with water, got some loose change for the lockers, ate some porridge, and headed out. The sunlight felt disconcertingly strong on my forehead, but it was 6pm; I told myself that by the time the run started at 7, it would have cooled. I would be fine.*
*Cue traumatic flashbacks to heatstroke at Lake Bled and my nude, vomiting convulsions on the forest floor while a muscular and very confused Australian man poured water over my head. GAH!
Anyway, I got onto the train platform and found the train was late: not a huge issue, but it would make getting there on time a bit more of a strain than I’d have liked. I waited twenty minutes, then an extra five minutes because during this time the train got somehow more late, and then, when it arrived, the doors opened to reveal an impenetrable cluster of vacuum-packed arses.
I sighed. I’d forgotten about the rush hour commuters. A couple of people got off the train, and everyone on the platform got on. I stood there, in my never-worn running shorts, watching them elbow their way into the thick of the sweating, humid, mascara-dribbling, armpit-stankin’ corporate misery. Nope. Nope. This final obstacle – the only one I’d not anticipated – was enough for me to freeze once more in indecision.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
(Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2)
Tantalisingly, as though taunting me, the train doors remained open for a solid minute – and of course for this full minute, nobody crammed into the train had anything better to do than stare at the bewildered-looking boy standing on the train platform with darting eyes. By now I was firmly entrenched in the stagnancy borne from a working knowledge of Sod’s Law, however. That is: if I stayed put, the train would also continue to stay put, and everybody would continue staring at me and laughing at my cowardice. If I stood up, on the other hand, beneath the 100 miserable pairs of eyes crammed into the carriage, it fell to reason that the doors would begin to close that second. I would have to run, and the sliding iron jaws would clamp down on my head, or my backpack, or else pinch my arse-cheeks as I held gingerly onto the sole thin sliver of overhead yellow handle that was visible to me in the stink-nest of weary finance people. ‘Cor, look at that man!’ children in flat caps would say from the street, pointing upwards as the overground moved off, and my pertly squeezed bottom mooned the entirety of South London.
I did nothing, obviously. I just sat there, stewing and loathing the blend of qualities I both possess (thoughtfulness, imagination, caution) and lack (self-assuredness, competitiveness, not-giving-a-fuckness) that so often works to immobilise me entirely. The doors closed, the resigned, sweating faces drifted away down the track, and I was left standing in the wind like the protagonist of a French film-noir, except in Primark shorts and a grey t-shirt and with floppy yellow hair.
You numpty, I told myself, as I went back down the stairs to the street and headed over the road for a session in the gym instead. Ah well. Next week I’ll try again.