Where I am

After almost two years in Denmark, have I learnt anything?

Difficult to say, but I’ll give it a go:

• Cycling to work, instead of suppurating in a criminally overcrowded and festering train carriage, is infinitely preferable.

• ‘Going out’ doesn’t necessarily mean drinking yourself into a stupor. But I still do it anyway.

• Creativity is a key element of happiness.

• Laughter is always the best medicine. Closely followed by Fisherman’s.

• Love comes and goes, and life is complicated wherever you are.

• But there is something which goes beyond love, and usually lasts longer. When you find it, don’t let it go. It’s unique to you.

• Autumn walks with people you love and/or cherish should be savoured. Especially when followed by tea and cakes and cuddling up on sofas in candlelit rooms.

• Trying to understand all of this, or striving too hard to reach goals that are usually artificially concocted, won’t get you anywhere.

•  If you can be light, and still easily carry the weight of your past, and yet shed it at your leisure, you will be closer to wherever you’re headed.

• Believe in yourself.

• Always build snowmen, run through piles of leaves, roll down hills, and also try and climb trees.

• Sitting outside a cafe with a blanket over your knees doesn’t mean you’re old. Or gay. But it might be a little bit twee.

• Thinking you’ve arrived is usually a sure sign of the opposite.

• Drinking champagne in the afternoon probably isn’t a good idea when you have access to a keyboard and a blog.

This shithole island

I have come back to England for the weekend. It’s the first time I’ve been here since February.

It’s a terrible thing to fall irrevocably out of love with your country.

There is a gnawing misery and hopeless discontent tearing through the ether here; so many people I have talked to this weekend seem consumed by material concerns.

Many are mortgaged up to their eyeballs, and those who aren’t seem weighed down by what they see as a failure on their part to not yet be owning a property.

This is all going to come crashing down.

Trust

Trust is not something I have given a lot of thought to in my life.

But recent events have forced me into some prolonged ruminations.

I think I am quite a trusting person, some might even say naive.

I tend towards the gullible, not seeing any obvious reason for people to lie, exaggerate, or deceive.

As a rule, I trust my friends and family to have my best interests at heart, I trust partners to be faithful and honest, I trust shopkeepers not to rip me off, and I trust my government to do its best for the welfare of my fellow citizens (there’s some naivete right there!).

And trust is a two-way contract. My friends no doubt expect me to look out for them, my family quite rightly expect that I will always do my best to love and care for them.

But what happens when trust breaks down? When a previously harmonious relationship, marked by seemingly mutual trust, is sullied by the failure of one party to honour their half of the contract?

Well, my reaction can be measured in stages: anger, an eruption of cynicism, and now sadness.

I hope this situation can be resolved, that trust can be restored. We’ll see, I guess. For now, I am looking at this as a learning curve. I always knew that people have an extraordinary capacity for deviousness. I just wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of it.

Looking for gold

I got a call from a guy I vaguely know yesterday. He’s more a friend of a friend but he’s a nice chap, and very funny.

He had been out all night and had found his way to Bloomsday’s, my favourite bar in the city, and got my number from the bartender.

Anyway, he asked what I was doing (nothing) and said I should come down. I told him I’d be there in half an hour.

We started talking about things and he told me he’d just broken up with his girlfriend because she had found out he had cheated on her. He met a girl while he was on holiday in Turkey and met her again back in Copenhagen. But it turned out that her friend was a friend of his actual girlfriend’s.

He was swiftly rumbled.

And now he is regretful.

“Next time I’m going to a be a good guy,” he told me.

He asked if I was seeing anyone and the bartender’s laugh was the answer.

I smiled and said that I was ploughing a single furrow and that was fine for now. He said I should be looking, and dating, and sleeping with as many girls as I could.

The barman laughed again!

My new friend said that if you wanted to find gold, you have to go prospecting. “You’re not going to wake up and find a gold nugget under your pillow one morning.”

I said I’d always believed that these things happen when you least expect.

“Most of the gold prospectors who moved to California in the goldrush found barely enough to live on,” I argued.

“But at least they tried,” was his response.

The problem is I found a whole heap of gold once. And let it slip through the sieve.

Poem part 2

I wrote a while ago about the time I put a poem under the pillow of a girl I liked.

I ended the story with me bottling the situation when she told me that she’d hoped the poem was from me.

Well, the truth is I denied writing the poem but later that evening we went for a walk and I said that even though I had not written the poem, I wish I had done.

We kissed. Under a blossoming tree, on a hot summer’s day. So long, long ago.

I don’t care I like you

We make a lot of mistakes, we do things we probably shouldn’t do, everything is imperfect.

The best times I’ve had are doing things I shouldn’t do, in fact they’re the most perfect. And they’re probably mistakes.

But i’d make them again.

And then i’d regret them again.

And then someone would say something profound when you’re out having a drink and you’d evaluate your life so far in light of that illuminating sentence and you’d have an epiphany and realise that you have nothing going for you and that your life is a sham.

And then biking home the air would rush through your hair, the sky would turn cerise to aubergine… and you wouldn’t care anymore that for weeks you’d woken up in pain, lamenting the chasm you’d opened in your own heart… and there would be nothing to do but admit you’d made a mistake and that you were not perfect, and nothing was, and never would be…

4×4 vs bike

I just conducted an interesting experiment.

The idea popped into my head as I rode to meet a friend after work – who would win in a collision between a 4×4 all-terrain off-road vehicle and my bike?

Well, today must have been my lucky day.

For no sooner had I imagined this intriguing scenario when a Mercedes GL-Class 4×4 (price – £57,529) ploughed into Everton, my clapped out bicycle (price – £50), sending me hurtling through time and space, and rendering Everton, and my knees, utterly useless.

I have had four beers now to counter the pain spreading through my body but it’s growing in intensity. Updates to follow.

Misanthropy

I just read Charlie Brooker’s weekly column in the Guardian.

It is, as usual, an apocalyptic rant, railing against an aspect of modern society that fills him with despair.

In this case, the subject of his ire is clubbing.

The following quotes, selected at random, give you an idea of his take on what it is to ‘club’:

“Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.

Drugs render location meaningless. Neck enough ketamine and you could have the best night of your life squatting in a shed rolling corks across the floor.”

And:

“Everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. “

I’m sure you get the idea.

Every word of that article rings true for me but somewhere an alarm bell is going off.

You see, I am growing more and more concerned – or maybe brainwashed – that such misanthropy is in some way unhealthy.

I have given enough thought to ‘personal development’ – and been told enough times that I am a sardonic, sneering snob – that in recent years I have attempted to change my ways and become more positive and less judgmental.

God knows it’s been hard. Not making snap judgments of people, keeping my mouth shut when some buffoon drones on about American Idol/Big Brother/almost any music that I don’t own/Harry Potter is increasingly difficult.

I smile beatifically and my eyes glaze over. But in my brain, imaginary darts are flying into that person’s eyeballs with deadly precision.

I don’t know where this snobbishness comes from. I imagine it’s a mild form of whatever convinced Hitler that only he really knew what was best for the world.

Thankfully, my convictions merely manifest themselves in an increasingly obscure record collection and not the cold-blooded slaughter of six million Jews.

But I am getting off the track.

My point is, I have tried – and to some degree succeeded – to become more open, more accepting, and more tolerant of those with different tastes.

But now I somehow feel a lack. It is as though the mantras of positive thinking have stripped me of the courage of my convictions.

I used to know that Weezer was infinitely better than Westlife. In fact the old, cynical me would rather rip out my own fingernails and eat them than even entertain the notion that people who liked Westlife were not congenital imbeciles.

Now I am not so sure. Does that mean I am a better person?

Nostalgia

Between the ages of 12 and 14 I lived in New Zealand.

It was an amazing place and an amazing time. In many ways it shaped who I am today though I won’t get into that here.

But having stumbled across the video below of the New Zealand rugby team performing the haka, I thought i’d share my own experience.

The school I attended was rugby-crazy – as most New Zealand schools are. I knew a few lads who went on to play for the All Blacks (the nickname of the New Zealand rugby team), while my head boy was none other than Andrew Mehrtens, the All Blacks’ all-time leading points scorer.

One of my most vivid memories is being taught the haka in one of the school halls ahead of a big match for the school’s first team.

Before the match, our whole school lined up on our side of the pitch and performed the haka in a ‘challenge’ to our opponents lined up opposite.

It certainly spiced things up a bit.

Anyway, here’s how the big boys do it.

Life is beautiful

Melancholy has often been close at hand, tangible, as real as the face in the mirror.

But things change. Where once sadness would took root, spread like ivy, grasping, clinging – now its blooms flower briefly, wither and die.

I have little to complain of, and so much that is good. I have love and friendship, health, beautiful memories, and the hope of more.

If I have optimism, it has been hard won.

Though my struggle, such as it has been, was nothing compared to that of Alice Herz-Sommer.  I hope you read her story.

Incidentally, I found the link over at Medway Exiles. It’s my favourite blog, even if Tim doesn’t post as much as he should.