11-11-2021: Day 154
Crossing over the wooden toll bridge opposite the old 16th century coach house, the Red Lion pub, my in-laws dog Paddy, and I both turned our heads in close timed synchronicity.
In the misty November rain, we were dramatically drawn to the caw-cawing of a hundred or so seagulls landing on the low-tide sand banks of the River Adur. As if congregating in a parallel universe, the gulls all assembled in a tight knit flock, tucked their heads under their wings in unison, seeking some shelter from the elements.
Imagining myself in the middle of some Attenborough documentary, I picked a path along the tow path by the Shoreham airport, smiling large at the fellow dog walkers.
It occurred, that steeped in a long thirteen-year period of my life, I had scarcely cracked so much as a wounded smile to a passer-by. Deep inside, my soul had been weeping with the triggered pain of buried trauma. However, today with the dog for company and a flock of seagulls over my shoulder, in the words of the Killers, I could smile like I mean it.
13-11-2021: Day 156
Maybe it’s an innate true calling of my Piscean will – the core nature of a horoscope fish sign caught in the slip stream of life’s river – but most days I feel the urge to immerse myself in water. It’s a daily morning ritual. Nothing to do with cleanliness being close to godliness, more something to do with submerging my body and grounding myself in the natural element of water. And so, it was this morning, I took the secular sacrament of a subaquatic nature.
This morning, soaking in the tub, I spend my time solidifying my thoughts, scrolling through all the negative deliberations waiting in my awoken in-tray. I filter through the dross, scrolling like flicking through streaming television content on the box. Swipe right for improved mental health and well-being. Either way, I don’t feel like a fish out of water, I just need a bigger pond.
15-11-2021: Day 158
I was standing in the garage, surrounded by skeletons of the past, wondering how these bicycles at various stages of disrepair, had come to book end life’s chapters and verse. The garage had the look of a Chinese bike landfill, in need of a little TLC, or technical rejuvenation, from toddler’s battered first push bikes to the defunct gear mechanisms of an adult mountain bike.
Memories swirled round my head, of pushing the kids bikes along the walk and letting go for the first time. Roll out the ticker tape parade. Big milestones indeed.
It was the Tory grandee Norman Tebbit who told the jobless in the early 80’s to get on their bikes. This political metaphor, along with other brazen shakedowns from his skeleton speech closet, had me closely examining this pile of rusty and redundant mangled aluminium frames.
And I was left wondering how the next gen so-called ‘snow flakers’ would mount the collective saddle, in the post-pandemic passport economies of the planet on a precarious climatic knife edge.