Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 2:38 pm
What's up?
I learned something this week. I learned how small a thing it can be that my happiness depends on.
It was the end of the day. I'd left the office by the main entrance and was trotting round to the couryard at the back of the building where I'd parked the SV. As I passed the barrier and saw the bike standing there alone I was filled with a kind of admiration. I began to think happily of the ride home, of supper and of the relaxing evening I had planned for myself. Crossing the courtyard, I unzipped my trouser pocket and felt inside for my bike keys. Bugger! They weren't there. My first though was that I must have left them on my desk.
But back in the office I soon discovered that they weren’t on my desk. Neither were they in it, and they weren't under it either. They weren’t in the meeting room where I'd spent a good part of the afternoon, or in the toilet (where I have a habit of leaving things) or lying in the corridors. In fact, they weren’t anywhere. Bugger! Bugger! Bugger! I started to think that I must have dropped them outside in the street when I came back to the office after lunch. I didn't want to think that but it was beginning to seem rather likely. On my way out of the building, I gave a description of my keys to the security guard, moaned bitterly to a departing colleague, and supressed the desire to kick something. Five minutes later, I had scoured the area round the building. Ten minutes after that and I was rifling through a huge box of lost vehicle keys at the nearby police station. Nothing!
As I walked back towards the town centre (stubbornly refusing to use the underpass and nearly getting mown down by a speeding motorist) I began to admit to myself that the chances of finding them now were not good. I would have to leave the bike in the courtard and catch a train home. Buggeration! I’d been avoiding that thought. A man without a bike, in my view, is like Poor Tom on the stormy Heath in Act 3 of King Lear - a poor forked creature with nothing to define him and barely able to call himself human.
A bike that is ridden every day is an intimate beast. It's engine note works its way into your arms and legs; it gets into your head. It conditions the way you walk and think and how your nerves and muscles act and react. After years of riding on two wheels, alert to every shift and movement of the bike, I am no longer designed to sit calmly on a train, or programmed to travel passively from A to B with my fellow human beings. With those realisations revolving sadly round my head, I tramped towards the station. To tell the truth, I was having difficulty leaving. I couldn't quite give up the idea that I might still find my keys if I looked a little harder. And I was wholly unhappy about abandoning the bike in the courtyard. That felt like a bereavment, a severance. I had to summon up every bit of common sense and willpower to march myself away from the office and towards the station.
As I walked, I thought about the predicament I now found myself in. And the more I thought about it, the worse my situation appeared to be. For one thing, I didn’t have any spare keys. They’d been nicked or lost at a rally a couple of years ago when my rucksack mysteriously disappeared. The key numbers were written down in my Suzuki service record book and that had been in the rucksack too. Attached to the set I'd just lost was my only surviving alarm fob. So the SV was now not only un-startable, but immobilised as well.
And that wasn't all: several years ago, I'd had the ignition barrel, replaced after it had jammed. Since then, I have one key to fire up the SV, and another to open the tank and the tail. Getting all this sorted was going to cost, I realised. Pound signs span dizzily round my head and the resulting dismay thudded down uncomfortably into my gut. I was still recovering from a huge (mostly bike-related) financial shock. Only a few weeks previously I'd had to fork out nearly £2,000. Thoughts of straws and camels went through my head and several other unpleasant things besides.
I also fretted about security. The more I imagined the SV standing in the courtyard overnight in full view of the road, the more I catastrophised. The courtyard is directly opposite and visible from the county court. Customers of Her Majesty's justice system would not be arriving till tomorrow morning, of course, but the mere proximity of the building put ideas into my head and made me feel uneasy.
An image took hold of coming back to Stevenage with a lock and chain and attaching the SV to the courtyard railings. I groaned audibly. I'd already given up on the idea of a relaxed supper and a pleasant evening watching a couple of videos with a mate. Now I was looking forward to an evening standing on draughty stations and rattling up and down the line in dusty carriages. So miserable an idea was this that I was almost relieved (no, I was relieved) to recall that my lock keys were on the key ring I had just lost. So that was that! The SV would have to take her chances as she was.
If something like this had happened under more normal circumstances, I would have got pissed off for a couple of hours, and then felt stressed and wretched. I would have shouted, wailed inwardly, been rude to someone for trying to be helpful, then calmed down. After that, I would have started - glumly - working out what I was going to do.
As it happened, though, I wasn’t in a ‘normal’ state of mind. I’d had a couple of bad months which had left me permanently stressed. So, instead of sounding off, I ruminated silently and pointlessly. I fretted all throughout that evening and then right on through a sleepless night. The next morning, bleary eyed and not entirely rational, I prepared for work, still chewing up the same old sweaty thoughts. I nagged myself on the train, and began to entertain a hot sensation in my belly which felt like a really bad meal that wouldn’t lie down. As I climbed the office stairs, half unable to believe what had happened, half silently complaining that it had, I became increasingly irritable at the thought of having to work.
As I came through the door to the first floor I saw Ann, seated in front of her PC. I've known Ann for years. She's a lovely person, prone to worry incessantly, usually about others. She looked up as I came in and called out my name.
“Have you lost anything?” she asked, holding up something that looked suspiciously like a bunch of keys. “You left them on my desk, yesterday. I've been trying to ring you.”
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This morning, going into work, the roads were exceptionally clear and I was able to haul the SV right over on several of the roundabouts. Yay! I also had a truly great motorcycling moment on the tight S-bend on the way into town. It was a good ride. Ten minutes later, though, as I parked the SV in the courtyard, and made for the main entrance, my fifteen minutes of exhilaration slumped and I started feeling more than ordinarily flat and low. The problem was this: there were no longer any little dramas in my life to raise the stakes and prevent me getting bored. Funny that!
I’ve just noticed it is two months since my last blog entry. I can’t believe it is that long. I've been having a bad time. One evening after getting home from work, I sat down and cried and realised I was getting seriously depressed. I cried about Dave getting crushed by his bike. I cried about Di dying on me and the fact that it had seriously broken my health. I cried about losing my dog, Loki. I cried because all the medical tests they were doing on me kept going wrong and they couldn’t tell me whether I had prostate cancer or not – or something worse. I cried because I was shaken up by the bike accident I’d had a few weeks before and because it had been partly my fault. I cried because I thought I was going to lose my job and because for the first time in a long time I was struggling financially. I cried, because I was beginning to understand how completely exhausted I'd been when I went to India last year and how far my having to abandon the trip had brought me down. I cried for all sorts of silly, stupid things that had piled up on top of one another over the last few years and had suddenly become all too much. Suddenly, there was a whole herd of camels in my head and a helluva lot of straw.
For several months after that, I went to work, got home, cooked a meal and went to bed. I knuckled down to the depression and tried to ride it out. A step at a time. I lost interest in everything. Nothing seemed to matter any more, even the bikes. I didn’t care whether I rode them or not. I didn't care if I got up in the morning. I slept for hours every day and still felt tired.
Here’s a joke: what does an Ulsterman do when he sees the light at the end of the tunnel? Answer: he orders another tunnel. Ha! Ha! Well, it’s funny if you have a bleakly ironic sense of humour and come form Northern Ireland, I guess. My foster daughter who lives in Belfast told ime this joke years ago, soon after the 'peace process' had begun, and now, years later, here it was going through my head over and over, like a broken record. Well, I'm not an Ulsterman, and I was damn sure I wasn’t going to order another tunnel - I’m not into self-destruction, even when things are looking less than perfectly sunny - but, though I kept looking for it, the light at the end of tunnel was a long while in coming.
I’ve always thought I was pretty resilient emotionally and never thought I would find myself in this state. But you can never tell. When something like this comes along, it comes, and you just have to let the knot untie itself in its own way. I’m feeling a helluva lot perkier now. I didn't lose my job and as it turns out, physically at any rate, I'm a pretty healthy bunny. I still get tired easily and sleep a lot but I don't feel quite so lousy. I hope that means I'm on the way out of it. Maybe it was even necessary - a step on the journey. I tend to think these things often are.
When I lost the keys to the SV last week I felt utterly crap inside – I got instant bike withdrawal symptoms. Big time! I take that as a very good sign that things are returning to normal.
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