The Old Man Visits Solitude - II

There were so many days of my life where the need to be alone became near-indomitable.  It was for all these noticed flaws, so flippant of the eloquence we can all achieve with our given minds, and  that crossed my arms for me, pushed me a step or two away from a gathering, rendered my pupil in contact with an open eyelid, exercised the ill-filtered appendage called sarcasm (devoured and cultivated many years ago).

For every raconteur’s tale, for every forced reaction; the need to hide your own neurosis and feign support for the whims of others. For every silence in small-talk, every instance where the chance to say “And how are you?” was lost. For the contemptible need of others to remember the trivial in an audible train of thought that drains minutes from my patience. I was for all of these that I realised I could not be with those who I was supposed to love. Quite willingly, I had confined myself within a cage, the key to which I kept to myself whilst letting others change the outside lock.

Which is why I was surprised when I heard a knock.

The rain pelted down in rattling cascades, and squally winds added a cinematic sort of drama to what should have been a setting positively English with isolated drabness. Like any other summer evening, I lit a fire and hoped that I would one day find it cosy, or have some indomitable command over me that forced a book to open on my lap. It would preferably be a book over which my floundering intellect could flounder some more, but at least I would be able to say that I read it, should anybody ever ask.

Three infirm raps at the door that I first assumed to be the wind came to my attention. I opened the door ajar and saw, amidst an ashen waterproof hood, a shriveled face with features felled by weariness. I’m not sure if it was he who requested it or his facial expression, but for the first time in over 20 years I had a visitor in the house.

The Old Man Visits Solitude - I

“I was born in Nettlecombe, a little farming village in Dorchester. Do you know Dorchester?”

I shook my head.

“My mam and dad moved there after they just met. He met her at the Poplar Grove Town Hall Christmas Dance in 1917. No! It couldn’t have been 1917 because our aunt Maggie was having her baby then so had to take her in the motorcar. Now, my mam knew my dad five years before I was born so it was 1918.”

He looked up at me after keeping his head down for the entire duration of this garrulous display of mental arithmetic. It was clear that I was going to need to sit down if he was staying for any length of time. A minimum of two glasses of brandy would be needed too, if I were going to feign any sense of civility or warmth that I am so innately void of. It seemed only fair to offer him one, particularly if the old man was going to pay the slightest bit of attention to his own story. Maybe the alcohol would help his inevitable autobiography of a monologue take a turn for the amusing, and he’ll tell me about the time he caught sight of the garters on some post-war eye-candy.

“Brandy?” I said. Decades as a near-recluse made me inevitably lose the obligatory “would you like a-” and my outward articulation had gone into such regress that I could easily have been some mono-syllabic Neanderthal - with distilled spirits to offer.

“Ooh, well, I shouldn’t be taking it with my medication and all,” at this point his face lit up with quasi-excitement; eyebrows raised, gossamer lips forming a narrow ‘o’ shape. The only way that I could adequately describe it is if you could imagine that he reserved it specially for when he saw a naughty boy with a bag of pear drops.

“But I will!” His quickly-made verdict rang out with surprising zeal.

Bucket List

The following four words are ones I once swore to refrain from writing on this blog for as long as I could manage:

As seen on my tumblr, this inventory of (ambiguously) imperative demands is what an existence of absolute accomplishment would entail for me. Despite the unavoidably clichéd content (of mine at least), I do consider bucket lists to be an extremely intimate depiction of ourselves. Few things make a person more vulnerable than divulging their definitive aspirations that give greater purpose to their lives to themselves, let alone others.

7 Weeks of Home - When English soil becomes an annual mud bath.

From the age of nine I have been a migrant - part of a family of four that now resides half the world away from the suburban semi-detached house, the town centre, swimming baths and local primary school that formed the centre of our lives for a decade. What was once the occasional utterance or very hypothetically natured conversation swiftly evolved into creaseless trouser suits and a myriad of job fairs in London. The nature of which, from learning about second-hand, I assumed took the format of a round-robin tournament. With a zealous but ultimately unsuccessful attentiveness I tried to digest all the names of countries and schools that my parents would attempt to be offered teaching posts in. My mental image of a black-and-white house in the tropics was surprisingly accurate when I finally encountered one, though the absence of herbaceous vines from which it was supposed to hang did not quite correlate. With a child-like slowness of perception I acknowledged the permutations that could easily be a reality until the day my father made an announcement, the prelude to which was the question "do you like long flights?"