Tag: The Rosetta Stone

Peaches

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  They will not be published until after my return, but that’s how I work anyway.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)

What I Do (Mostly When I Don’t)

My life is full of moments when I ‘do’ and moments when I ‘do not’.  When I ‘do’, whatever I do, I do it as well as I can (mostly not very) and give it all the concentration I can muster.  It doesn’t come easy to me, concentration: it’s an elusive beast and it slips through my, oh, what do you call them?  Fingers, of course, and I… now, where was I? 

When I ‘don’t’, whatever it is that I don’t, I write.  It is what I do when my mind is otherwise unoccupied.  It is what I do whenever I am not doing something else.

Life is cram-packed with ‘something elses’, they should outweigh writing many, many times over, but they don’t.  Writing is, for me, an every day (everyday?) pastime.  Other things eg buying new shoes, getting my hair cut, making perfect sense, squelching bare-foot through mud, do not happen anything like so regularly.  (Although having written it down, I will definitely attempt to make the latter a more regular feature of my life.)  Writing time is when my mind is at its most lively, but it is also its own ‘down time’ and even I am at a loss to explain it.

Back in the day, when it all seemed to matter a lot more, I would approach an evening at the typewriter with a sense of foreboding.  I had to get something down on paper, but I had no idea what (nor indeed, who, why or when).  I would sit and I would fret (on occasions I would fret and sit, just for a change) and I would write a first line over and over and over until, eventually, my mind began to lose both patience and interest and, quite suddenly, I would find myself with more lines in my head than I could fit on a page and my main issue was editing all of the ‘rabbit’ down to a reasonable length, ensuring that, hopefully, the punchline arrived before untimely death.  Everything hit the page in such a hurry that deciphering a first draft often required the services of either a Rosetta Stone scholar or a precocious three year old. 

When I wrote with my dear chum, the inestimable Mr Underfelt, we would get together just one night each week and spend the entire evening yelling ever more ludicrous jokes and situations at one another before retreating to our separate abodes where we each attempted to make some sense of it.  We each did, but it was seldom the same sense.  Next-week read-throughs – no internet back then – were an hilarious joy.  It is much more fun to laugh other people’s jokes – especially when they are funnier than your own.  (Fortunately I had the neatest handwriting, so I got to slip some of mine in when no-one was looking.)  This was when I learned that it is only possible to write well when you write lots.

Now, of course, I seldom worry over what I am going to write about because, as I am sure you are aware, most of the time I write about precisely nothing.  I sit at the laptop every evening with an empty mind when the day’s doings are over and I write about whatever is enjoying the space up there.  It’s when I do what I do, and I do it whenever the doing is done.

It’s what I do.