I want my life back

… and tell me about your mother. Freud* was an odd bugger, of that there is no doubt, but less well known is the awesome nuttiness of his contemporary Carl Jung who – after a somewhat public falling out with his fellow couch-man – embarked on a project to categorise each and every one of us into a personality bucket. All of which he apparently achieved without assuming a default position of an Oedipus complex.

At which point, everyone who was anyone** ignored his dry and dusty research, instead flocking to the Freudmesiter and blaming their parents for everything. Frankly, that man has much to answer for based on the feedback I get from my own kids. Anyway, post war and with a bunch of people needing jobs that didn’t involve killing people, the US government funded a Mother/Daughter combination to resurrect Jung’s theories to be applied to the modern workplace.

Myers and Briggs have stalked vocational spaces ever since with their carefully cloistered sixteen boxes of people types explaining why some of us – when presented with an audience -  feel the irrepressible urge to moon while others are found hiding in cupboards.  As part of a “group grope” management bonding thing, one of the many delights included completing a questionnaire which, carefully analysed, would inform exactly what kind of nutter you are.

Not being terrible self aware, but having been repeatedly – and tediously – harranged for being too impulsive/too noisy/too direct/too just bloody annoying, it wasn’t exactly a cosmic shock to find what passes as my personality is essentially keen to party, especially if it’s a party where the centre of attention is forever me. What did somewhat prick my balloon of carefully crafted amusement and cynicism was the probable reason for my obsession with lists.

I don’t do lists; I love lists, love them in the way of the incurably OCD. Mere collections of tasks are nowhere near enough; firstly we weave in sub-lists, create lists of lists, assign priority stars, stab linkages, arrows and – I am quite proud of this -mark the first item in  BLOCK CAPITALS “Complete To-Do List”. When you’ve written “Find Dog” on a notepad, while said dog is probably playing with the traffic, it is absolutely clear that organisation and structure are mainstays of your life.

Except they’re not. My aspiration goals may be neatly documented but they are never completed. Frustration lies between those two points, especially if you have the ability to understand what needs to be done, but are far too lazy to actually do it. Yet I cannot sit down with a beer and a book in the garden, if the supporting chair has a weed in my slumped eye-line.  The reluctant conclusion from all this is that my basic slackness is infected with a work ethic itself  inkly verbalised in lists.

Because if I every finish this list, and that list, and the list I wrote at 2am while wide awake trying to order chaos, then I will be free to finally sit down, do fuck all and not feel guilty about it. Waste time without obsessing that it IS a waste of time, stop making changes because they represent a new start, give up on it trying for perfect and accept that good enough generally is. What I may have learned is that list is never going to be done, so I may as well try being a normal person to see how that feels.

Carol’s pretty normal – with the exception she had a rather large blind spot in terms of suitable husbands – and I was pretty damn sure her personality was pegged by my five minute skim of some fifty years of research. And I was mostly right, except for the tiny assumption that she loved planning, lists – natch – being organised and helping organise, sorting stuff out and getting things done right now. It appears I was 100% wrong there, which may explain some issues of domestic disharmony in the last fifteen years.

Slow learner, that’s me. There is no point profiling the kids as they are perfectly attuned to any personality trait most effective in annoying their parents. And don’t think by changing the rules that this will in any way wrong foot them, because they adapt way quicker than us old fuckers.  And the dog is essentially mad so he’s not getting done unless there’s some hidden category involving a mental type entirely predicated on stealing food, chasing the cat, and – in a perfect world – combining the two.

You cannot read too much into this shit, because we’re all different, yes? We don’t fit into virtual boxes dreamt up by people who apply statistical rigour to something so organically random it cannot be so simply categorised. But for all of that, it doesn’t stop it being mildly interesting if only to make you question just why mainlining the arsehole motherlode comes so naturally. So this weekend I shall organise nothing, my listing notebook shall remain unopened, I’ll let the spontaneous genie back out of the bottle and refuse to accept life will end if that door isn’t painted.

Beer for breakfast then.
* Sigmund. Not Clement although of the two, I felt old Clemmie was slightly more bonkers at the end

** Although by this time they’d been convinced they were somebody else. Probably a Pharaoh, unlikely to be a turn-of-the-domini street sweeper. I wonder what that is?

I’ve been accused of many things. Some – if not most -  manifesting to the big difference between ‘waving my arms shouting big ideas’ and the actual delivery of these crowd pleasing promises. But yesterday I was blind sided by something tangential with a  heartfelt “You have No Common Sense whatsoever“*  being dropped into a pit of quite ego-stroking flattery.

What struck me most was the assertion that us Right-Brained “Look out of the Window and make something up” types  can not – and should not – belittle our cerebral creativeness with the desultory drudgery of everyday tasks  such as remembering  how door handles work.

This bothered me a little because I’ve always craved the heavy competence that comes with practicality, but when God was handing out those kind of skills, I was accidentally setting fire to an Angel.  So let’s examine the weighty term “Common Sense” shall we as,  from my analysis, it is neither very common nor entirely bedded in sense.

First definition is all about practicality especially in the face of a crisis. Take, for example,  when our state of the art heating system morphed to state of the ark when pissing mains pressure hot water down the sitting room wall. I was your shrieking Joe Pesci to Carol’s unflappable Danny Glover but afterwards I was the voice of calm whilst the remainder of the family refused to accept that one crap joint does not put canoe building at the top of your agenda for “Things to do at 1am in the morning”

So if it’s not all doing the right thing when everyone else is considering the benefits of personal explosion, maybe the focus should shift to an all round excellence in the shed. Common Sense is merely outstanding tool usage and the genetic ability to bevel. I’ve met people like this who can turn their hand to absolutely anything; wood into furniture, metal into cars, electronics into weapons and these people all have a name. It’s engineer and frankly they shouldn’t be allowed outside without a minder and a a translater.

Flip side is the practical types who can explain – to the point of eye-forking tedium – how stuff works, but let them within three metres of a power tool and there’s a good chance the world will end. And not in a good way.  So I’m no closer to what ‘Common Sense’ may be unless it’s something a little less aspirational. Are we talking about choosing to mitigate risk when considering reward? Is it saying “no” when “yes” might be quite a lot more fun? Especially if whipped cream and one of the Mynogue’s may be  involved.

I hope so. Because – at 42 – I’m pretty well set on not dying wondering. Most of my biggest mistakes** resulted from an impulsiveness that treasures a quick hit over a long term benefit. A cheap laugh rather than sparing a feeling. 30 seconds of stupidity instead of choosing a line better suited to my skills. A “Fuck it, that’ll go” rather than a week in Hospital. Twenty seconds of bullshit over 20 hours of research. Maybe Common Sense is nothing more than understanding you can be stupid or lazy, but not both.

You see I’m starting to find Common sense, well, a little dull. Let’s look at another human attribute shall we? For example being Brave, which I’ve always associated with a lack of imagination and a DNA lacking the mortality gene. But you will never feel more alive than when wrapping cowardice in a bravery straitjacket and trusting life to something other than stuff that you know is unlikely to kill you.

Common Sense starts to feel like being old. A good mate of mine was 40 years old at the age of sixteen.  He’s not changed much in twenty five years except for a big house and even larger wine cellar. He is the personification of common sense; not dull, not boring just happy with his lot and plug-wiringly competent.  He cannot understand, never mind answer, my question “Is this it then? Is this as good as it gets, is this ENOUGH?”

Stop being a dick Al he tells me. You’re not an astronaut and you never will me, but you’re luckier than most people. Get a grip, don’t shoot for the moon, disappointment is omnipresent. It’s out there waiting for you to fuck up.  Stop wondering about what could be, and enjoy what you have. Now that sounds to me like common sense.

I’ll give it a miss thanks. While I can scare myself shitless on my bike,  chuck toy gliders over landscape that feel like CGI, convince my kids that at least one of them is related to an elephant and make people laugh at me or with me, I’m not very interested in conformity, acceptance or death by a thousand cuts.

I am thinking of this as Uncommon sense and I hope you can join me in raising a toast to its’ two fingered salute at this ever more regulated world.

* Not Carol. She worked that out LONG AGO. About ten minutes after we met probably.

** I’ve asked my archivist, and she tells me this is true. Although there’s a few thousand examples to consider.

A little out of sequence but I thought it’d gone when I found a bit of the treasured memory stick hanging from the mouth of our dog. Luckily he only ate the lid. Seemed to quite enjoy it to. Anyway.. flying to South Africa (“Welcome to the Basket Case of the Word“), I wrote this:

I am sat here, alone, cynically observing advanced states of catatonia in airline supplied romper suits. They are all pissed of course, downed by measures that would stun a hearty donkey. And shrouded under duvets of the purest white that put me in mind of a legion of dead, fat, middle aged corporate warriors

I’m sober through a combination of a waiting hire car, and the enduring memory of an incident many years ago involving multiple bottles of wine, and nearly being turned back at American customs. So my ears are full of engine roar displacement music, and I’m left with eight hours of nothing to do but sneer at a plethora of business class worthies – each thinking they are more important than each other.

They are clearly more important than me. The whole experience from collection in a posh car driven by an old man with values slightly right of Genghis Kahn, to being whisked through security by a pretty women who knew my name feels like it should be happening to someone else. I’m mentally back on the train to a factor of about five – this is not my world, these are not my people, I don’t belong here.

The Virgin “upper class wing” – their words, never mine – describes this feeling in spades. It’s clearly been designed to a brief of “funky” and so split between zones of fun, work, chill out, and emergency haircuts. I’m about as close to Amish in spaces like this as you can get. Wandering about, waiting to be thrown out until I find something that looks visibly close to a bar.

Grabbing a beer served by two happy barmen who talk about their customers – between serving cocktails to the type of people who cannot demean themselves by looking their lessers in the eye – so we swap stories of arseholes, and watch the death throes of English Rugby on the big screen. They love their jobs to be fair, it’s good money and better to be away from the general bottle throwing population out in the public areas.

Having found some kindred spirits, I extend my shoulder chip to the sit down bar found on the plane. When everyone else has passed out, the cabin crew tell me that – even at a third full – all the profit in at this end of the plane, and everyone downstream in the cheap seas are nothing more than organic baggage.

I risk a non committal smile as a defence mechanism in the same way I’ve failed to kick off about my drivers’ “they come over here taking our jobs” rant a few hours earlier. For which there are many reasons, the sort of reserve the English feel allows dictators to invade sovereign countries, a weary acceptance that I’m not clever enough to make people see another side to an argument, and the guilt that comes with me pushing the firm to pay for me to fly this way.

People lampoon Billy Connolly with the dichotomy of his castles and working class welding stories. I feel a bit like that. I’m desperately proud of being brought up in a small house with a proper coal cellar, but still secretly love the trappings of the business traveller.

Bloody hell, that’s such a craven admission I think I’ll risk a beer. It’s that or I’m going to start poking sleepy passengers with an accusing finger and a demand to know where they get off being such dickheads.

At 10pm last night, I was suffused with anticipation with a bike already packed in the truck, a favourable weather forecast, a meet up early the next day with two old friends, and three of my favourite trails at the Afan MTB centre.

To say I was looking forward to a day of dry, fast riding on flowing singletrack is a phrase laced with understatement. In the same way as saying that Murphy quite enjoys his breakfast. So finding myself on a fourth visit to the toilet at 3am this morning, was a situation meriting more that a soupcon of disappointment.

It is not the worst food pointing ever inflicted on my innocent guts. That would be the night before flying home from South Africa a few years ago, where I completed an entire novel* while pooing out the contents of my small intestine. Determined not to shit my pants on the 11 hour flight home, I overdosed on Immodium which was both a spectacular success and – later – a painful disaster.

It was five days before I could go again. I honestly thought the local A&E crash team were going to be forced to remove the backed up bolus’s of bodily waste using a caesarian procedure. Last night was a mere three chapter experience, although made substantially worse by being undertaken in the outer reaches of the Arctic bathroom.

No heat can live here. You squat in trumpety misery while the icy tentacles of a chilly draught gently caresses your testicles. After one particularly lengthy exposure, my knees gave way and I crashed – head first – into the sink in the manner of a tall tree being chainsawed.

At 7am, I attempted to rise from the pit to begin my cycling odyssey. Such a noble deed was hampered by three not insignificant problems: a) an all over body weakness making even trousers a physically demanding step too far b) a poppin’ and a bangin’ stomach that suggested I’d best get started on the next chapter and c) a certain soreness where a Gentleman would normally insert a saddle.

Because I’m not even close to heroic, the best I could manage was a pathetic moan and a flaccid collapse back into the pit. The next few hours passed in extreme irritation with a perfect autumnal day loomed large in the window. Wisps of high cloud punctuated the blue sky, whisked along by a warm breeze. Weather I could best describe as “perfect for riding“.

Eventually I de-pitted myself due to a lack of hot towels and sympathy from the rest of the family, and took the kids out cycling. They certainly enjoyed themselves, disappearing to worryingly small specs on the horizon as their old-feeling man laboured breatherly behind them.

Tomorrow I’m in the slot for driving Random to a birthday party back in Aylesbury. A perfect opportunity to bag a couple of previously enjoyed trails and maybe a memorial pint. Unless tonight, I’m forced to move onto the complete works of Shakespeare, in which case the central thesis of my existence will be again confirmed.

Life isn’t bloody fair

* and not a small one at that.

… one bike sold. Another to be shifted tomorrow assuming email is upgraded to actual person. One may be wrenched from my pleading hands, while the other will glare malevolently from a dark corner for another month.

Anyone in the Ledbury area tomorrow hearing “NO NO I’ve changed* my mind, take the child instead”  followed by the dull sound of rolling pin on skull, should just nod sagely and move on.

Move on. Deal with the grief. Accept the passing of frames 24 and 25. Relish the comic irony of believing that the right bike equation has finally been solved. As it has so many times before.

I accept it is a incurable mental disease now, and mine is a chronic case.  So it should be no surprise that a quick palm reading shows “shiny things in your near future“.

I’ll stop moping and write something funny** soon. Assuming I can type through a vale of tears and sobbing.

* lost

* ish

… it is now.

Yesterday was my last ever London commute. 8200 miles, 421 round trips, 3 winters, 2 crashes and a daily joust with the murderous multitude. It was anticlimactic in the extreme with no fanfares or street parades marking my final passing of burned in landmarks. No final resurfacing of the pothole slalom which tests my early morning reflexes. No genuflection from those who I have bested in endless commuter races, nor gloating from those who have bested me.

No more shall I sequence lights in a three dimensional navigational puzzle, no longer shall the green of the Capital’s parks bring respite from tons of angry metal. No longer shall my ire be raised by unanswered pleas for airstrikes to disperse random roller-bladers. Not for me the obsessional forecast checking, the weary glance at a watch which must zoom round twice more before I am home, or the logistical ball ache of switching between urban MTB warrior and sad corporate clone.

And yet there is already a melancholy, a misplaced nostalgia if you will; sharp memories of soft summer smells, the warmth of the spring sun, the glory of a fitness properly earned, the joy of leaving fifty grand cars – with their brochure 150mph top speeds – in your £100 rat-bike wake. And even the grimness of seemingly endless winters could delight in crisp sunrises slash painted by azure blue, grinning through the rain, and just the simple bloody pleasure of not being completely ordinary.

It’s not enough. The first year was great, although cycling every day through the winter feels like it happened to someone else. My motivation to ride through the wind, rain and mobile death has diminished past the point of pragmatic excuses. Riding a bike – any bike – still defines what I really want to be doing right now, but the faffing, the background hum of traffic cockage, the grooved in rote of doing it again and again is no longer enough to make me do it.

This morning’s bikeless journey was strange. My bag was too light, my mind frazzled by a constant search for commuting collateral, my body showered and unexercised. My shoes don’t cleat click on the station cobbles and my helmetless head feels unbalanced. As I risk a guiltily glance at my shackled bike, I swear it glowers back at my disloyalty.

It doesn’t feel good or bad, it just feels weird. A phantom Al clips in and heads out, as I force a right turn into the peopled sewers of the Underground. Something feels lost and I think that might be me.

But this is not quite the end. The brutal termination of a two wheels to work strategy shall be stayed for at least the summer. I’m childishly excited by the prospect of a hard packed, off-road jaunt to Ledbury station. But no more riding in the big city, no chance of commuting through the winter, no danger of the big accident I know was coming.

But I can’t stop. Not yet. It’s like a Class ‘A’ drug and while I know I can give it up anytime, but not like this. I must wean myself off it slowly, let it be chipped away, sliced by a thousand excuses, a slow death barely noticed.

But when I do, what the hell am I going to write about?

Politics and Hedgehog sit together as comfortably as a sadistic cat* and a feisty hamster, as ably proven by my previous bluster on politicians and their arrogance. And yet after a mere five minute immersion into the 24 hours news pool, I find myself again arguing passionately for a benevolent dictatorship.

The problem I have with yet more indirect taxation is that it comes with a smug veneer of social policy attached. And by doing so, perpetuates the myth that by taxing great swathes of the population, actual changes are going to be made in the way people live their lives.

And that is total bollocks.

It isn’t going to stop people drinking or smoking. It’s not going to fix the health problem of the middle class trudging home – after the longest working hours in europe – and downing a bottle of supermarket wine. Granted, it may divert the tiny disposable income of those in very low paid families away from useful stuff like food. But it won’t stop anyone who can afford eighty grand of sports car driving it away because there is an additional £1000 of tax, and yet it may keep older, more polluting cars on the road while the rest of us baulk at the ever increasing tax burden of buying new.

This kind of indirect taxation is nothing short of licensed theft. And it’s not fair because when it’s imposed on stuff 45 million people consume, it is almost completely biased against those on lower incomes. It doesn’t achieve anything except to shore up a level of financial incompetence, that could better manage the public finances by stuffing the tax receipts in a sock.

So I have an idea – let’s assume that these latest increases price most of us out of the market. So now we do exactly what the government is promoting – we abandon our nicatine habit, we drink water instead of beer, we make our own wine from nettles or shuttle cheap booze from French supermarkets. We don’t drive anywhere, everyone rides a bike or a donkey and we bloody well break the link between pious populism and actual economics.

Wouldn’t it be great to see the blood drain from the faces of those stuffed shirts when we actually do what they tell us? Then they’d be faced with the very real prospect of having to stop fighting other people’s wars, abandon fattening up their bloated departments with policies no one cars about, and get back to distributing wealth from the rich to the poor, and making the bloody trains run on time.

I’ve given myself dislexia by proxy irritation writing this**. Therefore all I can suggest is we allow this wave of impotant anger to wash over us and remain clam.

* How that failed to trigger the tautology filter I do no know.

** I have also turned into my Dad apparently.

Step carefully into the darkness. Grope for a frosty door guarding the entrance to the hard transport option. Shiver and fumble, with cold fingers, for riding gear. Add an extra layer and wheel out into the pre-dawn light. Clip in and fire shotgun audio – bang, bang – into the still of an icy world.

Crank carefully on white roads. Imagine a painful future through squirming tyres. Feel the freezing sizzle of 23c of slick on nature’s glass. Then, carefully risk upping the power needed to heat freezing extremities. Watch a crescent of fiery orange imperceptibly ascend over the low hills. Marvel as the layers of primary colours – reds and blues – push back the night.

Frozen water from autumnal storms forms winter crop circles. Long shadows are cast from bovinely stupid but contextually perfect cattle. Stop, dismount, abandon the bike to spiders busily icing Mandelbrot patterns. Marvel at this planetary show of fire and ice, until freezing hands and leaving trains drive you on.

Snick a couple of gears. Pity those unknowing stuck behind airbags and fiddling with heater controls. Sweep into the station and catch a little slide on untreated tarmac. Ignore the warmth of a stuffy waiting room. Grin at a hundred identical city coats and useless patent gloves.

Feel the morning blues. And reds – freezing fingers and hot blood mirror the colours of the sky. Stand on the platform now, savour the feelings of being warm and worthy. Remember why you ride a bike. Smile.

Moto Parker, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

The earth may have turned seven times but not much has changed. Another idiotic charge into waterworld, another joust with tractionless roots, hub deep mud and all-body immersing puddles. Still stupid, still fantastic but it got me thinking about how we slice time.

Before global warming, we had 1976. No rain for approximately ever, creepy spires steepling skywards through a glassy Ladybower reservoir, baked earth, parched vegetation and – if you are 9 years old – just bloody fantastic. That summer never seemed to end; oh you sort of knew that at some far future point, a return to school awaited. But you didn’t care because every day was a voyage of discovery, finding stuff, making stuff, learning stuff, bonding friendships. And it felt like it would go on for ever.

That’s not how life works now. I measure stress levels by the weight of the bottle recycling and general job busyness by the increasingly frenzied scrawl, which is beginning to resemble an inky spider performing an operatic death scene.

It’s a far cry from living for the moment, greeting each day as an adventure that has yet to start, and dreaming of how tomorrow might be even better. Age may allegedly bring many things but long term memory is not one of them. Years coalesce into non sequential events, time compresses everything that is important into flickery thumbnails.

Here’s an example – what happened to the summer pf 2007? Except that we never had one. Good Metrological answer but it is not the one I was looking for. I accept the climate of this low lying windswept island is basically different temperatures of rain but that’s not the point.

So what is? Maybe nothing more than an realisation that there is nothing penultimate about this life. And this must be the hazy rationale to why saying Yes is suddenly very important. Yes to riding in all weathers, yes to reading with your kids, yes to finding time to have a beer with your mates, yes to stuff that is contextually stupid but life affirmingly brilliant.

And No too. 10 days without beer made the nights slow like summers of old but lordy how keen was I do say Yes to everything else. Although I accept I may have misinterpreted the amorous signals of next doors dog. I’m coming to a reluctant conclusion that alcohol – lovely as it is – is not a substitute for real life. A bit like computers, blogs and pointless internet surfing really.

It’s funny really – many people try and alter their personal history so they are venerated when they die. That bothers me not at all; all I want is to do everything today and then the same tomorrow and the day after that. I’m absolutely fine with mediocrity but it has to be mediocrity with style.

Look I’m over 40. This gives me rights to naval gaze occasionally

… I promised to swear my through an accident which bothered me less for what happened to me, but way, way more on the way it was met by a total lack of humanity from those who put the ignore into ignorance. But I’m waiting to see if it may still have a slightly happy ending. Which’ll please my mum who – because all mothers support their kids even when they have forgotten why – reads the blog and finds the swearing a bit offensive.

It would please me too as the incident messed with my version of reality, to an extent that I wonder if I’ll ever properly understand it. And you can judge if this is merely pretentious overreaction when I finally get round to writing it up.

As for the many other articles airily promised, but never delivered, over the last two years, the 22 dusty items in my drafts folder should give you some idea of the chances they have of every electronically coming to life. Snowball and Hell come to mind. I like to think of it as harsh editorial standards but really I just can’t be arsed to finish them.

And there’s something else. In January, the Hedgehog will be limping into a frankly unbelievable third year. In that time there have been tears, occasional laughter and a string of rubbish photographs. And while my ability to carry on writing it is almost as infinite as your patience for reading it, there are things afoot. Or possibly apaw.

But I’m fairly certain – for a given value of certain – that we may have to pickle the old fella for a while. And it’s odd that I care because long ago, I convinced myself stuffing the ‘hog was written for the enjoyment of trying to be clever, rather than any reflected ego in all of you reading it.

Might have been kidding myself then. Anyway – even by my loquacious standards – I have rambled enough tonight. Fear not, I’ll provide a plethora of links to funny people who will amuse you for far longer than I can. And while you’re doing that, I’ll burrow on with the secret project to see if it can ever crawl out of the burrow.

And no, it’s not a collection of mixed metaphors. But thanks for asking.

EDIT: The reason this post was pulled a couple of times – for those utilising the magic of the RSS feed – was because I was concerned it was self referential BS. In face, I’m still pretty sure it is, but if we’re mixing those metaphors on the great decks of pretension, it seemed important to draw an electronic line in the sand.  Or something. Right, glad that’s cleared it up