stop press

People keep asking why we are still talking about the snow, why it is headline news. Part of me agrees but at the same time it is so there, all over the country; rarely is a news story so relevant and directly visible to everyone. It is there on my street, no gritters here. It provides endless possibilities for skidding and sliding and crunching and crashing. Snow, the beautifier, the silent, the sinister aggressor. It is there in the park, draining my energy and straining my muscles to keep balanced while dog-walking (or dog-skiing, as I have come to call it). Falling can be a comedy pratfall or a sudden blow to the head.
The trouble is, there is no news. Nothing new to say. No-one really wants to hear politicians argue about whose fault it is. The occasional human interest story of devastation grabs us by the head and dunks us into cold water but trickles away as we move on to pictures of snowmen and sledging children.
I was reading The Day of the Triffids recently (balm after watching the ghastly TV adapatation) and a scene of the book that really appeals to me is the apocalyptic vision of London just a few years on from its being abandoned. It seems to me that snow is one of the few times, the few weathers, when we can see how quickly the natural world can overwhelm us. It reminds us that our intrastructure is based on a daily fight against nature, the weeds in the driveway, the cracks in the pavement. That given a short space of time, undiscouraged, nature would return things as it found them.
I am no fan of 'what if' news stories. We haven't run out of grit, or gas, yet. A man did not get further than the runway, did not have explosives and was not there on the same day as the Queen (yeah that's an old news story but it still grates). However, I think the snow story is current and its prevalence forgivable. To paraphrase an esteemed friend, it awakens something primal in us (often the urge to hibernate). It feels like the whole country is under siege (not under neige). We can't get to where we want to be, wear what we want to wear, we have bumps and bruises and red noses and pink skin. It burns us and freezes us. We want to play with it, fight with it, feel it on our nose and eyelashes. People talk to each other in the street, or exchange news of snow days on Facebook. We get to enjoy it AND complain about it (and complain about complaining about it); what can be more satisfying than that?

overheard

The sound is sharp, an icicle in the air.

‘YEAH, WELL. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE’.

A face-off, squaring up to each other. Think headlines, knives. But these boys are dressed in neat uniforms with football rucksacks crammed with files and socks. Children trying on their teenage selves for size. But there’s no pushing, no tightened fists. Confusion, mostly.

‘But we always walk home together’

‘Well not any more’

‘I thought you were my friend’ (now where have I heard that before)

There are three on each side. One of the three larger boys has, for some reason, disowned one of the smaller. He wants to hurt him, cut him. Win. The other boy wants to walk away but senses somehow that bravado is what is expected of him in some bigger picture he can’t see. At the moment the situation resembles the type of falling-out he will come to believe that only girls have: men are say things to each other’s faces rather than behind closed doors; fight it out rather than mysteriously ditch a mate. For now, he has no context to put it in, just feels an unfamiliar hurt and sense of public humiliation, he has realised he is naked.

Obviously, I am trying not to watch, for social and moral reasons and also for self-preservation; but I am also trying to watch, because it is an unfamiliar situation for me to witness. I wonder what it must be like to be a twelve-year-old boy, utterly confusing I imagine (just like being a twelve-year-old girl) but really, what is it actually like? To go to a boys’ school and be boys amongst boys. You can imagine the stereotype of pressure against girliness (perhaps more so at that age than later when you realise girls like a bit of sensitivity?), ‘gay’ as a euphemism for anything outside of certain parameters (sport, computer games), but that can’t be the whole picture. There must be enough poets and painters and scientists among them to create a balance. Or maybe the poets and painters have to take it until they find their own ways out, maybe they even need it as an impetus. How would you feel if you were gay, or thought you might be, and had to defend yourself against it as an accusation for totally unrelated behaviour several times a day?

The boys are still clumsily battling it out, the two other small ones have an air of ‘leave it, mate, he’s not worth it’. The rejected friend is trying to think of something clever to say, something that will make him seem clever and uncaring and that will hurt the other’s feelings. He can’t, though.

‘I never wanted to be friends with you anyway’

The factions separate, the bigger child with his big new friends. Is he feeling victorious or just as confused and hurt as his ex-bff seemed? The smaller boys go a different way, the two bystanders more confident and less self-conscious as they head up the road and kick a few leaves. The third looks dazed, he wants to look back but he doesn’t and runs ahead to catch up the others.

I wonder if he’ll remember it in days or weeks or years to come, or if it will melt into an awful or happy childhood, depending on how his counsellor encourages him to recall it. I reach the top of the road a minute later (still walking slowly) and they are gone.

2010

It's been pretty sunny so far.

end

I feel monochrome.

journey

You leave the airport, alone and slightly choked. The snowflakes register. The car is cold as it glides down the multi-storey spiral but thawing by the time your ticket opens the exit barrier and warm by the time you hit the motorway. You manage to take the right combination of roads, none of the usual detours. The snowflakes register again, more insistently. You continue.
Your phone beeps. Snow on runway, I try take pic! x
The Hoover building looks different in the light, white on white. As usual you think it would make a lovely theatre and how much would it cost but it might be awful and no-one would come all that way to see things. It’s wasted on Tesco.
The road twists and turns and roundabouts and suddenly you can’t see the markings on the road to know which lane you are in, or which lane the car in front is in. The only white lines you can see are the horizontal ones being flicked towards your windscreen. White lines, running through the sky. Your car has eight windscreen wiper settings but they all either squeak against the snowflakes or don’t clear quick enough. You can’t work out the tipping point.
It feels like you are about to die, not in a melodramatic way, just a factual one. The car moving in the same direction as the way you turn the steering wheel starts to seem more like an occasional happy coincidence than any result of design or engineering; slowing down is a version of Russian roulette.
A large four wheel drive sloshes past, spitting in your face. You think uncharitable thoughts. Yeah, so your car is actually useful in the city for a few days of the year, well done you.
Your world reduces to the imaginary lane you are staying in. You concentrate, rely on your senses and responses, not your instinct, or God, who you briefly consider as an option currently as rational as science. There is a constant tension, your hands clenched, your thighs tight. Breath held. Your teeth gritted where the roads aren’t.
Your phone beeps, you don’t check it.
You start singing Christmas songs to yourself as the radio isn’t working and the sat-nav lady isn’t feeling chatty. Driving Home for Christmas, Let It Snow, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas. You adapt a verse of Jingle Bells: Driving through the snow, in a 3-door purple Ford, o’er the North Circular we go, thirty all the way. It doesn’t rhyme, or scan. You try and improve the wording, or the scanning; it doesn’t get any better.
You go past Ikea, strange to see something familiar and so ordinary. Past the McDonald’s arches, fancy a skid-through?
Slow again and a car pulls off the main road and into a driveway. You notice a row of houses that have never registered more than peripherally before. Grey houses, never restful, made beautiful this ugly evening. For the first time on this journey you recall that palliative aesthetic effect, snow the great leveller. Tomorrow all will be clean and footprints and walks in the park. For now, keep gritting.

holding hands

Holding Hands

Have you ever looked at someone’s hands
And remembered every detail of them
Because you knew, before long, you’d have to?

Watched them resting on the table across from you
Taken in every freckle, every contour
And pasted them on the back of your mind.

A family obsession: holding our hands up to each other’s
Finding the similarities, echoed shapes, soft skin
Holding on to each other.

Remembering those fingers, holding
The steering wheel, the telephone, a knife and fork
Latterly, being held.

You hated the wires, crawling out
Don’t worry, I’ll always remember them
Resting on the table, across from me.

Strange when people tell me about you
What you achieved, gave, created.
I think, yes, but I looked at his hands.

notes from the overground

As you may be aware I have spent the last few weeks commuting to work, after several years of… well it was more of an idle wander.

It's been an odd experience, I find the extra hour and a half either side of each day exhausting, but I am strangely serene about the actual journey. I look at the people who do this every day, maybe have done for years, and think, well I can understand why they have more reason to be irritable than me but then, surely if you know you are going to do it every day for years, you might as well try and enjoy it. Every day we all walk past numerous copies of the poster by Mark Titchner, which declares loudly, 'IF YOU DON'T LIKE YOUR LIFE, YOU CAN CHANGE IT'. It always makes me smile when I look at the grumpy people crammed like sardines in the carriage (I tried to think of a more original simile but I don't think there is one).

Mind you it is amazing how quickly one becomes institutionalised, the routine of getting on the same train every day, Metro on the way in, thelondonpaper and the Lite on the way home (always in that order). Standing opposite Gordon Ramsay's nose on the gin ad, knowing that not only will the tube doors open right in front of me but I will then get off the train right by the exit (this could be quite depressing but does have the advantage of meaning I gaze at Gordon's craggy visage every morning and there's nothing not to like about Gord, must be all that cooking and arrogance). I am still a bit overexcited about my Oyster card (how did I survive without one? I must save milliseconds of my life every day) and occasionally slap it down with far too much relish, not having perfected the nonchalant caress of the more experienced commuter.

So how do you stop yourself becoming miserable and dejected from this institutionalised, overcrowded lifestyle? An extraordinary woman pushed her way on to the tube the other day, whingeing about how she'd had to let two trains go past before she could get on one. I really wanted to say, but that's true for all of us, you were in a queue, it's rush hour, what did you expect? And more pertinently, there is a train once a minute. You have waited a maximum of three minutes for this train.

I didn't, of course; she would have punched me.

So how do I pass my time waiting these interminable three minuteses? There are the obvious tactics, those little games you can play – who out of the people sitting opposite me? Who out of the carriage? I read a good new one the other day where you have to pick someone off the opposite escalator to you, once you've picked you can't change your mind, but if you haven't picked anyone by the end you have to take the last person to get on. There's also tube surfing, seeing how many stations you can go without holding onto anything, but I haven't been brave enough for this yet.

Occasionally something unexpected will happen, the other day an American busker who I see most days playing anodyne rock suddenly stood up and yelled, 'Earlier a black man gave me five pounds! What does that say about all of you?'. This continues to puzzle me; what did he think it said about us all? Another day I was sitting on a train and three teenage boys got on in full chav gear, white tracksuits, baseball caps, the whole catastrophe, loudly talking about some girl who they deemed had 'no chance'. A moment later one of them added, 'Yeah, Hillary's never going to beat Obama'. I spent the rest of the day contemplating my sartorial prejudices with some contrition.

Of course, most days nothing exciting happens so you have to make your own entertainment inside your head. If all else fails, you can always write a blog in your head and try and think of a more original simile for commuters than sardines in a tin.