Tag: What passes for normal

Back Again

Photo by Thiébaud Faix on Unsplash

My new office not yet being in service I am writing this with my laptop on my knee in the lounge as my wife watches ‘Call the Midwife’ on TV, but contrary to commonly held opinion my-self absorption does have some limits and so, prior to dropping this onto the blog and plunging back into the world of all about me I hope to catch up with everything you have been doing before this appears in all its (vain)glory.  You will, by now, know if I have managed to do it.

I will therefore begin this post by apologizing for my prolonged absence.  Told at 2pm on 11th December that the house move would definitely not happen until mid-January, we actually moved on Friday 13th December in the kind of rush normally associated with free fries at MacDonalds.  We spent the next couple of weeks falling apart and are only just beginning to pull ourselves together.  Hopefully, barring electrocution, drowning or insipient madness, I will return to whatever passes for normal around here very soon.

It’s not that I have stopped writing in the weeks since the move, I have actually written dozens of posts, all ready to go as soon as I was back online, but having read them through I found that they were all about exactly the same thing: the new house (problems therewith), so I’ve binned them all.  I want to start the New Year with at least some degree of optimism.

We are surrounded by boxes that we currently have no inclination to unpack.  My lovely new office is packed to the door with what is to be the content of the new attic which is itself currently inaccessible – hence the knee tapping.  I have spent two weeks attempting to find a way to persuade the might of Mr Branson’s empire to get me back online.  I have spent that time traipsing around the homes of everyone I know in a bid to hi-jack their internet.  I am sleep-deprived, anxious and (thanks to an unaccustomed acquaintance with various knives and other DIY accoutrements) my hands are home to more cuts than a Conservative Party Manifesto.

I have, God knows, a great many failings but I have always felt assured somehow that my head is, at least to a great extent, perpendicular: that is that my eyes run in the same general latitude as my shoulders.  I do not know what misfortune has befallen the previous DIY practitioner at this house but nothing is horizontal, everything is cock-eyed.  There is not a single electric socket that follows the grout line, there is not a single cupboard that does not lean at an angle similar to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s approach to pastoral care.  Whomever DIY’d before me clearly had more screwdrivers than spirit levels.

There are so many things in a house that you do not notice until after you have moved in: the electrics here are a Gordian knot of hope and betrayed expectation, the plumbing dispenses water with an abandon seldom witnessed since the Red Sea got it back together.  Even the bloody house number is falling off the wall.  I am uncertain exactly how many ‘snags’ can be contained within a single property, but I begin to realise that ‘snagging’ must be a very secure profession indeed.

My wife is much more efficient than me at unpacking: when things are in her way she simply moves them so that they are in my way instead.  Life is like a giant game of Ludo.  Everything is moving round and round.  Each box is opened, scrutinized and then moved elsewhere.  Mostly they are sent back to the Start, but eventually I hope that some of them will begin to make it Home.  I’ll let you know…

Business as (Almost) Usual

My brother died.

He was younger than me.  It was unexpected, it was sudden and it knocked me sideways, but fourteen days have now passed – it is, I know, no time at all – but I feel that it is none-the-less, the right time for me to start to settle back into what must pass for normal.

You see, my problem is that I see the absurd in everything and even the most painful of circumstances do not put a block on it.  Everybody else’s problem is the same one – me.  I have learned, of course, that just because I have seen it, I don’t necessarily have to say it, but I have also learned that popping the balloon is, occasionally, exactly the right thing to do.

I have been through these situations before – too many times (and I carry the knowledge that there will be many more to come) – and always, when despair is at its worst, we have laughed.  It must be part of the human condition.  It must be how we cope.  It is why The Wake can sometimes become such a riotous occasion.  When we are wretched, when we are sad – even more so when we are terrified – there is always the feeling that a giggle is not too far away.  Somehow, all extreme human emotions channel into the need to laugh.  We huddle together, we look on helplessly and hopelessly and we search for something to break the mood.  Nobody wants to turn tragedy into Music Hall, but everybody senses the point at which the deceased would have laughed too.

Laughter does not stand apart from grief.  It runs side by side.  It is an inalienable element of coping.  Joy and anguish are interwoven threads through which we look both forwards and backwards.

I cannot tell my mind how to think – we both know who is in charge there – but I do realise that I am not being disrespectful by looking at my own life in these circumstances.  Nobody expects me to stay sad forever, nobody wants me to be sombre.  In the darkness, I am most definitely not the light: I am the coffee table that skins somebody else’s shin.  I am never the way, but I am often the diversion.  I would love to cultivate gravitas, but I am stuck with child-like curiosity.  I will not make jokes about my brother or his life, but then I would never have done so anyway.  There are no circumstances under which I would seek to devalue the depth of pain being experienced by his wife and children, but I am equally certain that they understand that in discussing my own oft irrational responses – how I cope with this and all aspects of my life – in no way diminishes my appreciation of their loss.

I hope that from today, as far as this modest little smorgasbord is concerned, I can return to business as almost usual.  It will change nothing – that is not within my gift – but it will help my brain to re-establish some sense of equilibrium.  Life changes, but it goes on, and somehow I cannot stop myself from watching it…