It’s been a strange set of times recently.
There’s me undergoing a huge life change. First outside the home job in 6 years, up at
5 a.m., back between 6.45 and 7.30 p.m., depending on the traffic or the
invisible bus paradox, or the sudden cancelling of the exact train I was
waiting for phenomenon. A job where I’m around
people all day (from relative solitude), to speaking to people all day (ditto),
and then travelling for up to 4 hours a day (which is sometimes rather
annoying, and would be very bad if I felt ill; but it’s very good for being alone
[ish], and reading). I am in a world
full of small details, and procedures.
On the one hand this is comforting, I like to have processes around me
to follow. On the other hand, not being
able to plainly speak my mind on solutions, outcomes etc…that is more…I am NOT
going to say ‘challenging’, because (a) I hate what’s been done to that word,
and (b) that does, in the new definition of that word, describe some of my
customers, so I’ve ring-fenced (hee hee more jargon) that word for this purpose
now. No, not being able to cut through
the vagueness and obtuseness of what I am saying sometimes makes me irritated:
saying how something actually *is*, regardless of whether this will be liked,
is a quicker, cleaner way of dealing with things. Sometimes.
But not to be done. Till I learn
a more Sanza (see Game of Thrones,
the books people, not the TV series)
way of speaking, I will have to throttle my directness and carry on saying what’s
needful, but feels a bit unclear.
When I get home, I catch up on the news. The world has gone, it would appear, madder than usual in a bad way. I can’t
decide how much of that is down to reporting habits, fear mongering and the way
the establishment wishes us to be perceiving whole groups of people and
countries, for their own ends (i.e if we’re scared enough of them, we’ll stand
by and let the government/s do whatever they want to those people and countries,
usually for reasons other than those stated, for mineral or oil resources, for
trade) – and how much is simply what’s happening. I observe a dimming and a blurring going on
between the bare facts (as much as they can be gathered) of what occurs when
things happen, and then a bias, editorialising opinion-making reporting of
these events. So often I see opinions
passed off as facts. I see primary and
secondary sources conflated. I see
things taken for granted that aren’t at all, things to be taken for
granted. I see that saying to myself ‘follow
the money’ when I watch ANY news story still bears more fruit when finding
motivation for slant and attempts to brainwash the viewing public to a
gut-feeling point of view that seems so simple and common-sensical but evades
even the barest deeper analysis. Things
are rarely black and white. They are
really annoyingly gradiated between grey, black, white, fog.
Increasingly, bearing the insanity that is being portrayed to
us in mind, I look to what I genuinely see around me. People just wanting to get on and live their
lives. True, they don’t want to be interfered
with much, specially by people they don’t know, or ‘figures of authority’, but
at the same time – most people I meet and see behave decently. They help when someone slips in the street. They run after someone to give a dropped
purse or wallet back. If someone doesn’t
have enough money to pay for something in a supermarket queue, and is fumbling
with change and looking horribly embarrassed, your average person quietly gives
over some money if they have it, with soft spoken words, trying to mitigate the
horror of being helped by a stranger, “no no, don’t worry – you’d do the same
for me…you could be my nan/my sister/my daughter…” etc. This idea of chaos beating on the walls (the
literal walls if some people had their way) around us, I don’t see it in our
lives, not the way it’s painted. I see a
lot of quiet poverty, degrees of poverty, degrees of desperation, degrees of
very difficult compromise. But I don’t
see humans as the worst kind of ruthless animals. I don’t see yet, that Dawn of the Dead (the original, please - and that link there is an interesting article, go see) is true.
Saying that: I have felt a bit bombarded by consumerism this
year. Maybe it’s because I have been
massively taken up, first with jobhunting, and then with doing this huge learning
curve of a job. The long commute. The job has swallowed me whole, I’m not yet
properly rebalanced. Home is a mirage
where I sleep worriedly, dreaming about callers and things they may say that I
don’t yet know the answers to. I wake up
wondering how close to 5 a.m. it is. But
Christmas appeared to start in September, didn’t it? That’s when I first heard carols in the
shops. And shortly after, the
decorations began. Then there was the
whole imported ‘Black Friday’ thing the other week. I was sitting in any old shopping centre in
workplace area, having some quiet (ha ha) time away from the phones with my
lunchtime sandwich, listening to announcements about DEALS, and registering
that foot traffic was way up on usual for the time of day. People pushing past one another, looking
focussed, harassed and rather grumpy – not happy, I’d say, about DEALS, with
many many bags. I’m completely skint
till my first paypacket, so I wasn’t taking part. Did most of my Christmas shopping earlier, in
anticipation of future skintness. But
every day, the carols seemed to get louder and more intense.
By the time I took Fluffhead to the Whitgift Centre in
Croydon, I was feeling, and it sounds stupid, yes I know it does, attacked
by Christmas being pushed at me as shopping and a feeling of forced
jollity. Adverts about family get
togethers, huge boards advertising Sky movies, where sad things happened before
families got together at the end and smiled while wearing green and red and
surrounded by sparkling oh so sparkling and tinkly silver and gold things. There were live carol singers, one week from
a church outreach, another time from a homelessness project. That was nice, hearing real voices sing. But they fought against the taped and piped
voices. The mixing of genres. ‘Santa Baby’ fought against ‘Good Rest Ye
Merry Gentlemen’ against ‘Do They Know Its Christmas Time At All…’ Everything was shining at me, everything so
loud. Try a chocolate, try a mincepie,
get your Sky package for Christmas! This
all MUST have been here in previous years, perhaps it’s simply that I’m very
tired all the time at the moment – but I have never felt more Bah Humbug.
It’s not that ‘the real meaning of Christmas’ is getting
lost. Of course it IS, in the sense that
it’s a Christian religious festival, I’m not Christian, I don’t go along with
the idea, it belongs to them, not me[1].
It is lost in the sense that their Jesus
didn’t pop down to remind us to not miss Black Friday and get our Sky
package. So yes, that’s a bit of a
travesty. But it’s perfectly possible to
borrow lightly from the Christian festival, and come out with a pleasing
secular idea of Christmas involving emphasis on giving things to people cos it
makes you feel happy to do so. Giving
things to charities and those who have less (ditto, don’t pretend to be
selfless; think of it as enlightened self-interest instead – there by the grace
of whichever god go I etc). Decorating
because it’s fun to make a fuss of certain days – and it’s nice to celebrate
red and gold and green and silver and make things sparkle. It’s nice
to have friends and family over if you like and see them and maybe cook them dinner
if you’d like to. (Notice how lovely and
‘if you like’ that all was. Ahhhh, if
only.) It’s nice and fun and good for us
to be grateful for what we have, what we’ve been given, and to try and see the
goodness in people. Nice to see the
wonder of the world and each other.
I think both the Christian Christmas and the secular
Christmas are being a bit bombarded by the COME
AND BUY STUFF AND EAT FAR TOO MUCH AND
BE WITH YOUR WONDERFUL FAMILY THAT YOU *ADORE* messages. You KNOW something is wrong when you
start thinking the misery of an Eastenders Christmas Day episode is both more naturalistic and preferable than the
saccharine and manipulative images you’re being forcefed are! I really will do muchos shopping earlier than
ever next year, and online. It’s just
not fun shopping (or just being out) when everyone is all stressed out and spending too much and
grumpy and harassed, and all the children are really tiresome from waiting in
line for 2 hours to get a present from Santa’s Grotto. (Fluffhead did really well, actually. He was only naughty twice, and most of the
time was highly amused to watch some people dressed as reindeer on stilts
wafting about. WHY were they??? And a man
in a bear costume collecting for a charity in a bucket, whose head was
obviously on slightly wrong, so that he couldn’t see any of the children
milling around before and below him tugging on him and waving at him, and was
just wandering up and down, looking, even though I couldn’t see his face,
dejected. It was in the shoulders.)
I think it may have jinxed me, writing that post all those
years back about how I loved Christmas when everyone around me didn’t
much. (See here – it is wonderfully
enthusiastic.) Since then, I have not
had one Christmas that hasn’t been a bit odd.
Mum’s car accident that year (where she sat in terrible pain through
Christmas dinner because the paramedics had missed the fact she had a broken
collarbone, and then she was very sick after dinner, and eventually we ended up
in Casualty). This year, Stanley’s
father has died not very long ago, so we appear to be still doing Christmas,
though its chances of being anything other than strange, dour and gloomy are
slight, as any forced occasion
is. That’s the really weird thing about
Christmas – the way people seem to think they MUST do it in some way
shape or form, even when it’s not appropriate for them at that particular time,
because of its connotations of jollity and familial closeness. My mother has been trying to have an alone Christmas
ever since my dad died in 2008. She just
wants to rest and be quiet on that day and not have the pressure of everything
unless she *chooses* it. But every year it’s
either been her here, because Stanley or I have been sick, or Fluffhead is too;
or she’s had to go to her brother’s (a noisy extended family thing, several
children). Stanley and I are doing
Christmas because of Fluffhead – if you do it lightly, its very fun for the
little ones (he and I used to do our own kid Christmas brilliantly, as 2
overgrown children together).
But we
aren’t feeling it this year. And that’s
alright. That will happen
sometimes. I shall stick with wonder at
the natural world, and loving the green and red and gold and silver. Not as dictated to me by others, but just
because they really are beautiful.
Image from: www.lovethispic.com
I am definitely off-balance at the moment though. I’ll show you what I mean. An incident from a couple of weeks ago. You know when you feel you’ve made a
connection with people, and you’re wrong?
That feeling? Embarrassment,
isolation, not exactly loneliness, but out of placeness?
There’s these Eastern European young men I see in Costa
every morning at the station. They get
there either before me or very shortly after me. Very young, early 20s. Something very isolated about them too, just
as there is about most Eastern European people I see, as if they are still
partially elsewhere. I don’t know if that’s
because they wish they were elsewhere, or can’t forget good or bad things that
happened elsewhere, or if we haven’t made them feel very welcome, or likely, a
combination of all three. They are
always glued to each other talking in their own language, these two, separated from
the rest of us, who are not talking
all in the one language. It must be
nice, for privacy, to have another language, like being in another room without
having to be. I feel a sort of siege mentality
from them sometimes.
I had occasion to speak to them one day a while back, I dropped
something or they did or someone minded someone’s stuff while someone got more
coffee or went to the bathroom. They were
all smiles and helpfulness; a real difference in their faces. Lovely to see. Their reserve vanished on
speaking to them.
Anyway. They are too
clean and well dressed to be construction workers. Too casual and loose for office workers. No bags with books and folders, so not
students. I wonder what they do, now
they have piqued my interest by being so friendly suddenly.
On the first day I was here at the coffeeshop after the minding
or borrowing (which was it?), I smiled and nodded at them, and there began the
daily smiling and nodding. They usually
left before me, so we always had the smiling and nodding on the goodbyes, as I
sit by the exit so they come past me to leave.
Nothing more than that. They don’t
look for me, but when they do see me, they smile and wave, before becoming a
mysterious and foreign speaking unit again.
As a person new to the area, new to my job and this entire
section of my life, these small and apparently meaningless encounters MEAN
something to me. Same people everyday on
the train platform; these men in Costa; the woman on the bus going home in the evening
who recognised me: they make the start of routine, of familiarity. Small patches of warmth in an uncertain and
cooled newness.
So this morning, I stood in the queue for my coffee with the
younger of the two men. The one I think
of as more mischievous and quick with his movements. The other strikes me as more solid and
dependable. (Oh, first impressions –
wouldn’t it be so funny if I was completely wrong?!)
He said hi.
I said “Hi!” back. Bright
smile.
“How are you?” He
says politely, eyes (I should have been warned) far away.
I make an extreme tired face. He looks a little bit bored, but
understanding, and mimes it back.
“My shift is changing, so I won’t be seeing you guys after next week.” I add.
He looks like I just said far too many words. An expression passes over his face and I can’t
decide if it’s pure boredom that that woman in the coffeeshop is speaking to him, or whether I just spoke
so fast that I went further than his ability to process English. I gibberished, maybe.
However, he’s still looking at me, so I try again, and
repeat it a bit slower, with the chaser, “so I’ll be here much earlier,
catching an earlier train; gone earlier.”
I really don’t know what I was expecting here. A falling to the ground in abject sorrow with
weeping and wailing, that they won’t be able to say hi to me in the
morning. That we’ll never be able to go
beyond saying ‘hi’, to actually being acquaintances, progress to small
talk. I had a fond (and no doubt highly
dubious) imagining that we’d eventually small talk ourselves to where they were
from, and they’d teach me small throwaway phrases in that lovely language they
speak so earnestly. That I could ask
them what they do here, and there would be no more mystery. That they might laugh with me about how if it’s
very windy or very rainy, I will get lots of calls about nothing but weather
related damage all day, so that I feel like a barometer now when I’m out,
keeping one eye always on the weather.
Oh the indignance of fallen trees.
Or if it snows, there will be 100 righteous demands for residential road
gritting. The little silly things that make
up conversations. The beginnings of
connections with fellow humans. Just a
warm smile and slight, if thoroughly shallow, understanding of another’s life
and current experience. All stuff that’s
fascinating to me.
Anyway. So he looks
like I said too many words again. Not
exactly irritated, but tired and surprised.
I say the thing about the earlier train.
I think I wanted
him to say, like a polite old style English person would (see – cultural difference,
that’s a hole easily fallen into): “oh no, shame, it’s been nice seeing you
every day – hope all goes well for you, good luck, and bye!” – something like
that?! And I would ask where the
beautiful accents come from, just to satisfy my endless curiosity.
Instead, he just continues to look completely nonplussed, a
hassled barista gives him his coffee, and he nods at me in a brusque way with
eyes averted, and goes off to his table.
I feel confused.
(Which is not exactly an uncommon state of affairs for me.)
Obviously I completely misjudged either his English, or his
interest in any talking at all. I hope
he didn’t think I was flirting?
I’m an inveterate talker to people. I’m usually pretty good at reading bog off
signals too. In the world of scary new
job, where everyone is nice but I am waiting to fall flat on my face (and I
will, because the training is huge and extensive but rushed and there’s not
been enough consolidation time) – tiny scrappets of smiles and warmth were
helping.
I realise I definitely did misjudge something, and all my
usual waiting feelings of my out of placeness rise up. I take my own coffee and deliberately go and
sit down somewhere where I can’t see them and have my back to where they are.
Better they just go back to nodding and so do I. I read my kindle. When they leave, before me, as they always
do, the solid more dependable one makes a point of saying ‘hi’ and ‘how are you’,
but now I am hearing it sounding just like polite boys taught to not be rude by
someone when small. Just something you say
(and something people never seem to want the actual answer to, which always
perplexes me). I have developed the
habit of just smiling when people ask me that, then asking them back, or
complimenting them on something (never hard to find something nice to say about
a jacket or hair or pendant or just looking well). It’s like a hurdle you have to get past,
before you can have an actual conversation with people.
Its times like this, me thinking like this, that I miss Fry
most. His total unabashed social
awkwardness mixed with a testosteroney ‘oh fuck it’ disposition. He would have understood my reaction to this
small and stupid exchange, my misreading of the situation, feeble attempts to
make a tenuous connection. And he would
have shrugged at the end, at my sadness at the misunderstanding. He would have said something to make me
laugh.
In this new world, I keep hallucinating Stanley and Fry
around the place. When I’m in the
shopping centre at lunchtime eating my pack lunch – on the one hand blessedly
alone; on the other isolated and cut off in an invisible bubble, I see them out
of the corner of my eye, going past, coming or going. As if they just went for coffee and will be
back in a minute.
I hold the images of them close. Pretend it’s so and they are here. I feel the warmth of Fluffhead on my lap
having the ‘dressing hug’ he always stops in the middle of dressing to have,
one of the best hugs of the day. He’s
not there, but I feel it.
It’s because I’m so tired I am feeling like this, and out of
kilter this way; attaching vast significance to small incidents, small
feelings. Always the same. Remember
the tiredness factor.
Finish the coffee. Off to work. Do my best, try to help the people. Be kind, be polite, be present. And feel the invisible hugs.
See? I’m not quite
right at the moment and have to bear it in mind and be slow, be calm and be
careful.
I had a wonderful time yesterday afternoon with Rosa, my
closest Green Party friend, writing a small analysis of COP21 for the Sutton
members newsletter. There, I felt competent
and calm. We worked beautifully as a
team, suggesting phraseology and where to put each point so it all flowed
clearly and usefully. She finds me
funny, laughs at my silly jokes. She’s
ill, but exudes so much joy and energy (even when she can’t hold up her own
head because she’s so tired) that whenever I leave I feel buoyed up and more
able to take life as it comes, and see the happiness all over the place, the
waiting of smiles. There’s a Spirit of
Christmas. And people like that are All
Year.
I know many people who do their best in this totally
confusing world with its contradictory messages. Time Traveller, writing now her third book,
always seeking answers, always questioning.
Alias True, with his willingness to overthink with me to a place of calm
and plateau, where we look down and see events and the world for the lessons
they all are. They’re just the two who
pop to mind immediately. I think the
world is a better place than we are told, despite all the nastiness definitely
going on. Much to hope for, much to believe
in and work toward.
Strange and interesting times, for sure. Hold fast, hold steady, be kind. Be calm.
Out of the corner of my eye, Fluffy Cat who has been clawing the smallest
tree in the garden, jumps three feet up in the air, which is quite miraculous
seeing as she’s immensely huge, and then leaps sideways with a bit of a screech
and dives into the hedge – gone.
Ehem. Yes. Be calm.
Do not follow the Ways of This Cat.
Or you will need much Brushing, Later.
Have a lovely Christmas, and a Peaceful New Year.
[1]
Yes yes yes, don’t get me started on the pagan stuff came before the Christmas
stuff and it’s all the same. Yes, I know
that. For the purposes of this comment,
I’m speaking as a person living in a nominally Christian country, where there’s
been some strong arming of the ‘spirit of Christmas’. Back to the main point.
