nunoncastors

Royal Mail, if we’re fair, has grown somewhat lazy and feckless in recent years. The loss of the second delivery was bad enough, but now it seems that any delivery is too much to ask for, at least in Netherfield.

The other weekend, our postman knocked on our door at 8:30-ish and I, being the lively chap that I am, crawled out of bed to answer their call. Upon opening the door I was informed that, “I didn’t think anyone’d be in, so I haven’t brought your package.”

This, understandably, confused and upset me, and I told them so. I then suggested that going and fetching my package would be a good idea, something which, it must be said, didn’t appeal to our postman very much. I was informed that I could do their job for them and retrieve it from the sorting office on Monday morning.*

This prompted an outburst along the lines of, “What? Tell you what, how about this instead? You do the job you’re paid for and fetch my post, and in return I won’t lodge a formal complaint about you and your apparent inability to understand what is required of you; namely, the delivery of post.” It wasn’t the most diplomatic response, I admit, but what the hell did they expect? Lazy fucker.

*Not in so many words, but that was the gist of it.

I am the victim of a phenomenon; potentially a Gipsy Curse, for I find that the extent to which inanimate objects – indeed the world at large – conspire against me is dependant entirely upon my mood. It smacks of eldritch naughtiness, frankly.

Take my garden gate for example; the green wooden bastard. Should I wake up nice and early, enjoy my breakfast and be in a buoyant frame of mind, he’s fine. No problem at all. Should I have endured a night of fitful sleep however, accidentally poured orange juice on my cereal and burnt my toast, he’ll be an absolute fuck. The lock that usually turns instantly will take five minutes of awkward jiggling and fumbling, for reasons unknown, until I eventually lose my temper and begin kicking and swearing at the fucking thing, which then, mysteriously, opens.

Then there’s this morning, a prime example of my being ensorcelled, because, despite running through the same routine I follow every morning, I managed to catch my rucksack straps on everything, my keys wouldn’t come out of my pocket, the front door wouldn’t unlock, the gate wouldn’t lock, the shed door attached itself to my rucksack, my bike refused to change gear and the wind blew in my face irrespective of which direction I happened to be going in.

Eventually, part-way between Wilford and Ruddington, as I stopped my bike to remove yet another stick that’d decided to wedge itself in to my spokes, I gave in and screamed at the world to fuck off and leave me alone. It didn’t, but I felt a bit better. Anyone else suffer from this kind of nonsense?

Emigration; it started as an idle threat, a childish act of dissonance to make my objections seem more profound and heartfelt; now it’s fast becoming an intention.

How did that happen?

Truth is, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m feeling increasingly trapped in this country and need to leave before I erupt. It could just be that I need a holiday, that a week of doing nothing will reset my anxiety levels to ‘mmm, nice’ and paint the nation a rosy hue. I doubt it, but you never know.

As it is, I find myself making enquiries and planning ahead so that hopefully, by the time of the next election, I can be primed to jump ship before they start jabbing RFID chips into people’s eyes and installing viewscreens in every home.

Then again, maybe the government will stop behaving like some vast and insidious overseer, bent on intruding into all aspects of our lives, and I won’t have to emigrate before I’m arrested for civil disobedience. I’d like that, all my friends live here.

Who knows, maybe eventually I’ll learn to love big brother.

Man, life can be complicated.

I’m missing some files, can you restore them?

Ok, where were they located before they went ‘missing’?

The recycle bin.

It’s like Brideshead, but more secular.

A few days ago I wrote a post entitled School, and into this post I poured a certain amount of hate and a soupçon of morose rubbish. It’s very much what I do. Now, as a rule I don’t tend to reread my entries here, they’re intended to be ‘of the moment’ rather than considered discourse. However, I’ve cheered up in the intervening time and feel that there were some glaring omissions.

For example, context is always important; it’s one thing to say that I loathed school and another to elaborate on why. My time at school, I imagine, was no worse than anyone else’s, full of travails and nonsense certainly, but arguably no worse. The fault, I suspect, lies with me.

In as much as my original post was born of grumpiness and doubtless a subconscious desire to paint events a rosier hue by a) partially justifying them and b) trying to present myself as being aloof and detached, this is an attempt to explain rather than point fingers.*

I realise that my view of the world is perennially dim, ever has it been so, but why do I recall school as being uniformly horrible? Well, I think if we take my suicide attempt at the age of eighteen and work backwards, we’ll probably get a pretty good idea.

It’s very easy to say that I was ‘unhappy’, almost a cop-out, but realistically this was the case. My parents divorced when I was ten and, while things are fine between them now, at the time I was treated to a certain amount of… shit. I suppose you could call it that. Again, hindsight undoubtedly blurs recollection, but when you’re ten divorces aren’t the easiest things to get your head around and, as much as I’d like to think I knew what was going on, I don’t think I really did. I certainly wasn’t equipped to deal with it.

The upshot this divorce was that I ended up living with my mother, visiting my father once a week and coping with the joys of my grandparents moving in to share the house. This, as you can imagine, made for a strange dynamic, one not necessarily conducive to a normal upbringing. Not that there was anything particularly abnormal about it, I certainly didn’t want for love and affection, it simply created tensions that again, you’re not really equipped to deal with as a child.

Which sounds like more excuses, doesn’t it? Perhaps they are. It remains though, that we are the sum total of all our experiences and, while some people cope and flourish, I evidently didn’t. My dark rumblings on school should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt the size of a small van if they are to be considered accurate; the same goes for this missive.

Navel gazing and reminiscing really doesn’t serve any purpose does it? Time to move on.

* Seriously though, there were some people who were wankers at school and, having met them since, still are. Though I sometimes wonder if I’m one of them.