Recently, I discovered yet another gap in my social abilities. It’s not as if I didn’t feel I had enough issues with dealing with the normal social interactions, but this one is perhaps a little more specialized; a little more writing-specific.

As part of my desire to improve my writing skills, I often attend an informal meeting of writers who live in our small and significantly creative community. At such meetings, we share examples of our work, and offer constructive feedback to one another. A wide variety of material is brought forward, and it’s very interesting to experience such different perspectives, subjects of study and styles of writing. Having once worked as an adult educator, I have a strong drive to offer feedback in a constructive way, although most of the time it is flavoured with a strong sense of “I’m not sure I have the right to be saying this...”.

At our most recent meeting, fellow writers were rehearsing pieces of work which they intend to read out at a forthcoming writing festival event. A ten minute time limit is strictly enforced for this event, and so everyone had exactly that time to present their piece in rehearsal. As usual, several people stepped up and read out some powerful passages. Some were funny, one or two were very funny and one or two were the kind of pieces which make the listener sit quietly for a little while after they have finished, absorbing the import of what they have just heard.

One of the people present was a stranger to me. He immediately struck me as someone who considered himself to be the comic wit in the room, interjecting at multiple points to share his idea of humour with us. After the third such intervention, it became irritating. By intervention number twelve, I was in danger of crushing the spectacles I’d been fiddling with.

Relief of a sort came when it transpired that he was here to read out his own piece of work. As he stepped up to the lecturn, I braced myself for an avalanche of hysterical ‘humour’. What followed was prefaced by a preamble which rambled from conspiracy theory about 9/11 to an indecipherable explanation of the background to the passage he was reading. A feeling of dread came over me as the phrase “…what really happened in the days before nine-eleven.” reached my brain. Oh God. The reading then proceeded; what it contained doesn’t really matter here, but trust me, it was not good. I’m being too gentle here: it was bloody awful.

At the conclusion, a smattering of applause politely filled the silence. I confess to being more on the side of smattering than applauding. Every part of me wanted to offer constructive feedback to the man who had tried to make ‘jokes’ about everyone else’s offering, but I found myself withdrawing from doing so. I’d been enthusiastic in my praise for other pieces and had offered what I considered to be gentle, positive feedback about the presentation of the work, but here I found myself unable to offer anything of value. I stared at the floor.

Part of my difficulty was that over the years I’ve developed the habit of giving developmental feedback in the form of what we called a ‘shit sandwich.’ That is: positive things either side of the developmental feedback (the proverbial ‘shit’) in order to protect those with delicate self-esteem, and to ensure that development is free to happen. In this case, I felt that I had before me not a shit sandwich, but a tower of excrement with no bread-based product below or above it.

Faced with nought but a runaway list of things he could have done more effectively, I decided that my best strategy was to keep my mouth closed in case I put my foot into it. What made it worse somehow was the discovery that he obviously didn’t understand the feedback he was receiving from others. My feedback gland went into spasm, which was a good thing as it induced a fit of coughing and prevented me from contributing in any way to the critique of his work (which, he was at pains to point out, was a five hundred page novel and in the film version, was to be translated into twelve languages). The word ‘fuckwit’ began to loom large in my thinking, a sure sign that silence was best advised.

It’s a new thing, this critique-ing of creative work from other people. Usually, I’m inclined to be impressed, which is something that’s easy to share, but when the work is so bad it’s painful to listen to, I find that I have few options available to me. I have a serious problem with not telling the truth, for one thing, and my face tends to tell the story that my mouth is trying to find a way around, for another. Perhaps, on reflection, saying nothing is the best option of all; maybe it’s best to keep quiet and avoid hurting the feelings of another person – even if that person is a dyed-in-the-wool, no holds barred, confirmed fuckwit.

I was a late arrival in the world of the ‘information super-highway’ by the standards of my peers. In 1999 I purchased my first internet-ready computer. It was an exciting moment; representing as it did a leap from a largely analogue, relatively slow and self-contained private world into the comparatively bullet-train digitized existence of all the knowledge at my fingertips all of the time. Well, I say ‘all the time’; many of us will remember the joys of dial-up internet access which often resulted in no access at all, or transfer rates which by todays standards would be regarded as an utter and complete system failure.

Social media was in its infancy in those days, but the thrill of ‘talking’ to someone on the other side of the world in real time and through a computer keyboard was enough to make us forget that telephones had been performing the same trick for many decades. WiFi was a non-existent dream and the rapidly-evolving mobile phones were still mostly used for speaking to people with our voices. Flip phones were new, and rather cool. Yes, really.

Flash forward to the present, and we’re surrounded by transmitted data, whether it be text, graphics, video, music or conversation. I can talk ‘live’ to my cousin in New Zealand whenever I see her name appear on my Facebook page. I keep in touch with my oldest friends through the same medium, one which is increasingly favoured by people of a certain age who are now too wary of trying a ‘new’ internet program. I’m suspicious of things like SmartFace or InstaApp; they are untested by me and are likely to remain so, lest I inadvertently send all my sensitive information to a group of bored, spotty hackers sitting in a Starbucks in Amsterdam. We oldies stick with what we’ve come to know – hence my truly ancient email address, which will soon be celebrating its twentieth birthday, and thereby entering its digital dotage.

I was raised in that analogue age. My very first digital watch, for example, was a very, VERY big moment. In those times, we mostly spoke face-to-face to one another, and so the way we spoke was governed by our anticipation of the effect upon the listener. We cared about how our words affected others, not least because a punch on the nose not only tingles somewhat, it also tends to ruin a friendship, or indeed a party. We therefore tended to be careful – as in: full of care about what fell out of our mouths.

Not so on social media pages today. I’m sure we’ve all become aware of the nasty business of internet bullying; a cruel strategy employed by cowards, psychopaths and other despicable people who lack scruples. The issue of which I speak, however, is more widespread than that. Every day I read parts of conversations on Facebook which are not merely robust or forceful, but downright obnoxious. Sometimes, the attitude comes out of left field and seemingly apropos of nothing at all, and sometimes I find myself tensing up in anticipation of the inevitable sh*tstorm as I read an innocent comment which invites the presence of the invisible warriors. Some people seem to have given up trying to be reasonable or graceful and seem instead to be reckless about causing offence or hurt. They seem to have stopped caring about the effect of what they say, just as long as they feel that they have ‘won’ an argument. The luxury of typing in our own homes has turned many into mean, even vicious interlocutors.

Tangible consequences for humiliating, insulting or hurting another human rarely feature in those online conversations which may not constitute bullying, but probably do fall into the category of acting like an arsehole. So many cowardly types seem to no longer care that they might be damaging other humans. Even relatively mild condescending tones can be profoundly – if unintentionally - harmful to some of our more vulnerable fellows, but my internet community is replete with snotty, snide, aggressive gobshites who seem to derive pleasure from coming across as – and here I go again dipping into the delicious English vernacular – utter bell-ends.

A few years ago when I was relatively healthy, relatively strong and still had my own testosterone coursing through my veins, I would find myself getting hot under the collar and wishing that one of these obnoxious little shits would pluck up the courage to talk to me the same way in the street. I imagined – using scenes dredged from a law-enforcement past characterized by the appropriate use of force – a brief interaction ending with one participant being very, very sorry that they had behaved like one of those aforementioned bell-ends.

Now, alas, a depleted and relatively frail fellow occupies this skin, but my revenge these days is, I tell myself, more mighty. To all those who shout online, who proclaim their superiority with unpleasant gusto and at the expense of others, my response is…to close the laptop, walk away and forget about them and their unimportant words and lives. I haven’t quite perfected the technique; depending upon the time of day, within an hour or two I’ll probably be back online for one reason or another, and then I’ll soon be once more huffing, puffing and sighing at the crass stupidity of so many of our fellow humans. Will it ever stop? Probably not; humans are such silly creatures.

This evening, prior to rustling up a thoroughly *insert adjective here* meal for my lovely lady and I, I was lucky enough to watch a short documentary about a museum exhibit put together to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of 'The Philosopher's Stone'.

The programme was rather delightful, with plenty of input from the accomplished lady herself. For the record, I consider her to be utterly uncontroversial. Do I envy her the success she enjoys? If I'm honest, of course I do. Do I begrudge her this success? Not one iota; she created a marvelous thing, a truly wonderful story that has given pleasure to so many, and which was a stunning piece of creativity, the like of which I can only dream (vainly, I suspect) of ever emulating. I admire her a great deal.

Living up to my expectations, she finished the programme perfectly. I shall have to paraphrase, since my beleaguered brain accurately retains only that which is useless...

Speaking about how people have told her how they have enjoyed her story, she said "...it's not the success that matters; to a writer, the idea that even just a few people have enjoyed your work is what counts, and is important." In that, if nothing else (and it really IS nothing else), she and I are very much alike.

An excerpt for you...

Mr. Barker was a very tall, very thin man. If he was alive today, he’d be an internet meme. His height was bad enough for a child like me who was small for his age, but compounding his looming creepiness was a permanently ghostly white complexion, emphasised by a fierce bluish beard shadow even at the start of the day. Steely, dark eyes peered out malevolently at the world as he bestrode the corridors and revelled in his power as the not-quite-but-almost boss of the school. He was never seen to smile (not even if a child tripped and injured themselves right in front of him), and the consensus was that he never blinked. Rumour also had it that he was married, but kept his wife locked up in the house when he was at work. How the heck the person who started that one came up with it, I’ll never know - but I believed it for several years. He was that kind of man.

Mr. Barker always, always dressed in a brown suit with drainpipe trousers. The suit – made of high quality rayon - rustled slightly as he walked, the interlocking fibres generating thousands of volts of static electricity. Every ten or twelve paces, he would pause to ground himself on a metal window frame or door handle, the pain of each static shock strengthening his resolve to never stop hating the children under his supervision. Mr. Barker, through word and deed, was the living manifestation of the grim reaper whom we all feared. Following my innate sense of self-preservation, I kept my distance and allowed my terror of him to quietly and steadily develop.

Until…

At one time, together with a couple of my friends, I took to spending time inside the classroom at lunchtimes, where we would read, tell each other silly stories, and draw. It was simple stuff, innocent and utterly harmless. Staying indoors wasn’t exactly banned, but was definitely frowned upon (the staff didn’t bother with ‘gently discouraging’ anything, and instead leapt straight into frowning disapproval), since the merciful Lord’s fresh air was deemed to be good for us. Other teachers had seen the three of us making our own fun and had quietly warned us to not make any noise, but otherwise left us alone, since we were doing no harm and not actually breaking any rules.

One day we all decided (for the same kind of reasons that kids will stand in the shower with their raincoat on, or try – just once - to drink milk through their nose) to sit underneath one of the classroom tables and read a favourite story from the library shelf. It felt a little like camping – it was fun! For a while we quietly giggled and chortled at something very innocent, but were interrupted by the shock of a huge BANG on the top of the table. For the first time in my life, I farted with fright. I looked up to see – to my horror – a pair of brown drainpipe trouser legs standing motionless next to the table, an occasional crackle of high voltage sparks playing across the surface of them. Mr. Barker, the seeker of all things sinful, had found us.

His curiously high-pitched and hoarse voice reached out to us like a whiplash; “Come OUT of there at ONCE!”. The indignation in his tone was palpable, as was the magnetic field being generated by his suit. We didn’t even look at one another, so deep was our terror. Trembling, we emerged from underneath the table to stand, huddled together for protection, under the distant gaze of the fearsome electrified man. Above him boiled and rolled a black cloud, from which lightning bolts flickered and jabbed. Obviously he hadn’t grounded himself in the last few minutes…either that, or I was hallucinating. “WHAT do you mean…” he hissed, baring yellow, narrow teeth in oversized gums; “…by this BIZARRE behaviour?”. I was nine, and had absolutely no idea what the question actually meant. Nobody had ever thrown the word ‘bizarre’ towards me before. As for what did I mean…well…I didn’t mean anything! I was just having fun. I doubled the amplitude of my trembling. “WELL?” roared the mighty pipe cleaner, flaring his impressive nostrils. My dad had big nostrils, with bits of hair poking out of them, but Mr. Barker had him beaten on that count by several dozen as far as I could tell. I wondered why I was noticing that detail at such a  dangerous moment. “I don’t know sir.” a small, reedy voice said. I was a little shocked to realize that it had found its way out of my own mouth.

I knew instinctively that – feeble, contrite voice or not - this was a poor response. He flared his mighty air intakes again; “YOU DON’T KNOW?” he bellowed (as well as he could, with his sinister, hoarse voice), his eyes widening to the point where we could almost see them. “You don’t KNOW? How can you not KNOW? What on EARTH would lead you to…to…sit under a table at…at…lunch hour?” The latter part of the question was delivered with an almost hysterical emphasis and prompted me to wonder if he thought that sitting under a table at some other time of the day was perfectly acceptable. Worryingly, I could see some white, foamy spittle forming at the corner of his mouth. I suspected that I needed to stop noticing details such as that, but I took the spittle to be a bad sign, and allowed my bottom lip to quiver accordingly. To my left, my friend Paul grabbed the leadership role and burst into tears, to the accompaniment of soft sobs and the gentle vibration of his mop of blonde, curly hair.

The fearsome man croaked again, warming to his task now that he had caused some real distress; “I have never come across behaviour of this kind before; I find it quite incomprehensible.” I found his sentences pretty hard to understand too, but I decided not to mention it, as well leaving out my thoughts about his nasal hair. I was also still a little fixated by his spittle, the sight of which made me feel a little nauseous. “You boys...” he went on with ill-disguised relish, “…will stand outside my office in silence for the REST of the lunch hour. THEN I will decide what to do with you…”. The last part was left hanging in the air, as if everything up to and including public execution might be one of the options he was considering. I wouldn’t have put it past him. Trying my damnedest not to wet my short pants, with my two fellow criminals I dutifully made my way along the corridor, past the open door of the staff room and up to the wall adjacent to Mr. Barker’s small office, there to wait below a large and rather explicitly gory crucifix, for our fate to be decided.

I felt this was too good to not be purloined and shared:

A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
A question mark walks into a bar?
A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
A synonym strolls into a tavern.
At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
Falling slowly, slowly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

I was going to put this on the 'snippets' page, but then I lost the inclination to do so...

The evening had started well for the splendidly - and as it turned out, rather optimistically - named Richard Edward Hercules Hampson. Celebrating his re-emergence into the world outside of the prison fence, Richard – or ‘Ricky’ as he was most frequently called - although he’d occasionally been known to answer to ‘Asshole’ too - set out to tie one on with a hundred bucks withdrawn from his creaky old credit union account just as soon as he had made it down the hill into town. Only two short hours after the seemingly endless process of signing himself out of prison clothing and into his old, stiff and mysteriously stained denims, Ricky was successfully hammered - and man; it felt good. He knew, of course that it would soon stop feeling good and within a short time start feeling shitty, but for now he’d take what enjoyment he could from the taste of that liquor and the who-gives-a-shit feeling that it gave him.  It had been eight months since decent liquor (in other words; not that God-awful prison hooch) had passed his lips, and there hadn’t been a day that he’d not missed it. Hell, he’d missed it even more than he thought – more even than the feel of a woman’s skin, and the realization bothered him; bothered him so much that he’d drunk even harder to make that realization disappear.

Two hours in The Pitsnake bar had numbed his lips, his worries and his good sense – not that he’d ever been blessed with an over-abundance of the latter, as his criminal record and list of short, dead-before-they-started relationships would testify. Over the previous ten years, life had been a roller coaster of good booze (sometimes), bad women (almost every time), way too much heroin, a little crack here and there, and a total of about four and a half years spent looking out at the outside world through a chain-link fence from the inside of one institution or another. Ricky wasn’t a bad guy, no sir; he was just an ordinary fellah trying to break a long streak – a very, very long streak – of the worst kind of luck. That’s what he told himself, five or six times each day - just to stay on the right side of crazy.

He’d never hurt anyone (except for that one time the snot-nosed kid had come at him with a broken bottle; he’d been askin’ for that) but, shit; he’d been hurt plenty of times himself. That old stab wound in his side ached when it got cold or just kicked him in the gut out of spite if he moved the wrong way or too fast. The only time that pain went away completely was when he could get himself on the outside of a large amount of some hard liquor. A time like tonight.

By the time he hit (literally, with his head) the battered exit door of The Pitsnake Bar, that old bite had stopped hurting. Pretty much everything had stopped hurting – unless of course you didn’t forget the absolute one hundred and ten percent pain-in-the-ass-truth that life was a fucken bitch, and that then, when the shit was finally piled on you deep enough, you died. Life sucked, and Ricky, numb as he was and with alcohol doing its thing to his brain, had plenty of time to think about exactly just how fucken much it sucked as he walked back up that fucken stupid hill towards his sister’s fucken house - the house that had been their mom’s, and should’ve been his. Just another fucken injustice to add to life’s pile of shit.

Earlier in the day, on the way down the hill after his release, he’d dropped off what remained of his belongings, leaving them in a plastic-wrapped heap in the front porch so that when she got home from work she’d know he was back out and to expect him some time after the bars had closed. She knew exactly what to expect; she’d been through it enough times with him. As a social worker she knew how it worked all ways round, knew from the outside and up close how booze and drugs had sucked him in and spat him out time after time, how he’d learned to not give a shit about who he pissed off if it meant that he could score; knew that he would probably die one day when he poisoned himself, whether it be with  legal shit or illegal shit. When that happened, he figured that it didn’t much matter what the law or anybody else thought, anyway. Dead was dead. The idea that he could drink himself to death quite within the bounds of the law (and pay fucken tax while he was doing it), but would be arrested for simply getting a fast high made him smile grimly as he dragged his sorry carcass up the stupid, pain-in-the-asshole steep hill. The fucken law made no sense. Life made no sense and therefore his philosophy was simple and to the point: fuck it.

He paused outside the familiar house for only the second time in eight months and three days, exactly – almost to the minute, his chest rising and falling after the long uphill stagger. A few hours ago he’d flung his bag of shit onto the porch without giving the weary old place a second glance. It was good to be out, but like him the Hampson house was tired; worn out and almost at the end of its rope. Something had to change; he really was too old to be doing this shit any more. Maybe, perhaps, this time was the time when he could keep a promise.

Eight months and three days ago he’d been arrested on that very same spot, on the way back from the bar on a cold, wet night and having failed spectacularly - yet again - to get inside Laura Deacon’s panties. As a result, he was feeling as mean as a starving dog when the young cops pulled alongside him and called out to him by name with goofy smiles on their pimply faces. He’d felt even worse a few seconds later as his arms were forced roughly up his back and the cuffs were tightened around his skinny wrists, but he'd learned long ago not to give the cops an excuse to take their fists to him, and made his feelings known, not by physical resistance, but with a stream of the worst insults he could come up with, given that he was still feeling pretty humiliated by Laura calling him ‘Needle dick’ in front of the other customers in the bar. His howls of protests had brought his sister to her window, and her plaintive call-out to the cops had eventually led to a shouted explanation of sorts – another fucken warrant. A warrant. Fuck the law.

He’d seen her shake her head and slide her window shut, slide it shut on the world and him in particular. That was a long time ago – eight, long, hard months ago, but now he was back.  Well, he thought; fuck her, she was still his sister and she knew that he needed help, dammit. He knew that she knew that he had no other place to go, and despite his liquor-fuelled bitterness and petty spite, he also knew that she would forgive him one more time, just as she always had - and just as their parents had never done. She loved him, and he could never figure out why or how. In return, he loved her to pieces and he knew exactly why, but in thirty nine years he’d just never worked out how to show it, or even how to tell her.

The light was on – that was a good sign. It meant that she was waiting up for him, and that usually meant that she would be pleased to see him - maybe even had some home-cooked food ready. As he walked unsteadily up the overgrown path – Sadie had always hated gardening – it struck him as a little strange that the blinds were still open. She was usually a stickler for her privacy, to the point of locking her bedroom door even if she was the only one in the house. No matter, he thought, hopefully she’d got something good waiting in the oven for him – cherry pie, even. Cherry pie would be very good.

He stopped when he noticed his plastic bag on the front porch, exactly as he’d left it a number of hours earlier. That was not a good sign, for fuck’s sake. That quite possibly meant that she was pissed – probably because the cops had paid her yet another visit while he’d been out. He’d been pinched at the prison gates before today and taken to the courthouse before his clothes had even gotten warm, only to be back in the big house by nightfall, but he’d also had the only slightly less aggravating experience of being out a few hours before the warrants caught up with his release date. Perhaps this was another one of those. Fuck. What the hell was it for this time? He didn't even try to remember - it didn't matter in the long run. Jail was jail, no matter why you were there.

Slowly climbing the three steps, Ricky the drunken fool approached the front door and tried to open it. Nothing doing. Shit and bastard! Trying as hard as he knew (i.e. not very) to not sound like a pissed drunk, he banged on the front door and called out to Sadie. Nothing. Shit – the last thing he wanted was to wake the neighbours and have the cops around - but dammit, Sadie was being a bitch. Biting his tongue in concentration, he unsteadily negotiated the darkened steps down to the garden level and wound his way through the thick unmown grass and weeds to the kitchen windows. The light beamed out from the chest-high windows across the small yard and lit up one side of the tall, unkempt hedge. Despite his irritation, the idea of startling her by suddenly appearing at the windows had him grinning like an idiot as he approached the stucco side of the house.

The windows were all shut – again, unusual for a woman who liked to have the air moving through the house as long as it wasn’t freezing outside – but Ricky chuckled to himself, knowing that the surprise would be all the greater. Pausing to allow himself to stop laughing and setting his face in his favourite Jack Nicholson expression, he crouched down below the window line and began to slowly rise into the light. Keeping his face rigidly manic and eyes focused on the far wall, he rose fully into view, ready for the scream that would surely come from his sister’s mouth. She’d always been so easy to scare, especially when they were kids and he would jump out on her at the bottom of the stairs. Her strange quavering cries of dismay and shock used to reduce him to tears of laughter. Hell - he wished he could be that happy again.

Staring at the furthest wall for maximum creep effect, Ricky’s expression began to lose its rigidity as he realised that Sadie wasn’t reacting as planned. Relaxing his face and cursing her silently, he blinked a few times to get the old peepers working again, and stared intently into the kitchen.

Sadie wasn’t there. What was there was a horrific,  grotesque thing lying awkwardly on the floor, wearing Sadie’s clothes and surrounded by what looked like a pool of black pitch. The fact that most of the back of Sadie’s head was a matted mess told Ricky the rest. As his eyes took in the scene, his mind quickly began to overload. This…this…couldn’t have happened, not to Sadie, not to him. A high pitched whine began to ring in his ears and a grey tunnel started to form around the edges of his vision. “No!” he thought, desperate to cling to consciousness; “Not now!”. The ringing in his ears became a deafening high-pitched shriek, and the world faded to a stop.

Two posts on one day? Yes, well my lovely website host decided to screw around with me for a month or two, hence the recent hiatus...I thought that in celebration of my return to activity on this site, I might overwhelm you with two posts almost at the same time...

Under normal conditions, I would shy away from writing an end-of-year reflective piece, but my condition is not normal. That’s to say, it isn’t the condition I had become used to, although I may have to accept it as my new ‘normal’.

Many things have changed during 2018. I began the year believing that I had – at some point in 2017 – suffered a stroke which was causing the problems I was experiencing with the sight in my left eye. I was wrong about that, just as I’d been wrong to ignore my developing battery of symptoms for so long. I’d been scared of what I might discover about my health if I investigated matters. I’d been a fool.

In 2018 I learned – and I’m still learning – how to go about accepting what is. That, I think, has been one of the major lessons of the journey that my family and I have been on. Things – regardless of how I might feel – have changed, and there is little that I can do about many of the changes that have arrived to test my endurance or patience. I must instead accept them.

For much of my life I have lived within a dichotomy; a shy, oversized man employed in roles which required me to behave forcefully and confidently. A large and (yes, I must accept this) strong man capable of being proficient in various sports, and of using my physical power to be useful in a wide variety of situations which might cause difficulties to anyone smaller or less strong than I. These things have changed. I must accept a physically reduced version of who I once was. I must accept those things of which I am no longer capable. I must accept the word ‘disability’ as it now pertains to me.

I’ve learned this year how much my physical stature and strength was part of what helped me survive emotionally. As that physical strength has been stripped away, my emotions have been laid bare, my vulnerability visible (it has seemed) for all to see. My lack of emotional strength has been painfully apparent as, at various times of the year, I’ve leaned so heavily upon my wife’s remarkable depth of love for me. I’ve become aware of it, and accepted the truth of it. It has always been who I really am.

2019 sees a different person looking out at the world from this familiar-looking face. The face in the mirror looks much the same (a little more grey, a little fatter, a little more tired) but I’m not the same; I couldn’t be.

Counter-intuitively perhaps, the easiest response would be to fight against the difference; to try to regain what I once had and to try to be who I once believed I was. The harder course is the one that I am choosing, because I believe that wisdom lies along the way. I choose to embrace the difference and to rebuild my small world in acceptance of who I am now.  I’m assisted by the fact that my new community has never known the previous version of me, and so there is little or no pressure to revert from the people who have met only this version of me.

My partner in life, and my children know, of course. What, I wonder, is this like for them? What is it like to see a person they love changed in this kind of way?
What is it like, and how, now, can I – with all the love I hold for them - help them?

Life surprises me with delicious irregularity. Since I was reunited with my first love almost exactly ten years ago, reflecting upon my stunning good fortune has been a constant habit; a foil to my natural grumpiness and an antidote to my glass-half-empty outlook. Five years ago, after twelve months of grieving for my father,  I sat down in front of my computer and reflected upon some of the issues in my life. This year, events have not-so-gently nudged me towards repeating the exercise with a slightly different flavour. Today, as I stare at the small screen before me, my mortality stands alongside, a reminding hand upon my shoulder. My journey continues to teach me valuable lessons.

Firstly, I missed my father. He left this earth more than six years ago, but I don't just mean that I miss him - which, by the way, I still do - I mean that I missed him. Like a fool I missed my chance to find out about him before his last illness diminished him so cruelly, and while he could still share something of himself. Over the preceding years I didn't ask enough questions, nor ask them persistently enough to elicit meaningful  answers. All I know of my father is ‘Dad’; the little that this quiet man allowed to rise to the surface - an idea of which can be gleaned from the fact that after over eighty years of life, all he ever wrote down about himself was – at my urging, I might add - four or five pages. He barely told us more face-to-face. He was a generous and loving man, but he made a sad mistake in this regard. He left us wondering, and unknowing. I cannot let the same thing happen to my children.

His lost legacy is now the reason I write; I write – consciously – for and to them, and to their children. I am so very grateful for the lesson my father unwittingly taught me, and for the opportunity to avoid repeating it.

It took me a long time to learn to be loved. Indeed, I’ve only very recently – lying in a hospital bed and watching my lady loving me with a benevolent and passionate ferocity – begun to understand it properly. Even the thought of it now moves me to tears. I have always loved intensely, but I was always an unhappy lover, and only recently, in my mid-fifties, have I realized that I was eye-wateringly terrible at being loved. I denied it, I refused to believe it could be true, and I closed the door upon the joy of it. I loved desperately and hopelessly, and as a result, I lost. Awakening to being loved has transformed my outlook. Suddenly, my world is full of colours, filled with happiness and chances to return that gift.  How blind I was; how beautiful is this new glorious panorama.

Looking forward is still fun. My lovely lady and I long ago formulated a step-away-from-it-all plan for our semi-retirement which we have now managed to bring to fruition. It's a simple idea, but one which fills us with excitement at the thought of creating a new chapter of our lives together. We managed to achieve a major part of it before I fell ill and were forced to put many of our intentions on hold. We never lost sight of our goals, and we find ourselves now in a delightful, peaceful part of the world, surrounded by natural beauty and softly embraced by our small community. Our future, for a while veiled and uncertain, has returned to clarity and a measure of certainty as we embrace a fruitful last third of our lives. It is a fresh idea and as such is entirely ours, with few echoes of our prior lives. It’s an adventure (in a gentle and not particularly dangerous kind of way), and it gives me a great deal of joy to anticipate living within our little dream, with the person alongside whom I wish to grow very, very old. Looking forward Is not the sole preserve of my young self, after all.

I'm fortunate. Not just lucky, but incredibly fortunate. I am deeply in love with my lady, and she with me (and that alone is enough to make the world worth living in). Together we have three fantastic children - now adults - of whom we are very proud, and we live in a spectacular part of the world. Despite the different routes that we have taken to eventually get here, we have made this happen. This year, we have come through fear, pain and an uncertainty neither of us has faced before. I could not have done it alone; I will be forever grateful, forever aware of the fate that we have been so fortunate to avoid and so fortunate to bring to fruition. We've worked hard to be here today; we deserve our happiness, but we also appreciate how lucky we have been.

It's not over until it's over. My wife and I lived apart for most of our adult lives. We first got together on the stroke of new year 1983/4 and became an 'item' within seconds. We were together for nearly three years before – mostly as a result of my previously noted troubles with being loved - we went our separate ways. But then, as 2008 came towards an end, we found one another again – or should I say she determinedly hunted me down half a world away. The road between 1986 and now has been...interesting. There have been full lifetimes’ worth of ups, downs and sideways-es in the interim, but I have to say that none of that really matters. We have both lived interesting lives on two continents, and we have loved, laughed and cried apart from one another for many, many years. These days, we laugh more than we have ever done, we remind ourselves of how loved we are, and we find joy in our instinctive outpouring of love for one another. Life - and living - is good.
We are now, after all - after all these years - where we truly belong. Together.

And now, I find myself reflecting upon my reflections. When the shimmer clears, when the ripples upon the water’s surface fade away, my reflection is clean and clear. At last, I know. Life – my life, at least - is about love; being loved, loving and demonstrating that love. Over the last year, the reflection in the mirror has changed more than ever before, as have my reflections. As my hair and my beard have grown whiter, my reflections upon the last fifty-plus years have become brighter and more positive. As my life lost its guarantees, it became more valuable and more valued. Life is good, and for the overwhelming majority of time, has been so. I’ve wasted time in not appreciating and enjoying that fact. It is time to change that now.

For ever.

Under normal conditions, I would shy away from writing an end-of-year reflective piece, but my condition is not normal. That’s to say, it isn’t the condition I had become used to, although I may have to accept it as my new ‘normal’.

Many things have changed during 2018. I began the year believing that I had – at some point in 2017 – suffered a stroke which was causing the problems I was experiencing with the sight in my left eye. I was wrong about that, just as I’d been wrong to ignore my developing battery of symptoms for so long. I’d been scared of what I might discover about my health if I investigated matters. I’d been a fool.

In 2018 I learned – and I’m still learning – how to go about accepting what is. That, I think, has been one of the major lessons of the journey that my family and I have been on. Things – regardless of how I might feel – have changed, and there is little that I can do about many of the changes that have arrived to test my endurance or patience. I must instead accept them.

For much of my life I have lived within a dichotomy; a shy, oversized man employed in roles which required me to behave forcefully and confidently. A large and (yes, I must accept this) strong man capable of being proficient in various sports, and of using my physical power to be useful in a wide variety of situations which might cause difficulties to anyone smaller or less strong than I. These things have changed. I must accept a physically reduced version of who I once was. I must accept those things of which I am no longer capable. I must accept the word ‘disability’ as it now pertains to me.

I’ve learned this year how much my physical stature and strength was part of what helped me survive emotionally. As that physical strength has been stripped away, my emotions have been laid bare, my vulnerability visible (it has seemed) for all to see. My lack of emotional strength has been painfully apparent as, at various times of the year, I’ve leaned so heavily upon my wife’s remarkable depth of love for me. I’ve become aware of it, and accepted the truth of it. It has always been who I really am.

2019 sees a different person looking out at the world from this familiar-looking face. The face in the mirror looks much the same (a little more grey, a little fatter, a little more tired) but I’m not the same; I couldn’t be.

Counter-intuitively perhaps, the easiest response would be to fight against the difference; to try to regain what I once had and to try to be who I once believed I was. The harder course is the one that I am choosing, because I believe that wisdom lies along the way. I choose to embrace the difference and to rebuild my small world in acceptance of who I am now.  I’m assisted by the fact that my new community has never known the previous version of me, and so there is little or no pressure to revert from the people who have met only this version of me.

My partner in life, and my children know, of course. What, I wonder, is this like for them? What is it like to see a person they love changed in this kind of way?

What is it like, and how, now, can I – with all the love I hold for them - help them?

A little part of me in the big, wide world:

www.holstee.com/blogs/mindful-matter/the-surface-stills