Entries 27
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Voices in my head
I could hear the voice. Whispering to me. ”Gaff… Gaff…” from just behind me. Or to one side, I couldn’t tell. The voices have started. I had a feeling the day would come. I set of welcomed it, a...
Boom or bust
The last job I worked on didn’t go well. The money was good, I’ll give it that. But the first 2 months were far too stressful and the hours were ludicrous. Then, once the show actually opened and...
Up into the hills
You only need about 10 minutes and you’re up into the hills. The weather is good, decent sunshine but not the exhausting kind. Things are very simple here, this winter. Back to England in a coup...
Boxes
I haven’t been writing much. I’ve been enjoying a simple life, here. Christmas has been quiet, the first we ever spent away from the kids. Refreshingly uncommercial. Sparing amounts of tinsel, ch...
A quiet day
My daughter is here, for a week. Unfortunately, I won’t be here for all that time, I’ll be in Madrid for a few days, and then to Dubai at the weekend. I should be more excited I suppose. I’m not....
It is stupid
It is stupid, but it makes me smile that the illegal exhaust on my motorbike, if I over-rev - it shoots flames…
Click-clack
A disturbing clicky-clack on the bike as I wheeled it off the drive. Online research led me to suspect a worn steering head bearing. From the way I typed that, you’d think I know something about...
Indicators
I suspect they’re called something else in the United States - flashers, winkers? Turn signals, that would be it. Anyway, just after you buy a 2nd hand vehicle, there’s that period of time when y...
Descampo
And actually, for 3 euros, I can pick up a bottle of pretty smooth rioja. It’s just a 10 minute walk into the pueblo, the dogs bob along, amused by the barrio smells. The moon is half cut too. To...
I do miss the fields though.
I do miss the fields though. Most days I used to walk up through the churchyard and a few miles across the fields to where the river forges, taking in clusters of oaks and elders. Here, I have a...
Another 10 years
They move on quickly now, the years. ”With lies you may go forward. But you can never go back”. I’m hard on myself, harder than I am on others. I don’t read the self-help volumes anymore, occasio...
Thumper
I’m not great at deferred gratification, but I’ll just have to deal with it. Yesterday I paid a deposit on the suzuki. I’ll pick it up next week. This is what’s known as a thumper. That’s becaus...
And we're off
It’s a full moon on Sunday. We should be half way down France by then. 25 years ago, we headed off to Spain, just her and me and a camper. It was the best decision, the best journey I’ve ever mad...
Final therapy session
I thanked her this morning. We finished 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Partly, we had said what needed to be said. I say ‘we’, actually she doesn’t say all that much. It’s usually me who does the...
It's not that
It’s not a mid-life crisis, by the way. For one thing, I’m at least 2/3s of the way through. Also, I’m pretty content. Frustrated by my mother’s narcissist tyranny, but at the same time I feel...
Motorbikes
I can’t afford to retire. Not really. Not unless I die about 10 years from now. But I just don’t give a shit about my work. I’m in the service industry, I put on a suit and make sure that PowerP...
Swift key
I wonder if it will get easier, typing on my phone. Easier than getting off the sofa and walking down the garden to my office and laptop. In some ways, the office in the garden reduced my writi...
More grateful than resentful
But it’s strange, this resurgence of negative feelings and memories of my parents from my childhood. Actually, not so much childhood. My teenage years, which were a disaster in many ways. I thoug...
Another 2 weeks feeling old on the road
Am I getting too old for this? The truth is, I’ve been getting too old for this for some years now. Then again, I keep doing it and surviving it so perhaps not too old, perhaps just old enough. ...
Car park
So, my career not so much at a crossroads as… in a car park. Unless perhaps I chase the permanent jobs in events management. But do I really want to move to London? Don’t even ask the question. 1...
The Post Office
So, I’ve applied for a job as a postman. Not in a Bukowski way. I’m not writing or drinking myself to death. I’m not doing much of anything really. Reading a lot. At the moment, the idea of wand...
Rope barriers
A few weeks ago I was building some scenery for an events company. I also looked into some rope barriers (like you get in museums) and I downloaded a few photos to show to the client. Nothing es...
French damp
It was generally damp in France. Moreso when the water pump packed in. Predictably, it did so on a Friday morning in rural France, and no part available until Monday. Fortuitously, the insurance ...
Tupperware Sky
The dogs are urging me to boot up and set out over the hills. When she is away they are more alert. Impatient at times. The sky looks solid grey and I’m pondering excuses not to venture out. It w...
Little and often
Spring flies in, but Englanders are not so easily convinced. We celebrate the days of bright sunshine in the certain knowledge that next week will bring cloud and heavy showers. But I did get out...
Book Description
It’s nearly the end of June. I don’t have enough work.Also, I suspect that I haven’t done enough work over the last 10 years or so. I can just about stretch my freelance CV wide enough to cover the years, but face it - I don’t have the consistent, regular experience in events than so many of my peers. Although I do have a good variety of work, managing, facilitating, directing, teaching… It looks OK.
I hate it though. It doesn’t energise me. Putting shows on and off corporate stages, scene changing stools for panel Q&As with lecturns for these tremendously dull key note speeches. Watching illuminated logos flick around auditoriums of disengaged sales folk. ” We need to do more of A and B to achieve C. More and more. Now and in the future.”
I wonder, will I carry on like this, eking out my years until retirement.
Last week was particularly bad, admittedly. A week in Madrid! Except I barely left the conference centre all week. We worked from 07:00 am until midnight, shunting flip charts around 4 acres of conference centre. Smart business shoes, hard marble floors, 10 miles of day back and forth from our office to the auditorium and circulating around 40 breakout rooms. Post-it noes, flip chart markers and pencils. We bought 250 flip chart pads, calculating on 10,000 sheets (each pad has 40 sheets) to allow for 900 candidates to use 10 sheets each, approximately.
They got into groups of 10, and each group used 3 sheets each. What I’m saying is, we used 250 sheets (maximum) out of 10,000. On the final day, Rach and I made a final pass around the 45 rooms with a trolley, loading up the unused pads, to be left at the hotel. It would more to ship them back to the client than to buy them again. That image actually sums up that conference for me. A hotel trolley, piled with unused flip charts, probably to be thrown away, or stored in the deepest recess that Europe’s largest conference centre has to offer, until flip charts are completely redundant. And may this time come soon.
So, what can I do then? Sit around in my half acre of rural Warwickshire, playing the piano, walking the dogs and watching movies?
Actually, why not? I can’t quite afford it, not easily. I need to keep work coming in from time to time. This morning I thought, as I continued wading through a slightly ‘worthy’ novel, set in New Zealand in 1886, that I should write something.
I used to be good at that, no? Also, I used to enjoy it. I had a desire to that very thing. I kept an online diary for 12 years of so, writing a thousand words or so most days, often more. And the writing… it had its moments. The more I did it, the better I got.
I should do that again, so as not to waste the time that my life currently affords me. So as not to end up like that dusty hotel trolley, groaning with the wait of a couple of hundred unused flichart pads.
That… that would be silly.
