Mean Faced Figure - George

He was tall and thin almost cadaver like

Face craggy, half shaven with coldness in his eyes

Prone to fits of temper and violence

His bad humour fitted him tightly squeezing

An ever-present sneer onto his lean face

Not all bad, he was kind to his big black dog

But he was cursed with mood swings

That changed like the weather

Afflicted with mental period pains

One minute joking and laughing

The next lashing out at whoever was in range

Couldn’t understand where all this rage came from

What fuelled these toxic dark moods?

Until I met his father sitting by the fire

A sullen, scowling, mean faced figure

With hardly a word muttered

He radiated his misery

His unhappiness filled the room

And I saw the truth

The apple never falls far from the tree.

Plodding away hamster like

I have been going to the gym and joining all these peculiar people on moving platforms and bicycles plodding away hamster like.  Reminds me of those pictures of poor pigs unable to move in the their pens and reduced to swinging their heads to and fro in a repetitive fashion.  I am doing my abdominal lifts (sit ups) all wrong and these slim trainers come over and point this out and I point out that when you have no abdominal muscles this is how you do sit ups!!  Since they all have flat tight muscles with no bulges they have no idea what it feels like for me.  By far the worst thing however is seeing my reflection in the full-length mirrors that are everywhere.  As I plod along I examine this plump middle-aged lady with frizzy hair facing me and wonder in amazement just exactly who she is as in all honesty she bears no relationship to the me as I see myself.  I begin to regard it as a kind of mental torment designed to bring true self-awareness.  What is it about this age that you start to loss all feeling of being even vaguely feminine?  You grow out in all directions so that there is no hourglass figure (well ok there never was) just a barrel from the chest all the way down.  Your face develops all these lines as if your armpit creases have spread to your forehead and eyes and neck and mouth.  Black hairs begin to sprout from your chin and neck, long thick ones perhaps nature produces them in kindness as an attempt to hide the worry lines?  I have resorted to using that device you gave me Mum that pulls them out by the roots (for your legs) on my chin as now tackling them with a pair of tweezers would frankly be like painting the house with an ear bud.  So in order to regain some lost femininity I went and did a thing I swore I never would.  I got my ears pierced!  Don’t ask me why, I just wanted to look more like a woman.  Does that make sense to anyone there.  The clip earrings are too painful and I end up frowning in pain after two minutes when I wear them.  So I went down town and I had them done by a lady with a gun.  It is a bit like a staple gun and the earrings are fitted inside.  So I now have two small earrings and believe it or not I feel a sense of accomplishment – how easily the foolish are amused! 

Packing, moving, cracking up

Things that go into boxes are not so bad.  There is a kind of ordering of all the chaos of one's life that is strangely productive.  The bit I hate is when you have packed the hundredth box and you walk into an almost empty room and know there is at least another twenty boxfuls there.   Worse still are all the things that don't belong to any box, can't be dumped, sold or given away.  You end up grabbing such oddments and throwing them into a pile muttering, where the hell do you go? I am rapidly resembling a headless chicken racing round in circles with only 5 days to get out of this house.  If you were me you would not be wasting time writing a blog.  On that note I better stop.  This moving country thing is certainly up there with the divorce, bereavement and job change in terms of stress!  I promise myself not to accumulate so much junk in future.  There will be silence from me for a while, for obvious reasons.  The silence of despair!

Old Territory - a caricature of me

A day begins but I am in reverse going over old territory getting nowhere.

Making the same old promises of what I will do in the future

While revisiting exactly what I did before

Like the caged lion in the zoo

Walking up and down

Not only the same side of the cage

But placing each paw

In exactly the hollow

Moulded by years of habit

Something must be broken

To break free

Some caricature of me that I have unwittingly become

To really, like this day begin!

Choose the Opposite - be wise

This is me aged 5.  As you can see I have the doll and pram but look carefully and you can see a gun and holster.  What an odd mixture, hand on gun and pram.  Perhaps it comes from having only brothers and to this day I wonder how different things would have been had I had a sister.  However, no complaints the brothers will do fine.  Only, they don’t visit me, ever!   

I used to think it was the fact I lived in Greece for a decade and that, admittedly made visits tricky and expensive.  But actually living in the same town has the same result, no calls.  But, to be fair Northern Ireland folk are pretty strange.  Perhaps it is the same where you are?  Here, people polish and clean their houses, fuss over tiles and curtains, sofas and bedding.  They match carpets to lamp shades and a whole lot of other stuff I have no time for.  Then, they establish a routine that is stuck to.  It may be watching soaps, football, endless work or hobbies but when that routine is established not even the end of days will shift them.  You sense it, when you visit, that an inner sanctum has been breached.  The place of security that homes have become and in which others should not come.   

All of us become foreigners outside our homes and feel strangely adrift until ensconced once more on our coordinated turf, remote in hand.  The only outing tolerated is to the shops and that is too is part of the routine.  Don’t vary from the norm, don’t risk changing anything, after all so much crap happens even when you have constructed this spider’s web of activity – heaven knows what might happen if routines were abandoned. 

 Well, I reckon we need to challenge the norm.  A friend once said, if you want to do the wise thing look around and watch what just about everyone else around you is doing and choose to do the exact opposite.  There is something in that. 

To have no rain is a rare thing

It rains constantly here

Pouring out of the skies

As if a gracious Gardner is over concerned

About the greenness of our lands

These small fields

Multihued hankies

The hills bog strewn

With bleak beauty

We discuss our weather

As we do our health

Shocked at how poor both are

Comparing notes on how wet things are

‘sure no summer at all’

And happily combining both in

‘this weather really gets into my bones’

But if the sun shines, all is transformed

The green freshness looks majestic and vital

The sea turns from gray to beckoning blue

And our mountains become as nature intended

Wild with beauty

Every face is radiant with joy

In the rare sunshine

We cannot hide our delight

And want to hug ourselves

At this good fortune

A dry day with no clouds

Sure it is no wonder we dance and sing our joy

To have no rain is a rare thing

Sorry lads, could not resist!

You hear the warnings about things that appear in Facebook, Myspace etc, unexpected photographs, videos taken by others while you all unaware show aspects of yourself that you would not dream of exposing.  Horrid people are out there willing to do the dirty.  Having begun to back up all the laptops and computers as part of the house move I have been stumbling upon photographs of my kids at young ages and have been putting them up willynilly on my facebook.  Apologies for those subjected to these.  But coming across videos taken by my sons that are still on hard drives that I have never seen has proved extremely entertaining.  It worries me greatly that this is how they behave when driving a car, but it made me chuckle and will no doubt make them cringe so here goes.  Let it be a warning to this generation of mobile phone recorders.  No one is safe!