Day 338: Negroni

Well I’ve had better days! Been bleary and dribbly and dumb today. But if you can’t have a few drinks at the wedding of one of your best friends, when can you?

Well, never, I guess, if you’ve committed to not drinking any more. But whatever. It’s only a thing if you make it a thing. Stop making it a thing.

Soup for tea, posh soup with coconut and spices in. And garlic and cheese flatbread. And a shipping container-sized portion of chips and houmous. Posh houmous, with chickpeas on top.

Had a good talk with Pat last night, who was being the kind of heartfelt and genuine you only arrive at somewhere after the fourth negroni. Pat had had eight negronis, so was especially heartfelt. I told him how lost I’ve felt of late, how much I’ve been struggling. That I’ve cut out the drink and the drugs (ignore the merlot in my hand at that moment) but it’s only shown me how incapable I am of socialising and enjoying life and taking chances when sober. How I’ve mostly spent this year hidden in my room, or grinding through shifts at work, no way to relate to my colleagues now I don’t go out and booze it up in dive bars after we finish (ignore the merlot etc.). How I have no clue where I’m going or what I’m doing.

He basically told me to relax, to go easy on myself, to shut the hell up. That building a new life takes a long time, you’re laying down a new path, and you lay one pebble at a time, and for a long time to begin with you only feel lost in the wilderness. But keep going, keep laying those pebbles, and the confidence and the success will start to come.

And Christ, the lad looked so sharp in suspenders and tie clip and tie, such a lump of soulful charm on the dancefloor, so in love with Jordan and situated exactly where he needed to be, so happy to be alive, that it was hard to ignore him.

I mean, for about five minutes, and then I went back to worrying that everyone else in the world was splashing in the warm waters of life while I was shivering and scared on the shore unable to leap in… but I guess they had all had substantially more negronis than me. And the essence of what Pat said sunk in, and has stayed with me.

I’ve figured out that I suffer from acute social anxiety that I’ve been masking for a decade and a half with alcohol. And that’s tough. But it’s better to be at the point of acknowledging that, even though it feels worse. I’m not floating out on the waters on a boozy lilo, but realising I can’t swim is the first step to learning.

Err, does that analogy make any sense? It’s the best you’re getting out me today, so you might as well make do.

God, I’m glad I didn’t have any of Pat’s negronis. But I’m also glad I had a Pat. Everyone should have a Pat.

P.S. I've just realised it's the last day of the month. Balls. I'll do my monthly round-up tomorrow. That's when I always do it. Yu-huh it is. Shhh.

Day 337: Wedding

I return from Mike’s wedding, intimate little reception in the room above Gatsby. Pat getting slow and sensual on the dancefloor with Jordan, serenading her with every word to Paradise by the Dashboard Light. You got a keeper there, darling. “I know.” Pat’s Jake beside them, extolling the virtues of absinthe drunk in the Bohemian style, throwing out all the moves, big and bold and beautiful. Arron skulking in the corner, choosing rums while Lizzie boogies with Emerald, before returning to him for caustic comments and a team once again. And Mike too drunk to stand, and Emerald swaying and stomping heels to the country tracks with her Canadian family, and the lights low, the music high, the tequila flowing.

I had a few drinks. I felt so anxious and self-conscious when I arrived, exhausted from a ten-hour Saturday shift on not-enough sleep, and I eventually decided to treat myself to a glass of red wine as it was a special occasion. And then a rum with Arron. And then another.

Home now, suddenly early morning and don’t understand where the time has gone, until I remember the clocks have gone forwards. Cheese sandwich and a glass of water, and post this up, and then tipsily wash my skin and apply acne cream, and fall into bed.

Off tomorrow but need to head into work to take photos for an upcoming promotion. Will take my Chromebook and find a coffee shop in which to situate myself, hunker down, do some writing.

OK, falling asleep now. Ta ra x

Day 336: Meagre

Worse day today. Been sluggish and unmotivated and low all day. Miserable about my skin being worse, and about the GP fobbing me off with fucking Differin, rather than referring me to a dermatologist. Said he couldn’t do that until other treatment options had been shown to have failed. So that’s now months slathering on yet another ineffective cream, a few weeks of my skin getting worse, and maybe red and inflamed, up to two months to start to see a meagre improvement, another few months showing that I’ve given it a go - the cream costing £9 every few weeks - then make another appointment, week or two waiting for the appointment, to tell yet another GP I’ve probably not met before who has no bedside manner and no empathy that, cheers, but fucking adapalene is not the answer to my problems, and can you please put me on the months-long waiting list to see a dermatologist now, before I throw your fucking computer on which you’re reading my patient history rather than actually looking at and talking to me out of the fucking window. Thanks all the same.

So, no, not in a good mood today. But I did go for a nice walk earlier, and take some nice photos - although out of five from one location it would actually be a composite of all five that would be the shot I was after, but, hey, it’s all good practice - and I meandered to a coffee shop and ate a delightful falafel wrap and drank good strong coffee and read Naomi Klein’s take on Trump and did some writing and enjoyed the calm and tranquility of the late afternoon.

So, hey, we soldier on. It’s only skin. It’s only the membrane that separates me from the world. Tear it off and I will blend beautifully with the cosmos. Let it bubble and fester and scar. It doesn’t affect my ability to write, to think, to love. That all comes from far deeper down.

OK, good, written myself back into equanimity, better go right to sleep now to be up tomorrow for Saturday work. Oh my God I hate Saturday work more than anything on this Earth. How I loathe it. I don’t want to sleep because then I’ll have to wake up and it will be time for Saturday work.

Well. Equanimity ruined. It was nice while it lasted.

Byeeeeeeeeeee x

Day 335: Wick

I am burnt out today. A fizzling little curl of wick, a pool of melted wax. I was up late writing the night before last, then back up early for a GP appointment about my skin - a disheartening affair that I’m too tired to go into now - then all day writing this week’s film review in coffee shops, then all evening and night working a horribly busy close, got out late, got home, another few hours finishing up the review. Then I was too tired to sleep. Then up today in time to let the bloke in to replace the battery in our house alarm...

So today I have mostly been doing: nothing. Watching Arrested Development (still better than season 4, still worse than  1-3). Catching up on a few game reviews. Washing my bedding. I took a few photos as the lip of the sky was turning watermelon pink and the light fading from the world. Ordered Domino’s and ate it in front of Sidney Lumet’s Network, an elegant and wry and thunderous satire from 1976 that I’ve somehow never got round to watching before.

Just pootling around now waiting for my sheets to finish drying, then I’m going to crawl under crisp covers and fall fast asleep.

I’m fine. Everything is OK. I’m just exhausted. Normal service, etc., tomorrow.

In a bit kiddiwinks. Yawn. Bye x

Day 334: Wednesday Reviews - Baby Driver

Right. Let’s do this. Bag open. Laptop out. Swipe detritus from desk. Second swipe to remove detritus not caught with first swipe (there’s so much detritus!). Laptop down. Knuckles cracked. Thinking, thinking, pen tapping against teeth. OK, go!

Baby Driver is a nitrous-fueled barenuckle chase screeching and stick-shifting to soulful rhythms, roaring straight out of the mind of Edgar Wright, acclaimed director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

It is Edgar Wright to the core. It is trademark Edgar Wright. It is filled with the same filmmaking tics, tricks, and techniques - including those calling-card quick cuts - that have exemplified his work going all the way back to Spaced in 1999. As a story it isn’t, apart from its central conceit, highly original, in fact it is derivative of a lot of similar films, but it is pulled off with such confidence and panache that it ends up being a slick and effective thrill ride.

And that’s the intro. Lovely. Time for a coffee.

Fridge open. Coffee grabbed. Coffee spooned into mako pot. Spilt coffee swept off counter. Kettle filled. Hob flamed. Pot on hob. Clock ticking, tick-tock, tick-tock. Ping. Pot removed. Mug down. Coffee poured. And drink. Ahhh.

Where were we? Baby Driver is a film about a young getaway driver called Baby, played by Ansel Elgort. He’s got tinnitus, poor Baby, a result of the childhood car crash that killed his parents, and he copes by drowning out the buzzing in his ears with music played over headphones from a selection of iPods he carries with him - which iPods are now apparently anachronistic relics of a bygone age, as antiquated a concept as radial-dial telephones, typewriters, or political leaders not hell-bent on thrusting the world into a new Dark Age).

But so thus most of the film’s sequences are choreographed to the tunes Baby listens to, the diegetic music becoming the soundtrack, the world pulsing and flowing to the beat when Baby is in sync with his surroundings, halting and jerking incongruously when he is out of whack. It’s a nice conceit, and feels like a natural progression of Wright’s style. His editing has always had a musical rhythm to it; here that is externalised and underlined for all to see, and hear.

Anyway: story. You’d think after the orphaning car crash Baby would have developed a phobia of all car-related activities, but he has in fact gone in the opposite direction, becoming a preternatural whizz behind the wheel, a Subaru-situated speed freak, capable of the kinds of vehicular feats only imaginable if your last name is Bond. Or Bourne. Or whatever Ryan Gosling’s character is called in Drive. Or Nolan-era Bruce Wayne. Or anyone from any Fast and Furious or Gone in 60 Seconds film. Or the Blues Brothers.

Baby got himself into a spot of bother, a few years previously to the events of the film, by boosting the car of criminal mastermind Kevin Spacey (playing a character less reprehensible than the actual Kevin Spacey, it now transpires), and is now working as the suited gangster’s preferred getaway driver on heist jobs to pay off his debt to the boss man.

Cue glamourous chase sequences tying local cops in knots speeding the wrong way down freeways and in and out of car parks and over ramps and up sidewalks and all those set pieces you know and love, all lurching to the perfectly chosen tunes blasting from Baby’s ear buds.

He eats getaway jobs like these for breakfast, does Baby, but he dreams of more. Or less, as form dictates. No more the thrill-ride life of crime, into which he has fallen as coping mechanism, and within which he has then become trapped, rather than chosen. All he wants is to hit the road with the waitress at his local diner, to turn the radio way up, and drive off into the sunset. But with one last job to pull off for Spacey’s character, it falls to ask questions such as: Will all go to plan? (No.) Will Spacey let Baby go free with no strings attached? (No.) Will Baby be forced to confront the ghosts of his past and face the centre of power in his worldview to wrestle control of his destiny back into his own hands, which hands will in the pivotal moment be firmly gripping the plush leather of a finely tuned automobile’s steering wheel? (Come on, you know the answer.)

Like I said, the narrative is far from experimental. It adheres to formula to such a degree that you could believe it was pieced together in a Robert McKee screenwriting workshop, ticking off one ESSENTIAL SCREENPLAY ELEMENT after another. The characters - most of whom comprise a ragtag bunch of hoodlums brought in for the criminal jobs, including John Hamm and Jamie Foxx - are differentiated, memorable, yet cartoonish. The waitress, played by Lily James, appropriately embodies all the freedom and acceptance for which Baby yearns - and is as empty of autonomy and framed through the male gaze as the women in these parts always are. She bears a striking resemblance, in fact, to Mädchen Amick’s diner gal Shelly Johnson from Twin Peaks, in both actress and character - minus the teeming underbelly of darkness to which the apple-pie surface was wryly contrasted by Lynch. The film doesn’t, of course, come close to passing the Bechdel Test.

Yet the point of Baby Driver isn’t the depth of the content so much as the enjoyment of its visualisation. Wright has always been a director wringing utter joy from the process of converting our world into filmmaking moments. He’s always thinking about the most visceral and satisfying ways to translate script into celluloid (or digital bytes). He wrings fun from the kinds of moments that most directors treat as bread-and-butter transitions, or flat coverage. Never the simple mid-shot for Wright, when a fast pivot, a close-up insert, and a zoom back could work instead.

It’s stylistic, for sure, and perhaps faintly one-note. He does better with action sequences and flair-filled scene transitions than moments of quiet contemplation; he’s not so much your guy for when you want the lens to disappear and the space within to be given room to breathe, the emotions develop. He’s not subtle. But in terms of broad and bold films for wide audiences, for filling cineplexes, he has a grinning elan that is up there with the best.

It’s gratifying, as well, to have followed his career all these years, and to see that he’s still essentially the same director, deploying the same techniques, as he was twenty years ago messing around on that little set (“It’s not a bedsit. It’s a flat.”) with Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes and the rest. He has stayed remarkably true to his initial impulses.

What else? Ansel Elgort is very good, insular and sullen and principled and hopeful in equal measure. The ending is nice, not quite what I was expecting, but immediately appropriate.

The music is, of course, excellent, Queen and Simon & Garfunkel and T. Rex and Martha and the Vandellas brushing up against The Damned and Danger Mouse. It’s eclectic, feel-good, and only perhaps a touch too obvious.

I am going to take this opportunity though to come out and say it: I am utterly bored of mainstream Hollywood car chases. They’re the same scene over and over. They’re a codified formula by this point, and the only creativity comes in how to assemble the exact same structure with the exact same beats using details that haven’t quite been seen before. It’s a successful formula, for sure, I’m just sick of it. So there.

But then maybe mainstream cinema isn’t the place to reinvent the wheel. You just turn the wheel as fast as you can, screech off the tarmac, and leave your mostly teenage audience thrilled and happy.

Baby Driver does this with aplomb. It is riotously funny, heartfelt, big and bold and colourful, and watching it is a joy. Not a nuanced or profound joy, but a joy nonetheless.

A road trip, then, that doesn’t go anywhere you haven’t been many times before, but this time in the sexiest car, with the most assured driver, and with the top down and the wind whipping your hair, you can’t help but smile.

Sorted. Now just... Scanning for typos. Highlight "[word when music is part of the scene]", right-click, search Google. Scrolling down page. Scanning. Stop on "diegetic". Highlight, copy, alt-tab, paste. And publish post. 

Then feet down stairs. Boil kettle. Pour tea. Tap spoon on rim. Lean back in chair. Sigh.

Ahh. Another day complete. Lovely.

Day 333: Our Nige

Day 333. A portentous day. Halfway to the beast. Not actually in hell yet, but certainly approaching a slip road leading circuitously to its environs. The Greater Hell region. The suburbs of hell. How’s the weather?. Warm. Oh, that sounds good. Well, no, it’s that humid kind of warmth, actually. Clammy, you know? Close. Oh, that’s not great. No, it’s not. Not terrible though. But it does rain a lot as well. Damp and humid. Pretty miserable actually. Accommodation? Not festering pits of eternal torment per se, but… well… condominiums. Thin walls. And your neighbours are always playing bad reggae music. Not at full volume, but you can hear it. And walking up and down stairs late at night. And who are your neighbours? They’re all called Brad. And they’re all social media influencers.

Or maaaybe. 333 is the number of the cut-rate beast. Lay out pentagrams in rat blood on your cellar floor and ensconce yourself in darkened cowl and intone the summoning ritual murmuring “Three-three-three” under your breath and you invoke the spirit of Nigel, second cousin once removed of the Beast. Cloven hooves, blood-flecked flocculent hide, lashing viper tail…. but a weak chin. Varifocal glasses. Has an allergy to dust mites. Needs special slips on his pillows.

“Oh, right, sweet, thanks for answering my eldritch call, Nigel. You going to smite vengeance and damnation upon my mortal enemies?”

“Oh sure, sure,” our Nige replies. “Step one: hack into their work computer with my infernal powers (/lurk behind them and read their password over their shoulders then wait for them to go on their lunch break). Step two: take a screenshot of their desktop. Step three: set the screenshot as their background wallpaper. Step four: move all their desktop icons to the edges of the screen so only one pixel shows, but on the static wallpaper the icons are still part of the picture, albeit non-interactive. Step four… sorry, step five, was it? I get lost in my plans sometimes. Step five: wait for pandemonium to ensue.

“Pandemonium... ensues. You only ever hear those words together, don’t you? You hear pandemonium, you want to add ensues afterwards. It’s like finishing a yawn. You’re not satisfied till you’ve done it.

“Well, anyway, that’s all I’ve got.”

“All right, Nige, I suppose I only bought the candles at Wilko’s, and they were LEDs. And the cowl is the cushion cover off the upstairs sofa. It was… wait… why are you backing away, Nigel?”

“I was going to stick around to exact a terrible toll on you for meddling with powers you cannot comprehend, but I can feel my eyes watering from that cushion cover. Not got an anti-dust slip under that, have you?”

“Err, no, sorry. I wouldn’t even know where to get one.”.

Most department stores, actually. They do them in Wilko’s, you just have to know where to look. You could always nip out and… no, sorry, no… my nose is going now as well. I’d better be off.”

He vanishes in a cloud of… not smoke, more a kind of ineffectual haze.

You turn to head back up to your kitchen.

A wet noise.

A cough.

You turn back. It’s Nigel again: “You, err. You going to eat that rat, or…?”

…….

OK. That’s my skit about the number 333. Thanks for reading. I’m going for a sleep now. Bubyeeeeee x

Day 332: Reyt

Little bus sketch, trying to reconstruct overheard snatches of conversation...

"Oh look who it is. Ahreyt?"

"Ahreyt."

"What you been up to?"

"Same shit, different day."

"That's it, innit?"

"That's all it is these days. That's all it is."

"Aye."

"What about you?"

"Nowt. Same. Just working for food fe' babbies."

"You got... two still?"

"Aye. One's one and one's... three."

"Mad."

"Aye it's mad."

"Still wi their mam?"

"Nah. Nah. Still see the little-uns as much as I can like. Every other weekend. Couple a times in the week. It's what you have to do."

"You know, it makes me so mad. These men who get their girls pregnant and fuck off, it's reyt bad. It's..."

"..."

"Oh, no, I know you didn't do that... I remember she were a nightmare anyway."

"..."

"Sorry, but you know me. I have to say it like it is. I'm reyt bad that way. And I have to say she were a nightmare. I remember her being a nightmare, no offence."

"Yeah. It's reyt I spose. We're not together no more, are we?"

"Yeah, true."

"..."

"..."

"I'm the same anyway. Broke up with my fella... ooh... in October. Just been looking after mesen since then."

"Aye."

"Aye. Getting up. Going to work. That's what I'm ont bus for. They messed up my holidays. Called me up this morning, said they needed me to come in. I were like, ye what?"

"That's literally it, innit. They don't care."

"Nah, none of em care."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"I reyt want a drink now, you know?"

"Aye."

"You need one after work, don't you?"

"A bottle of wine."

"...Or two."

"Aye."

"Aye. But yeah, I'm not with Dan no more. I were bad when we were together. I'm looking after mesen now. But I were bad. Eight stone, by the end, I were. It were all that powder every night, you know?"

"It's bad, innit? I were doing too much as well."

"I had to stop. It were reyt bad."

"You can't go out and not do it, though, can you?"

"That's it, innit?"

"That's it."

"Yeah, I just do it when I go out now."

"You've got to when you go out. Everyone's on it."

"Literally everyone's on it."

"You say to yourself you're not going to do it, and then someone offers you some, and then you can't say no."

"That's why I just do it on nights out now. But before, with Dan, I were doing it all the time. In the house all the time. It were bad. I had to stop. I barely do it now."

"Aye."

"Aye."

"..."

"We're getting old, aren't we?"

"It's mad. I'm getting such a gut."

"Nah, you're looking OK. But I used to be reyt good at running, these days I get out of breath walking to the top of my road for the bus."

"I remember you were always the best runner at school."

"It's so long ago now, innit?"

"Aye. All in the past."

"..."

"..."

"Can you believe we're twenty three, eh?"

"I'll be twenty four next month."

"Twenty four."

"Aye".

"Aye."

"We're getting old."

"..."

"..."

Day 331: Swollen

Another migraine today, another day off gone. Did my washing, felt like I was going to be sick, felt like my brain /was/ being sick, vision bending, colours piercing, sounds swollen - and felt that I’d brought the migraine on by wrecking my sleeping schedule last night, by missing a meal, by staying up after I woke from my evening-long nap staring at screens until four in the morning. All classic triggers.

So I sat today unable to do anything I’d planned, filled with self-loathing, trying not to vomit. Took paracetamol and ibuprofen, watched about half the latest season of Arrested Development - it’s better than the consecutive-stories revival of the previous season, not as good as the original three - and tried to keep my face, and my thoughts, as slack and tranquil as I could.

The migraine did let up come evening, and I was able to cook tea, watch the film for next Wednesday’s review - I’m working the close Wednesday and don’t have much time - and do some photo editing.

Not an entirely wasted day, but frustrating nonetheless. Back on the early open tomorrow, and Tuesday, then GP appointment then the close on Wednesday, fit the review in somewhere…

Eesh, can feel depression wrapping around my feet, climbing my legs. Need to remind myself that I’m doing the best I can, that healing isn’t linear, that some days will be worse than others, and some weeks, and some months. Having lots of automatic negative thoughts, and ruminating - but that's OK. That will happen a lot. Automatic negative thoughts aren't reality, they're an opinion about reality, and they have an agenda. And rumination is not an effective strategy for solving problems. And that sense of failure and despair I'm feeling /now/ is learned helplessness, and what has been learned can be unlearned.

So that's good. Everything feels shit right now, but it will not feel that way forever. Things are slowly getting better. Tell myself that enough and it might start to come true.

Day 330: Reconnoitre

Eesh. Went for a half-hour nap after work, fell asleep until now. Feel broken and weird. But I have just found out the HBO movie of Deadwood is coming out this May, fully 13 years after the last season was abruptly cancelled, and I am giddy as a schoolchild.

Deadwood was the best ever American television show not set in Baltimore. It was nuanced, contemplative, profound, funny as all hell, and slick with some of the most playful dialogue this side of Shakespeare. It had stand-out performances from superb character actors - Brad Dourif, William Sanderson, John Hawkes, Powers Boothe - as well as a great central dynamic between Timothy Olyphant's rigid yet hotheaded Sheriff Bullock and Ian McShane's conniving, monstrous, and monstrously entertaining saloon owner Al Swearengen.

If memory serves it had perhaps lost some of its bite through the third season, and I'm glad it never had an opportunity to slide gradually into mediocrity as so many shows have before it - but equally the build-up of the plot was left entirely unresolved, and the fact that HBO have taken some of those bags of gold they've earned from the increasingly formulaic Game of Thrones and furnished it on the dusty old backwater prospecting town of Deadwood makes me exceedingly happy.

Come the end of May I'll be pouring myself some of that fucking black Darjeeling and going for a reconnoitre of the rim. If you've not seen the show you've probably got enough time between now and then to catch up. Nothing else happening on television before then, as far as I know.

Daenerys who?

Ta ra x

Day 329: Shredded Wheat

Ten hour shift at work, then two hours editing photos. I’m pork pied, mate.

Wait, that’s not correct deployment of Cockney rhyming slang. I’m… cream crackered. That’s the one. I’m ball and hooped. I’m down for lent. I’m Shredded Wheat.

... Beat, is what I meant by that one. Indeed. Hmm. Yes.

So I did watch some Umbrella Academy last night. I think I like it you know. It’s self-indulgent, undisciplined, preposterous - but that’s part of its maximalist appeal. It is rooted in genre, it deals in cliche and trope, but it does so with a confidence in its own right to exist that is as endearing as it is naive.

It simply thinks that it is really good, and never hesitates or second-guesses itself, and - so far at least - that rubs off on the viewer.

Ellen Page helps. The actors are all great, ludicrous and larger-than-life, clearly having all the fun, but Page is grounded and nuanced and quiet, in a way that anchors the show as a whole. She’s the audience’s way in, an achingly ordinary woman surrounded by greatness, a clever and wry and solemn figure who doesn’t quite have enough talent to wrench herself out of the mundane. And, yes, I’m not far into it, and clearly she’s going to awaken latent powers at the pivotal moment and become a Jean Grey-esque demigod - but for the moment she’s just like the rest of us, and that’s fine with me.

OK, it’s late and I’m on the open tomorrow, I’m gonna jump in a canoe and paddle.

...Skedaddle. Obviously.

Bubyeeee x

Day 328: A long slog

Sheesh. Yes. OK. I am here. I am writing. I can’t be bothered to be writing, but I am writing. It is a day. It is a… Thursday. My eye is twitching. Why is my eye twitching?

I have been out with my mum this afternoovening. We went poodling round Kelham Island, I took my camera with the kit lens on and the focal length mostly set around 28mm, because I wanted to see what coverage would be like were I to get a prime lens of this length. Coverage was... good. Here is a photo of a warehouse. 

There is glass on the floor. Your favourite band would love to stand in the glass and look moody. I took more photos. I took a photo of a bloke. He didn’t know I was there. I felt like a serial killer stalking a victim. I was a bit upset I didn’t get to dump my bloke in the canal when I was done with him actually. But I guess I took his photo, and therefore stole his soul, so that’s something.

It was nice seeing my mum. She talked about my sister’s upcoming wedding, about her new contact lenses, about this and that. I didn’t have a lot to say. I’ve been treating today as a day off, as I spent most of yesterday watching and writing about Ghost in the Shell for the blog. Don’t ask me things today! I am off. I am not here.

Oof, I do feel musty now. I’m sluggish. I’ve got bats fluttering behind my eyes. But I’m fine. I haven’t done any washing; I should have done washing but I haven’t done washing. But what’s another few days wearing the same jeans, wearing work tops for the second (third) time? The universe is crumbling. Linear time is dissolving. There’s Brexit to sort out before that. Really, my washing is not of utmost importance in the scheme of things. I am off Sunday. I will wash all the clothes on Sunday. And I will clean my bathroom, dust my shelves, read my books, make plans for the blog, take all the photos, sign up for therapy, deal with Brexit, save the universe…

For tonight though I will get into bed and watch the Umbrella Academy, content in the knowledge that all that other stuff can wait. We can only do so much, readers. We can only do so much.

Death is a cycle. Existence is infinite. It’s a long slog. Best pace ourselves.

Day 327: Wednesday Reviews - Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Picture it. You’re nineteen. You’re starting university soon, but for a few weeks beforehand you exist in a liminal state, not the person you were, not yet the person you will shortly become. You drift to your own rhythms: sleeping late, reading and playing videogames, skateboarding… then staying up half the night watching films, drinking whisky... the midnight hours, in your quiet house with the rest of your family in bed, belonging to only you.

It was in this zone between borders, outside of regular time, that I first watched Ghost in the Shell. I think it was the late movie on Film Four. I don’t remember if I’d noticed it in the Radio Times that week and settled in on purpose, or just changed channel to it accidentally.

I do remember how otherworldly and alien and strange it felt. A missive from another land, one of desaturated tones, rainslicked Tokyo rooftoops, alleyways submerged in shadow, starlight glinting off glass canyons stretching way out ahead into forever. I was anxious about a lot of things in those weeks - whether I’d chosen the right uni, the right course, whether I would make friends, how bad my acne was going to be come moving day - but over 80 minutes on that night, with the whisky softening the sharp edges of my mind and Ghost in the Shell splashing its light from our old TV set across the room’s dark walls, I was completely transported.

It is a good film for teenagers, I think, for people in their early twenties; a cult sci-fi anime based on Masamune Shirow’s manga about a cyberpunk near-future where the technological and the organic blend in ever-increasing ways, and questions of sentience and existence and the nature of the soul arise anew.

It isn’t hugely original in setting, theme, or plot, but it does cover well-trodden tropes with elan and a verve. It is a lonely film, melancholic and contemplative, with long stretches of dialogue-free shots soaking in the cityscapes, allowing the sense of isolation and yugen engendered by the tone to percolate, to ripple. A neo-noir Tarkovsky, then, with balletic assassins and automatic weapons.

Its story concerns Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg in a synthetic shell, with still the ghost of a soul, whether transferred or simulated (the film is coy with backstory) flitting around inside her. Major works for Section 9, a counter-terrorism unit in the Japan of 2029, and is often sent to do the off-books dirty work in which the government cannot be seen to officially engage.

Through the events of the plot Major and Section 9 become embroiled in the hunt for a criminal known as the Puppet Master, an elusive entity who hacks into human beings and forces them, without their knowledge, to do his bidding. An early scene shows a petty hoodlum being informed he was being controlled by this Puppet Master, that his motivating memories of family were implanted, and the tone is forlorn, cold, sad. But as the plot develops we learn that the Puppet Master might not be what he seems, and there are other forces hidden in the background pulling the strings.

It’s a plot that is at times obfuscated and difficult to follow, and despite its familiarity often front-loads information and rushes through beats in rapid snatches of expository dialogue. But we’re not really here for the plot. Ghost in the Shell is more a rumination on what distinguishes the living from the nonliving, and the mysteries of existence.

Major is a great character, elusive, enigmatic, tenebrous, yet relatable. She does not know what she is, but she knows that she is. What would have been a tiresome femme fatale robot assassin cliche in lesser sci-fi here is (slightly) more intriguing, more esoteric. It’s not high art, but it is good mainstream art.

The animation is also worthy of praise. It is sumptuous, and very well observed. It captures subtleties of movement and motion, it feels right, and a large part of the joy of the film is simply appreciating the way a body spins as it drops from a rooftop, the way bullets pepper and chew masonry, the way hair lifts and cascades in the heat of a blow-dryer. In its world of technological advancement and dehumanising isolation, the vivid animation helps ground the piece, gives it its humanity. The shell is cold metal, but the ghost inside is warm and flowing.

The world building is also solid, with the sense of much continuing beyond the narrative’s limited scope. Characters and organisations and nations are skirted over without much screen-time, but there is the sense of their internal existence even when they are only treated to an off-hand reference. There is, however, some of the feel of a feature-length television episode to proceedings - one adventure in an ongoing series, rather than a discrete work standing by itself.

If you’re expecting Major’s origin story you’ll be disappointed, and nothing is tied up, no hero’s journey cycle is fully completed. There isn’t even, in fact, much in the way of character arcs. An awful lot changes in its world in the last few minutes, but we’re not given the opportunity to explore this, and the ending feels rushed, abrupt.

The pacing is also a little off, the structure wonky. Two opening action sequences fan out into scenes of meditative introspection, what feels narratively like the end of the first act actually comes two-thirds into the run-time, then what would be acts two and three are squashed together at the tail-end.

So it’s not a masterpiece, and watching it now it is perhaps sophomoric, grounded in genre, derivative in theme. Yet it is an iconic work of cinema, one of the glistening lights of 90s anime, and I can still feel hints of what I felt when I first watched it, nineteen years old, utterly awed and enraptured by its weirdness, by those lugubrious neon streets, by that inscrutable cyborg figure shimmering in her optical camouflage as she fell through the air.

Forget the execrable live-action remake, this 1995 original is where it's at.

Day 326: Crop

Wotcha. Home late from work, we had actors in right at the end, dreaded actors, wanting to celebrate coming off stage, wanting to let loose, unable to see our pain and drudgery, our desire to close up shop and fuck the fuck off home, dragging their feet, drinking up at snail’s pace, distracting us asking where else they should go (I dunno. Not here), disappearing to the toilet one at a time as we tried to corral them to the door.

I mean, I knew a few of them, and they were all lovely and charming and grateful, but some nights you just don’t want actors. Some nights you want one old fella who calls you son and sees the tiredness in your bones and asks in an easy way whether it’s too late for a drink, and when you say of course not orders an easy ale, and thanks you, and tells you to keep the change, and to keep your chin up, and that the night will be over soon.

Anyway, back now, done a bit of photography research, some browsing of lenses - my 50mm is actually a 75mm when attached to my cropped sensor body (cheaper DSLRs crop the centre of the image), which is nice for product shots at work, or portraits, but not at all versatile for street or architecture or landscape work - so maybe I want a 35mm next (52.5mm on my body), or a 28mm (42mm). Or perhaps I save instead for a new body, or a mirrorless Fujifilm or something. Decisions decisions…

Going to bed now, don’t want to sleep through my day off tomorrow. I haven’t watched a film yet, need to do that, and write a review, when I get up.

Until then,

Toodles x

Day 325: Smile at service workers

Smile at service workers. At bartenders. At bus drivers.

Say good morning, smile, and most importantly, look at this person with whom you are involved in an interaction, however minor the interaction may be.

Some people do this. As they step onto the bus they hold their driver momentarily in attention, they acknowledge the driver's presence, briefly, as a whole human being with emotions and thoughts and needs. And the bus driver feels this. Sometimes you are the one to do it, and you see how glum they are beforehand, how lost and pained, trapped in public utterly alone in the prison inside their heads. The light has gone from their eyes.

But when you acknowledge them you sometimes see this light flicker back on.

And sometimes people do it to you, in your job, and it can be enough, sometimes, to pull you out of the ruminating despair or boredom or rage into which your daily life can so easily descend.

That brief holding of another in awareness, it is a hand on the shoulder, reaching through the bars into that dark room of the mind, and a brief message passed from one lifeform to another: I see you, I know you, I understand your struggle, and I am here in it with you.

It is no accident, I submit, that we talk about "holding" someone in awareness. It is a cradling. It is tender. And we all need a little tenderness.

This is your job. Not in the inward-looking meaning of a role you perform in exchange for money. In a deeper way. One to do with things that are hard to talk about - responsibility, citizenship, nobleness. This reality in which we find ourselves, this world, it must be carried from one moment to the next. It is heavy, and we all must lift it together.

When it is light for you, but you see someone else straining under the weight, reach out a hand. Help them. Do not look down at your phone and mumble and brush past them. Do not treat them as set dressing in your vastly more important play. Do not stare blankly across the chasm between you and them, assuming that some wretched failure on their part is crushing them while you, successful and strong, skip free.

That is a way that this beautiful and terrible existence will be lost to all of us.

Smile at service workers. At bartenders. At bus drivers. Reach out a hand. The weight of the world rolls, and where it is heaviest has so little to do with personal choice. Help those who are straining. It costs so little to do, and may in the end mean so much.

Day 324: Somewhere else

War was coming. People were scared of their next-door neighbours. They thought their next-door neighbours were the tribe over the hill, coming to take their land. They thought this because politicians had lied to them about it, for money.

Or maybe the world had just grown too complex. Instagram accounts, with IT technicians, and server farms, and cables under the ocean, and electronic component sweatshops in Malaysia, and social media influencers, and lipsticks, and jewellery, and cheap garment sweatshops in the Philippines, all so someone could post a picture of a new bag, and thousands of people could lie in their bedrooms caressing that picture of a bag on their phones in order to avoid thinking about their approaching deaths. And everything we ate was wrapped in processed petroleum. And then we had to figure out what to do with the processed petroleum.

And each vertex in the vast spanning web had mass, and slowly the overall mass was becoming too great, and soon the web would collapse.

War was coming. The dissolution of complexity into profound simplicity: us and them. It was a lie but it was one you could understand, and for many this was preferable to an unfathomable truth. And the bodies fell one on top of the other, and they looked like they were hugging but they were not hugging, and the bullets thudded into flesh like sandbags, and all were one, and still he fired, and still he fired.

War was coming. You could smell it in the air. You could taste it on your tongue. And in a hundred years the children would ask what people were doing to prepare for its arrival, and teachers would reply: watching makeup tutorials and masturbating to daughter-in-law videos on Pornhub.

… Or were you somewhere else?

Day 323: But it is good

OK so I may have spent another three hours editing photos after I got in from work tonight. It seems like I’m going to a lot of trouble for this commission, to the extent were it is no longer commensurate with the pay I’m receiving for said commission… but in truth I’m still learning how to edit, especially with Lightroom as opposed to the program I was using before, so in a sense I’m actually being paid to educate myself. Don’t tell my bosses that though!

But no, also it’s not bad pay for a very inexperienced photographer, and I want to do the best job I can with it. Maybe the marketing company won’t end up using any of the shots, maybe my old manager was only throwing me a bone organising it all for me… maybe it’s just a joke so they can all laugh at me taking it so seriously talking about “shoots” and “commissions” when I’m really producing the most embarrassingly amateur pictures imaginable (shut up brain, goddammit)... but regardless of forces external to myself, which after all I cannot control, here, for myself, I would like to do a good job.

It’s all done now anyway. Finished tweaking the last photos a few minutes ago, and sent them off into the world. Bye-bye ickle photos, enjoy your lives, don’t let the bigger photos pick on you, come back and visit your tired old pa some time.

Indeed. Now I’m sat in bed, perhaps more accurately /slumped/ in bed, tapping this out onto my Chromebook and fighting sleep for just a little while longer. Do need to get my head down soon though, I’m back in the pub for the open in the mawnin.

Anything else to say? Uuurm. It’s good to be alive, isn’t it? I don’t feel that it is, because of depression and that, but it is. Just because you can’t see the sky behind the clouds doesn’t mean the sky is not there. You have to continue with your life labouring under the assumption that the sky in fact /is/ there, and sooner or later the clouds part and the sun shines down and all is bright and clear and perfect again.

So I’ll just apply that mindset to depression. Life doesn’t feel very good right now, but it is good. I could be motes of dust floating in the endless void, I could be mulchy pond life squelching at the bottom of a lake, I could be Donald Trump’s toilet seat. I could be Donald Trump! But instead I get to be me, alive and conscious in a way that none of those other items I listed are, and I get to take photographs and write in Chromebooks and drink black coffee and run my hand across my beard and read poetry by Jack Gilbert and at the appropriate hour stop all of that and lie down and  sleep.

Day 322: Roaccutane

How do? I’m just back from a night out for Zoe’s birthday. Left them all stumbling to Wick, just starting to move the night up a gear, smudged mascara and ice cubes down necks and trips to the bathroom, but ancient creaking me ducked into a taxi and trundled on home.

Sat up here with the rain falling against the skylight, editing photos, playing around with Lightroom presets; now to wing this off and then to bed.

Feeling flat. Don’t want to be back at work tomorrow. It’s so good not being at work. Maybe I’ll buy a little Fujifilm camera and go travelling the world. Just fuck the fuck off from this boring Northern town. But I need to sort my skin out first. My acne is getting worse and worse, especially on my chest. The only thing that helped it in the past was Roaccutane, the big daddy of acne medications, only prescribed by dermatologists, a list of side-effects long as your arm, and regular blood tests to ensure it’s not doing serious damage to liver or kidneys.

But it works. The only thing that works when you’ve got severe acne, a God-send, a chance at freedom, at being normal - and it kept me clear for four years or so, finally got on it at 24, after creams, gels, washes, after three different courses of antibiotics which is, or was, SOP for GPs, couldn’t suggest Roaccutane unless other courses have been shown to be exhausted, so start on an antibiotic, skin gets worse for a month, then it settles, gets better, but not clear, for maybe five months, then the acne becomes resistant and the pills are useless, and you’ve burnt through a precious antibiotic, wasted half a year, and your skin is worse than ever. So I did that three times, which, motherfuck any GP who thinks that’s a good idea, seriously, you are an idiot, get to hell with that crap.

And but then I finally got referred to a dermatologist. Months waiting for that appointment. Then a what do you call it, an initial assessment, then weeks later another appointment to be prescribed the Roaccutane, then six months on that, lips cracking, scalp peeling, slathering on sunscreen to go out even in British spring… but it worked. It cleared me up completely. Still the scars, of course, I’d always have those, but not a single new spot for the last three months of the course. And none for years afterwards.

And then a few. Here and there.

And then a few more.

And then, by a few years ago, it was back at the level of continuous light acne.

And then more like moderate. And then more like severe.

Until now it’s almost as bad as in my early twenties. So I guess there’s nothing for it but a trip back to the dermatologist, and another course of Roaccutane. But, what the hell, I’ve done it once, and it wasn’t that bad. It’s supposed to be as effective the second time, if not more so.

Anyway, I’ve made a GP appointment. That’s the first step. And that’s the only thing I can do right now. Do what you can, and don’t sweat the rest.

That’s me, zen as fuck, up here in my attic bedroom at 3:07am, with my failing skin, my mechanical keyboard, a mug of cooling Earl Grey, a bed calling to me.

Until tomorrow.

Loves xx

Day 321: Days off? What are those?

Well, I sure have had a relaxing two days off. Yesterday I sat at my computer and edited photos from Tuesday’s shoot for six hours straight. I needed to pee for half of that time, yet just sat, thinking I’d do one more picture, until the sun had gone down and my room was dark and the evening was wearing on. Then I remembered my clothes that had been sitting in the machine since the morning, and worse, that I still hadn’t started my film review, which reviews I keep protesting are the thing I’m most interesting in doing for myself, rather than as a duty to someone else, yet I’d left to the last minute.

Writing yesterday’s was a nightmare. I sat for hours not able to get any words out. I started panicking that I simply wasn’t going to be able to do it, and that closed my brain up even worse.

Here’s a snippet of my notes from about 9pm last night:

“Opening swoop is chock full of information, and very simplistic information. Look at original, long scenes slow and cityscapes and they’re emotionally rich. Like, you get to feel things as you watch them. They’re empty of left-hemisphere information. They’re not scenes with talking language to tell you. What the fuck am I going on about? No, chill out. OK. It’s like… umm. They’re rich in meaning. But not in language meaning. They’re empty and in that space emotions, complex ones, can arise. But here, well, there isn’t that. It’s the opposite, whatever that means. I don’t know. I’ve forgotten how to write. I literally can’t do this today. I’m stressed. I can’t write at all.”

The anxiety - about a dumb little review of a dumb film on a dumb blog that no one reads - was sending me into fight or flight or freeze, and that is not conducive to the production of thoughtful, measured writing, let me tell you.

But I kept going, because I’ve felt this way so many times before, and always made it through, and slowly, once again, I found my way to that quiet place in my head where I could work. And the review was written. And it wasn’t the best review, but it wasn’t the worst, and it was one more victory against the forces of despair inside me, and I went to bed around 2am at peace.

Then today I spent another five hours finishing the photo editing, again sat unmoving at my desk, again not meaning to spend so long, but finding it easier to carry on than stop, and then seeing the end in sight, and pushing on through to get it done and over with. I’ve got a few photos to go back and tweak - I’ve recently moved onto Adobe Lightroom from an open-source raw editor, and I’m figuring it out as I go - but for the most part the photos are finished.

Here is a sneak peak of one of them:

And then this evening I went to see Sleaford Mods with Mike, which was not exactly a relaxing night out. The duo were caustic, combative, and angry, as is their wont - except I spent much of the gig trapped in my skull, stood near the back unable to make out the lyrics, unsure what to do with my hands, getting a headache from the dazzling stage lights, watching the beautiful children dancing and splashing in the waters of life while I stood alone on the shore isolated and anxious.

After the gig we were walking to the exit and Mike turned to me. “I felt a range of emotions during that,” he said. “And many of them were not good.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Well, I always forget, but sometimes I get really sad at gigs, wondering why everyone else is having so much fun and I’m having no fun. Wondering why I’m so intrinsically broken.”

I smiled.

It’s been a busy few days off, but it’s nice to spend some time with my friend, both broken together.

Day 320: Wednesday Reviews - Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Questions of existentialism and identity abound in this big-budget American remake of the cult cyberpunk anime from 1995. Sadly, such questions relate not to the film’s narrative, but to the adaptation itself: can the weird and beautiful soul of the original tale survive when transplanted into the cold, robotic body of a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster?

No. No, it patently cannot. Despite the borrowed motifs, visual cues and supporting characters - ghosts of the previous incarnation - this is a plodding, uninspired and artless cinematic slog.

Scarlett Johansson plays Major, a slim and slinky robocop whose brain is transferred into a synthetic shell after an ostensible terrorist bombing in the opening moments. Reborn, in a trippy and arresting early sequence, as a machine with a human soul, Major goes to work as an agent for counter-terrorism initiative Section 9, investigating hacking crimes - which, in a megacity filled with cybernetically-enhanced humans, is serious business.

While responding to the assassination of a scientist working for Hanka Robotics - the shadowy corporation that designed Killian herself - she crosses paths with an imposing and messianic foe who leads her on a journey to uncover the truth of her creation and the meaning behind the “glitches” she has been experiencing in her consciousness.

Draw a Venn diagram of Blade Runner (the original and the sequel), Total Recall, Ex Machina, The Fifth Element, The Bourne Identity, and, of course, Robocop - and in that brown, undifferentiated mess where they all meet you will find this iteration of Ghost in the Shell.

It is derivative, borrowing all of its visual, audial and thematic identity from elsewhere. In fact, add the Matrix to that diagram. And John Wick, from which it unsuccessfully attempts to lift the measured, balletic gunplay.

It is artless, with a plot that flails from one narrative cliche to the next like a drowning sailor grasping for passing driftwood. Shadowy corporation with a hidden agenda? Check. CEO wanting to use a scientific breakthrough for military purposes? Check. Protagonist with amnesia? Antagonist who is the only one who can reveal the truth of the protagonist’s backstory? Antagonist with a plan that involves initially being captured? Protagonist framed for murder and forced to go rogue to reveal conspiracy? Check, check, check, check.

I imagine the screenwriters, like Major's creators, sewing the script together from existing pieces they had leftover from a million other projects. The result is that the story as a whole doesn’t hold together, it looks just about like a story if you don’t pay it too much attention, if you don’t watch it move - but as soon as you peer closely the cracks start to show. Plot points are taken up then unceremoniously dumped a few minutes later, and logic is left squarely at the door.

Here’s an example: the initial terrorist attack that introduces us to Major's unit and role. After an establishing shot swooping through a neo-noir cityscape at night (you know, neon billboards, holographic advertisements, gilded towers of darkened glass), we come to Major, stood resolutely on a rooftop, “On site, awaiting instructions.”

Her unit commander, a taciturn Takeshi Kitano (playing against type, ahem) orders her to “Review and report.” Major scans the building and finds there’s a Hanka scientist meeting a foreign dignitary, and that the meeting is being hacked.

But… but… If she only just found this out then what was she doing “on site” in the first place? What was her mission? Go to a random rooftop and start listening and see if there’s any craic?

Anyway, having luckily stumbled upon a potential crime, she stands and listens until terrorists break into the meeting below and start shooting. She asks on comms where her back-up is - two minutes out - and decides that is too long, and starts prepping her dive suit. The commander orders her to stop - I have no idea why, it just makes good drama when your protagonist disobeys orders - and Major leaps from the roof, and somehow through the window of the meeting room far below, and takes out the terrorists.

Some of the terrorists are men in black suits who break into the room, but some are the robot geisha who the Hanka scientist was (I think) showing off to the dignitary. In fact the men in black suits were robots as well. And the robots were hacked remotely and forced to become killers.

Major and her squadmates, who arrive as Major is finishing up with the last killer robot, don’t actually achieve anything - the scientist is killed, the hacker has done what he wanted - but the film plays it as if they’ve just saved the day.

To keep the engine of the plot in motion Major then discovers that she can meld her consciousness with one of the damaged geisha to attempt to learn who hacked into it. She is again ordered to refrain - it’s too dangerous - but she again disobeys and plugs herself in and dives into the robot’s primitive mind.

But uh oh - turns out the hacker has laid traps for her (exactly as was presumed), and she starts to be swallowed by a virus code. Her squadmate, watching her body fitting and squirming, like how Trinity watched Neo when he was plugged into the Matrix, starts yelling that they need to find a way to get her out, that she’s going to be lost, yada yada blah blah. Finally, right as Major is about to die, her squadmate leaps and yanks out the cable connecting her to the robot, and she wakes up, gasping.

So… umm. If pulling the plug out could have fixed everything all along then where was the tension?

But never mind that, because Major, gulping down air, visibly shaken, proclaims that she now knows where to find the hacker.

And that’s exciting, so now we’re off for another action scene (because obviously it’s a trap, and the hacker knows they’re coming) … and we just bound on in this way, a pinball bashed from here to there, no depth or meaning to any of it, just flashing lights and loud noises and distracting visuals.

… It’s late at night as I write this, and I’m exhausted, so perhaps I'm being harsher on Ghost in the Shell than it deserves. It’s not egregious. It does look slick and impressive, although maximalist, and lacking focus. It has a decent pace to it, and Scarlett Johansson, although undeniably a case of whitewashed casting to make the Japanese original more appealing for Western audiences, puts in a decent performance as the confused and isolated woman turned into a walking weapon.

But then don’t the antagonists of the narrative do to her character exactly what director Rupert Sanders, along with all the writers and producers, do to her, the actor, in this film? Take someone whole and real and complex and turn her into a skintight catsuit, an object for salacious shots, a sexualised walking weapon? That the filmmakers pay lip service to a plot in which such actions are called out as reprehensible in no way assuages this - in fact it is simply them having their cake and eating it too. They do the same with the whitewashing, baking a reason for it into the plot, as if the demands of the story called for a Caucasian actress, and not the concerns of money-hungry studio executives.

This could have been an interesting film, using the stylistic trappings of the original to explore themes of body autonomy, sexual objectification and shifting cultural identity. Or it could have stuck with the original’s meditations on the dehumanising effects of the encroachment of technology into the sphere of the soul.

As it is it does neither, instead choosing to fall back on worn Hollywood tropes to tell what is at heart a bland and uninteresting story. The dialogue is flat, expositional, and frequently asinine. Characters are underdeveloped. The plot is riddled with holes.

Less an acrobatic cyborg leaping into action, then, and more one of these hapless fellas. Time to call for a robot exorcist, methinks.

Day 319: Late

I am done. I have made it through. I worked eight hours today on a photography commission at the pub, taking stock pictures for the other sites in the company to use. I took splash pics, pouring pics, smoking pics, shaking pics. Food being prepped, food being cooked, food being served. Keg beers, cask beers, canned beers. Coffee shots, wine shots, Champagne flutes clinking. I took photos of displays, of bookcases, of lights, of hanging glasses, of board games, of the building’s exterior.

And now I am off. Finished. Done.

Tomorrow I have a film review to write, but I can do that sat cross-legged in the Vietnamese coffee shop down the road, staring out the window and tapping on my Chromebook and feeling good about the world. And then Thursday I am also off. And Friday as well.

It feels like the most decadent stretch of time imaginable. I mean, I have 660 photos to edit, and the blog to write, but still, I’m decidedly stepping down a gear.

Christ, I needed this break though. I’ve been pushing forwards into the void for like twenty-five days now, head down, forcing myself to make it through. I think I was just running on empty from tiring bar shifts and late nights and daily blogging, and fighting to keep my mental health from plummeting, to keep depression at bay. And then Steve needed someone to help with his busy period at work, so I gave my days off to that - which was long hours, physically demanding labour, and a whole load of stuff in which I had no experience, which always takes more cognitive energy. And then Kieran needed me for an extra day at the pub. And then this photography commission. And all the while I was pushing myself as hard as I could with the weekly film reviews, because they’re the thing I’ve chosen to do, not a commitment to another person, not a duty I have to fulfil, but what I myself am passionate about, what I care about.

So yeah, I’ve felt ground to the bone these last weeks. I’m not at full strength, I have a chronic mental illness, and I get overwhelmed quickly. It’s important to remind myself of that.

But though I’ve been strained, I haven’t snapped. I’ve done everything that was asked of me, I’ve taken on the projects that have been thrown my way, I haven’t said no to anything, and I’ve found the time (just) to concentrate on my own work.

So: hurrah. I’m off now to eat a cream slice, drink an Earl Grey, write my daily gratitude exercise, and crawl into bed.

Setting my alarm tomorrow for: LATE.

Toodles x

Day 318: Again

20:08. I am on the bus down to work. I did this twelve hours ago. I already did this.

I forced myself out from under ensconcing sheets. I trussed myself up in clothes and gloves and coat and ventured out into the snow. I waited in the biting wind for a bus, driven by a slouching faced grump, sat on the top deck shivering with the windows misted up and rivulets of melted boot-snow pooling around my feet.

I got in to an office dripping water through its ceiling vent, which, when I lifted the ceiling panel by the vent, disgorged streams of yellow water down the wall and my arm and over my head. Above the office is the men's toilets. In the men's toilets was a blocked urinal. The urinal was streaming down onto my head.

I turned the water off to the urinals. Put buckets down. Mopped. Waited for the plumbers. I dealt with delivery drivers ringing because they couldn't find the pub. Chefs who couldn't print count sheets. Chefs who couldn't log on to laptops. Chefs who couldn't work an Excel formula. I showed an engineer what had broken in the cellar. Talked to reps. Took messages. Proof-read menus for the area manager. Put away deliveries. Cleaned lines. Sorted social media. I worked a day. I did my day's work.

As I was leaving at 17:00 Steve came in for a pint, and I sat with him at the end of the bar, chewed the fat, shot the shit. I made fun of Zoe. Laughed with Pat. Watched Lydia excavate a furry phone headset from her archeological dig under the shelf below the bar handwash sink. I chatted with Jordan when he came in, had two sips of an end-of-line Chimay Gold.

Finally I found the energy to push myself up from my bar stool, collect my bag and coat, lurch out wearily into the night. I humped my aching frame to the bus stop, stood in the biting wind, got on the bus, sat on the top deck with the windows misted up, rainwater pooling around my feet, and I felt my eyes unfocus and my mind slide into that great shimmering lake stretching below consciousness.

I did this. And I shook myself awake in time to leap from my seat and fly down the stairs and make my stop. I humped my aching frame to my front door, into a house drowning in gloom, got up the stairs, got lights on, got heating on, got into my room where all was bright and light and calm.

I flicked the power button on my PC. Kicked off my shoes. Collapsed into my office chair.

With the bending of my waist something sharp pressed into my thigh.

I reached into the front-left pocket on my jeans. Pulled out something long and shining.

In my hand was the safe key. The pub's one safe key. The safe key Pat needed to float the tills. To cash up the tills. To close the pub.

I sighed, pulled on my boots, hefted myself back up and out into the night.

Day 317: A garden without weeds is not enough

Hullo. I'm about to pass out, so best wing this off sharpish. I've been really good over the past year at being more aware of negativity, at noticing the intrusive automatic negative thoughts bombarding me, the patterns of rumination I fall back into.

This has been beneficial, but at the same time I need to work on nurturing the positives as well. It's like weeding the garden without planting better seeds - however much I pull up those shrubs they'll carry on coming back when there's nothing else being planted in the soil to grow.

I don't want to underplay my achievements. Every blog post - 317, and counting - is a seed. Many are planted in a rush, given the minimum water and light, never allowed to sprout beyond a small shoot. But some grow larger. And regardless, it is instilling within me, ingraining in me, the action of going to the soil and digging out space and planting a seed. It is the framework of action, of effort, of habit. It is good.

And I make my bed every single morning now, the first moment of the day one of care and assiduousness. I meditate (although not enough), write lists of gratitude (not enough), watch films that I'm interested in and write about them once a week.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I have been saying yes to things, pushing myself more. Working with Steve, taking over the pub's social media, taking on photography assignments, putting myself in situations in which I'm not comfortable and familiar. Include in this writing about subjects that I find difficult to speak about, my mental health, my struggles with acne.

I'm reading more books, fiction and non-fiction, playing fewer videogames, obviously not spending every day drinking beer and whisky and wine. I've been trying to socialise in ways that don't involve alcohol, seeing friends and playing board games and hanging out.

But a lot of this, vital though it is, has felt like faking it til I make it. It's been forced action without lightness or joy. I've not, simply put, enjoyed it. And more than enjoyment, which can be a shallow, transient thing, I haven't felt it.

What I've been is a highly depressed person forcing myself to do things that a non-depressed person would do. It helps, but at times it feels like guiding around one of those Flintstones cars powered by my feet sticking out the bottom, only made up on the outside to look like a modern machine. I get to be on the road, get to wave at other drivers, toot my horn - but inside there's no real engine, and the effort of pretending is grinding my feet to the bone.

So what I want to focus on more going forwards is how to feel good about my life. Not simply removing negativity, but purposefully developing positivity. Not just noting every instance of my brain telling me how wretched and pathetic and ugly I am, but encouraging, strengthening that other voice that thinks I've done a good job, that likes me, that enjoys and appreciates life.

I've got a bit of that now, and I want to pause here for tonight and just dwell on it. Ring it. Underline it. There is happiness in the world. There is humour and tranquillity and love.

One of the major symptoms of depression is anhedonia, the loss of the ability to take pleasure in previously pleasurable activities. The inability to feel love. But it can come back. It is coming back, slowly, for me. But it needs a little help along the way. The weeds need clearing away, sure, and continuously, as they freshly spread anew. But every time a little shoot of love pokes above the soil it needs to be cradled, shielded from harm, watered, allowed to bask in the warming light of awareness. A de-weeded garden isn't enough. There need to be flowers growing in the empty space.

Hopefully this is something I will get better at doing. Right now I'm allowing myself to feel good about giving it a try.

Day 316: Orbit

Super tired, and I can feel my brain leaping around, all jagged, and being drawn towards negativity, because that’s where the gravitational force still lies, clumps of negativity that have been reinforced over the years, pulling in passing meteors of negative events, coalescing, forming planets that generate their own orbits. And it’s a constant effort to pilot my thoughts between these planets, navigate through the wilds of space burning thrusters whenever I’m close to negative thoughts that start drawing me in. And when I’m tired I’m pressing the little thruster button (or pushing on the thruster stick, how do thrusters work?) but it’s puttering and there’s no fuel left to use to blast me away. So I fall into the dark planets, which are maybe black holes, I don’t know, I haven’t thought this analogy through.

But then how true is all of that? Because I can feel myself now finding a gentler route. There’s a way to avoid the black holes that doesn’t involve using up depleted fuel reserves. There is a tractor beam locking on to you always, wherever you are in space, waiting to pull you in. It requires only your authorisation to begin. It permeates all matter, all distance, every moment in the universe.

It is the Borg, and resistance is futile.

Nah, I’m kidding. It’s love, innit.

Gonna go drink some Earl Grey now and watch an episode of The Umbrella Academy and let that loving tractor beam carry me to sleep. Ta ra x

Day 315: Dolly

Hullo. I’ve been watching the first episode of The Umbrella Academy. It’s the only thing I’ve been doing, other than working. Want me to tell you about the first episode of The Umbrella Academy?

I hope so. Because I've got nothing else to say.

It’s preposterous. It’s ludicrous. It’s glam as fuck. I think I love it.

Adapted from a Dark Horse comic written by Gerard Way, lead singer of emo band nonpareil My Chemical Romance, it’s a sort of hi-camp X-Men family drama about a superhero team of gifted kids, now grown-up (apart from the one who travels through time and has been gone for forty years but then returns still looking like a child) (and the one who’s dead), who must band together despite their differences to uncover the plot behind the death of their emotionally elusive foster father (perhaps orchestrated by one of their number), and also to save the world, which is going to end (according to the time-travelling child) in eight days.

There’s a chimpanzee butler who talks with an English accent. Ellen Page plays the only one of the children to not exhibit any powers (yet!!!). One of them can talk to the dead. One of them turns into a horrendous monster and tears people apart.

It’s mental. It’s X-Men as directed by Wes Anderson. Watchmen crossed with The Black Parade. It has no shame, no modesty, not even a shred of self-doubt. It’s basically: imagine if Dolly Parton was an emo, and wrote a graphic novel.

I’m only one episode in, but you can bet I’m watching more.

And I might squeeze one in now, and then bed. Working the open tomorrow, which isn’t great, but is better than working the close. And only four more days, and then another Wednesday review, and then I get an actual day off! Splendid.

Bubyeeee x

Day 314: Rivulets

Hiya. Just been dropped off by Steve, in time to nip into Sainsbury's for a cheese and onion roll and a microwave meal before it closes. Living the dream. "Why not get some nougat?" Steve asks, incongruously, as he forces the van up the hill. That Steve. Where does he get his wild notions? Nougat indeed.

Another long day, four hours in the van, breaking down a display and hauling it across the venue floor on groaning trolleys and into lifts operated by old black guys speaking broken English, down to the car park, hoisting the blocks and sheets and panels up into the van's cooly lit hollow interior. Finally hoisting ourselves into the cab, and four hours back up the M1 and North and home.

The rain running in rivulets down a lorry's dark tarpaulin. Men in hi-vis vests sheltering under doorways. Radio 2 right through the evening. Steve and John discussing golf, boosted Ladbrokes bets, football, more golf. Greggs sarnies and sausage rolls and fizzy pop on the road.

Going to bed now, got a 10 hour shift in the pub tomorrow. Yeeeuch. Laters taters x

Day 313: Wednesday Reviews - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

So. 2014's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is vivacious. Bounding along to bebop rhythms, composed of long takes spliced together to give the appearance of one unbroken journey, the camera roving up and around and over and through the warren-like theatre of its setting, its characters effusing burstfire dialogue or exploding into paroxysms of emotion or wrestling one another maniacally across the floor, this film hums. It buzzes. It jumps.

The work of director Alejandro González Iñárritu, known previously for his multi-character non-linear pieces such as Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, Birdman is a different beast from these interwoven stories entirely.

Primarily the exploration of one man’s struggle against his ego, it features Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, the washed-up star of 90s superhero franchise Birdman - now staging a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a bid to find the validation and worth that, despite his Hollywood megabucks, have always eluded him.

The film chronicles the few days of rehearsals and previews leading up to the play’s opening night, as Riggan, increasingly beset by internal voices of self-loathing and -criticism and -doubt, lurches inexorably towards mental collapse. Riggan’s ego is personified in the figure of Birdman, who leers over him, in full feathered costume, gravel-voiced, purring that he’s a joke, a failure, that his aspirations of respectability are doomed and he should go back to the only thing he’s ever been good at - making popcorn thrillers adored by the slack-jawed masses.

It’s very funny. Partly because of the obvious parallels between Riggan and Keaton himself, who played Batman - on whom the brooding Birdman is clearly based - three decades ago. But the humour isn’t all self-referential, although there are plenty of sideswipes at blockbuster cinema and the cult of celebrity. It is a comedic film, playful, wry, deadpan; a comedy in the same way you might say Pulp Fiction is a comedy.

Keaton mines the part for all he’s worth, playing Riggan as vainglorious, desperate, monstrously self-pitying, and entirely relatable. His failures are our failures, too. And the supporting cast is terrific. Ed Norton is the critically adored method actor spilling his blood, and other bodily fluids, across the boards in pursuit of authenticity and truth. He is magnetic, impressive, and hilariously insecure. Naomi Watts is his on- and off-screen partner, her role smaller, her performance as mesmerising as ever. And Emma Stone plays Riggan’s drug-addicted daughter and PA, cynical, cutting through the pomp of the other characters, yet underneath the manufactured insouciance and thick eyeliner as broken and uncertain as the rest of them.

Everyone is superb, but it is Riggan that Iñárritu makes star of the show. He is a child, warped, kept brittle, by fame, battling enormously to be an adult, yet utterly incapable of taking the steps necessary to move beyond himself. All his energy is turned inwards. Where Ed Norton’s character pushes his struggles out into the world around him, Riggan withdraws, ruminates. He is being sucked into quicksand inside himself. No one in the film knows what they’re doing, what life is about; they are all lost and scared. And yet they get on with things. Live their lives. Riggan can’t do this. His ego is a black hole at the centre of his being, pulling him in.

It is a struggle with which I have experience, and I love how it is visualised and explored here.

This is as much down to Iñárritu’s directorial style as Keaton’s delivery. The camera is ever on the move, inquisitive, agitated, peering in at characters, searching for something it cannot find. The shots are mostly steadicam and handheld, with wide-angle lenses filming in close-up to create a dreamlike, claustrophobic feel. There’s an urgency and restlessness to it all, a jazz syncopation engendered through the camera and dialogue as much as through the persistent scattershot drumming pattering across the soundtrack.

And there is Riggan’s telekinesis - the opening shot shows him levitating in his dressing room in his baggy and faded Y-fronts, and in quiet moments alone he is prone to dragging, twirling and hurling inanimate objects - like Darth Vader, or perhaps Matilda - exerting his gargantuan movie star/superhero influence upon the external world… although in one telling scene we watch him godlike, wreaking havoc upon his dressing room, and then the camera spins as his agent (Zach Galifianakis, who again is very good, and funny) opens the door - the camera spins back, now implied as the agent’s point of view, to reveal Riggan stood in a pile of mess impotently tearing up shreds of newspaper - with his plain old human hands. It’s a fabulous moment, heightened by Riggan’s embarrassment once he realises he is being watched, perfectly capturing how vast and powerful and tragic we feel in our own heads, versus how small and shameful we feel when viewed from someone else’s.

Birdman is a dazzling film. The technical accomplishments necessary to create the long and intricate takes, the abrupt changes of location, the unbroken transitions between POV, between dream and reality, beggar belief. Yet it does not feel like a technical film. Yes, occasionally it is showy, enamoured by its own wizardry, but mostly it services character and emotion, the craftsmanship of the continuous takes providing tension and excitement without drawing attention to itself.

I’m less certain about the film’s conclusion, though. It works, but feels dangerously close to a cop-out. In the end I’m not sure it quite knows what to say about, what to make of, the themes it brings up.

But as a portrait of a man grappling with his ego it is fresh, boisterous, and captivating, both tongue-in-cheek and sincere at the same time. Iñárritu has the wisdom to puncture his protagonist’s inflated sense of self-importance at every turn, yet the compassion to retain tenderness and pathos while he does it, mining the material for humour and poignancy in equal measure. Birdman is one of my favourite films of the decade. It soars.

Day 312: Complex structures

Wotcha. I'm on the close tonight, so I got a lie-in this morning, and have now a few hours to potter around, drink coffee, come to my senses. Much needed. Much needed? Is that a thing people say? Man I'm tired.

I did well last night. I was on the verge of being overwhelmed by dark thoughts, tired and run-down, but I managed to write my way into acceptance and peacefulness instead. Important to recognise that, to draw big squiggles under it and surround it with star stickers and say, hey, doofus brain, this is an example of what is possible. You don't have to descend into depression. You can be in that train station with all the platforms showing departures to misery town and you can be one foot on the carriage and still become mindful, step down, turn around, walk away. Remember this. Deploy this strategy next time. Follow this course.

I am changing my mind. I am changing the most complex structure in the universe (of course depending on your definition of "structure", but let's not even), and that takes time. It takes patience. I still struggle every day, and my life is still, I believe the technical term is: a right shambles. But I am getting there. It's not been a year yet. Keep facing and fighting my depression. Look back after two years. Three. Ten. See how far I've got then.

I'll probably always have the negative voices in my head. I'll always have those cerebral wounds deeply carved, the neural pathways just waiting to be activated again. But the more I move back and forth along healthier routes, the more traffic passes over the newly opened expressways (that, yes, are perhaps currently more like rough tracks in the mud), the more those old tunnels will be closed off, abandoned, forgotten.

They might always be there. But I don't have to go down them.

Is that how brains work? That's sort of how brains work, right?

Anyway, I'm going to go read in town for a bit before my shift I think, find a coffee shop, hunker down.

... And now I'm home from work. I did coffee-shop. I did hunker. Then work, which wasn't 100% great, but is now a thing of the past, receding nicely into nothingness.

Sleep now, then all dat fun film reviewing tomorrow.

Hugs x

Day 311: Wetland

Hullo. I’m in bed. Thank goodness for Chromebooks. I’ve come back from work and crashed. I ate soup, watched the new Alan Partridge, watched a classic Partridge, and now I’m in bed. I’m not getting back up again. I’ll have to send my missive from here.

I’m struggling today. Managed fine at work, but got as far as the bus stop after my shift and the wind fell from my sails. Been feeling bleak this evening.

I’m sorry. All I seem to do is write about how tired I am and how bleak I feel. It’s not nice to read. Why would anyone want to read this? But it’s all I’ve got.

It’s so hard to avoid negativity and depression when I’m this tired. I can’t remember any of the techniques. Can’t remember therapy lessons. Can’t remember how not to be depressed. It’s always an effort to drag my feet out of the quagmire, to pull myself free. I guess the faster you go the less time you’re touching the mud, then you’re running, then flying, and you’re free. But you get tired and you start to slow, and then your feet start sticking in the swamp again, and then it’s all your effort to pull a leg free, and while doing that the other leg starts to sink, and then pretty soon you’re battling far harder than when you were soaring above, all just to prevent yourself from being swallowed completely by that thick black slime.

That’s an apt analogy. I’m too tired to write it properly but I can feel it in my head and I can feel that it has truth. When you’re doing well much of your buoyancy is your own forward momentum, and you can channel that energy into swooping and soaring and you can glide on the natural drafts that blow your way. But when you are down in the quagmire there is nothing to ride; everything is an obstacle. Fighting to stay afloat drains you, and then because you are drained you sink lower, and you have to fight even harder to keep from drowning, which drains you further, which means you have to fight harder…

It’s a vicious cycle, a negative spiral, and you can be knocked into it by something trivial, meaningless, sometimes simply by getting tired. You’re doing well, you’re gliding, and you have some long days, and you dip lower, and suddenly your heels are splashing in grime and you’re squelching with each step and then it is too late.

……

So I guess it’s important to find spots to rest outside of the quagmire. To find a safe perch away from the wind and hunker down and give yourself an opportunity to recover.

So that’s what I’ll do tonight. No more writing. Not going to wrestle this post to make it flow, get it into shape. Going to drink some water, watch the new Fleabag, be kind to myself, get an early night.

The world isn’t all wetland. There are sanctuaries. There is space within the present moment to rest.

Day 310: Mantled

OK then let's get some words down why don't we. In the car back with Steve, we have dismantled what we mantled three days ago. Four hour drive back to Sheffield, munching gas station sandwiches (crumbs on the seats) and drinking fizzy pop, listening to Natalie Imbruglia's Torn at what can only be described as mammoth volumes, chatting about this and that. 

Steve's dad is behind us in the van, we're driving back to the shop, have to unload the aforementioned van, and the van John was using for the other job, when we get back, then load both up for the job to which Steve and his dad are driving at 5am tomorrow. 

I shan't be joining them for that one, I'm opening the pub at 9am. Then a close on Tuesday, then writing my review on Wednesday, then back with Steve dismantling another job on Thursday, then the pub all weekend, then Monday open again, probably Tuesday close, Wednesday review... and maybe a day off some time after that.

That's all going to suck a bit. But, I mean, I'm not working /now/. I'm not suffering /now/. I am in fact being paid now, travelling time is time on the clock, and what I'm doing to earn that pay is: sitting down, slurping fiery ginger beer, typing this, surreptitiously farting into my heated seat (sorry Steve). All is good.

And remember that I've chosen this. I could have told Steve I was too busy to help. I could have said I couldn't do the extra day my manager needed me at the pub this week. I could skip a Wednesday review this Wednesday, or next. I could die and get a nice long sleep for the rest of eternity.

It's my choice to not do any of that. I get so many options, and I choose this.

......

Back home now. Two vans unloaded. Two vans loaded back up. Body complaining. Mind unfurling. Got myself a nice Earl Grey, watered my plants, just need to pop this on my blog and clamber into bed. Yes, those sheets are calling to me. We're done here, you and I. Today is over. Begone with you.

Day 309: Stump

Greetings! I am le tired today, just for a change. I’ve been trying to write something all evening, and I can’t get any words to come out of my head. I’m ground down to the bone. So I guess I’d better take the stump away from the grindstone. Ease up. Stop trying to force something that isn’t there. Stop worrying about giving more than I can give. The universe has its rhythms, its natural flow, and you can’t get around that. You can’t develop muscle memory faster than muscle memory develops. You can’t ingrain new behaviours faster than behaviours ingrain. Like water, the Tao moves at its own pace. Try to go beyond this natural speed and you just end up robbing Peter to pay Paul. You take energy from where it is needed later, and risk a crash.

I have been working horribly busy shifts at the pub, and on my days off doing demanding physical labour with Steve, and at the same time as this writing film reviews and blog posts and round-ups, which I care about more than anything and desperately want to put energy into and make good - and all the while I am trying to fight off mental illness, trying to keep the constant stream of negative thoughts and clawing anxiety and that black vortex of nothingness at bay, and I am running dangerously close to empty right now. I need time and space to remember how to be human, to read poetry and eat fruit and sleep more than five hours a night.

So I’m going now. That’s it for today. See you tomorrow. Bye.

Day 308: Where he belongs

The morning sun shone through the grating in the tool displays, and the door was left open onto the grounds. We worked through the morning, the sounds of drilling and assembling, the hum of the small portable radio, filling the hall. At lunch we ate sandwiches on the grass in the sun, and some of us sat on the cold metal fence, and we looked away at the edge of the sky where mist became void, or down at our phones.

The sales team arrived in the afternoon and began unloading the products from their boxes and arranging them on the displays. We built the headers on the floor and lifted them into place above the displays that had been finished. When there were holes in the wood we screwed through the holes. When there weren’t holes we drilled holes that we could use. We lifted walls for the screens and kept them in place with supports, and screwed two-by-one to them to take the weight of the light boxes as two of us held them up and two of us screwed them in. Sawdust fell through the air and the sun caught the particles of dust and the particles glowed.

I assembled the crosswire but I was slow and I felt clumsy. I couldn’t get the drill into the crosswire at the right angle and I couldn’t get the sections of crosswire to line up. Steve worked rapidly, adroitly, a man where he belonged. He hooked his drill to the back of his belt when he was not using it with the lazy precision of a pro. He kept a pencil behind his ear and measured and marked lines for the supports, sometimes with a spirit gauge, sometimes by eye. He gave John and me little jobs to do, then stood in the hall conferring with his father about the next step, the pieces that had broken in Notts’ van, whether we were on schedule, the myriad problems and solutions and concerns to be teased out.

Low-level anxiety whispering through the room, always the possibility that they don’t get done, that something they’ve plotted on their CAD program doesn’t work in real life, that a joint cracks, a support gives, that those light boxes fall and take down many thousand pounds of equipment. So much riding on getting so many things right, and they’ve done it successfully five hundred times before, never failed yet, but every time is different, and every time holds that potential for catastrophe.

Yet Steve saunters and jokes and entertains the others, rides the anxiety with ease. He works quickly, but carefully, attentively, assiduously, through the morning and the afternoon, and tomorrow, and the day after, and most of his days alive on Earth.

You see him plod into the pub halfway through your dreary shift and you moan to him about how awful your day has been, and he nods and asks you for Stella, and you look at him and you have no idea.

Here is a man who is an expert at working, a man who moves smoothly and successfully through the working day. He is to be applauded, respected, he is right where he belongs. Get him his pint. He has earned it.