clinging to the wreckage

One moment you are living in Madrid, writing your Master’s Thesis, lead vocalist for a punk rock band, highly responsible IT manager at a large tech company, hard partying socialite, meeting new and exciting people every day, and the next moment you are going to lie on your bed with a book at 7:30pm on a Friday night. It’s not always about becoming old and boring, it is also about the things that you love to do. These things change over time. I miss the creative aspect of being in a band, but I don’t miss the hard work of rehearsals, concerts, tours, etc. We had to carry all of our equipment around, we had to rehearse in dingy, tiny rooms, and my vocal cords were often strained to the extreme. In terms of the social side, aside from the band, we’d formed a community that gathered every Thursday night and also hosted huge parties every couple of months. Thursday nights themselves were so extreme that Friday at work was a complete write off. And this meant that Monday to Thursday was eve...

  The winter wind howls outside. It explores the windows, looking for gaps and fragilities. The temperature drops and I find myself thinking of the stray cat who has become my friend. Where does he hide? Why will he not come inside? What has he been through? We spend a few moments together each day and I feed him. Then it is time for some human interaction… but, you see, most of them are not listening. Most of them don’t care at all. It’s seven weeks since my mother passed away, I miss her each and every day. For others, it seems to be forgotten history. And, I suppose, it is not reasonable for me to expect more than that. I remember the day that my grandmother, my mother’s mother, died. We made it just in time to her bedside. We’d driven from the south of England, where I lived, up to the north, to the town I was born in (the town all of my family had been born in). I walked into the ward first and saw a lady lying in a bed with nurses nearby. I asked the nurses where Winnie was a...

  When my family emigrated from England to South Africa, I struggled for a while with the climate… and the cultural change. Everything was dry and hot… and we moved in January, it had been snowing and freezing in Greater Manchester… in South Africa it was dusty, dry, and sickeningly hot. For the first few years, the days I loved the most were the rainy days. Another thing that struck me as different was the overwhelming presence of religion and religious belief within the majority of people. Religion was used like an iron fist at school to keep students in line through fear of eternal damnation in the fiery depths of hell. It was natural for me to rebel against anything that was being forced upon me… especially if it was in the form of a threat. There was nothing I despised more than the words ‘you are going to be in so much trouble if you do that.’ I remember fellow students revelling in the idea that you would be punished for forgetting to bring a book or a form or something insi...

  In life I have chosen not to have children and I have spent all of my life being extremely careful to avoid having them. I have also never wanted to marry (although I did for a few years due to love with geographical complications). I never felt a desire, or pull, to buy a house. I see a progressive city as one in which there is public transport, bicycle paths, and places to walk. It is incredible to me that people claim: ‘you must find someone and settle down, get married, have kids, buy a house.’ If that is what you sincerely want, great. However, if you don’t feel any desire for these things, there is nothing wrong with that choice. I have devoted my life to travelling, music, literature, study, and work. My incessant travelling, and moving to different countries, means that buying a house always seemed like too much of a commitment to me. The more I read about renting versus buying, the more I believe that the house market is bordering on a scam and that buying is equal to op...

  At 3am I am drifting around the apartment like Banquo’s ghost, awake and not so much alive. I stand at the balcony door and look across at the apartments on the other side of the swimming pool… some have bright lights on. Why do they have bright lights on at 3am? I watch for a while, but nothing moves, no one moves. The tenants clearly thought it a good idea to leave a light on while they went away, but instead of leaving a dim lamp or a low-lit light on, they left the main dazzlingly bright light on, the one that I never use because it makes me feel sad and empty due to an association with final goodbyes. Getting back into bed, I finally fall asleep just as I start thinking of giving up and making a cup of coffee. The dreams that came were not comforting. I was trying to get to the 11 th  floor of a building… I do not know if it was a hotel, an office, or my apartment building, but all of the elevators were out of order, there were no stairs, and some strange form of taxi k...

  Is it a new beginning… or the beginning of the end? It’s a New Year and yet, on some level, it feels like I am suffocating. On the one hand, I am starting to deeply love literature once again, as I have all of my life, but it is renewed, and I am reading and writing more. On the other hand, I feel as if I am not bringing much value or receiving much love in other areas of life. Therefore, I focus on quiet… and the beauty of the written word. It never fails to fascinate me that people feel a sensitivity that is deep enough to want to capture the daily moments of life. Not in the way most films do… in films it seems there always has to be a terrible tragedy to work around, I rarely see films that are just about life and the day to day and people trying to find meaning in the banal. This can be found everywhere in literature, because the writing style, the words, the thoughts… they make it beautiful even if it is just describing a brief walk through the city or next to a river. Ther...

I recall the way that she would lean to fill up the kettle for us to make tea in the office. It was unusual… awkward. And it was loveable, like everything that she did. I’d walk to the kitchen behind her and feel amused, and enamoured, by the way she walked. It was like a catwalk model, but slower… and she was funky (in the true sense of the word, not the modern American distortion). She had balance and elegance and style and grace. And yet she was clumsy. It was hilarious and beautiful. Being French, she didn’t put milk into tea or coffee, but as I told her how we drank it in England, she started to try it… and she liked it. Thus, I would make two cups of tea with a little milk and quarter a spoon of sugar. The connection was magical and inexplicable. It was something at a biological level… possibly based on smell or something else. Alas, it was not to be. She was engaged and had a son… and another would soon be on the way. The friendship remains to this day, but it is fragile and int...