Would You Just... Stop Boozing? Part Two

My sister is staying for the weekend. She's in the front room with my mum and me, talking to my mum about hotels she's been working with, looking at ornaments on the bookcase, drinking red wine. Mum also has red wine. I'm on the Earl Grey, feeling droopy tired and low and unable to concentrate. I should have more to say. This is a situation that requires booze, yet I am not boozing, so I sit there, on the edge of the conversation, a stranger even among my closest family, anxious and sober, wondering why I find everything so difficult.

I go to bed early and sit up tapping on my laptop, listening to the muffled voices drifting up from below. I wonder whether they're talking about me. Liz asking how I'm doing, whether I'm any better. Mum pausing, unsure how to answer.

I realised recently that every situation in my life includes alcohol. I'll sit cocooned at home, in a world of screens and thoughts, and I'll only perhaps have a wine, a whisky, it's not that important. But if I go out, to meet friends, parents, to go to a party, the cinema, a meal, a day off, an evening after work, I'll have to drink.

You fall into it. It's not like getting up at 7am to swig vodka from the bottle in an unfurnished bedsit with wallpaper peeling from the walls, at least not for me. It's more drinking to relieve anxiety, shyness, as a tonic for uneasy feelings, as a bandage, a crutch, a necessity, and finally just as the unconscious routine of my life.

It's easy deciding to stop boozing. What's hard is how to deal with all the neglected life you find dried and withered waiting for you after you stop. After so many years when the answer to every question was a drink, I feel clumsy and ungainly grasping for a different solution.

Even with my sister. She comes into my room, starts looking around for her toothbrush.

"In bed and it's not even midnight, you are being good," she says.

"I'm trying."

It takes me a long time to fall asleep.

***

Next morning, however, is another day. I'm up early and writing, feel growth in my bones, rolling stretch of energy. I goof around with Liz, drink tea.

We don't know what to do with the afternoon -- what do families do? -- but the weather is good and Yorkshire is Yorkshire, so we decide to walk, a walk is the thing, out to the Peaks in ranging wilds to get lost in the heather.

But I'm glum again in the car. I don't feel like walking, don't feel like chatting or listening to them chat, feel the strain of something being required of me that I am not capable of providing. I keep the feeling in check, hide it inside, but it's there, gnawing away.

Then we meet an old man and he makes things better.

"Don't be bothering with that," the old man says as Mum, Liz and I crowd around the pay-and-display machine at the car park.

"Oh, yes, har har," Liz says, rather inelegantly, because she has no idea what to say, but someone has to say something.

"Don't need no ticket," the old man, who somehow has two walking sticks, says. "Police don't come down here. Haven't put in toilets. And got no card, do you?"

"Mm?" Liz says. "It's card payment only, it says."

"Aye, but you've got no card, do you?"

"Ohh..." Liz getting it. "Well, she's paying already." Motions at Mum. "She's too honest. But thank you." Tries to smile him away.

"Only ice cream van comes here," the old man says, not moving off.

"Well," I say, looking at the ice cream van, my eyes narrowing. "Could be undercover police. Could be a sting."

The old man turns to me, levels a long glare, turns back to Liz. This always happens.

My joke having fallen on deaf ears -- perhaps literally -- I abandon Liz, and turn to help Mum, who is having an absolute nightmare with the machine, as she does with all machines.

The old man stands with Liz, who has used up her best smiles and is starting to look uncomfortable. The old man glances towards the car closest to us, a dog-on-board sticker in its window.

He clears his throat. "Dog... on... board," he growls. He looks at Liz. She looks at him. he walks off.

We could not be happier. A Thing has occurred, a genuine Thing, and it was just what we needed. We growl "dog... on... board" at each other all the way down the trail, cracking ourselves up again and again.

***

The peaks take our breath and roll it into deepening valleys and over sharp rocks up into cavernous sky, as they always do. I can never believe we live here. The Earth is splayed clear and hard below us, heather and rough trees poppling out to the horizon, the wind cratering and crushing -- jagged Northern land majestic yet cruel, making you aware more than anything of being on the side of a dying rock-planet looking out, into the allness of space. We stand and feel small. We breathe. We take photographs.

***

The release lasts the duration of the walk, and the ice cream reward, right up to the drive home. I scroll through the photographs Liz has taken, seeing my gimpy thrust-armed skeleton self, over and over, hair whisping loose from skull, morose chub-cheeked scowl though felt I was smiling, one shot after the other. What a beast I look, I think secretly in the car, handing the phone back, saying not a thing.

At home I make a risotto while they drink gin and tonics, and the rice won't final-soften, the greens lose their colour; Mum has bough frunched-up instead of flat-leaf parsley, in the end the meal tastes of nothing, I reckon -- they cry yum but I know better, and I have a headache and I'm frustrated and I want wine. They have wine. I have water.

My sober mind is so neurotic, itchy busy and aware and alert. Gently-blunting alcohol, underwater-green rounding the edges and sliding thoughts happily into place, has always, mostly, worked -- there's a reason I do it. The problem is that it blunts everything else, my writing sense, my willpower, my drive, my flame. And the hangovers are the pits. So jeering sober spike-thoughts it'll have to be.

I want to watch a film, feel without alcohol that'll be second-best escape. Want motion and sound within which to hide. But Liz isn't so keen, we can't decide upon anything. She won't watch The Grand Budapest Hotel or The Darjeeling Limited, they look too "weird" and "annoying". She won't watch The Sweet Hereafter, too slow a drama.

I tell her she's close-minded, she should give something different a chance.

"Leave her alone," Mum says.

Liz says she isn't sure she fancies a film, if anything it'd have to be easy-dumb, like Olympus has Fallen.

"Definitely fucking not," I say.

"Who's close-minded now?"

"Piss off."

Mum makes that little noise that means she's about to suggest something, beautiful Mum so shy putting herself forward, even with her own kids. And no wonder, because:

"I think back here I've got... Yes, here it is -- we could watch Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe?"

"Unngh," I sigh.

"God, no!" Liz says. "For ten years you've been trying to get me to watch Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I am not going to watch some film called [voice dripping with disdain] 'Fried Green Tomatoes at the Effing Whistle Stop Cafe.'"

Mum looks crestfallen, as always. "Rob's right, you know. You are close-minded."

Liz and I burst out laughing. Sweet old Cath pushed finally to a little sass, plus of course our shared understanding that for no discernible reason neither of us will ever, as long as we live, watch that DVD of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. And after that, though it has taken long enough, everything is finally OK.

We end up not watching a film. I say I don't mind watching the first episode of Stranger Things, which Liz wants to show me, but then we never put it on, sit instead with legs resting on each other on the sofa, Mum in her rocking chair, and we read our books; Liz helps Mum set up an Instagram account, searches on Google for clever writing hashtags for me while I copy my blog posts across to Tumblr; and we sit tapping away, heads down, on our phones but together, not the perfect family but a family, like all the rest, and the night sways on and perhaps the not boozing does have something going for it because Mum looks up at one point to see her two children sitting with her and murmurs that she is perfectly content, and for the first time in a long time I'd have to say that I agree.

Would You Just... Stop Boozing?

Well, yep, I've done what I always do. Fallen into that routine of getting a drink after work, because one can't hurt, because it's either a lonely trudge to the bus stop in grey cold to wait while the wind howls and dead-eyed office workers jab at their phones, to then hustle onto the bus trying to smile at the driver who is trying to smile back, both of us with faces like sad stone gargoyles, to sit then and jab at my phone, scrolling, scrolling, 40 minutes of this, crawling in rush-hour traffic, then 15-minute sore-footed hump from bus stop, exhausted after day running around the bar, to collapse in my room and sprawl for the evening bathed in the soft glow of my laptop screen in an empty room as I nod slowly off -- it's either this or get a nice drink of one of the nice ales I've been selling all day, to reward myself, just a little reward -- and so I get a beer and fall backwards and let it catch me, let it hold me up -- and then halfway down the glass here's Steve, trundling in in his workman gear, that stiff swinging gait of his -- "Hullo, Bobby", "Hullo, Stevie" -- and it's nice to have a friend, nice to have a beer and a friend, after a long day, and we sit and drink and laugh misery-blues, and wait see if we can get anything going.

And then Little Rob is finishing across the road, good old shuffling slouching heart-of-gold Little Rob, so we go over there for one, maybe two -- and then it's mid-shifters at mine finishing, here's Liam Straw and Zoe, heading over now, and suddenly this thing has momentum, suddenly we're together, we're a group warm and good, and everything feels all right -- Steve is buying a round, more money than he can spend on his alone self, and I move on to rum, and then I get one back because that's Right, and Straw has no money but he's ours so we've got him, and it's not long till the guys on the close will be done, the voice deep down knows I should go home but who's listening and it's all lost anyway and we share drinks and this is good.

I get drunk and lurch into awkward spider-skitting anxiousness -- they're playing pool and I should play but I can't play pool, can't do anything, and I go to the bar but I don't know the girl working -- So many new faces, I'm too old, what am I still doing here? -- and I try to act cool but I'm not cool and I'm a lost alien bug fiend -- and back at the pool table Little Rob is collecting his bag, he's on the open tomorrow, and the group is disintegrating and the happiness has gone and we are all of us doomed.

But then here's Jake and Missy, drunk, beaming, riding in on a wave of elation, in matching hi-tops and grunge shirts, bending the light around them, and we all cheer and hug and kiss, and the lurch is forgotten. Missy drinks gin and tonic and cocks her head to one side and throws out all the sass. Jake does his Jake-dance. I snuggle with them both and Jake and I talk and we're two boys and brothers and the love is eternal.

Then it's Dev Cat with my lot after the closedown and Straw and I are doing a skit and we're funny and we know it. We're in the booth behind the curtain and everyone is here and we protect one another, Baby D is beautiful yet worried, and I say words that protect him, and we get bourbon and drink it. Zoe and I are doing a thing where we laugh really loud at everything and then stop suddenly without looking at one another, and I don't know why but it's great, and the night swirls on.

They call time at Dev Cat but this can't be time so we bungle across to the Washy -- cheap Snake Dogs and Chloe eating bagged ploughman's and a mad woman is talking to us and I've got rum again and I feel bad I feel empty I feel great and it's lost all of it is going I don't know what's lost can you find what's gone we race and it swirls and will anyone find us and I can't find us but some people are getting chips and I'm getting chips but I don't eat them and I get in a taxi and go home.

And then next morning I wake up goopy and forlorn, broke-down sad and head pulsing deep-sea-rift-crash, and a tongue like old carpet, and I know I've done it again. Hangovers on my antidepressants are the worst. I eat a banana so I can take my pill and I eat two codeine also and then I go back to bed. I watch YouTube and don't get up till 4 pm, and do nothing then.

* * *

For so long I've been wanting to write more, to get up earlier, to deal with my life. And it's not like drinking is the core problem, but it's perfect avoidance -- I can pretend I'm getting back on track soon, when I get home, on my day off, soon -- but first I'll just have this one drink, I'm sad and the full solution seems impossible but meanwhile the quick solution is right here, a nice beer, medicine, and it helps, it works, even as it sows the seeds for more future sadness, and but you don't think about the future when right now you're in pain and there's something in front of you to assuage that pain.

But I spend half my wages back in bar tills, and I have brief warm highs between days of empty lows, and 2017 drifts on, the same as 2016 and 2015 before it. So I'm going to stop boozing. I don't want to stop drinking -- I like craft beer, I like a good gin and tonic, I like the idea of being someone who accepts a little messiness and imperfection in his life, who enjoys simple pleasures when they can be found. But there is a difference between a Belgian tripel once a week drinking slowly identifying notes in the aroma -- a difference between that and boozing all night after every shift too scared to go home and then hungover wailing through every day off. It is self-destructive behaviour, and it's time it stopped.

So here's this. Let's see how it goes.

Would You Just... Write a new post despite it being months since the last post in which you all but swore to write more regularly, and yet here you are, drinking after work again, sleeping till noon, killing evenings so you don't have to deal with them, killing thoughts for reasons of same, and you find yourself one night stood in your kitchen eating digestive biscuits from the tin staring not through the window but at it, at the glass, not even seeing, your eyes just resting there, zoned in truth somewhere deep down inside yourself, as you eat biscuit after biscuit, hand raising towards mouth probably the tenth now, crumbling through biscuits the way you are crumbling through life, and suddenly your vision snaps to focus and you see yourself in the glass, your reflection, and it's not a moment of clarity or anything, you continue crunching into the biscuit-teens, heading dangerously past biscuit-adolescence towards biscuit-legal-drinking-age, and you spend the rest of the evening doing Not Much As Per Usual, but the look of your eyes reflected in that glass stays with you, how little you recognised of yourself, and whether it's this, or perhaps just the new meds starting to work, but you sit down the next evening home from work after, yes, a little drink before the bus, but only a half, and you realise the moment has to be now, or you're a goner, and so let me pull back onto the main track of this question and ask, nay, beg, with every ounce of my being, for you to please, even if it is just one word, just one measly word, write a goddamned new post, right now?

OK.

Would You Just... Reopen the Tunnel?

So I don't know how much of this has become apparent, but a major motivation for writing this blog series was that I could use it to address the many varied aspects of my life about which I am frustrated, embarrassed. To explore the things that are wrong with me, one at a time, six thousand million times, until I die at a ripe old age not even a fifth of the way through my list which was in all honesty a rough and highly conservative initial estimate not really even scratching the surface of the things that are truly wrong with me.

I cleaned the grill, and I moved back in with my mum, and this was good, and allowed me to clear some space around me, gave me room to breathe.

But I find I cannot go further without first turning to some space even closer than that around me -- namely the space inside my head, because in there it is still utter pandemonium.

Honestly, it's a mess. Dark caverns filled with teetering piles of unfaced issues stacked to the ceilings. Rats of self-doubt gnawing at the walls. Lower chambers submerged in lakes of anxiety. A giant demon, a horned and suppurating arch-field, charging around on cloven hooves yelling about random past moments of shame, such as the time I mistakenly referred to Frank Ocean as Billy Ocean. A room containing a man who does nothing but perspire in front of onlookers, for eternity. Entire cave-systems dedicated to reconstructions of conversations with girls during secondary school, with the role of me played by Leonardo DiCaprio -- in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. A Tannoy on the wall that simply announces every fifteen minutes, as if it was new information, that I am a twat.

It isn't easy existing in such a cacophony of craziness. But for a long time I have had a method for coping with all this mental junk, and that has been my writing. If the space in my head is a cavern, then writing is like putting on my miner's helmet and hoisting my pick and tunnelling up to the surface, lugging handfuls of psychic detritus with me as I go. Emerging into the light, gulping down air, I will fling the mud and slime and bits of brain onto some blog somewhere, for people to rummage through. Take it, I shout, have what you will; it's yours now, I'm done.

And sometimes, among the waste, people tell me they find chunks of ore, hidden diamonds, fragile, shimmering veins of amethyst and quartz. And even if they're just saying that to be nice, and there's nothing there but a load of crap, I'm still that much crap the lighter.

For a few hours I will feel purged, at peace. Like I have fixed myself. But the problem with trying to escape your own head is that wherever you go, your own head pretty much has to follow.

Every time I finish a piece of writing I will awaken the next morning to find with dismay that I have rolled back down the tunnel I opened, that its walls have collapsed in on themselves during the night, that I am once again trapped in the darkness of my mind. All that effort, and I am right back where I started, and it's just as fucked in here as it ever was.

So basically I give up. I fall back on a different coping mechanism, which is to eke out an existence beneath the light shafts of distraction.

The cavern walls are thick, but here and there a tiny chink opens in the rock, a crack that allows stale, fetid air to filter down to me. I'm talking nights out with friends, downloaded films, the dopamine hit of social media feeds, video games where you drive fast in cars or shoot people and the people fall down and you get to think, I did that, I'm powerful.

I shamble between these brief base pleasures, pressing my face to the rock, breathing down as much air as I can. And this pattern ossifies into routine that keeps me alive, but barely. I shuffle on in torpor, resigned to my fate, even as the rampaging of various demons and hellion imps and putrescent ogre-lords -- "HEY ROB REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU THOUGHT THE RAMONES WERE ALL BROTHERS AND EVERYONE LAUGHED AT YOU? THAT WAS FUNNY. ANYWAY I MUST BE OFF. YOU'RE GOING TO DIE ALONE BY THE WAY. TA RA" -- even as their stampeding causes tremors that shake the walls and begin to block the light shafts in one by one.

But still I'll plod along out of habit, hoping some last vestiges of air will continue to seep through, mostly finding nothing. Distractions cease to distract. I stop being able to concentrate on films or games, I sit in bars letting conversations wash over me, I get drunk and night blurs into day and the cavern grows darker and in the darkness I sense shapes gathering, the brush of mottled hide at my back, the flap of leathery wing, a glint of tooth.

Eventually of course the dread builds to such a crescendo, I become so starved of oxygen, that I break out of my routine and strap on my mining gear and make one more great expedition to the surface, perhaps wrestling one of the foul beasts that has been stalking me up as I go. I'll be a different person during this ascent, determined and focused, and I will smash through the crust to the outside world with a cry, hurling the beast away from me, and the beast in light of day will turn out to be nothing more than a common bat, or a frog, and will flutter or ribbit off into the night, and I will breathe a sigh of relief and pass out from exhaustion, finally free.

And then morning will dawn, bleak and grey, and I will open my eyes to find I am lying on cold stone back in the darkness of the cavern, and something in the shadows will be stirring, something that cannot just be a bat, and the thing will smile a serrated smile, and cackle, and the whole process will begin again.

***

So that has been the cycle of my life for many years now. But not this time. Okay, the previous two posts were mostly fuelled by the pent-up energy amassed from festering too long down in the caves, but this one was written when I'd normally be giving up, getting drunk.

It was difficult. Setting off into that collapsed tunnel every morning, to chip away thanklessly, with all the demons crowding around me trying to force me back down. Hitting blockages of pure rock and having to tunnel round far longer routes, or even go back the way I came and try to open another tunnel. Not knowing when I'd emerge, whether I ever would.

It would be so easy if this wasn't the case. If my head wasn't dark, if it was instead like one of those grand ballrooms that other people must have in their heads, open spaces with light from expensive chandeliers gently coruscating, demure residents engaged in polite chit-chat, perhaps a waiter passing around trays of amuse-bouches. It would be so easy if there was a passageway to the outside world open at all times, a wide, poplar-lined gravel drive along which butlers would carry neatly gift-wrapped presents for the waiting masses, who would (the masses would) cheer and chant my name and write nice things about me in broadsheet newspapers.

But no. I've got dingy basements with tribes of scabrous toad-men charging into walls and waggling their flocculent little penises at one another and vomiting down themselves, and I have to sweat and grunt away in cramped tunnels just to squeeze weird excretions like this post out of openings that immediately close back over.

But okay. If that's my life, then okay. The work is hard, tiring, often frustrating, sometimes leads nowhere. But okay. It's also rewarding, complexly enjoyable, cathartic. The actual action of pick against rock, pick against rock, tip-tap-tap, is not, under everything, a bad way to spend the day. And at its core it feels... I don't know, necessary.

Yes, inside my skull there may be dark caverns. But I have a feeling that many people's heads are darker than they'd care to admit, and the more light I shine into my own, the more I go down day after day and reopen that tunnel, the more it might let those people know that they are not alone, that they do not have to be afraid.

Would You Just... Help Your Mum With The Shopping?

I'm at my mum's house trying to clean her kitchen. "Trying" being the operative word.

My mum is a hoarder. Not in the sense of stacking newspapers dating back to the seventies against the walls, or hiding mason jars filled with urine under the beds, but she does have trouble throwing things away. She wants to keep everything, finds meaning, memory, in everything.

"What about this?" I say, holding up a small and badly-painted plastic dog figurine, the kind you might get free with an RSPCA membership, perhaps.

"Oh, no," my mum says. "He's special."

"These?" I point to the mountain of half-empty Tic Tac boxes I've found.

Long sigh. "Well, I suppose. Although if they're different flavours..."

I usually leave my mum to her Ways. I'm not home often, and the odd evenings I do pop by we find enough about politics and religion and my future to argue about without bringing her house into it. But this is different. My girlfriend and I, after a long period pretending things were working when they evidently were not, have broken up, and lacking anywhere more sensible to go it now appears I will be staying back with my mum for a while.

There's not much it would be fair to say about the break up. My life is material for my writing; Charlie's is not. I hope she's going to be happier eventually without me, that we'll still be friends, all those cliches you cling to in a sea of terror and uncertainty.

Anyway, after two days on my friend's sofa drinking whisky and watching, inexplicably, Mythbusters and Singin' in the Rain, I decide I am not going to fall apart, so I cook my friend and his girlfriend a risotto, then go home to my mum's.

This is not my house, I tell myself later, standing in the kitchen. This is my mum's house. She has a right to keep it however she wants. If she finds calm in clutter then that's fine.

Except, are these birch leaves here? Brought back from a walk last autumn, maybe, and now crumbling to dust beneath, what? a pile of ancient Spanish phrase books, some dog-grooming leaflets for the now dead dog, a one-legged, mud-encrusted action figure from my youth, rediscovered I presume while gardening, and a veritable smorgasbord, a cornucopia, of phone and camera chargers, some of these surely from phones and cameras that haven't been turned on since before Live and Kicking went off the telly.

Perhaps I will do a little light clearing, actually. But I'll be understanding. I won't interfere; I will help.

"This?" I say ten minutes later, waving a car-parking voucher from a folk festival held in 2013 at my mum's face in an accusatory manner. "Surely you don't still need this?"

"That will go upstairs," she says, "with the others."

"Yes but are you going to put it upstairs, or are you going to drop it in the other room and then I'll find it under a load of old crosswords in six months time?"

"Oh, Robert..."

As far as I can make sense of my mother's system, she seems to have three baskets in this kitchen for odds and ends, either sort of inchoate, nebulous planets towards which odds and ends are being pulled from the asteroid fields of odds and ends littering the rest of the room, or else the odds and ends are the inhabitants of the basket-planets, now migrating across the room's galaxy to find new homes among the stars (or kitchen appliances) -- it's hard to tell. There is also an odds and ends drawer, that will no longer open all the way, that probably contains clues to the birth of the universe, but I just cannot even think about that drawer right now.

I condense the baskets into one, fit all the odds and ends from the rest of the room into it. I pull out the microwave and the toaster and the bread bin, brush away all the crumbs and leaf residue and sticker-ties from loaves of bread that have accumulated behind. I wipe the counter tops, clear and wipe the table. I scrub the fronts of the cupboards and around the sink and behind the collection of Interesting Shells and Rocks (?). The grill, thankfully, is already relatively clean, but I do under the hobs and the oven front and around the dials. I sort out the Things Under the Table. I sweep the floor.

That's okay, I think. Everything is okay. I cook tea for us, serve tea, respond to my mother's conversational prompts -- Yes, it's tough, it hurts, but I think everything is going to be okay --, smile, take the plates out, wash up. Then I go to my room and close the door and spend the rest of the night worrying that everything is really not going to be okay.

* * *

The office chair is a problem. It's my day off and Charlie is back home with her family and we've arranged that now is a sensible time for me to pick up my belongings from her flat. No longer our flat. It's these little thoughts that are the most serrated. Other examples: We'll never now finish watching season two of Mr Robot together. How will Charlie complete the Day of the Tentacle remaster without my Playstation? And what should I do about my office chair, the one Charlie paid for the day we went to Ikea, when I zoomed about on the trolley like a child instead of thinking about the future, before Charlie got angry and I got to pretend it wasn't my fault? I want to offer to pay for the chair, but there's something about this that feels horrendously pragmatic, cold, like we're negotiating a business deal. But to just take the chair would be wrong.

I text Charlie, offering to pay.

"The chair was a present," she replies. "I don't want anything for it."

I feel sick.

I put the chair in the car, along with my clothes, my PC, my books. The guitars I can barely play. The DVD collection I haven't added to since 2010. All the stupid videogames with the stupid war-men on their covers.

I sit with the cat for a long time. She attacks my hand, bounds away. She doesn't seem to comprehend the gravity of the situation. I say goodbye to her, close the door, leave.

Back at my mum's there is no space on my floor left on which to stand. I look at all my junk splayed about the room. A sorry account for a life. Yet all I have left to hold onto. That night I fall asleep under floral-patterned spare covers, feeling that I am slipping through the gaps between the cardboard boxes and bin bags into a weightless void beyond. I feel like I am disappearing.

* * *

The next morning, however, I have not slipped, have not disappeared. I am still here.

My mother makes coffee, talks about the Archers -- which programme apparently makes her more angry than some real-world wars, yet cannot ever be missed -- then asks me if I will go to Sainsbury's with her.

I have lived back home before, as an adult, and I was bad at it. I acted like an entitled adolescent. I would get in at 3am, drunk, maybe stoned, fix myself maybe one last gin and tonic from my mum's spirit shelf (telling myself vaguely I'd buy replacement bottles some time, never doing it), then lock myself in my room and watch films or play games, feeling unhappy, until it was time to go back to the job I hated. I treated my mum horribly, as if it was her fault I was so miserable. I sat in silent disdain through her meandering stories at the dinner table, mocked her offers to get me out of the house on a walk to the countryside -- "Thanks all the same but actually I don't fancy spending my one day away from the purgatory of that job walking around a large body of water discussing farm-based radio soap operas with my mother," -- and, most of all, I despised being asked if I would go to Sainsbury's with her.

I would slouch along the aisles, scowling, saying I didn't care what we bought, I didn't know when I'd be around for tea, I'd just eat out or something, whatever. I'd be as uncooperative as possible, hoping negative reinforcement would condition my mum into never asking me along again. I would basically be a terrible prick.

Remembering those days now I think about how much I don't want to be that person. How terrified I am of still being that person.

"Of course I'll come to Sainsbury's," I say. "Shall we go now?"

In the car down, as my mother talks about Karen, who I don't know, who was the teaching assistant before Geraldine, or was it Katie? No, it was Geraldine, because it was Geraldine who, her husband Keith, it was very sad actually, Keith had lost his brother Gavin, and Keith hadn't really recovered, although... no, well of course that was the year before, or... God, it wasn't Gavin was it? It was Richard -- as my mother talks, I look at her, think how lonely she must be in the house by herself sometimes, about how she texts me whenever she's in town asking if I want to meet for a coffee and I reply, three days later, "Sorry wasn't around", and she texts back that she loves me, and I don't reply.

"So yes," I say. "Geraldine's husband...?"

We walk around Sainsbury's, chat. I pick up a few Belgian beers, don't say anything about my mother's silence, accept that she worries about my drinking, accept that she is making an effort not to comment.

Back home I bring the shopping in from the car, put it away, offer to cook.

Then I sort out my room. I empty the cupboards and drawers, the boxes and bags, of my own odds and ends, mementos left over from shared houses, old jobs, university, school. I put a few letters, notebooks, old drawings to one side, throw the rest away. I bag up for charity all the clothes I don't want. I strip everything down, dust. Then I put out my books, and the names -- Foster Wallace, Delillo, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Kerouac, Fitzgerald, Plath, Woolf -- look down on me approvingly.

I don't know. It's all a bit fucked. But maybe it will be okay. Maybe a step backwards isn't always a step back. When you've lost your footing, for example. When you've walked head-down into a bog. Sometimes the best way forwards is actually backwards, just a little.

***

I go downstairs. The light is fading. Mum is standing in the half-light staring out of the window, one hand lightly touching the locket she wears about her neck.

"I could get rid of a few bits myself, I suppose," she says. "Take a few bits to the charity shop. I won't be around forever, after all, and I hate the thought of you and Liz having to deal with everything when I'm gone. That wouldn't be fair on you."

I put my arms around her. She is very small next to me.

"I'm sorry I haven't been a very good son," I say.

"Nonsense," she says.

We stay like that a while.

Would You Just... Clean the Grill?

I am about to do something unconventional, radical, perhaps even heroic. I am about to clean the grill.

I know.

I hate cleaning the grill. I have always hated cleaning the grill. I remember childhood as one long uninterrupted stretch of wonder and joy, pretty much because I spent it never having to clean any grills.

At 15 I could be found in the kitchen of my family home, staring at the grill with tilted head, silently, like that dinosaur trying to comprehend existence in Tree of Life. Cleaning that grill must be a nightmare, I began to think. I'm glad that has nothing whatsoever to do with me.

At university I was appropriately adequate in many ways. I finished my assignments on time and washed my pots and only occasionally maxed-out my overdraft. But the grill was just not my domain. I found if I left it long enough someone else would get angry and clean it for me -- and that person's anger was always infinitely preferable to actually doing the grill myself.

But then university was over and I was living back at home, pretending I didn't need a job because I was going to be the next Jack Kerouac, and suddenly my mother had decided the rules had changed.

She would return from work and I would hastily tab out of World of Warcraft, back to the Word document in which had been scrawled the same lousy four paragraphs for weeks, and my mother would come upstairs and ask how the writing was going, and I would squint at my lousy four paragraphs and say, Yes, good thanks, yes. And my mother would put her arm on my chair, and I wouldn't say anything. And she would peer out of the window, and I wouldn't say anything. And she would walk back towards the door, and my fingers would be hovering over the alt and tab keys, and she would be at the door, through it, gone -- and then she would turn around, like fucking Colombo, and offhandedly ask if I would mind quickly cleaning the grill.

And I would stomp downstairs, muttering how the grill wasn't even dirty, I hadn't even used it, that Jack Kerouac never would have finished On the Road if he had been perpetually forced to clean grills like this, and I would get to the grill, and in fairness it would look like the back seat of the car in that scene in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta accidentally shoots Marvin in the face.

But I had meandering poetic romans-à-clef to be writing -- or at least night elf druids to be levelling up -- so I would do with that grill what Harvey Keitel had the mobsters do with that car in Pulp Fiction: I would gather up all the sodden old tin foil and throw it away, and then basically ensconce the grill pan and all the crumbs and congealed fat and bits of crisped bacon in new foil, so that if someone peered close the subterfuge would not hold, but from a distance any mum-cops in the area might be fooled. And then I would make cheese on toast and go back to World of Warcraft.

***

Of course now, a decade later, I'm a proper adult, which means I don't even change the foil in the grill. I just leave it all and hope that, like hair, it will eventually start regulating itself.

Except the roguishly deprecating tone I've engendered here belies the truth of the situation, which is that I am miserable. My girlfriend will come in from her exhausting job as a pub manager -- which job provides the flat in which we both reside -- and I'll hastily tab away from, I don't know, a Wikipedia page detailing Captain America's role in the 1982 Marvel comic book cross-over event Contest of Champions, say, back to the Blogger draft in which has been scrawled the same lousy four paragraphs for an eternity, and she, my girlfriend, will ask how the writing is going, and I will squint at my lousy four paragraphs and mutter, Yes, good thanks, yes.

And it's all fucked. I don't know what to write. If I'm not up for work or something that will let anyone but myself down then I'll just stay in bed all day, and the flat is a tip, and I've got no clean socks, and I keep reading the first page of books and then throwing them aside, and there's this weight pressing down on my chest that has been pressing down in some form or another for as long as I can remember, and it's like everything is too heavy, I can't lift any of it off, it's all fucked...

And then here I am in the kitchen one day looking at all the dishes feeling the weight pressing down, and sort of slowly yet all at once it strikes me that although I can't lift off the heavier weights, the ones about my career and my future and the apparent inexorability of my failure, there are smaller, more manageable weights that I could lift off, if I actually so desired, and one of these, perhaps the smallest, so small that it would almost be more ridiculous to not do it, is cleaning the grill.

So I am going to clean the grill.

***

And immediately I find I can breathe easier. Although, yes, only a minuscule weight, it is the first time anything has been lifted off rather than added in aeons, and it fills me with hope. Life is not so bad. You do little bits and they add up to big bits, and eventually you are free. The trick is to go slowly, and go easy on yourself. The grill today, then later I will watch Netflix, maybe have a beer, and I'll be prepared to tackle more tomorrow.

But what will I watch on Netflix? Do they have Aliens on Netflix? I love Aliens so much. It's not got the majesty of the original Alien, of course -- what does? -- but it is basically schlocky 80s B-movie as apotheosis. I tell you what, when you're having a beer, a few beers, and watching Aliens -- when those marines are running around in their bandanas, and Bill Paxton is shouting "Game over man, whoah man, we're toast man," and Michael Biehn is being Michael Biehn -- when the alien queen detaches from her flaming egg sack -- when that reveal comes of Ripley in her mech suit...

... Or is it Bill Pullman? Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman are similar, no? Is this a thing? Do people know about this?

I continue with such thoughts for about half an hour, until I realise I've spent all the reward from cleaning the grill but have as of yet not actually cleaned the grill, and that there is nothing left to do but go and clean the grill, and I instantly start feeling miserable again.

I motivate myself all over again, and head into the kitchen. To the cupboard where we keep the tin foil. There is no tin foil.

What the Paxton?

I swear, every time I try to drag myself out of this pit, God comes and puts some insurmountable obstacle in my way, like he doesn't want me to succeed, like he wants me to stay suffering here forever. How are you supposed to fight against God?

No, Rob. Stop inventing deities to blame for your inability to complete basic household chores. Just go to the shop for more tin foil.

I go to the shop. Outside it is balmy, warm, wonderful, and everything feels great. I'm moving, life is happening, we can do this.

My cheeriness lasts for two and a half minutes, until I arrive at the shop and the lady points me to the wrong aisle for tin foil, and I decide the best course of action is to stand there pretending to choose from what is actually a selection of tinned goods until she disappears and I can go looking myself -- except then the lady realises her mistake and comes jogging back, and I have to yell at her that It's fine, it's absolutely fine, I wanted butter beans anyway. Which I definitely didn't.

Then at the counter I put my basket down before the woman in front has finished paying, and I don't know what to do, whether to draw attention to the awkwardness by picking the basket up again, so I just hover there too close while the woman buys lottery tickets and chats to the cashier. I'm invading this chat, I think. My arms hang at my side like repugnant flippers. I can't for the life of me remember how people are supposed to stand.

Finally, eight years later, it is my turn. I act too northern with the cashier to mask my embarrassment, but it comes off weird and I know she can tell I'm from the posh end of Sheffield, that I don't belong here. All walk home I am distressed, gloomy. I think of others my age, struggling with promotions and babies and marriages, and here I am struggling to buy tin foil from a shop. I am wretched.

But the only thing more wretched, I decide as I return, would be to use my self-pity as an excuse to not clean the grill. I really am going to have to clean this grill.

So I get started -- by planning out what I'll do. First the dishes in the sink will need washing to make room. Which means actually first I'll have to put the dry dishes away. I hate that this is a thing. Why don't we just build kitchens with huge draining boards instead of cupboards, and then we could store dishes where they dry, thus removing a pointless and mundane job from existence? The same with clothes. Replace wardrobes with massive clothes horses, then we'd never again have to stress over folding t-shirts and the sides not being even and having to shake them out and try again, and finding pairs for all the socks, and staring at the wall as the light fades and the evening draws in, wondering whether it's even worth being alive in such a bourgeois existence that apparently consists of nothing but putting possessions in drawers and then taking them out again, over and over, until death comes for us hunched and--

--Oh, that's the dishes put away. Wasn't so bad.

I wash the dishes in the sink. I wash the big roasting pan that we inexplicably store on top of the grill where it gets covered in dust and grease. I bet that was my girlfriend's idea, I think. I find a better home for the roasting pan, on top of the highest cupboard where neither of us can reach.

Finally it is the grill's turn. The old tin foil wilts in my hands. Underneath is a fatty pool of despair. I scrape out the pool with a spatula. I attack the grill pan with wire wool, green scourer, sponge. I attack the grill rack with same. I put it to dry.

I rinse out the empty wine bottles, the empty milk carton. I clean the hobs, the front of the oven, the kitchen tiles. I look around, panting. I do inside the sink, the back of the sink, wash out the cutlery tub with all the pond water in the bottom. I take out the recycling. I empty the cat's litter tray, take the bins out, sweep the floor. I get it all done, do it all.

***

It is later. We're watching Netflix. I tell my girlfriend I'm making a brew. I go to the kitchen, stand in the middle of the room, look around. The grill is gleaming. Everything is gleaming.

This will be easy, I think. All I have to do is apply today's technique to every issue in my life that I've allowed to get on top of me over the past decade, and continue applying it every day for the rest of my life. Yes, I think. Easy.

On Brexits, Portents

Last Friday, as the pound plummeted and the markets tanked, as our prime minister shuffled out of the house we gifted him to announce that, with a sluice gate of excrement opened above our heads, he felt that his job was now complete -- as Scotland muttered of independence and Labour began to implode, I was in Bruges, getting drunk. Wandering the old town's cobbled streets, its gently arcing canals, a few bottles of Chimay the heavier, I found my gaze pulled upwards towards the fronts of grand hotels, where, tousled by a soft June breeze, fluttered the unmistakable azure-blues and golds of the European Flag.

I looked at the stars upon these flags, each representing a distinct nation, arrayed in a chain of unity and cooperation, strengthened from the outside, joined within, facing the darkness of the unknown together, and I thought about how that morning one of those stars, our own, had voted to leave the circle, to break the chain -- and I grieved.

***

The coming years will be tough. Taxes will rise. Food prices will rise. Mortgages will rise. Wages, in relation to inflation, will likely fall. In free-market capitalism the only god is profit, and he must be appeased. It will not be the richest who sacrifice. It will be the poor, as always, who will become poorer.

In the power vacuum created by the collapse of the two major political parties, if they continue on track, it is not impossible to envisage a far-right organisation, whether Ukip or someone new, gaining traction. The weapons that we use to combat such evils, weapons of compassion, creativity, cultural exchange, the enriching worth of diversity, have all been dulled by the referendum result.

Yes, in such times grief feels appropriate. But let us be aware, those of us who mourn, of the form we allow our mourning to take, especially as shock turns to anger, as a desire to act sets in, and we begin looking for people to blame. Anger, carefully directed, can be a powerful tool, but its power is dangerous, a charging horse of which it is all too easy to lose the reigns.

***

I have no qualms, though, being angry at David Cameron. There has been praise for the poise with which he has accepted defeat this past week, for his leaving with, as one friend put it, "his head held high."

Perhaps. Yet he is leaving office for a life of luxury, free to spend the gains from his many financial interests away from the public eye, no longer having to pretend he enjoys riding that bike of his everywhere he goes. I wonder for how long his wife will keep that Nissan Micra he bought her.

Never mind the past week, Cameron's actions these past years have epitomised a Bullingdon Club arrogance for which we are all now paying the price. Cameron was supposed to be the captain of our country's ship, yet to quell dissent among his officers he let the crew below deck vote on the direction we would sail -- a crew who, meaning no offence, did not have a view from the crow's nest, had no access to navigational charts, were not familiar with the geography of the surrounding regions. And when this crew inevitably plotted a course straight into the largest storm on the horizon, our captain jumped overboard, presumably onto a raft made from our rations, to float away to a beach on the Cayman Islands. Holding your head high at such a time seems less like poise to me, and more like sharp insult.

And then there is Nigel Farage. Seeing the man gurning his way through European parliament this week, cackling with whatever the word is for the polar opposite of magnanimity, I felt like I was watching someone who had been spanked in childhood so often, and with such vigour, that he could no longer experience pleasure unless it was attached to a sense of being utterly despised. His cheap attacks on MEPs appeared less like healthy democracy and more like that one boy at school who can only gain attention by smearing shit on his hand and chasing children around the playground with it. That this man may be offered anything more in his future than sympathetic looks and some in-depth group therapy is simply unthinkable.

As for Boris Johnson, I still cannot decide whether this wealthy ex-journalist who purposefully musses his hair before public appearances, who doesn't understand how a capo works, is a blustering buffoon, careening through intra-continental relations as he careens through small Japanese children, or else some kind of malevolent, Playdough-faced Bond villain. The announcement today that he will not be standing for Tory leadership only serves to confound matters.

While we're angry, of course, we should reserve some of that anger for Thatcher. We should always reserve some for Thatcher. To continue the earlier seafaring analogy, it is true that by the 70s, by the Winter of Discontent, our ship was listing heavily, its beams straining, taking on water. But as captain, Thatcher's response was to strengthen the hull by stealing from internal supports, to create affluent officers by destroying morale among the poorest of the crew. She gilded the upper cabins, sold the rights to manufacture sails to wealthy cloth merchants, yet down below entire decks were being left to rot. Pitilessly, myopically, her government shovelled up all the shit that had been plaguing the vessel, and then dumped it into the hold with the poor, telling those it buried that if they couldn't dig their way out it was their own fault for being weak and lazy.

How can we be surprised that communities in Sunderland, in Lincolnshire, in the townships surrounding Sheffield where I live, have voted overwhelmingly in favour of Leave. For generations we have built up the City, made cosy our leafy suburbs, and it has been working-class communities that have paid. For generations these people have been abandoned to fear and despair, and now they have finally been given a voice, and that voice has cried out for change.

Yes, they're wrong to blame immigration and the EU for their problems, they have been manipulated by heartless chancers. But the point is they have problems, serious ones, and we have ignored them for too long. It is not hard to goad beaten animals into attacking other animals, while those holding the clubs become rich off the violence. Perhaps the middle-classes, never having been locked in such cages, could use their energy more effectively than by getting appalled at a whipped beast for the ferocity of its snarl.

Because I've still got a little anger left in me, and it feels only fair to end this charge by turning it towards ourselves.

Seventy years ago our continent, our world, was at war with itself. We ended that war by dropping two bombs, on the city of Hiroshima, the port of Nagasaki, that instantaneously liquefied 120,000 factory workers, labourers, nurses, schoolchildren. Countless more died in the months that followed.

We committed this act of unimaginable evil, we tell ourselves, to prevent the dragging out of further pointless, meaningless evil, to get all the evil over with in one final burning, gasping scream, so that the years that followed might be marked with a lasting peace.

And for some of us they have been. Those melted nurses, all the divisions of soldiers lying crumpled across the Earth's fields, sowed with their blood a freedom that you and I still reap today. We have been gifted prosperity, comfort, calm.

And how have we spent that gift? Playing World of Warcraft. Ordering pizzas to our doors baked with bits of hotdog meat stuffed inside their crusts. Arguing over teaser-trailers for Marvel superhero films. Ours was a world of limitless potential, paid for with untold sacrifice, and we wasted it drinking frappuccinos and complaining that our Snapchat filters made our cheeks look fat.

Yes, we are cultured, sophisticated, knew the many benefits of EU membership. How could we not, with our first-class educations, our family holidays to Cannes, our university halls filled with interesting Europeans, our jobs in the city among the cream of the continental crop? We enjoy the benefits every day. I imagine that for someone whose life contains none of these things, but instead betting shops, job centres, John Smiths, cocaine, the value of wealthy politicians in Brussels must feel rather more remote.

We awoke last Friday in shock, fearful for the first time for our futures. But many in our country have been fearful all their lives. The flag they fly says nothing of unity between distant stars, but tells the simple story of a numbing blank white tedium, and a central red cross marking a single spot, the self, where they must stand strong whatever the odds. You and I may only now be feeling the first portentous raindrops upon our quaint patio doors, but make no mistake: this storm has been brewing for a long time.

***

On days when I'm feeling down I like to listen to videos by Jon Kabat-Zinn, this nice old man who runs a program of mindfulness meditation for those suffering from chronic pain, mental disorders, terminal illnesses. In the videos, Kabat-Zinn encourages patients to turn not away from the suffering of their bodies but towards it, to look directly at it, with eyes of awareness and curiosity, and in doing so to find a place beyond the suffering, an aspect of the self rooted in the present moment, where whatever is happening may be allowed to happen, to play itself out. Moments of pain, Kabat-Zinn says, deserve to be experienced as fully as any other moments of our lives -- sometimes are the only moments of our lives. And experiencing them, though we would never ask that they continue, may nevertheless teach us much, if we are prepared to listen.

Home, now, from Bruges, I find myself walking instead around the polished floors of my local shopping centre, in Beighton, an ex-mining village to the south of Sheffield. Residents here voted leave, by a vast majority.

In shop windows gaudy signs advertise Amazing Value! Everything £1 on goods worth much less than a pound. 25% is slashed from the price of clothes that still turn a profit because they are made by women in Bangladesh for 23p an hour. Cakes glisten with wet icing sugar that masks their partially hydrogenated oils, their artificial flavourings, their petroleum-based additives. In CeX, teens, those in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, trade copies of second-hand videogames, on whose covers armed men are poised in stoic silhouette against backdrops of orgiastic destruction. McDonald's is, as ever, booming.

Our country, it seems to me, is a kind of person, a body, a connected organism. And this organism is in pain. On the streets of my hometown I turn my eyes not away from but towards this pain, towards the overweight, those on mobility scooters bedecked in Union Jacks, those carrying bags of fast food, cans of cheap lager -- and meeting my gaze I see not demons or enemies, but people, mothers, grandparents, sons, struggling on through hardship they never asked for, whose reasons they may never understand. There has been a storm coming for many years. For those of us who are concerned, I believe it is time we began thinking about what we can do to help.