A Short Message to Time

Stop all the clocks,

No really, I'm not ready,

You're trying to push me fast

When what I need is to go steady.

They can't see me like this

They won't understand,

My head needs some fixing

This was not what I planned.

I've examined myself

And I'm found to be wanting

More life, More vitality,

More of just something.

My edge,

This is what I'm lacking.

I never felt prepared,

It'll look like I'm not bothered

It'll seem like I don't care,

I won't make an appearance because it won't be me that's there.

I can hide,

better than you can imagine.

I've spent time on my own before

I've stayed awake for fear of waking

upon a new day with tears and shaking,

This isn't who I am,

I'm strong.

I've been like that from day one

and I believe I'll carry on

but not now,

not right now,

not on this hour of this day

I need some time alone to say to myself,

"Hey!", "You can do this, you were meant to"

"and you've come along all of this way"

But not today.

For now stop the clocks, I need to rest my eyes

I need some time to focus,

I need some time to wake myself to make me feel alive.

To make me feel myself again

please don't leave me behind.

I'm asking you this time.

Snow Problem...

It's the 22^nd of December or if you have been watching South-East today as I have, the 5^th day of chaos. Yeah, take that advent, you haven't got a patch on BBC local weather news. On the fifth day of chaos South-Eastern Trains gave to me, 5 hour longer journey, 4 revised service routes, 3 stations closed, 2 press statements, and a rail service unable to cope when things get icy. I don't care about this of course, as I'm safe and sound back home with no real need for an efficient public transport system, in fact the most of my worries is how poorly my 5 days of chaos poem scanned. But this would be a whole different matter if I was in West Kent, then I'd have a much bigger problem. This problem would be angry commuters, second only to Londoners in their perceived right to have a huge moan about things beyond our control. Lines of them queueing up on station platforms looking cold, bedraggled and bewildered, unable to function without a double shot latte, stood around confusedly staring at screens pondering the implications of the delay to the 7:36 service to Charing X.

I'm unaware of how many of these commuters understand the finer workings of a rail network, but I'm guessing it's not all too many, and I'm guessing the ones who do possess such knowledge are probably rather cleverly keeping their mouths shut. You see, I am among the majority, in that I know very little about the rail network and the inner workings of a modern day train. But humour me for a minute if you will and let me outline what I do know about such things, and then in turn the reason why I would not have been queueing up to tell the news cameras how “ridiculous” this whole thing is. Firstly I know that rails are made of metal, metal which has a low latent heat and therefore in winter weather is likely to get rather cold. Secondly I know that in cold and wet conditions, it is possible that snow will fall, I know snow too is cold. I know that in consistently cold weather this snow can often turn to ice, particularly on surfaces which don't lend themselves to absorbing things, e.g. metal (stop me if you see where I'm going with this). Thirdly, I've seen videos as a school child urging me not to run across train tracks not only because of the potential zillions of vaults which could fry me in an instant but also because because trains are big and heavy and can be travelling at high speeds. This whole size thing is brilliant for transporting large quantities of people and the speed thing helps the train achieve this quickly. However, as with many things in life, this poses a problem, that is braking, slowing hundreds of tons of train down, with only a relatively small surface area on metal rails. However this feat is achievable, hence the birth of the train, Hooray!

When you throw ice into the mix though, things get a little more tricky, I've had the joy of being chauffeured around in a few cars in this recent spate of snow, and it's been tricky for cars to maintain control on icy roads. It's all a great deal of fun when you're young and on holiday. The potential for a car to become stuck in a snow drift and for you to have to push it out sounds more of a exciting challenge than a nasty threat, like one of those adventure holidays and I didn't spend a penny. But this is genuinely a problem for many people with cars, cars and snow on the whole do not mix. Now, trains are much much bigger that cars, and they have a much harder task when it comes to braking on rails, I can only imagine this job would be made much harder by ice on the rails (ice is slippery, I know that too). Trains much like cars have to share the same rails as other trains, those trains could be going slower than them, faster than them or even in a different direction to them. This is why trains have timetables, so that they don't accidentally bump into each other somewhere along the way. As a reminder, and a fail-safe mechanism, there are also a series of signals, much like traffic lights. Trains are required to stop at these when they are red (or double orange), which is fine. Providing they are travelling at the correct speed (pre-agreed on for that service on that route) they should be able to stop in plenty of time at these lights and avoid crashing. Unless of course there's something which hinders the brakes performance, for arguments sake, let's call this “ice”.

This “ice” means that trains must travel more slowly in order to brake for the lights, which makes train's journey times longer and also means they arrive less regularly at stations. This in turn makes commuters begin to speculate about the state of the nation, something they are only too good at, as any eves dropper on train journeys will tell you. The problem with their speculative efforts to improve things is, they are unwilling to ever arrive at the conclusion “This is nobody's fault, it's just one of those things that happens, There's nothing we can do and some people seem to be enjoying it so maybe I should just give it a rest”. This is much the same way as I feel about Big Brother or The Daily Mail. OK, so maybe I do think there are things that can be done about those two things, but they are at least under human control, the weather however, most certainly isn't.

So really, there's no scape goat for this problem of snow I'm afraid, you can try linking it the government, the rail services or join a wacky cult and pin it all on full body waxes and homosexuals, but it's not gonna make the blindest bit of difference. So this chaos, wait no, this mild problem that comes around maybe once every year for about a week, is something we largely just have to bloody well grow up and live with. I am aware that in countries like Germany, France, Austria etc... the public transport continues to run through tough weather conditions, but this is something that they experience every year, for months on end, and something which costs millions and millions of euros to deal with. It's going to be cheaper and easier in the long run for us to just wait the week out with a smile on our faces and try to remember that some people at least enjoy the snow. Whether it's a senile grandparent confusing song lyrics with what winter's were generally like all those years ago, or a school boy excited by the potential of missing double maths to smother snow in the face of his unknowing and now unhappy crush. There is an upside to snow isn't there? And listening to Christmas songs on your iPod at a chilly station a few days a year has to be better than standing around moaning to television cameras about someone or something that may or may not be linked to the snow, isn't it? Maybe I'm wrong, and moaning is just one of those guilty British pleasures, like queuing or... ah... well... moaning at the weather.

Seems I've been wrong all along then, as you were. But if it really is such a pleasure, could I ask that you crack a little smile or wink at the camera from now on please, just so we all know, it'd make the whole thing a lot more bearable.

Thanks.

So This Is Christmas...

...and what have you done? Well not very much to be honest, because as seems to be custom I've let other things get in the way. "Let" other things get in the way? I hear you ask - well I hear myself ask (split personality works well in monologues) - You shouldn't let a silly festival get in the way of the important things in your life, like work, hobbies and basic essentials. And you'd (I'd) be right there are things I 'need' to do and they should be the focus of my life at the moment. Anyway, Christmas tends to lose most of it's excitement when you want for more in your life than a new lego model. The streets are jammed with worried parents and relatives frantically working their way through lists trying to figure out just exactly what a their 15 year old god son they haven't seen in 3 years would want for Christmas, heaven forbid forgetting them, it's a middle class nightmare. For everyone trying to continue with their everyday life, well, they get caught up in all this muddle, parking spaces become scarce, short-cuts through shopping centres become just as long winded as the route you gave up doing 2 years ago and going for a lunchtime coffee becomes a futile task what with the hundreds of new stressed out customers littering the place with bags and small children. Then there's anybody who works in the retail industry, and that really is quite a lot of people. It becomes quite tricky trying to serve twice as many customers whilst there's an oversized Santa hat slowly working it's way down your forehead and itchy tinsel adorning every edge of clothing, not to mention the extra hours and having to navigate around that Christmas tree that there wasn't really any room for. It's enough to get anyone down really, no-one enjoys Christmas, we just go through the motions, or at least that's what I'm being told.

Every year the first Christmas advert hits the telly more prematurely than the last in a desperate bid to break the news first, as if the first place we see advertising Christmas deals is where we will go to buy everything we need. Anyone who has been or known a teenage boy will know it's usually closer to the reverse, if it's still got things left on Christmas Eve then it's getting business. The adverts are always filled with cheery shelf-stackers itching to fulfil their destiny of selling as many Bosch Power Drills as they can before the low low prices run out. Or the perfect housewife, who's left the creepy vanish lady at home babysitting the kids and laughing at stains in order to stock up on the joy that she can only find in spending vast amounts of money on the perfect offspring she's created, and the man with the face 10x smoother than that of every other. And it really doesn't matter how many celebrities want to be our best mate all of a sudden or how much time and effort has gone into creating an advert filled with merriment, it generally only elicits one response from people. "Oh no B&Q are wishing us glad tidings, it's that time again, there's no way we're re-tiling the bathroom this year then". It really is a stark reminder that the end of the year is coming and there's a million things (well a short list of things anyway) that you planned for that year that haven't been done, deadlines you haven't met and goals that weren't achieved.

So with the ever receding adverts comes the ever receding antidote, cynacism, the art of laughing about something whilst admitting defeat. Don't get me wrong I love it as much as the next person, better to laugh at these things than let them get you down, it's just, well they're getting earlier too. The first cynical article I read this year came out less than a week after I'd seen the first Christmas advert, it took the article to make me register that all this was going on. So I was sat at my desk reading this (and admittedly enjoying it) on the 18th of November, and the problem is, I wasn't even thinking about Christmas at that point. It was like a present that came too early, and so when Christmas does come round and I could do with a healthy dose of cynicism it will all have already gone. I should have saved it, I should refuse to look at anything relating to Christmas until it's within at least a few weeks of the actual event.

I didn't always think like this of course, I stopped enjoying Christmas as much in my late teens, because there was so much more that I had to do before I could be allowed to feel 'Christmassy'. There were the aptly named 'Christmas exams' to revise for, higher education's gift at this time of year, those and the coursework deadlines I got in a stocking. Thinking about Christmas then would be a distraction from what was important, it was a distraction from getting on with what I needed to do. By the time I was finished with all my work I had to schedule in a few late carol services, tune into every music channel available and generally flood myself with all things Christmas for the last few days in the lead up to the big day. However, I did get there, my blitzkrieg approach to Christmas worked, I've had consistently fun Christmas days as far back as I can remember. So I thought I had the solution, this was my approach to Christmas, a new and functional approach for the new and functional me, a way to fit in an enjoyable Christmas and deal with my responsibilities as well.

But this year something started to bother me about this, it was November and I was going through something I've come to call in recent years 'The November Blues'. You see, November has become the worst month of the year for me, I'm a student and it's around this point that everything starts getting very tense, my work load increases and my spare time and available money decreases. This year it was going to be worse than ever, the coursework deadlines I had were more important than those of previous years, money was tighter and the prospect of finding a job over the holiday's was getting slimmer and slimmer. I retreated to my room to start the inevitable and unavoidable climb towards the summit of the work mountain. Now, I could continue my mountain analogy by talking about how I was climbing solo, how I had no support line and the incoming blizzard meant I couldn't see past the ground in front of me. But this wouldn't be right, it would make it sound like I was left no choice in the matter, like I'd been abandoned and left to tackle all of this on my own. Truth is I was the one who'd cut the support ropes and I was too busy looking at the ground in front of me to check if anyone else was around. I thought this was what I needed to do, whereas in fact it just made work a slow and arduous task and it took one good day to stop me from giving up entirely, to stop me from saying "Christmas be damned, you're nothing but nonsense, a Capitalist ceremony to help companies reach their sales targets". It was on this day that I had a mini-eureka moment and decided on a new approach to the Christmas period.

The thing is, I'm afraid my first sentence was a little bit of a half lie, it's true that I haven't done much in terms of shopping etc... and I have been getting on with other things but it hasn't "got in the way" of Christmas at all, quite the reverse. You see, the decision I made late in November was that I could be as cynical about Christmas and all that entails until December, that would be my guilty pleasure, something to help me through the month and stop me from going bitter. But when December came round, I was going to leave the adverts alone, stop laughing at the silliness of it all and just enjoy it. I know it sounds crazy to just decide to enjoy something, but it's been a lot easier than I thought it would be. I've drunk mulled wine to warm me up, I've stopped to watch the street performers, I've smiled at the display of lights around the town centre. I've allowed all of these things to help "get me in the Christmas spirit" and it's worked, I feel more positive about the season now than I have done in years.

I still have a lot to do, I have a deadline coming up next week which I still have to do work for, then there's my ongoing research project, I have a last food shop to do and I haven't made a start to Christmas shopping yet. It's not going to break my back admittedly but it's still there nagging away at the back of my mind. But for the first time in years this doesn't bother me, I'm always going to have work to do and I'm always going to have various chores and upkeep to deal with, but now I'm in a Christmassy mood. I know that in a few weeks I'm going to be able to put my feet up in a warm house and spend time with friends and family, I'm going to have a real holiday, one where for just a bit I really forget about my responsibilities and enjoy myself. The thought of that is what's keeping me going, it's what now helps me work through my essays with a smile on my face.

I found what had been missing from Christmas these last few years and it was nothing external, it was me, I had been absent. I hadn't realised that "Tis the season to be jolly" was an instruction not an observation, it was a reminder for something I was actually meant to be doing. So I smile at the lady in the coffee shop wearing the flashing Santa hat and stop to applaud the magician in the shopping centre because being jolly makes things easier, and we need that at what's otherwise a very difficult time of year. So boo to the Humbuggery of the whole thing and screw the cynics because Christmas is what you make it and mine is going to be great.