Welcome Home - Week 2 (Delayed)

I feel like i've made a terrible mistake at some point, and stepped through a mirror. My worries are abstract - based on the opinions of people across the world, or messages through a phone I can turn off. 

I'm almost surprised when something physical and real happens - like 'oh, that's a thing!' 

I lie awake in the morning, reading news and email on a phone, I plug in headphones and walk to the train, work on a computer, videoconferencing with people I rarely meet, surrounded by other people, all gazing at their screens.

Sometimes I travel, for ten hours, I look at a different screen, in a smaller chair, to arrive in a hotel. Thank god, as I plug into another screen. 

I cook, I talk to my wife, but often we're on our phones. 

I studied Digital media technology - using these tools to create. I thought I was so clever - now you can use an Instagram filter, and get better results. So much of my life is abstract, I'm worried that I need to come home, get back to something real. 

I daydream about only having a world I can see and touch.

Then I write about it on a cloud-hosted blog. Banal. 

Week 2.2 - Welcome home

I can still clearly remember the first night at home with my baby son.

"Welcome home". It's a phrase normally punctuated with an exclamation mark, and infused with warm, fuzzy feelings of happiness, familiarity, safety.

Sure, happiness was in there. But familiarity and safety? Not by a long shot! Fear, on the other hand? The feeling I'd talked myself into a job I was vastly under-qualified for? Check, and check.

We got home in the afternoon - Sean, baby Matthew and me, along with a bunch of "Welcome Baby Boy" and similar cards and a collection of stuff that was really too much for such a small person to have gathered together as essentials in just over 24 hours of life.

Like someone with the 'flu, I felt relatively OK until night fell. Sure, we hadn't a barney what we were doing, but I had no doubt that given time we'd be wielding muslin clothes and getting legs as ridiculously wriggly as they were tiny into miniature trousers as confidently as the best of them. Maybe daily baths would even become a thing - just because I could, rather than as some awful self-punishment.

Already familiar with the exhaustion that was to become as normal in my life as Cornflakes for breakfast, the three of us headed off to bed at the same time.

Matthew seemed to cop the point of bedrooms quite quickly, heading off to sleep with ease.

Sean and I...didn't. We couldn't. Suddenly the huge responsibility we'd taken on made itself comfortable and settled its whole weight on our shoulders. Perhaps I'd read too much into the SIDS info, but all at once the job of successfully keeping our little scrap of a baby alive through that night and all the others to come became as challenging as climbing a mountain. In a wheelchair. With no water.

We didn't sleep much that night. I cried at a point.

Fast forward 18 months or so and there are still some nights when I don't sleep much. And cry. But the reasons have changed. Two nights ago the scrap of a baby who has turned into a bolshy toddler vomited on my face, which effectively put paid to quality slumber that night. And tears are a destination I'm sometimes driven to by the same toddler, whose relationship with sleep has changed since that first night to some sort of on-again-off-again one that I for one just can't predict.

But, thank God, the first night fear is but a memory.

Week 1.2 Restart - Laura

“Will ye ever whisht, the farming weather’s about to start,” Jim said gruffly, his manner both terse and resigned.

His tone was one that brooked no argument. Years ago it had worked a charm at immediately bringing the household to a silent pause, unpaused only when the meteorologist gladdened, or more often broke, his heart with news of the expected weather. In recent years, however, it had become ultimately ineffective against the babble (he’d given up tuning in, so couldn’t say whether it was friendly conversation or argument) of his three children.

“What’s wrong with companionable silence?” he thought to himself as the familiar theme tune jingled its way from the television set to his ears.

“Good afternoon, and thanks for joining me for your weekly farming forecast,” forecaster Evelyn Cusack began.

“The past week saw more rainfall than average for this time of year,” the familiar voice continued.

“You don’t have to remind me,” Jim thought, shaking his head at the thoughts of the mowing he’d done on Tuesday that had been promptly followed by showers as heavy as he’d seen last winter.

As the forecaster stepped from one side of the map of Ireland behind her to the other, Jim recognised that her reflections on the weather that had gone before were being wrapped up, and the important bit - what was to be expected next week - was on the way.

“Shush,” he bellowed, to no avail.

Not able to hear exactly what weather he could expect, Jim leaned forward to see if the charts Evelyn was summoning to the screen as if by magic could fill in the gaps. He thought it suggested the rain might hold off until Tuesday night, and so let him get the top field mowed and picked up before then, but without the glasses he could never find he couldn’t say for sure.

“...heavy showers,” Evelyn concluded. “Good afternoon.”

And it was over.

“What heavy showers?” Jim panicked. “When?”

“Three Goddamn minutes, is that too much to ask for?” Jim shouted. “Three minutes for a bit of help from Met Eireann so I can keep doing my level best to keep this farm from going under and keep you in the style you’ve become accustomed to. Sure for all I got from that forecast I would have been as well going out and asking the dog what he thinks. I may as well toss a coin to decide when to mow now.”

“Just rewind it Dad,” Clodagh, the six-year-old apple of Jim’s eye, suggested innocently.

“I can’t rewind it, silly billy,” Jim said, softening a little. “It wasn’t a recording, it was today’s weather.”

“That doesn’t matter, you can rewind it. You can even go right back to the beginning of it if you like,” Clodagh insisted, skipping over to the collection of remotes on the coffee table and taking control of them with all the confidence of her young years.

A few button presses later, and Evelyn was once more bidding Jim a good afternoon and thanking him for joining her for the forecast.

An old dog, Jim had as much chance of learning how to time travel back to the start of the forecast himself as he had of figuring out how to do what his little girl had just done.

“Turns out you’re worth your salt after all,” Jim smiled, ruffling Clodagh’s hair. “Give me a hand with the herding and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d worked your way up to an ice-cream after dinner.”

Week 1.2 Restart - Andrew

I always buy runners. 

Then I have a stake in the game - I don't want to be that guy who bought runners and never runs. I run for a few weeks - months if i'm lucky. 5k in 30 mins, and I love it. I feel great. I'm happy, proud, and positive. Then i miss one. I have to travel for work, I miss a couple, and then I'm not running. 

I start to track my food in myfitnesspal. I do well until i'm in a routine, then I travel, or have a birthday, or get a cold, or some other excuse. Most recently, it was fox's classics. They put fox's classics beside our kettle in work. Have you had one recently? After avoiding sugar for six weeks, the crunchy biscuit is like a sparkler in your mouth, the creamy filling like a velvet blanket. 

I haven't restarted. I haven't bought runners, and I amn't logging in myfitnesspal. 

I bought a synthesiser, and i've started to record with the band. We're picking thing a week back up, but I know none of them are the problem. 

The problem requires a serious restart. 

Week 42 - Andrew - Debate

Let me present the case in defense of an aspect of my life few people understand, and a scheme I have been undertaking for some time now. 

Every day, I wear black socks. Marks and Spencer, size 9 black socks. I don't have special socks for special occasions, I don't have dressy socks, I don't have casual socks. 

We don't have a tumble drier, and we have to hang the socks out to dry. this is a fiddly job, and I hate it. I also hate pairing socks. It is an annoying job, with little return for time spent. 

My wife is an extremely kind woman, and she sometimes washes my clothes - she has complained about how difficult it is to pair identical black socks. 

Now, I love my wife, and I want to spare her from difficult jobs. 

These were the pieces in play before I began my scheme. 

If you assume that all black socks are identical (which, given how difficult they are to pair, would seem true), then there is no need to pair socks. Any black M&S sock will go with any other M&S sock. 

I've heard complaints here, people who say they can't wear socks if they know they came from seperate pairs. To those people, I say - the time you spend thinking about socks, I spend productively reading articles about old engines on the internet. Who is winning now? 

So now, I have a drawer with un-paired black socks. So far, so productive, and Aoife's job is easier. There is, however, another barrier to a happy life - washing and drying all these socks. 

I'm a hygenic enough man, and I like to wear fresh socks every day. That's fourteen socks to be washed a week! Every week, for the rest of my life, I have to wash fourteen socks. It's enough to take up regular heroin use. 

This is why, for a period of time last year, I didn't wash socks. I bought socks. My target was to buy 90 pairs of socks. What a waste of money, right? 

Wait - If you assume that a normal pair of socks wears out after a year's wear - that's 52 wears, if you have seven pairs of socks. oof - heavy work on that poor sock. With my system though, it would take thirteen years to get to fifty two wears of a pair of socks! Imagine not having to buy socks for thirteen years! 

There's also the question of washing socks - That weekly chore? One big wash every three months. Granted it's a bigger job, but it's less annoying than a constant grind. 

This point of view is somehow controversial. I always try to maintain a balanced view on the world. If I feel strongly about something, I will try to empathise with those who feel the opposite. This helps me to moderate my views. 

In this case, however, I cannot see how moderation is called for - 90 pairs of socks. Buy socks once every thirteen years, wash socks every three months. 

You know I'm right. 

Week 42 - Laura - debate

To get a fringe or not? It really is one of the great debates of our time. Or maybe just my time. As in my time right now. Today. This minute.

I’ve finally broken up with Mark, and I’m determined to rubberstamp my decision with a brand new hairstyle. Sure, it’s clichéd, but it’s effective. And even though I’m pretty sure it’ll end in disaster, I’m thinking of a fringe.

The funny thing is every girl who gets a fringe knows she’s going to end up hating it. She just doesn’t know when. Maybe she’ll love it for a couple of years. Maybe she’ll get sick of it in a month. That’s the magic, and the mystery, of a fringe. Much like the magic and the mystery of Mark, now that I think about it.

I suppose, technically, it’s not the fringe you end up hating. It’s the thing the fringe becomes when you decide to grow it out.

Fringes seem to need trimming every twenty minutes or so. Weirdly though, it takes about a hundred years for a fringe to grow out. And in the meantime you’re stuck with in-between-y strands of hair that are neither short nor long and are only good for looking crap.

“So, what’s it to be?,” my new stylist asks as she eyeballs me in the mirror, scissors at the ready. I swear she's laughing at me. Probably because she knows the internal argument I've been having with myself for the past five minutes word for word. And she knows how it ends too.

Feck it, for better or worse, I’m doing it!

Week 41 - Andrew - Dinner last Friday

Lunch

The day was bright and blue. As we passed over the Samuel Beckett bridge, I picked out the sunlight on the water. It is that memory I will take with me when I no longer work here. The taxi driver was giving me feedback on my directions. I could save myself money by taking a different route.

'If he stops talking' I thought 'I can save money by not vomiting on his taxi'.

I had been drinking, and heavily. There was prosecco, and cocktails, and whiskey, and vodka - straight, and a bottle of cider. and some champagne and lots of all of it. There wasn't much food, and even less thought as to how I would manage to survive.

The office was quiet with people, but loud otherwise. The noise was loud, even from the ground floor. The lift opened on my floor. There were maybe a hundred people there. Men and women, twenty five, thirty and forty years old.

It was eleven in the morning, and they were dancing and drinking. A sales manager had set up a PA system, and it was banging - LOUD. Two directors had set up a bar on a desk, and were racking up STRONG bloody marys in red solo cups.

I stepped backwards, and the lift doors shut, to take me away, to a toilet cubicle.

The rest of the morning passed in a sweaty montage of conversations, retching, solpadeine and Todd Terje's greatest hits.

Lunch was healing. Salty chips and hotdog sausages. We sat, the survivors, staring at each other. Asking the same questions - "Did that happen?" "Did we really see them do that?" With each second, with each grain of salt, everything became easier to handle.

Dinner

The clear day had given way to a freezing black evening.

Two hours face-down on the couch, I was surprised I couldn't see the imprint of the cushion etched red on my face. More Solpadeine fizzing through my blood, nominally curing my headache, but mostly acting as a security blanket against a harsh and unfeeling world.

Comfort was easy at dinner. Hot food, good company and clear, pure sparkling water. Soft music and easy conversation. Trust and fun, nonsense arguments and acceptance.





P.S. - Esprit de L'Escalier

People probably take drugs because they're fun.

There are probably points on the spectrum between 'no drugs are legal' and 'there is no law'. I am advocating in favour of one of these points.

People should take pride in their work, I enjoy restaurants, I have tremendous respect for the people who work there. It's just unusual to start cleaning away plates when someone at the table is still blatantly eating.

Just how many Solpadeine would I have to take for it to be an addiction? Fizzy water is massively improved by the addition of codeine.