Sponsored Write....

Oh god.

So I entered a sponsored writing competition. having not really written much creative work in a while. The brief was to work on the term 'Quality of Life'. Sponsorship went to Macmillan Cancer Support.

This resonated with me as I have been thinking about this quite a lot. I just quit my job to attempt to be more creative. I just had to deal with a house move, and a death in the family of someone whose, quality of life was a very real concern that effected many decisions on whether or not it should continue.

The story I wrote was meant to be performed on stage by actors and should probably have been uplifting and fun and funny and you know... Good and stuff.

The story I wrote however... it seems I feel into the trap of writing for my own therapy. This doesn't make for an entertaining story. And definitely not for on-stage work.

I am sorry... I'm pretty sure that they aren't going to/ didn't use it on stage... but in the interests of full disclosure..

Here it is... My training run... an early start. I will get better again. I promise.

still... It's not all bad.

Dundry Hill

HE

A flight of Birds… tall and heron like, erupts from the reeds that surround the river bed. Startled by the passing of the helicopter which is filming these shots. It’s a necessary evil, but the brief knowledge of it’s existence, the juxtaposition of furious machine against natural serenity doesn’t fully distract me from the images. Not completely. 

Sunset yellow has seeped into everything. Like spilt ink. Where it has touched, the colours are all changed into something wonderful. The deep blue of the darkening sky… the deeper green of the twilight savannah. Either side of the river there are unmistakably African trees, pruned to look like umbrellas by the very giraffes that move beneath them. Right now on the edge of being visible, but on their way to fading into black. Preparing for the night. The camera pans up from the river. No longer distracted by the rhythmic flapping of panicking egrets, the lens pulls its focus onto the sun itself, framed by mountains. Too bright to be seen by the naked eye. Now the birds come up together. To swoop in formation across the sun, as if choreographed. My heart beats harder in my chest. I may be sweating a little too much,  and this may make me uncomfortable later… but I don’t care.

I thank god for HD Television because I am cheating. I have woken up for a moment, and I am not alone, I am just in time to share this quasi-religious experience.

I am in front of a screen experiencing a depth of feeling normally reserved for those who have lived the good life. The perfect life.   If we can sweat and toil and move and mascarade and work and spend and love correctly the these bright-lights and vivid colours, this swelling of the heart is the ultimate reward.

I am not alone and I want to share how I am feeling, in this brief moment of clarity… I try to think about moving. I think about moving. Even though I know full well that I can’t

My attention goes back to the screen. I am transfixed for a moment. I am slipping again it’s hard to know if what I am seeing is real or not. Then suddenly, Someone is squeezing my hand…

I am half in the dream. It is 25 years ago, or 10 maybe or no time at all. Some kind of amalgam. I am tired and happy on a hill side. Looking away from the city.  There is that hand squeeze again… I’m with her!

And I’m about to say something stupid telling her that my socks are magic… pretending I am fluent in Gildensterni… when I am suddenly struck dumb by the view. And we enjoy it together in silence and everything is ok.

I, the viewer, move beyond the silhouettes of birds over the river… and something else appears on the sun. Another silhouette. The words “Experience Africa. A land of unimaginable beauty.” And cliché for me becomes real. Unimaginable beauty.

I close my eyes.

My head falls to the right. I am able to open my eyes again. And there she is. Just for a moment. Still there, still beautiful, still squeezing.

If anyone does, She deserves Africa, I want her to know what I am feeling, not just see the image of it. She deserves the real thing… She deserves unimaginable beauty, and not be here with me, trapped in this room.

I try my best to convey this complex emotion with only my eyes. And then when I am just about sure that she knows exactly what I mean, I am gone again.

 

SHE

When presented with an anonymous survey… Most office workers admit to wasting approximately two hours a day. That’s 10 hours a week. A day and a half… in every five.  Around eighty days a year… just staring blankly, at the screen, zombie-like. Eighty days of pretending to look busy while scrolling down the Facebook News Feed, browsing Twitter, waiting for a conversation you can weigh into with some kind of witty retort. Pausing as you spy a picture of a rich relative looking resplendent on the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Eighty days of Angry birds and longing glances across the car park, over beyond the rooftops and high-rises, out towards the lower slopes of Dundry Hill.

Dundry; that much closer than Kilimanjaro… but still in a galaxy far, far away, completely out of reach, yet embedded in my mind. I’ve never been there but it looks calm and green and is visible from almost anywhere this side of Bristol even from the BRI, that’s the hospital, I don’t work at the hospital, I just… go there a lot, at least once or twice a week.

It strikes me that you might not know Dundry Hill at all, let me explain that it’s green and pleasant and English, and special to me, and a half-day holiday waiting to happen that I have never taken. It comes complete - lonely oaks and silhouetted copses and quaint pubs with real Ale and charismatic staff. I am told there’s a pub out there that still serves Mild. And I know this because he loved mild, though I have no idea why. Some kind of throwback to the mythology of his northern roots.

Anyway, that should be enough of a description for you, let me know if you need more. I mean, I could go on, but some responsible impulse within me is demanding that I get back to the point before someone notices I’m not working. And now the phone on my desk is ringing. But I’m not going to answer it because I am still talking to you, the reader, about the mythical two hours of human waste a day.

I will let it ring. They will leave me a message. I can call them back in a couple of hours, when I feel better.

Two hours… Just think about that. That’s what people are willing to admit to. Multiply that by all of office workers on this planet, take your 80 days around the world… and discover a mountain of limp bodies that dwarfs Dundry, and mount bloody Kilimanjaro.

Millions of day dreams and duvet days later and we still won’t have come close to reaching the peak of this wasted potential. Because the actual reality is so much worse.  A European butter mountain so tall as to require more than just oxygen for the final assault. Something akin to a space suit probably. So many people. Stacked on top of each other… barely alive, watching the clock even when they have the option to leave.

I scrawl a picture on the pad next to the still ringing phone. A spaceman holding a flag on a mountain top. I add a goat. The goat makes me smile. He’s chewing on the flag.

I am sure that when answering a survey like this. People don’t even count the meetings in which nothing is achieved. The teleconferences where you fight against an involuntary nap with the head nodding inevitability that at some point someone will ask you where you are with the Cost-Benefit Analysis, or demand an ETA on the final breakdown of an inter-departmental time and motion study. You will have to be bright, on the ball… fully engaged. You will have to answer. I am not equipped to do any of these things.

The phone finally stops ringing.
Thank god for the lock on my office door.

I stare at a list of emails. Flag one for immediate attention then place it into a folder to deal with at another time. There are relevant tasks I could be doing. Jobs that need to be done. Pivot tables to populate and analyse. Stories to tell. All valid uses of my time and all much too involved for me now, in my current state. It will require herculean mental effort to even move the mouse. And these are ‘start in the morning’ type jobs, not for now. Right now, It is all I can do to just stare out the window until it’s time to leave.

I am too weak to even pretend that this isn’t what I am doing. Because the reality is, I have been in tears for two years but no one else can see them. It’s a poetic description of reality that also happens to be true.

Here’s another. I have been holding onto something with hands that seem weaker every day. Trying to hold on. That is my function now. Comb hair, smile at nurses…  squeeze his hand at the right time, and wonder if he even knows I am there. This, apparently, is what love feel likes.

HE

When poetic reality becomes the truth… you know something is very, very wrong. When the whole world feels as vivid and moving as an African Sunset, touched up in photo-shop and entering my brain through a plethora of expensive filters… When the perfectly exposed image of even the most mundane of objects is too beautiful to bare. These are the worst of times… possibly the best.

Definitely the worst because part of you knows it isn’t real, is aware of its fleeting nature, knows that the memory will later turn on you. And the crippling starkness of its contrast will be the weapon with which you taunt yourself. A violent gear-change jerking you away from the state of mind you are required to adopt in order to function on a day to day basis.

I remember explaining this to her, trying to sound clever, acting every part the “real northern poet” in wine bar in Bath, tucked away on Green Street. I was, going for ‘a little bit crazy, a little bit dangerous.’ I made a point of talking to Ifor the owner, to show her how cool I was… how connected in the scene. She seemed to go for it… to be a little bit impressed. I was doing the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa, she was doing Business Administration at the real university…

The road ahead was lined with milestones, paved with potential. Young, bright, beautiful and creative, she trumped anything I could think of to compare her too. And I tried.. My god I tried. 

Through out the years that followed. I built mountains of scrunched up paper… So many failed attempts, We laughed when I said “we’re going to need a bigger bin.” The truth was I needed a slag heap. Paper balls are the net product of a poet at work. You work the coal face for hours, days, weeks on end and most of the time nothing comes out, and you start to wonder if there is even anything there. And then in a moment of apparently wasted time the poetry comes. In a moment spent staring down at the city from the slopes of Dundry hill. With your mind in the middle distance, your fingers involuntarily reach into your pocket, take up the pen and scrawl down line after line, without mental interference, of what will eventually be your first published work.

Just as a town planner, business guru or administrative assistant, needs to day dream in order to function, so poets need to waste time working on metaphors that they are fully aware are far too cerebral to work. Like waste-paper being the ullage from some kind of imaginary poetry mine.

When we met I was pretentious, half-talented spotty and young. And to my surprise she seemed to like it. And she loved me and she nurtured me, and she read my work and made it better, and I was the dreamer and she made good money. And for years nothing was published because nothing was worthy, but in the end there was a book about a hillside I went to, just to clear my head… and there was adulation and public appearances and readings and finally commissions, recognition and the financial stability of a teaching post.

And so, so much of it was down to her. And then suddenly, with only a few weeks warning, all of that was over. Paradise lost in a single diagnosis, and that wasn’t her fault at all.

And now that day, the night of our first date…. Is the happy, vivid memory with which I like beat myself to death. And sometime I wonder if there can be a better tribute to her than that? And I curse myself for never quite finding the right words and Perhaps I am being too morbid right now, too panicked, but if a man dying slowly by degrees, and brain-first to boot, doesn’t have the right to feel sorry for himself, then I have no idea who does.

But it’s actually not all bad. Not all the time.
It really isn’t, weirdly.

SHE

I didn’t go into work today. I didn’t go to the hospital. I may go later on. I’m not sure. Instead I decided to go for a walk. Less of a decision, more that my legs were making the decision for me.

For the first mile I had no idea where I was going. Even though it was obvious. It was where he used to walk, when he was fruitlessly “digging in the mine ” pretty much two or three times a week if I am honest.

I remembered our first date. The Wine Bar in Bath. He’s never been more out of place in his life. His fumbling attempts to impress me. His awkward small talk with Ifor…. It was all so humorous, and despite everything he couldn’t hide, the person he was going to become. It was as if emanating from his charity shop leather jacket and ill advised hat was the intriguing lustre of an unpolished diamond, still half buried in the ground.

I fell in love with the spark of talent that I knew would emerge between the mass of juvenile comparisons between my neck and that of a giraffe. My body and that of a Cheetah in full run… My heart and that of a bull elephant, rampant and in heat. I never, ever understood that one.

As I walked the city got smaller and smaller. Not just the ones in the distance, but also the building around me Smaller houses, surrounded by more and more space. Space to breath. When he finally hit his stride I wasn’t even surprised. I’d seen it coming for so long.

There is something strange about walking through a place you have heard described so many times by someone you love. It feels like rediscovery, the reality of these once imagined objects makes all of it more true. The Ivy covered pub with the pit-bull for a barman. The lonely oak. I had not come before as I didn’t want it to fail to live up to my imagination but for the first time since the diagnosis, I was doing something that didn’t feel like a total waste of time.

HE

Sometimes the experience is so real and so vivid that I forget that they are reflections of something that has already passed. The world stops being painful. Life, no longer fleeting.  And I stop hearing the noise of the hospital, the rhythmic beating of the EKG, I don’t feel the changing of the drip or eavesdrop on the quiet conversations between doctors and nurses. And I feel at peace. Because even when I come back around, I know that all those memories still exist and always will, inside both us and also inexplicably, somewhere else, somewhere very real that I cannot explain. I know in those moments that in spite of everything and from my admittedly skewed point of view, the past is not the past but also my present and my future. And then she squeezes my hand. And even this becomes a part of the memory and there suddenly there exists, in my beatific confusion, the fleeting possibility of a never ending… unimaginable beauty.

So yeah, as I said. It’s not all bad.

SHE

I was about half way home when I decided to hand in my notice, by text message no less. Later this got negotiated down to a career break but I may well decide to never go back.

And it was five days before he passed, that in moment of almost clairvoyant forethought, I bought the tickets.

But of all of that time, the moment that I carry with me, as I look out at the view, complete with giraffes and birds and golden suns… Is the moment in a small square room, when an advert came on, and after being unresponsive for days, I had the sense that he was present again, and together we watched a flock of birds take flight across a golden river, and I squeezed his hand as if to tell him that I was leaving. And he turned his head and looked at me. And I could see from his eyes, that it was going to be ok.