Not just a face in the crowd.

People in cafes and bakeries are recognising me.  Today, I walked into my favourite of all the cafes in town, one that serves my favourite of all the coffees, and as I got to the counter I was greeted with, “Hi, flat white, is it?”  It was good, I think.  I’m fighting a battle, you see.  By becoming this I am becoming part of being here, if you see what I mean?  I feel oxymoronish.  It’s quite crippling.

Obviously, if since the end of December you have been repeatedly visiting an establishment, they are going to start recognising you and remembering what it is you like to order.  I appreciate that, but it is quite the odd sensation to go from ‘punter’ to ‘punter whose face we know and who we now speak with beyond cursory greeting and thanking’.  And I am completely torn between appreciating it and wanting it to not happen.

I can feel the street wearing beneath my feet.  The pattern I tread from flat to library to café to library to flat is becoming overly familiar.  Faces are now familiar and mine must be to some of them too.  I’m revelling in the anonymity, of being the man who speaks a few words here and there, and to whom they speak in return.  That’s enough.  I’m rubbish at small talk and don’t particularly want this to turn to conversation.

It’s scary.  I came back here not really wanting conversations with anyone other than the family I knew I was coming back for.  It is a peculiar mental position to find yourself in, one that is self-imposed and speaks about me and who I am.  Or, more accurately perhaps, it speaks to who I am at the moment, who I am now.  There is the want to speak with people but there is also the fear of speaking with people.  It’s not something I am comfortable with…and yet…and yet… all those smoke and mirrors, you see.  Perception is a curious thing.  There are many who would be amazed by the admission that now, when I get home and I close the door, and I am on my own, I can breathe.

I am comfortable on my own.  I meander through a world that is not real and enjoy sending out comments and interacting with people that only exist in zeroes and ones – a Jesus Jones reference for you there.  Even when being harangued and screamed at for owning an opinion that is different to some others, it is a situation much more preferable to being in the street and speaking with people.  There is an edit facility.  There is a chance to rehearse and delete and parse and then press send.  There is a familiarity with what you present, how you present and you know it is all a mask.  Just as are all the masks you wear in day-to-day life, but this is a concrete mask.  One that doesn’t have eyes to reveal or tells to suggest otherness.

The contradiction is, of course, that the person side of you likes the idea that people recognise you.  It’s a trope of moving into an area, isn’t it?  How long will it be before you’re one of the community, one of the locals?  It would be wrong to deny that there isn’t some sort of happiness from seeing the familiarity in the faces of the people of the town now.  It’s inbuilt to want to be a part of something, of a community or a group, I suppose.  As I say, the oxymoronish feeling of comfort of being on my own and the liking someone knowing my order.  It’s something of an affirmation of self – that or I am ubiquitous in their days now and they have no option but to remember the face of the man who walks in, greets, orders the same thing every day and then sits on his own and reads.  Who’s to say?

By the way – Black Book Café is pretty wonderful.  The coffee is terrific, the cake is gorgeous, and the atmosphere just simply suitable.  If ever you are in town, go there and drink coffee.  I’ll be the one sitting reading.

Smoke and mirrors

On Tuesday morning I spent some time making sure that I framed myself in a camera shot just so.  I was about to speak with a bunch of students via Skype and I wanted to convey the idea that they’d caught me as my natural self, totally unprepared and that, yes, I always sat this far from the camera, at this angle and yes, the quirky stuff in the background just happens to be there etc.

The Skype session went fine and the teachers emailed later on to say they were grateful for my time and sorry the students were shy of speaking with me, and that the session had been good.

Throughout the entire time I was on camera there was a voice and a belief inside my head that I was going to screw up.  That I was going to come across too confidently and arrogant, or that I would take myself down a verbal cul-de-sac that would wind up both incomprehensible to both them and me.  Essentially, in my mind throughout the time running up to the session and as the session went on was the consistent thought of fraud and failure.

*

On Wednesday morning I took thirty minutes to walk to a meeting.  I was going to teach a class and speak with other teachers.

I had dallied about getting ready through the morning.  In fact, the evening previously, I had considered the fact that I would wake up and decide not to go.  In the event, I readied myself and walked out of the front door.

Every person I walked past on my way to the meeting could see straight through me.  They could see me, and they could recognise a charlatan.  The pace I walked at slowed and slowed.  It slowed the point where I was going to be late.  There was no way I was going to be late.  To be late would be to actually announce I was a failure, a deceiver, out of my depth.  To them, all it would signal was I was shit at keeping time and, hence, not worthy of theirs…correct but not for the right reasons.

To have been late would have been a physical manifestation of my weakness.  It would have meant an explanation, leading to a bumbling, Hugh Grant-esque umming and aaring sentence or so mask.  The real reason being that all this is smoke and mirrors.  That I am stood in front of you, or on your screen through the wonder of Skype, and I seemingly know what I am doing and look in control and make you laugh and know the words, but it is all a sham.

If they knew that if they could slice me down the middle and open me in two then they would find an empty shell, the computer would be switched off and the invites rescinded.  Who wants to invite a vacuum into the space where they exist?  That’s how it feels.  Appearance and reality: looks fine, has an absence of self.  And a hatred of looking at yourself in this way, at this perception of you that you hold so fiercely in your hand, so tightly that the fight to prise it from your fingers is one you don’t know if you have in you.

*

This move back has been a journey to try and get a hand on the tiller.  To try and get the head up and look about and see a path, some sort of path to follow.  Truth be told, I know there are lights up ahead.  I can see lights, that’s for sure and they are beckoning and I’m following.  I can’t yet see how to get to them, nor whether that when I reach them it will just be something on fire.

That’s why it sucks that they messed about with the Marmite.  Things change, of course they do; but you look for reassurance sometimes and to have "reassurance" changed can have an unintended, unimagined affect beyond all measure.  Twitter, bless it, has told me that I can still buy the Marmite I know and love, so perhaps nothing has changed after all.  But we know it has.

What is that phrase you keep repeating, Dorothy?

It was reassuring to see the face of the Britain I remember so well, this week.

I had to fly to Germany.  I had to overnight at an airport hotel for an early morning flight, so, with all the on site hotels fully booked or charging an expensive price – the reason for which will become evident – I ended up a little way from the airport but that was fine; I knew the airport and knew that distance would not be an issue… waking up at stupid o’clock in the morning would be.

All good.  Train up, perfect.  Bus across, perfect.  Walk to the hotel, perfect.  First impressions – not so perfect.  The building is a post-war, concrete edifice – any takers for location yet? – I’m reckoning 1960s by design.  That’s fine and well.  The tower in Cwmbrân is a 1960’s design and it’s just dandy (excellent parking too – GLC).  In this instance, it is the superficialities of the building that are such a let down.

The majestic Cwmbrân Tower!

The property fence was knocked over and broken, unkempt.  The driveway pot-holed and uneven.  The plants that lined the entranceway lawn alternated with yellow hotel bins.  The unsurfaced car parking around the building held a tumbled-down wall, bricks scattered on the floor.  Welcome to the hotel.

The foyer is clean – it must be, there are hand sanitisers on the wall for your use…and on the wall of each of the landings – a curious and obviously welcoming feature.  The furniture in the lobby is worn, wearing in the cushions, threadbare.   It was warm, the heating worked.  I know that because the room I was in had the heating turned all the way to eleven.  Thankfully, I could adjust, although even with it turned down, I could feel my waters seeping through the pores of my skin and evaporating into the atmosphere.  That’s cruel, possibly unnecessarily so, but then so was the next trick the hotel played on me.

I tried to log on to the internet.  No service.  I went back down to the lobby, in the lifts that told me about fines for something or other rather than about services, and the internet worked.  Excellent.  Back up to the room.  No internet.  Back down to the lobby.  Internet.  Me to receptionist:

“Please can you help?  I can’t get internet connection in my room.”

“There’s no internet in the rooms, only in the public areas.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”  Obviously the first "really" was said with disbelief, and the second with incredulity.  In the lobby, I went online – sure enough, free Wifi in public areas.  Although, just free Wifi on another site.  Hey ho. So, I had paid the expense of the room to leave the room empty and come and work in the public areas of the hotel.  Not a problem, I thought, I’ll take my stuff down to the bar and work there.  I got my stuff and went down to the bar, literally separated from the lobby by an archway, and logged on to the internet.  Or tried to log on to the internet.  Back out into the lobby I went.

This was the Britain I remember from before I departed these shores.  A backward looking forward priced, can only order a three course meal in the restaurant but can eat from the bar menu if you prefer, splash-marked bathroom door with the plug on a chain not attached to the bath in the bathroom with an odd rusted porthole circle in the wall next to the sink, and a door that looked prised open at one time, unvalanced bed held up on bare two by four style pillars…but, but: the bat-phone link to the taxi company worked, and the taxi driver was at the hotel promptly and with humour – for stupid o’clock in the morning – and the transfer to the airport was sweet.  So, ultimately, this place - near the NEC where Crufts was taking place and every hotel and it’s dog was booked – fulfilled its brief.  What a metaphor.

The hotel shall remain anonymous momentarily, a conversation needs must happen before the big reveal.  By contrast, of course, The Golden Leaf Hotel in Frankfurt, a similar concrete edifice, was a delight.  Go figure.

The Golden Leaf Hotel and Residence - Frankfurt.

Peaks and Valleys

“In life, there’s always peaks and valleys” – so the song goes.  This week has been full of them.

The valleys?  Arguing – full on Monty Python, “I’d like to have an argument please” vitriol, gainsaying, condescension and “LA LA LA LA, I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”  I like to go on the internet to see how much it likes me…not this week.  This week I am the deluded, parrot of ill-informed opinion and I’m not from the right country to have an opinion anyway?  You guessed, I’m embroiled in the latest argument surrounding America’s obsession with and inability to deal with their problem with the latest Star Wars movie.  Ok, with guns.  It may as well have been about Star Wars, both topics bring out the irrational.  That was one valley.

Another has been lack of routine.  I’m angry at myself for becoming so het up around the need for routine but, hey ho, that’s how the inner working of Mr Brain has decided to go.  The arrival of sub-zero temperatures, snow and wind has hijacked my running schedule, destroyed my daily routine and I’m out of kilter.  It’s affecting my mood – to often bad enough as it is. Routine has been crucial in the readjustment to being back on these isles.  Not being able to run has had a greater impact than it should.  That has annoyed me.  Definitely another valley.

The deepest valley has then been trying to maintain some sort of order for the rest of the working day.  It has been a battle.  I find myself becoming flotsam on the sea of social media, losing time flicking through comment after comment, liking, commenting myself, sharing.  I’m at the beck and call of youtube clips, mindlessly searching through endless history documentaries and comedy snippets to find the hidden gems I just know are there!  It is procrastination of a type but it feels more than that…like a subconscious sabotaging of the day by my worse intentions.  I’m swaddling myself in the fluffy blanket the fluff on internet has to offer; it’s a chore to pry myself away.  The lowest valley floor indeed.

Peaks?

Two.

Writing.  One strong aspect of the routine I have built myself is sitting in the comfy chair at the library and editing my arse off.  It has paid dividends, this week.  The magnetic pull of the chair has cut through the malaise.  I have managed to complete the first version of one story; continue the writing of a second and create a presentation for a trip I’ve got coming up.  The burrow of the comfy chair at the library is a boon.  I can furrow myself away.  The high sides of the chair blinker me on the screen: it is a piece of furniture that focuses.  Sitting there allows me to finagle words from my head and put them onto a page.  That has been a peak.

Second?  Black Book Café, in Stroud.  I have brought with me from New Zealand a taste for a flat white. This café not only does a proper flat white, it also provides a place to sit, ruminate over the routine of the morning and prepare for the focus of the afternoon.  As the name suggests, the setting is one of books, I particularly enjoy the way the books, although the line the walls stage left and right are, actually, centre stage.  The hodgepodge tables and chairs give an impression of casual thrown-togetherness that may or may not have some truth behind it.  The use of books as a centrepiece for the café is theatrically managed.  Having ladders to be able to climb to the higher shelves to extract a text is an especially pleasing touch.  I have enjoyed nothing more, in this week of valleys, to be able to sit and read and enjoy a properly made, deliciously bitter, biting, creamy coffee.  Black Book Café is a highest peak.  This week it is a true escape from the mire inside the mind.

Days continue.  The schedule will fall back into place, no doubt.  Being back has not yet sorted itself out…the peaks and valleys will continue to occur.  What have been yours, this most trying of British weeks?