Swung back down

"Now I've swung back down again
It's worse than it was before
If I hadn't seen such riches
I could live with being poor"


Just when you think the silver lining is in view, the cloud reasserts itself, and dumps on you big time. I spoke to my wife this evening, and money, just for a change, loomed large. Or the lack of it, of course. Another litany of bills landing from on high, utilities and an obscenely large phone bill, new school uniform for my daughter, etc, etc, etc. And that's before we get started on the mortgage and other finance issues. I get paid on Friday, including the extra for all the overtime I worked a few weeks ago, but it seems that it's all gone, and more, before I've even received it. The hamster wheel doesn't even begin to describe it.
What makes matters worse is that when my wife has her 'down' moments about all this stuff, I'm supposed to be her 'tower of strength', but when I struggle with it, as on the phone tonight, she doesn't even want to talk to me. 'I don't know what to say'. 'Well, leave your job, then'. 'Are you going to ring me tomorrow?'. Thanks for your support. How am I supposed to be a tower of strength when the foundations are missing? It's times like these when I feel like I might just as well come out to her and let the whole meretricious edifice collapse. If it wasn't for my daughter, I might be sorely tempted, but is even that a good enough reason to carry on? I probably will, because that's what I do, keep on, but the seeming pointlessness of it is hard to get past.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Expected visitors, an unexpected encounter, a new toy....and a real, live boy!

A little boy, though, of whom more momentarily.
My wife and daughter came up to Surrey for a visit yesterday, something we'd provisionally arranged last week, and confirmed over the weekend. I'm on nights this week, allowing me to take advantage of being free during the day (although sleep was a bit hit-and-miss - I only definitively went to bed after my family had headed back in late afternoon, and almost contrived to miss my train to work yesterday evening as a result), so we went out to lunch and I then gave the ladies the guided tour of my accommodation. It just about passed muster, I think, although my wife said how much it reminded her of her nursing home room when she was a student nurse many moons ago. It was nice to see them, and a refreshing change from my usual 'away from home' routine, which normally centres around the laptop when I'm not at work.
When I walked up to the station at midday to meet my family, I certainly wasn't expecting what happened next. I went to the cashpoint and withdrew some money to pay for lunch, then ambled across the road to the town centre exit of the station, where I'd arranged to meet up with the girls - and someone (male) called my name. Given that I know literally no-one in the town where I'm staying, this was, to say the least, a surprise. I turned to see my good friend, the one was best man at my wedding, with his wife....and their son. It transpired that they were meeting up with some other friends of theirs who do live in the area, before going up to London, my 'home away from home' station being en route from were they live in East Dorset. It's around three years since we last saw them, and it was a very nice surprise, made all the better by my having a chance to actually talk to a boy for the first time for pretty much the same length of time. Given their son's age, it absolutely wasn't with any nefarious intent on my part - he's 'six years and eleven months' old, as he proudly told us - but it did underline that I do actually have some genuine rapport with boys, when I put my mind to it, probably because, as I've said in the blog before, I'm still a boy myself, in my head, at least, even if the external realities are rather different. He was only three and a half the last time I saw him, so he obviously didn't remember me, but in the few minutes before we went our separate ways, he was already chatting away to me without much shyness. When his mum told him to be careful not to fall off of the low wall he was standing on, and I offered to catch him if he did fall, he grinned and jumped down, just to show me what a little daredevil he is! Just so cute, in a proper, 'little-boy cute' way. I simply loved it, and without the remotest thought on my part of anything salacious.
The new toy was my first new mobile phone for the best part of seven years - I've finally joined the smartphone revolution, so it must be time for the next new thing to take over(!), I've rarely been an 'early adopter' of new gadgets. I wanted to get onto a tariff with inclusive call time, given the amount of time I spend away from home, and my old phone has started to do some unnerving things, crashing and switching itself off for no obvious reason from time to time, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I ordered it while I was off at the beginning of last week, but it hadn't arrived before I had to travel back to Surrey, so my wife kindly brought it up with her yesterday. I spent a couple of hours playing with it during the relatively quiet early hours of this morning at work, and I'm starting to get to grips with its capabilities, albeit slowly, while I downloaded myself a couple of apps, too. My first venture into 'apps-world' - Backgammon and Tetris! Are there no limits to the ways I can find to waste my time? Apparently not!
Well, I reckon it's rather past my bedtime now - I'm off for (I hope) a good day's sleep.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Courtesy

It's probably a sign that I'm getting old, when thoughts along the lines of 'it never used to be like this years ago' come into my mind, but something that's happened in the last hour or so have sent my consciousness into 'boring old fart' mode. People often bemoan the ills of society, and come up with all sorts of schemes, very often completely harebrained and impractical, and usually reactionary - two of my colleagues at work the other day were discussing the merits of reintroducing National Service to 'tame' the 'youth of today', in spite of the fact that they were at least twenty years too young to ever have had to do it themselves - but, for all that, there does seem to me to be one element lacking in contemporary life that was perhaps more prevalent when I was growing up, namely courtesy. Thinking of other people's perspective before you act, of how your behaviour will affect those around you. It seems to me that courtesy waned a lot in the 1980's, with the 'greed is good' kind of philosophy that the Thatcher government espoused, leading to a 'grab what you can for yourself' mindset, where riding roughshod over anyone getting in your way seemed to be positively encouraged. Those who grew up in that era are now, twenty years or so on, today's parents of young families, and what sort of role model are they? Not all that spectacular, in a lot of cases. Hence my 'curmudgeon of the day' bid today, I guess - someone who has recently moved into another room in the same accommodation as me has had visitors this evening, including a couple of small children, little more than toddlers, really. Rather than actively looking after the kids, the mother has basically just let them run riot in the building, charging up and down the corridors and shouting. It appears not to have occurred to this woman that there might be other people around who might appreciate a bit less mayhem, or maybe it has occurred to her, but it's just too much trouble to actually engage the children and interact with them. All the parenting skills of the average cuckoo. Oh well, rant over. But it would be nice if people sometimes did think of others, and of the consequences of their actions, or inactions.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Well, that's screwed me up for the rest of the night

I've just seen a picture - on a blog I rarely look at, actually - which has really found a way through my defences. A black and white picture of a boy of around 11 who, if he had slightly darker hair, would be the image of my cousin as he was at that age, when I fell in love with him. (Here's the story, if you'd like to read it.)

My darling boy, love you always.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

You might think they'd have known better

Another little snippet from my train journey back from work earlier. I was sitting just in front of a group of teenage girls of Asian extraction. Two of them came out with the benighted 'That's so gay' remark in quick succession. For a few seconds, I was sorely tempted to turn to them and say something along the lines of 'That's so Paki', not because I'm racist in the slightest, but just to highlight their casual bigotry. Coming from the community that they do, I'm sure they've suffered more than their fair share of racism, which you might have hoped would have, at least, made them aware of the consequences of intolerance. You hope in vain, it seems.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Saving myself from myself?

I was going to go up to Central London after work this afternoon - despite the fact that my job is in the suburbs of the capital, I haven't been up to 'town' since April, apart from catching trains to and from Paddington on odd occasions - but, in the event, I've decided to abort the trip and head back to my accommodation instead. My decision was partly to do with the uncertain weather, the morning having been punctuated with heavy showers and the afternoon promising more of the same, but the main reason I'm back in my room was that when I thought about why I'd planned the trip, the answer was, purely and simply, boy watching. Trying to be as realistic as I can about it, spending hours looking at what I want but can't have wasn't, in my present fragile emotional state, a very good plan. Ironically, though, getting off the train at my local station, I saw an absolutely delicious cutie of around the 'magic' age, 12 or 13. I was almost tempted to try and speak to him, suicidally reckless though that would have been - he wasn't with an adult, unusually these days, just with another boy of around the same age. My usual cowardice intervened, but it was a close run thing. I really do need saving from myself at times.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

More inconsequential stuff

It hasn't been the most eventful 24 hours of my life, which may or may not be a bad thing, but there have been a couple of bits of what I might call 'good news', albeit of the 'very small earthquake' variety.
I managed to extend my lead at the head of the Runic Drops all-time high score table by another three and a half million points. The game's a real time waster, but when I'm away from home, or even sometimes when I'm at home, it keeps me out of mischief. That's the problem with open-ended games - you always think you can do better than your previous best, even if it does takes hours on end to do it. Slightly more substantive is the discovery that my all-time favourite online story, The Geppetto Project, has been 'reborn' as a kind of a sequel, The Green Tree Updates, although it's more, I suppose, a continuation of the same story under a different name rather than an actual sequel. Whatever it is, I still love it, and its cast of characters, including, and especially, the boy whose name I've 'borrowed' as my nom-de-plume. Would that I could meet someone like Sammy in reality. I'd definitely die with a smile on my face.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Let's agree to disagree

I've been thinking about how to describe my blog in one sentence, and here's what occurred to me. A lot of it has been about coming to an accommodation with myself. Because I think, the way society is at present, that's the best I can hope for. Because my desires are so anathema to the overwhelming majority of the 'general public', there's no hope of my coming to any kind of understanding with them, no prospect of meaningful negotiations, because they already 'know' they're right, and I'm vile, therefore no point in even trying. Equally, I know I'm not going to suddenly change, suddenly become the average 'red-blooded male', or even the average gay man, and, in all honesty, taking into account that I can't wish away my proclivities, I don't especially want to change into anything 'acceptable', but untrue to myself. Even if I never do more than look, for the rest of my life, I'd much rather look at cute boys like the young Spaniard (well, Spanish speaking, at least) who got on my train with his family at one of the principal stations last night, and whose reflection on the, by then, dark window I spent a goodly part of the last hour of my journey admiring (they were sitting in the bay of seats immediately behind me, so I couldn't see him directly), than any female or adult male my imagination could envisage. So, there you go. I'll accept that I'm never going to be accepted, as long as the world at large accepts that I'm not going to compromise, either. Let's agree to disagree.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Heading back to exile

Well, all good things, or, in the light of recent days, not such good things, must end, and I'm on the train heading back to Surrey. And, just when I need it the most, it looks like this stint could break my already unenviable record for the length of time I'm going to be away from home. It appears, on perusing the roster, that I've only got 4 days off due in the next four weeks, and no more than one day off at a time, so how or when I'm going to be able to next be at home is a pretty open question at the moment, although at the end of the four week period, I have got two weeks off to look forward to. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.
I have pulled out of my weekend tailspin a little, but my downbeat mood seems to be more difficult to break than usual. I'll just have to do my best to wind my neck in and get on with it, I suppose. I know what would cheer me up no end, but I also know there's virtually no chance of that eventuality coming about, so there's little point in speculating about it. Don't think about the impossible, or at least, highly improbable, might be a good piece of advice to give myself. We don't always follow good advice, though, do we?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Like wading through treacle

I'm going to try and be rational here, but I've got the feeling that this is going to be a difficult post to write. I tried yesterday evening, but I struggled to make any sense, even to myself, perhaps feeling the after effects of too much travelling and too little sleep on top of everything else, so I've deleted that draft, and I'm going to make another attempt, both to sum up how I feel now, and to try and answer some of the comments people have kindly left on the various posts I've written in the last couple of days.
The place in my life where I find myself just now isn't something that's appeared suddenly out of the proverbial 'clear blue sky'. It is, as far as I can assess from the inside, a result of the steady accumulation of pressure from various directions over several years. More or less everyone has issues in their lives which they have to deal with - I guess there might be a lucky few who are totally happy with everything, all the time, but I would imagine such people are pretty thin on the ground - and I make no claim that I should be entitled to a trouble-free life. Many of my problems are self-inflicted, too, the result of poor decisions I've made in my life, exacerbated by what I would claim is a more than fair share of bad luck, particularly in housing and financial matters. Again, most people's lives are characterised by a series of interconnected decisions, about, for example, what you choose to do for a living, where you live, who you share your life with, what your aspirations are. The background to those decisions might include who you feel you are, what your capabilities are, what your preferences are. Judging from a sample of one, i.e. myself, if the background and the decisions you make as result of that background are too far out of kilter, the tensions that arise will eventually lead to a situation where either things break, or you live in a constant state of expectation of that kind of breakdown. I think that latter case is where I find myself at the moment. To be as low as I have been in recent days, I would have expected some major disaster to have befallen me, but no such big incident has taken place. I've been at home for most of the last week and a half, much of that time has been pretty relaxed, no new problems have reared their heads. But still, I've found myself slipping lower and lower, to the point over the weekend where I've seriously wondered what the point is to it all. The human instinct for survival is a strong one and it takes a pretty strong disconnection from your 'normal' life situation, either physical or mental, I believe, to overcome it, and, being as dispassionate as I can, I'll admit I haven't been that close to overcoming it myself in recent days. I can, though, envisage a set of circumstances, not too far removed from where I am now, where I really might struggle to convince myself to carry on.
I know I've written about this next element a good deal, probably too much, in the history of my blog, but it is, in some ways, the raison d'être for my presence in cyberspace, and that's the fundamental difference between my personal, emotional circumstances, and who and what I 'really' am, of what I would choose for myself in some mythical, ideal world, and the oceans of frustration I suffer as a result. In this area, as in many others, I know I'm far from being unique. There are, I have no doubt, myriad gay men and lesbian women who have, through the pressures and expectations of society, family and even from within themselves, decided that they have to suppress what they really want, their real selves, to be able to live anything resembling a 'normal' life. It's a sad indictment of modern society that people should have to live their lives in hiding to be accepted, and while, as Micky said in his comment, things are easier, certainly in the UK, for gays to be themselves than it ever has been (but still not that easy, given the sort of bigoted attitudes I encounter on an almost daily basis at work), there are certain types of person who are still way beyond the pale. And I, of course, have the misfortune to be one of those people. Even many of those who are relatively tolerant of gays, indeed, even many gay people themselves, hate boylovers with an intensity that makes even rational discussion of the issue impossible. I know, because I'm married to someone who falls into that category, an intelligent, compassionate, people-oriented woman who had a number of gay friends in her nursing days, but who can't read one of the deluge of 'paedo' stories with which the British press seems to be awash without some epithet like 'bastards' passing her lips. I don't, for a moment, condone anyone who forces another, child or adult, into unwanted sexual contact, and what I'm going to say next will probably just be seen as my trying to defend the indefensible, but I don't believe that any and every sexual interaction between an 'adult' and a 'child' is necessarily damaging, if there is consent. I know what the law says, and society reinforces, that 15 years 364 days makes you a 'paedophile', whereas the next day, everything is miraculously different, but I'm afraid that I just don't believe it. The realities of my situation are, though, that because I am attracted to those law and social mores say should be sacrosanct, I have to spend my whole life pretending to something, someone, I'm just not. And that dichotomy, that pretence is the biggest single issue in making my life as difficult to bear as it has become. Tony left a comment to the effect that honesty is the best way to go, and, in many ways, I agree with that assessment, but the problem is that for me to be honest, either with those closest to me (with the exception of my daughter, who does know the truth) or the world at large would take more courage than I possess. That's really been the problem, always, going right back to when I first realised I was 'different' to my peers, when I was in my early teens. Even admitting it, properly and fully, to myself took about 35 years, and didn't really come about until I came to terms with the fact that I'd fallen in love, at something like 48 years of age, with an 11 or 12 year old boy. Not that I did anything about it, again because of that fear, the fear of exposure, the fear of losing all the trappings of a 'normal' life - I couldn't even bring myself to speak to him, but just how much he came to mean to me, even at a distance, as it were, was underlined by the ill-conceived trip to my former workplace last week. I should have known how difficult it would be, whether I'd seen him, or whether, as was the case, I didn't, but I couldn't help myself, and I think that trip was the initial trigger for what became such a painful weekend for me. In my calmer times, I can look at my sexuality rationally and say that I pretty much know I'm never going to be able to become involved in the sort of relationship I most want, for all sorts of reasons, but that knowledge can't stop the wanting, can't change who I am, can't make me anything other than the boylover who is me. As I said in a blog post a few months back, that word 'never' is a very, very scary one for me. When I'm down, and that word comes into my mind, that's when I really struggle. Again, without wanting to seem to be wallowing in self-pity, if you accept that you're never going to get what you most desire, under any circumstances, why bother, really, to carry on? It could be said, and has been by some of you who comment, that there are other things I could pursue that could act as a 'displacement activity', a 'consolation prize', as I might see it, and it's hard to argue rationally that such suggestions are wrong, except to say that I know what's in my head, I know what I want, and sometimes, I even come close to knowing why, and, by the same token, I know that the consolation prize wouldn't console, because the knowledge of what I really want would always be there, implacable.
I've got a feeling that this is starting to ramble somewhat, so I think I'll draw it to a close. What I would like to do, though, is to thank everyone who's read my blog in recent days for your patience, and, in particular, those who have taken the time and trouble to try and help me with their comments and feedback. I value your support and friendship a great deal, and I think that I can find things here in Blogland that are inaccessible in 'real life', whatever that cipher means. Thank you all very much.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Précis

I've been trying to come up with a sensible response to those who have been kind enough to respond to my downbeat posts over what has been a difficult weekend for me. I've written quite a long 'response' but it's getting bogged down by tiredness and feelings of pretension, so I'll curtail my reply by saying I'm so grateful to Jay, Randy, Tony, Daniel and Brian for their feedback, and to those others who may have simply read my blog, and to reiterate that I'll try and reply more comprehensively over the next day or two.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

'Fifty years of....something'

An unintentionally apposite remark my wife came out with on the way back from our shopping trip an hour or so ago. It was elicited by her seeing part of the logo on a flag, near a well-known local landmark which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year - I have no doubt that the flag was linked to the semicentennial. Particularly in my present state of mind, though, it could be a reasonable summary of what my life has amounted to (yeah, I know my semicentennial was last year but I'm applying a bit of literary license). Fifty (one) years of....something. Something worthwhile? I have my doubts.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Eighteen hours, four minutes, and I still can't work out why

That's how long I was away from home to work my one-off night shift, and that was only because I borrowed my wife's car - if I'd used the train, as originally intended, I'd still have been travelling now. And for what? More of the same, ad nauseum. I've read the comments that people have kindly taken the trouble to write. I'll try to answer them with something sensible. If I can work out if there is anything sensible to say.
I've also read a few things arising from one of the comments. I may not have fallen quite so far  - yet - but the mindset is certainly recognisable. If I can't find an answer to the 'Why?' question that convinces myself....I don't know where the next step will lead.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Why do I carry on with this charade?

A question I've asked myself often enough, in the blog and IRL. Nothing that's going on in my life is making me happy, if I'm being selfish, and that makes it almost impossible for me to make anyone else happy, either. I'm just so sick of it all, the slogging away at a job I'd rather not be doing and that still leaves me without enough money to make ends meet, the being away from home, and then the personal issues, the hiding, the lying, never being able to be myself, even here, given the pseudonymity I feel I have to maintain. The sheer soul-destroying pointlessness of it all, and the knowledge that nothing's ever likely to change.
This isn't living, it's existing. And, at the moment, I can't see any compelling reason for this existence to continue.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

On the edge

The edge of despair, the edge of what's bearable. The right side, at the moment. But it wouldn't take too much more for the line to be crossed. What makes it worse is that nothing out of the ordinary has happened to make me feel this way. The pressure, it seems, is cumulative.
Get over it, many would say, you don't know how lucky you are. Untold numbers would love to have your life. Well, maybe I'm just too self-centred to appreciate that. All I know for sure is how I feel. And I'm not in a good place. Drowning in pools of crap.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Time flies

I've been off work and at home for just over a week, but it hardly seems like it. I've got to head back 'up country' tomorrow for my 'guest appearance' night shift, then when I get back to Cornwall, sometime around Sunday lunchtime, I'll be faced with the prospect of only having one more complete day off - Monday - before I'm back at work definitively, on Wednesday morning (Tuesday doesn't count, in my book, as a day off, because it will be structured around travelling back to Surrey in late afternoon/early evening). The fact that I haven't done anything much during my time off isn't an issue, it's the fact that it's the exception rather than the rule that brings me down.
Today's agenda hasn't thrown up anything too exciting, although I did post a little, fun thing in 'Cuckoos' which I'm rather smugly pleased with (not that I'm making any claims to its being wildly original). After the rather heavy stuff of the previous couple of days, I don't think a little bit of light relief has come amiss. It was one of the denizens of my ridiculously populous 'drafts' list, which I tarted up and added a bit to before posting it, and that's something I want to try and do a bit more - there are some fairly good ideas, IMHO, amongst the drafts, it's being willing and able to consolidate those ideas that has been the problem. Hopefully, I'll be able to maintain the momentum and get back into a more active phase of my fiction writing. As usual, no promises, though - I know there have been quite a few of these false dawns over the last 15 months of the history of 'Nephelokokkygia/Cuckoos'.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Indoctrination

As I've said several times in this blog, I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist for a long time, since my early teens, and, ironically, the main reason for my having followed this path was my higher than average (by UK standards) exposure to organised religion, given that I was a church chorister for nearly five years - I had plenty of time to think about what I was hearing, sitting in the choir stalls, and came to the conclusion that none of the 'faith' elements of religious belief had any validity. I saw no reason to take on trust, as it were, that some invisible deity was required to explain either the existence and evolution of the universe, or to mediate the behaviour of people towards each other - as my Mum once memorably said to our parish vicar, 'I don't have to go to church to be a good person.'
Having said that, my attitude has always been that I'm quite happy for people to believe whatever they like, as long as they extend me the same courtesy. I've had no interest in trying to 'convert' anyone to my way of thinking. Of late though, perhaps the past year or so, I've found myself becoming inclined towards a more radical position. I'm still of the opinion that people's personal beliefs are a matter for their own conscience, if only because of a Voltaire-ian "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" turn of mind, but I'm coming to believe that organised religions, the 'businesses' of faith, if you will, are nothing but a vehicle for hypocrisy, oppression, and, often, outright acts of evil. I'm also extremely concerned, as I said recently, about fundamentalism and its potential for even greater injustices, or even, depending on who manages to get their hands on the levers of power, particularly in the White House, the potential for the world to be ravaged by 'holy wars', launched by a theocratic US - Bachman, Perry, and their ilk scare me fartless, not to put too fine a point on it.
Because these people are not very far removed, in my opinion, from those I read about today, a fundamentalist couple convicted of murdering their adopted daughter, a 7 year old girl, by beating her to death with a plastic hose, in some sort of depraved simulacrum of the biblical 'spare the rod, spoil the child' adage. Beating her for seven hours, only taking breaks to pray, reportedly, because children have to 'obey'. I'm not suggesting that behaviour like that is in any way commonplace, but it is, in my opinion, indicative of the slavishly obedient mindset that many religions, not just Christianity, seem to value so highly. Children submitting to their parents, wives to their husbands, men to God. 'It's God's word/will', 'God told me to do it'. And that's without starting on the issue of what these people think of and would do to LGBT people, never mind boylovers, given the opportunity. Terrifying.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Pyrotechnics

My daughter should have an interesting evening - she's gone off to watch the National Fireworks Championships with some of her schoolfriends. I took her there, but, luckily, her friend's dad is giving her a lift home, so, unless something unforeseen happens, we won't have to go and rescue her at some benighted hour. Interesting in another way, too - although she's going to be out until quite late, probably after 11:00, my wife has been surprisingly relaxed about the scenario. My daughter is in a group, and there is at least one set of parents kicking about, but it looks as though my wife is slowly starting to come to better terms with the fact that the girl is growing up, and will be doing more independent things as time goes on. I'm not complacent about her safety, by any means, but I am a bit more laid back about 'loosening the apron strings', I'd like to think.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Why are they not being thrown in jail?

These people seem to be able get away with anything, possibly even literally with murder, just by calling themselves 'Christian'. Meanwhile, the same fundamentalists want all gays, and especially 'paedos', not to be allowed within a hundred miles of any child so as to 'protect' them. I might be turned on by boys, but at least I don't go around punching 10 year olds in the mouth. Sheer fucking hypocrisy, yet again.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Where is my darling boy?

He must be out there somewhere, the one I can love and cherish, the one I can help to educate, help to grow, the one I can spoil, the one I can give pleasure to beyond anything he could have imagined. He must be out there somewhere. Waiting.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

An excursion I shouldn't have taken

My wife had to go to Exeter today in connection with her work, and wanted to travel up on the train, so I ended up with her car, having taken her to her office this morning, my car still being hors de combat. This tempted me to take a trip I've been thinking about for a while, but hadn't got around to. And, after the way it went, I wish I hadn't bothered.
I set out, with my daughter for company, knowing that there was 90% or greater chance that I would end up being disappointed, but the degree of disappointment was what came as a surprise, even to me. It just underlined quite how attached I'd become to, I suppose, an image, an ideal, and how that ideal had infiltrated itself into my emotions. And how deeply, ultimately, I'd fallen in love as a result.
In case anyone hasn't worked it out by now, I went to where I used to work, hoping to see DBJ, maybe for one last time. And, needless to say, I didn't see him. And I was gutted.
A lesson learned, I think.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

P.S. There have been a few late night, possibly Chardonnay fuelled tears. I miss him so much. And I'm still in love. I know that probably just makes me a sad bastard, but I can't help it.

SB

Why is it the weather forecasters are only right....

....when they forecast bad weather? At breakfast time today, my wife was listening, as she often does, to our local commercial radio station. She told me that, if I had anything outdoor-ish in mind I should do it this morning, because the weather forecast was for rain this afternoon and evening. And the rain has duly arrived. Wonderful.
As it's transpired, I didn't really miss much by avoiding the weather, because I've spent quite a bit of today writing, having resuscitated another of my wide selection of drafts in 'Cuckoos' and managed to move it on quite substantially. It's still only a draft, six or seven hours on, but it's a lot nearer to being postable than it was.
Brownie points of the day were earned by going through yet more financially related paperwork with my wife this evening, including completing one particular form for the second time - do these financial institutions not retain any of the stuff you send them? I can only presume not, if they're sending out exactly the same form that I filled in just a couple of months ago, and expecting it to be filled in again. Life's too bloody short for pointless bureaucratic nonsense like that, in my opinion.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Well....it could have been worse

My wife travelled back today (on the train I suggested, logic perhaps did win out in the end), so my daughter and I drove over to the mainline station to pick her up in mid-afternoon. I have to admit that, this morning and through lunchtime, I was feeling very pessimistic about how the 'reunion' would go, but in the event, it was all quite civilised, if not exactly a passionate, 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' experience. In the aftermath of the pair of 'difficult' phone calls in recent days, things were still slightly strained initially, and there were a few pointed or, at least, meaningful words said, but I think we both know that there is still some kind of solid basis to our relationship, and that we can find a way to go forward from here. There are pressures within the marriage, particularly, from my perspective, from the things I can't talk to my wife about, but much of the stress we're under is external, in terms of our financial problems and the sort of lifestyle we have to lead as a result, which, hopefully, is a situation which is fixable, given time and hard work (and no more bad luck).
By way of a bit of light relief, there was an unintentionally funny moment as we arrived back home from the station. There were some mid-teen lads kicking a football around as we turned into our street, and my wife made a comment to my daughter about 'dishy boys'. I looked at my daughter, who was sitting in the back seat of the car, as I reversed into the parking space opposite the house, and both of us struggled to avoid laughing out loud. As I said to my daughter a bit later on, though, there wasn't really any ambiguity in my wife's comment - the boys were all too old for me, if not for my daughter!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Clever. And laugh out loud funny.

I found this just now. The title of the post sums up what I think of it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Why does it always have to be such hard work?

I'm moaning again, I'm afraid. Even though she's 250-odd miles away, it seems that my wife still can't take anything I say at face value, even when the subject really shouldn't be in the slightest bit controversial. When she rang a short while ago, amongst catching up on news of the day (not much at this end, my daughter and I have had a lazy day, using the excuse, if we need one, of not very good weather to gratuitously slob around, for the most part), she asked me to look up some train times for her to travel back tomorrow. There are regular through services from her home town to our local mainline station, so I concentrated on those but, given that it's Sunday tomorrow, the first direct service doesn't leave until late morning. So she asked me if there was an earlier train she could get by changing at Birmingham, the main Midlands rail 'hub'. There wasn't. The only way she could get home sooner than the first through train was a very convoluted route, starting off by heading in the wrong direction, and leaving nearly two and a half hours earlier to arrive back an hour earlier. Rather than accepting what I'd said, though (and I can, on this topic, be believed - railway timetables are not something I struggle with, for reasons I'm not prepared to elaborate on), she just repeated the question. The answer was the same, of course. No, there isn't an earlier option via Birmingham. Why would I say there wasn't if there was? 'I tell you the truth, and you don't believe me', as The Jesus & Mary Chain memorably said. (Here). And then she wonders why I get frustrated. Meh.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Ships that pass in the night, good advice and another example of 'Christian' tolerance

I arrived home well after midnight last night, by which time my wife was long since in bed (although my daughter was still up and about - anyone would think there was a teenager in the house!), and she was out to work at 8:30 this morning. I then went to pick her up at lunchtime and took her to the station because she'd decided to go up to the Midlands to stay with her dad for a couple of days, as both of her sisters, who live relatively locally, were going away this weekend. I've got rather mixed feelings about her being away - given the friction between us earlier in the week, our not being under the same roof will minimise the chance of a renewal of hostilities, but, having been away for the best part of three weeks, I'm not thrilled about the prospect of extending the separation further. One thing her trip will do, hopefully, is to make my wife feel better about herself - she often seems to beat herself up about not having 'done enough' for her parents, given how far from her home town we live, so I hope she'll at least give herself some credit for this visit.
In my wife's absence, it's just going to be my daughter and I at home for the next couple of days. We were chatting this morning, comparing notes on our cyberspace experiences. I was telling her that I've been a bit disappointed of late about how I don't seem to be connecting very well with people via my blogs at the moment, in response to which she came out with something typically bright and perceptive, and something that came as a reminder to me of what I said when I started blogging, namely that my blog was really for me, first and foremost, and that if anyone else reads it and responds to it, that's a bonus. I don't deserve her, sometimes.
I found this during my wandering around the net earlier on. The post says most of what I would have said by way of comment, and considerably more eloquently than I could have managed, but it well illustrates, in my opinion, the utter intolerance of any lifestyle or worldview other than their own of many on the religious right. In the face of garbage like this, I don't feel myself in any way morally inferior, even as an atheist boylover.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Rhetorical question....what's the answer?

What's the point, I asked yesterday. After a night's reflection, the answer - there is none. I might as well take the scant remaining resources available to me, and find my own pinnacle to scale, even if I have to plumb the same depths in the aftermath. Later.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

This must be a new record

The last annual leave I took was in February, and my time off was ruined less than two hours after I got home by my wife's news about the likely demise of her job (a story that's still rumbling on, despite her having been transferred to the new contract holder a month ago - she might still end up having to accept something like a 15% pay cut to keep on doing what has become a bigger job). This morning has surpassed that record easily, however - despite almost literally working myself to a standstill over the last few weeks, I ended up with my wife slamming the phone down on me when I refused to jump through the same hoop for the third time for the benefit of our mortgage provider. I've spoken to her since, and to say diplomatic relations are 'frosty' is something of an understatement. So, this break appears to be heading for the rocks nearly 48 hours before it's even begun. Why do I fucking bother?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Home on the horizon

Only three more days, and I'll be heading for home, with a good break in prospect - from Friday, I'll be off for 11 of the following 12 days. It's slightly irritating, given that I applied for the leave at the beginning of June, that I couldn't get the one extra day to make it a complete break, but summer Saturdays are always coveted as time off, and some of my colleagues were obviously more proactive than me - we have an agreement that no more than six staff can be on leave at any one time, and I was number 7 on the list - so that I'm going to have to travel up on Saturday week to do one night shift. Long distance commuting, with a vengeance!
I'm looking forward to my time off with more than usual relish - I've worked quite a bit of overtime since returning from my suspension, and I've volunteered for more tomorrow, another twelve hour shift in the offing, but, on top of that, I'm still far from convinced that I really want to be here doing the job at all, and there's always the ongoing pressures of finances and my inner demons to contend with, too. All in all, some 'downtime' in Cornwall with the family will be very welcome.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The Gordian Knot

Alexander the Great managed to solve the puzzle of the Gordian Knot with some lateral thinking, cutting through the supposedly intractable tangle rather than attempting to untie it. I get the feeling I could do with something equally drastic to help me deal with the maze that's living in my head at the moment. Less than 24 hours ago, I was teetering on the brink of despair, yet this afternoon, like the most hopeless of addicts, I was back sighing over another cute 12/13 year old on the train back from work. Can't live with it, can't live without it, as I've said before. I just wish sometimes that I had the slightest idea of what to do, how to find a solution. Maybe there isn't one to be found, perhaps that's why it all gets so impossibly frustrating, why I'm prone to taking out those frustrations on myself. I hope I can find some way of coming to terms with myself before something, physical or mental, breaks as a result.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

P.S. I've just re-read the blog post that sent me into a tailspin last night, and another related one that's appeared today, feeling that I ought, in some way, to make a comment on one or both of them, but I can't find any way to do it that isn't focused on my issues, which would be totally inappropriate, in my opinion. I'm rather ashamed that I can't get past my own reactions, but get past them I can't.

SB

Monster

I'm very tired, so maybe I'm more susceptible just now, but I've just read something that has, again, made me feel completely worthless. The word 'monster' was used. If I pursue my desires, or even if I just carry on wanting what I want, people could call me that. And maybe it would be justified. It could be time to let go, let the flood wash over me. Then I wouldn't be able to hurt anyone.
And nobody would have to call me a monster.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Keeping my nose to the grindstone

I finished work at 9:30 last night, I'm just about to get ready to leave in an hour for a 9:30-9:30 twelve hour shift, then doing the same tomorrow, before doing a ten hour turnround to be back in at 7:30 on Sunday morning. Only for an eight hour shift then, though. Can someone just remind me how much fun I'm having, please? Oh well, it'll all be worth it on payday, when I can pour all my largesse down the waiting throats of the financial institutions. Hang on....

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A flying visit, and the curate's egg

I was off yesterday, and not working until 3:30 this afternoon, so I took the opportunity to sneak home for a brief visit, to break up what would otherwise have been a straight 3 weeks away. I got home about 1:00 on Wednesday morning, and left again at 9:00 this morning to travel back. The bit in between was largely enjoyable, but with one or two less palatable bits.
After chilling out yesterday morning, apart from doing a couple of minor domestic jobs and some washing, the sunny afternoon and the fact that my daughter is well into her summer school holiday tempted me to do something I haven't done for absolutely ages - go to our local pub for a 'beer garden experience'. My daughter and I walked the 15 minutes or so up there, and settled ourselves at one of the picnic tables in the garden, and spent a happy couple of hours chatting and generally enjoying each others' company. She really is growing up into an absolutely lovely person, even allowing for my paternal bias, and the fact that I love her to bits - good-looking, clever, funny, interesting, a good conversationalist, and on a similar wavelength to me in quite a lot of areas. And, of course, she's the only person who I see or speak to on anything like a regular basis who I'm 'out' to. I actually got quite emotional at one point - before I'd had much to drink, I hasten to add, it wasn't a maudlin moment - when I thought about, and told her, how much she means to me. She even managed to take the tears in my eyes in her stride, when many, if not most, 13 year-olds would have been cringing in embarrassment. Not for the first time, I counted my blessings that she's not a boy - if she was everything she is, and male, it could have made for some extremely problematic family dynamics.
Sadly, our closeness isn't universally approved of, or so it seems. When my wife got home from work, and rang to find out where we were, she came up to the pub to join us. By that time, the weather had deteriorated rather, with drizzle in the air, so my daughter and I had found ourselves a quiet corner inside, on a nice comfy leather sofa, and my daughter was propped up against me as we pored over a game she'd downloaded to her phone. When my wife came in and found us like that, she looked like she'd swallowed a wasp. It's a common refrain that my daughter is 'Daddy's Girl', and that she never speaks to my wife about anything of consequence, but yesterday was the worst example of her being overtly jealous about the issue that I've seen. It put a damper on what had been one of the nicest afternoons I've spent in a long time - my wife had barely sat down before she started muttering about going home, even though I focused more of my attention on my wife than my daughter after she'd arrived. It's a difficult situation to work out how to handle - I love them both, but it certainly seems that I've got more in common with my daughter.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Reassessment

In the course of an e-mail conversation I've been having over the past few days with someone who's kindly taking a lot of time and trouble in trying to help me come to terms with some of the problems stemming from my being a closeted and frustrated boylover, I've looked back on one or two things I wrote, in this blog and in 'Cuckoos', over a year ago. It's been an interesting experience, in comparing what I said then with what I think and feel now. It's not that what I wrote in the old posts was directly dishonest, but there is certainly an impression that I was trying to rationalise my feelings in a way that isn't in line with true reality. In a nutshell, I've spent the first year or so of my blogging 'career' telling the world, and, perhaps more significantly in this context, myself, that I'm bisexual, when that doesn't now appear to me to be true. I have little or no doubt, as things stand now, that I'm gay, and always have been, albeit that my attraction is towards boys rather than men, despite the fact that I've been married for the best part of twenty years, and that any thoughts I've had to the contrary have been nothing more than 'wishful thinking' on my part, aimed at trying to construct a persona acceptable to the outside world, because I haven't had the courage to accept and embrace what I really am. I read somewhere, early on in my meanderings around cyberspace on this subject, a quote saying 'if you ever think you might be gay, you almost certainly are', the thinking behind the quote being that, even in the 21st century, there is so much negativity in so many people's minds about gay people that anyone who wasn't gay wouldn't want to go anywhere near even the thought of the possibility. Well, I had my first 'I might be gay' thought when I was not very far into my teens, and, with hindsight, if I'd had access then to the sort of resources that are now available through the internet, the 'I might be' would very soon have been replaced by 'I am'. Would I have been happier now had I come to terms with myself at that stage? It's impossible to say, really. From a family perspective, I think my dad would have, perhaps a little reluctantly, accepted me for who I am, but I'm almost certain that my mum never would have, while of my siblings, the older of my sisters would have been with my mum, the younger with me, while my brother would, I think, accept me now, but probably wouldn't have then. Rereading that last sentence about my family, it really only applies to my being gay. If I was to throw the boylover element into the equation, I doubt that any of them would be able/have been able to come to terms with that, with the possible exception of my youngest sister. And my position within my own household is similar - my daughter knows and accepts the truth about me, but my wife would, I think, struggle badly with the 'gay', and would definitely not be able to cope with the 'boylover'.
OK, so having, perhaps definitively, come to terms with myself in this area, what do I do about it, if anything? If I 'come out', even as gay, and certainly as a boylover, much of my life goes down the toilet. My marriage, and with it my home, and maybe even my daughter, at least until she's no longer a minor, my job, because I've seen more than enough of the bigotry at work to be pretty sure that most of my colleagues would refuse to work with a 'paedo', even a celibate one. In other words, nothing really has changed. I still have no viable option than to carry on in the closet, living a lie every day of my life. If I wasn't so inured to the situation, it would be a bleak prospect indeed, but I suppose if I've put up with the consequences of my cowardice for as long as I have, I can carry on putting up with it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Tired and emotional

And no, I'm not using the phrase ironically or euphemistically as it often tends to be. I'm as un-drunk as I'm ever likely to be, not having had an alcoholic drink for almost a fortnight. Tired, having done another extra shift today, finishing my week of nights at 7:30 this morning, then going back to work at 1:30 this afternoon. Emotional, because, and this is ironic, after having been given some very good advice about how I might deal with the shambles that passes for my 'inner life', I simply got depressed at the realisation that I couldn't possibly enact the advice in my situation and with my personality, and that there still isn't a way out of the maze. At least the oblivion of sleep will make it all go away for a few hours.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B