The attic – Getting On

I write almost every day, even if what I produce cannot be described as being of merchantable quality, I still go through the motions. Not, of course, that I would suggest for one minute that my motions are, in any way, something that you might wish to go through. But I do. Or did. For the last few weeks I have not. I have started one or two pieces, but I have finished none. It has been a period devoid of application and inclination: a lethargy that has actually seeped into my soul and found it to be disturbingly empty.

I have searched for an excuse: I have been busy and preoccupied with housemoving matters, but I’ve been busy before and it has never stopped me writing. I have delved into my memory – have I had a period like this before? – but my memory is not what it was (or, to the best of my recollection, ever has been) and it is currently highly-coloured by a lifetime of photographs needing to be sorted and, in large part, binned. The attic was full of them: boxes of 6×4 inch (or 7×5 during more affluent periods) snapshots of a million yesterdays, some of them featuring people that neither of us can remember, most of them including faces (largely blurry) of parents, children and yesteryear selves. So many, in fact, that I think the surveyor thought that we might have been using them to insulate the loft. The temperature in the house – as well as the spirits of those within it – plunged with each discarded binbag.

My memory consists of flashcard incidents, like the thirty second trailer for a thirty part series on TV, there is generally no context or chronology to them. I remember anything notable, but with no reference to time or place. I remember holidays I have loved, but I cannot ‘picture’ them. Photographs are the key: it’s all in there somewhere, the frozen image just unlocks the door. It’s amazing just how much ‘forgotten stuff’ is stored within the brain. Like the attic, it needs unpacking and sorting before I can decide what to keep and what to take to the dump; what needs retaining and what needs tearing in two before burning.

It’s an odd sensation, being an outsider peeking in on your own life, still unable to follow the plot. It’s like watching an old film and realising that whilst you have retained the general gist, all the detail has passed you by. You realise that there are many things you have completely mis-remembered, like you would never wear that shirt… would you? We are all shaped, to a greater or lesser extent, by every single encounter in our lives: some round off edges, some leave fractures that it takes an age to smooth over, some break us in two. We are all pebbles on the beach being ground down into sand – and we all know how bloody annoying that can be in the underwear. It is impossible to wash away; it irritates and chafes until one day it is no longer there, just a faint rash to leave you wandering where it has gone…

…Well, I can tell you. Most of it has gone back into the boxes it came out of and back into the attic. We will sort through it before we move – obviously – although the new house does have an attic and, at the moment, there is absolutely nothing in it…

I’ve got that photograph of you
It’s in my head
And it won’t ever fade away.
My eyes they took a snap of you
And my heart said
Photograph, please don’t laugh, I love you… I’ve Got That Photograph of You – Spike Milligan

I know that this song does not really fit in with the general remit, but I recall seeing Milligan sing this many, many years ago in an episode of (I’m guessing) ‘There’s A Lot of it About’ and the obvious joy he took in doing so. As soon as the theme of this post began to resolve in my head, it was joined to this song and so it will stay…

Sometimes I begin this thrice weekly little tarradiddle with a title, sometimes with a subject and sometimes with nothing at all. Sometimes I stride with purpose and sometimes I wander with nothing but peanut butter between the ears. Mostly I wander. As I get older it becomes increasingly obvious that there are very few new places to go, all that I seem to be able to do is alter is the route that I take to get there. My mind has become a SatNav which has, in addition to Fastest (slowest), Shortest (any route that passes via a sink estate in which mine is the only car that is not on fire, along an overgrown bridle way and across a twelve foot deep ford) and Eco (via Penzance) has Meander, which takes me from A to B via something that was inadvertently chipped off the Rosetta Stone, for the three miles per journey in which it has a signal. When you realise that there is little left to do that you have not done before, you start to search for new ways to do it. In every nano-second of life, there is an echo of another. There is comfort to be found in the familiar, but too much comfort – like malt whisky and the moral highground – can become disorientating. When destination becomes secondary to journey, it is time to take the bus.

At the time of writing, the post-Christmas/New Year tidy-up is in progress and I am forced to make a number of disconcerting trips up into the attic. Attics, like belfries, are uncomfortable places full of fractured memories and bats: filled with webs, but devoid of spiders. Mine also houses the ancient Christmas tree, a lifetime of baubles, the emergency chairs and a howling gale on the stillest of days. The attic is where the house goes to die, and it is where Christmas spends eleven months of the year.

Most people are pleased to see the back of Christmas by the time it is all packed away, but I find it unbearably sad: Goodwill to all men stashed in an old cardboard box and stacked underneath a moulding set of curtains you never quite got round to hanging three houses ago. There is something very forlorn about the rows of threadbare trees awaiting pre-mulching collection. There is a horrible finality to the departure of the holly and the ivy: peace on earth in a bin bag…

But Spring is just around the corner: a world full of new shoots, new colours, new lives… already the lawn looks like it could do with a mow. The WD40 sits with a rising sense of expectation. It is impossible not to be changed by Spring: the first frost-glistened appearance of snowdrops, the colour-splash of crocus and aconite, the full-on joy of daffodil and tulip, the sudden greening of a beige hemisphere. Hope* in every tree. What’s not to love about a season that heralds falling energy bills, thinner coats and longer days? Perhaps hormones might start to stir – not always a good thing for fifty percent of the species – and loins begin to gird. As one gets older, it becomes frighteningly easy to anticipate bad outcomes and almost impossible to perceive good, but the echoes are always there, you just have to choose to see them…

…oh, and put the postcode in the SatNav very carefully…

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can… Echoes – Pink Floyd

*Hope is the thing with feathers… Emily Dickinson