This week I’ve been mostly feeling rather smug because I am taking part in a blog tour and my blog post has been kindly provided by Jim Webster. Except, of course, that when I scheduled it, I discovered it’s next week. More on that story … well … you know … next week. Obviously.

Doh.

Life feels a bit like this right now, doesn’t it? This is McMini’s work.

In the meantime, I have wondered if I should even say this because I don’t want to be tactless but the honest truth is, I am beginning to rather enjoy lockdown. Far too much for my own good I suspect.

Yes, it will be nice to see people again, but life locked down is gloriously uncomplicated. With all this space to think I have realised a lot of things. For example, I had no idea that my biggest source of stress is getting to appointments on time, or just … remembering them. The endless pressure to to conform with the way the normals structure their day is a bigger source of pain than I realised. Getting up in time to get McMini ready for school, getting to the school to pick him up on time, remembering I have a dental appointment, remembering I have to take the cat for his shots, remembering to book the cat into kennels while we are away, remembering to go to the gym, remembering that I need to pop out to the shops and get milk, remembering all sorts of ridiculous stupid shit that I would gravely upset other people – or the apple cart – by forgetting.

I have absolutely NO need to remember now!

The pressure is OFF.

Booyacka!

Apart from my name, what day it is, to ring my mum, my on line bi-weekly writers’ meet, which I have forgotten once but managed to join before everyone else had stopped, and a few other bits and bobs, I don’t have to remember jack shit. You have no idea how fucking marvellous that is, how liberating.

Off the scale liberating.

Apart from the wages – which is more of an honour than a chore, all those little admin tasks that should, ‘just take five minutes’ and end up taking the whole bastard day have temporarily been suspended. Although I have friends I am worried about who I need to (and haven’t) rung. But I have time now. I can even write them letters.

What has happened instead?

Well… first up, the mojo has returned. I have been writing again, OK I haven’t written any fiction today, I’ve written this, but I mean generally, I’m writing. That’s not something that happened at once. I’m very lucky in that I have always been reasonably pragmatic, for all my tendency to worry. I can just sit here and accept that while things might be very weird right now, the world is out of my control. I have already learned that lesson through Dad’s illness. For so long a big chunk of my life was about what happened in his. Once my anxiety about the rona subsided a bit and I stopped watching the news, I began to feel happier.

Then I started having bizarre dreams. Absolutely nutso. Not quite as absolutely hat stand as all those ones about crapping in the wrong place. Most of these are about getting lost or losing people and then trying to find them or leave a message. Trying to organise stuff, basically and failing.

At one point I dreamt was wandering round some Italian town on holiday, where I thought McOther would expect to find me, but I wasn’t sure, and couldn’t get hold of him so I was trying, and failing to find the bus station which is where I reckoned he’d find me. Just as I found the bus station in question, although not McOther at that point, I woke up, exhausted.

In another dream, we were out to dinner at a night club (no sane person, and McOther and I are definitely sane in this respect, would eat at a night club – for starters loud noise dampens your sense of taste, although with most night club food that may be an advantage). McOther and the others just upped and left without my realising. How did I miss that? I ended up wandering round this bizarre town looking for them. Eventually I realised they would have gone to a club called Ritzy’s (Mwahahahahrgh every town has one of those) but there was a huge queue on the door. So I told the bouncer McOther knew the proprietor. I got ushered in and they weren’t there.

The next thing, it’s morning, having found McOther and I’m giving him a bit of grief for buggering off and leaving me when I get a call from the bouncer I lied to the previous night saying I have to persuade McOther to work for his ganglord boss or McMini will be murdered. Then as I lie there in bed dreaming this, snoring, I’m aware that I’m dreaming and I’m thinking, ‘there’s a plot hole here. He couldn’t have got my number.’ But I’m still in the dream. There I am, knowing McOther will tell them to piss off, and knowing there’s no point in asking and that I don’t want to persuade him, anyway. And I’m trying to flannel this guy so we have time to escape and go into hiding before I’m forced to meet him and confess to my failure – dooming McMini to an early death. And then—

Thank fuck I woke up at that point, as I was properly at a loss for a way out of that one.  In short, sleeping became fairly exhausting for a while there. Many mornings I was waking up thinking, What in the name of Pete was that about?

But slowly, the dreams have abated. The weird has stopped coming out in my sleep and is now quietly seeping out in the usual manner, through my fingertips and a keyboard into words. Don’t worry, I haven’t turned into one of those disgustingly productive people who does more in a day than the rest of us achieve in a year and then flaunts it all in everyone else’s faces. It’s more a case that I’ve just been … doing stuff. I’ve been productive as if I was doing my job, day in, day out, like one of the normals. Some work on the latest set of hello emails, a bit of editing, sending the next K’Barthan Short to the editor – hopefully that’ll be out in June.

Yes, I am still vague but I can complete a thought every now and again, and that, my lovely people, is a WIN. I am feeling less stressed than I have in ages. Life has slowed down. Some days I go for a walk, others I ring Mum and walk round and round our tiny lawn as we talk. I’ve worn a little path. My Fitbit tells me I am doing my full half an hour of getty-out-of-breathy exercise every day. Not something I’ve achieved more than twice a week pre lockdown despite going to the gym and spending a lot more of the day walking about.

I’ve started doing the stuff I couldn’t fit in before. I’m doing more physio exercises for my knees. I’m doing weights three or four times a week. For the first time since I had my son there is space in my head for everything I need to put in there. Stuff that I want to remember is no longer falling out, pushed out by all the administriviatative shite I have to remember and being forgotten. I am doing what I should do rather than what I have to. I am retreating into inner space. I am so far into K’Barth I may never return to you. No I will at some point, I promise. Hopefully, with a massive book.

My point is, I needed this space. And thinking about it, I wonder if, maybe, in some respects, we needed this. Not the bad stuff, the horrors, the financial hardship so many people are going through. I mean the pause. The time to think, and maybe, the impetuous to step out of things in a way that, perhaps we might not have done without this involuntary thinking time.

Maybe it’s just me but modern existence seems to be a succession of trivial shit that expands to suck in the entire day. A perfect storm of everything at which I royally suck. Mentally, having to stop; being forced to stop, has been good for me. I might be quite rare in that but I have needed downtime for so long. For the last eight years, my life has felt like running for an old London Routemaster bus, one that’s open at the back so people can hop on and off between traffic lights. Eight years I’ve been metaphorically chasing up Piccadilly after that sodding thing and now it’s finally got to a red light and stopped. At this rate, I might even catch up with the bugger and step on.

Or maybe a better metaphor is a hamster wheel. But instead of running on the spot and getting nowhere, it’s like the hamster wheel has stopped and I’ve just stepped off. I don’t want to get back on again. I really, really don’t. I will have to, of course. Early mornings will return. Which isn’t so bad because despite finding them really hard, they do provide me with a lot of day. Stuff to organise will return; holidays, organising kennels for Christmas, New Year and family commitments, school charity days, remembering birthdays and which things McMini is supposed to take in to school on what days – because he hasn’t (and never will have) a fucking clue. I’ll return to being a square peg in a round world constructed for the organised, normal early risers with no imagination. But my brain will have had this little holiday. Even if the lights go green just as I get there and the bastard bus drives off before I can leap on, maybe normality will be easier for a little while after this. And I am looking forward to seeing Mum again.

At the same time. Would it be such a bad thing if the world changed? Imagine if we all stepped off the wheel, or slowed it down just a little. If we stopped our headlong pursuit of pointless shiny shit that we think we need, that we think makes us better, that we buy to cover the cracks and addressed the emptiness inside instead.

There’s a horrifically schmaltzy video going round of some bloke reading to his kids in bed at night. Looking back at now from then, as if we are somehow going to move on to a new and more compassionate world. As if we are going to change.

It’s a thought though, isn’t it?

Do you think we can?

No. Of course we can’t. I may be a dreamer but I’m not that naive. Maybe few people will be in the right place at the right time and earn a fortune making and selling PPE, the kind of dot com millionaires of our generation. Good luck to them.

Perhaps we will start taking an interest in how the things we buy are produced and where they are from. Perhaps we will actually have some respect for the people who produce our food. Perhaps. But that would take principles. Most of us will be very poor when this is done, and principles are not just difficult, they are expensive. Unless someone in power comes along and makes principles a LOT cheaper, I suspect we’ll take the cheapest, easiest path. That’s the one we know. The one we’re on. The one that keeps the oil lobby happy, along with the handful of billionaires* who are so shit at business that they can’t change or adapt and who, rather than try, prefer to pay millions to stamp on change and keep things the way they are. Built in obsolescence at the cost of … the earth.

I hope we’ll stop self actualising through our looks and start to understand that the important bit of a person is not the face but what’s behind it. I hope we will lean less on the pronouncement of self-obsessed vacuous ‘influencers’ who teach us we should obsess over the minutiae of our body shape, or some other pointless crap which means nothing and which nobody needs. Perhaps we will be happy if we have a slightly less ready supply of pointless plastic tat to buy, although, I confess, I love a bit of plastic tat as much as the next person. Perhaps we will start looking to something other than the accumulation of possessions for fulfilment.

Perhaps we will come out of this knowing how fluid a term ‘success’ actually is. Perhaps we will understand that ‘happiness’ is the best kind. Perhaps we’ll know that contentment doesn’t necessarily equate to owning lots of stuff and that possessions bring a lot of complications.

Perhaps we’ll know the answer.

Yeh. Well. We can only hope. Maybe we’ll learn something, maybe we won’t. But before it all starts up again, I am going to make the most of it … Who knows, maybe I’ll catch up with that fucking bus.

*not all multi-millionaires/billionaires are idiots. I’d just like to point that out here because it is just a handful of jerks with money that I’m talking about.