In February 2016 I spent a week in a gypsy caravan where I recorded twenty songs in the hopes it could become my first album. It was bitterly cold and I had to turn off the storage heater in between takes. I brought home those songs and let them sit for a little while. Then I started tinkering.
This week I finally finished tinkering and am happy to announce that my first fully-functioning album, Workbook, is available now.
You can download it for free. All I want is to share my music and enjoy the fact I’ve managed to get this project together. I’m immensely proud and enjoyed the process so much that I’m already planning a follow up.
I love the idea of now making videos for the tracks. The first of which, for the opening song, Sometime Later, is here.
“Clearly you’ve never been to Singapore”, famously uttered Captain Jack Sparrow upon freeing Elizabeth Swan from her corset using a knife. This wasn’t the only reason I wanted to visit the city but it was up there, along with the fact it would coincide with Eurovision. I figured flying to South East Asia was a cheap price to pay in order to escape the hideous showboating and rip away skirts.
When my friend Adam, who I first met two years ago on a trek to Machu Picchu, mentioned the pair of us going to stay with his friend Roshni in Singapore, I think he was expecting a little more resistance. I agreed almost immediately. It was only afterwards the gravitas of the decision really hit me.
It seemed bizarre to travel all that way to only visit one place so we set upon Malaysia and Thailand in the process. This post, however, is about Singapore, what we saw and did there, and the lessons we learnt along the way.
Changi airport is one of the best air-conditioned spaces in the world. How do I know this? I tried going outside at eleven o’clock at night to hail a cab. Two steps out into that muggy wall of heat and I returned to the Wi-Fi and eateries of the arrival hall. While waiting for Roshni to meet us, unsure of exactly how we had ended up in such a predicament, we counted our money and tried to work out how many Singapore dollars there were to the pound and if everything before us was a bargain or a rip off. It’s fair to say that Singapore has equal opportunities for both.
Roshni collected us and we got a taxi across the city, taking in views of the marina and the incredible number of skyscrapers before blasting out the other side and up to her apartment. Roshni moved to Singapore last year to teach. She’s possibly the most upbeat and spirited person I have ever met. She’s purposeful and attentive and her smile can sort of break your heart a bit. On top of this, she insisted we take her bed while she slept on the sofa. It was the first of many nights Adam and I were in bed together.
The following morning Roshni made us smoothies and introduced us to her flatmate Amanda who also worked at the school. They took us for breakfast at a restaurant called Jimmy Monkeys to sweeten the deal before we attended a dance show at their school. It did the trick. As I sat with a thick vanilla milkshake, eggs and avocado smeared across soda bread, I couldn’t care what we did, as long as we kept cool in the process.
Like most drama schools, there were a lot of pushy stage parents. My first encounter with them was when we were ushered into the darkened auditorium and told we could sit anywhere by the other teachers, before being moved along by parents who had booked specific seats. They obviously needed to best capture the offbeat stammerings of their kids. After being moved on yet again by another set of Croydon facelifted mothers we hit the back row and watched two hours of theatre which was probably cute if you had an invested interest/offspring putting in a wonderful performance as a daisy or rabbit.
Afterwards Roshni took us on the Singapore underground service, the MRT. I just did some research and that stands for Mass Rapid Transport. How delightful.
We went to every coffee shop, bookshop and bakery we could find before heading to the top of the Pinnacle Tower for an incredible view over the city. Singapore has been built up very quickly. The skyline looks like a competition nobody is winning.
We headed back down and strolled around the city before Roshni took us to one of her favourite vegan restaurants for wraps, soup and salads. Adam and I discovered paying by card in Asia is not commonplace. Like the Queen, I don’t carry money. Unlike the Queen, I serve a purpose beyond just looking nice. Each time we wanted to pay for a meal we had to locate a cash machine on the busy streets and then worry about how to get back and whether our bags and passports would still be there. Considering it lacked my favourite foodstuffs, the vegan restaurants we visited in Singapore were incredible. I was almost converted.
Roshni took us through Chinatown and back onto the MRT to go and see the Supertree Grove in the Gardens by the Bay. This is a must when in Singapore. Not only is it beautiful but it’s also free. My favourite things are beautiful and free. We spread out on the paved floor, in the way of everyone else, and stared up. The supertrees are a collection of eighteen man-made trees, at around eighty-feet high. One of them has a restaurant inside to give an impression of scale. Each evening a light show plays out across the trees in sync with classical music blasted from hidden speakers. We were treated to a waltz. It was a mix of Fantasia, Debusssy and the music from X Factor. I was quiet and still for ten minutes. If there’s one thing it is enchanting to be, it is quiet and still. The lights and music pumped through me and I was so moved by the display that I realised my mouth had dropped open. The experience was something I was so pleased to enjoy with friends.
Afterwards we met up with Roshni’s friends and went to a bar in an alley where musicians played covers on guitar, trumpet and keyboard and we sipped at expensive cocktails named after renaissance painters or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Soon we were dancing away in the hot night. Adam and I took breaks to stand in front of a huge fan that pumped out recycled air into the alley. We watched a woman getting arrested and Roshni fell in love with yet another musician, taking up residence in the chair directly opposite the performance area to pine. After clearing away all of the money we had withdrawn earlier in the day on drinks, Adam and I were forced to call it a night and get a cab back to Roshni’s apartment, falling into a drunken sleep underneath the buzz of the ceiling fan. The best way to get over jetlag is to get drunk.
The following day we woke up late to discover we had been left alone. It was a Monday and Roshni and Amanda had both got up and gone to work/school. A friend of mine had recently returned to the UK after spending a year in Singapore and had given us a number of spots to check out, including a barber’s shop in Geylang where he had worked.
When we got outside it started raining, a thick viscous downpour that quickly soaked us through. I was growing tired of the mop of fringe dangling wet in my face. I wanted it gone and considered shaving my head.
We took the MRT without Roshni’s assistance for the first time and when we arrived in Aljunied (memorised by thinking of All You Need Is Love by The Beatles) we found the barbers closed. I had told Adam we couldn’t rest or eat until we had found it. After rattling the door for confirmation our thoughts turned to our stomachs. We didn’t have a clue where we were or where was good. There were no picturesque bakeries or quaint vegan eateries so we stumbled into an open air buffet next door where we were promptly handed two plates of what we quickly realised were the “westerner’s special” – rice, noodles, chicken, sweet and sour pork. It was delicious but Adam was feeling adventurous. He went back up and returned with a plate of pig skin. He assumed it would be fried off, similar to crackling. He was disappointed. What he had collected was boiled skin. I watched him struggle with a mouthful before deciding I needed a similar kind of punishment. I have put some terrible things in my mouth but the lump of pig made me heave. I quickly chewed and swallowed it down but I could feel it writhing. I was once told that pork is the closest meat to human and I had the horrible feeling I had gone all Hannibal on the buffet. Our two plates of food plus pig skin, two bottles of coke and four bottle of water came to £9.00. You can’t beat that with a stick.
Being suckers for punishment we decided to head to Orchard Road, an intense complex of shopping centres designed for the ex-pat community especially. The place was so swanky that I felt like I was going to be shooed out with a broom the whole time. Adam found a gold-plated, jewel-encrusted pen that was marked up at £3,500.00. He said he would buy it if he had the money. I called him a capitalist pig. It was the first of a series of conversations we had about materialism and politics. I told him a Bic was good enough for me. He pitied me.
We had arranged to meet Roshni and to visit another of her favourite spots, East Coast Park, but were slightly concerned we would have to forgo meat from another meal. Despite the tale/tail of the pig skin we were eager to get some food in us before our next adventure and hid in a KFC near our arranged meeting point while trying to connect to the Wi-Fi so we could book a restaurant for dinner. As Roshni had been so kind to us we wanted to treat her. When we told her she seemed genuinely impressed but had already set her heart on visiting Brownice, a vegan Italian bistro nearby.
We first went to East Coast Park, took off our shoes and paddled in the water before walking up and down the beach and talking about how connected we felt with the earth. At the time it felt really intense and honest but I now feel silly and clichéd for considering a concept so enlightened. Not me at all.
Brownice had the best food I ate in Singapore. The pizzas were big, covered in tofu and vegetables and their Root Beer float changed my perspective on the universe. Again, when it came time to pay, we couldn’t use our cards and Roshni had to pick up the tab for the bill we had kindly taken her out for. We got vegan ice cream and sat out in the hot street, watching traffic and street cats wander past until it was time to go home.
The next morning we awoke at six for our flight to Malaysia. Roshni made us smoothies so thick they would have been placed in a remedial class and we booked a taxi back to the airport. Our next adventure was waiting.
“Please ensure your chairs are returned to their full and upright position, that your seatbelts are fastened and that your tray tables are stowed away”
I had managed to secure the window seat when my travel buddy got up to use the bathroom. It meant I got to watch the strange shapes that clouds make from above. As a boy I took it as gospel that it was possible to bounce on top of clouds like in Peter Pan or Mario, depending on your cultural viewpoint. Neither seemed to apply as the plane started to descend and my ears began to pop.
I was on my way home from five days in Malta, five long days away on business. I was in suit. I’m never comfortable in a suit even if I tried to make it look entirely natural as I stalked around the duty free selection of the departures lounge. It had been a hard graft being away and I was pleased to be home but as the clouds broke apart around us and I caught sight of London I felt like I had locked eyes with the love of my life from across the room.
I have made no secret of the fact I struggle with my mental health. That still applies. I’m currently medicated and in therapy but my god that flight made me feel thankful for a number of things I hadn’t taken stock of in a long time. Descending into London is really something magical. It’s the stuff of legend, both EastEnders theme tune and the opening scene of The World Is Not Enough, to my mind one of Brosnan’s top three outings as Bond. London to me is still a city where the streets are paved with gold. In a more literal sense they are paved with chuggers, Pret and scuffed brogues but we aren’t talking about that.
As the plane headed towards the capital I couldn’t help but smile. I’ve been really lucky. I had been to an island I hadn’t visited since I was six months old. I was returning to my own place. I have a job I love. I have people I love all around of me and who seem in varying senses to get me. I have a whole league of things ahead of me this year to look forward to. I was left with the strange sensation that everything was going to be alright. The knot of anxiety I wear around my neck near enough constantly wasn’t with me on that flight, maybe it was in the luggage I had checked in but I certainly didn’t appear to have carried it on. I felt breathless and weightless and fantastic.
I wanted to log that somewhere, the sensation that despite all the shit we all go through, it’s worth it for, what Jules in Pulp Fiction refers to as a “moment of clarity”. It made perfect sense at the time and I hope you get them every now and then too because they make everything flow a lot better from that source.
Surfing has always seemed like the coolest sport anyone can do. It conjures up images of handsome people with lovely teeth and sun-bleached hair scoring their boards and their bodies through the water as they escape whatever it is people hide at sea to escape from. I’ve always watched from the shore and wondered, would I be as good at that as I feel I would naturally be. Before we continue, the short answer is no.
As a kid I watched Neighbours a lot. There were a lot of cool surf dudes in Neighbours at the time. There may well be still. I can’t deal with the thought of watching soaps though. My first experience of death was Todd Landers. He got hit by a van. It was 13 July 1992. Todd was really cool. I still miss him.
For my 29th birthday Charlotte and I headed down to the coast. Which coast you may ask? The coast if you want to get away from it all and have the chance to surf. Cornwall. We stayed in a gypsy caravan for a week where we would often fight over who was going to get out of bed and into the two degree winter morning to make tea (it was invariably me) and see what culinary delights it was possible to summon up on a simple red camping stove. It turns out you can bake a Camembert and grill a salmon if you really commit to it.
While we were there, our kind host Dale, who we found through my new best friend AirBnB, asked if we wanted to go surfing. Dale had lovely teeth and sun-bleached hair even though it was February and for some reason I trusted him.
On the last full day we were staying in St Ives he picked out a couple of wetsuits for us, found the biggest, thickest surfboards known to man and we followed him in his 4×4 down to the beach. The car had to be bump-started every time he took it off the farmland. It was part of the charm.
We pulled up in a residential area and walked through a number of alleyways to get down to the beach itself. Dale kept pointing out different buildings and telling us how much it would cost to move into them and move it up. For a cool surf dude he had a real eye for property development. I could hear the roar of the water, feel it rising up high enough to sit on my lips and make the experience taste salty. I wedged the board under my arm tightly and tried to make it look like I did this shit every day. I don’t do this shit every day. I process words and numbers every day for “the man” but I wanted to look like I knew what I was doing.
We got to the beach and quickly got changed into our wetsuits. There were two reasons we quickly wanted to get changed into our wetsuits, the first is that we were very exposed in the little concrete overhang beneath the stairs down to the water and the second is that it was four degrees out. If you take anything away from this, it is important to know that it is a bad idea to go surfing in February as a first-timer. It’s a bad idea to do anything in February really.
Wetsuits are a curious thing. With the way Bond slides out of them revealing a tuxedo underneath you would think they come away like the outer layer of a week old onion. They don’t. It’s like trying to fit your entire body into the rubbery insides of Ronnie Corbett via his mouth hole (especially when you’re six foot tall). I eventually wangled my way in with a lot of elbow grease and grunting and like in every other situation I’ve ever been in, started to wonder how much of a tit I looked. I looked over at Charlotte in her sea-blue wetsuit, she looked like Lara Croft in those levels where you spend a lot of time underwater watching her fabulous pixelated backside. As a boy I used to enjoy watching Lara Croft drown. Concerning and also possibly the reason I didn’t offer a lot of support when my girlfriend went under the water.
We waddled out awkwardly, trying to impress on the dog-walkers huddled up against the cold on the far reaches of the beach that we knew exactly what we were doing. I’ve seen enough people having surfing lessons to know that you’re not allowed in the water for about an hour. Instead you have to put the board down in the sand and practice lying on that, popping up and riding around like a sand god or goddess. Before we even have time to ask if you still called the front the bow and the back the stern, Dale and his girlfriend had run out into the water and disappeared. The waves breaking about a hundred metres out looked incredible. It was only as they reached them that I was able to see how large they were. Aside from the little dots climbing up the side of the walls of water everything looked fairly grey. The sky was grey. The water was grey. My skin was grey and sort of mottled. I tied my GoPro around my wrist and hoped that it a) wouldn’t come off and b) would make me look cool. It held around 50% of the bargain.
Charlotte was a couple of steps ahead of me and bravely headed out into the water.
“My shoe just filled with water,” she said of the two-pronged Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-looking shoes we were both in. “Is that supposed to happen?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said in a way that I hoped convinced us both. We walked out a little further, her slightly less stable because she doesn’t have the gangly proportions of a Beano character and can’t wrap an entire arm around a surfboard.
We soon discovered that the cold we had been expecting, that breath-shuddering induction to the water simply wasn’t there. I felt comfortable in my wetsuit. Maybe, I considered, I had found my true calling. I pushed the board out further and dipped the back of it so the front rose over the first few waves we had encountered. Charlotte was struggling. What I hadn’t considered is the differences in our history around open water. I spent a lot of summers in the sea, and I don’t mean that in the twenty-first century call to get rid of something we don’t like. We would always find a beach and my brothers and I would bodyboard our way to glory. I therefore know how to get through waves, how to ride back in and most importantly, what to do when you inevitably go under. Charlotte managed to set herself up to ride her board in a couple of times before she went down. I helpfully captured the whole thing on GoPro before she was able to splutter enough seawater out of her face to call me a bastard and call it a day.
I headed out deeper without her. Waves started to seem like daunting bullies from my secondary school days, big foamy versions of the boys who hit puberty first and didn’t like me. I bounced up and nutted them down. I wasn’t having any of it. I rode in a couple of times laying out on the board and then decided to test this standing up thing. If you’ve got to crawl before you can walk then I had put in plenty of time riding into the shores of the med as a pre-teen. The first time I “popped up”, I made it to my knees before the board tipped up and I disappeared beneath the water. I coughed up a lot of seawater and quite probably a less important internal organ. I looked up to the beach to see if Charlotte was hanging around looking cold and concerned for my safe return from sea. I couldn’t see her anywhere. I headed back out to try again.
I knew it would be just a matter of time before I found my natural rhythm and went pro. All I needed was a couple more hideous wipeouts and I would be the best damn surfer this ocean had ever seen. The next time I managed to stand I was too far forwards on the board and it nose-dived to the sea floor, sending me hurtling upside down into the water again. For a second I wondered if it looked like I could have been hanging ten, a move I only know from playing Tony Hawk, again as a teenager. Watching the footage back there’s no mistaking the fact that I simply didn’t know what I was doing. I was also very liberal with the bluest of four-letter words.
I pushed the board out again and waited. Tick followed tock followed tick followed tock. Everything went black and white. Some horses started to gallop over the lip of the next wave. I was in a Guinness advert. I lined myself up and started to paddle. The wave caught me and I bolted forward. I held the board steady, got up onto my knees and then jumped up. I was standing on a surf board. It could only have been for a few seconds, enough time to triumphantly lift my arms over my head before it all went Pete Tong but I was going to have that. I had done some actual genuine surfing.
Once I had recovered I looked up to the beach alcove and Charlotte was still not there, not watching me. I wondered if she would ever realise how truly cool her boyfriend was. It started to rain. Then it started to hail. I was reminded of the line in Forrest Gump:
“We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain… and big ol’ fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.”
This was the rain that seemed to come straight up from underneath. I decided to take on one more wave before having to explain to my girlfriend why I thought it would be enduring to capture her first wipeout to show to our grandkids one day.
I spotted the wave. I turned and started to paddle. It caught me. I stood, I whooped and I fell. I realised as I walked back to the shore and started to consider getting out of my new layer of Rip Curl skin that everything is like surfing or that surfing is like everything else. The things you fear about it, the being cold, the going under, the drowning. It’s very unlikely they’ll actually end you. You might fall, you might go under. You might end up in tears because you can’t feel your feet for an hour afterwards but at the end of the day, if you can just stand up for two seconds and holler it out to the world then it feels like you have got somewhere.
This week saw me having a number of frank and beautiful conversations with people about mental health. Their mental health, my mental health, what they were taking, what I was taking, who they recommend I speak to, who I recommend they speak to. It’s so nice to have kick-started something for myself and others which means this subject gets the openness and respect it deserves.
A lot of people have told me that what I did last week, what I wrote, was brave. It isn’t brave. It’s something we should be able to talk about in the same way I will tell you now that I’ve had some wicked migraines in the last couple of days which I have taken as being a foretelling of the coming of the end of my days. It shouldn’t be brave to talk about mental health. It’s like any other kind of health. The amount of time I spend listening to people complain about having man flu could instead be filled up with people just as naturally talking about their mental health.
I would like to thank everyone who took the time to read my blog, everyone who commented, everyone who spoke to me privately about their own concerns. It’s meant the stats have gone through the roof. On the day I posted Citalopramstagram my blog had more hits than on any other day in the four years I’ve been writing. We are all brave. We are all amazing. I am not defined by my mental health but it certainly is a part of me.
Hey.
It’s okay. It’s just me. Don’t mind me.
I just wanted to let you know that you’re going to be alright. There’s a lot of bloody awful stuff going on in the world but you’re doing really well.
When I was younger I got sad. I was hella young and I was hella sad (I’m going to call that my “hella” quota for this blog post). Nobody knew what to do with me. I hadn’t seen an awful lot of hardship aside from the fact I never got Hungry, Hungry Hippos for Christmas in 1993. I had never been beaten (other than with a spatula which was all the rage at the time) and I was never molested. I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t explain it. I sat with that sadness for an awfully long time. I suppose you’ve reached a point where you are wondering why I’m telling you this. It’s for me. It’s for you too but it’s mostly for me. Whenever I tell people that I suffer from anxiety, that I suffer from depression, that sometimes I see a train pulling in and wonder how long it would hurt for, they ask how. I am outwardly happy. I’ve had to learn to be. These are perfectly normal thoughts, unless you’re being quizzed by a healthcare professional in which case they draw a sad face next to that question on their little survey and carry on. I’m writing this as someone who has been in and out of some kind of therapy for more than five years, more than fifteen if you count the sugar pill homeopathy sessions I underwent when I first got the sads. I’m currently on citalopram. I’m on the waiting list for therapy again. I just wanted to write this to let you know that it’s okay. I can’t talk for people who have undergone horrible circumstances. I can’t speak on behalf of battered spouses or soldiers returning with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have never really been victimised (beyond generic school bullying (my name came under some scrutiny for not being quite English enough)). I’ve never really had a problem that couldn’t be resolved with a box of Kleenex and a cup of tea. Take that however you wish. I just wanted to let you know that even if you haven’t experienced something horrible, if you feel you are not allowed to show any kind of emotion at Million Dollar Baby in case people realise that you’re human, that it’s okay to need help and its okay to sometimes feel like you are a bit broken. It’s alright to want to do terrible things, to destroy yourself and the world around you. I don’t think that’s something that is taught. Like I said, I can’t speak for people in a lot of circumstances. I’m trying to completely understand my own privilege as I type this. Just because I have that privilege. As a man. As a white man. As a straight white man. As a straight white man living in England. As a straight white man living in my own place in England. Even with all that going on, it’s alright to be sad. It’s alright to feel emotion. It’s alright to feel like you want to shut yourself away from the world. We are taught from the earliest ages that we aren’t allowed to do certain things because they are gendered. We, as boys, got DIY and not being able to dance, girls got a lot of accessories and all the best colours. It was also taught women were allowed to have emotions that men weren’t. Isn’t that twee and quaint and adorable? For the longest time I felt guilty about the way I felt about things. It didn’t matter if it was social injustice (flies on the faces of kids in Sudan) or Aslan dying and rising up like a glossy yellow Jesus. That guilt runs pretty deep and I don’t understand why. What’s the problem with showing emotion? I cried when David Bowie died and I cried at Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s nice to be able to cry. It’s also nice to be able to talk openly about depression. Why do people have such an issue with it? What’s the big problem there?
As it turns out, once you become the person who mentions it, you’re actually like some kind of soothsayer for anyone else you come into contact with. As soon as I was comfortable enough with my own mental health to start talking about it, I discovered other people had thoughts and feelings and had been waiting for someone to talk to. Why don’t we all just talk about it? Wouldn’t that be a lot healthier than sitting in the dark and rocking? When I was a kid I genuinely thought I was going to be dragged off to a padded cell in a straitjacket. If I could travel through time, one of the first things I would do, after investing in Apple when they were working out of a garage and telling George Lucas not to put eyelids on the Ewoks, is tell my younger self it’s going to be alright, that it is okay to be sad and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s something I needed to hear at the time and as incredible as my parents were when I got that way, it didn’t help to settle the fear there was something wrong with me.
I read something recently that said “in the forties, eighteen-year-olds went off to fight and die for their country and now they just want to talk about their feelings”. I hope the source realises they are talking about a generation who returned home from that war, if they were lucky enough to return at all, and a lot of them suffered for the rest of their days. My grandfather was born in Holland. He was in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. He saw piles of bodies at roadsides. He had to hide under floorboards from the Nazis when he was a teenage boy. You don’t think he wanted someone to talk to about that? He couldn’t. He was never the same again. There wasn’t a term for it then. He, like many men in wartime, had to suffer in silence. I know someone who toured Afghanistan just a couple of years ago and the boy who came back was not the same boy we sent off. Fortunately he’s now getting the help he needs.
That’s why I’m offering this advice ultimately. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, or what you’ve got going on, just know that the thoughts that keep you up at night, the fears you have and the concerns you carry are entirely okay and you’re going to be alright. Look after yourself, get in touch with me if you are worried about anything and I will speak to you soon.
Hello. It’s me. From the outside or something. That’s what she says isn’t it? In the song.
In January 2016 (now) I decided I was going to give up social media for the month. This is a big deal. I chuffing love social media. It has all those bits you can drag down and release to update and it jingles and woops for you. What is not to love? I’m just worried it’s a bit dangerous. I spend so long on there that it gets fucking depressing. I’m supposed to be a writer. I’m supposed to produce things. How can I do that if I am locked into this infernal battle of baby photos and engagement announcements. That’s why I’m giving it up.
Those of you with me last year will remember the struggle of Dry January 2015. I didn’t drink. Apparently I don’t drink a lot now, and last night I downed three cans of San P Limota in a move that left me slightly nauseous for the rest of the evening but I assure you, I still drink. I wanted to give up something this year that had the same level of overlap with my life. It was either going to be social media or caffeine and I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to my grandes.
I’ll do a nice big wrap-up of what has gone on this month at the end but I just wanted to drop you all a message to say I am ok. I’m focusing on the things I actually enjoy. I’m writing a lot. I’m making plans that I hope to see through. Everything is awesome. I’ll see you when I’ll see you. Alternatively, there are other ways of getting in contact with me and you can use any of them. Don’t be a stranger or at least, don’t be any stranger than you usually are.
There we go, like narcissistic thieves returning to the scene of the crime we find ourselves back at another January. The chance to give everything a lovely little wipe clean and an opportunity to take stock of our life choices, or the chance to mock anyone who would consider changing anything they’ve ever done just because of the date. Either is good. It’s been a funny old year. I often wonder which it’ll be that the entire world gets destroyed because of bad decisions but here we are in another new one, blinking slowly through our hangovers and willing our genitals to return to normal size after knocking back half an E with a glass of bubbly because “fuck it”. Many things happened in 2015, politics and stuff, but what you are really wondering is what I made of the weird stuff that happened to me. Well, I’m going to tell you, breaking it down month by bloody emboldened month.
January: The year began much like others before it, by following on from the year that had been. I spent most of the month accidentally writing 2014 on documents and having to correct myself and dreaming of the day I would have to make a 5 look like a 6 rather than making a 4 look like a 5. I was also swiping right with a fiendish speed I first established playing Track And Field as a kid. It was an experimental time for me as a man although one which, as good fortune would have it, stopped me from being on the Channel 4 show, First Dates. I will forever be in debt to the replacement bus service I refused to get all the way to London on the promise of a background TV date and a dinner (which I have in my head would have definitely been a battered sausage and chips). Elsewhere, my glasses got trodden on in a sex kerfuffle and were never the same again.
February: As with every year before it, February was celebrated nationwide as being my birthday month. While the House of Lords still veto the suggestion we all get the whole month off and call it a Pauliday I did get a lovely four Saturdays and Sundays off in a month as well as a mixed grill to celebrate the day itself. In a move that shocked many (me), a number of my friends forgot the date and spent weeks afterwards trying to make amends. I pigheadedly refused to lower myself to their level and instead floated around my flat in a pair of mop slippers. I went to my first ever Drive-in movie where I saw ab-flashing gay romp Top Gun for the first time. I went to a very nice hotel in London and upset the establishment by drinking a lot of vodka martinis while dressed like I was in Mad Men.
March: Two incredible things happened in March 2015. The first was that The Strokes announced they would be playing Hyde Park in the summer. I booked tickets. The second was that Secret Cinema announced they would be showing The Empire Strikes Back in the summer. I booked tickets. The third was that I started talking to an incredible woman via my blog who utterly compelled me. The only problem was that she was in Manchester and I was in Essex. With the near-Vulcan levels of logic I possess I got on the National Express website and booked tickets. I was also asked to perform at Old Trunk’s Tales & Ales events. My best bit from the show was getting to say cunnilingus onstage, I’m like Shakespeare.
I also forgive my friends for forgetting my birthday when they surprised me five weeks late with a meal out. I almost cried hard salty man tears.
April: I spent most of April darting back and forth to Manchester and falling in love like an idiotic little schoolboy. I also got to visit Salford Lads Club and having been there and done that, got the t-shirt to prove it. Everything I had ever said in the throes of my relationship-hating mentality were served up to me on toast points. I was literally (not literally) eating my words (metaphor). After spending three days together Charlotte and I decided the best thing we could do about the two-hundred miles between us was reduce it to about fifteen feet at all times and she started packing up her life to come and be with me. As I am constantly reminded, the north remembers, I know nothing, winter is coming… except it wasn’t. Spring was. And I was full of the joys of it. I was reasonably youngish, I had a foxy lady and somehow I managed to get an interview for a job I had lovingly gazed across the room after for about six months.
May: In May everything went proper mental. I had to clear enough space in the wardrobe for another person to get their stuff in there and I found out I got the job I had been pining for. I could practically smell the impressive job title on subtle off-white business cards, It would even have its own watermark. I bought a number of suits because I was still watching too much Mad Men and tried to negotiate a start date. After a heavy 24 hours in which I drove back and forth to Manchester with a carload of stuff we got Charlotte moved in and began our domestic bliss of cold cups of tea, love and dolly grips fucking everywhere.
June: In a matter of days I got to see two of the most important things in my shared love of life with my hetero-life partner Antony. We watched The Strokes and then we watched Star Wars and it was a-maz-ing. I finally felt like I was at a point in my life where I could be the adult version of child me, allowing these incredible opportunities I had always hoped for to play out. More than anything I always wondered when I would get to a point where I was happy with my lot. I seemed to have found it. Charlotte and I also welcomed our ridiculous bundle of joy Rigamortis into our lives. The rescued halfling of a cat with bowed back legs became our fur baby and we started creeping other people out with the way we talked about her as if we had birthed her ourselves. I started my new job and was immediately overwhelmed.
July: For Charlotte’s birthday we went to the Harry Potter Studio Tour and geeked out for a number of hours. I discovered that regardless of what I may have thought I was never in Gryffindor House and have been flying the Ravenclaw flag ever since. We visited her family for a few days and traveled to Hay-on-Wire for all the bookshop feels.
August: I was reminded of just how cool all of my friends were as they simultaneously jumped ship for the Edinburgh festival. I submitted a new novel about a version of me with a different name to agents and publishers across the land and was told I had made the main character purposefully unlikable. It was a low point. I spent weeks trying to make myself purposefully likable again. Reading Festival allowed Antony and I another chance to geek off as we spent four hours circling the M25 before finding our turn off, drinking too much, thinking that some of the children at the festival should really locate their mums and dads because they’d had far too many disco biscuits for their faces to deal with unattended and then watched The Libertines locked arm-in-arm.
September: I started trying to fit six months worth of training ahead of my annual charity trek into just one month as it dawned on me I was going to actually be flying to the Grand Canyon. I spent my weekend walking across the very flat and un-Canyon-y Essex countryside, taking refuge in the sitting rooms of anyone who would have me and making Vines that I assumed were hilarious. My fourth book, The Stamp Brotherhood, was released upon the masses (my parents and possibly some people who got the free e-book) and once again I waited for Lady Fame to come knocking at my door. The book did incredibly well, getting into the Kindle Top 20 for its category and earning me even more of a smug demeanor. I got three new tattoos, finally reaching a point where I realised I don’t have to explain the relevance of them to everyone each time I get one done and it can simply be because I like something. It’s not like it is permanent anyway.
October: I flew to Las Vegas and was jettisoned out into the desert to trek the Grand Canyon. I met some lovely and incredible people who I will remain in touch with, as I did after the Sahara and Peru treks. I raised over a thousand pounds for the Guide Dogs charity and I added another country to my roster of blagging rights when I looked off wistfully and recalled the time I hurt my knee in a cave. I got drunk in a casino, was denied entry to a club, lost my underwear on a building site and was shown to an executive business suite in the course of one night out. I downplayed this element compared to all the great charity work.
Charlotte and I visited Bath, enjoying a relaxing day in the thermae spa, a trip around the Roman baths and a lot of good food. We both got tattooed on Halloween.
November: I decided I was going to write two novels instead of one in the National Novel Writing Month event held each year in November. I completed the first one, at sixty-one thousand words, in just twelve days, promptly had a breakdown and was offered counseling. The second book is still in development. I also took too many truffles and got weird on a houseboat on the canals of Amsterdam.
December: Then we got here. Lovely little month December is. The warmest since records began. I ran about everywhere in a t-shirt, sweating and trying to work out if I had bought enough stuff for everyone. We commandeered a Christmas tree and set it up with the fancy baubles and bangles we had collected on our recent travels. I got to perform with some of my friends in a weird quiz show held at The Alex where I was the sexy scorecard boy. It developed my desire to bring back crop tops for men. Star Wars brought absolute joy to my face. I watched it twice and wept quietly each time. I went to so many Christmas parties that I forgot what working without a hangover felt like. Then it was Christmas and we were packing up and off to the midlands again. It was the first Christmas I had spent away from home and Charlotte’s family made me feel very welcome.
I got to see in the new year with my shoe brother before heading round to see other friends and get weird into the wee hours.
Every year has its ups and downs, it has triumphs and it has disappointments. I’m trying my best to navigate through it all, to celebrate the things I have done and recognise the fact that I’m in a very good place and space. As a very wise man recently told me, you need to find success in the life you are living and enjoy those victories. Here’s to 2016. Cheers.
My brother surprised us all by popping the big question today. It had nothing to do with the Hadron Collidor. In fact, he asked his girlfriend to marry him. I have a strange relationship with my brother. We have completely different tastes in a lot of things but I love him more than anyone else in the world including Benedict Cumberbatch.
As his older brother I felt it was important I put together some advice for him. I am not married. It’s a punishment for shoplifting in some countries. I have been to weddings and lived for two years, three months and seven days longer than him so I know what I’m about son. Here is my advice:
1. She is always right.
2. Weddings are apparently quite expensive and quite hard to organise. I am therefore willing to offer my services not just as a superstar DJ but I will also spellcheck your speech absolutely free of charge.
3. Don’t skimp on food because I will judge you.
4. If I’m not your best man I accept your decision but insist on assisting in writing the speech in an advisory capacity. Again, this speech can be spellchecked by me free of charge.
5. Don’t wear brown.
6. If you want to keep the headcount down, have the wedding somewhere exotic. I recommend Tibet, Kiev or Bangalore.
7. Let Harry be the ring bearer. He can drive up the aisle in his new BMW. It’ll be brilliant.
8. Don’t let people throw rice because if a bird eats it then it expands in their stomach and they blow up. This sounds quite cool in theory but you don’t want seagull guts on your nice tweed drainpipes.
9. Chocolate fountains, photo booths, karaoke, public hangings and pick n mix stalls are great at weddings.
10. The best weddings have free bars. Cut costs elsewhere by picking up a dress from Oxfam.
When I was at school people insisted on telling me they were the best days of my life. Not the people I was actually at school with, they were too busy tripping me up, spitting in my hair and trying to dislocate my shoulder each time they walked past me in a corridor, but adults. Those mystical and wonderful creatures with their stale coffee breath and bags under their eyes. “These are the best days of your life, it’s all downhill from here” my dad once said to me, elaborating further on the sentiment. This came from a man I respect not just because he managed to not kill and eat any of his offspring but also because he continues working the same job he has for the last forty years. That’s the kind of commitment that makes me feel dizzy. Being at school were not the best years of my life and nobody ever told me it was okay that I didn’t enjoy the experience. I made friends and I will never regret not knowing how to deconstruct the poetry of Robert Browning but the best days of my life did not take place until much later than my supposed salad days – “Anyone for tennis, bleurrrrghhh!”
I wish people had not told me those were the best days of my life like every single one of them was fucking Bryan Adams because I subsequently felt I needed to detract myself from the situation and look at it with all this misty Wonder Years sentiment thinking constantly that one day it would make a worthwhile anecdote. Maybe that is what provided me with the tools to be such a gifted and handsome storyteller. School is terribly organised bullshit of the highest order and I got a hell of a lot better once I was done with the lot of it. What would have been more useful to me as a growing Schierneckerling is if someone told me how surreal it is for the stuff that happened within your lifetime to suddenly become worthy of being celebrated as nostalgia. 1993 is not history. Don’t try and celebrate it like it was over tweeennnttyyy yeaaarsss aggggoooo. Oh hang on… Ford unveiled the Mondeo in 1993, a stellar year for the future of family rows, especially for us on the confusing roads of France on our way to another static caravan ready for butter to be flicked down its longside (This is a very niche joke that possibly four other people will get but maybe two will read).
What I never realised when I was growing up is that all of the odd little things that happened in pop culture would eventually fade only to come back at me through a number of memes aimed at making me feel terribly old. Diana died eighteen years ago. That’s a whole adult person’s lifetime now. A person born in the same year Diana died can now go into a pub and order gin. That’s the kind of mindpoke I do not need on a Tuesday. Diana’s death hit us all in a way. I remember everything coming to a halt, literally. People didn’t seem to be able to function. It made me question the very nature of existence which is dangerous to do when you’re ten and wearing glow in the dark pyjamas. My folks tried to fob me off with some kind of nonsense about heaven but I was yet to see the Swayze/Moore paranormal porn epic that is Ghost so didn’t believe in such things. What was my point? Oh yes, nostalgia.
If you’re young and using the Internet and my blog as a source of news and light entertainment, well done, I have no doubt you are both young and funky fresh, but this my warning to you, like the ghost of future past but with nicer hair. Don’t let other people bombard you with new nostalgia or newstalgia if you will. Your lifetime is short. In the history of time we have been here for the last second of the last minute of the first day. That’s some Carl Sagan shit I just dropped right there. Appreciate.
It doesn’t matter if you remember growing up watching Hey Arnold or if your diet was solely Panda Pops and asbestos, you’re a person living your life and doing what you can. Make every day your last but don’t cry over the fragility of it all. You can start anything today. You can achieve and be great. Don’t be blindsided by newstalgia and keep on trucking. Just don’t think about Screech from Saved By The Bell’s sex tape.
Paul Schiernecker 