On Sleep

If I found lamp – you know, one of those ancient, traditional oil lamps that looks suspiciously like a gravy boat – and if on my trying to clean it I accidentally released a genie, I would have only one wish. I wish I could sleep.

That’s not to say I’m biologically incapable of sleeping or that I’m so badly sleep-deprived as to be having waking dreams, but I am typing this with my vision obscured by an eyelid vibrating with fatigue. Unfortunately, I seem to have found myself trapped in a nine-to-five world where I have to be up at seven in the morning to stand a cat in hell’s chance of being at work on time. Although I function a lot better on a bad night’s sleep than many people, if I don’t get enough sleep of a night I get scatterbrained, irritable and uncoordinated, and spend the whole day feeling like I want to cry. This feeling dominates my working week.

Some simplistic people have said to me, “Go to bed earlier.” Oh, how I wish my body clock worked like that. The fact is that I find it damn near impossible to get to sleep before eleven, and some nights my various anxieties and neuroses leave me lying awake for hours once I’ve gone to bed. Unfortunately, a lot of those anxieties stem from fear of sleep itself. When I was a teenager, I had a functional sleep pattern destroyed because my dad decided I had to be out of bed early every morning including Sunday, which was the day I caught up with the sleep I missed midweek. Unfortunately, I couldn’t adapt to sleeping more midweek at the time and thus didn’t get more than a handful of proper nights’ sleep in a four-year period. Then I started work in a cinema and spent a further four years on night shifts.

It doesn’t help my sense of stress about sleep that my current job has me working alongside old-fashioned, working-class types. The prevailing school of thought back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth is that the only healthy way of life is to get up at four in the morning. You see, getting up early is the only demonstration of a true work ethic.

So here I sit, dizzy and sick with eyeballs that feel like they’re about to explode, wishing I could just let go of all the anxieties that keep me awake and wishing that people who don’t know what they’re talking about would stop giving me bad advice. I did see a doctor about all this, but the pills he gave me paralysed my body without actually putting me to sleep. Evidently, the solution is to try and learn to relax so that I can at least get to sleep soon after going to bed. But then, I wonder if it might be easier just to go back to a night-shift job…

Bad Decisions

Sometimes I make bad decisions. Sometimes I suffer the consequences of those decisions for several days afterwards. And sometimes those decisions are compounded with enough coincidental bad luck to bring everything crashing down around my ears.

On Friday, I went out to Solihull for a friend’s birthday. I’m living close to the breadline at the moment, so going out isn’t a sensible thing for me to do right now, but I don’t see this particular friend very often. This was the logic behind my trip out to Solihull and this was the logic behind my caving in to the badgering that I follow the party on to Snobs. I drank far too much of the cheap house whiskey and grabbed a taxi home, emptying my bedroom bin for the inevitable hangover the next morning and falling gratefully into bed. There was somebody due in the early afternoon to do the annual gas safety check, but I reckoned I’d get enough sleep to be functioning when he came.

At half past ten on Saturday morning, things started to go badly wrong. I was woken up by the door bell and found my landlord on the door step. He had come with some men to sort out the tree in the middle of my lawn, the one that’s been in desperate need of a trim for more than two years. Too badly hung over to even consider the implications, I went back to bed. All I wanted was sleep, but that comfort was denied to me by the worst round of hung-over vomiting I’ve ever indulged in. My whole torso was convulsing in an attempt to squeeze bile out of my overworked gall bladder. Normally, I slumber and doze through hangovers but I was forced to suffer ever agonising minute of this one fully conscious.

The gas man came, and I had to get up again to let him in. As I saw him out of the door, one of the landlord’s men accosted me and said that they’d dealt with the tree and were moving on to the rest of the garden. I said it wasn’t necessary. He said they would cut things back and I could take it from there. If it was sunny next weekend, they would be back to finish off. I gave up and went back to bed.

It was nine in the evening by the time I was strong enough to even keep water down. I had rehydrated myself over the course of the afternoon by rinsing my mouth without swallowing. I eventually ate then slept the night, and on Sunday morning I dragged myself into the garden to survey the work. The scene of devastation that greeted me made my heart sink. The landlord’s men had cut indiscriminately into the garden and left the lawn strewn with debris. It took me most of Sunday afternoon to clear up after them. And now it’s going to take all my effort to keep them from carrying out their threat to come back…

On Times and Seasons

Have you ever felt that the world makes no sense? I often do. Even the change of the seasons seems to follow no particular rhyme or reason these days. In the last few years, I’ve found myself wondering why it always seemed so warm in February when Spring doesn’t officially begin until 21st March (at least as far as the calendar is concerned). Or, for that matter, why the leaves start dropping off the trees in August, why November is so cold and why I get my worst sunburn in May. Then one day a lecturer in Old English told me that the Celts considered February a Spring month, and the penny dropped.

Here comes the history lesson. The calendar we and most of the Western world use is based on the ancient Roman calendar, with a few days added to pad out the year. This is as good a calendar as any in most respects, especially when you live in the Mediterranean climate. The problem comes with British weather, and probably Northern European weather in general. Summer, according to the Gregorian Calendar, begins on the Summer Solstice: i.e. the longest day of the year. Yet we call that day Midsummer. When you consider that the hot weather sets in a week or two into May, suddenly it makes sense that a solstice three weeks into June is the midpoint of the season rather than the beginning. And if you extrapolate from that, making the arbitrary season starts marked on the calendar the midpoints instead, you get Spring beginning in February, Winter beginning in November and Autumn beginning in August.

And it’s no coincidence that these dates coincide with pagan festivals such as Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain. Furthermore, some flammable bonfire night traditions have little to do with Guy Fawkes and friends – they are pagan Winter rituals given a secular context as the centuries passed.

Thinking in these terms has actually helped my personal world make a little more sense this year. We had that last gasp of snow at the beginning of February before Spring kicked in with weak sunshine and daffodils, May was probably the most consistent patch of Summer sun we had, August is when the insects reach the reproductive part of their year and the corn harvest begins, and November’s grey and dismal nature falls sensibly into Winter where it belongs. I hate Autumn less as a season now that more of it is taken up with colourful trees and less of it with icy rain.

Does it matter? I suppose it doesn’t and that this is just a rant from a history buff with too much time on his hands. Most of us being urbanites in this day and age, we’re very used to ignoring things like stars and the weather, and we’ll happily accept being told what the season is by an arbitrary calendar. Personally, I enjoy being out in the garden too much to have my Autumn spoiled by a month like November…

The Triumphant Return

What with my having appeared back on the internet out of the blue last week, I suppose I should give an account of what I’ve been doing since February. Besides buying jackets, I mean.

It’s more doom and gloom, I’m afraid. The recession has bitten us all one way or another, and I’m in the unenviable position of merely scraping a living while I wait for a bullet from above. My job could, in theory, be terminated any day now and my job-hunting prospects don’t look particularly rosy. The best way I can put it in perspective is the cover of every Thursday’s Birmingham Mail. On the header bar is the advert for the weekly Jobs pull-out, claiming the vast number of vacancies advertised in there. A mere two years ago the Mail would advertise “1000+ Jobs” weekly. Now it frequently dips as low as “250+”.

Last week, I decided to start taking my half-hearted job hunt of the last six months seriously. I booked a day off work to have a trek round town and badger the employment agencies, and it was a weird experience. Wages are way down, for a start – some places aren’t advertising anything that pays more than £7.00 per hour. Furthermore, I was told by one high street agency that the six-month gap in my CV means that they are unlikely to be able to get me anything at all. Where this became bizarre was later in the afternoon, when I knocked on the security-sealed door of an international recruitment agency on spec. A little joke with the consultant who answered and I was let in for a rushed chat with somebody five minutes before they went into a meeting. The result of this chat was that they had a potential vacancy coming up that they think I might be very suited to. So, apparently, I’m not good enough for the high street small fry, but the bigger players are all over me…

The reason it has taken me so long to get this far is a construct of my own psychology. Up until very recently, I was coasting along in a rut. I had a grand plan that involved a career path and would mostly result in my making money. I even opened a savings account (how grown up…). Then one day I realised that I didn’t know what I was doing it for. Voices at the back of my head were saying things about supporting a family, but I don’t even have a girlfriend. And this is why I had a six-month break from blogging: I’ve been a while deciding what I want to do. The current job search comes from the need for money to help the grand plan, but now the grand plan isn’t just to make money. And the new grand plan actually involves me blogging, so you can plan on hearing from me more frequently for a while.

The End of an Era

It’s the end of an era. This week, I finally parted company with a loyal friend after nearly eight years together. I have finally bought myself a new leather jacket.

No, that’s not a metaphor. My first jacket was a present from my mum when I was fifteen. I was just about to start that obligatory fortnight of work experience and I was doing my time in a local primary school. Kids being kids, the first question I got asked when the reception students I was assisting saw me wander across the playground in it was, “Do you have a motorbike?”

I still don’t have a motorbike.

I lived in that jacket – some of my friends wondered how on Earth I managed to walk the streets of Cambridge in black leather in the middle of July. It was just what I did. In many ways that jacket was part of me. I wore it every day during my last year of secondary school, it accompanied me through the rough ride that was sixth form, and it was my coat of choice through my gap year and university. Even when the lining was coming apart and all the pockets had huge holes in, I still wore that jacket to work most days. It was with me at my first gig. I wore it to many more since and countless nights out. It’s had beer and cider spilt on it, been vomited on twice (by other people), been used as a pillow and been used as a blanket on many occasions. I’ve even had sex on it.

It was a Topshop jacket. High fashion, not high quality. The polyester netting that passed for a lining started coming apart year ago. The colour faded out of the sleeves, giving it a battered look, and eventually the cuffs wore through. Finally, the zip came off one of the cuffs and the front zip came off in my hand one day soon afterwards. Two years ago, my mum had given me an IOU for my twenty-first birthday for a new leather jacket. It was time to cash it in.

I went on a bit of a browse and saw a jacket I liked in a shop in the Palisades shopping centre in Birmingham. I bought it the next day. Being a landmark birthday present and a present from my mum, it still feels special. But after seven years of adventures, I don’t have the same affection for it as I did for the old one. It’s been on its inaugural night out, at least, but it has yet to be christened the way the last one has. Meanwhile, my first jacket is wrapped carefully in a bag and stored in a cupboard. Battered beyond use though it is, I can’t quite bear to let it go.

Medical Notes

I went to the doctor’s the other week. It seems a strange thing to be writing, given that I never saw the inside of a doctor’s office for three years at one point. My health was just as crappy then; I just never bothered taking any of my ailments to get sorted. In my third year at university, I had to actually take some notice of my collapsing health (don’t worry, I’m nowhere near death’s door yet) and found myself registering at the university’s medical practice. I’ve been in and out of doctors’ offices ever since.

These days, I go to a practice that’s been in the same building for about a century. It used to be a nice little country practice, until Birmingham swallowed the area into a suburb. It’s still a nice atmosphere to be treated in and still has the feel of a traditional practice. To be frank, I find modern general practice buildings to be a bit sterile – in the bad sense. I like to relax in nice surroundings when I’m ill – I can do without the featureless, beech-trimmed corridors that are fashionable in public buildings now.

Anyway, I knew what was wrong with me last week. It’s wrong to self-diagnose, but I’ve taken the same symptoms to doctors a few times and they’ve voiced their suspicions; they’ve just never investigated and made certain. So I brought my ailment in one final time, wanting a proper diagnosis and knowing what was required to make it. So I marched into the office and demanded that the doctor stick a finger up my bottom.

Actually, that’s an exaggeration. I gave him the list of symptoms and he suggested the same thing everyone else has before prescribing me some medicine and telling me that he might need to take a look up there at a later date.

“I’ve had this for several years now,” I said. “I was hoping you’d take a look now.”

“Well, if you’re mentally prepared, I’ll do it,” he said. “Do you want a chaperone?”

It saddens me that our society knee-jerks so much to isolated incidents that our sense of trust in professionals is undermined like this. I’d only just met him but, so far as I’m concerned, a doctor is a doctor. So, as requested, I removed the bottom half of my clothing and lay on the couch with my knees against my chest while he donned the glove and lubricant.

As I lay in the foetal position, naked from the waist down, one thought crossed my mind. Where is this chaperone supposed to come from? I’d come alone, so it wouldn’t be anyone I know. It would very probably be another member of staff at the practice. Which begs the question as to why the system assumes that I might feel more comfortable with a complete stranger who has nothing to contribute to the proceedings watching me lie in this undignified position with a doctor’s hand up my arse…

Doctor Who – The Next Doctor

I have to admit to having been a little worried about this year’s run of specials. I can see the logic of doing them, of course. For one thing, the star of the show is having a break to do something else for the year. It means that BBC Wales can recapture some of the freshness of the first series and blow off a few preconceptions – this can only be helpful to an entirely new team of writers and producers. And having a series of specials rather than a wholesale gap year means that the show stays in the public consciousness.

However, there is a downside. Personally, I’ve never liked Russell T. Davies’ writing style. He does some good dialogue, but he writes by set-pieces and the internal logic of his scripts often visibly breaks at the seams. I hate having my intelligence as a viewer insulted and Davies does it a lot. Furthermore, his Christmas specials have had a tendency to be silly romps, where Doctor Who works best when the drama and humour are balanced.

From that point of view, The Next Doctor was a pleasant surprise. The title was a genius piece of intrigue, teasing us with what may or may not be glimpse of the future, and that concept was dealt with very well. The cybermen were handled brilliantly, even though the whole “cyberking” bit was a touch strange, and the episode worked well both as sci-fi drama and Christmas fun.

David Morrissey’s portrayal of the alternative Doctor sold the sub-plot well, and the revelations about his past were well-handled and supported a good story, illustrating the evil of the cybermen without resorting to excesses of violence. Overall, the story worked very well and was a well-presented episode of Doctor Who.

If it were in the middle of a season, though, The Next Doctor would not be a stand-out highlight. The final conflict was visually impressive, but had the spell broken by another of Davies’ internal logic failures: why did the giant cyberman thing disintegrate? No discernable reason outside of the convenience of tying up a giant robot in 1850s London as a loose end. Furthermore, Jackson Lake was the only really well-rounded character. Miss Hartigan’s character motivation wasn’t as clever or insightful an exploration of Victorian gender relations as the smugness of the script suggested Davies thought it was; she was just another megalomaniac villain. Overall, there wasn’t anything fantastically engaging or life-affirming about The Next Doctor. I wouldn’t call it a damp squib, but I wouldn’t call it a classic either.

If this episode is indicative of the specials to come, I think we can expect them to keep the ball rolling. Four extended specials will keep people watching, but the first was something of an average episode and I can’t see a reason to expect more from the rest. It feels like the show is treading water waiting for the next season, but I’m happy to tread water along with it.

Delayed Reaction

It’s been over a fortnight since the announcement was made, now. Eighteen days and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Matt Smith is going to be the eleventh Doctor Who.

It was odd watching the build-up to the announcement. For one thing, I was surprised by David Tennant’s declaration that he wouldn’t be in a new season; I was expecting another surprise regeneration. The thing is, Tennant leaving changes everything. Russell T. Davies, Phil Collinson and Julie Gardner, the executive producers, have all bowed out of the series to leave a new creative team in charge. There isn’t a hanging companion character between series either, so having a new Doctor on board means that Doctor Who is not going to be the same show as the one that ended so spectacularly last June. This, to my mind, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given who the new production team are. It’s sad, though, because David Tennant was very good as the Doctor.

Obviously, there was going to be media speculation about the new Doctor. The usual lists from William Hill and Ladbrokes were trotted out and the usual speculations about a female Doctor were made (as they have been for nearly thirty years). Still, I was expecting the speculation to go on for a while – it was odd to watch it cut short suddenly by an early announcement. To put this in perspective: Doctor Who has begun its run around Easter since 2005. This means we’ve been told the big news fifteen months before we see the new Doctor on our screens. I suspect that this is to get us used to the idea of the new guy so the sudden change of style next year isn’t quite such a shock to the system.

Then there it was. A lengthy introduction and discussion, new faces appearing on the screen with the name captions catching up a few seconds later. I’d never seen Piers Wenger’s face before, so it was with curiosity that I first looked at Matt Smith as he appeared on screen. There was no drum roll or fanfare; he just appeared in the middle of a discussion about the new Doctor. The youngest actor to be given the roll, and a lot younger than Steven Moffat ever intended. I must admit to having doubts when I first saw his face. And then he spoke. There’s something about his mannerisms and the way he talks that made me see what the production team probably saw in him. Yes, this man is the Doctor, and the right Doctor, too.

On Superstition

In many ways, I am a superstitious person. I take a bit of a Sliding Doors attitude to life, considering that the butterfly effect can turn the smallest decisions into events with wider-ranging consequences. Small things like the kind of breakfast cereal you have in the morning can effect your mood in tiny ways that effect your decisions later in the day. What colour shirt you’re wearing can affect other people’s moods around you and how they respond to you. The list of trivial effects your decisions have on the world is endless and, therefore, not worth thinking about. But I do. I could so easily paralyse myself with indecision and drive myself mad with thoughts of differing consequences I can’t even predict. So I only buy one kind of cereal, for a start…

The way I get around this little neurosis is to make a habit of going with my gut. In a world of subtle fates, I assume a certain amount of fatalism and just make the decision that feels right at the time – it gives me the comfort zone of assuming that the consequences of my actions are Meant to Be. This doesn’t stop me being superstitious, but it keeps me out of the mental asylum.

Recently, I replaced all my underwear. I hadn’t bought new underpants in a couple of years, so I figured that it was time to buy some. Some of the one I bought were black, some were blue, and some had patterns on them. Underwear isn’t a big deal most of the time, unless, of course, you have a habit of driving yourself crackers with trivialities.

One night, I was going on a night out and was getting ready for the occasion. I had a strange instinct to wear a black pair of underpants with little white designs on them that kind of made them look star-spangled. Thinking this was silly, I actually put on a plain black pair. I had a bit of an odd night and came home late, drunk and with a feeling of dissatisfaction. So the next time I went clubbing, I wore the star-spangled y-fronts…

I made some bad decisions that night, the result of which was that I ended up on the wrong side of Brum and didn’t get home until eight on Sunday morning. I had things to do that day, but I was in no fit state, so the day went to the wall. Two weeks later I wore those same pants out again and got so drunk I lost another day to one of the worst hangovers I ever had. Yes, I’m superstitious, and underpants have nothing to do with decision-making or self control, but I’ve still never worn those underpants on a Saturday night since.

Goodbye 2008

So I’m stuffed full of plum pudding and have drank so much brandy I may well ignite if you light a match too close. The mark of a good Christmas. The festive season is nearly over, as is the year, and I’d like to take this opportunity to look back at the year through a Nevermore-shaped lens. It’s been a roller-coaster year, what with that period of unemployment in the middle, and I’ve come out with a better sense of direction than I had before. I hope 2008 has been good for you, too.

In the same format as last time, I present below the first sentence of each month:

January

Sorry I’ve been away for most of the month, life’s caught up with me a little and a lot of people have wanted my attention this month.

A bit of a personal opening to the year. I’m sure I developed a policy of not writing so much about my private life before I made this post. Maybe I’m wrong. What’s notable here is how quickly this vague set of New Years Resolutions got broken. That fiction project on Vox still hasn’t emerged, for example…

February

I didn’t post anything this month. This was the month I finally quit my job in the cinema after about four years of service at various sites in the company. At the time, I was working two jobs – a day job in finance and the cinema in the evening. January and February are so bare of posts due to sheer lack of time.

March

Well, I’m sorry for vanishing off the face of the Earth for the best part of a month.

March was also a bare month. It was also the month I left my main job – two days after the final post. I was under stress from my job, seeing a psychiatrist and trying to find a way to cure my damned insomnia. It turned out the answer to everything was the dole. Who knew?

April

Sorry I’ve been away for so long.

This was the only post. A late Doctor Who review. By the skin of my teeth, I managed to review the whole series this year. And, yes, there will be a review of the Christmas special.

May

Quite simply, this is the kind of episode I watch Doctor Who for.

The month began with another review. This was the month where I made the best decision of my computing life – ditching Windows in a fit of pique and going over to Linux. I didn’t make many “real” posts that month. Still recovering from my last job and hunting for a new one in the meantime, my main motivator for writing was my personal reviewing challenge.

June

I turned my back for a few days this week only to discover I’m another year older.

The month of anger. I had a bit too much time to think, by the looks of things. The results were good, though – I’m quite pleased with the political and philosophical rants that resulted.

July

With less than five hours to go before the grand finale, I just want to get my two cents into the public domain.

More Doctor Who. I’d apologise, but the reviews bring more hits to Nevermore than any of my other posts. There was only one general post for this month, and I fell silent after the 10th. This was because my money was running out so my job hunt became desperate. I wrote nothing – not even a sentence of my novel – for nearly two months.

September

Hey! I’m back! Did you miss me?

I briefly broke my silence for a whinge here. By the end of the month, I had a job. For two weeks. Fortunately, this broke the ice and got me into my current, long-term role.

October

So here it is: the end of an era.

Fatigue has crippled my writing. I have an 8 o’clock start on the far side of the city and I’m not a morning person. In fact, my body doesn’t really like to sleep before midnight. I’m working on it.

December

What happened to November?

This post was really a reminder that I’m still alive. Due to not being able to focus properly, I’ve not got much work done for Nevermore. My novel, on the other hand, is coming on a lot better. Hopefully, I can get things sorted so that 2009 is much more productive both on the blogging front and the fiction front.

So there it went. 2008. I think I’ve learned a lot about dealing with life through what was a bit of a rough year. And now I’m bouncing back stronger than ever before. Have a good 2009, everyone. Mine’s going to be awesome….