A Year Ago
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Yes, but I've become increasingly belligerent since giving up drinking. I started this week (my second week of abstemiousness) in the right spirit by emailing Looby "an you can fuck off an all", which was less than polite. Tonight I got home from Dagenham (had to take the car to be repaired after its fourth burglary in a month) - (clue to would-be burglars - first steal the car, THEN fiddle with the odometer. Trying to rig the mileage before you get the steering wheel lock off is silly) to find a relatively reasonable email from the Wickedex asking about potential buyers viewing the flat. The time she chose coincided with the next journey to Dagenham (it's made two hours longer each time by the witlessness of always picking the wrong train and ending up in Upminster without a ticket), so I replied with an ill-advised un-proofed torrent of invective about how my life is rubbish and it's all her fault. Still...
So, to cheer myself up before I open the letter from the car insurers (that I know is about defaulting on the payments), I thought I'd look back at the calendar, which passed its year mark this autumn.
A year ago today, I was on strike. I recall watching Quincy and drinking coffee a lot. No picketing, because I disagreed politically with the strike, I was simply too lazy to not strike. My ears were probably still buzzing and slightly dulled after my first big stadium concert - the Foo Fighters at Wembley Arena, with a mate. (Wickedex had commented that I might as well start listening to Iron Maiden and refused to come.) The concert itself was technically, musically quite blah, as you could barely see the band. But the moral weight of a really large crowd simultaneously foot-stamping and chanting was scarythrilling, in the same way as that moment that the undercarriage lifts from the tarmac when a plane takes off, the plane banks steeply upwards, and you feel slightly pressed against your seat. Even as a calm fearless flyer, your palms grow a little moist clamminess.
The weekend after, I took the Eurostar for a night in Paris, to visit the lovely and talented Toulouse. Which is such a coincidence, just last night I booked tickets to go over there again. God, I must be predictable - Christmas ... Paris. Perhaps it looks better in the dark. Or more probably, I do.
I remember it being much much colder than this year has been - I'd nearly frozen to death under two coats and a thick scarf at London Zoo with my family earlier, and had to stuff myself silly with cabbage products and vodka at a Russian tearoom in Primrose Hill after. (mmmmm..... I picked up a dreadful pierogi habit when I was in Poland, that always has me jonesing for cabbage and dumpling in winter.)
That fortnight, I'd also gone clubbing in Birmingham with a load of people I knew from years of talking crap online, and we'd gotten utterly trashed after ritualistically eating raw meat and vomit. Well, it smelled like vomit, anyway.
I'd also driven 200 miles to Swindon and back in one evening, to see a Peter Kay show; the tickets had been for my sister's birthday, but it had turned out that she was the only one in the family who had no idea who Peter Kay is. I'd spotted my childhood English teacher in the row in front. He looked the same, except I wasn't this time sitting at crotch height, which weirdly figured in my teenage memories of him a lot. Wickedex didn't attend any of these things - oh except the Paris trip - and was away working in Yorkshire and Devon as usual for half the month. Hmmm, foreshadowing?
Not totally, we'd just come back from a holiday driving around Switzerland. We drove from the Alps (that's the Eiger behind me), to a sunny vineyard on the banks of Lake Geneve in the Valais, to a cheese infested dairy farm in the Emmental, having started off in a cloud.
The gigantic muffling grey groggy cloud was the reason I'd wanted to go to Switzerland - the (politically despised) Millennium Expo there was in its final weekend, and I wanted to visit one particular exhibit at Yverdon-les-Bains - a man-made cloud in the middle of a lake, centred around a pier. It was fantastic - everything you imagine when you stare out along the wing of the plane and look down at a cloud carpet. Most of all, I loved saying to people at work that I was going to Switzerland to sit in a cloud.
It was wet, white, steamy, cold, tasty, quiet (just a steady small hissing sound), and every twenty minutes they purposely let the cloud drop, so it would disperse and you'd see the contrast of a sunny clear lakeside, before the cloud would re-form. Gorgeous. A lake-wide rebirthing tank, almost.
Any parallels? I was keeping busy. Perhaps there's a lesson there.
Updated: Thursday, 27 November 2003 10:29 PM GMT
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