Andy's Blog

I am very definitely a Winter person.

There is something deeply satisfying to me when the fogs of December come rolling in, especially in the early evenings, and the street lights flicker into life and cast the scenery with eerie punctuations of light and shadow.

I am also at my most reflective during these shadowed evenings, especially with all the dramas of life at the moment.  Sometimes just stopping by Abington Park, after karate, pumping up the mood music, opening the doors and taking a calm moment before continuing the journey, is required.

There’s probably a hundred reasons why it’s not a good idea, but there’s just as many as to why it is.  I think next time I try it I’ll source a good cup of java from somewhere.

A trip up to Scotland, especially at this time of year, has been too long a time coming and my batteries are in sore need of some recharging.

In a particularly low point at the moment, so have decided to wallow in some self pity and retrospective angst.  I think I’m turning into a Goth, or worse, my sister when she was a teenager!  (..that particular joke will have some severe repercussions).

My karate, as with other things, has stalled.  Despite putting in what I feel is 100%, the execution seems to fall far short of the expected standard and the appearance of going backwards more than forwards is somewhat disheartening.

Maybe it’s just a recurrence of what a good friend once called “Blue belt blues”.

T’would seem my old managers favourite dictum, muttered every pay and bonus review time, has come back to haunt; “Remember, Andy, that 100% of nothing is still nothing”.

Wallowing, angst and other inglorious forms of self pity will of course be accompanied by some very loud music, in the Marilyn Mansun and Iron Maiden flavours methinks, and occassionally interspersed with some comedy genius.

…buggar!  Still not sorted this out either!

“You have to do a blog post when you get home!”

Unfortunately, and almost bizarrely,  NOTHING had happened at the point of exiting my usual Tuesday visit to Senior Karate Class.  There has been a couple of Incidents within the carpark, after the Senior class had finished, which almost makes me sound like some kind of pervert hanging around dark car parks at night.. not helped by the fact that both incidents seemed to involve at least two female colleagues from Karate.

“Tart” as a friend called me, and no matter how much you protest your innocence; it only seems to make you seem more.. more… something-or-other!

However, it was incident free.  Nothing extraordinary had happened, apart from me not making some kind of arse of myself as usual, and no unintended double-entendre’s had been uttered.  How uneventful.

I was just musing on how quickly a holiday can fade into memory, and even more on how much you get out of shape during said hols!!  The evidence m’learned colleages;

• First karate lesson after coming back from hols and I managed to completely destroy my hard man of karate persona (self delusion is a wonderful thing); Shouting Ichi! Ni! San! Shi!… and then squeaking like mickey mouse on helium “Go”, “Roku”…
• The Alfa Romeo has decided to act all Alfa Romeo’y and decide it wanted 450 of my finest english pounds to be spent on its lower regions (brakes, disks and bearings)
• My sunburnt head has now turned to a peeling head.. I look like a “shoulda used head-n-shoulders” disaster advert.
• 563 work emails on the first day back is never a fun thing to behold.
• The holidays are not even a week old and I feel like I need another one.

Ah well, there was always Senior Karate?  Unfortunately I was bloody awful!  I felt like somebody had strapped lead weights to the ends of my arms, which wasn’t clever as Sensei was not in a very forgiving mood today.  I think I caused at least one of the press-ups that were metered out as punishments, but not all the others.  I was sweating, heaving and panting by the end of the lesson.  Nice!

I wouldn’t mind all that, but it didn’t look like I had even BEEN on holiday.  I stood next to Libs and looked all wan and pale next to her gorgeously tanned self.. Even Sarah looked more tanned than me, and as far as I am aware she spent the past two weeks in rainy England.  *sigh*

..and then to top it all off, as I stand in line at a BP Station to purchase some much needed cold beverage to throw down my parched throat, I hear from the two young teenage girls standing behind me; “Eeeerrgh! You’d think he’d be too old to need those!”.  I look down at the pack of chewing gum I have also decided to impulse buy.

I look up at the two girls, who look back at me like I’m the perv as described in the first paragraph of this blog post.

“Whoah, hang on…”

But it’s too late, they wander off.  So now it’s official, I am now too old for chewing gum, or worse.  I woulda given them a reverse shuto to the heads, but I was feeling my age and couldn’t even if I wanted to.

*double sigh* time to check the calendar and figure out when the next holiday is…

Well, I have hit that big milestone in my life which, depending on who you talk to, is either all down-hill from here-on-in or where my life begins.  I am of course talking about reaching my 40th year of life.

To be honest, and to great disappointment in some and relief to others, I haven’t had any major wobbles or mid-life-crisery with this particular milestone.. or in fact am particularly bothered by it.  For some reason I had a major wobble at 25, as my erstwhile friend in Scotland will avidly remember, and that’s it. 

Apart from giving me an excuse to eat copious amounts of cream cakes and doughnuts, plus a damned good reason to demand gifts with menaces, I have entered my 40th year of life with a non-committal shrug of the shoulders and a “meh”.

That said, and despite all the gifts I received and which were gratefully received, I think the best presents I received were from my sprogs.. although I don’t think they intentionally went out and got these for my birthday.

My youngest managed to get a handful of 3A’s *and* a 4 in his SAT’s (which is in the ‘beyond expectation/exceptional’  range for his age) and my eldest got straight-5’s in his SAT’s (which again is in the ‘beyond expectations’ range). 

A bit of a last huzzah from #1 son in his last year of Primary School, as he also received the School Governor’s award for excellence!

There’s nothing quite so soppy as a proud parent …apart from, possibly, an old soppy parent!

Sometimes, and I’ll freely admit it to being a weakness, it is just easier to not ask those questions in which you already know the answer.

..It’s a brief respite until reality comes rudely crashing in.

Or for you more traditional folks out there, the 80’s original;

(shockingly crap video though!)

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Sometimes, and rather rudely at that, you have to stop yourself, look at what it is you are dreaming of and come to the realisation that is only that.. a dream, and one which is probably too far away for you to touch or could possibly have hope to realise.

And that’s where I am today. I looked at the dream from several angles and put on my ’sensible head’, which is not something I do very often, and came to the stark realisation that I was being an idiot, which *is* something I am very often!

I am a somewhat unhappy at having to do this bit of growing up, but will put this down to a ‘Mid-Life Crisis’, as a friend so helpfully labelled it, and move forward with something less than I had hoped.

It *is* the sensible thing to do after all..

(bloody hell!  back to the maudling posts again!)

The title is a doffing of the proverbial cap to Sigmund Freud who called our dreams the “royal road to the unconscious”. His idea being that our dreams were shaped by experiences in our childhood, which psychoanalysts could use to reveal our childhood miseries, and thereby cure our inner torment.

Which is all very nice, but a bit too dry and dusty for my tastes.

I think it must be the time of year, the fact that you can actually feel Autumn beginning its onset, but I have been having conversations with a number of friends about our/their dreams.  Not the stuff that psychoanalysts get all excited about, but the aspirations we had when we were younger and why none of us seemed to have done anything about them.  Suggesting that these conversations are the product of our imminent crash into mid-life-crisis’dom doesn’t win you many friends - go figure!

The outcome of these conversations?  Bit of a mixed bag really, and nothing you could, or should, base an ethos on.  Mostly that; when you are younger life seems to stretch out in front of you and you have plenty of time to deal with those dreams later on, after a healthy bit of hedonism.  Unfortunately at some point you blink and find yourself married, with kids, a mortgage and more responsibilities than you can shake a stick at!

The dreams you had now become an object of regret, instead of something still to aspire to.  A number of friends are dealing with this in different ways; from the “sod it, i’m going for it anyway!” to the ”it was only a dream, I was a lot younger..” more grown-up attitude (their words, not mine). 

Unfortunately, the nature of some of those dreams have a more acidic impact on our “today” life and would probably mean giving up more than we ever envisioned.

Me?  For the moment I am taking the path of escapism!  It has been more years than I care to mention since I passed my Motorcycle test and had twatted around on a motorbike (‘twatted’ being the appropriate verb, as I had more accidents during that period than at any other point in my life!).  However a rather good friend of mine, in the hope that I am tempted to buy it, has lent me a bloody great beast of a bike and is allowing me to once more forget about my “today” life and escape into the moment.

Helmet down, iPod set to heavy metal, flick the electronic ignition, feel 1000cc’s between ya legs (no rude comments!), slip the clutch and roar off at a frightening rate of knots… bliss!  For a small while you are back to the teenager you were, no responsibilities and the road ahead is open to make of as you will.

What a dream!