Feedback Friday :: Countdown

bulk :: 15st 1
days without alcohol :: 0
Wii Fit sessions :: 4
substantial bike rides (90mins+) :: 4
nagging stomach pain alert level :: elevated

I’ve probably got about eight weeks left up here. In Grimstone. And although I’m having a thoroughly pleasant time and am Getting Stuff Done, I am very much looking forward to getting back to London. I miss people. I’m realising that without leaving the house on a regular basis to spend time in the company of other human beings, I regress. I tend to go a bit vile. Last week I found a full beard on my face, and in the last few days I’ve sprouted a cluster of small red blotches on the crown of my Johnson. It’s grisly stuff, I know, but apart from being hunched over my two monitors like a low-rent Terry Pratchett, I’ve little else to report.

The problem of course, is hygiene. Or, more precisely, a lack thereof. Thankfully, cycling has come to the rescue, for when I return from an hour or so of grafting and gliding, I am invariably radiant with perspiration and sporting a magnificently oily calf.

I miss London, however, because I want to be forced to shower by the prospect of social congress, rather than the appearance of cheese-blisters.

You know, sometimes I look at my bike and I want to kiss it.

Speaking of dubious tenderness, the answer to last Mittwoch’s Bookscan competition was…



You’re kicking yourself now, I know. Stop it. It’s not allowed.

Now, as for this week’s Bookscan, I have a doozy. I also have approximately 200 CDs to give away. I’ve uploaded them all onto my machine and I’m about to sell them to the ghouls at Music Magpie, but if you can guess the answer to this here competition, you can maybe have some instead if you like. There's bound to be something you’d like there. My Fair Lady maybe? It’s very good. Some of it.

So without wishing to 'drown the miller' with preamble, name the book, claim the prize…







This weekend I am going to go cycling and I am going to tidy and read. I'm also going to attempt to adjust to life without joints. I have run out of ‘the herb’. In reality, the tough part will be no more tobacco, for which it's fair to say I’ve most probably redeveloped something of an addiction. And with the bastard tobacco back I go to square one.

Hello, pleased to meet you. I want to get fit, stop smoking, move to London and meet a doe-eyed, shark-toothed, pen-hearted woman who loves me for who I am.

Who's with me?

Ah. I see I'm alone. So be it.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Limbo

I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m in limbo. There are things I can’t talk about. Everything’s wrong at the moment and I don’t know what to do. I think I might have to get out of London. The next two weeks will hold the answer. But anyway, in the meantime, life goes on. Kinda.

So you’ll be wanting to know the answer to Monday’s Bookscan. Yes, you will. Don't be impertinent.

It was Big Ethel!



Hmmm. So recently, I found a box full of old notebooks, full of lots of things I can hardly remember writing, including a short story I was quite pleased with. Here it is here.


Nothing Personal

I waited for over an hour. Twice I saw her arrive and relaxed, a relieved smile breaking out across my face like sunlight. But it wasn’t her. It was merely someone who looked like her. My smile died. My face darkened.

The anger was the thing that really surprised me. While I was waiting, I imagined conversations we would have when she finally arrived. ‘Are you pissed at me?’ she would say. ‘No, I’m not angry at all,’ I would reply. ‘All that matters is that you’re here now.’ And I would stroke her face, and she would kiss my hand. But that conversation never took place. And as I made my way home, alone, I was dizzy with rage. I’d never been stood up before. It stings.

I refuse, however, to take it personally. Even if the warmth and laughter and tactility she’d shown me the week before was fake; even if she only gave me her number and insisted I call her to get rid of me; even if she only made the date with me because she thought that standing me up was the best way to get rid of a misguided, objectionable, persistent fool such as myself; even if all that were true – I would still refuse to take it personally because I know my worth. It’s her loss. Fuck her.

Of course, I should have forgotten all about it, but the anger stayed with me, and despite my fine words, my wounded pride got the better of me. So a couple of days later, I called her, partly to give her a piece of my mind, but still half-hoping to discover a simple explanation.

Thankfully, there was a simple explanation, and now all the anger has gone, and I feel at peace. I’m sad too, of course. Extremely so, because I think we could have been really good together. But then you always think that at the beginning.

Her mum answered the phone. She’d flown over from Ohio when she heard the news. She started crying on the phone, wanted to know who I was. ‘Just a friend,’ I said. ‘She’s dead,’ she said. ‘Laura’s dead.’

I made suitably shocked noises. I was shocked. ‘What happened?’ I eventually asked.

Through muffled sobs, Laura’s mother informed me that her daughter had been beaten to death. On Tuesday evening. As I was waiting and raging, Laura was having the life punched and kicked out of her by her husband, who’d found out about her date. He’d found out about me.

She told me when I met her, during the twenty minutes we spent chatting and plotting, she told me it wasn’t a very good relationship. ‘My husband is selfish,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see it for the longest time, but all he cares about is himself.’ And when I asked her out, she said yes. She said it would be good to spend some time with someone who thought about her for a change.

And now she’s dead and I feel relieved.

I feel relieved because - now I know - it was nothing personal.

Loss

On Thursday night, feeling awfully sorry for myself, I typed the words ‘PABLO – BELOVED BLACK CAT – CASH REWARD OFFERED FOR HIS SAFE RETURN’ into a blank Word document. I added my phone number and a photograph of Pablo. Then I pressed ctrl and P, keyed in 20 copies and pressed ‘print’. As I picked up the first sheet to examine it, my mobile phone began to squeal.

Timing.

It was Ron, next door neighbour in Herne Hill, owner of three discoloured teeth and one fabulously untended garden which was until recently Pablo’s favourite stomping ground and miniature jungle kingdom. I’d already talked to him about Pablo going missing post-move. He had kindly checked his garden and promised to keep his eyes peeled. So when I heard his voice, I was optimistic.

Ron explained that he was with a young man called Tony. Tony had been going door to door in the area asking if anyone owned a black cat. He’d eventually been pointed towards Ron’s building. When Ron said yes, his ex-neighbour was missing a black cat, Tony burst into tears.

‘I’ve got some bad news,’ Ron said. My heart sank and my stomach turned. He passed me over to Tony.

‘He just ran straight out in front of my car,’ Tony explained. ‘There was nothing I could do.’

Tony was a cat person. He felt terrible. I felt bad for him. But I felt sick for Pablo.

I drove back to my old house. I shook Tony’s hand. There was nothing he could do.

‘It’s OK,’ I told him. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘I’ve got four cats,’ he said. ‘I know how it is. I’m so, so sorry.’

Tony showed me to his car. He’d placed Pablo in the boot. His car was a Skoda.

A fucking Skoda.

Pablo deserved better than that.

I was surprised by how light he seemed. At first I thought maybe he was lighter because the life had leaked out of his body; because the weight of his soul had departed. Then I realised he’d probably lost a bit of weight in the few days he was missing, roaming around Herne Hill wondering where his life had gone. A shock ran through me. Pity and anger and shame. I tried not to blame myself. I’m still trying not to blame myself. But I do blame myself. At least partially.

I’d never held a dead body before. I touched my mother’s face before they put her in the ground but I didn’t feel much.

I loved Pablo much more than I loved my mother. Probably because Pablo showed me much more love than my mother ever did. It was easy to love Pablo. It was impossible to love my mother. She made it impossible.

His body was still warm.

It had been a clean hit, thank God. He ran into the front wheel with a thud. None of his insides were outside - I don’t think I would’ve been able to face that – but there was blood on his face, already dried. I couldn’t tell where it had come from exactly. I closed his eyes, the way they do in films, with soldiers.

I wrapped him in his favourite blanket and placed him on the passenger seat of my car.

Stalled at the traffic lights near Dulwich Park, I looked down at the blanket and let out a low groan.

I missed Sally.

....

A couple of weeks ago, Sally and I ended up having quite a heated argument about her taking photos of me. ‘I really thought you’d be into it,’ she said.

‘Well, I’m not,’ I replied. ‘I’m really not.’

‘Well, why not?’ she wanted to know, and it pissed me off that she seemed to feel some sense of entitlement. Like I was some art project she had paid for with her body.

‘Because you make me feel like a freak show,’ I said.

‘But I think you’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘In your own way,’ she added.

I made a face. My face said, ‘Thanks for that. You certainly know how to make a person feel like shit.’ Then my mouth said it.

‘But I mean it!’ she cried.

‘I know you mean it!’ I cried back. ‘That really doesn’t help matters.’

‘But you don’t understand,’ she said, still digging a dirty great hole for our relationship. ‘For me you have a kind of anti-beauty that’s very attractive.’

‘Jesus, Sally. There’s no difference between that and morbid fascination. I am not an art project! I am a human being!’ I smiled but I was pissed off. ‘Seriously. You really do make me feel like a freak show.’

‘Well, you are a bit of a freak show,’ she said. ‘And that’s part of the attraction.’

I didn’t know how to react to this. I felt like Susan Sarandon in Thelma and Louise when she says, ‘Damn, Jimmy. What did you do, take some kinda pill that makes you say all the right stuff?’ Only in reverse. I just shook my head.

After which, things became rather strained between us, and as if by mutual, albeit tacit agreement, we began to see a little less of each other. Then we met up for a late dinner on Wednesday night, then back to mine. Everything seemed great. We laughed a lot and touched a lot and everything seemed easy again.

It’s amazing how quickly you can start feeling really optimistic again, no matter how wrong things might be underneath. If indeed they are wrong underneath. You never really know.

Or do you? Maybe you do. I don't.

At 4am I opened my eyes and Sally was sitting cross-legged, wide awake in the middle of my bed, her body twisted away from me. She had a little white vest on. She looked like a dream. My bedside lamp was on, blinding me. I squinted, shaded my eyes. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked. She turned off the light, lay down and pulled the sheet over her body. She said she was fine. Told me to go back to sleep.

I didn’t believe her. ‘What’s up?’ I said.

‘I had a bad dream,’ she said.

‘Poor baby,’ I said, snuggling up to her and experiencing a wave of tenderness. There’s a song by Counting Crows with the line, ‘And every tine she sneezes, I believe it’s love’. It was that kind of moment. Like she’d sneezed all over me. She turned her body away from mine and I positioned myself behind her. ‘What was it about?’ I asked. And just as I did, something fell from the bed to the floor. I jumped. Sally didn’t move, but her not moving was so precise, so deliberate, that it had more impact than if she’d jumped to her feet. ‘What was that?’ I said. I reached across Sally, turned on the light, angled it away from my face and sat up.

Sally continued not to move. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just my camera.’

I looked at her. She continued to face away from me but I sensed her eyes were open, waiting.

‘Were you taking pictures of me?’ I asked.

She turned to face me, looking furtive, guilty. Or not. I don’t know.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘God, you’re paranoid.’

‘Sally. Why were you sitting up in the middle of the night with your camera and a light shining onto my face?’

‘I told you, I had a bad dream. I couldn’t sleep.’

I shook my head. I did a lot of head-shaking with Sally.

‘What?’ she snapped. ‘I was awake and I was looking through photos on my camera.’ I stared at her. She stared back. ‘You’re being weird,’ she said. My mouth fell open.

‘Me?!’ I was aghast. ‘Let me see the camera then.’

‘You’re joking, right?’

‘You’ve showed me photos on your camera before. Show me again.’

‘So you don’t trust me?’

‘Sally. You look guilty. You look like you’re lying to me. And you must admit, it looks pretty suspicious.’

‘I’m not lying and I don’t care how it looks.’

‘So show me. What have you got to hide?”

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘I agree entirely,’ I said. ‘This is utterly ridiculous. You’re behaving like a child.’

‘Oh, fuck off.’

And with that, she got out of bed, pulled on her clothes, picked up her camera and left.

To my shame, I did a little pleading. ‘Please don’t go, Sally’ I said, and I sounded pathetic. I followed her downstairs, wanting to stop her, physically. I tugged at her elbow. She reacted like I’d stabbed at her with a cattle prod and glowered at me. I felt guilty.

She said she wasn’t going to stay where she wasn’t trusted. I said I did trust her. Honest.

She left.

When the front door closed, I came back to my bedroom and picked up my watch from the bedside table. It was a quarter to four. How was she going to get home? I got back into bed.

I picked up my phone. I put it down.

Then I picked it up again and started texting.

Then I shook my head, cancelled the message and threw my phone across the room.

I turned off the light.

I thought how she often flicked through the images on her camera and realised that her explanation was entirely plausible. Why the fuck would she want to take photographs of me anyway? She was right. I was entirely paranoid.

I thought about how I’d never met even got the chance to have her mum cure me of my heliophobia.

I thought how her eyes had flashed hatred when I grabbed at her arm, like she expected me to hit her, and she was daring me.

I thought how we didn't really know each other at all. I should never have touched her.

And now she was gone. With or without stolen snapshots. It didn’t matter. I felt stupid, like I’d fucked everything up.

I looked around the room, staring through the darkness.

I missed Pablo.

I placed the palms of my hands over my ears and pushed my fingernails into the scalp at the back of head until it really, really hurt.

Maybe he’d come back tomorrow.

Feedback Friday :: Fuck It

bulk :: 16st (fuck it)
losses :: 2

Bad week.



Here’s to the future.

Have a good weekend.

Wednesday Weigh-In, Black Dog, Black Cat

bulk :: 19st 13 (I mean, what’s the point? Really. My body seems not to be able to tell the difference between chocolate and salad.)
exercise achieved :: swam 750m in about 50 minutes – it felt good, but that really is atrociously s l o w . . .
calories :: no idea. I’ve decided that calorie-counting is for gimps. No offence.
cigarettes :: none
packets of Nicorette gum chewed :: 4
alcohol units :: 16ish
black dogs saddled :: 1
ladies bewitched :: 1

So. I’ve been a little down of late. In fact, sometime on Sunday night I fell into a big black hole of total and utter despair and self-loathing.

God, I despised myself.

I should probably talk about it. I think it might help.

The word is pathetic. That’s how I felt. That’s generally how I feel when I get down. I just feel pathetic. I feel like a big useless turd of a man. Neither use nor ornament. Neither mickling nor muckling. And there’s nothing I can do about it. I looked at this blog and I thought: what on earth are you doing with your life, Stan Cattermole? And not one of the answers I came up with made me feel any better.

There were a number of factors I think leading to this particular bubble of despair, and again, I think it might help to go through them.

1) My coccyx doesn’t seem to be healing anywhere near as fast as it should and I want desperately to start running or something, I really do. I’m so fed up with this sedentary life of mine.

2) Love and Friends has yielded nothing. Not so much as an ironic wink. I don’t know what I expected really, but I guess I just thought – I don’t know – that someone might say hello or something. God, I’m wretched.

Is that it? That can’t be it, can it? Jesus. Oh, no, wait…

3) I’m fat and I’m fugly, and neither of these things seem to be going away. And with every wave of self-pity, there is an attendant wave of self-loathing. It’s like, how can one man be so incredibly self-indulgent? Self self self and I say to myself, I say Self, there’s nothing wrong with you, you spoilt Western toad! You’re relatively healthy, wealthy and wise, you should just shut the shit up and make the best of it. I know all that. I know it. Yet still, it persists…

However, there are two sides to even the most devalued coin – even chocolate coins, for God’s sake – therefore I should definitely list the things that helped me to shoo the black dog away. So here goes…

1) Keith left a message on my answerphone on Sunday night. It said: ‘Alright, mate. I’ve just got this terrible feeling that you’re sitting at home moping and feeling sorry for yourself and pissed off that you pigged out yesterday. If I’m wrong and you’re right as rain and off out celebrating your joy, then I’m happy to be so wrong. But if I’m right, then… I dunno. Cheer up, mate! You’re allowed to treat yourself once in a while, for God’s sake. It might not be good for your diet but it’s good for your soul. Your soul! Anyway, take care and speak soon… Oh, and everybody here loves you.’ At which point, in the background, Patricia, Ben and Dina all shouted, ‘We love you!’ and laughed. ‘You see?’ said Keith. ‘Seeya later, mate. Give us a bell. Bye.’

At the time, hearing the message made me feel even more pathetic than I already did. The idea that someone knew me well enough to know that I’d be sitting at home in a nauseating heap, too miserable even to sob, let alone pick up the phone, upset me. Was I so predictable? Was my pathetic personality so widely acknowledged?

But then 24 hours later, listening to the message again made me shudder and shake with dirty great tears of something approaching joy.

Then, as if by divine coincidence…

2) Ange called and asked me if I fancied going out for a drink on Thursday evening. I said I did. I do. We ended up chatting on the phone for over half an hour, which is something I generally don’t really do. At all. I have a very brusque phone manner apparently. But it was easy with Ange. I confessed that I’d been down and do you know what she did? She cheered me up.

I honestly didn’t think she’d be in touch again. It’s great to be wrong sometimes.

3) I’ve got a reader! Yes, you. You know who you are. You’re an American lady and basically, you said you’d do me to death - sight unseen - if only you didn’t already have a boyfriend. Alright, you didn’t quite use those words – because you’re classier than that. But you did describe me as ‘crush material’. And you did say, ‘Don't discount the power of brains coupled with a dark sense of humor.’ And that made me feel good. So thank you. You also said that I shouldn’t be so self-deprecating. I know you’re right of course, but believe me, it’s a hard habit to break.

So, what else has pleased me this week? Oh, yeah, further to my last meandering retch, I received a reply from David Baddiel. I wrote to him about Facebook Walliams. He wrote back:

He's not the real one. But I haven't bothered to take him off. The real one took himself off about three months ago.
If you look again at my site you'll see a link to a column I wrote in The Times about fake Facebookery.
At last count there were about four fake mes on Facebook.
And lastly: John Sessions. Please.
D

Good old Baddiel though eh?

On the back of our exchange, I thought I’d try to befriend all of the other David Baddiels on Facebook. Just for a laugh. But unfortunately, I ended up accidentally trying to befriend the real Baddiel. Now he thinks I’m a total nutbag.

Jesus, maybe I am.

However – nutbag or no – at least I have friends. And they mean the world to me. As does Pablo. My beautiful black cat.