Jamie'sPostcards
2005
(Go <-postcards | <-home)
This could be called a blog, i suppose;
but it's a terribly lazy one, one in which I never really
get around to finishing anything properly - more of a bl..
Don't Pine for Me, Sun 23 January, 2005
Flying Back, Sun, 27 Mar 2005
Tomorrow, Mon, 17 Oct 2005
Previously
2000-2004
Smooth as their finest chocolate and as intoxicating as one of their
lighter beers, the Belgian train sped silently from the lowland
dullness of its native soil and onto the blue skied plane of Northern
France. The effect was truly stunning. I was so taken by the transition
- and the speed at which we were travelling - that I felt prompted to
take my laptop from its bag and join in on the flow of things by
getting some work done. At the same time, also evidently moved by the
change in scenery, the quiet man with the neat grey suit and
feathery moustache, who was sitting next to me, turned up the volume on
his ipod. Though not loud enough to make out the exact words, the song
he was listening too seemed familiar. The tune, the chorus - it all
fitted some pattern, something I knew, perhaps from as far back as
childhood. And then it hit me: it was the soundtrack to "Annie" the
musical, and the song "Tomorrow"!
I was stunned. Stunned by the thought that, not only had a grown man
chosen to download such tripe - perhaps even purchased it - but that I
myself, a wholly involuntary subject, was now beginning to find the
words of those irritating, whiny, songs tumble down from the recesses
of my mind and form hum shapes at the back of my throat. Disgusted at
the thought, I closed my laptop and set myself doggedly to
concentrating on the passing scenery. My attempts at work, yet again,
foiled.
Is it possible to work while travelling? I always maintained that my
productivity was at a peak during transit, but this position, in truth,
had never really been put to the test. So some weeks ago, just as I
began the writeup of my PhD thesis (the supposed apex from 4 years of
academic toil), a combination of long booked engagements and bad
planning led me to embark on a three week jaunt across the continent -
from Zurich to Lisbon, to Paris and Glasgow, to Grenoble and back. In
each of these places, I had some fixed appointment: catching up with
old friends, a wedding, a family reunion, and a conference; so there
would be little time for the PhD. But with my thesis deadline fast
approaching, I had no choice but to bring the laptop with me and
attempt composition while en-route between these places.
With a combined total of over 20 hours sitting on trains, boats and
planes, then surely I could get something done. In my head, and in my
all too painfully public pronouncements to friends and colleagues, I
pictured myself tapping away on speeding trains, engrossed in the flow,
and sharpening my lines of thought as they reeled out onto disk. I saw
myself as the diligent editor, attending to issues of structure and
concise expression, as I sipped espresso in station cafes while waiting
for the next connection. I saw myself sat in brightly lit hotel rooms,
catching a moment before dinner to offload my latest efforts, over
wireless internet connection, to my supervisor in Zurich. And I saw
myself at home, back in the bosom of my family, putting in a solid ten
hour day, with breaks only for dinner and the occasional Mum-served
cheesy toast sandwich and tea.
Ah, sweet dreams are made of these. With the possible exception of the
cheesy toast, the reality of my travels proved rather different.
First off was the flight to Lisbon. Now I had contemplated getting out
the laptop and doing a spot of work at the airport lounge, perhaps even
seeing what I could get done on the plane itself. But this
contemplation was a brief one.
I might have mentioned the slight reticence I hold towards air travel in
previous postings, but so that no-one be in any doubt regarding this
position, I shall re-iterate: air travel is one of the most torturous,
and frankly unnatural, activities which human beings engage in. I hate
it. I booked this flight, one-way, the sole airtime of my trip, purely
out of convenience - the alternative by train would have taken two
whole days. So naturally, by necessity of survival on those two hours
and forty-three minutes of hell, I took succor from a handful of the free on-board miniatures, and got myself drunk.
Drunkenness might have allowed me to strike up friendships with my
fellow passengers (and forge a 'last kiss in event of disaster' pact
with the Brazillian supermodel who, by some miraculous fortune, was sat
next to me - probably the main reason fate kept this plane safely
aloft), but it did not allow me any work. In
fact, I was in such jolly spirits on leaving the plane that I forgot my
laptop in the overhead luggage.
After the initial panic at the airport, ('Somebody stole my laptop!'),
I arrived in Lisbon eager to continue the merriment. A fruitful night
indeed, one in which I rediscovered the joys of Port, and the
willingness of random German tourists to engage in all-night
Trinkfests.. The next day, which in my diary was allocated towards
serious hotel room study, became instead a time for furrowed-brow
contemplation, and protracted, rehabilitory, bed rest.
And so it was, on conclusion of this brief holiday, as I embarked on
the 14 hour 'express' night train North, that I finally pulled the
laptop from its bag and began to compose my thoughts. Didn't last long
though - having left the thing in 'standby' mode for three days, the
battery died as soon as I switched it on.
I got out the power adaptor and fumbled around my cabin in search of a
socket. Naturally, the socket I found did not conform to the Swiss plug
I had, but after a good half hour of coercion with the pin from a
coat-hanger, I managed to make some kind of connection. Trouble was,
the socket turned out not to be connected to any power, so my efforts
had been in vain (which was probably just as well, considering the
things I had been doing to it with my coat hanger).
I settled instead for some reading. I had brought some papers with me
so that I might, in moments such as this, work 'off-line'.
Until that moment I had been the sole occupant of my cabin, but the
appearance of another passenger put an end to that: a large,
heavy-breathing, squint-eyed man of, it turned out, Belgian extraction
- a scary sort of cross between Uncle Monty (from 'Withnail and I'),
and one of those men in long brown overcoats who hang around school
playgrounds (school janitors). For some reason, I found it difficult to
read with him being there. It was one of those situations of being all
too conscious that there is someone watching, someone who is perhaps a
bit weird. Try as I might, I could not get beyond reading, and
re-reading, the same sentence. In the end I resigned myself to sitting
in face-forward awkwardness.
The night afforded me precious few hours of sleep - paranoid thoughts
of Uncle Monty and what he was up to in the bunk below did not help.
The next morning while waiting in a French railway cafe for my
connection to Paris, I was just too drowsy to even think about
work. Once on the train, rather than returning to the papers I
had abandoned the night before, I indulged myself in a few hours of
sleep.
Infact, from Paris to Brussels, from Brussels to Leuven, from Leuven to
Zeebrugge - even after I managed to recharge the laptop's battery - not
for a moment could I push myself to work. I was simply unable to wake
myself from idle stupor. The distractions of passing scenery, chatting
with fellow passengers, and more commonly, the trappings of sleep, all
conspired to ensure that my PhD thesis would remain unwritten.
And so it was to home that all my hopes were pinned. Five days in a
fixed, familiar environment with free food, a solid table, and a
reasonable internet connection - surely there I would make some
progress? Sadly, as it turned out, the answer was no.
On the first day, I wasted several hours trying to connect Linux to the
internet (one of those activities some of the more computer literate
might be familiar with.) I then spent the remainder of my time reading
and replying to all the email which had amassed over the prior week.
That done, the next day, I promised myself, would be one of solid
productivity - I was going to make up for all the wasted time and get
some major chapters rolled out.
The next day, as is usual following such pronouncements, I slept in.
When I eventually got around to booting up the laptop, I was confronted
by the following message: "Error - cannot find device, 'Hard disk'."
Many cups of tea, cheesy toast sandwiches, and ultimately, days, later
I managed to figure out and correct this problem. No lasting damage,
thankfully. The document known as 'thesis-chapter1' was still there,
and was, besides a heading and some rudimentary words of introduction,
just as empty as ever.
The remaining days, now without any excuse for further delay, I
spent watching television and sleeping till mid afternoon. All
the time my conscience was screaming quietly in my ear, "Write thesis!
Write thesis!", which i worried about, and then conveniently ignored.
Every time I thought about beginning again, I would sit and do
precisely that - I would think about beginning. I never actually got
around to beginning.
Before I knew it, I was back on the train and heading back to Zurich.
I had failed the test. My belief that I was capable of a measured,
sensible working regime while in transit was crushed.
On reflection, if I were to encapsulate, in a single word, the reasons
behind my failure to live up to these cloud dreams of efficient
industry, it would be that which was first brought to my attention some
years earlier during an English lesson early on in high school, when
John Allison stood up in class with his offering for 'word of the day':
a word seemingly, to my juvenile mind, so improbably long - at least
until discovery of the German for 'tram stop' (Strassenbahnhaltestelle)
- that by the end of any attempt to utter it, assuming of course one
reached that point, the untrained speaker would find themselves
slightly out of breath; a word which, if ever I get around to writing
it, aptly describes the process by which one aims with high intention
to begin something, yet is so distracted by everything and nothing else
besides, that that thing remains unbegun; a word which describes the
indecisive, and fruitless, run-up to that illustrious eleventh hour,
the moment at which Horace was driven to declare:
"Who knows if Heav'n, with ever-bounteous pow'r,
Shall add to-morrow to the present hour?"
That word is procrastination. The art of putting things off: Dr.
Johnson, in far more eloquent words than I could ever hope to conjure,
spoke of his own grapples with this condition, though the great man,
"only trifled till diligence was necessary", unlike the inferior
multitude:
"..who have trifled till diligence is vain; who can by no degree
of activity or resolution recover the opportunities which have slipped
away; and who are condemned by their own carelessness to hopeless
calamity and barren sorrow." (Rambler No.134)
Ouch. As I write these words - necessary, perhaps, for my own mental
state, though not exactly relevant as a thesis contribution - I feel
opportunity slipping away from my inferior grasp. The fear, that come
thesis hand-in date I shall be, academically speaking at least, utterly
barren and filled with hopeless sorrow, hovers ever over my trifling
self.
I sit here now, steeped in the Autumnal brown of Zurich, my travels
ended and at least another three weeks of writing time left, and I ask
myself, what can I do? If nothing else, surely this fear, this
realisation of fear, will motivate me, give my procrastination a kick
in the posterior and pull me back up? Of course it will. For now
though, I think I'll just leave it till tomorrow. After all, what does
Dr. Johnson know anyway? I'd much rather look to the tunefull words of
sweet little orphan Annie for my inspiration: "Tomorrow, tomorrow, I
love you tomorrow - you're always a day a-way!"
Now its in your head.. ha ha!
Yes I know it was bad, but it's been more than a month since Christmas
and I really couldn't think of a more suitable thing to do with it -
not without costing me money and loads of extra hassle. So I squeezed
it out the balcony door, chucked it off onto the garden below, dragged
it sufficiently far from my apartment so that no-one would suspect
where it came from, and left it bedraggled and lonely down by the
railway bridge. Where now, if it has not already been carted away by
some eager (and surely disgusted) railroad dogsbody, it is slowly
beginning to decompose.
I'm speaking, that is, of my (former) Christmas tree. It had begun to
look so sad in the corner of the living room, devoid of its fairy
lights
and tinsel, and was just beginning to drop little brown needles all
over the carpet when I decided that the neglect had gone on long
enough. I had just not given the right kind of attention that a
Christmas tree of its former cheer demands.
It was the biggest and brightest in the shop when I bought it, way back
in those manic days before Christmas. In the corner of the living room
where it spent perhaps its best days since uprooting, adorned in all
its silvery plastic finery, it shone like a beacon of joy and hope, and
everyone who saw it was -I am told- filled with an enormous sense of
wellbeing. I myself took great solstice in its presence and spent many
a darkened melancholy sipping red wine by its side.
But then the festive season passed us by, as seasons are wont to do,
and just as the strange bedfellows of joyful expectation and wistful
melancholy were swept aside by the fresh rot of New Year, so too was
the need for having a pine in the front room.
Apparently the council did offer a free collection service, but that
ended long before I got around to finding out about it. Even if I had
known on time, they said that it would only be collected if the tree
was cut into strips smaller than 1m long and bundled together neatly
with string. Sounds far too much like hard and dangerous work to me. I
know the Swiss like things all neat and packaged nicely - one only has
to observe the neatly wrapped bundles of newspaper which are put out
for the recycling man every Tuesday for evidence - but wrapping up a 3m
Christmas tree, covered in sharp needles, with nothing but a pair of
scissors and a small ball of string as tools is taking things a bit far
in my opinion.
Next year I shall buy a plastic tree.
Return to top.
[This story refers to an earlier post, Flying
Fears .]
And the rain came down. Torrential, I could see drops, illuminated by
the strobe of the wing light, smashing past at ridiculous speed. We
were heavy; I say 'we' as it was a shared burden that we carried, this
craft and I, a load too much to bear (at least as far as I was
concerned); too many people on board, too much luggage in the hold, too
much heavy air above us. Yet up we went, despite the dutiful craft's
weary groans, and the sky's piteous lament; despite my whimpering moans
and conviction of impending doom; we rose up through the murky Rhine
valley evening and into an even murkier wall of cloud.
Can anyone actually say that they enjoy this experience? If they can,
then I doubt that they have ever seriously thought about
it- I mean,
really thought about it, with open eyes, conscious thought and true
awareness to all that is going on. Lost in fancy dreams of flight,
flapping arms to the wind, reveling in the sensations of moving
at great speed and rising, rising, rising above all that lies below; if
that is your view, then evidently you have not given the actual matter
of travel by aircraft much proper thought either. Oh how I envy
you.
In my last correspondence on the matter, I beat myself up over my
inability to deal with my fears in a rational manner. Reported facts
and statistics my guts would not, could not, heed. But now as I
look
back on it, it is not the instinct of my guts that is at fault - au
contrair, the
little fellows have it spot on! Flying, in particular take off and
landing, is an extremely foolish thing to do. To fill one's head with
some fuzzy notion of statistics and, for those so inclined, the
operational intricacies of the jet engine and the dynamics of flight,
only to then let the imagination fool around with the Whiz! and the
Whoosh! of it all, is nothing short of self deception. Your guts are
-if you'll pardon the pun- being taken for a ride.
Not mine though. They knew exactly what was going on. As the craft
banked into the cloud, I felt a terrible jump in my stomach. My travel
companion, well aware of my 'irrationalities', tried to redirect my
attention with a friendly poke in the arm. I feigned irritation, but
kept to the serious business of contemplating disaster throughout such
infectual attempts at distraction.
The aircraft continued to bank, quite a turn for a craft so soon after
takeoff. Its movement was sluggish and deliberate. I could imagine all
the luggage in the hold tumbling after the turn, lending more weight to
the effort but hindering any future attempt at regaining stability.
When indeed we did not stabilise, but continued in a seemingly
perpetual spin to the left, the sense of inevitable disaster made the
paradoxical transition from real to unreal. A calm swelled inside me as
the quiet tension of 130 passengers began to fill the cabin. There were
no screams, just a hundred odd intakes of breath; a hundred and thirty
beings emerging from the thrill of takeoff; a hundred thirty souls
slowly coming around, one happy fantasy displaced by another - more
terrible - reality. Too quick to wonder why, too slow to ignore, we
were at an instant of doom where all anyone could do was sit buckled to
their seat and try to remember what they believed in. Outside now. The
mighty craft creaked in its final moments as an ineffectual wing flap
struggled to regain mastery of the wind. The red light flashed and the
rain fell down. A terminal building met the tip of the downward wing. I
could see it all. No fire at first, but the most terrible screeching,
grumbling, metal twisting, glass smashing, crumbling sound..
We waited by the conveyor belt. Everything was bright, everything, save
for the giant poster with the smiling child with the flower in her hair
welcoming us to 'Wherever You Are!', was white. The conveyor spluttered
into motion, the sound of its many wheels intense- the sound of
deliverance; we waited patiently. Bag after bag floated by, but no sign
of my luggage. There was a problem you see, said the man in the white
suit, golden wings pinned to his official lapel. Problem? I would have
to wait. So I waited. My companion had to go, as did all the other
passengers; the conveyor belt continued on, empty save for a folded up
child's pram, now on its 26th lap, with a label bearing the destination
'Somewhere Else'. I was the only passenger left. My luggage had been
held up, something about it being over the allowed weight limit. I
would have to pay a fine. I waited. Eventually it appeared: a 31Kg
wedge of cheddar cheese.
As it cycled around the arrival's hall on the near empty conveyor belt,
I realised that something was not quite right. For one thing I was sure
I had weighed the cheese properly before leaving. The other thing was
that if we had just survived a plane crash, surely the cheese could not
have remained in such good shape. The final thing I realised, and the
more quick witted of you might have also realised this two paragraphs
ago, was that I had been dreaming.
Cheese, when eaten before going to bed, gives you bad dreams. Any
grandmother will tell you this. It's a fact as old as the Alps.
Now why does he bother me with such irrelevant nonsense, you might ask.
I thought he was going to tell us about his first experiences with
flying in over 2 years, how he got over his irrational fear and how
well and safe that maiden journey, despite his bitter reservations,
turned out to be? Well, I could tell you all this. I could say how
anxious I was, but how totally unfounded my anxiety turned out to be. I
could tell you how much I did not actually think about dying during
those two brief flights between Ryanair 'Glasgow' (Prestwick) and
'Frankfurt' (Hanoi) and back; how the intervention of my flight
companions managed to keep my imagination on the ground, my composure
calm and steady.
I could tell you all these things, but I would be lying. The flights
were awful, both of them. I hated every moment that I had to sit
strapped to those synthetic blue and budget yellow chairs - expensively
designed, so I am told, to look cheap. Every change in altitude,
however subtle, brought sweat to my brow and movement in my gut. It was
truly awful. But I did it. I flew.
And that is the important thing I guess. I do not think that I will
ever enjoy flying again - not until I reach senility perhaps - but at
least I know that if I really have to do it, I can.
Is there a lesson that I might be able to impart to you from this
experience? When I think about it, not really. Which is why I offer, by
way of distraction, the following piece of advice: if you really must
eat cheese before going to bed, then make sure that it's Brie; the
dreams will come, and they may well be bad as grandmother warns, but at
least with Brie (unlike many other cheeses in my ongoing personal
study*), they are guaranteed to be interesting!
* I find cheddar to produce particularly disturbing dreams, and is
doubtless the culprit at the centre of my gran's concern. Emmental, as
with most of the milder Swiss cheeses, tends to induce a sense of
boredom: the last time I tried it, I imagined an entire episode of East
Enders, complete with my own collection of stereotypically dull
characters. Nothing of note happened, and I awoke with a sense of
terrible drabness raining through me; I would have gone back to sleep
had I not been urged me to get up and make a nice cup of tea instead.
As for Roquefort and its bacteria strewn ilk, I can only offer words of
caution: do not attempt unless you are planning a family. As for the
rest, well its not the place to elaborate on any more here. If you are
interested in finding out more about the study, or indeed would like to
contribute some entries, then please do drop me a line at jamieward dot net.
Return to
top.
--END/Beginning/whatever--
all work copyright Jamie Ward 2000-2005