gaps in the story

There are three drafts unseen to in the eponymous section of this website, stretching back to March. They touch upon spring blossoms, the patterns of feeding geese on riverbanks and stargazing in a French swimming pool, among other things. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish them. Blog posts should really be finished in a short time, whilst the neurones fire. I write down a title that amuses me and an opening paragraph and then I get distracted and then that’s all that’s left. A sentence fragment that seemed clever to me at the time and maybe, if I’ve been productive, a hundred or so words that segue into nothing. Like a house converted to flats that still has one of those staircases that lead only to cream-painted plasterboard.

I know what they were going to be, vaguely what observations they hoped to make. The spring blossom one aspired to turn a brief sojourn to Cornwall into an Odyssey, likely to be littered with comments about hedgerow and the hope that spring brings and the joy of the wilds. There would have been a melancholy to it though, as it was my first trip to Cornwall since July 2018, and that trip, as joyful as it was, was joyful in the face of a grief and sadness I cannot shake, nor do I want to. I’m sure I would’ve made it work somehow. Blossoms and grief. The end of winter. The mirror glass of tidal water at the ebb, crusted hulls of abandoned boats askew in the spreading mud reflecting some fucking thing. If I’d written it I’m sure some links would come. I would’ve hammered it out.

Sat in the pub with a pint by the pier I watched the geese creep up to the river grass with caution, as though there may be a fox hidden below the tide line, small enough to hide amongst the reeds that stood only a foot tall. Each step they took they took as though there were boobie traps everywhere. They were the water fowl Indiana Joneses of the Thames that day. It piqued my interest, in part because I was trying to write a lot of other shit at the time. I watched them dart their heads into the foliage, quick, eating whatever it was that lurked in that grass that looked edible. Every couple of jabs their heads would pop up like meerkats to see if there were anything coming to eat them. Then they’d go back to eating. I’ve no idea what the point of the post was going to be, or if there was one other than the joy at observing a hitherto new (to me, at least) behaviour in the invasive, annoying and usually uninteresting behaviour of our loathsome invasive goose species.

As for the stars and the pool and France, that all feels like stolen time now. The title I came up with for the draft is “lying in the dark to stare at the light” and I’m quite happy with that as a title because that’s what we did. I think I managed a sentence or two and deleted them and rewrote them about four or five times before retreating from the post. I can make all sorts of excuses about why I didn’t push on with that but it’s because I’m selfish and I didn’t want to give it away. Sometimes writing is a release and I didn’t want to release that for fear that it wouldn’t be held quite as close to my heart afterwards. We saw shooting stars and satellites and aeroplanes and at least two nights were dark enough to make out the pale cataract-ic band of the Milky Way. Sometimes you write so as not to forget, but sometimes you don’t write because you’re not quite ready to let go yet. And writing can be letting go.

Letting go. I didn’t start a draft about this past harvest. I never got that far. It rattled in my head quite a bit. There were several storylines and a surfeit of metaphors to abuse but instead I just made wine and drank beer and ate wild boar and anchovies with my pals. I wish I had. I wish I wrote more while I was there instead of thinking about writing more. I didn’t because it was my fifteenth harvest and sometimes when you’ve done things for fifteen years in a row you pick up your pen with a little less urgency to scribble every detail down. If you’re not careful though, they can all blend into one. The fruit was good but there wasn’t enough of it. That could be 7 or 8 of the last fifteen years. But this year was different. I just didn’t know it at the time. I’ll have to stumble over my notes and photos and see if I can put it all together.

Now it’s autumn. And I look over the heat and tumult of the summer and spring and it doesn’t all quite fit. A didn’t go to b then c. I remember pretty much everything but nothing has followed seamlessly as cause and effect would have us expect. I lament the lack of writing but don’t know where I would’ve fit it in. Yet that might be why it doesn’t fit. Because I wasn’t writing it down. Perhaps those are the empty spaces, the bits where I didn’t take the time to write it down and make sense of it while it was happening. Not that it made sense at the time.

old haunts

I climbed the steps out of the tube station into the familiar. Streets I’ve wandered for 32 years, give or take. So much has changed that I can’t quite place everything. The Itsu that used to be a Burger King but was a Wimpy before that... or was that the Boots? The WH Smiths is now a bakery. The dodgy used record shop where I bought knackered old comics is still there, though. In fact, it’s multiplied and split off into several dodgy shops, each specialising in various used wares, all looking equally knackered and yet somehow still sort of desirable.

Every memory brings more along with it. Sometimes they’re specific, lingering, moments and sometimes it’s a flip book, a mental shorthand where several years are condensed and rush by in a flash. And sometimes it’s not the memory itself but the realisation that there’s a memory there, just out of reach, slipping between neurones, elusive, like a shape in the fog or a shadow under the water. It’s those that shorten the breath and brush the spine. Like you’ve been touched by a ghost. Tendrils of the past caressing lost corners of the mind, withdrawing before they can be seen and remembered.

It’s always been a little dirty here. Shabby, chic, but not a combination of the two. Somehow both at once. The mansions of billionaires and the council flats all stones throws away from each other.

It’s the end of winter but in my head it’s a summer morning thirty years ago, probably about 6am, the sun already up and blinding, my eyes red raw and crumbling to dust without sleep, but sobered up enough to make my way up from one of the squares next to Portobello Road back to Notting Hill, hoping that the bus is running. It’s probably a Sunday. The streets are wet from the thunderstorms the night before. We turned the lights off at the party and watched the lightning through the window and played Purple Rain really fucking loud. Tins of lager and Thunderbird and probably some other stuff kicking about. Stuff that gave me a wicked fucking headache. We thought the thunder would break the windows it was so loud. It woke up some of the drunks we hoped would stay asleep.

Some market stall people are just beginning to set up and the hill was so fucking steep. I could’ve just got the tube from Ladbroke Grove to Hammersmith but my world was smaller then.

Jump forward a decade and a half and I’m at lunch in a little Greek or Italian place across from where the posh wine merchant used to be, hoping to impress someone I thought I was in love with.

Then back again even further than the walk of shame to a lunch where we snuck a beer or two and then went back to school. Wondering if the teachers would notice. Wandering the canyons of grand terraced houses broken up into flats, some of them crumbling, some of them with fresh paint, made whole again by a wealthy developer hoping to attract a wealthier buyer.

From the tube I walked past the Coronet, now a theatre but formerly a cinema. I sat in the smoking section twenty-seven-or-so years ago for Clear and Present Danger and smoked too many Marlboro Lights and drank too much beer afterwards. It was a shabby cinema. It seems quite a chic theatre.

A year and a bit ago a friend of mine and I drank cans of Tyskie and ate tortilla chips on the corner behind The Gate cinema just back down the road. The pubs were not open. It was plague time. It still is.

Turning up Campden Hill Road I remembered a generous client taken suddenly ill and now gone who lived only a hundred or so metres away. The hills are steeper than I remember.

A night in the Windsor Castle, a restorative pint after the worst wedding ever, five years or so ago. It was only meant to be a pint but it was more. It started off as three of us but others joined. Just at that right time late on a Sunday afternoon when all the roast-eaters have buggered off and the staff look so grateful you just want a beer rather than to specify some terrible preference for overcooked roast beef. We kept getting rounds in. It wasn’t closing time but it was late and dark when we left and I didn’t go home straight away. One of us from that night isn’t here anymore.

It’s a pub with hidden corners. Ancient panelling and small passages from one bit to another. Almost every corner holds a memory, even the garden. The same with The Churchill Arms down the road, with its myriad tchotchkes and cheap, great Thai food. The two couldn’t be more different as pubs yet they bear about the same share of my ghosts.

I’m not back here that often anymore. I think it’s been a year or so, sipping those cans of beer on a street corner. And yet, in spite of all the things that are different, it’s still like walking into a set of all my lives before. As though turning a corner it might be 1990 again, or 1998, or 2005, or 2017. And so when I’m here, I’m not all there. There’s a part of me lingering in the past, tracing old steps, sipping empty pints with friends who aren’t around anymore, getting into trouble and wondering how to get back.

That’s the trouble with old haunts. They’re haunted.

old tests

I threw out all those old tests. The ones that said I was sick. And the ones that said I wasn’t sick anymore.

I lied though. I took a picture, in spite of myself, of all the positives and the negatives. I couldn’t not. I take pictures of that sort of shit.

I didn’t share it though.

Nobody out there needs another picture of somebody else’s covid tests.

It seems as though I’ve made a full recovery, for which I am grateful. Friends around me young and old struggle with long covid indiscriminately so to be left with only my familiar ailments to confound me is a relief.

partial recall

I have a friend who’s a neuroscientist. One of my dearest and best pals. He doesn’t do the brain stuff these days. He’s in fintech. A word my spell-checker hasn’t underlined or corrected which I am happily taking as one of the abundant signs of the impending apocalypse. We used to be flatmates. Back then, as far as I know, was when all the research into memory revealed that many of our memories are actually acts of imagination. That because of the way our neurones fire, and rebuild past events in our minds, a lot of it might not be drawing from stored memory but created on the fly to fill in gaps.

Like that bit from the video tour in Jurassic Park where they, using the magic of animation, plug frog DNA into dinosaur DNA, we ourselves are plugging our imagination neurones into our memory neurones to make a T-Rex.

(I know that that is not how neurones work)

I used to ask him about the memory stuff but I’m not sure I was smart enough to understand his answers.

I have a good memory. Except for when I don’t, which is another story, but for the most part, I have a very, very good memory. It’s something I’ve worked on since I was a little kid. I remember lying upside down on a staircase in a flat my dad’s company rented in 1985, before we moved to London but while we were still here a lot, and looking up at the dim bulb at the top of the stairs, and thinking to myself, “I bet I remember this in thirty years”. Thirty-years ago was seven years ago this coming September.

Nothing interesting happened in that moment. I just found myself, as a nine year-old, in a weird spot on a staircase. I had probably been in similar spots several times that day. They were steep stairs and fun to fuck about on. In my mind they were whitewashed but carpeted down the centre. For some reason I think the carpet was a pale blue.. Perhaps aquamarine. I think that part’s bullshit. I think that’s a bit of frog DNA fucking up my T-Rex. But I know that moment happened because I promised myself I’d remember it. And because I promised myself I would remember it, every time I thought about any promise I ever made in the 36 and a half years between now and then, a little flash of that moment would pop up, reminding me.

As far as I know that was the first time I ever really thought about memory. Contorted, upside down, in an underlit stairwell in the mid-eighties Trying from then on to, basically, remember stuff.

Obviously it’s selective and entirely useless academically. It’s not a memory palace or some easy way of regurgitating the right pub quiz answer at the right time. Instead it’s kind of accidental. It never worked with studying or reading something for school or university. But it seems to work with people, and the folks I’ve met along the way. The good times and often the bad. The bad ones get stuck on loop sometimes, but even with those I like to think, to hope that the memories are more T-Rex than frog DNA.

And it’s nice when someone who hasn’t seen you in 30 years asks about something and you remember it clearly. You remember them and what you ate together and what you drank after going to see a shitty movie. Buying a bottle of cider and a bottle of Martini (I’m pretty sure it was Extra Dry, but our age suggests it may have been Bianco - we were way ahead of the vermouth revival), very underage, from a Victoria Wine in King’s Langley in 1991. We only dated for three or four weeks but it seems longer.

Isolation is fertile ground for revisiting stuff like this. Wondering which vivid pieces of memory are real and which are made up. A grand mosaic, some pieces fired porcelain, some plastic, fitting together to tell a larger story that, viewed from a distance, provides no indication of which piece is which.

Maybe the mosaic thing works better than frog DNA and T-Rex DNA? It’s prettier.

You folks know you can buy my books, right? Here (winemaking book) and here (novel).

temporary posterity

I tested positive again this morning. Both lines were pale, but they were certainly there. There wasn’t any doubt. I threw away the accoutrements but saved the test itself, writing the date on it with a Sharpie.

I’ve saved every positive test since they started being positive. I have no idea why. I have no means by which to properly compare anything. After awhile they sort of wash out a bit. They’re sat on a counter in the kitchen, in ascending order by date (all scribbled on in Sharpie). The first one, the one that told me I was sick, that’s the boldest of the bunch. Bright red, confident lines. Each as intense as the other. If it had been pale, I might have been tempted to take a second, just to be sure. But I felt kind of shit anyway, and that line by the ‘T’ was SO FUCKING RED, I didn’t see the point of wasting any more.

Then I ordered some more tests.

Then I checked the fridge and the cupboards and everything to see if I was ok to stay inside for 10 days. It turns out I had enough wine and whisky. As long as my smell and taste held out, I thought I’d be ok.

Then I thought my throat felt more sore, and my back ached that bit more, and all the little indicators that prompted the test that morning were a lot louder than they had been. Hypochondria after the fact is a thing, apparently.

I remember picking up that first test and grabbing the Sharpie. I wasn’t going to post a photo. I’ve posted and seen too many photos of tests at this point. We all have. It won’t be long before there’s an algorithm in our photo apps to collect them all together for some sort of twisted plague-nostalgia slideshow. For whatever reason I thought I should save the test. And if I was going to save it, I might as well date it. I keep at least four different Sharpies in different places on the ground floor of the house for just such important occasions. That I was able to find it without any issue is proof that the system works.

My symptoms change daily, sometimes during the day. From cold to flu to chest infection to some terrible muscle and back trauma. I feel like I have a fever and then I don’t. I don’t feel that sick, but at the same time I’ve never really been sick like this before. Or not at the same time at least. It’s confusing. And I know I’m getting off lightly. Crazy lightly. I’ve got an autoimmune disease and while this thing seems to be playing hopscotch with my immune responses, it’s doing so with a forgivingly gentle hop. It’s unnerving.

None of those positive tests, with their strange gradients of red lines, provide that level of detail. The story they tell is of a single state. They are representative in the most limited sense. Yet I’m still keeping them. Not forever. Just until the status changes. When it drops from two lines to one they’ll all go in the bin. Why keep them in the meantime? Like I said before, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because I knew where to find the Sharpie.

...to remember it now...

Most mornings I open a knackered green Moleskine notebook and attempt to transcribe my scrawls about whisky. I’m grateful for the ribbon that marks my page but I struggle to find the correct bit on that page amidst the scribbles and angrily crossed out misspellings. It’s mostly written in biro, though the odd felt tip makes an appearance.

I’ve never written anything so long in longhand before. It was an experiment. I enjoyed it, in parts, but don’t know if I’ll do it again.

I appreciate the battered pages, that unique dent a fine point pen makes, creating texture that is at once familiar and mysterious to the touch. I can close my eyes and run my fingers along the sheets and know there are words there, even if I don’t recall what they say.

Typing out these thoughts and stories and ravings has become a journey in itself. Remembering not just the stories, but writing those stories for the first time. Sometimes it’s so clear. I might remember where I was when I jotted down a tale about the midges on Loch Indaal in August 2013, bathed in the golden light of the waning sun and drinking Bunnahabhain with a champagne chaser (I was in an airport bar on my way to France to make wine for the 2020 harvest). Or sitting on a chair in a garden on the Thames and trying to describe hosting my first whisky tasting, illegally, in a dorm room at high school when I was 16. Or just sitting at my desk trying to in vain to properly explain how important a whisky Ardbeg 17yo has been in my life.

Sometimes both the writing and the words feel like they are the work of someone else. Someone kind of like me, but not me. I see my handwriting and know the story but it’s not how I would have told it and yet it’s there, in black or blue ink, and I apparently told it like that when I knew only myself would be the reader. There’s no rhyme or reason to these discrepancies of memory. Some stories that feel they should have been vivid when I wrote them seem distant. Others I can smell not only the drams from the time, but also the one I sipped when I wrote it down.

I sipped quite a few drams while writing it down.

I transcribe a few pages every morning before coffee or running or work. Originally, I was going to edit and rewrite as I transcribed, but I feel getting everything digital first is for the best, especially as I’m trying to do it before coffee or running and I can’t really trust any decisions made before those things. Perhaps before one or the other, but not both.

It’s taken me some time to realise that transcribing is not scratching the writing itch. I will tick the box that I’ve worked on the book, so that’s a manner of writing task, but it’s not writing. It’s copying. With a bit of palaeography thrown in (my handwriting isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great either). So coming back here and blathering on about it has been good. But I’ve also started writing notes again, proper notes in a notebook. Though you’d think I was a bit over the whole notebook thing by now, I’m just over the whole handwriting the WHOLE BOOK thing now. I think taking notes for books in longhand is great and would actually be perfect if I could remember which notebook I took the notes in.

Next to my desk is a stack of eight completed notebooks. Some are tasting notes, some are journals, some are a mixture of the two. They cover fiction, non-fiction, thoughts, poetry… they all go back to 2005. There are more elsewhere. These are just the ones I put next to my desk because I thought they were the most urgent. They don’t include the whisky book manuscript. That’s another one. There are a couple of Smythsons (super posh), several Moleskines, and in-between a Field Notes or two. For every notebook that’s full I have three or four untouched kicking about. Perhaps more.

I love buying notebooks.

Imagining all the writing I’m going to do is so much easier than writing it.

unchecked lists

I wrote a list when I got here, of all the things I wanted to do, and some of the things I had to do. I think I managed about half of them. Maybe two-thirds. Most of them were places I wanted to eat. It’s pretty dumb of me, really. Key West is an island most people go with the express purpose of not really doing anything. It’s designed to undermine the most active of intensions, unless those intensions are to drink margaritas and eat seafood.

I’ve no idea how Hemingway managed to write here. I stare at a page as the morning gets hotter and my eyes get grabbed by a lizard flitting along the deck or a hummingbird whizzing about and then it’s too hot and a tree frog croaks or the pool looks too good or there’s a beer that’s been in the fridge too long and I should probably get that out and sip it while trying to get a word or two down. That’s why I get up early to go for a run before the sun rises. At least if I’ve done that, I’ve done something. I can nap, drink beer, eat ice cream, munch fish tacos on the beach; whatever I want, because I went for a run and did something. Doing something is one of the best excuses for doing nothing out there.

Buy my book.

Buy my other book.

everything that's happened since

I've written a whole book since the last time I was on here. Not sure how I managed that, or how I managed to not pour forth on here about the daily hiccups and constant torrents of self-doubt that accompany that particular endeavour. Previous attempts at book-writing accumulated another book's worth of blog posts; meandering missives concerned with the curious space writers occupy. It could be limbo, but perhaps it's more that limbo is the ideal, the space I search for when I'm writing. An in-between space occupied by only me, a part of the world and apart from it. In contact enough to sip a whisky and see the odd friend, but outside so that nothing can exist but the sound of my fingers banging on the keys to Dvořák's 9th. It works as an ideal to aim for, rather than something to expect. Anyway, I wrote it, limbo or not, and I'm rewriting it now. I like the characters more than the book, so the rewrites are to make sure they get the book they deserve. It's slow, but sort of steady. 

Also, through no fault of my own, I appear to be a wine merchant again. In a shop. With wine. And whisky. I missed whisky. Well, I missed constantly dealing with whisky on a professional level. I was never really far enough away from it on a casual level to actually *miss* it. There are thirteen bottles next to my desk and a glass of Springbank next to my trackpad for goodness' sake. Anyway, it's a job with great booze. I will not be talking about it much here. 

There's another manuscript to rewrite, an old one. The first novel I wrote, the one that got me writing in the first place, that is going to need a hefty rewrite as well. Fortunately, my editor doesn't get their mitts on it until October, so I've got time to rewrite the other one first. Hopefully. That book is published next year. You can still get your name in it, if you fancy.  

I've drunk well, eaten well, and run a lot. I've come up with a name for my wine label. It's Cathar(tic) Wines, if you're at all interested. They are not yet available in a discerning independent wine merchant near you. They may never be. There aren't many bottles to be honest, and I'm pretty sure my mum is going to drink most of them. The name's a mediaeval history joke, if you need any further proof that I'm an incurable nerd. I like having a wine label. It's only taken a decade, which is less time than getting my first novel published, but more time than publishing my first wine book.

Other than that, the summer is kind of a blur. Some lovely friends got married, though that was May. Some other friends had parties and others drank on weather beaten picnic tables outside pubs. I tried to get to get to Scotland but couldn't, so I drank a bit more whisky than summer usually suggests and Scotland came to me. 

Someone died that shouldn't have. Who I'd not seen in too long but was so strong a presence in a time and part of my life that still feels and tastes so fresh that it could have been five minutes ago. I can hear her laughing and fighting and shouting with glee and she's not there anymore and while I know that I'm supposed to celebrate her having been there at all, I'm still angry and sad that so bright a life and talent is gone. She drove a red Honda Jazz (when I knew her) and painted horses and liked wine. I disagreed with some of her politics, but liked the way she fought for them. I'm ashamed that whenever I thought, "I've not seen or spoken to her in awhile" I just assumed it would be something time would correct, that we would meet again because that's what people do. But she's gone now and it doesn't seem real.

missing him

He looked sad for a minute that morning. Stood in the doorway staring out at nothing in particular, his eyes watered up a bit more than usual. They’re watery anyway, in the way that old men’s eyes get, in the way you never think your father’s eyes are going to get. But this was more than usual. A timely blink could’ve unleashed a tear. His hands shoved in the pockets of his shorts, he looked as though for a moment he remembered. Not everything, but something, even just that there was something to remember. And with that he knew that it was time. Somewhere in his lost head, a head that knew little but the most basic of things, and not even those very well, there was a sadness and an understanding. It only lasted a moment, then his brow furrowed at an imagined annoyance, and he pointed at a tree, a tree that had been there for years, and asked what the fuck it was doing there. 

Perhaps I projected. Maybe I saw what I wanted to see. It’s so easy to do with his dementia. It’s not like some forms, where the distant past can remain crystalline and sacred. No, Frontal Temporal Dementia is cataclysmic, deleting almost everything and bringing the structure that held it crashing down. Like erasing a chalkboard, leaving that thin dusty film of white, and then kicking the board into kindling. With so little remaining, it doesn’t take much to put there what you want to see. 

Sometimes he seemed like a great actor who forgot his lines. The words, their meaning, their place. He sounded so like the man I knew. But the things he said, even though they were in his voice, weren’t him. Sudden anger, annoyance, and a stream of swearing at some mysterious slight. And yet all I had to do was stick my tongue out, make a funny face, and give him a thumbs up, and all was laughter. It was something he’d done to cheer me up, when I was little. Then, as I grew up, we would both do it, trying to catch each other out. Now it’s just me, using it like he did, to cheer up a stubborn child. Child? I guess so.  A 79 year-old baby. 

And like a baby, moments of joy were a wonder. His smile and laugh lost nothing. But when they passed, a blankness returned. Disinterest; vacancy. 

We took him to the home on Monday. It was unexpected in the way that inevitable things tend to be. Instead of drama, it was a quiet, paperwork laden process. Every possible disaster played out in my mind, but not in reality. It’s a nice place, run by caring people. His room was nice. He chatted and said hello to the strangers around him. When mom said goodbye he said I love you. I held his hand and kissed his forehead and told him to take care, I’d see him soon. Whatever presence had been there that morning was gone. His attention turned from us to the book in his hands. Pages covered in words he didn’t understand. We left the room and then left the home and part of me was destroyed.

In my head, my father’s been gone for some time. His disease left an echo of the man I knew. We, I, had to be pragmatic about it when mom could not, and seek what was best for her and best for him. Taking care of him was killing her. I knew, we knew, were resolved, convinced, convicted, all this was for the best. But now there’s doubt, not that we made the right decision, but that it’s what I wanted. For her, for him. Because leaving my father there and sitting here without him all I have left is missing him. Pushed down and back and deep for four years there’s no longer his echo to provide the comfort and frustration, to delay that truth. I miss my father. I miss the man he was and the man he is now. I miss him laughing with elfin delight when I stick my tongue out and give him a thumbs up. So that moment on Monday morning, that glimpse of sadness, if that’s what it was. I so desperately hope that was there. That for a moment he understood enough to be sad and that we shared that sadness. Because I’ll miss him for the rest of my life, and he’ll never know.

Please support my first novel.

I’m not the chatty guy in the hospital waiting room.

That’s someone else. I’m the guy with his nose in his book, reading and flipping pages and not being there. Aside from the nurses, it’s just me. Just me and the chatty guy. 

He arrives with volume. 

“I hate these things. Always scare me. They petrify me, in fact. When I was first diagnosed, they scared me to death.”

I look up enough from my book to see him gesturing towards one of those circular, wire-framed, rotating racks. Somewhere else it would be full of postcards, or ordinance survey maps. Here it is full of information pamphlets.

I manage a semi-nod and maybe even a grunt. He disappears to produce a urine sample and I continue to read. I hear a flush and he sits down again and it’s another paragraph before I realise my plight is hopeless. 

The chatty guy in the hospital waiting room will not be denied.

“So how long have you had MS?”

Everything stops. I see the sunrise through a large glass of whisky from my bedroom window in the summer of 2012. I swallow my first response that it’s none of his chatty fucking business when I got MS. This is a place of shared suffering. 

“Three years.” 

A couple of weeks ago I sat on a couch in an old wooden house with an old friend I’d not seen in half a decade and I told her about it and she smothered me with a hug so warm and full of love I didn’t know what to do.

Chatty guy pulls me back.

“How’re you doing?”

I’m tired and fucking sore, dude. But I’m fine. I’m managing.  “I’m fine.”

“Walking ok?”

That’s the fucking scariest question you can ask. “Balance is a bit tough.”

“You do yoga?”

Fuck off. “No.”

“Do yoga, man. It helps with the balance.”

Fuck off. “I run. As much as I can.”

“Wow. Running with MS?”

As long as I can. “Keeps the fatigue at bay.”

He’s going on to my medication. How am I finding it? Fine. Better than injections. So much better than injections. He mentions how scared he was. He points again at the rack of pamphlets about living with MS and tells me how they petrify him. He then tell the nurse that he’ll get all his info from the internet and I know why he’s scared and maybe why he’s so chatty. I’m called into the office and nod towards him and mumble some attempt at “nice chatting with you”.

My meeting turns out to be a meeting to arrange more meetings. I need blood tests and an MRI and some sort of schedule. I leave. Chatty guy is still chatting to the nurse. The MS ward is on the 4th floor. Quiet; away from the rush of the rest of the hospital. The elevator’s crowded but they make room for me and an old man with a cane. 

As I leave the hospital it occurs to me that the chatty guy in the hospital room is the only person with MS I’ve spoken to since I was diagnosed. And I have no idea what his name is.

Please buy my new book. 

What I should be writing.

For about the last ten years or so, I've been writing a novel. Well, not solidly. I finished a first draft about 8 years ago and since then, in between failed attempts to find an agent and publisher, have performed various light-hearted revisions and tinkerings with the manuscript. In that time, I wrote and published a whole other book from scratch, held various jobs in the wine trade and moved to Scotland from London and back to London from Scotland. A glance back to 2005 and 2006 in my archives will show several references to 'the book' as well as the navel-gazing and pondering that poured forth in the writing of it. 

And while I never doubted that I would find someone to publish it, there were times that I doubted my lack of doubt. 

Well, yesterday the project launched on Unbound, and with fast enough funding should be published in Autumn of 2015. I need your help for that, and I'm not too proud to ask. I very much enjoyed this process for Salt & Old Vines, though at times it was a battle. So if you've read my blogs and are wondering what I should have been writing at the time, check it out here and pledge. Thank you, and thank you for reading.

ten years

We sat around the table, the two of us, speaking in hushed tones. She was sad, disillusioned. He'd been a dick. Again. I poured out the end of the bottle into both our glasses. She looked at the wine and then at me, her large blue eyes surrounded by a haze of red. Hurt but strong. I took a sip and tried to look at the time without looking at the time.

What are you looking at? It's 4 in the morning. 

It's Game 4. The Red Sox could win the World Series. 

You came over here with wine when Game 4 was on?

You sounded like you needed wine.

I needed wine. You want to see if we can watch the game? 

It was the sort of late that just didn't matter. No exhaustion or sleepiness. It could have been any time of day.

Yeah.

She popped open her laptop and we looked for a feed, but nothing came up. The connection was too slow. We finished the wine and poured a whisky. 

One of the computer labs?

Could work. My ID's a lot out of date though.

I'll get us in. 

The rain pelted. The wind hammered. Both came from the east. It was cold. We leapt over puddles and leant to the right as we did to keep our balance. A proper Scottish gale. It was only a block. Cobbles one street, tarmac the next. A wynd and a half in between.

We dodged the empty kegs outside the Keys and crossed North Street. The lights around the library glowed but it was dark. But we weren't going there. She slid her keycard down and the lock clicked. One lone student sat working in front of a glowing screen. One screen out of dozens.

She logged us in and I found a feed. It was so pixelated. I still can't believe there was audio. Just a small window on a small screen. Small blocks of green and red and white and sand and grey. Blurs, really. My heart beat fast and my breath shallow and then there was no breath. She grabbed my shoulder and still there was no breath. We watched.

Pixelated, impressionist, Keith Foulke flipped a ball to Doug Mientkiewicz and the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years. I looked at her because I didn't really believe it. She looked at me because she was happy for me. It's a rare joy to be truly happy for somebody else. We laughed and ran back out into the storm. 

I woke my dad up with the call, but mine wasn't the last. My sisters and brother phoned too. We phoned our dad who handed the bat to Ted Williams 50-odd years before that. He sounded happy and sleepy when I spoke to him. Not as excited as me. As though that flame had been passed to me and he was fine with it. It was my joy and burden now. 

I said goodbye to him and hung up. I said goodnight to her and walked home in the rain. But I didn't go home. I walked to the end of the pier as torrents, gales and waves pounded and the North Sea raged and I looked out into the black and grey maelstrom of night and elements and I shouted and cried and punched the air and my hat soaked to my skull and I laughed because it happened and I couldn't believe it. 

Damp and cold I went to bed about 7 and was at work for 9. My shift ended at 5 and I opened a bottle of Dom Perignon 1996 for my colleagues and friends who knew nothing of baseball or curses or Ted Williams or David Ortiz. I explained everything, or I tried to. No one cared. There was great Champagne, what else mattered?

Everyone is in a different place now. But that morning, that day, ten years ago, everyone was right there, and it wouldn't have happened without them. 

extra hours

Some old friends are coming for a late lunch. I've chosen some wine and there's beer in the fridge, but one of them's driving and the other behaves themselves on school nights. That's ok. I behave myself on school nights too these days. Most of the time. 

There are some things to chop sat on the island in the kitchen. Mushrooms and courgettes. I've not got out the onions yet, but I'll chop a couple of those too, for good measure. One onion to go with the chicken and one to go with the mushrooms. Outside it's a cool, autumnal grey. The piles of fallen leaves look tired.

I put this morning's extra hour to good use. I filled in my absentee ballot for the midterm elections in Florida, caught up with some paperwork and found an extra £6 I didn't know I had. Enough for a pint, at least. Well, in some places anyway.

What I didn't do was work on the book. Instead I'm writing a little blog post, assessing the brief bit of the day that's gone by, planning in my head what's yet to come. It's part procrastination, but only part. A bit of it is stretching. Getting my fingers used to the keyboard again, and writing for myself rather than the day job. There are no perfect writing conditions, but there are a few things you can do to make it easier on yourself. 

I changed the clock in the car and the one in my bedroom. I can never remember how to do the oven. I'm a daylight savings time agnostic. I always appreciate the extra hour and loathe the one stolen, but don't feel either way whether it should be maintained or abolished. It amuses me how arbitrary it is. It makes me yearn to set the calendar back a week or two, to get some extra time that doesn't slip away so quick. Why fuck around with one measly hour? Why stop with a week? Let's turn the calendars back a year or so. I'm sure I could fix a lot with an extra year. That's what I tell myself, anyway.