6.23. Insomnia. I can’t get no sleep.
Motionless in time and space.
I lie peacefully on the bed like the stone male armoured knight in Larkin’s ‘Arundel Tomb’. Waiting for the dawn. Waiting for the shadows of the night to recede. Waiting for something to happen.
I gaze, open eyed now, at the stone sleeping beauty lying next to me, watching the rise and fall of her every breath, tuning into the occasional snort, toss or turn. All that will remain of us is love.
Lying there, I prick up my ears, and listen attentively to the false dawn chorus. The false dawn chorus begins with the cawing of seagulls, then the low rumble of lorries carbon commuting on the dual carriageway, and finally breaks out with the neighbourhood birds chirping their enthusiastic chatter and morning song.
A week into the New Year, a New Dawn and a New Lockdown, thoughts are inevitably turning to the three R’s: Resolutions, Revolutions and Revelations. On this day of days, when anything seems possible, I need to wring the sweaty metaphorical bedsheets for every last drop of promise. I chew over this yawning thought as I unceremoniously leap from under the covers in search of a brew.
Falling into the sunken sofa, brew in hand, I reflect on the old year that has just eclipsed the new: of personal changing fortunes and hand dealt cards of fate; of wider Viral mayhem and continental Brexit drift; and of raging global flash forest fires and ancient coastal levees breached by rising flood waters.
I stew for a minute on the conjecture the media and news fakery face of planetary suffering witnessed is the tip of the iceberg.
I wonder and baulk at the gigantic hulking and melting frozen mass below.
Gazing at the ceiling, while sipping tea from my solar-system mug, it occurs that our collective planetary destinies are all entwined – we are all seated in the same speeding car, hurtling down the fast lane – with no seatbelt, no life insurance and no crash test dummy to absorb the impact.
Never been the one for Resolutions. Never been the one for broken, cracked, and abandoned promises to the self. After forty-six years on this colossal lump of rock, this jaded middle-aged soul has learned to carefully measure life, filtered through a rocky spectrum of the mind, and to clip any wings or thoughts of flight early in the dawning of the New Year.
This one, however, this year of years, feels different. Slugging back another brew, I plug into Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ or ‘Death and all his friends’ for a private airing as the family sleeps calmly upstairs. Different. A new prospect in the long shadows of the Soul Asylums, where in amongst the book pages, lies a new direction, towards future inspiration, or trolling, or both.
And as ‘Strawberry Swing’ calls time on these musings, so comes the time to face this perfect day, cut adrift on this Island in the middle of the North Atlantic ocean.