Handwriting – Getting On

I have days when all I want to do is write funny. Occasionally I have days when I can actually do it, and even more occasionally the two days coincide. On those days, in addition to writing, I almost inevitably find myself re-writing: my stock of yet to be published is given a jolly good full-body massage and slapped into some kind of life. I don’t know why I’m not like it all of the time, but somehow I fear that if I was, someone would have killed me long ago. These are the days when my life is like a tub of Alka-Seltzer into which someone has dropped a spoonful of water. On these red-pen days I even tire myself out.

I have learned to rein it in a bit: in the past it all bubbled out of my mouth, but these days it ends up scattered across a number of various computer chips, although it still leaves me feeling like I have binged on Love Hearts and Irn Bru: a long, dark night of the soul, just camomile tea and me, a pen, some paper and the kind of ever-evolving, meandering plot that would make James Joyce blench (and let’s face it, he deserves it) lies ahead. Alcohol is never the answer – unless the question is ‘what is ethanol?’ Time making sense is usually wasted: never explain a joke.

My handwriting is dragged along by mood in a way that I do not fully understand; from backwards sloping, to forward sloping; from large and loose to tight and tiny; from neat and tidy to totally deranged; it’s all the same me in different hats. I have tried so hard to analyze the nature of the scrawl, but I can make neither head nor tail of it – as long as that is not what you do when sexing hamsters – the writing/mood/joke conundrum is not one that can be solved by the likes of me, even if chocolate is involved (and it usually is).

Actually, it has just occurred to me that hamsters don’t have tails and that I have no idea how you would ‘sex’ one anyway, although I presume that there are people who actually do need to know a hamster’s gender. I thought about looking it up, but I didn’t want GCHQ to have that Google Search to hold over me. They have quite enough. I may be paranoid (or possibly neurotic, I’m never sure) but someone is listening to everything I say. I only have to utter the words ‘hamster sexing’ for my phone and laptop to be full of it within minutes. Try a web search for ‘How do I grow carrots?’ subsequently and I will get the answer, ‘Do you mean “How do I sex a hamster?”’ I would be a hair’s breadth away from having a device full of scantily-clad Cricetinae and the police knocking on my door with a telegraph pole.

It is just one small entry in the list of stuff that keeps me awake at night, like global warming, world war three and what is the right size of cup for a Cup-a-Soup? At what stage do you graduate from a Cup-a-Sludge to a Cup-a-Coloured-Water-with-Soggy-Croutons? I know that there must be a ‘sweet spot’, but I have never found it. How easy life would be if it had more perfect Cup-a-Soup days. Most of the time it just makes up funny…

It’s not that funny, is it?
But you can’t get enough of it
It’s not that funny, is it?
Not that funny
Not funny
You can’t get enough of it… Not that Funny – Fleetwood Mac (Buckingham)

I try to maintain a rhythm in my life and whilst others either sunbathe and read, or play Biff-Bat in the warm Andaman Sea, I lay and write. Two weeks on holiday requires six posts. They will not be published until after my return, but that’s how I work anyway. These holiday posts are always fragmentary – a couple of hundred words here, a dip in the sea, a leisurely lunch, a couple of hundred words there, a nap, a conclusion of sorts, all to be cobbled together on my return home – but today more so, because today we pack our bags for the journey home, but we don’t head home, we head instead for an airport hotel to ease our way into an early morning departure.

My handwriting, always less than calligraphically perfect, is a mish-mash of varying styles and legibility depending on writing stance and sobriety. I write additions to the lined text across every margin. I have more corrections than a minor public boy’s school. Should future scholars find this tatty little Exercise Book they will believe that, like the Rosetta Stone, each leaf contains a number of different languages forged by different hands. They will have a tough job of making sense of it: I write it and half the time I am unable to make head nor tail of it. At least, for you, it means that holiday posts tend to be a little shorter than normal – although not necessarily any more concise. Word Count appears to offer no limiting boundary to aimless wittering. The same prattle, fewer words.

I have just checked into my last fifteen minutes of gazing-out-to-sea time. A fevered period of attempting to stuff worn clothing into suitcases ill-equipped to deal with the volume will follow then a brief period of limbo before a ninety minute taxi ride to our overnight accommodation, around which my wife hopes to find shops and I hope to find a bar. (We found neither. The hotel was as clean and well-equipped as you would expect but placed in the middle of an industrial estate that was also home to a number of backpacker hostels. We found a 7/11, from which we bought snacks, and a bar with a barbecue that nobody considered safe to use. I have no idea who was responsible, but it was almost certainly me.)

I never feel ready for home at the end of a holiday. Home may be where the heart is, but it is also where the bills are, where the pipes have leaked or the tiles have blown off the roof. Home is where reality is: it is where you find out that whatever has occurred during your absence, you are not insured for it.

Don’t get me wrong here, I do realise that a holiday is not a holiday if it is permanent – my own body is crying out for some form of exercise that doesn’t end in beer – if a holiday becomes routine then, sooner or later, you will need a break from it. For most of us ‘holiday’ is such a small portion of our lives that we always find ourselves wishing that it could be a larger part. Going home is a vital part of any holiday. Returning to work and reality will put an end to all of that ‘r…e…l…a…x…’ nonsense. By the time you have driven from the airport you are as wired as a telephone exchange and not even the threat of unpacking can dent the expectation of freshly laundered clothes going back into the cases sometime soon.

My next holiday will be post-retirement, so I have no idea how I will feel about the whole business then. To holiday more is the retirement I planned for, but will holidays be the same when there is no work to escape from? Time will tell. Perhaps time on the beach will tell me even more…

Oh shit, there goes the charabanc!
Looks like I’m gonna be stuck here the whole summer
Well, what a bummer
I can think of a lot worse places to be
Like down in the streets or down in the sewer
Or even on the end of a skewer… Peaches – The Stranglers (Greenfield/Burnel/Duffy/Cornwell)

Tag: Handwriting

Not That Funny

Peaches