Being Helpful

I should stop trying to be helpful in shops; it seems like most shop assistants are too obnoxious or stupid to cope with it. Saturday morning in the New Street Station branch of W.H. Smith was a case in point. By the tills was a magazine rack with glossy gossip weeklies in it, each one with a four-inch high price offer label on the bottom of the shelf proclaiming in a big yellow circle the price of “£1”. Given that OK is £1.99, this may strike a customer as a bit of a bargain, until they glance to the middle of the offer label where it says (in rather smaller writing), “Aero, aero mint [etc., you get the idea]”. Not a chocolate bar in sight, just those magazines on the shelves.

The queue was short, so I reached the tills quickly and I said to the girl on the counter, “You know, trading standards could have you for that.” Before quickly explaining what was wrong with the shelves and the price labels.

She went over to have a look and came back with a bemused and slightly patronising smile.

“You don’t really care, do you?” I said.

“Well, I didn’t put them there.”

Really? It wasn’t like it made much odds to me; I was just trying to help. But when stuff like that comes up at work, I file it under “things to tell a manager when I’ve got time”. People with this particular girl’s attitude frankly ought to be sacked from a series of jobs until they develop the ability to at least feign the air of giving a shit. I wasn’t annoyed about the chocolate labels, but I was annoyed with her by the time I left.

I get this in supermarkets a lot, too. It’s as if they can’t get their heads round the fact that I’m not making a complaint. About 6 months before they got the self-serve checkouts in the New Street Tesco, they had two banks of tills, one along each outer wall. I was in there one busy evening, and the shifts of the checkout staff had fallen in such a way that there were only workers on one bank of tills, so a queue was extending down the central shopping aisle. The queue was blocking shoppers, an obstruction that could have been entirely avoided if half of the open checkouts were on the other bank. So I collared a member of staff in the hope that I could point this out to a manager. The manager was taking a delivery, so I explained what I was driving at to the member of staff, who promptly led me to the tobacco kiosk and said to his colleague,

“Could you serve this gentleman? He’s complaining about the queues.”

Is it me?

The Rants of an Insomniac

Long-term depression is a funny beast. I feel fine, right now. I have a certain amount of energy, I can find enthusiasm for things and I’m full of hope and optimism for things to come. Perhaps there’s a certain amount of New Year spirit in that, but I could be looking at 2012 with dread and believing that it will be as horrible as 2011. And yet, despite this new optimism, according to my PHQ 9 scores I’m as bad as ever, if not at my lowest ebb. I think it’s the Black Dog fighting back. I may be beating the thought processes at the moment, but I have to struggle through the other side of some rather debilitating symptoms.

For a start, my sleep is completely to buggery at the moment. I can’t seem to sleep at night – my body, rather than my mind, just doesn’t seem to want to let me. If I lie down and close my eyes, I feel completely alert; if I try to get up, tiredness hits me like a wave. So I lie in bed trying to use sleeping techniques given to me by my former shrink, but my mind can’t quite focus on them. I may sleep for a while after spending hours doing a more efficient version of counting sheep, only to wake again after five hours with a restless feeling. A feeling like I want to move, to get up and go, to get on with the exciting new day. Only to feel like a zombie the moment I stand up.

So I drag myself through another day. I have things to do: things I want to do, things I need to do. And instead I spend the day on facebook looking for replies to my oh-so-witty (i.e. inane) comments and obsessively checking my wordpress stats. (Nevermore gets 30-40 readers per post, while Running from Nothing gets four. Am I that shit at writing fiction or am I just promoting it badly?) Why do I do this? Mostly because I seem to have an unnamed fear of starting anything. Procrastinating behaviours start rearing their ugly little heads to stop me doing things I don’t even feel any real pressure about. Why can I not just bloody get well!?

So here I am at 4 a.m. I’ve slept for an hour tonight. I slept for five last night despite deliberately dragging myself through a tired day just so I can sleep the whole night. I had a nap for five hours this afternoon – it was only meant to be for two. I was knackered all afternoon and evening and I needed to sleep, but I just bloody couldn’t. And now I’ve got to get up for work in an hour and a half. I just want to function like a normal human being again. I don’t want to be tired all the time. I don’t want to lie in bed not sleeping. I want a fucking life, dammit!

2012 Motherfuckers!

So for New Year’s Eve, I went to Eddies for my first New Year party there since the brief stint in the Gosta Green. Actually, it was my first New Year’s Eve out since 2006-7, mostly because the atmosphere in the Gosta that night was something I doubt I will ever see topped. But I was working ’til 8 on the big night this year, so I couldn’t feasibly host my own party and none of my friends seemed to be doing anything much either. In fact, one of them texted me to ask if I had a plan…

I was always going to play it by ear. I wanted to avoid Eddies for fear of tarnishing my memories of 2007, but I was torn between the familiarity of Scruffy’s (where I knew some of my friends were going) and the urge to have an adventure. Eddies seemed like a good compromise because I didn’t know who would be there. So, not having pre-booked a ticket, I went there figuring that I could always wander round town and see where I could get into if it was booked out.

And what a night it turned out to be! It wasn’t a repeat of the Gosta, but it reminded me who I am and what I am. I drank, I danced and I chatted with some old friends and even some new faces. There was nothing to tell a story out of, unfortunately for this blog, but it was one of the first times I’ve felt truly myself in quite some time. It felt good.

So if there are no misadventures to report, then what’s the point of this post? Well, I think it’s a statement of intent. The events, or non-events, of last year almost broke me. My confidence was shot, I was beginning to feel like I’d lost whatever it was that made me the king of my own personal world in the years before, and I thought I was just going to die unhealthy, unhappy, and unremembered. Now I know I’m still me. And I’m still awesome. I’m going to get a real job, that pays real wages with a real working week. I’m going to find a drummer for my band. We’re going to record music and play gigs. And by December we’ll be one of the biggest draws in Birmingham.

2011 did not happen. I want to put it behind me. In 2011 I failed a masters degree, ended up in therapy, and began to convince myself that I was losing my friends (the black dog will do this to you). Now I know who I am, I won’t let this happen again. I’m back and I’m in control. And I’m making 2012 the year of the Rob, motherfuckers!

(And the one friend that did genuinely abandon me in my hour of need has now been relegated to “people I worked with once.” She knows who she is.)

Whatever happened to Harlequin’s Kiss? (part 2)

I’d love to have given this post the subtitle “The Rise of Harlequin’s Kiss” but “The Further Setbacks of Harlequin’s Kiss” seems more appropriate.

After the guitarist and drummer mentioned last week left, Ed and I decided to regroup. We gathered all the material we knew and practised hard, getting ourselves as tight as possible and rebuilding our self-confidence in the process. It took us nearly two months before we were satisfied with our sound, and we had to spend that time because we knew from past experience that we could spend up to a year auditioning new musicians. We needed faith in ourselves to survive.

Fortunately, finding a guitarist didn’t take too long. As a long shot, I put out a call on facebook to see if anyone I knew could help. I was answered by someone I knew through a work colleague (or, more accurately, his wife answered on his behalf). I’d met André a few times before, and after we heard him play we were convinced he was the guy for us. He wrote guitar parts for stuff Ed and I had kicking around, and we made more progress in a fortnight than the previous line-up had in eight months.

Getting a drummer has turned into a sticking-point, however. We have a drum machine, courtesy of André, but machine tracks lack life. Where many guitarists seem willing to try anything, getting a drummer though the doors to even audition seems to be a battle. Even the few that replied to my ads online usually decided we weren’t the project they were looking for before they even got as far as meeting us. And as for the ads I replied to, well, they were equally a bunch of non-starters.

We did have a brief glimmer of hope over the summer, when a drummer jumping ship from her old band played with us for a few weeks. I was mildly surprised, as I didn’t think we’d be her bag musically, but we had a fairly instant rapport as a group. Unfortunately, her day job ended up scuppering things and we were back at square one.

So as things stand, we’re still plugging away in rehearsal studios. New material is on the way, demo’s may well be finished (albeit with mechanical drum tracks), and the hunt for a drummer continues apace. It would be nice to be able to guarantee a gig soon, and we may yet go on stage sometime with machine tracks just to get a bit of fresh air, but we’re just taking each day as it comes for the moment. If you’ve been following our progress, thank you very much for your patience, and we’ll come and blow your ears off just as soon as we can!

Whatever happened to Harlequin’s Kiss? (Part 1)

It’s very much a knotty question, because I think the band essentially imploded. I can only guess at motivations etc. so, giving my now former bandmates more fairness than at least one of them deserves, I’ll stick strictly to a narrative of known events.

We were always plagued by technical problems, mostly PA systems screaming at me, which left me singing at a volume where I couldn’t hear myself. Not hearing myself, I was out of key and (let’s make no bones about this) we sounded like shit. So one day, we let the drummer set the volumes of all the amps and, hey presto!, I could hear myself again. At which point our guitarist at the time decided we had to move from the Lamp Tavern’s function room to a real studio because there was too much echo in the room and he couldn’t hear himself. It took us months to finally realise that most of our issues stemmed from a particular syndrome that young guitarists have where they believe they can’t hear themselves if they’re not the loudest thing in the mix. And boy did he try everything not to have to turn down. Unfortunately, just as we had finally reached the conclusion as a band that we had to try out a lower volume, the guitarist’s college course turned out to be too much pressure, so he gave me a polite phone-call to say he couldn’t commit any more. This was late March. We’d moved from the Lamp to Carbon studios in January.

A lot had happened in between. We set ourselves targets, but every time we looked like reaching the point where we should have been gigging, said guitarist cited our poor sound as a reason not to. So we agreed new targets to try and improve ourselves and get ready to gig. Every time a new plan started coming together, the same thing would happen – the guitarist would pull the rug and we’d agree a new plan. Unfortunately, the guitarist and the drummer knew each other socially and spent enough time together that, as frustrations with not gigging began to surface, we were starting to function as two half-bands.

The split didn’t have to be acrimonious. The guitarist’s polite phone call had no hard feelings and I didn’t give him what for either. The problem came when I contacted the drummer and he told me his frustrations with not gigging, told me that he found my lyrics to be in poor taste (he’d never said anything before in the preceding eight months), and that he found my sense of humour offensive. To cap it all off, he said, “Whatever [the guitarist] has told you, he agrees with me.”

That’s a potted version. Make of it what you will.

Now we were two, and Ed and I decided to rebuild the band rather than call it quits.

This tale continues next week.

Catching Up, part 2

I suppose the next thing I need to tell you about is my course, source of woe that it turned out to be. I began an MA in Medieval History last October, and things started to go to ratshit about January. As I mentioned in a post around the time, I hadn’t written essays in a while and ended up procrastinating a bit before getting into the swing of them. In the end, though, they all came good, despite all being handed in a day or two late. Unfortunately, I never quite recovered from the chaotic fortnight I spent writing those essays.

Firstly, what little working pattern I had became disrupted. The rhythm of my academic life just plain stopped, and I never managed to get to grips with my workload again. My state of mind was declining, I was swinging between insomnia and oversleeping, and I was having trouble keeping focussed while I was reading. Finally I found myself in bed after a night out with what I had first assumed was a hangover turning into the worst migraine I’ve ever had. I lay there for two days, pretty much not moving. Every time I tried to stand, I threw up. My neck felt like it had been run over by a truck. All I could do was doze fitfully and spend hours contemplating the sheer agony I was in. This was March, and I should have taken it as a warning sign. Instead, I rolled on through the next couple of months until the second round of essays was due. I had developed a facebook addiction, mostly linked to a sense of disconnection I had from my friends and my social world. I felt like I was drifting away from everyone in my life. And this was only compounding the difficulties I was already having with studying. So another essay ended up late. And another.

When I say “late,” I finally submitted that second essay in October, when it was due in May. The reason for this is that, when it was a mere week late, I tried pulling an all-nighter to finish it and only got half-way through before having a panic attack. I ended up with a phobic reaction to any attempt at writing more, so I was only able to complete it after several weeks of therapy in September. As things stand, I have now missed an extended deadline on my dissertation, mostly because I made bad decisions while panicking. No-one seems to be able to tell me what happens next under these circumstances, so I’m writing a dissertation whose only purpose is to entertain my supervisor.

On the plus side, I managed to pull a solid pass in a Latin exam with inadequate revision, so at least I can claim my knowledge of the language is still functional…

Catching Up Part 1

It’s hard to know where to begin when I think about filling in the events of the last ten months or so. I suppose the place to start is my mental health, as all things spring from there. Although, as a culture, the British (if not the entire English-speaking world) tend to trivialise emotions, I make no bones about the fact that I suffer from depression. Day to day, it gets hard to respond to a casual “how are you?” from a work colleague or acquaintance, because my natural honesty and desire to connect with other people comes into conflict with the fact that I know telling them the truth will make them uncomfortable. Sometimes I tell people what’s really going on just as an experiment, but sometimes I do it in the knowledge that my naturally affable exterior will make it sound like I’m joking. I get to share my pain while trivialising it in a thoroughly British manner – win-win, surely?

The weird bit is that I can feel happy at times when mood-rating scales on mental health web-tools are telling me that I’m actually in a pretty bad way. A friend of mine recently flagged up a new (and controversial) theory doing the rounds in the States that suggests that bipolar disorder shouldn’t necessarily be diagnosed on the basis of outright mania. If the diagnostic tool that this theory suggests holds water, then I may be mildly bipolar and this oddity in my moods becomes less surprising.

What this has all meant for the last ten months is that I have been through periods of serious social anxiety (in the sense that I manage to convince myself that nobody really likes me), I have been unable to concentrate (e.g. reading a paragraph several times without taking it in), and I have swung between bouts of insomnia and oversleeping. For added fun, a two-day migraine, a panic attack, increased hair loss, and constant cold symptoms have all been thrown into the mix as well. I’m a mess.

Writing all this down, I can’t help but feel a sense of fear about putting this out in a public forum. I fear the accusation that I’m making it up, or that I won’t be taken seriously. The fact that I have never felt suicidal, even at my most desperate, sort of makes me think I should be dealing with my problems more easily somehow. I think it’s because I have a lingering sense of “but you don’t look ill” about it all. So all those times I want to just curl up under a table and rock back and forth are just me being childish, all those times I feel sluggish are just me being idle, and all those times I wish I felt better are just me being too much of a pussy to deal with the world.

I sometimes wonder how the police haven’t been called to my house because my neighbours have heard the screams.

I’m Back, Baby!

Well, hello there. My, it’s been a long time. So long that I’ve started quoting (or possibly misquoting; I can’t be arsed to look it up) country songs. As the title says, I am indeed back, and I’ll be blogging regularly for the foreseeable future. It may not have escaped your attention, o regular readers, that my disappearance from the blogosphere has been entirely due to time constraints. I took on too much this year and, to be blunt, I’ve suffered for it. I’ve had a nervous breakdown, been in therapy, had days off work sick, had an epic migraine (an experience I never wish to repeat), and spent months just wanting to throw it all over and live in a yurt. Some of the pressure has eased, now, and I’m back to doing something loosely resembling what I actually had planned for my life. This is progress.

So what happens now? Well, I probably owe you deeper explanations, and it’ll give me something to blog about besides, so the next few weeks will be taken up with catch-up posts telling you as much news from the past eight months as I can fit into five hundred words. I want to be a more active blogger because, ultimately, this is the only thing in my life at the moment that is trivial enough to be called a hobby. Everything else I do seems to be tied into my career aspirations one way or another.

I also have to admit a sense of guilt. I was a 20sixer. Back in 2004, before everyone and his dog was a blogger, 20six was a blogging community with users from all over the world. I never made the London meet-ups (A.K.A. Blinks) but I still felt like I was part of at least one group on there. Then the powers that be changed some of the platform without consulting the UK users and all the features that kept us together disappeared. We scattered to the four winds. I’m still in touch with one or two 20sixers, but I don’t read enough other blogs any more. The tragedy of this was driven home to me a few months ago when I was informed of the death of one of my closer comrades-in-keyboards after a battle with breast cancer. Judy/Quagga was an engaging writer and I loved her take on the world. She stopped blogging a few years ago for unknown reasons, so the email about her passing was a bit of a bolt from the blue. We’ll never rebuild what we had on 20six, but I do want to be a blogger again, not just a vanity writer using his blog as a platform. So I’m sorry if I’ve neglected you, but I’m back now, and I’ll be rebuilding my online world along with the rest of my personal world.

On the Disturbances

When something shocking happens (like the events of the last few days), it’s in our nature as human beings to try to make sense of it, to square it with our world view to make life seem more predictable again. The thing is of course, we always opt for the easy answers when things are not necessarily that simple. Try these on for size:

“…there’s a disengagement. They feel no-one at the top of society, in the government or city hall cares about them or speaks for them… This is anger and it’s disaffection.” Ken Livingstone, former (and not particularly widely missed) Mayor of London

“It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall.” Mary Riddell, Daily Telegraph columnist

I don’t think that this is just left-wing drum-beating. Nothing like this has really happened before in this country. Ever. Let us not forget that the disorder we’ve seen in London and elsewhere these last few days cannot be dignified with the term “riot”. This is not civil unrest, this is not violence against institutions, this is a very sudden outbreak of aggravated burglaries. So, trying to fit this situation into a frame of reference, some pundits are comparing this situation to the easy context of the 1980s race riots. It’s a simple answer and it means we can fit these events into our world view without the trauma of having to adjust it.

Of course, the fact that this began with the shooting of Mark Duggan has muddied the waters. There was a protest. And then there was a riot. But somewhere in the middle of that, people realised that the police, in being cagey about blowing up a tense situation and not coming down too hard on the rioters, were not really doing anything to stop the looting either. And when certain people in other cities realised that the police were powerless to stop the looting in London, they began their own little looting sprees as well. It’s an easy narrative to follow, but the question remains as to why this has happened. Let’s face it, there’s always an awful lot of opportunity to commit crimes, but it’s unheard of for people to begin doing it en masse like this.

Have a listen to this:

“That’s what it’s about: showing the police that we can do what we want.” Two girls speaking to the BBC’s Leana Hosea on Tuesday morning. (I think we can safely ignore the bit where the young lady here says, “It’s the government’s fault. I dunno. Yeah, the Conservatives, whoever it is,” as an attempt to clutch at straws for justification.)

The bit that interests me here is that in these girls’ minds the whole shebang is about showing that they can do what they want. It reminds me of a report I read somewhere about a decade ago where a policeman told the journalist that it was a typical response of criminal children to say, “what you gonna do about it copper? I’m underage.” This was back when the UK’s statutory age of criminal responsibility was still 15. It strikes me that there’s an arrogance to a lot of young criminals; not so much a belief that what they’re doing is right as a failure to even question that what they’re doing might be wrong.

Take a look at this:

In this video, an injured young man in the middle of the disturbances is helped up then robbed.

Just look at the body language of the guy who takes the item out of the victim’s bag. That’s not furtive behaviour, nor even particularly aggressive – it’s the confident motion of a man who thinks he has every right to take the contents of someone else’s rucksack.

What I’m trying to say is this: this is a social problem. Not the social problem of a response to deprivation as the left-wing drum-bangers say. Heck, these kids were co-ordinating themselves with blackberries. Nor is it the simple lack of discipline and toothless policing that the right-wing drum-bangers would have us believe either. The perception that spending cuts have already effected the police and that they would be unable to respond has been a catalyst, no doubt, but this is all indicative of a state of mind. It’s consumer goods that are being robbed. The small businesses that have been targeted have come as a result of simple lack of feeling for those being hurt, in some cases, or, in the case of higher end businesses like that furniture shop in Croydon, resentment that anyone’s got more than the looters. And I’m sorry to say this, but I think this attitude to life has been about thirty years in the making and we’re not going to fix it overnight.

Doctor Who – The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon

I have to say, sometimes I find the pace of the new Doctor Who episodes a bit too frenetic. The thing with drama is that you need to take the time to develop tension, let new information sink in and let the audience develop a response to what is actually happening on screen. This season’s opening two-parter is a case in point. It had the feel of dominoes being set up for later in the season, and, as such, was very clever in places, but it would have been a lot better if it were spread over three episodes. Instead, a lot of information was dumped in our laps while the Doctor, Amy, Rory, and River blazed around the screen like mad things seemingly without pausing for breath.

Chiefly, what marred these two episodes was the info-dumping. I re-watched them both on iPlayer shortly after their first broadcast and the pacing seemed better on the second viewing – which gives me the suspicion that the mad pace was simply my perception as a result of the information overload. I suppose a non sci-fi fan, the kind of viewer that doesn’t try to put the pieces together and second-guess the story arc, would have simply found “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” to be merely an enjoyably complex thriller. Personally, my first viewing left me cold.

All that said, Steven Moffat made ingeniously economical use of time in his script. The revelation of the Doctor’s plan following what seems like his companions being on the run from the FBI is a brilliant use of the gap between the two episodes, and does create some dramatic tension from the bewildering plotting of the story. Likewise, the Silence are one of the creepiest concepts ever devised in the series. Where the best monsters have been the ones that make you afraid of everyday objects, now we can contend with the fact that there always might be something there and we would never know. The make-up and modelling on the creatures also helped to make them terrifying. Furthermore, “The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon” was a good story for attention-grabbing. The scale of it was epic and gave the series the feel of hitting the ground running, leaving a sense that it was a jumping-off point rather than the beginning of a slow build-up.

I’m not quite sure what to say as a final assessment of this two-parter. I couldn’t call it bad by any means. It was very clever, set up a lot of interest for the viewer regarding the rest of the season, was action-packed, and had a good sense of mystery to it. Maybe the problem is, on sheer technical details, that it was too good. Too much went into it, not leaving enough time to let the story sink in.