For Ronnie O’Sullivan
It was always just after 1 o’clock when the doctor would peer from behind the perspex of a waiting room window and usher me with a smile into his small office. It was lunchtime on a Tuesday and I was the only soul waiting in that room for the huge bearded figure to welcome me back into his life of chickens and kittens, life back on the farm after a medical tour of Iraq and any and everything that came into his brilliantly warped mind before falling asleep, repeatedly, when not talking at a million miles an hour and instead listening to the broken man sat opposite him. It was “off book”, in his lunch hour and, as he would regularly chuckle, a reason not to be in the staff meeting next door. I obviously said something to this part-time chicken farmer and escapee from the rigours of a staff meeting that warranted our secret Tuesday gatherings, but I’ve said a lot of stupid shit to a lot of people over the years and hence I’m unable to nail down exactly what I said, but it was clearly stupid enough for my doctor to give up his time for me, every Tuesday, come rain or staff meetings, to fall soundly asleep before waking with a concerned look on his face as if to reinforce he’d been listening to me intently all along, and with some considerable thought too.
What larks! One of life’s lifeboats. I thought of this mini expression earlier when making a fresh cup of tea. If only life was as simple as making a cup of tea. Perhaps it is for you and if so, I congratulate and envy you in equal measure. Life’s lifeboats. What to make of it eh? What does it mean to you? I’m as guilty of posing too many questions in my writing as I am of disappearing away on vicious tangents, already my mind a whirl after simply putting two words together in a silly phrase and I’m looking at one of life’s lifeboats right now, a young man who was a mere young boy when he was a topic of conversation with another of life’s lifeboats a lifetime ago. You really shouldn’t put the word “life” three times in a sentence containing only four words but then again, maybe you should? Break with conventions I say. Break a few literary rules. Sob your heart out to a sleeping doctor dreaming of chickens once in a while. It might just help.
Life’s lifeboats eh? If I was a clever and articulate enough writer I could weave twisting tales of the human beings who have worn the heavy burden, conscious or not, of being another of life’s lifeboats for me, or the bread and circuses I devour for yet more of life’s anchors of certainty, the dates and times in our “calendated lives” (copyright pending) of constant distraction from our other distractions, the constant chattering of an unsound mind in a blur of certain uncertainty. But maybe I’m not the writer I believe I am. Considering what a shelled out corpse I am it’s a minor miracle I manage, occasionally, to even assemble these words into any kind of grammatical order and my what a pleasing sentence that was to write. A “shelled out corpse”. I’ll add that as a headline to my internet dating profile. But I have a need to write, to jump into my own lifeboat and escape from the thoughts and anxieties and the realities of life that crash into the life of someone as crushingly lonely as I am.
The silly sports teams I cheer for are doing rather well thank you all the same, I watch a plethora of good to great movies that I can’t help but pen my thoughts on when not writing about any and everything else, I’m alive, I watched a stupendous public firework display with my two favourite people in all the world recently, my football team play tomorrow and Saturday, I’m reading a damn good book (I’m always reading a damn good book), I spent the majority of the summer in a toy town, I spend every other day with the light of my life who loves me and depends on me, and I don’t have an internet dating profile. I have enough lifeboats. I’m just too far out to sea.
Yesterday was horrible. Tomorrow will be much the same. I’m breaking the rules of life again but already dismissing something that hasn’t happened in a future not yet here. But my future was yesterday and tomorrow. There are always yesterday’s and tomorrow’s. I think I’ve written that before. Probably yesterday. “Maybe tomorrow, I’ll find my way home”, so penned a Welsh songster when I was talking to a doctor about his chickens, and where that takes us all from here is anyone’s guess at this stage in the proceedings and perhaps it’s for the best you keep your own destination to yourself. I just wish I wasn’t lonely enough to constantly think about those yesterday’s and tomorrow’s or that calendar date this week I’ll never be able to forget. I just wish for someone to say that WE will deal with MY problems because I’M too fucked and broken to face them alone.
For an hour and a half on Saturday evening I felt indestructible and I bet you never envisaged reading that particular sentence after the depressing dirge you’ve just waded through. The bitter and the sweet. The lifeboat’s of life. The standing with a bag of chips and a sausage in batter and the watching of fireworks screaming into a night sky. The yearly tradition. With my two favourite people in all the world.
90 minutes of feeling comfortable in my own skin.
Thanks for reading. Not what I intended to write after the chicken doctor beginning, but I have this habit of thinking I’m sat at a typewriter, a single candle lighting my way, and when a sentence is written, fuck the delete button. Something like that anyway. Here’s further proof, this time the right way up in our upside down world.
"The Spirit of Cricket" - link to Amazon
