That was the week that wasn’t
A letter to a friend.
A letter to a friend.
Hey Bubba!
Well I’m sat at that twenty year old wooden table again my friend, the table which could, if it had the power of human speech, tell you the tallest of tales that would blow the very socks from your feet. It’s exactly 7pm as I commence this communique to you across our star filled universe and whenever, wherever and whatever the time is in your universe when you read this message in a bottle, I hope it finds you with a spring in your step, in the rudest of health and with a satisfied smile of a life well lived.
Remember the film Se7en and it’s always raining as they insert the days of the week in the bottom of the screen as Morgan Freeman mournfully laments at the state of a barbaric world? Well that was my Monday.
Wandering around in the drizzle and mizzle in the once beating heart of industrialised central England I was panic stricken, nervous and full of unmitigated dread for a coming afternoon of strangers, a strange language, and a stranger in a strange land not of his making or choosing. So I had a panic attack in front of an English friend whom I’d always believed was Welsh, scaring him half to death in the process, much like the time I did likewise about seven years ago. Did I ever tell you that story my old friend, when my English Welshman friend feared leaving my side after turning up unannounced as he was worried for me and then refused to leave for hours even though his girlfriend repeatedly telephoned him wondering where on earth he was?
Boy that was some night. I’ll tell you about it sometime.
Tuesday was far better and a return to form primarily because Monday was in the rear view mirror and Friday was still a good mile away on life’s merry journey. My son was here, I was writing an article on how I’d secured a minor “win” and poked one of those strangers in a strange land squarely in the eye, and we were both safely and securely in our bubbles of preference, a short tale I’d tell some more strangers on Friday. I abhor phrases such as “Happy Place” my old friend, you’ll know that like no other in this universe of ours, but this is that happy place, and a combination of the only two things I cherish in this maddening upside down world.
With the return of the misty, drizzly rain of Monday, Wednesday became a film day, and four on the bounce of all around top quality. I can certainly heartily endorse Everything Everywhere All At Once as it really is the Oscar success you may have read about. Look, there’s flying dildoes and Jamie Lee Curtis has butt plugs for awards on her office desk and it’s a surreal mash up of so many films but if you like the Wachowski’s The Matrix or Cloud Atlas, you’ll love this surreal universe within universes madcap caper. I then almost completed my Guy Ritchie “collection” with his 2021 film The Wrath of Man but I’ll forever refuse, even on pain of death, to ever see Swept Away, before I was repulsed, intrigued and even a little enchanted with last year’s cannibal horror love story Bones and All.
Wednesday ended where it began with the documentary film I Got a Monster (it will anger you but it comes highly recommended) and in between I watched my gallant Reds of Liverpool come up a few goals short of Los Blancos of Real Madrid.
There was no come from behind win for the ages Bubba, not this time.
Thursday was a mixed bag as my bubble was bursting with the twin threats of a Friday with yet more strangers in a very strange land and the cold or flu that my English Welshman friend had inadvertently sent my way on Monday. I penned a poorly written article as I shivered like a shitting dog from early afternoon onward before doing likewise all night as sleep evaded me. I cried instead. Wailing like a banshee when not coiled in a sobbing ball or sat at the top of the stairs disconsolately admiring the silly pictures that adorn that small alcove. Back to bed. Look at the clock. Out of bed. Can’t stop shivering. Wailing like a fucking banshee and hating myself for being alone, forever alone, forever lonely, and just wanting a damn good hug.
I kept retreating to the kitchen throughout Thursday afternoon too as I simply couldn’t stop crying and was a raging, shivering mess by the time I dropped my son home.
Luckily for me, he was looking the other way.
So to today Bubba, and a Friday full of the remnants of a cold or flu, a mountain of tears, a panic attack, and the meeting of yet more strangers. There was supposed to be four but one had to join us by telephone. I lamely joked that I was disappointed it wasn’t a “Batphone” from the Batman TV series. A wag responded that the “Bat signal” wasn’t being flown from City Hall either.
I rather wished it was.
So I told these strangers that I’d finally found my calling as a writer and I presented hard copy evidence of such as well as my tales of hitch hiking aboard a canal boat when I was lost on the canals of Wales last Summer and my gallivanting around the historical ruins of the castles and cathedrals of central England. I called it my purpose. I’d finally found one. I’d written a book! But I need to find a publisher who shares my “vision” for it. And that I’d promised another stranger many moons ago that there was a writer inside me and that I’d prove it to myself if no-one else.
I waxed lyrical on that happiest of all places, my son safely and happily beside me, he inside his bubble world, me in mine sat cross legged on a rolled up duvet on the floor in front of a small table, a fresh piping hot cup of tea sending ghostly wisps into the air as I ponder how to start yet another article, or that vaguely amusing set of paragraphs I seem to have constantly rolling around and inside my tiny mind. I’m simply providing my son with a safe, happy place to be where I can spend time with him, hang out, make jokes, share a bag of sweets, demand he listen to a favourite song or even worse, demand he listen to a passage of my writing which I’m rather pleased with. His response is always, “hmmm, interesting” before we retreat once more into our little bubbled worlds.
What I failed to tell a plastic telephone and three strangers is that he provides the safety and comfort I should be providing him.
We talked about my son (or rather, I did) for a large portion of our uneasy time together. I mentioned my dear old parents but not at any great length. I repeated my tired old mantra that I only have two meaningful things left to me in this world now and that I retire to bed each night hoping that I don’t awaken the following morning. That I live within a non-religious purgatory of nothingness, of trying and failing, and failing once more. That I don’t have the means to end my own suffering as I know the anguish I’ll leave behind. That I’ve become so insulated and socially distanced from a world I genuinely despise with all of my blackened soul that I traipse up and down canals or visit the beautiful village Ironbridge for even a semblance of relief and the ability to breathe. The writer broke out in me as I said that being within earshot of the bells of St Luke’s Church had a calming effect on me and you can’t shake the feeling that you’re in an entirely different century. That the “Grand Old Lady” of Ironbridge provides a bizarre kind of solace and peace of mind. What could possibly go wrong in this most beautiful of places and from a very different world entirely?
I lamented on my lack of friends as I continue to be a stranger in my new hometown two decades after moving here. Even without including the telephone, I sadly confirmed that there were more human beings in the room we were in than I can count on now as actual friends, and that I fear going home as I’m not the Stephen Blackford I was when I thought I’d finally grabbed life by its tail in the mid to late 1990’s.
I am that Bill Hicks joke now, a shell of my former shadow.
So that was the week that wasn’t Bubba.
It’s a little after 9pm now and it’s been a hell of a week.
Send word.
Thanks for reading. For far less serious fare from the bread and circus of life, please see the cave of wonderous delights that is my collected library here or alternatively, here are my three most recently published and future Pulitzer Prize winning articles:
“Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Worth every minute. Across every universe.medium.com
Montaña de Madrid demasiado empinada para Rojos galantes
Real Madrid 1 Liverpool 0 (6–2 on aggregate), 15th March 2023.medium.com
“65” (2023)
Superlative familial tale. With added dinosaurs.medium.com