Late Night Thoughts - reversion

Tonight, as usual, I'm lying in my bed, exhausted, trying to relax and allow my mind to unwind. I can't sleep. My silly brain is doing its usual trick of zapping around like a bee that's high on E-numbers from drinking too much orange squash and so I'm reading and thinking of things that I will write tomorrow. Instead of working today (on the idea I have been developing for a few weeks) and actually putting some effort into the craft that I want to spend the rest of my life doing, I've been fucking around, surfing the net and looking for 'obscure porn' on youtube. While this might be vaguely interesting or funny, I'm feeling what I often feel on these late nights when I can't sleep, that I've squandered a large portion of my life that I'll never get back.

The rain is hitting against the skylight in my room with such force that it's almost offensive, beating a tattoo as I lie here, cursing myself for wasting my life. Usually, I love the sound of the rain on that window, it's incredibly relaxing and reminds me of when I was younger, but tonight, it seems almost mocking. When I was about seven, I would lie awake listening to the rain and try to see if I could keep my eyes open for longer than the downpour lasted, playing chicken with the night outside. Needless to say I always lost.

Somehow the years fell away quickly, and now this bedroom is only a place I stay when I return home during the holidays. It's no longer 'my room', but rather the 'spare room'. In fact, the only thing that connects this room to my childhood is the view outside. The back gardens and roof-tops of all the houses of the neighbours around me, and the view of the river leading towards the sloping beauty of the city walls and the valley. It's weird, I vaguely miss the place when I'm away from home, and I love to be back, but there's always a huge part of me that wants to keep moving, an inability to rest.

I've noticed as well that when I'm back home I revert to who I was as a child. Most of my friends are the same, something for which I feel blessed, with (thank fuck) a few exceptions, and I feel that I am self-confident enough to relax in almost any social situation. Somehow, however, when I meet some of the people I knew in school, people I've known for years, I clam up. Me, who usually never knows when to stop nattering on, stands on the fringe of the 'chatting outside the pub' group trying to think of something to say, and realising that I've got next to nothing to say. Maybe I've become really boring, or maybe I've just grown apart from some of these people. The reversion is that feeling of being on the fringe of a large group that I've always felt, like being right back in my old school uniform. I know that it's reversion because it's a million times different to how I normally feel when I'm out and it proves to me that I must have changed, that I AM changed, irrevocably. I dunno whether that's for the better or the worst.

Anyway, as I'm writing this, trying to find words to describe what's jolting through my mind, I've suddenly noticed that the rain outside has stopped, and that by being awake, I've won the game I was playing with the night sky all those years ago. I'd give anything to have lost it though, it seems like a pyhrric victory.


I hope it rains again.

A Late-Night Anecdote About My Mother

Okay, this one is a bit weird. I was watching the Jimmy Carr 'Live in Concert' show on Channel 4 with my mum and dad. Jimmy was up to his usual nonsense of a pile of extremely squeamish-inducing gags.

He was posing a lot of very awkward moral conundrum questions. These, he says, can show how an audience rate in terms of decency. There are no correct answers, but the answers usually raise a laugh.

One of them was, "Would you kill a whale to save two pandas?" and the audience yelled "Yes"


He continued this for a while as my parents and I laughed along. Suddenly something awful happened. Jimmy asked the ultimate question,

"Would you fuck your father to save your mother?"


There was silence...horrible silence in the living room. I chugged my wine with gusto, hoping that I wasn't blushing, and avoided my parents' eyes.

Suddenly my mother turned to me, and in deathly seriousness said, "You'd fucking better"


Priceless.

The Quiet Season

I've been back in Derry for less than a week, but there's not been much to write about. One or two evenings aside, life has been a torpid, heavy-lidded affair, and I've been itching to do some more travelling. So, I'm going to France at the weekend!

My friend Ste's parents own a lovely little house in the town of St. Paul de Fenouillet, in a vignoble region just outside Perpignan in the south. It's a really sleepy, Stella-Artois-Advert type of burg, with a largely comatose population and a really great little wineshop, aproximately eight metres from the front door of the house. It also has some beautiful scenery and landscape around it, with a great gorge, a huge valley and mountains and a million little swimming holes and mountain paths for exploration.

I have a huge amount of little stories from the last time I was there, and the 'Yearly France Trip' has become somewhat of a tradition.


The last time I was there, I had white blonde hair, and we would spend the day walking tens of miles, with litres of wine, exploring the countryside and swimming and eating when we felt like a break. It was bliss. There were a few crazy moments; like almost being kidnapped by two massive gay guys for a funboy party, or smoking weed with a crazy mountain man in his cave, or chatting over a muscat to the ancient (but vibrant and fascinating) ex-pat Irishman whom we nicknamed Treebeard, for his booming voice and knowledge, and who made us all so very welcome...but those are for another time. Maybe if I write them up I can post them. One reader recently commented that my blog was 'a bit long' (the schmuck) so I dunno if I can post the full story without injuring his fragile sensibilities. But fuck it, why not.


I'm going (with my five travel companions) to Belfast tomorrow, then from Belfast to Toulouse on Saturday. We're going to spend seven days drinking wine, getting some sun and doing a lot of rock-climbing and hill-walking. There's no internet, no computers, barely any phones and I'll be well and truly off the rader. What bliss. I'll have my notebook with me, and will hopefully return with some happy stories, a bit of scandal, a nice tan and a newly inked pocketbook.

Chat to you all soon, fingers crossed for the weather!

xx

Interactive Thursday

Again, the Novelista Barista has thrown down the gauntlet to her blog-followers to interact with her and answer a random question every week as part of her Interactive Thursday.
This week:

'What is one song or album that you’ve listened to over and over again in a very rough period of your life? What is your sad song?'


Well, to answer her question I'll have to refer to two different songs:


Backwardly, my sad song. I'm one of those people who, by mixture of being a prick and a fool, has gotten myself into, and managed to fuck up (or get fucked up by) a whole load of relationships. Some of them I've almost forgotten, but others....well, not quite.

One of the ones that was important, we had a song. It was one that we played whenever we were hanging out in my flat, and it set the mood really well, as well as really helping me to relax (which I often can't really do due to my silly brain) and keeping us company when we had those great comfortable silences. It was the wonderful 'Comfortably Numb', by Pink Floyd. The version that I played was the 'Live in Berlin' recording with Van Morrison as guest vocalist.



But we broke up, and it hurt. I did the whole after-split mourning period with this song on repeat in the background, watching the complete docu-series 'The World At War' (to harness the 'rage' side of the break-up by watching the entirety of the War with Laurence Olivier's narration) and quaffing Apple Schnapps like it was going out of fashion.

NB: That's a really good way to break up and I got the idea from Charlie Brooker. The apple schnapps ideas is my own. It works, but hurts.


So when I feel really sad now, one of the first songs that I'll go to is this masterpiece.

But this pales in comparison to the 'Rough Time' song.



The song that I have listened to during rough patches, and which I listen to as often as I feel I can is 'The Court of the Crimson King' by the late '70s/early '80s prog-rock band King Crimson. The first time I truly appreciated this song was when I was living in the United States in the wee small town of Lexington, Virginia. I had returned home, slightly baked, to my little apartment when a FRICKING MASSIVE thunderstorm came out of nowhere and rent the night in two. The lights for some reason went, and I had to unplug all the electrical items in the room.

Luckily, my laptop was fully alive, so I was able to sit and listen to music whilst doing some writing, illuminated only by the glow of the screen. My back had been killing me for days so, in my altered state, I lay flat on the floor, when this wonderful song came on. My head swirling with thoughts and ideas for the stories which I had been working on, raced as the neurons stonedly dealt with what I had been working on. The lightening got really close to the house, and as I lay, humming along to myself, a massive sensation of euphoria overtook me, mixed with a great feeling of calm, a feeling which I very rarely experience. My mind was still racing, but not in the usual grey-hair way. Everything made sense, and everything was good. The song was almost perfect.

The theatrical nature of it; with its epic choruses, three-act dramatics, mystical lyrics and its underlying sense of reflection made me extremely happy. It was like someone had flicked on a lightswitch in my head, and the joint feelings of world-weary tragedy and hope that the song inspired really took a hold of me. It was one of the greatest ten minutes of my life, sad as that sounds.

Since then, if I've been going through a really rough patch, and nothing really seems to make sense, I just lie on the floor, put on my studio headphones and crank up the volume...





Here ya go Jen, I hope you enjoy these songs, and thanks again for a great Interactive Thursday question.

Con
:)

A Late-Night Anecdote About My Grandmother

My grandmother is a bit of a legend. Mamo (as we call her, from the Irish maimeó- grandmother) has always been a little bit of a rebel. There are a million little funny stories I could tell about you, like the time she told off an RUC officer for waking her because of a bomb threat, or the great (joke) conversations we have about how much I love coke and hookers. Needless to say she's rather cool.

One time in the mid 80's, she was driving along the Glenshane Pass, bringing my ubercool, biochemist super-aunt Jill back to Uni for her final semester. This was during the height of the Troubles in the North, when the least important thing on anyone's mind was the state of the public motorways, so needless to say, it was a pretty crappy road to be driving on. Also, it was apparently very wet and, as occasionally is the case, rather foggy.

My aunt tells me that as Mamo was driving along, barely peering over the wheel, a car suddenly shot past them, dangerously overtaking them on a bend. My grandmother apparently let out some noise disdain and tutted.

Of course, my aunt asked what the problem was, and my gran told her that the young man had been been travelling "far too fast" for such a dangerous road.

When asked what she meant, Mamo replied,

'Well, I was doing 90..."