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I awoke on the sofa post-snooze, glancing down at my watch. Half six in the evening. The feeling of a siesta well-sojourned I went to the fridge, cracked some cold gold and resumed my position. Twenty minutes into No Reservations: Love in The Professional Kitchen I walked back to fish out number two. As I did, something strange happened. It began to get light. In the manner of the sky outside my window it slowly dawned on me my siesta had lasted 15 hours.

It was 7am on a Wednesday and I was on my second beer watching Aaron Eckhart seduce Catherine Zeta Jones with some Tiramisu.

Life was very sweet.

*

When I work I relax, doing nothing makes me tired.

Picasso

All very original Pablo, but let’s be real. Nobody thinks this.

I’d go so far as to say doing nothing makes me feel like a man.

We all have our areas of expertise, our zones of interest. In an Apocalypse-type situation, I feel no hyperbole in attesting I’d be the guy everyone looked to when the imperative was staying put. All eyes trained on me. He’s been through the mud, they’d nod gravely.

What you know about hitting the snooze button every fifteen minutes til 3.08pm. What you know about being on first names terms with your Uber Eats delivery guy. What you know about sitting with saltNsweet popcorn waving to the usher in a 300seater Vue waiting for a Thursday matinée to roll as he pokes his head round the door to check if the screen is empty.

Leisure should be approached like any other serious occupation. To be refined and sculpted into a fine art. Everyone should dedicate themselves to something, to really apply themselves to one thing, to touch base with the realms of mastery, over said chosen curriculum. The wandering Samanas of the Indus valley learnt three virtues, to wait, to fast, and to think. I know a little about fasting and more or less about thinking, but give me a wifi connection and a L-shaped sofa and I can wait.

Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler.

Dr Johnson

Thumbing the faded pages of this book of life by the fire in my carpet slippers, I see much time spent doing what I loved. The time you enjoy wasting, said Bertrand Russell, is not wasted time. I see a babe sleeping tranquilly, giving his caregivers peace of mind and pride. I see a young teen rolling homeward, once home alone, just inside the door stripping down to his pants with panache, leaving trousers and socks at the door. I test-drove my only ever pair of silk boxers for eleven days straight until I wore a hole in them. Felt good.

Felt like integrity.

It was an extended sojourn in Argentina just recently, where I found myself in the habit of cracking a brewsky at midday on the bell toll, consecutively for a fortnight, that got the cud of the chill-out zone ruminating in my gut.

*

When did we decide we had to busy ourselves in order to justify our existence. To what end. In the present day madhouse of relentless connectivity, do we need to do the exact opposite. Flip the script. Own the idleness. Take pride in the nothing.

Cavemen knew about the chill-out zone.

When they weren’t starving or traipsing hillsides for berries, or protecting themselves from saber-tooths they went hard. Our fascination with fire, the hours we spent gathered round it staring into its dancing spirit, was route one to some hardcore relaxation. Analysis of the day, the weather, space for light humour.

Do we have it skewed these days. This whole idea of action for action’s sake, mopping the sweat off our brows at the behest of some task, in order to then dissolve on the grounds of a job well done. Projecting the idea of a busy morning to put our feet up. Where’s the dignity in that.

It’s not the chilling that’s the problem, it’s the guilt associated with hardpound relaxation.

This isn’t even original thinking.

The Greeks vaunted said lifestyle. They thought idleness the greatest of all goals. Epicurus believed in the idea of atraxia, which means peace or undisturbedness. He thought the good life to be about pleasure, about being happy with what you had. Socrates warned of the barrenness of a busy life. Around me now, the world, busy as a humming meadow of spring, is it in need of a chill-pill.

Somewhere along the line we lost the knack. A friend of mine took a sabbatical once and told me he was losing the plot, didn’t know what to do with himself. How do you do it, he asked despairingly, his eyes thrumming with existential angst. I took a deep intake of breath, hit him with the thousand-yard stare.

Hard work making this look easy.

Getting to the place where hours can drift by in calm insouciance, where one no longer feels the shuffling off the mortal coil nor the guilt associated with levels of inactivity more commonly paired with poor health, takes willpower and concentrated fieldwork.

I have often said that the cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Pascal

*

Leonardo da Vinci broke his day down into mathematical fractions and slept fifteen minutes out of every hour. In this way he stayed up around the clock, 24 hours a day, designing machines capable of flight, mapping out the human body, painting the Salvator Mundi. Relentless progress to one side, did he fall short. Was he on first name terms with his local ragazzo delle consegne di pizze.

For who are we ear-marking this grandiose achievement. This need to make our presence felt, mark our territory. Be valued as a constructive arm of human society. It takes gumption to gaze at the sky and mull over some lunch options.

All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?

Bertrand Russell

I take it as a badge of honour how little can get done in a day. You start sluggishly, assess some mitigating factors, before you know it you’re well into the afternoon. Our passage through time. We grow older, through the latter part of our life, we look back and think, that guy knew how to go hard. There lies a man who could press pause on life’s remote.

Does anything really have a point. Does all of this thickness within which we reside matter. Are we inordinately tiny specs on a spinning rock in the middle of a vast nothingness. And mulling all this over, what better idea does anyone have than to hold up our arms in the face of our irrelevance, prop up the bar, and crack a cold one.

What exactly is doing nothing, asks Pooh.

Well, replies Christopher Robin, I’m told it means.. going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear.. and not bothering. It’s when people say, what are you two doing, and we say, oh… nothing. And we do it. This is a sort of a nothing thing we’re doing right now…

What if Simba had kept chilling with Timon and Pumbaa on the Hakuna Matata breeze. Scar would’ve got old and rickety. The rains would’ve come and gone. The Russians beat Napoleon with tactics of non-engagement. They were onto something. All of time is a tide moving in and out, in and out. Forest becoming sea, mountain to desert, aeon.

The Greeks were right.

Life is for the living. Life is for the chillaxing. Enough of this constant striving. If we all get on with it, we can all chillax together.

The chill-out zone wasn’t some mythical place a taxi driver at Bristol Temple Meads came up with in his head once my brother and I had got in the cab, the chill-out zone is a state of mind. He knew it then. I know it now. He validated me, saw the longing behind my eyes. I owe my life to that man.

Everything is seasons. The cold of winter requires a crankage of the thermostat from under the blanket. The spring cacophony needs a take5, a pause outside the maelstrom. The beating hum of summer requires the shade of the lilac tree. Autumn, a refrain we hum along to in the backseat. Relaxing is a round the clock vigil.

A friend of mine Mim alerted me last year to the idea that this wasn’t just all whimsical baloney steaming off my keyboard, that people like me actually existed. There was a whole community. I was stunned. There was a magazine called The Idler, there were books, a manual, there was even a festival.

It was almost unnerving. Finding your tribe.

I’m yet to commit. In the meantime I’ll bide my time in the way only I know how, sat there on the fence swinging my legs in the spring breeze.

Waiting expectantly, to see whatever this or the next life might bring.

As time goes by people keep getting younger. Dua Lipa releases tunes I will never listen to. The year of my birth starts to look somewhat Aramaic. Around me friends get older. They progress, mature, actualise. Me, I stay the same. Benjamin Button, Peter Pan, I can relate to those guys.

Them cats had style.

But I’ve been telling myself that since ’83.

And now in my fifth decade, stood there like Bilbo, trembling imperceptibly rolling the ring in my pocket between thumb and forefinger, a thought comes swimming through my head.

But put off what exactly.

It’s not like I have a concrete idea of what I’ve been putting off, or what I evidently need to put on. I could put on a jumper. What is perplexing is how the last ten years seem to have gone by in a haze of daydreams and baggy Y-fronts. And now I’m five years older than Napoleon was at the battle of Austerlitz and I still have a provisional drivers license.

In the immortal words of Dr Seuss.

How did it get so late so soon.

*

My first girlfriend sent me a photo the other day of her case-logic, one she’d been looking for for ages. In it were some killer mixes I’d thrown together from back in the drizzie. I mean, being involved in a whole case-logic situation in itself, makes one think one is definitively no longer part of the Zeitgeist.

But there was something comforting in looking at my wannabe gangsta album art. There I was, 19, belly full of fire, wanting to be rapper. Now I’m 40, still using that same wannabe gangsta lettering, still freestyling on the way to the shops. I might have replaced Pot Noodles with sun-blanched tomatoes from M&S, I might once have dropped 250 quid on a coffee grinder, but seeing that photo made me think the core of me, my interior, hadn’t changed that much at all, and something within that made me feel consistent.

*

To a certain extent we all stay the same age.

The only thing that moves is the Zeitgeist itself.

The video below of Gen Alpha is terrifying. These little guys are from another planet, a whole new species. My mate Alfie told me something weird, that his daughter Iris thinks of the 90s like we think of the 60s. How we thought of Woodstock and George Harrison’s beard is how Iris thinks of Ace Of Base. That is terrifying. The thought that knowing all the words to Ice Ice Baby might no longer hold any kudos, and worse, would make you sound like a dinosaur.

The turning 40 conundrum is so weird we made a podcast on it.

As if this particular milestone would bring forth the idea this won’t all last forever. That the final whistle might now be a thing. The reaper moving out of the shadows to clear his throat.

One day, wrote Paolo Coelho, you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do all the things you wanted to do. Do them now, he says. Was he speaking to me. Have I run out of time. Staring back from the mirror, do I see another squandered youth. I was so young and foolish, I thought those days would last forever.

40 is a confusing time.

When does checking out girls in their early 20s become legitimately pervy. Should I buy a beige anorak. Move to a hamlet in the home counties and have my say in parish council meetings. How about getting into lawn bowling.

Sat here looking over the laguna, pops tells me he sees a 45yr old staring back from the mirror. I tell him what I’m writing about. How childhood is mostly an unending paradise of hours and hours of endless hours.

He concurs.

When you learn, which is all of youth, he says above the birdsong looking out across the water, life slows down. It’s when you know what awaits you, it’s then that things lose novelty, that time starts to rush. Repetition is the great deadener.

When I was thirty I changed my life, it was a great jump, I came to Europe. Those next ten years were a grand chapter, because everything was new. When I married your mother and had a family, that too was another jump. It was a great listener. Building this house is a stopper of time also.

It might take him a bit longer to get from his temple of pillows to the bathroom in the middle of the night, or til 5pm most days to get out of a dressing gown, but pops is not slowing down. His mind is sharp. My mother isn’t due an oil change any time soon either, according to my brother her What’s Up response-time takes absolutely no prisoners. What kills us much faster than old age, apparently, is loss of enthusiasm.

(It’s WhatsApp mummy)

Is it time to resurrect my dormant rap career. Put down some fresh lyrics, D-sizzle on the mic. Do I need some hobbies, shall I embrace the monk vibe, grow out my hair, get a cassock.

It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

George Eliot

Do those reading this have a clue what they’re up to. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life, says the sunscreen line. But live it forward, I suppose the general idea is. This waiting for divine providence to come floating through the window is a definite plan C.

It hasn’t been all bad.

I’ve put some savings in the memory bank. Accrued some habits that make me happy, beers in the bath, seeing the divinity in all people, the peace of mind from a nokia 301 that turns a walk to the shops into a Netflix special, resisting the urge to line up my books in colour coordination. They say youth is wasted on the young. But nonsense, a place of relative peace requires screwing up a few times, to get us closer to the grail, the removal of our need to give a shit.

We didn’t realise we were making memories, we were just having fun.

Pooh

*

I had a weird vision the other day.

Of standing in a circle charing a group of Hackney kids in their late teens on some deep theme like love or ambition. It was very crystalline and informed. Having mentored an eleven year old for the best part of three years now, this could all be a pipedream. Seeing as every time we’re chilling all he does is mentor me.

Stop saying sorry all the time Domingo, it’ll be calm.

Pipe down and guard me dweeb.

Every one needs a dream, we just need to lose the pipe bit.

My father’s sister Mercedes told me years ago how unfathomably quickly life goes once you get older. In the blinking of an eye hours become days become years become lifetimes. Is this a rocket up our asses. In a famous Borges story called La Señora Mayor, pops recounts, an old lady goes gaga, forgets everything. So every day is a new day, literally, since she remembers nothing of the previous one. Era en suma feliz, writes Borges.

She was, all in all, happy.

I wrote once how I’d put a photo in my flat of me aged eight, so when I brushed my teeth in the morning and saw the little guy looking down at me it would be a daily reminder not to let him down. It’s harder than it looks, I’d say to him. But what I really needed, I figured, was a photo of me aged 80, surveying the life I was giving him to look back on. They’d both be saying don’t screw this up. But old man Domingo would have edited the refrain slightly.

Calm down, he’d be saying. It’s easier than it looks.

My mate LG obliged me. With some thing called FaceApp he worked some magic, just so happened he chose the most ridiculous photo on the planet. But who doesn’t look good in a sombrero.

I thought back to a time in France one year, around 28, having lost some friends in a market I went for a pootle down a side alley and found a ball, started hitting it against a wall with my hand. The bounce was just right, I zoned in. A few minutes later an old lady rounded the corner, stopping. Monsieur, she said with slight consternation. I looked back, worried I’d done something bad like stepped on her lap dog. T’es comme un enfant.. she said. You are like a child.

It took a few years to land but I liked it.

Up in the Andes last week with a gaucho called Jesús, picking our way along a river valley in the heat of the mid-morning, we got deep. Nearing the end of the ride, he said something that stuck with me. After explaining the shittiness and hardship of life at times up in the altiplano, he turned and shrugged, smilingly. Y bueno, la vida es un juego.

Hey-ho, he said, life is a game.

*

When you really don’t know where you’re going with something in the slightest, there’s always Pooh.

Climbing a tree together, Christopher Robin tries to tell his friend he might not always be around. But that this didn’t mean goodbye. As if this talk with Pooh might in some way be waving his goodbyes to childhood itself. You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. Might be the greatest clip in the history of the internet.

Do we really ever leave anything behind.

Happy is he who still loves what he loved in the nursery. He has not been broken in two by time. And he has saved not only his soul but his life.

G K Chesterton

When Jung dropped his immortal line, life begins at 40, he was speaking in the early part of the last century. Everyone grew up much faster then. Stick 2024 in the mixer and you can delay this whole schlepp by 35 years at least. Abraham didn’t get moving til he was 80. Lived with his folks in a tent. What’s the rush.

Might as well give it another decade, mull it over.

Why not tire life out, I figure, ropadope that sucker til it’s all punched out, hit it with all I’ve got in the twelfth.

Be like Guiseppe.

When Giuseppe walks through la piazza la nonnas they stop their yabbering.

*

One more thing, that photo of me aged eight. I couldn’t tell you why, but it felt like I was beginning to make him proud, for maybe the first time in my life.

And so we beat on,


boats against the current,


borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Johnny Fontane has his head in his hands.

Don Corleone gets up.

Administers a hard right to Fontane’s left cheek.

You can act like a man.

*

I spoke once of going back to Pride Rock. That at some point we all have to return. The story of Simba, the prodigal son, the story of Matt Le Tissier. Actually Matt never left did he. But just like Eliot said, to realise the end of our exploring would be to arrive at the place we’d started, and know it for the first time.

That was beginning to land.

Life has a strange way of showing one how to live it, if we give it time. In Taoism there is a philosophy called Wu Wei. It means do not force things. Do not force a lock, the key will break. Act according to the pattern of things as they exist, rather than impose a kind of interference that is not in line with the situation. I find it very comforting, this idea.

We often can’t see it, but we might live in a perfect universe.

*

A good friend of ours passed away just after the New Year. It rocked the best part of us. It is difficult to understand how to digest things of this magnitude. Nick Cave thought the common underlying thread running through humanity was not greed or power, but the binding agent of loss. Having suffered the loss of two of his children, the impact of this had made him able to look at anybody and feel connected to them, regardless of who they might be. In this process, he said, lay a power not often recognised.

Off I went to the Pampa to be with the folks.

A WWE tag-team, my mother flying back, me staying out with my old man.

*

The three of us spend four days together looking out over the terrace towards the two enormous cedars, back she scoots to the swirling winds of storm Jocelyn. For God’s sake try not to fight with your father, her parting council. Meanwhile the heat bakes the desert of grass yellow and the rain is a no-show. All the while the mosquitoes hum with a sound that will inherit the earth.

I sleep late, read, apply OFF! to the top of my head like an old man’s suncream. I channel my inner zen. He’s not gonna change now, my cousin Francisco says, it’s up to you. Don’t get so affected. We are getting on swimmingly. There is much to divert our gaze. The house is in severe upheaval.

The first days morph into next week and I feel a sense of homecoming. Back to Pride Rock is right. As I’d written, as well as love, this house for many years had been a source of fear. A weird tip being responsible for a family pile 7,500 miles away from where you spend the majority of your idle hours.

Built in 1881, the house has looked over our family for seven generations. The Pampero, pops tells me over lunch, the wind beginning in the Polynesian islands, blows across the Pacific and up from Tierra del Fuego, stirring up the dust of the corrals and the smells of the earth, the mint and grass and dung. And the despotic sun, he grimaces, for ten hours a day in summer, petrifies everything. The house needed to be bigger to ward off the elements, he says. For years he has harboured plans for expansion.

Every generation must leave their mark on a house, their legacy.

Pops

You tell ’em pops.

For the last year, in and out of gaps in walls up and down unstable ladders, like worker bees ten men have kept him company as the house balloons like an insect bite. They seem to love him. He teaches them history, tells them to turn down their Cumbia de mierda, gifts them suckling pig which they invite him back to eat with them. The youngest, a sensitive soul called Gonzalo, he gives Siddharta by Hesse as a gift. All the while he scolds them, calls them idiots, cracks up, all the while in a dressing gown.

Es un personaje, they laugh. A legend.

Gonzalo and his older brother Pupi and their limping dad Raúl are the Carabajales, the beating heart of the outfit. They are kind to me and we banter about all sorts. Politics and football and coca leaves and la bruja.

I can’t sleep at night, I wake from 1am til 5am and listen to podcasts and watch nonsense on YouTube. The blue light prolongs my insomnia. As the light begins to creep every so slowly through the trees it looks like a scene from the Headless Horseman. Fog, mist, all spooky like.

Thoughts of our friend come back to me through the day. In the evening I pray for him, for his brother, for his fam. I think of how the eastern mystics tell us we do not live in this world, we are only passing through. The other night pops and I watch Past Lives over some beetroot soup. In-Yun they say in Korea, has to do with fate, with reincarnation, our past lives meeting once again in different iterations.

Even simply brushing clothes with someone in the street, the proverb goes, is fate. Every interaction between you and another person, be it a stranger on a bus, is no accident, but providence, the elaborate result of your past lives and theirs entwining over many previous iterations to make these interactions in the present take place.

In-Yun.

The world is more mysterious than we want to concede. We don’t understand it very well. The west, so advanced, so wedded to their Science, might be the least aware of all. We are no longer connected, never further from the deep truth of things, from spirit, from the playful dance of the Universe.

*

Pupi suggests a picadito, a game of football. My legs are too fucked. I am like a tin-can man, rusted up and rickety. I stay up one night with Francisco, we take mushrooms and talk and laugh and sip shots of whiskey. Driving back through the early morning in the jeep, the sun peeking over the horizon, stopping to open the tranquera, I hear the chain, smell the dust of the corrals, it hits me in the face, I well up hardcore.

The clank of the metal, the thud of wood on wood, the smell of the tierra and junco, of dust blown in my eyes by the tyres of the jeep, conjure up from somewhere such a flood of childhood, of waterlogged winters and endless summers spent sleeping on recados in woods by the embers of a fire, that my body bends double.

I describe the moment and pops lets out a laugh. I’ve felt it too, he says. Es una ola, a wave. Perhaps some swirling magic exists here, a land our ancestor negotiated peacefully off the indigenous Indians, because people who never grew up here get thwacked in the face by it too.

My father complains it is the most melancholic place on earth.

THE PARABLE OF THE RAINMAKER

There is once a terrible drought in a far-off Chinese province, and many people and animals die. Eventually in desperation, they summon the Rainmaker.

From a faraway place a withered old man arrives and takes up residence in a shelter he makes just outside the town. For three days and nights he remains there, until at last, on the fourth day, it begins to rain.The villagers run to the Rainmaker. How did the rains come! they cry.
The old man answers.

I came from a country where all things were in order, in harmony with nature. But here in your province I found all things out of balance, not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Being in a disordered country, I too was not in the natural order of things. I waited three days, until I was back where I needed to be, in order with the Tao, and being in order myself, then naturally the rains came.

*

I find a strange energy running through me. Taking on the sands, in Simba mode, finding my way back. Feeling myself fill with something called adulthood. I cannot go towards it, only watch it come to me. I grow out a gangsta beard, a Lion’s mane.

You can act like a man.

Imagine, wrote Viktor Frankl, that you have lived already what you are about to do, and are aware you have done it wrong, but have a chance to go back and put it right. This, he said, is how one should live the present.

My mother emails.

By the way, Pops’ voice on the phone when you are there is totally ANOTHER THING, he sounds really happy even if frazzled about the goings-on around the house etc x x x

Love each other, as I have loved you.

Come towards Me said the voice.

*

The cedars from my window spin out a yarn, a story of life.

The time before birth, the early fog unfolding.

Birdsong, joy, the beating noon of life.

Moon bright, shadow, life everlasting.

*

I’d found this Pueblo Blessing years ago and stuck it on my board.

It seems as relevant as ever.

On one of those sleepless nights, during the witching hour as the moon rose slowly between the two trees and I was bored of reading but not sleepy I’d get balls deep in internet nonsense, at one point a YouTube short loads. I think I put it on repeat for a day. An Italian lady with a voice like honeycomb singing to her baby daughter. The love in the little girl’s eyes is too much, I watch it over and over and it fills me with an awe.

Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:3

*

Life, ey.

Too short. Too long. Too much in between.

The only thing greater than chaos, than tragedy, than uncertainty, than betrayal, than endless barbarity, is a one syllable word beginning with L. In the hell of Auschwitz there were still those who gave their bread to others, still washed themselves in the fifteen allocated seconds they were granted by the guards, in icy filthy water, in order to maintain their dignity.

I don’t see the world in the way I saw it before, Nick Cave goes on, I see it now as much more complex, much more fragile. Loss and love are very much connected, he says. I said before the underlying thread that runs through humanity is loss, but you could replace that word with love.

*

We cannot really change the outside world. The rainmaker could tell you that. We can only refine ourselves. Imagine. A world full to the brim with the best of us. Who knew how many more long Pampa summers I would get to live out with the old man, sat there chatting gas over some Torrontés. The show won’t go on forever, not in this lifetime. Throw your arms around them. Tell them how you feel. Get to it.

Go hard.

Everyone can recall a moment, universal to all, perhaps from early childhood, when you wanted to love everyone and everything – you father, your mother, your brothers, evil people, a dog, a cat, grass – and you wanted everyone to feel good, everyone to feel happy, and even more, you wanted to do something special so that everyone would be happy, even to sacrifice yourself, to give your life so that everyone should feel happy and joyful. This feeling is the feeling of love, and it must be returned to, for it is the life of every person.

Tolstoy

Whatever love might be, might be in the doing.

Not a feeling, but an action, a friend’s father told her once.

Let’s get our skates on and fill the world with it.

Looking out at the horizon, my thoughts consumed by the ubiquitous dunes, by time and the ephemeral. What better landscape to ram home this metaphor for life. The sands of time, evanescent, but still somehow tangible, not quite illusory. My reverie is interrupted by a loud guffaw. Right mate! comes a voice piercing the silence.

Enough dawdling.

We need some shots for my Raya profile.

When Cowper my friend of 27 years, Harry by name, said mate come stay with me in Singapore, I told him as much fun as he found it, dominating VIP tables at nightclubs where they play trash music sitting among a harem of beautiful Asian women, was not my idea of a stand-up time. Fine, he said, not remotely offended.

And like the lairy guy from the Ghostbusters II painting he stared me down.

There is a plan B.

Turkmenistan is high up on the list of the weirdest places on the planet. Even among the countries that make up that enormous expanse east of the Caspian Sea, bordering Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran, 90% of which is desert, Turkmenistan holds its own. A place so off the beaten track only one guidebook in the last ten years is in print, written by some brey called Simon Proudman, published under his own imprint, ‘Far Flung Places’.

My eyebrows raise two inches.

Cowper parries.

We’ve got to go mate!

I am wary. His enthusiasm has all too often meant my downfall.

A once distant territory of the Soviet Union, Turkmenistan has a brow-furrowing recent history. For press freedom, it rates second only to North Korea. Post perestroika in 1991, having fallen into a dictatorship Saparmurat Nizayov aka Turkmenbashi (leader of Turkmen) began sharpening up his shit. He renamed the months and days of the week after himself and his relatives, wrote his own Bible the Ruhnama, named bread after his mother, banned beards, erected gold statues of himself in every public space. His minister of health took over, and then his son.

Not your average long-weekend holiday spot.

This is child’s play to Cowper. Two decades in the oil industry, amassing the carbon footprint of a small village, the guy has seen a lot, too much maybe. He’s set foot in North Korea, melded into the tribes of the Congo, brokered oil deals in Novosibirsk, seduced large women at hotel bars in Port Moresby, Papa New Guinea. What he lacks in basic empathy, he makes up for in unending appetite for new experience. Cummon mate, you’ll love it! Why not, I figure.

Eight months later, visa secured, we touch down at Ashgabat International Airport. It is 1.30am. Destiny awaits. Not before a covid swab test that touches no part of our nostrils, two visa windows, an unmoving two hour queue where a face off between members of separate ethnic clans takes place, four security bag checks, five passport controls later, at last through customs we meet Ruslan, our long-suffering guide. He welcomes us with a tired smile.

We cruise into town.

The place is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It is hard to get my head around. Half exciting, half terrifying. Along huge empty highways, lit up by endless street lamps, we arrive at Hotel Yldyz. The jewel in the crown of Ashgabat guesthouses. We walk in, a lobby the size of Hackney Town Hall and twice its height. Columns of brown marble rising up six floors. Not a soul in sight.

We get shown to our rooms. See you tomorrow! Cowper clamours.

Thunk. My door closes.

What in the world is going on.

*

I’d had a bit of a dreary summer. Broken my shoulder, been bed ridden for three weeks, then fallen into one of my episodes, which had dragged on far past its calling. I’d actually emailed Cowper a month before asking if we could postpone. He was like, look mate, the fact we got a visa is a miracle, and I can’t come again til April 2024, but also said very sweetly, don’t think you have to be on sparkly form, I’m sure it will do you good, think of it as a therapy. No pressure to be anything other than you. I got a bit better, not a-okay. Shakily, I got on the plane.

*

The next morning I wake up, in the enormous suite, and literally think how am I gonna get through this. Text from Cowper. Get to it mate. See you at breakfast in ten. I roll over and try to suffocate myself with a pillow.

There’s something of the Bryan Johnson about Cowper.

You know the guy who spends millions a year on longevity hacks and looks like an alien. Something is selling Cowper short. He’s literally his idol. Why are you so obsessed with living longer? Why aren’t you, he retorts. Why isn’t everybody. I dunno the fact we are eternal souls endlessly reincarnating in search of Atman? His eyes roll back in his head.

Check out my regime, he chortles.

We have a strict itinerary. You aren’t actually allowed to go anywhere in Turkmenistan without a guide. There is no wandering aimlessly to the local bazaar. The bazaar, if there is one, is 20km away along their equivalent of the M4.

On the list for today, an ancient fort. And then a whistle-stop tour of the magnificent monuments of the new city. The Presidential Palace and Parliament buildings where photos are forbidden, the Monument of Neutrality, the Independence Monument, the Ruhnama Monument, the Alem Entertainment Centre, an enormous ferris wheel that isn’t working, the Wedding Palace, the Hippodrome, the enormous Mosque of Turkmenbashi Ruhy, fit for 15,000 people and empty, because Turkmenbashi insisted on writing excerpts of his bible the Ruhnama on the walls, putting off most practicing Muslims.

We drive from monument to monument in the beating midday sun, get out and take photos, get back in the car. Apart from the military manning checkpoints and women in head scarves gardening, there is not a soul in sight.

I find it very strange.

Cowper keeps shouting fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. We learn there is a ‘new town’ the current president is building. He has designs on making Ashgabat the Dubai of the east. In the last ten years the country has been the largest importer of Italian marble in the world.

We hit the bazaar. To a carpet shop. Cowper springs for some pretty ropey local designs in the Turkmeni style, they are master carpet weavers, I spring for the leftfield option. Yes, says the owner, this is from the Köpetdag region.

That evening we meet Sona, Ruslan’s wife, also a tour guide, at a restaurant roof bar. They are wonderful, and very open to answering our questions. They tell us more fascinating stuff about the country. Only white cars are permitted on the roads. Women under 40 cannot drive, or leave the country. A foreigner requires a USD10,000 deposit if he wants to marry a Turkmeni. Out of the corner of my eye, Cowper’s interest piques.

We drink cocktails, looking out over the huge lit-up expanse of Ashgabat. It is very beautiful in the neon haze. At one point Sona mentions, if we are referring to presidents don’t call them by name, just say 1, 2, 3. Do you think there might be people spying, or listening to us right now, I ask. You never know, says Sona smiling. Cool. I feel quite East Berlin in the 60s.

*

The next day after a visit to the carpet museum where I see absolutely no evidence my carpet is from any region at all other than maybe the Turkmeni version of Ikea, we get a in a car for our four hour excursion into the desert. We are both excited.

The Door to Hell, the second biggest tourist attraction in Turkmenistan is a massive hole in the middle of a natural gas field, that has been burning constantly since it was ignited by Soviet engineers in 1971, thinking it would burn out in a couple of days. Big mistake. For 52 years the fire has continued to rage.

It was the number one reason Cowper wanted to come. To get his Raya profile shot. A divorcée, the man has set his sights on meeting someone and settling down. And like everything he puts his mind to, he will go about it with a Batemen-esque psychotic drive.

Mate, you sure Raya is the right place to meet someone cool, I ask. He matches these otherworldly looking females, Vogue cover type girls, and then complains yea mate there isn’t often much connection.

What about you. I tell him I am in a barren no man’s land and as a result somewhat missing my ex-girlfriend. Okay mate, he says, and I smell trouble. As we cruise the bumpy roads 300km outside Ashgabat, to our left a freight train chugs along through the desert at 13km an hour. A year driving that to get her back. Fuck off I say. Give me some other options.

It becomes the gag of the holiday. Schadenfreude, finding pleasure in other people’s misfortune, runs thick in the blood that courses through Henry Sherard Cowper Coles. In hysterics, he proposes different scenarios. Working at the burger joint in the mall we’d been to the day before for five months. No! I protest. Leave me alone…

How many months did you say.

Harry is a strange cat. Charming, unendingly animated, disconcertingly curious, ruthlessly judgemental, spending four days with him is something special. It is the therapy he’d suggested in his email. We could’ve been in a padded cell and he would’ve made me feel better. His stories are so far-fetched you can’t tell if he’s talking shit or not. Maybe he can’t even tell.

I tell him about Big Fish. The Tim Burton movie, where Albert Finney spins these incredulous yarns, so in-credible, that his son on his deathbed wants to know if it was all baloney, if there was any truth to it at all, or just an invention of a playful mind. And then gloriously, at the end of his life, all the characters of his made-up stories come out and gather round to say goodbye. You can’t believe somebody has got up to all the shit he has. And yet maybe it’s true.

Cowper seems pleased.

*

We get some good profile shots, sit in the desert at night talking shit for an hour, and bed down in the yurt. I look forward to falling asleep, the wind through the dunes, camels, adventu-… MATE. Do you mind a bit of History Hit, I actually can’t fall asleep without listening to a podcast. What about when you’re seducing these Raya chicks, I mumble through the dark. Yea, they deal with it. I put my eye mask on and hit play on Elizabethan England. They love it.

We wake in the morning and have breakfast as the sun is rising.

My favourite part of the trip! I say to Harry. What. Sat around some plastic chairs outside a yurt. What is wrong with you? But I am at peace for the first time. I feel I am travelling. Looking out across the endless sand, to the east the Silk Road, and vast nothingness. I feel deep in an adventure.

Ruslan and Sona are wonderful. But being honest I don’t like Ashgabat all that much. I don’t like not being able to get under the skin of things. I don’t like tours and monuments, enormous hotels at the end of vast highways. I want people, and goat stew, and dreams.

On our way back, bumbling along the endless desert road, Cowper goes in. Do you believe in fate, he says. I think he is tricking me, we have our run-ins about religion. He is a hardcore Big Bang scientist, I am increasingly a Big Man In the Sky convert. Ummm, yea I guess, I reply. The deterministic universe, you mean? Yes, he says. Yea, I think so. What about you.

Undoubtedly, he replies. Think about it. The Big Bang. It’s like a pool table, a cue ball hitting a pack of balls. They disperse in a certain way. From that moment, everything is expanding in a specific way. From then, from that very moment. So everything we do is merely acting itself out. Woah. I didn’t expect this. So you mean we really have no control over what we are doing. None, he says. Everything is merely playing itself out.

So my trip to Turkmenistan, to liaise with my old mucker, despite me being a little worse for wear, but having decided to get on that plane, was playing itself out. If I hadn’t come, that would’ve been also playing itself out. Everything is just playing itself out. Maktub. It is written. Ten months in the yurt we just slept in, eating goat stew, going to see the gas crater, he says guffawing.

Mate I’ll take the train.

*

We go clubbing on our last night, it’s great. Surprisingly western. Cowper as is his want insists on ordering the (second) most expensive bottle of champagne in the place, plus Coffee Patron. Can’t get this stuff anymore, he shouts around the table we are sitting at. I hit the dancefloor, throw mad shapes, only man on there. Wonder if I’ve just offended decades of Turkmen masculinity. Cowper takes two glasses of champagne over to some smokeshow in a hood, she looks at him horrified. Three weeks later, I remind him. Mate don’t, it haunts me still.

On the way downstairs to the loo, out of nowhere I get put in a choke hold. Fuck, must be the KGB, they been tracking me the whole way. Kinda exciting, I think. A Turkmeni dude is shouting in my face, but somehow friendly. It’s the carpet guy! He is off his tits. He bundles me into a karaoke bar, next thing I know I’m belting out Angels to 60 bemused Turkmenis. Cracking my voice on the and through it alllllllll….. I get a round of applause. It’s a moment.

What in the world is going on.

Mustafa our driver, cruises back through the night with us in the back. He drops us off. We chat garbage in a hotel room til 4am.

*

I remember once, after Cowper had said he was going out for a run, I asked excitedly ‘where did you go?’. I did five laps of the hotel roundabout, he said. Where else could I have gone. And in my room we looked out across the vast expanse of Ashgabat, at these endless new white marbled buildings, row after row, interspersed by monuments and beautiful topiary and lamplights, and I said, don’t you find it a bit depressing. Nope. It’s fascinating, he said.

But what he loved, didn’t do it for me. One thing wrankled me. I’d asked the guide, isn’t there a place in old Ashgabat, some tree-lined boulevard with cafés and music, where the real people of Ashgabat hang out? Because we never saw a flicker of that. No mate! Cowper would cry out laughing. Get over your dream. This is it.

But I didn’t buy it.

And that was my takeaway from the trip, a feeling off slight chagrin, that I’d never peered under the surface, peeled away a layer. The happiest I’d felt was by the yurt at breakfast, or driving through a local village in the desert, watching the kids run around the school yard. But maybe some places don’t want you to peer under their surface. Maybe they are there just to marvel at, to get out of the car, take a few steps, take the right photo, get back in, onto the next.

*

Four days in Turkmenistan.

Was a trip. It wasn’t even about the place, I mean it was great, just to get out of my head, to realise life is in the doing. Meeting and hanging out with Sona and Ruslan was almost the best bit about it. You can do shit at half mast and still sail on winds to see new sands. And spend time with my mate. As we get older that becomes more and more precious. Just to sit there and crack the hell up about absolute nonsense. That was the tonic.

On our last morning, hanging out of our asses, trying on some local garb, Cowper finds what he is looking for. Sometimes what you most need, appears stage left when you least expect it, right in front of your face. Instant connection.

He missed the flight back, as far as I know he’s still out there, arm in arm, by the gas crater, taking artistic shots for his Instagram profile. Who needs Raya anyway.

Someone said once contentment is not wanting to be anywhere else, doing anything else, with anyone else. I’d say our long weekend got close to that. A stand-up time.

*

Where next, he says, we have to do one every year now.

I dunno mate. Skegness?

Let me check Raya. Could be slim pickings..

Me and my mate Alfie made a part-time job of chatting garbage round a kitchen island for most of our 30s and finally decided to get real. A couple of mics and pretentious leather armchairs later.

Enter the drop-IN sessions.

The podcast arm of dropthebeatonit, where we right the world’s wrongs for half an hour on an array of dazzling subjects, from relationships to life stages to fizzy water to regret.

It’s all here.

Listen here on the normal apps.

Our first few joints are below.

They didn’t know it but I’d been recording them for a while.

Hiding mics under cushions, behind the marmalade, in the sleeve of my coat. While they mused on dead poets or fine places for murder mysteries, family history and the silhouettes of trees. Whenever they busted me they’d go ape. This is voyeurism they’d cry. I’m immortalising you, I’d shout back. It made for great listening, when they weren’t around, they wouldn’t always be.

I could crack a can, press play, get a piece of them.

There was a method to this espionage. What motivated me was a thought, that not thinking hard about los padres perhaps not being around, what a world like that might look like, before the day something did actually go south, and the news coming in, a text of some sort, the type that blindsides you on some idle Tuesday, would be like going into an exam room having done no revision.

With eight decades and change of fine lunches in him, Pops was beginning to creak at the hinges, crankier than ever, his impenetrable memory was showing weak spots. And as if overnight, he began to lose the use of his right hand and foot, could no longer write, could no longer type, dragged a leg behind him. We all got worried. They made a mad dash to BA for a brain scan. We waited.

When we’re young the raised eyebrow Home Alone moment seems ideal.

I made my family disappear.

But when it starts happening, you start realising how quickly you’d like them to not disappear too much. More friends than I can count on two hands had recently been through this pain, and pops’ malaise was a clearing your throat moment coming into rearview.

*

Parents can break balls, no surprises there.

What would I miss, I wondered.

Hands.

I’d miss the smoothness of hers, that grabbed mine and dropped them with a pat after half a minute because she wasn’t brought up Latin. The tinkle of mamama’s bracelet on her wrist. Her jumpers, a mother’s smell. How she said oh do get on when I was being a simp. Her non-pushover kindness. Watching her on the sofa all zizzed out. I could live without her tech quandaries or running film commentaries. Most of all I’d miss never knowing what the hell was going on in her head. Very mysterious lady my mother.

Him.

I’d miss his solid granite-like fingers fused at the joint. Thumbwar. Asking him inane shit just to get my favourite reaction. Pero vos estas loco. The way he stopped mid-walk for eternal minutes to make some point. His bottomless pit of knowledge. The stupidly expensive wine he ordered with a what the hell else are we here for look. His madman giggles alone to himself having breakfast. An ability to catch immediately the nuance of your thought. I could leave his rage and high maintenance. But his singing at table, his half stare lost in some thought, some passage in a dusty novel or what was for first course, I’d miss that.

It wasn’t my father faltering that made me write this. I’d watched friends go through real shitters and wanted to help, I’d learnt things and wanted to iron them out, see if there was anything I could spin to make sense of the nonsensical. Life is a great surprise, said Nabokov. I don’t see why death should not be an ever greater one.

*

Everyone’s favourite Austrian grandpa has his gameface on.

Surely death can’t be like birth, says the interviewer, if it’s an end.

Yes if it’s an end, says Jung, and there we are not quite certain.

There are peculiar faculties of the human psyche that aren’t confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future. You can see around corners. Only ignorance denies these facts. It’s quite evident that they do exist, and have existed always.

So we grieve.

We grieve life itself. We grieve separation from youth and beauty, we grieve past lovers, the hedonism of weekends with no commitments, things we can’t get back. The photo stared down at me every time I brushed my teeth. The one I put up there thinking it would inspire me, make sure I didn’t let the little guy down.

How could I let him down. Even back then, he was me now. Just as I now, was him then. He’s inside me, I’m inside him, we’re the same. Some days I miss her. But where is the separation exactly. Everyone you’ve ever met, been brave enough to love, is inside you. Every morning, afternoon, late night conversation, every row, every lol, every half glance. How could you be separated.

Surrounded by his followers at his bedside, the dying monk laughs. Why do you cry. Where could I go. If we zoom out we are all part of the same essence, the same grand process, separate pages bound in the same book. Moana, on the cusp of her great journey, unable to leave her dying grandmother behind, goes to her bedside.

Scene killed me.

There is nowhere you could go that I won’t be with you.

*

The tribes of the Amazon say the same thing, they know it intuitively, in the west you have severed your connection to spirit. The Hindus have their reincarnation. Encouraged in their culture rather than dismissed, Indian children remember past lives until their prefrontal cortex develops. In touch with the endless cycle of death and rebirth.

A mountain, described by the Buddha, six miles high six miles wide and six miles long, where every hundred years a bird flies over with a silk scarf in its beak, running it over the mountain once. The length of time it takes the scarf to wear away the mountain is the length of time we have been on this cycle.

Walking through the Recoleta with Clara searching for our grandparents’ tomb, we take separate avenues. Rounding another corner in the maze, I see on the wall a line from St Agustin.

Oh you who cry for us
Do not let yourselves be cast down by your grief
Watch for the life that begins
Not that which has come to an end

Sat there with a friend in the pub, I explained the things I was trying to understand. She looked sadly into the middle distance, thinking of her pops. You’re right he did have a good one, he wasn’t that young I suppose. I know it sounds woo-woo I said, but apparently this stuff might be actually going down. Don’t be silly I love your spiritual stuff, she replied.

We don’t understand the world very well. What of stories of NDEs, near death experiences, accounts of tunnels and light and immense peace. 21 grams. The weight of the human soul. Stories of past-life regressions. Mysterious clues that point towards a continuation. If it is an end, Jung had said. And there we are not quite certain.

When Jules’ dad died they buried some of his ashes with a sapling in the garden. Once inside they looked out and saw Xav’s dog Vaya sitting there, as she had been for the last ten minutes on guard, staring unmoving.

Tell me where you’ll be, my cousin Clara implored my uncle when he was very ill. Communicate with me, find me. Francisco her brother kept his ashes in the living room, spoke to him, asked him things. I chatted to him about something yesterday, he told me in a voicenote.

Sat there alone in my flat I frowned. How does he know this stuff, I couldn’t figure it out. It was a recording from 1985, Ram Dass was mid-flow.

When you’ve entered into real love with another human being, there is huge attachment to the loved one, they are your connection to that feeling of love. So when they die the loss is felt so intensely, you try to hold and grab onto the person you knew.

My suspicion, because their karma was very involved with you, is that when they leave their body often they stay in a certain space in order to be there for you. Once a grieving process runs its course, and that can take time, years, there begin to be moments where there is a little space. Where you have opened to the grief, and can be quiet in a moment, and feel the sense of being back in the love, in the presence of the whole thing again. Not in the presence of the person, but in the presence of the essence the two of you had.

But because the grieving is so loud, and you are busy missing the person, you want them the way they were, to talk with them, to have them talk back to you, you don’t get quiet enough to hear that the thing that was the essence of it, hasn’t gone anywhere. It is still right there, all this time. And when you find this moment of peace, you get what you wanted, but not the way you thought you were going to have it.

*

This is quite amazing.

*

Grief is a thing with feathers, grief is a storm we weather.

On the rock in the vast nothingness we continue the spin-cycle. We look up at the moon. As the ancients did. How long have we been doing this. The bird moves the scarf over the mountainside, brushing across it gently. See you in a hundred years. What is even going on. The grand miracle of everything.

It seems to me to be as close as we can come to an armour, to protect us against the full force of the blow. How much we feel is how much we love. In our hearts and minds we keep them there, alive through love. They live in us.

There is nowhere you could go that I won’t be with you.

This is no answer, an attempt at a balm maybe. A way we might come closer to understanding the un-understandable. If we knew what was going to happen, we might care less about the thing in the first place. So it remains a mystery, for us to fumble around in the dark in spite of.

A mate showed me a poem, by an Alaskan Native American called Mary Tallmountain, called No Word For Goodbye.

Sokoya, I said, looking through
the net of wrinkles into
wise black pools
of her eyes.

What do you say in Athabascan
when you leave each other?
What is the word
for goodbye?

A shade of feeling rippled  
the wind-tanned skin.
Ah, nothing, she said,
watching the river flash.

She looked at me close.
We just say, Tlaa. That means,
See you.
We never leave each other.
When does your mouth
say goodbye to your heart?

She touched me light
as a bluebell.
You forget when you leave us;
you’re so small then.
We don’t use that word.

We always think you’re coming back,
but if you don’t,
we’ll see you some place else.
You understand.
There is no word for goodbye.

*

The results from the scan came back.

A blood-clot on the brain from an accident months ago, was pushing the thing to one side away from the cranium. This explained the loss of movement in his right hand and leg. They operated, drained it, within twelve hours he was back to some semblance of normal. The whole time I was strangely calm. It surprised me.

My bro texts.

Having fought with two nurses before the sun had risen, down the phone to me this morning talking through his death’s door moment, we spoke of the divine and what awaits, spoke of prayer, things I’d learned, you need to teach me, he said, I will be your disciple, then started barking at me for abandoning him. Yeah, he was back. The dictaphone could wait. Not forever, but a while.

*

Where are they.

Inside us, I think.

When does your mouth say goodbye to your heart.

Separate pages bound in the same book.

A clumsy attempt to tie some things together.

How to deal with great pain, I wonder, pain many had felt, were feeling, a pain we would all feel. Maybe to register we ever had anything to start with. What are the chances, all things considered. And we will wonder not where are they, but wow, how come I got to spend some time with them at all.

A strange thing happened last week.

I went on a whistle stop tour of Dante’s 7^th circle. Never has a man fallen so far so fast and been spat back out in time for the second week of Wimbledon. What was strange wasn’t the mood, but the downright speed of it all. It was like depression on meth. Before I knew it I’d dusted myself off, patted myself down and gone in search of a toothbrush for the first time in a week.

When you don’t get out of bed for 52 hours things get stinky. What made the stinkiness worse came down to a plethora of intergers, lack of air flow, an influx of natural gas, and of course the midst of a long hot humid summer. On the upside July is quite an OG time of year to get deeply depressed, at least I was keeping it fresh.

Perhaps not fresh exactly.

Imperceptibly it arrived, this mood of mine, and never abated. A slow Sunday morphed into an abject Monday and then into a soup of hours and changes of light outside the window and ceiling fixation. For five days I barely moved.

All the characteristics of past episodes were there. Loss of track of time, loss of perspective, a barrage of unkind thoughts, intense fatigue at all the wrong hours, and no trigger. Not really. I’d been bed-ridden and confined to my flat since a bike accident a month before, but this was a total base jump.

These days I find myself in such a temper, that were I underwater I should scarcely kick to come to the surface.

Keats

The old wet-blanket card, I heard the mean part of my brain cry. I’d been superb for ages. I almost couldn’t recall what a bad mood felt like. For months I’d been straying dangerously into the territory of what one might call reliable.

This was some much needed self-sabotage.

The wet-blanket card never did it for me. I wasn’t one for complaining much. Self-pity never came that easily but perhaps I should’ve tried harder. Ex-girlfriends, friends, they all concurred. I wish you were less hard on yourself.

There is a purpose to self-pity. To dilute the critical voice, the one that drives the mood downward. Perhaps the mercy of telling oneself it’s not all your fault, can serve to steady the ship a little.

The case for my defence was also aided by the fact I really do not like being in bed. I find lying horizontal on a mattress beneath a certain tog-count beyond the allotted time close to torturous. Any protracted time spent in bed, even on weekends, came down to one of two reasons only.

Bad moods.

Or the company of…

ladies.

Neither of which had happened in recent memory.

*

Lying there swilling in my own filth, I had a thought. There must always be a method in the maelstrom.

Nature does not hurry, and yet everything is accomplished.

Lao Tzu

I flipped the narrative.

Some of the greats had lived in bed. Florence Nightingale, Marcel Proust, Churchill. Perhaps unbeknownst to me, something more mysterious was at play. Perhaps this was progress.

What people don’t understand, said Alain de Botton, is that writers are hard at work even staring out of the window. Maybe I was too hard on myself, maybe I wasn’t depressed at all, maybe I was working my arse off. In our modern age of relentless busybodyness, who else was going to have the imagination to spend a week in bed. To report back from the coalface. This was valuable fieldwork. I didn’t see anyone else writing this kind of stuff.

This was a scoop.

Hemingway said the real work of writing goes on in your subconscious, while you’re asleep. Perhaps the longer I slept the more fully formed my prose would be, maybe a week of solid shuteye later, I’d wake up with a headache and a fully formed novel in the mixer.

Questions poured down like falling rain.

What did Gen Z have to say about all this, I wondered.

Seconds of a finite life ticked by.

I’ll say something. Uber Eats is resoundingly not depression’s friend. The gig economy makes it perfectly possible to not see a soul for weeks, whilst simultaneously not succumbing to starvation, whilst perfecting a smile devoid of all life but enough to foil the unsuspecting delivery guy into thinking you’ve got your shit together.

Rubbish started collecting at my door. Was this the first step to becoming a hoarder. I’d stare at patterns on the bedpost, go through past memories with an unforgiving siv. They say in AA you can’t think your way into better action, but you can act your way into better thinking. I honestly did try to stir myself into action. And yet even applying deodorant was an existential crisis.

Part of me hoped I’d get to that point where you don’t need soap, where your body starts cleansing itself. I lay there waiting for the sweet smell of pheromones to cascade from my nether regions and override the BO.

This never happened.

I stopped answering messages, stopped even registering them, eventually I stopped looking at my phone altogether. I didn’t listen to music. I didn’t want to be depressed. Nobody would will this on themselves. But I was underwater. One night some over-compensation from my shoulder put my back out. This was getting bad. Like I’d aged sixty years over night.

As the days, and I can’t remember which ones they were, morphed into one another, and I wondered what was going on in the world outside my window, worrying I might have to fumigate my T-shirt, growing paranoid the Uber Eats guys might start suffering Groundhog Day syndrome, I did get worried this might be the fist chapter of something more serious. Something was both familiar and predictable, like going for a haircut and watching it go wrong, knowing all the while there wasn’t a thing you could do to stop it getting worse.

And as soon as it teetered on the edge of becoming something more noteworthy, it vanished into the ether.

Just like that.

Life is just a series of peaks and troughs, and you don’t know when you’re in a trough until you’re climbing out, or you’re on a peak until you’re coming down. You never know what’s around the corner. But it’s all good.

David Brent

In the manner of a lairy-looking fairweather cloud, the mood passed on by. As Brent had said, I suppose until I was climbing out I couldn’t realise the extent of it all. I came to, in a state of odour no Dove Bright Bouquet could assuage, clawing my way back to a normality I could vaguely recall. What music did I like. Was I married with kids. What was my name.

Let’s be clear about this.

Nobody likes a good times guy. I’d been in a fine mood for far too long, it was getting repetitive. Life is a spectrum of all shades, the only constant is change. Chicks dig mystery. Plus if I’m gonna play the tortured artist card, I should remember to be a bit tortured now and again. Otherwise I’m just unemployed.

The five days were bleak but somehow edifying.

A gentle tap on the shoulder, a reminder that life isn’t all blue skies and banter, a warning sign to be mindful. A little like the flu jab, give yourself a tiny bit of virus so your body can man up and learn how to fight.

Twelve years of episodes and medication can keep a score somehow. So now I see, the needle finds its groove seamlessly, which is kind of scary. A mood had taken me. This explained the unbelievable speed of it all, but also how well I am.

That it should all be so surprising.

*

I walked to the window, stared out across the midsummer city. To my right, a succulent chilled. I looked again. The cactus in question had done nothing for two years, and now out of nowhere, it was having a hernia. This was fantastic. Who knew when things might get going again. Nature does not hurry.

And yet everything is accomplished.

Out of this trough I climb on out. Bit vulney. Bit shook up. I’ve been great for ages. Sounds silly but sometimes you don’t want to be happy. You don’t want to be miserable of course. But you just want to be okay. There’s something in that. Maybe you just want to be less obsessed with your feelings.

There was one unexpected aspect to all this.

Watching messages come in from people, lying there having no interest in responding, once I’d returned to the land of the living, felt somewhat parasitic. As if, if I wasn’t involved in mankind, what the hell was I even doing here. Like there was no purpose. This was never a feature of past episodes. In times gone by I’d gone awol and not even noticed how out of touch I was.

This time round left a feeling of having a role to play, and missing my cue. Once I was back I realised how the world had not had me for a week. It might sound self-centered but I felt it strongly. Like I was part of a bigger whole, a fundamental part of some network, the Universe needed me.

Past episodes, bacchanalian feasts of depression, had left their mark. None as unique or brief as this past week. The palet-cleansing sorbet of depressive episodes. An express trip to the underworld. A whistle-stop tour of joy interrupted.

I’m back I reckon.

Shoot I forgot to pick up a flaming fridge magnet.

On Wednesday morning, the gates to the world’s most notorious adult playground were flung open. Sat at home loaded up on opioids with a 5-inch scar down my shoulder, I scowled at the sky bemoaning what might have been. Spread out on a sofa with my maternity pillow, I wished the revellers plague pestilence and famine.

Three days later I came to on the same sofa, after one of the great weekends of my life.

*

Glastonbury.

A weekend were mainly wealthy middle class youngsters who want for nothing spend the weekend in a field listening to wealthy out of touch musicians preaching left wing bile.

Ex British Army Paz49

You tell em, Paz.

Having given up a ticket 3 days before, I was in no mood to celebrate. As I watched revellers get loose on a sun-drenched Friday from the sofa, I found myself siding with Paz. What a waste of resources, bunch of reprobates in a field. I wondered if storm clouds would descend and wash it out.

On Saturday morning with that bone-dry enthusiasm of the self-piteous, I took down some codeine, decided to watch more festival coverage. If only to dampen my mood. The sun was out. My scowl was ready.

I flicked the stages and settled on Park. Some girl in a rather ridiculous gold stretchy latex thing was moving around. Kids these days I gurned. She got out a violin at one point. I listened on. And on. Oh God.

This is good.

Oh no.

This is really good.

Van Gogh would fall in love every day. In his youth my friend Jonty would spy a girl in a coffee shop who would proceed to live rent free in his head for a week. These flights of fancy were not alien to me. Watching the screen doing my damndest to contain the serotonin, I found myself falling.

Violon solo over, she sang the words…

The space behind the sky, on which the darkness depends on.

I thought about the sun, and how everything the light touches, is because at that moment the earth spins into the sun’s gaze. And spinning out again we are shrouded by night, but the night is really just the immensity of dark foreboding space. So stars were the beacons on life, centres of solar systems, around which planets danced.

I looked back at the stage. Around it she moved, reflecting the light like a golden shining sun.

I was in love.

The crowd watched her in awe. I watched them. Something happened. Suddenly I was no longer on a sofa in Hackney. I was there in the field. Shades on. Beaming. We were one. United in the glory of the moment. Paz was missing a trick.

They ended with 50/50, a certified banger. To rapturous applause they thanked us and disappeared round the back. I thought about the exhilaration of walking off having just played your first Glastonbury. With strangers, new friends, we wandered around the place, supping beer, basking in the midsummer sun.

Everyone went back to the tents to freshen up. See you in a few hours, I said, hit them with the peace sign, went to the fridge. Alone in my flat, I felt the pang of first love. I googled Jockstrap. Within an hour I knew the band’s history, had read interviews, watched shaky camera concert footage, listened to the album twice over, and as the sun began to lower in the sky, my cheeks creased with moist-eyed joy.

Since breaking a shoulder up a hill in France, I’d felt despondent. And watching the world inhale the wonder of a festival I’d given up a ticket to, I felt envy. But music and the discovery of that afternoon was making something absent for a while pour light in, into a place too long in shadow. I told my mate Tommy M the story of my crush. Sat there on his sofa, he replied.

Yes sir.

There was something about the music of these two 24yr olds, the freedom of it, that reminded me of youth, of my twenties, of feeling confused but beatingly alive, the feeling triggered every time I cycled down through Deptford and New Cross, the smell of air after rain. When you get older things get taken from you, says Pacino in Any Given Sunday. But this was a madeleine moment. What we had was real. I wondered if she felt it too.

Music will save the world.

That night I got absolutely railed at Leftfield. Park Stage 8pm. The next thing as joyous to rushing your tits off as the lightshow goes bananas at one of the great music festivals, is watching a thousand plus people with shades on do it. They played the bangers. Afro-Left, Song of Life, Rhythm and Stealth. Out of nowhere in the middle of the maelstrom, this guy pulls a Blue Steel and my heart fills with happiness.

I wondered where she was, if she was resting up from running through my mind all day.

I hit the pillow and swam in dreams of golden violins.

*

I woke up buzzing from the night before. Everyone had stayed out until sunrise but I’d got an early one, called it quits when the BBC programming stopped at eleven. Staggered back to my bedroom fuzzy from three beers, full of memories of the joy of feeling alive. What a set, what a moment.

Sunday was muggy, nice respite after the intense heat of Saturday. Strangely enough sitting on a sofa all day inside with a fan doesn’t submit one to much risk of UV. But a part of me was bereft. Nothing could top the encounter of the day before.

I fished out a 0.5% from the fridge, made my way into the festival, my heart was heavy. Where was she, I wondered. Had she noticed me, staring into the camera, all those miles away on the sofa. Could attraction so great bend the laws of physics. I longed to see her one more time. Weird how, when you most need it, the Big Man in the sky can answer your call.

Watching a very cool band called Black Country, New Road, there she was. We locked eyes immediately. Gone was the gold, more demure this time, the violin was out.

Woah.

This was too much for one codeine-addled Sunday, I decided to cool off in the shower. With Elton incoming I took a well-earned repose. I had gone through the whole gamut of emotions. My new festival experience showed me something else, how much could be gleaned from moving all of ten metres, sofa to fridge and back to sofa. Rest. Repeat. If we are living in a simulation, which Elon seems to think is highly likely, frankly why waste the energy.

But how to play it.

Assessing the situation, I concluded it was a long shot. When I was graduating from university she was 4. Hold on, did I even graduate. I was forty in a month, had failed my driving test last year, and at times when I was very relaxed and not paying attention I sucked my thumb. She could do better. I realised love is messy, that the only real love worth its salt was the collective love of mankind.

The love shown to Lewis Capaldi when he couldn’t finish his set. The love coursing through the night sky as Elton played banger after banger, that was so palpable you could feel it coming through the television. What a fantastical place it was. You should check it out Paz, you might learn something about feeling good once in a while. If you hate on love, all you got is hate son. Rick Astley said it, I think there might be something magical going on here, like actually magical.

As the ardour of that first love began to quell, I thought of the odyssey I’d been through, and how that quote I’d read was probably on the money. You don’t miss the person, you miss the feeling. I wondered if you could get a restraining order from a blogpost.

If you’re reading this.

Go live your life, you’re too good for me. Butterflies are free to fly, sang Elton, fly away, bye bye. I’ll pick up the pieces of my broken heart and move off into the arms of an alternate destiny. Great festival experience though.

A 36hr love affair from the back of a sofa, I’ll take it.

Lying in hospital at 2.43am on a drip, I figured the only way was up. I almost shrugged a shoulder but thought better of it. For a week the only thing holding my collarbone inside my body had been skin, my left wrist was a mess.

From on high a zen descended.

When you go down with 50kg of loaded touring bike under you it’s always dramatic. I’d brushed myself off, saw blood and road rash down my leg and elbow, felt an adrenaline surge to mask the pain. Close run thing. I went to pick my bike up. It dropped like a stone, no strength in my arm whatsoever. I reached for my right shoulder and a bone the size of a golf ball I’d never felt before was pressing out of it.

I hung out with some horses for half an hour, a plump lady rounded the corner, I flagged her down with my good arm. Je crois que j’ai cassé ma clavicule, I said. She looked horrified. Oh mon Dieu. She reversed onto the grass and lit a cigarette.

The ambulance took another 45. A legend called Habo, a military doctor who’d pulled up in his jeep, kept giving me counting exercises to do to stop me fainting. When the Pompiers loaded me into the back and barked at me to stop fretting about my bike, Habo was like bro chill, I’ve got it. He called me most of the afternoon to check on me.

After seven hours in a hospital in Limoges watching people being wheeled into A&E in ten times worse condition than me, they sent me away with no pain medication for one of the worst nights of my life. My wrist was fractured, my collarbone was three inches out of position, I couldn’t take my cycling shorts off to pee, and lay on the bed of a hotel room in filthy sports garb sweating out the pain, thinking of large women.

In the morning I limped to the pharmacy.

Nothing rams home the information you should probably get a girlfriend faster than your mother flying out to France to carry your bags back for you. Gap year stuff.

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley

Robert Burns

Back in London a surgeon told me my shoulder separation was a bad grade 5. What’s grade 6 then, I asked. Not much shoulder left. I asked him about the odds of attending a festival in Somerset the week after the op and he cracked up.

It killed me.

I’d been looking forward to the trip for months. Heady summer days stretching out before me like a never-breaking wave and in twelve seconds my plan A had spontaneously combusted. Plan B didn’t exist. If I hadn’t been focusing on the half-cow I was going to take down for dinner maybe I would’ve seen the oil patch, maybe I’d be free-wheeling down a mountain like a gee instead of sat in a hotel stinking of BO and regret.

With a week to go until the op I fell off a cliff. Alone in my flat I sprung for a Huski beer cooler and got totalled on ludicrously cold pale ale. I awoke with three types of pain. A headache, a fucked shoulder, and the mental malaise of the other two put together, mélanged with a summer slipping out of my grasp.

*

CHINESE PARABLE TIME

In olden times, a Chinese farmer’s horse runs away. That evening his neighbours join him to commiserate. We are sorry to hear of your horse. This is most unfortunate. Maybe, says the farmer. The next day the horse comes back with seven wild horses, in the evening the neighbours return. What a turn of events, you have luck on your side. You have not one but eight horses. Maybe, says the farmer.

The next day attempting to break in one of the horses the farmer’s son is thrown off and breaks a leg. The neighbours crowd around, commiserating. What bad luck. Maybe, says the farmer. The day after officers came to conscript soldiers into the army for a Great War, they scour the village but leave the son behind on account of his injury. What great fortune! chime in the neighbours.

Maybe.

*

Chaperoning me back to Hackney after the operation my bro buys me food from the supermarket, makes sure I’m chilling and leaves. The door shuts and I bend over-double, break down. Sob hardcore. I feel pathetic, I drain my tear ducts. Weirdly once I think I’m done, I go again. Intense cartoon-like bawling. Some almighty build-up of tension releasing itself.

I spend the next week staring glumly out the window, noting down my cocodemol so I don’t overdose. On a nurse’s instructions to allay the plugging up of bowels from illegal amounts of codeine, I up my fibre intake and slam Weetabix for the first time since ’91.

I think back over the last month.

Makes for strange reading.

I’d been mugged by some dodgy guys in the back of a Merc. Two days later half my bike gets stolen. An oil patch rules me out of a great adventure, a best mate’s 40^th, and I sack in a ticket to the world’s greatest music festival. Spurs finish 8^th. In a hotel in some French town I suffer the ignominy of not being able to wipe my arse for two days.

Am I being tested.

On the phone down to LG, I search in vain for the moral of the story. There doesn’t always have to be a moral you douche! he says laughing. There’s always a moral, I clamour. I call a Deliveroo driver an idiot over text. I’m not wrong. Refuses to find my flat even though he’s a minute away. Still it haunts me.

To atone I pick up three Huski beer coolers for some cold-gold obsessed mates. Yesterday a salt of the earth dude takes the Amazon package from outside my door before I can get it.

I am being tested.

Sometimes rock bottom is your trampoline.

Job-like I rail at the sky.

THIS ALL YOU GOT BRUH.

When God takes everything from Job and Job asks why are You testing me, God shows him the infinite complexity of the world of His creation, and says you have no idea the things that are at play, in every minuscule moment. My shoulder situation was shit. Or was it. Maybe. Like the Chinese parable, who knew what weirdness might come my way, in this newfound situation, not in spite of but because I had gone over my handlebars, halfway up a hill in France.

The guy who told the parable, Alan Watts, went on to explain. The whole process of nature, he said, is of such immense complexity, that it is impossible to tell whether anything that happens within it is either good or bad. Seeing as one can never tell down the line what might be the consequence of good fortune; nor the consequence of misfortune.

Mulling this over on my eighth cocodemol of the day, I figured things could be worse. Then again, who was I kidding, they could be a lot better too.

Maybe a summer of sitting on my tod knuckling down, healing, finishing a book, making podcasts, reading good shit, doing things I didn’t want to but were beneficial to me, was better than what these months of balmy evenings tended to encourage, impulsive pleasure and Gatsbyesque hedonism. Far-fetched, but not out of the question.

What if everything right now, was mysteriously perfect.

You know what’s better than feeling superb. Summoning a smile when shit goes south. Laughing in the face of aridity and disenchantment. When things get really bad, that’s when you take the stage, do a little jig.

When life gives you lemons you paint that shit gold.

I’d hurt my shoulder. But I was no man in the iron lung, lying in a yellow box since 1952, all the while insisting his life was perfect. If you wanna find someone worse off than you, you don’t have to look far.

My shit was laughable.

Just as well really.

The surest sign of wisdom is a constant cheerfulness.

Montaigne

It sounds pathetic, but those two days in the hotel, when the pain in both arms got so bad I couldn’t even take my socks off, the night I’d spent when the only movement not making me wince was opening my eyes, showed me something humbling, about a state of survival. As if when things are really bad, all you can do is breathe. There’s no space for sadness. It’s just onto the next.

Reduce your time span. Get through the next five minutes.

*

The end scene from The Martian, that had flipped my lid so hard on a plane once I’d copied it onto my boarding card, came to mind.

This is space. It does not cooperate. At some point, everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south, and you’re going to say.. this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that. Or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just.. begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one. And then the next. And if you solve enough problems you get to come home…

Feeling miserable invokes a certain leeway, a space, a gap within which to feel sad. But when things really go south, all you can do is get through it. Get to work. Solve one problem, then another. Put out fires to get you through the day.

I would’ve learnt none of this had that road had no oil on it. I would’ve had a nice holiday and some high-end steak, got a ropey tan-line and gone to a banging music festival.

At the end of Eternity’s Gate, in a passage from one of his letters Van Gogh turns to the man he is painting and says an angel is never far from those who are sad.

*

So that’s me.

Spouting philosophical garbage tripping balls off codeine, doing the next best thing, counting blessings, listening to unhealthy amounts of some low-end podcast. Life could be better. Life could be a whole lot worse. When it gets better I’ll calculate if deep down, all things considered, things are even better after all. They might be.

Maybe.

I’ve got a question mate.

(Alfie and I are hashing it out, an hour in.)

What you been doing for the last fifteen years.

My brow furrows and I mull over a nut-scratch. For dramatic effect let’s imagine I’m in a dressing gown nursing a White Russian. Couldn’t really tell you bro, I say. I think about it often. The title of this piece, a take on Socrates’ claim on his own ignorance, is not strictly true.

I do things.

I wake up in the mornings, I make myself a coffee, I take in the world around me, I water my plants. But yes, I am perhaps a source of jealousy to friends who aren’t bigger fans of their desk jobs.

I’ve eaten, prayed, loved. I’ve wept and squandered, I’ve risked, been brave, a coward, I’ve known regret, taken a chance. Given everything and seen it crushed. I’ve supported Spurs. I probably do more than I give myself credit for. But seeing as for years I couldn’t confidently answer the question, what do you do, it has been a source of existential angst.

There’s a beverage here, man

The Dude, Big Lebowski

I’m getting better. More gravitas in my words. More weight. I’m a writer, I proclaim. Got a website, writing a book, podcast in the mixer. I then leg it to the loo and lock myself in.

*

I wanted to write some take on this conundrum for a while, but also realised it is sticky. In today’s western clime of being defined by your profession, by the sacrifices you make in order to afford the life you choose (or don’t), to talk about not doing much is just not cricket. It’s almost in bad taste. But what defines us, in the end.

What we do.

Or who we are.

Or both.

*

Everyone is a unique cocktail of influences that went into their own melting pot since the day they came into the world and before, in the womb, and before that through those pesky fucken stone-washed genes. I grew up in strange circumstances, but also, and unlike my cousins who were in the same position, not ingrained with the idea of doing.

If I could afford it, said my father once, I would employ someone to tickle my feet. My mother would groan and get on with her business. He vaunted above all literature, art, the subject of being alive, my mother preferred a life lived through action. My brother works harder than I do. I was at the shallow end of the dream pool.

Maybe I’m just fucking lazy, I said to a mate once.

You’re the least lazy person I know, he replied. Probably in reference to my psychotic feats of endurance. Lazy is a bullshit word, my therapist elaborated. It masks deeper concepts. Fear of rejection, fear of failure. We don’t begin, seeing as we’ll find it all too painful. So that was it maybe, too little consequence if I didn’t man up and take my place in the Circle of Life.

I remember working in advertising and having a terrible boss, and my thought was literally I don’t have to be here. Why am I here. The trouble is, as Alfie put it, experiences with dickhead bosses are valuable. What probably happened to you, he said, is that instead of leaving that at work, you went home and became your dickhead boss. He manifested in your head, and never left.

Explains the cruel monologue I lived with since my 20s.

Here’s a question.

What would a squirrel do if it didn’t have to squirrel nuts. What would its purpose be. Would it consider the majesty of the branch it had just run down, the richness of the leaves reflecting the light, dancing patterns, the smell of the air after rain. Or would it sit there counting the nuts. Maybe I could be the guy in the Mont Blanc ad, with the shoes, I thought to myself.

Vibing out with a journal n shit.

In another incarnation you were a Chinese farmer, said Alfie, don’t beat yourself up about it. Why do I write this shit, I think to myself, why bother. I suppose writing gets it out of me, a strange type of therapy, and yet I’ve u-turned on this one ten times. Scared of it coming across as some ludicrous sob-story, some silver spoon bullshit.

I don’t envy you at all, said my therapist. People underestimate how hard it is for those in your position. And yet it’s the opposite of hard. It’s too easy. And that might be worse than hard. We want challenges, we want coal faces. I mean we also want Ben & Jerry’s and box sets and cuddles. But all after a hard day’s work.

For the man who does not work there can be no leisure.

The guilt I carried, whose source I couldn’t quite locate, was a continual tap-tap-tapping at my temple, a reflex hammer prodding away for so long at my dome that I just got used to it. There I was telling Guy about a girl I was talking to who was curious about my 3pm baths. So, I said, I ended up explaining I was a rich prick. He looked back seriously, like I’d offended him. You’re not a prick, he said. Pedalling my way back home through the night it was strange how much I needed to hear it.

TIME

What most friends and acquaintances suffer from is not a lack of money, but a lack of time.

The one thing hardest to buy, the one thing friends, now with jobs and kids and email inboxes, get far too little of. The one currency I have more than any. If my worth is based on that parameter, call me cash rich. I have briefcases full of recently minted hours.

So what am I doing with it. Well these days, I’m an around the clock philanthropist. I give it away. I saw a postcard on a revolving stand in a gift shop one December. The most generous gift you can give anyone is your time. That’s me. The Bill Gates of tiempo.

*

REDUX

I may not have gone where I intended to go.

But I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Douglas Adams

Sitting in a tent chugging Pimms two years ago, Bournio looks at me and goes… It doesn’t even matter what you do with your life now. You were literally put on this earth to make people feel good.

I think I might think about that line most days, it might’ve been the most necessary thing anyone has ever said to me. The spark to the flame of some fire that crackles contentedly in me right now, leading me blindly towards some final destination. Some knowledge in me that all I need to do is follow.

Deathbed regrets involve the same thing always. People. Wishing you’d spent more time with them, wishing you’d told them how you really felt. If you break it down and strip it back, the only thing that matters in this world is be a good person. Spread your fingers out like a harry potter wand and shoot tiny sparks of good vibes into the ether. A smile, a wave, a glance. I mean in the end what are we even here for.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are many ways to be in the world. The Inuits, the Amazonian tribes, the Maori, the Yogis who meditate for 40 years in caves, your cat. In Berlin they have a custom, you do not ask someone you meet ‘what they do’. It is bad manners. You ask them ‘what interests you’.

To be of service, that interests me.

It took me a minute. But in the end, it seems to be what I’ve by chance evolved in those dank hours of idle afternoons, an ability to talk to people on their level. They tell me their lives in detail. Twice a week I meet friends of friends I barely know, and we hash it out. The coolest communication in the world. The Hackney Healer. Lol. Life begins at 40, said Jung. Everything else up until then is research.

Sitting here writing this, I’m sat behind a desk in the reception of an art space in Greenwich, helping Alfie out for two days. I take the post, chat to the clients, navel gaze and write this. I even made a pack lunch. A funny thing, doing something, even when I’m not doing anything at all. I’m not used to it. A rare thing, not feeling that guilt.

He offers me a more permanent post.

Nah bruvs, I got work to do.

Nietzsche said he who has a why, can bear almost any how. What if you had no why. Ever. The how would take on less importance. You’d have to find a why, rather than have it served up to you through necessity. And then, along some distant day into the future, when the why came along and said hello, here I am, it would be pretty exciting.

*

Out in the outskirts of Madrid, a man is busy at work.

53 years it’s taken, and he’s still going.

If I start now I’ll be 92. Justo Gallego is 90. What cooler thing have you ever seen anyone do, ever. The man who single-handedly built his own cathedral. I’d be down with that.

I’ve written this line before.

The happiest people in the world are those who have been released from some sort of shackle. Free from the shackles of what, I ask myself. Of needing to feel bad about things, because it was what I thought I deserved, because deep down I was sure I was a bad person. Some childhood bullshit. And being sure of that, I sieved everything through the same lens, all of it, money crap included. Who knows.

Something like that.

Also, who cares.

I am not what has happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

Life begins at 40. Here I am, three months off.

Booya.

There is work to be done.

Where aaaare ya!

Come the cries from the terraces.

A week it’s been, since the clocks went forward. 

A week that should’ve seen the city spring to life, seen crowds thronging outside pubs in just-ordered garms waiting neatly folded by the door for this very moment. The jasmine should’ve been sneaking out in some form by now. The magnolia surveying all from a gently swaying branch.

Instead, we’re inside, three jumpers on, having meltdowns. The magnolia coats the floors of dank wet pavements, floating sadly in puddles from rain that won’t stop falling, the Big Man in the sky is having an especially early April Fools. Everyone is in a mood.

Spring is just not happening.

*

I’m losing my fucking mind, comes the text. It’s Friday morning, a downpour. Greg is at the end of his tether.

Adding insult to injury, BT decide to peddle some seasonal deals.

Sitting here writing this as the droplets drum methodically against the window and I spy a forecast of rain until at least Tuesday, I think thank God I’m getting out of here. Forsaking this spring that won’t appear, heading across the ocean to an autumn on the pampa. Sure to be warmer and dryer and more alive, even as around me everything begins to die. Easter with my old man, who feels felíz he says, but whose moods are as changeable as that other thing on the horizon.

In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.

Mark Twain

2024 has been a weird one, my winter was remarkably joyful. I didn’t suffer at all. So spring means somehow less this year, it doesn’t feel like a saving grace. I am in no need of saving this year.

As the clocks went back in November I wrote about a mini depression I’d succumbed to, about the futility of SAD lamps and channeling a stiff upper lip. In some sense I’d managed to get it out the way before Christmas. So the drudgery of January and February was totally painless.

Friends didn’t have the same experience. Some were going through deep grief, almost all overloaded by crying infants, nappy changes, dark afternoons, big life decisions, everyone seemed to have had a rough one this year. In some sense spring has a duty to us, to rouse life into us, just as it does the earth.

Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men.

Chinese proverb

There have been glimpses of something.

On Monday on the way to M&S, the blossom moved prettily in the breeze. The fairweather cyclists were out in force. A crowd congregated around the evangelical Christian stand chatting about the Lord. The guy who’d worn shorts and a tee through the whole winter was still wearing shorts and a tee.

It was close to 8pm and still light.

This was change.

And change was bad. I was doing fine. I didn’t need this crap. How dare my emotions be dictated to me by something as evanescent and predictable as a season. I was enjoying my padded Columbia jacket and my fluorescent pink beanie, the one that made me look like a twelve year old emo. I didn’t want change. Who knew what change might bring.

Maria the lady sat outside M&S gave me a smile that made me want to fold in two, told me about her three children. Grazie, she kept saying. And then a cloud moved across the sky and the temperature plummeted. Still, a soupçon of something. A faint whisper. It’s always darkest before the dawn, said Stan, the only upbeat thing I’d heard all week.

Perhaps we just don’t like waiting for things.

I remember once in the desert of New Mexico cycling for eight hours straight through the night into the dawn, as it morphed from jet black to a dazzling day, and as I moved through the landscape it became clear to me for the first time that the sky doesn’t move around us, we move around the sky. I literally saw the planet turning in slow-motion.

March 20th marked the spring equinox, the first time the sun’s direct rays cross the earth’s equator into the Northern Hemisphere. My experience of the earth moving slowly around as it held me, suggested the idea that seasons aren’t just appearing for us, we are actually coming into them. And that means physiological change, not just outside, but within us.

No wonder spring gets us so amped.

Of course everything is blooming most recklessly: if it were voices instead of colours, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Rainer Maria Rilke

When we are young, the days are short and the years are long, in the autumn of our lives there is a shift, the days are long and the years are short. The older we get, the more we need it. When I was young I liked the autumn, wrote Borges, in my old age spring is what I live for.

Earlier this week, the sun crept out from behind a cloud and poured through the flat. Enthusiasm means to be filled with God’s spirit. I walked back from the station and thought, spring makes a tune through your earphones take on a divine importance. Just the sun’s warmth peering out from behind a cloud makes your body explode all over with a fizzing.

Spring’s message is simply this.

We can get through things.

Without the sour the sweet would not be so sweet. What would a life of constant 21 degree weather be. Temperate countries have a hard nut to crack. Why do anything when you get hardpound UV injection all year round.

I changed No.7 on my blackboard.

Dunno why, made sense.

To go towards what really scares us and get past that, that is where the treasure lies. The treasure in question is just around the corner. It might be shitting with rain right now, but it can’t go on forever. To make matters worse, a girl I was trying to work some magic on blows me off by text this afternoon in a somewhat brutal way. Maybe I was overthinking it, but today I feel worse than I have in months.

I might need spring more than I thought.

George said it best.

Here Comes The Sun It’s Alright.

Swallowing my wallowing bullshit pride, I went out into the wet, sat outside my local with a pint of the good stuff and some bacon fries. Soaked in the last of the winter rain.

There it is, biding its time.

But it is on the way.

It all started pretty innocuously.

A stray coffee cup here, a bathroom puddle there. One morning I woke up and the sink was coated in a green gloop. My couz was lying in bed in the shadows of the spare room, perusing something from the glow of his laptop screen, drawing on the yerba maté of his youth. The green gloop lining the sink was the dregs of him making a new batch.

My insides began to recoil. I felt like I’d just done 54 ab-crunches. Something was out of control. I internalised this wellspring of feeling, repressed it, wrote furiously in my journal.

What was this thing, that was out of control.

Ooooh.

It was me.

*

I don’t like being out of control. I like control.

Not so much the black latex whip kind of control. More like if I applied for a cleaning job and they gave me a trial, I’d probably be asked back. That kind of control.

This isn’t exactly news to me.

I’m an orderly type of guy. I must’ve been neatly coiling my umbilical chord in the womb. I grew up folding my school uniform to within an inch of its life. When I lived with my bro in our 20s I’d do the washing up before I’d eaten the fucking meal. I’ve been told by previous flatmates that I exist firmly in the realm of psychopathology. You’re a psycho, said Guy every time the merest mention of Mr Muscle cascaded from my lips.

I’m not proud of coming across like a dork.

I am proud of the order I feel in my soul after a good DnB session.

Dustpan N brush crew.

*

I’ve written about acute clean-freakery before.

My parents told me once when I was 26 and wanted desperately to live alone, you’re too young to not have to compromise. You’ve got problems. Sharing with other people will dilute them. Maniatico was my father’s word for it.

Perhaps I just know what makes sense to me. Do I feel good being informed a kitchen is more than just a place to dust, that you can actually cook there. That a dishwasher can be switched on. My cleaner’s blank expression when she walks through the door and tries to work out what the hell to do for the next three hours. No single man lives like this, said a mate the other day.

The first inkling my cousin was living with a weirdo was when he woke up bleary eyed and busted me manically scrubbing at something I’d missed during the previous evening’s deep-clean. Fede by name, was coming to live with me for 3 months. Growing up in Argentina but separated by an ocean for most of our lives, we’d evolved in absentia, and this was a nice wholesome get to know you again moment.

Well, quite nice.

Nobody likes being seen.

Having a flatmate for the first time in five years was revealing the extent to which I had become somewhat stuck in my ways. I thought this was normal. Apparently it was not. Like all things that force you to think about habits you have unconsciously surrendered to, I was being shown a vision of myself I had trouble accepting.

But everyone deserves a fair trial.

EXHIBIT A

Cartoncito

fig. 1

fig. 2

Why the hell do you insist on keeping the packaging on tubs of hummous n shit once they’re open, said my cousin one morning. What can I say, I like the graphic design, it feels good. It’s a nice touch. Brings colour to the fridge. I’m an aesthete, sue me.

Verdict: Pretty psycho behaviour. He’s not the first person to have complained about this.

EXHIBIT B

Bed-making

fig. 1

fig. 2

I mean, my couz is staying with me for months, a man has the right to keep his abode any which way he desires. Does that mean my stomach doesn’t constrict every time I pass his open door. No. Despite the shitshow of (fig.1), being a well-mannered man he does make an effort to make the bed each morning. But observe the clean lines, the glassy-sea of (fig. 2). Egyptian cotton made to soar.

Magisterial.

I know which room I’d rather sleep in.

Verdict: Psycho.

(No joke, picking out an emotive filter I found myself staring at the photo of my room and shuddering at the lifelessness of it.)

EXHIBIT C

Coffee pods

I explained to fede, the reason for the pretentious coffee tamper. That with a flick of a supple wrist and exertion of mild pressure, it turns the coffee into these little brick nuggets you can discard with ease, primed for another deluxe early morning ristretto. If you don’t fulfil this instinctive step, it becomes this rank gloop and all manner of clearing up is then required.

No memo was received.

fig. 1

fig. 2

Verdict: Hung jury.

While my argument holds sway, it’s too psycho to get that annoyed about. It does annoy me though. Hey at least I get to clean something up.

EXHIBIT D

Drainage

This was found after one of fede’s notorious ‘clean-ups’. I tactfully skirted the idea that draining was for water to leave kitchen implements. He looked at me like I was a monkey, shrugged his shoulders, said I don’t really care.

Verdict: I take this one by a mile.

Anyone who doesn’t understand rudimentary laws of physics needs an IQ test. It’s basic logic. Like a mate of mine who used to grate cheese sideways, and wonder why even though the cheese lasted longer not a huge amount would end up on his supernoodles.

*

This is really just an excuse to air my clean, freshly pressed laundry. I’m clutching at straws, I’m also trying to work out quite how far off-piste I’ve gone. There’s not really anything solid for me to accuse anyone of. All I end up is feeling accused myself, coming back to the extent of my clean-freakery, my desperate need for order.

But this is my relationship to it all. If I’m hungover I will lie in bed and visualise exactly what it is I need to clean, go through the implements, the process, roughly how long it will take, and the excitement spurs me into action, I spring out out bed, get to it, the activity genuinely restores order to a beer-addled brain, to the inclement chaos in my soul.

Maybe I should be a cleaner. Make an ad n shit.

Guy was right, I am a psycho.

Why the need to stockpile like I’ve just finished gazing at some moody clouds in an Apocalyptic film. Buying the same shit in the supermarket, over and over again. Is this the zen of knowing yourself. Or a refusal to try anything new because it would throw you off.

Perhaps this was why I cycle every year. Camp out at the end of a wheat field. Go nowhere near all the shit I think I can’t breathe without, and somehow keep on breathing. Depriving yourself of the things you think you can’t live without, as the Stoics implored, only to realise you’re fine. Will my world really fall apart if I can’t access a glass of chilled sodastreamed tap water at some point in the window between 7:40-7:45am.

Maybe I should get into VOSS.

I could give you some spiel about how it all comes from childhood, from being in an emotional state of lack of control, be it a strict parent, a overly-sensitive dome, maybe just being left in the supermarket once for half an hour too long. So what I began to fear was fear itself. This is the constant unconscious need, to barrage myself against something I’m afraid I won’t have the guts to feel.

I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life…

Romeo and Juliet [IV, 3]

It could just be my nature, my brother had exactly the same upbringing, and he’s probably the messiest person in southern England. He walks past a towel, it stands to attention, and literally falls on the floor. When we lived together in Abingdon we had blazing rows about how I thought it was fundamentally unjust to go halves on the cleaner.

I like to think I have the ability to laugh at my psycho-ness. Maybe an excessive bordering-on-panic-attack kind of laughter. But laughter nonetheless. At least I don’t double-down, storm out the house, slam the door and go on the hunt for some 2for1 air freshener.

Also, who gives a fuck. Less interesting is why I am the way I am, more interesting is how to get the hell on with the business of being me. I am not what has happened to me, said Jung, I am what I choose to become.

This was the grace of fede coming to stay. The obligation to stare some of these things I’d assumed were normal in the face, accept them, moderate them, laugh about them. The most alluring drug for a control freak is a chunky line of loss of control.

This might be the universe’s way of telling me to buckle up, that my order-obsessed bullshit could do with some watering down, that I might be ready to meet someone. While I mull all this over, I mull over a cheeky early-afternoon ristretto. I wonder if the coffee pod will be nice and solid or limpid and gloopy, and think how some part of me hopes it’s the latter.

At least I’ll get to wipe something down.

January, almost done.

A twelfth of the year, gone Keyser Söze.

My 2023 has got to slow up, but just doesn’t want to. I drink my celeriac sea-salt smoothie and feel grateful. At one with the universe on this tiny spinning rock. My screen-time is down to eight hours. I can breath-hold for 35 seconds. New Year’s Resolutions? For me.

Can you fix what isn’t broken.

I ditch my time-keeping devices.

Time is illusory, the position of the sun dictates my days. I wake when I feel, stay up all night when inspiration calls. My muse can’t keep her hands off me, the channel is open like never before, heaven is a playground and my creative mind is frisky. Some ideas are wacky, too wacky, I can’t get them down, what would people think. Lol. People tell me I’ve changed, they look worried, talk about a ‘new me’. I’ve always been like this.

Just never believed the hype.

Life begins at 40.

I’m 39. A mix of wisdom and childlike playfulness floods through me. 2023, The year of emptying out. Fill your cup to the brim and it will spill, says the daily stoic reminder on my phone. Nice. I take a carefully filled glass of chilled VOSS and sink into my meditation app.

Meditation clears the mind, sure. But I like to spend it thinking about what people think of me. In that restful state I go over past ancedotes, brunches, jokes that landed, being the funny guy is well and good but I must give others space to bloom. I finish my shower with 3.5 seconds of cold water. Every cell in my body explodes with heamoglobin.

The codeine from the co-codamol gets to work. We all have our peccadillos. Perception, reality, who cares. I feel fantastic. This is what my favourite thinker Sam Harris calls ‘wellbeing’. My haiku sharing circle is this evening, they’re not the brightest bunch but I like to inspire them with my offerings.

The leaves in Kyoto sway/cherry blossom all around/in the air pink heaven

I can’t stop reading.

Audiobooks mainly.

My book seller in Frisco knows my tastes and sends bundles across the pond. Wall deco. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing like the feel of recycled Oregon ash between my fingers, but where’s the 4x speed button on Donna Tartt when you need a decaf ristretto takeout. If you have time to sit with a book these days what the hell even is your life. Some novice gives me the wrong coffee and I lose my shit. What part of quadruple do you not understand, I shout in his face.

Out in the street, it’s epiphany time. Wardrobe makeover. I wonder what shade of aquamarine to buy new clothes in. Uniformity is confidence. Don’t look outside yourself, the answer lies within, pings my app on eastern wisdom. I look to the sky and muse. Should I go inside, I think to myself. I think so. It’s freezing.

This year is about perfecting simplicity. Every day the same lunch. Kale, pine nuts, tumeric oil, can of kombucha. On Wednesdays and Fridays I’ll eat a baklava, I like the Turkish culture but more than anything I’m a fan of supporting local business. It gives me bad wind, must be my chakras clearing.

Back to the grind.

I got into tech last year, ventures came to nothing. Crypto too unstable. Lots of avenues, no dice. I met some really good people. This year, I’m focusing on writing. Self-expression, thought-pieces, confessionals, that sweet spot between the share and the overshare. The power of the written word. Start your own pod! someone implores me. I’m looking into home studio options. They say the market is saturated but come on, not all voices need to be heard.  

Being a writer means 30 minutes of concentrated work daily. Any more and I lose momentum. YouTube tutorials on procrastination help the focus. The algorithms really know me by now, the ads are up my street. I buy a blender.

Music is a constant backdrop. I can’t live without tunes so I’m always on the hunt. I’m getting into classical, feel myself responding to the subtlest melodies. The best of Beethoven is a touch. In need of new methods of self-expression I spend the afternoon researching the jazz-keyboard.

*

Some days I get angry, so angry I don’t know what to do. I sit in it, seething, feel myself sinking deeper. I rage, I want to break something. The littlest things make me explode. I’ve upped my co-codamol. The doctor says he can’t keep prescribing so I’ve started steaming. It helps sometimes. The feeling of the cold plunge after a long session, namaste.

*

Girls?

Where to start.

Five in the mixer. None of them text. Game-players. I’ll play any game you like. I can’t blame them. I’m intimidating, I’ve been told. Everyone has baggage, mine is reputation. Quick to laugh. Sensitive. Firm. An ‘intellect’. I’d intimidate me. But I’m 4th wave, don’t believe in men making the first move. They’ll come calling.

Maybe I aim lower, spread the love. Equality of opportunity. Three nights a week I arouse myself without climax. No destination more sweet than the journey. On Thursdays I take a zoom-class on boiling pasta. 10 weeks to professional al-dente. Gio from Bracknell is impossible to understand. At night I eat the pasta from the pan with oil and pepper. I’m getting good.

I almost call my mother, but don’t.

I watch a nature doc and scroll.

*

The fucking thermostat is playing up.

Every morning I wake up sodden.

I need new skies. Mull over a long weekend in Tokyo, the canalside of Nakameguro, mochi, the steam rising in the cold air of the morning. But I’m off the gram now, what’s the point. You can’t go on a trip like that and not share it with friends and fam. Letting people into your way of seeing the world, your reality. I do miss checking in sometimes, the likes, comments, that feeling of connection. I haven’t seen most of them in years.

What if I just go. I laugh off the idea. Would be lonely, self-indulgent even.

A click away from reactivating, something stops me.

How can they move on, seeing me living my best life, day in day out. I think about them thinking of me, heavy-heartedly. I want my exes to heal. What’s the saying. If they love you, set them free. Something like that.

What was it she said when she left. I needed to change. Never explained herself. Aren’t I the ‘new me’, the one my friends rave about with a look on their face I can’t quite place. I think about reaching out. But that ship has sailed, reached a new harbour. I search my drawers. Spend the night scouring London for late night chemists. My dealer gives me some garbage. I send him abusive messages into the early hours, delete his number. I heave in bed in sweats, awful dreams.

*

2023, the world it keeps on spinning.

It’s Friday night, 27th. Dry Jan, not for me. You do you, guys. If you need a month not drinking maybe you’re the dry one lol. Seriously though, an entire month off the sauce might mean there are problems you’re not admitting to. Rich & Smooth or Round & Plummy.

Decisions.

I want to float away in the pages of Donna Tartt, but my wifi is down. I want to smash it, but channel Shiva and Krishna. Deep breath. Feels like progress. My journal beckons to me from the table top. Why not. I fish it out, mull over a couple of lines, musings. I read over my most recent entry, from 2015.

You’re on the right track. Peace! X

We really do change, or do we. We stay the same. Two days before, my eastern wisdom app sends me a vid. Some old Indian guy, Krishnamurti. Nice name bro. It’s the answer I’ve been looking for. It fills me up. I am on the right track. Maybe we don’t change so much after all.

It’s only when the cup is empty that it can be filled. Only when the mind and heart are totally empty, then it can comprehend, then it can live. To be so completely empty, is the highest form of intelligence, the highest form of love.

Steady on mate. I have to agree though.

Speaking from experience, that’s me. Emptying out.

2023. Closing in on 40, never felt so empty. Not like this.

It has already been written.

So said a Bangladeshi taxi driver the other evening. So said the M&S security guard yesterday morning, spying my Argentina scarf walking through the electric doors. So said Zlatan, the great Swede, before even the quarterfinal stage. This is Messi’s time, he said. It is already written. Prophecy, in a post-enlightenment world, is the stuff of the loony bin. But something is in the air. A prophetic energy.

It is palpable.

*

The beautiful game, they call it.

I’m yet to be convinced.

I’m obsessed with football. And it bores me.

Nothing saps your soul harder or faster than sitting through a Sky Sports Super Sunday marathon in the fading light of some idle October afternoon. Nothing is less inspiring. Football is a bad spectator sport. Unless, that is, all of human emotion is on the line. Enter the World Cup. The most watched global event by a country mile brings the entire world to a standstill for a month every four years.

In the morass of those few weeks the planet itself stops spinning for a few seconds to peek.

Tomorrow is the final. My country, half my blood, for some reason the whole of my footballing passion, is playing. And in that team, probably the greatest genius to kick a ball plays his final World Cup match.

La pulga atomica, the atomic flea, the enano, cementing himself as the best player of all time by lifting the greatest trophy of them all on Sunday, is starting to feel more like destiny. The material world playing out something prefigured in the heavens. If it has already been written then Mbappe, France’s modern day d’Artagnan, turning up trumps to score a hat-trick on Sunday might not even matter that much.

Maybe.

*

When Argentina won the World Cup in ’86 I was barely three and all I remember is going outside to throw loo-roll off the balcony down into the ecstatic streets of Buenos Aires. Plumes of white trailing away from my fingertips into an abyss. It was my first memory.

It must’ve marked me. Whenever they play a World Cup I go into a month long anaphylactic shock. If England play Argentina and England score, I die inside. I can’t explain it. It’s deep. I feel very little for the Three Lions. When Kane skied that penalty a week ago I felt for him as a Spurs fan, not much else.

Last month as the midwinter turned bleak and my mood followed suit, and I had no mind to write anything at all or feel much joy, my lifeblood became the football. I got obsessed. After each game I would potter to my wallchart and fill it in.

The narratives and subplots. The clash of footballing cultures. German precision, the joga bonito of Brazil, the tiki taka of Spain, England’s stellar new generation, the French superstars. Morocco getting to the semis. North Africa going wild. The tension of the group games. The Aussies progressing. Japan playing out of their skin. The human rights discourse drowned out by the glorious football.

I don’t write about sport much.

But I had to get this down.

In the back of my head, the story was about one man only. La Pulga. But it wouldn’t mean much if we’d gone out in the quarters. There would be no story. The resilient Dutch equalised in the 100th minute. 46m Argentines died and resurrected and died again. Messi’s last World Cup game… it was unfathomable. The heavens had other ideas.

And again four days later in the semifinal, what I wanted to say would have no value if we’d lost. We were expected to. The Croatian midfield titans Modric Kovacic and Brozovic would neutralise Messi’s genius, said the pundits.

Look what he did.

Took out the best defender in the competition, a twenty year old masked man-mountain called Gvardiol. Danced around him three times. Toyed with him. The Argentine coach Scaloni, who feels so much tension he can’t manifest it physically and spends entire matches simply gurning, watched the third goal doing his best Stone Cold Steve Austin impression.

Watching him is hilarious. The release of tension when Lautaro Martinez scored the winning penalty against the Dutch was something else. Rather than celebrate with the team he just ran off down the tunnel in paroxysms of emotion.

Only the World Cup can do this.

So whatever happens on Sunday, I can write about the wee man with hope in my heart. Prophecy. The footballing Gods shining down on the greatest player the game has seen.

The dream is alive.

It has captured the imagination of the world. Everyone is an Argentina fan. All of South America is supporting them. We are the same people, solo la cordillera nos separa, screams a Chilean. Only the Andes separate us! Colombians, Uruguayans, Peruvians send their support. It is bringing out the poetry in everyone.

If any Argentine happens to come across these pages, know that there are parts of the World you are not even aware of, streets and bylanes you will probably never visit, that rise as one with you, celebrate as one with you, cry as one with you.

*

Francisco my cousin watches at home in BA in the heat with Balti and his friends, Dolores sulks in her bedroom. My couz grew up watching Maradona at La Bombonera. He was an artist, he explains. He painted masterpieces with a ball. But he was drugged from age 20. Who knows what he could’ve done sober. Pero sí, Messi is an alien. There’s no doubt. Every time Argentina score, they run to the pool. They started in the group stages against Mexico.

Now it is tradition.

The kids will remember this month forever, I say. We’re watching history. That’s what makes the World Cup so spectacular. Someone missing a penalty, falling to the floor, in tears, we are watching a split-second they will rue the rest of their lives. There is no bigger collective human emotion on the planet than a World Cup. None. All this, from booting a pig’s bladder into some netting.

*

After the semifinal, where el enano once again did extraterrestrial things with the ball, an Argentine journalist called Sofia Martinez interviewed him. Her last words formed no question, only a statement. It was wonderful, emotional, made tear ducts swell around the world, Messi was visibly moved.

It’s not about even winning this thing anymore, she said. It’s about the joy you’ve given us, all us Argentines, the whole of this last month. Every kid in this country. Nobody can take that away from you now.

Shall we talk about him.

He plays a different sport. To anyone, even perhaps to El Diego himself. He does things nobody has ever seen someone do with a football. And he’s been doing it every three days for the last fifteen years.

Pep Guardiola, the greatest coach of the modern era, says he is on another level to anyone in history. As manager of Bayern, before a crucial Champions League semifinal, he was asked in a press conference how do you stop Messi. He answered quite seriously, with a humorous resignation.

You can’t stop him, not in the form he’s in. There is no defensive system that can stop him. There is no coach that knows how. No se le para. No se le para. Es demasiado bueno. Un talento de esa magnitud, no hay caso. There is no stopping him, simply no stopping him. He is too good. A talent of that magnitude, there is nothing you can do.

Lilian Thuram, a French great, who played for Barcelona alongside a 19 year old Messi, explained it further. Normally as a defender, he said, you wait for the attacking player to make the first move, to try to go by you, so you can react. But Messi shows you the ball, waits, waits, for you to make the first move, and when you do, because his feet are so quick, he simply takes it past you. So it is physically impossible to stop him.

Tevez says it was actually hard to play alongside him. He does things that are so unexpected you just gawp at them. He’s running towards the goal, four opposing players swarm him, crowding him out, obviously I start running back knowing he’ll lose the ball. He gets past them all. So now I’m suddenly out of position. Even amongst the elite, he is on another level. We play football, says Tevez, el juega a otra cosa. He plays a different game.

If you want to get lost down a wormhole, to really catch a glimpse of his genius, watch this. It’s my favourite video of his. When he was young, before his so-called peak. Watching him dribble, it doesn’t seem possible. The speed of it all.

Some say he is too metronomic. Doesn’t show the cracked genius of Zizou. The poetry, the flawed antihero. But they said that about McCartney, he couldn’t have been the genius, he was too nice, and yet the other three say he was the greatest of them all, without him none of it would’ve happened.  

Messi isn’t just Federer, Jordan, people who transcend their sport by showing you things you’ve never seen. At the risk of sounding like a twat I really think he is in the realm of Bach, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, the divine shining through this monosyllabic reserved 5’7 man from Rosario. He gets people out of their seats, holding their head in their hands.

Disbelieving.

His no-look assist against the Dutch, so freakish that Schweinsteiger, the ex-German pro, said he watched it in slow-motion 4 times from the birdseye camera, and still didn’t see the pass.

Messi is the last person who understands his Godgiven talent. When his son Thiago asks him ‘papa, why did they give you another Ballon d’Or’, his 7^th, Messi replies shyly, no sé? I dunno. With a timid shrug of the shoulders, the kind you’d give a girl at prep school asking why you sent her a Valentine. I dunno. The best player in the history of the sport, receiving the prize all players covet, still not understanding why.

Messi has for years been in the shadow of God.

D10S.

El pibe de oro, the golden boy, el Diego, a warrior, a leader of men. Though their skillsets are freakishly comparable, both small, low-centre of gravity, wands for left feet, you’d never see La Pulga shouting sons of bitches to a global audience before a World Cup final. Wenger said it best. The difference is only this. Maradona was an extrovert, Messi an introvert.

This World Cup something changed. Messi has risen out of the ashes of his shyness, inspiring team talks, given the referees grief, talking trash to the bully. He is a leader now, all players look to him, many theorise he has been possessed by the spirit of Diego himself.

El Cholo Simeone, legendary coach of Atlético, a team-mate of Maradona, called it. Diego was everything, Diego gave us memories we will never forget, but there, in between the cracks, it is clear, Messi is better.

*

Right now in BA, it is so hot birds are falling out of trees. The whole place is at a standstill. No-one can talk about anything else. The streets are empty. Es una locura, says my cousin. A madness, this country has for football. A country at the ends of the earth, successive failed governments, corruption, hyper-inflation, rife with tension, passion, all united over this one sport they excel at. When I think of the World Cup, texts Alfie, the first thought that comes into my head is the Albiceleste. The famous strip of Argentina. Massive compliment, he says.

I should have gone.

I mean I’m flying out Wednesday anyway.

Why not change my flight. Get there in time. To see once more what I saw in blurred outlines as a three year old throwing loo-roll off a balcony into the streets below. To see collective emotion explode and take over a whole country. To watch La Pulga lift the most glorious prize of all. A month of street parties. My bro landed last night, he’ll be there, for whatever might go down.

But I haven’t been quite right for a month or so. I’m better now, but can’t quite handle that much human energy, in 35 degree heat. I will watch it alone, or with a carefully chosen accomplice, from my sofa in Hackney. Try not to have a heart attack. Meet with triumph and disaster, do my best to treat them just the same.

Even if the stars don’t align tomorrow, if it was not written in the way all of Argentina has been hoping, then fine. As Barney Ronay said in the Guardian recently, ‘He doesn’t need the World Cup. He’s been the best player of all time for ten years already, it’s not even close.’

There are no more words left, repeats Guardiola.

Just watch him.

*

2-1 Argentina, the security guard in M&S says. I narrow my eyes, Messi to score…

Yes. One.

We spud, I walk out into the piercing December air.

Does it matter. Yes. Does it really matter, not really. Just as the reporter said to him. You’ve already given us so much happiness, that’s more important than any World Cup. Any trophy. More real.

Would be nice though.

*

POSTSCRIPT

Walking down the embankment four days after the clocks went back I heard Big Ben ring out. My mood was the colour of the murky waters to my right. And as the sounding gong rang out across the evening, I had a thought. An enormous barman in the sky was ringing out his bell. Last call for drinks. Donnng. The shift from autumn into winter was real, was kicking everyone out into the cold.

The summer of 2022, the great pub session of all our lives, had come to an end.

I always thought I liked the slingshot into winter.

The dark, the twinkling lights, the water vapour breath. I liked to sit on Monmouth St around half six as the coffee joint was closing its doors. Watch the ladies go by. Lurking in the shadows obscured from the pools of lamplight, taking cover behind the rising steam of a double ristretto, warming my eyes on the female form. If my stars were aligned I’d get a lucky dip into the polythene bag of excess pastries discarded at the end of the day. I’d make it count, passing up a macaroon in lieu of an all-butter croissant.

But evidence would suggest otherwise.

Last month predictably my mood began to nosedive.

Mucho the tequila bigger the headache. Cause and effect. When I’d spoken in the summer of an unquenchable energy, of feeling supercharged like a firefly was shining its light out of every pore, a mate had told me ride it to the last stop, but mind the dismount. I’d taken the first bit of advice, less the second. In fact I’d missed my stop altogether. I’d woken up in the bus station, cold and alone.

SAD people yelled at me.

No need to spell it out. No, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Oh. Still I protested. I’d be damned if I was going to let a seasonal shift affect my disposition. I was no fairweather fool, some simp needing said-hours of daylight to keep my mood in check. Besides I hated the sun. But I also hated feeling like shit. So I did some maths and sprung for a lamp.

There is no bigger vibe-kill than owning a SAD lamp.

Sitting there on my bedside making me feel exactly what it said on the tin, it occurred to me the ‘sunrise effect’ could be achieved by switching on any light whatsoever, and mulling over a scathing Amazon review I couldn’t but cast my mind back to the halcyon days of summer when all was alive and in bloom and a good mood required no work on my part whatsoever.

I thought back to the great barman in the sky. It made sense. The reason this mood had taken me down is because I just wasn’t ready for it. I’m no fan of a party ending. And the summer energy is so palpable, so full of itself, it stays there inside you even when summer has left the building. Like the love that remains after the lover has shut the door behind them.

In essence, autumn is one big warning sign. Guys, you know what’s coming don’t you. Death darkness and hibernation. But there I was out on my bike, enjoying the pale light, moaning over the beauty of the leaves, and before you know it the clocks go back and you’re a mess.

Donnngg.

The Pagans arranged their year into eight separate celebrations, denoting the morphing of the outside world. Samhain, the most recent, Halloween’s predecessor, marked the descent into the darker months. That way the ancients kept a marker on the rhythms of the sun, the light dimming or amping up, the solstices. An active way to participate in the great breathing in and breathing out of the seasons.

To anticipate the change before it sucked the life out of you.

*

So there I was feeling like a baloney sandwich, systematically getting out of social engagements one after the other as they reared their heads. Little things were five times harder. They required five times more willpower. Just going to the shops was like taking on Ivan Drago in the twelfth.

One afternoon Chloe texts. I’m with the kids in a pizza joint. I can handle that I thought. I cycled down, spent an hour with them, talking football cards with kit and magic with nell. I got back. Texted Chloe. Asked how bad it was. If I looked weird, smelt funky, seemed off.

You’re better than you think you are.

That was good to hear. It was a kernel.

Stem the flow. Pick up your worn-out tools. Write it out. Position it outside of you. Admit to yourself you’re not doing superbly. Then you can act on it to remedy it. Baby steps. Contrary action, like they say in AA. You can’t think your way into better action, but you can act your way into better thinking.

Besides winter had only just begun. I couldn’t lay down my cards now. I was jumping the gun. I was on a February tip in mid-November. I mulled over seeking out an endless summer like those surfer dudes in the 60s, chasing the earth’s tilt across its surface in search of the perfect wave. You don’t like sun and you can’t surf bruh.

So what to do. Lean in. Get medieval.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

I didn’t need an invincible summer. I needed an obscure pale ale, some free-range humous, a brace of corn cakes and a fucking backbone. I needed Gregg Wallace gurning at the mere mention of a calvados and dark chocolate parfait with a treacle and coconut tuile.

Rachel, a best pal of my then-girlfriend, sent me something once which I always remembered. While it’s good to look after ourselves, she said, sometimes we need to not be always holding ourselves together perfectly, if that makes sense. That was huge. Merciful. I thought about it often. Holding space for the juggernaut of life to hit us head-on, without getting too overawed by it. Without letting it run us over.

Just because you’re not feeling great, doesn’t mean your life is a shipwreck. Paying dues to the spectrum of mood that isn’t superb, and isn’t terrible, that welcomes you to sit with it a while.

When you have a spectacular run of fine feeling, the one this summer of all summers had imparted, you almost lose that muscle that can combat bad moods, you’re out of practice. I was out of practice. One can’t expect fine mood to shine down on you like some Sunny D ad. Like Chlo had said. You’re better than you think you are. A lot closer to feeling alright again than your addled brain can at times do its damndest to convince you.

Show up every day. Take it from there. Be grateful for the flaming miracle of everything. Know that people are fighting far harder battles than you. Stem the flow. When it gets bleak, stick some Axl on.

Hear him croon.

Cos nuthin lasts forever, even cold November rain.

Pull your hood up, go for a brisk walk around the Downs. Like you’re a character out of Hound of The Baskervilles. And if it’s really bad. Know it might not be tomorrow. And if it is, channel your inner-grizzly. Remember the birds get out of Dodge til spring. Get inside. Crack a can. Raise a toast to the great barman in the sky.

Stick some Jehst on.

Ride it out.

I hibernate through tha winter, and wait for tha summer madness.

Jehst

Overlooking a lagoon rising out of a desert of grass there is a little hill. On it sits a house. The womb of a family. I went there in August on my own. Touched base with a part of me I’d been ignoring, that had been gnawing on my insides for years. They say the happiest people in the world are those who have been released from some sort of shackle. That’s me. Thumping my chest like a bass drum.

Not scared anymore.

My father came to England at the start of the 70s, to escape a tired Peronismo but more his parents, worked in Gospel Oak as a psychoanalyst. Ten years later at a cocktail party he met my mother, proposed five times in 3 months. Two years later my bro appeared, and then me. Being called Domingo was definitely uncool until well into my 20s. I drew the long straw. My brother’s full name is Miguel Martín Tomás de Teresa de Jesús Cullen. An exile in a foreign land, no 7,000 mile stretch of water was going to stop my father, hellbent on making his children as Argentine as possible.

Every school holiday saw the four of us on a plane, my mother writing Spanish vocabulary furiously in pocket books, learning the language from scratch aged 39. In the beating English summer we spent two months out in the Pampa, jumping in puddles, huddled around fires, watching the winter course through the plains and beat against the wall of our fortress, the great trees that held us firm.

We grew up mestizo.

In a strange no man’s land. English but not quite. Not Argentine but nearly. Months of horse riding and campfires, mud and bruises, Nesquick and boredom and the endless horizon of the huge expanse waiting there like a sea. The birdsong. The electric storms. The runaway horses. The power cuts and candlelight.

You could write a book about it.

My father did.

Took him forty years.

The Estancia is the house on top of the hill. Santa Helena was built in 1881. One of the many estancias divided up in the hectares our ancestor negotiated from the indigenous Indios who reigned over that enormous territory. When he died mad and scribbling on walls after years of government house arrest, the Indians stole his body and took it back with them to the pampa.

For seven generations it has been the home of our family. The trees, the birds, the laguna, the stink of sweat and horsehair under the cincha of the recado, my whole Argentine family grew up here.

‘We were woken by the sound of the gravel being raked, and then, when our nanny Gilda opened the window, by the white glow of the maple tree. The sun, already strong, reflected the white of the gravel and the white of the tree, and gave our unassuming country morning the radiance of the sea, or snow.’

The Estancia, p.127

My father, his brother, and his sister fought over the division of the house. For a decade. It was the source of so much angustia. Recriminations, lawsuits, resentment. Feeling they had a right to what was theirs. Feeling what was theirs being taken from them. It drove a stake between them. In the Latin way, unfamiliar to my English side, of loving and hating simultaneously, best of friends and enemies. In the end my father and my tío Carlos flipped a coin for the house. It has its own name now, its own folklore. La moneda, they call it. Papa won. The land was divided three ways.

The house, up on the hill, kept watch, over this family. Through seasons, her colour morphed from green to maroon to stark grey, on moody days the wind moving through the eucalyptus drowned the call of the wood pigeon and the chimango and at her edges the endless pampa bayed to come and subsume all to its will. In the evening my father liked to walk to the palos at the end of the park, the border between us and that plain where the shore meets the sea.

‘The vast landscape was deaf to the beating of my heart, and still it urged me to follow, to disappear within it. What do they know, those who speak of stillness? I stood there with the flat vista stretching out before me, the locked door of the casco at my back, and behind it the sunset burned, its light spreading out in a semi-circular fan before me. As the horizon receded, the smells of the pampa, revived as the heat exhausted itself, returned; mint, grass, dung, the dust of the corrals. But my trapped eyes ignored them. There was no smell, no temperature, no sound, only the silent fire at my back that enlarged that empty world that was me.’

The Estancia, p.158

Jaded by the fights, Papa left the house to me.

You’ll be better at fighting off the people who want to take it from you, he said. It doesn’t make sense to Miguel and I. The house is ours. When I think about it, the house is not anyone’s. Our family is the house’s. Santa Helena owns all of us. She has done for 140 years. All of us, generations of our family that have slept in her womb, walked her corridors, treaded her steps, flushed her cisterns, even the families of sirvientes and peones, park keepers and mayordomos. She owns all of us.

*

Analia brings me breakfast in the comedor, the steam from the coffee rises up in the air of the morning, the fires crackle in each room. I am alone in Santa Helena. These fires lit for me? I write to pops, hellbent on hearing my news. He’s living your every breath, my mother says, but he doesn’t want to bother you.

No se quiere meter.

I sleep in my mother’s bedroom, watch the embers spit in the darkness I shift position and hear the brass bed jingle, the linen sheets my old man loves are scratchy. I am happy alone in this big house listening to it stretch and sigh beneath me. The next morning in the bath, I look out at the window towards the laguna and remember being small, sitting at night as the water grew cold watching the frogs on the outsides of the window still as old stones lying in wait for bugs, and their tongues. Slop. Gobble. Gulp. Heavy weight of memory.

I read a passage in the book, feel something fathoms deep move in me.

*

So that was me.

Locked for years in this scary bind with that land I somehow didn’t feel worthy of.

I had cousins aunts uncles grandparents, memories, and I felt scared. When people came back from BA and declared it the coolest place on the planet I would grin and bear it. I wasn’t a tourist. I wasn’t a porteño. I didn’t know where to fit. I felt not Argentine enough. I remember talking castellano to someone on the flight back once and she commented that my accent was strange and it killed me.

The car ride from Ezeiza to the centre of BA was blind fear. I wanted to hide. I still feel it. Round at dinner at Solís, Vivian a friend of our family, did the maths. Of course you felt fear. Think about how tense tu papa must’ve been. His relationship with papapa and mamama was so strained. I saw it all the time. You could cut the tension with a knife. He would’ve been a state, your mother would’ve been a state on his account. Imagine you two, hiding in the backseat, feeling all that. Like heading into some sort of purgatory.

Alone in BA I walk the long corridors of Esmeralda and hear the wood creak underfoot and think of them all. The ghosts still there in that huge empty apartment. Mercedes my aunt said it terrified her to sleep there alone. But I don’t feel afraid. If mamama walked in to talk to me I would love it. Through the open door is the room where her and papapa died.

Every room full of the past.

When I was 28, one winter’s morning papa and I went rowing on the laguna. It was windy, twice we rescued his panama from the water. Half way to the gallinero, I broke down. Que pasa! he said. I can’t do this. Do what. I can’t do it all, I said in tears. I can’t teach Ruben about trees. I can’t talk to Analia about flowers and oeuf cocotte and borders, I can’t be their shrink and their confidant, I can’t give them orders, I can’t teach them about history, I can’t tell them what branches to prune, I can’t carve lakes out of the earth, I can’t make decisions about cows, I can’t earn their respect, their fear, their love.

I don’t know how.

Whatever you’re crying about, whatever you think it is, it’s not that, he said. It’s something else. Francamente, he said half-laughing.

Back in Blighty, scared as I was, I confronted none of it, and my relationship with that earth, that house, fell into shadow. It gnawed at me every day. The source of my biggest fear. An enormous black presence I chose to avert my gaze from. Papa would get sad, why do you not go there. I thought to tell him, but it was so hard. It felt like my failing. I didn’t tell anyone anything much back then.

He must have thought I didn’t care.

Why don’t you ever invite us out, my friends would clamour. I told myself it was another world, they wouldn’t get it. Now I realise it’s because I knew they would sense my weakness. It sounds silly and yet it had wormed its way inside me, it was fixed there like a simple pin. I didn’t even question it.

Matt went out there with Miguel once, we went for dinner on his return. What are you doing, he cried. Go you idiot. You have such a beautiful family out there, waiting for you. All they want to do is see you.

*

In February this year I awoke with the mother of all hangovers. Went to get a coffee and my card got declined. It came flooding back. Fuck. Alfie and I had got loose, extremely loose, gone deep about Argentina for hours. Your fear is your guide was our motto. We were shouting it by the end. Not before I’d booked a one way ticket to Argentina, club class, leaving in three days. I rang up BA, got a refund, and fell into a six week depression.

But somewhere on a rusted track wheels had clanked into motion.

After a post-covid summer of love, I booked a ticket. Followed my gut. I don’t quite know why, something inside told me I couldn’t not. My uncle was ill. The end of winter was approaching. Days of cold sun slowly lengthening, the sea of grass, fires lit, the birds. I made my way across the ocean.

I spent three weeks there. Three weeks of something exploding in slow motion, something freeing itself. With my cousin Francisco we went to Santa Helena. He left, I sat in the comedor alone. On the terrace. To Kakel with Fede, riding back, the smells of tierra and junco, the horse’s sweat under the recado, five years it’s been and feels like yesterday, I say to him. Literally, I did this yesterday. With Ivan to the far flung territories. Without papa I felt an envoy, in some small way like a patroncito. That I could fill this hole after all.

There is part of my old man that is so consumed by that place he can’t give it up. Mi casa, he calls it. And then when he’s tired and bored of the endless task of it all, he says I’m doing this all for you. Tu casa. You don’t have to be your dad! Mariano our administrator cried out in the comedor one evening. You do it your way. You have to be you.

When I was sad and anxious I thought I must clean my hands of it, I can’t bear for it to be there, the whole weight of this family, the responsibility of it all on me, thousands of miles away drinking craft beer in Hackney, that house, the womb that carries us all, lying empty. The fear would take me. The same fear I now had to go towards. As I felt the spirit of my grandmother accompany me to the loo I thought what madness. What am I even thinking. What would she think.

Back to the bath.

Sitting there looking out at the windows recalling the frogs. Reading what papa had written 50 years before. I realised I was the last, not the last, the latest link in the chain. And I had no right to break it, because if I did it would shatter into a million pieces, who knew what else might break with it. Like Muir said, tug on anything at all and you take the entire universe with you.

‘We stretch like those tiny frogs that stick to the glass of windows at night in the estancia; and when immobile resemble straw coloured moths, but wet and translucent, craving rain with protuberant eyes and trembling throats, taking aim at the insect dazzled by the light of the room we are watching from, the diminutive frogs let loose another long and avid tongue to swallow the insect with a shaking of its whole body. But they are still hungry. Because they never tire of being hungry.’

La Estancia, p. 396

In all endings are my beginnings, all time is eternally present. The same frogs stuck to the windows of our past. Of my father’s. The same ones mamama would’ve seen, and otramama before her. We move our fingers back along the chain, feeling it like Braille, like the rosary. Link after link after link.

*

I went rowing with Fede as the sun was falling.

A funny thing not feeling afraid. You don’t feel it leave, you just notice it isn’t there anymore. As if like dust it has evanesced onto the wind. Rising into the enormous sky, carried on the streams that keep the storks floating like suspended stars.

We shall not cease from exploration, said Eliot, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know that place for the first time. I think I understand it now.

You change. And the world around you changes. You reshape it, remould it, banishing the ghosts of the past, and see it as it is, untangled from the weight of old memory. The memory is there still, but lighter. And you pile new memory on top. The happiest people in the world are those who have been released from some sort of shackle. Always in a state of becoming.

I can’t be who I’m not. I must be who I am.

Around us the world whizzes on.