Busy doing nothing

It's been that sort of day - I haven't really done anything very much, but I've been far from being bored. Life's too short to waste it being bored, anyway. I have nibbled away at my 'dystopian future' story a little bit, so there are a few more paragraphs of that in the draft now, I've been nominally looking after my daughter, as she was off school today because of the public sector workers strike, but she's largely been doing her own thing during the day (including not getting up until almost midday - anyone would think she's a teenager!), I've cooked the evening meal, I've helped (in a very small way) my wife collate some information for a report she's got to write for work, and I'm now sitting here typing this, drinking a glass or two of Chardonnay and watching football on TV. All pretty inconsequential, really. The sort of day where, had I decided to stay in bed for the duration, nothing, in global terms, would have been different. But just being at home, enjoying the amenities that entails, and seeing the people I care about the most, is satisfying in itself. That makes me a good candidate for early retirement, I think, in all respects except one - I can't afford it. Meh!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Sympathy

This one has been fermenting in my mind for quite a few days, almost a fortnight, in fact. It revolves around a single word, the title of this post. I left a comment on another blog, in response to an item about the aftermath of the Penn State sex abuse allegations. Among some fairly predictable stuff about 'grooming' of 'vulnerable children', there was a line about 'scientists' not knowing why 'some adults are attracted to children....it could be like a sexual orientation'. I commented that, at least in my case, it isn't like a sexual orientation, it is a sexual orientation. The blogger concerned replied to my comment, and while I've got no doubt at all that he's a genuinely caring person, the fact that he said that he offered me his 'sympathy' brought me up short. I am what I am, and I really don't see my nature as being an object of pity. I have frustrations, well documented here, but I'm far from being the only person in the world who has to live with not being able to be themselves. It's a fair indication of the depth of contempt that boylovers are held in, that even caring people seem to find us pitiable.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

I don't want to tempt fate....

....but the first day of my break has been, on the whole, pretty reasonable. The day started fairly early, getting ready to catch the first through westbound train from 'domicile-ville', and rather chilly, too - the fields, viewed from the train window, were more than a little frost-glazed in places, not a sign of things to come, I hope, because the relatively mild weather we've had over the past few weeks is rather more to my taste.
Not that there was any great likelihood of anything too wintry back at home, though, and that, indeed, was the case - it had begun to rain by the time I got off of the bus at our local stop at lunchtime, and it carried on raining for most of the afternoon, but it was 6° or 7° warmer than it had been in Surrey. The usual quid pro quo of our maritime climate, of course.
As usual, certainly of late, I was a little bit apprehensive about how my wife and I were going to interact when she got back from work. In the event, though, it was all quite congenial, once she'd vented about her current job situation, which she isn't very happy with. My daughter and I quickly slotted into our regular badinage, too - while we were out on a brief shopping trip, largely to replenish my stock of alcohol, if I'm being honest, I told her about the 'harem gang' from yesterday, which she found amusing. She found a way of ribbing me gently afterwards, looking at me meaningfully as a teenaged boy walked past us in the shop, then claiming, when I said he was a bit too old for my taste, saying that he was too young for her! Given that she's not 14 until February, and the boy was probably 15, at a guess, it was just her winding me up a little, as her inability to keep a straight face proved, but at least she can be lighthearted about my foibles, something I'm grateful about, given that it could easily be said that I've put too much pressure on her at too young an age by coming out to her, albeit accidentally. Looking back over the 18 months, more or less, that she's known about my boyloving side, I'm convinced we've become even closer than we were already, possibly because she's aware of the implicit trust I have in her, and the way I treat her as an equal, something I would have wanted to do in any case, but has been underlined by the confidences we've shared.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Eye candy bonanza!

Working the shift pattern that I do, school terms can be a real desert for me as far as 'boy watching' is concerned, because I'm just not out and about at the same times of day as they are. This week had been very much like that - until this lunchtime. It was a very pleasant day weather-wise, with blue skies and, by the standards of late November, warm sunshine. Both the train to work and the town centre at the 'work' end were very busy - and the cute boys were out in droves! In particular, there was a group of 8 or 9 boys, all about the same age, around 11 or 12, seemingly off on some sort of outing with a couple of adults, walking down the steps onto the station platform as I was making my way up to the exit - and they were all cute, every one of them! Somebody's birthday treat, perhaps - either that or it was the annual general meeting of the South West London Gorgeous Boys Club! All just eye candy, as ever, but I'm not complaining, in the slightest!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

I was going to rant, but I haven't got the energy

Another morning of seething at work at more rank hypocrisy from some of my colleagues. I had a rant full of expletives in my head, and had I written this post a few hours ago, this corner of cyberspace would have been blue, but the after effects of six consecutive early starts rounded off by a twelve hour shift today have drained all the fight out of me for the moment. Suffice it to say that the usual double standards were out in force - amongst the cesspits of egregious bullshit was the tale of the young son of a friend of someone at work who had received a series of crudely suggestive text messages from a girl, which was seen as highly amusing, despite the fact that the boy was seemingly deeply upset by the situation, but, needless to say, if I'd done something similar, as a boylover, and it had come to light, I'd probably have been taken out into the car park and lynched. I'm so sick of these sorts of attitudes, and the fact that I can't, in any remotely feasible way, have my say without collapsing the whole edifice of my life reduces me, at times, to almost inarticulate frustration.
There is a brighter side, though, for a change. My back is substantially better today, so it looks as though my diagnosis was wildly out (although I'd still like to know what was wobbling about at the base of my spine the other night), and I've found a picture of an awesomely lovely (and fully clothed, I hasten to add) boy on one of the eye candy sites I visit reasonably often, which I've added to my very small (less than 10 in over two years) collection of 'borrowed' internet images. Best of all, after my late shift tomorrow, I'm off for 11 days. I won't be home until Monday lunchtime, which will be half a day gone already, but I'm still not complaining. Living a reasonably normal life for almost a fortnight is as much as I can hope for at the moment.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Aches & pains, and yet another story idea

Another health issue has reared its head over the past couple of days, but not illness so much as 'physical integrity'. For all my vicissitudes over the last few years, I've never suffered from back problems, even in the relatively physically active environment of my previous job, but that seems to have changed this week. My lower back is very sore, but most worryingly, when I rubbed the painful area last night (why, in the face of its complete ineffectiveness, does anyone ever rub an injury?!), I felt something moving below the skin which I don't think ought to have been moving. Visions of a slipped disc came to mind, although, given that I'm nowhere near being completely debilitated, that was probably unnecessarily pessimistic, but something certainly seems to be amiss, to the extent that I've arranged to see my GP next week while I'm back at home. I normally see her around this time of year to review my heart meds anyway, so it could be a 'two birds with one stone' appointment. I could certainly do without a bad back, particularly given the amount of travelling I have to do, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this turns out to be something and nothing. And I seem to be coming down with a cold, but that just comes with the territory at this time of year.
I have been working, intermittently, on a couple of my drafts in 'Nephelokokkygia' of late, but another idea has struck me recently. About this time last year, I wrote a story called Jamie which I was fairly pleased with, and which, having re-read it, I'm even more convinced is one of my best efforts to date. One of the comments I had at the time suggested that it could have been 'fleshed out' more, and that's what I'm now thinking of doing, but with a twist - the 'Jamie' character has a young son in the story, who plays a brief but important role in the plot, and my intention is to write, not so much a sequel, but a parallel story, written from the child's point of view. As ever, I'm giving no guarantees that I'll have either the requisite inspiration or perspiration to make anything of it, but I'm going to give it a try. Apart from anything else, it will be interesting to see if I can put myself into a child's mindset, given how long it is since I was a child myself. A test of my imagination, for once.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Mundanity

It says something about the lack of excitement in my life when the most noteworthy event of the day was the discovery that a new supermarket has opened a few minutes' walk away from my accommodation. It's a branch of the supermarket chain where we do most of our shopping at home, and is a fair bit cheaper than the shop I've used most of the time since I've been staying here, and with a somewhat bigger inventory, too. There you are, I'm waxing lyrical about a shop - shows how much of a non-event my lifestyle in Surrey is!
Despite the fact that it was early afternoon, and before the end of the school day, when I was shopping, there was one moderately attractive cutie wandering around the store, seemingly on his own. We got as far as eye contact, and, for a rash moment, I was almost tempted to speak to him, but it would, no doubt, have been a thoroughly bad decision had I succumbed to that impulse. There is no way, it seems, of breaking through the wall of paranoia and distrust, on my part as well as on the part of boys like today's example, in the present climate of hysteria.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Targeted advertising, and a nice numerical quirk

I found a junk e-mail in my 'sammyb50' inbox earlier which had evaded the spam filter, and which was a first for me. Presumably some 'web crawler' or other had found my blog, because the e-mail was promoting a gay dating service website. I found it quite funny, really, because my first thought on seeing it was 'there's no chance you would have anyone on your books I'd be remotely interested in'. It might have been entertaining, if I'd been feeling daring, to fill in an online questionnaire completely honestly, but there would probably have been too much chance of the 'paedo police' paying me a visit, so I resisted the temptation without much difficulty.
I noticed a 'round figures' numerical coincidence last night which was quite nice, if completely inconsequential. The first pageview after I'd published yesterday's post, which was the 600th in this blog, brought the overall total of views the blog had had at that point to 14000. Lots of zeroes! And lots of thanks to all of you who come and visit, even if it's just proof of the adage of 'hope over expectation'!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Disposable society

I saw two things at work today which highlighted how wasteful our modern, 'Western' society can be. I was on my break, eating my breakfast in the mess room, when someone came into the room - I didn't know who he was, but he evidently worked for my employer, because he was wearing a fleece bearing the company logo. He walked up to the water cooler, took one of the plastic cups from their dispenser, drew no more than a mouthful of water from the cooler, drank it, then threw the cup in the dustbin and left the room again. It all took less than a minute. A trivial, everyday occurrence, no doubt echoed in thousands of workplaces worldwide. And that's just the point. How many plastic cups are used in this way every day, then just thrown away without a second thought? The numbers must be astronomical. The incident seemed to me to be emblematic of today's 'throwaway' attitude - if something isn't perfect and new, and sometimes even if it is, chuck it away and get another one. I remember seeing an advert extolling recycling a few years ago, and although it was undoubtedly simply the company concerned - Shell - doing a bit of 'greenwashing' of their image, the tagline stuck in my mind. 'Don't throw anything away - there is no "away"'. It's a big world, but certainly not infinite, and people would do well, in my opinion, to remember that.
The second example of waste is, in a way, even more unconscionable. Over the past weekend, the night shift obviously had some time on their hands, and decided to check through the items that had been left in an uncomfortably overstuffed fridge/freezer in the mess room. Someone had written out a list of the items that had been found to be past their 'use by' date, and had been thrown away. It filled an A4 sheet, which had been stuck to the fridge door, and included items going back to June last year. And it wasn't, for the most part, 'bargain basement' stuff - a lot of the things came from the likes of Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Sainsburys (the 'posh' end of the market, for those not familiar with UK food retailers). When so many people in this country, let alone those in the so-called 'developing' countries, have so little, this kind of heedless waste is something I find extremely distasteful.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

I may be some time

Even more than usual, this blog has been an unmitigated tale of woe of late. There's no reason why I should expect anyone to have to read about my troubles day after day, so there may be a hiatus, unless I can find something more upbeat, or, at the very least, something more interesting, to write about. Please don't hold your collective breath, I wouldn't want to induce hypoxia in anyone.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Smile

'Smile!', my wife said to me earlier on. Would that I had anything to smile about. No money, every chance we'll be evicted in the foreseeable future, marriage falling to bits, heading back to Surrey tomorrow, and that's before I even get started on boys, and matters arising. And Christmas on the horizon, too, with the prospect of not being able to afford much in the way of gifts for my wife or daughter. I don't know about smiling, another thing my wife said, this morning, might be more apposite, when she wondered aloud whether I should be on anti-depressants. Yeah, give me a 'happy pill', that'll solve everything.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Old Pool

The house that appears in Noctivagent (which isn't totally moribund, despite my having made no progress with it recently) as 'Old Pool' is up for rent! It isn't very far from where we live now, and it's most certainly the sort of place I'd love to call home (and my daughter, too, as I showed her the online listing for it a while ago). It's probably too pricey for us, anyway, even if we do have to move in the near future (which isn't inconceivable), but there's no harm in daydreaming.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Not much progress

My wife and I are still pretty much bumping along the bottom. Nothing much was said this morning before my wife went out to work, and not much more was said when she got back again late this afternoon. It seemed to me that she wanted to disregard what had happened last night, to pretend that nothing was wrong. I don't think that's possible, though, given what was said - at the very least, some discussion, as far as I was concerned, was needed. That discussion came after our evening meal, and didn't go very well. In a nutshell, it came back to the position my wife has taken before in similar circumstances - if I don't like it, I'm a 'free agent', and can choose what to do. Take it or leave it, in other words. I turned the proposition round, and said she had the same choices, which, of course, she has. At the end of the day, my perception is that she wants an easy life, and when she has to make any sort of effort, to come out of her comfort zone, she resents it. I still don't know where we're gong to go - maybe the immediate crisis has passed, but we're far from reaching a resolution yet.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

On the rocks?

I really think it might have happened this time. The actual cause was trivial - isn't it always? - but the underlying tensions magnified the effect, and led to some very bitter things being said. Whether I'm still here tomorrow, or whether my wife is still here tomorrow, remains to be seen. After an hour or so to calm down and assess the aftermath, what convinces me this is more likely to be terminal than its precursors is that I don't feel that distressed. It would be an exaggeration to say I don't care, but I don't care as much as I feel I should if I wanted to retrieve the situation. Even my daughter, who was distraught the last time there was a major fall out, seems to be relatively sanguine this time, as though she knows, instinctively, that this might be on a different level.
Call me selfish, whatever, but I really have got to a point where I don't think I can accept being treated as the 'root of all evil' any longer. It takes two to make an argument, I know that, and I'm not claiming to be a totally innocent victim, but it's all getting to be too much, if it hasn't reached that point, and beyond, already.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Damned if you do, and....

People have different talents and abilities, there's no doubt about it. And just as well, because it would be tricky if everyone knew how to bake bread, but no-one knew how to make flour. I'm pretty hopeless at dealing with people, but I'm very good at dealing with procedural tasks. Like navigation. I never make any claim to being any more than an adequate driver, but I am a good navigator, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been lost in my life. On the other hand, my wife is very good at dealing with people, but could get lost in the long grass of our back garden. So when, this morning, it transpired that the only way she was going to be able to get to a meeting she needed to attend in another town, around 30 miles away, on time was to drive, she wasn't happy. She wanted to go by train, but hadn't checked the times, and when I looked the services up for her, because the rail journey isn't direct, and involved a change of trains with only an hourly service on the second leg, it was already too late for her to have caught the latest train from our nearest mainline station that would have made the necessary connection. So car it was. Seeing how unenthusiastic she was about the prospect of getting herself there, I offered to take her - after all, I'm just chilling this week, and had nothing else planned. But that wasn't right, because that was making her dependent, and she needed to 'do it for myself'. So I worked a route out for her, she wrote it down. In essence, it was a journey she'd done several times before, albeit with me driving, because her destination was only around half a mile from where her best friend used to live after her move to the West Country, a couple of years before we moved to Cornwall. And it all went well enough, because she rang me, 20 minutes before her appointment, to say that she was more or less there. Win.
After the morning's success, the return trip would be a breeze, of course. Well....no. That's where it's all gone tits up. In the last hour, I've had three phone calls from my wife, having 'the vapours' because she's got lost. Twice. Follow the outward route in reverse? Far too complicated, apparently. And, needless to say, it's my fault. Universal scapegoats are us. She's now 'lost her confidence', is 'never doing this again', it's 'bloody ridiculous'. Yes, it is. Ridiculous that an intelligent, 40-something woman can't follow the signs out of a large town, heading for an even larger town, without getting to the verge of a nervous breakdown. And without blaming someone else. Someone who volunteered to chauffeur her around, and was rejected. Please remind me how much fun this marriage business, someone.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Time to give up, I suspect

When even liberal, rationalist, humanist bloggers, from relatively liberal and rational countries like Canada come out with statements like 'there's no such thing as child sexual abuse, it's all rape', it's probably time for me to admit that there's no place for me in this world. I'm used to the kneejerk haters, the ones I'd never agree with on anything at all, but when people who are on approximately the same wavelength as me on many issues hate what I want so vehemently, there really is nowhere left for me to go. Of course, the argument would doubtless be that I don't deserve a place to go, apart from hell or jail, or hell via jail, and anything I might say to the contrary is my trying to defend the indefensible, again. Maybe I am just an Orwellian 'minority of one', and, as such, an 'unperson'.
'You do not exist'. Not in any way conducive to personal fulfillment, anyway.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Another quiet day, and another new story

The story will probably end up as unfinished, but I've had an idea over the past couple of days, and it began to take shape earlier today. It will be, if it gets off the ground, something slightly different from things I've written before, with elements of political thriller and dystopian futurism. As ever, no promises of publication, soon or, indeed, ever.
That apart, my aim of having a chilled-out week has been furthered today - I haven't been out of the house, and haven't, in all honesty, wanted to. I might become a little more adventurous as time goes on, but, on the other hand, maybe I won't.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Some internet reading matter is sweeter

Yes, there's some sex in it, but if you can cope with young teens being less than 'pure as the driven snow', this story is just stunning, cute, sexy, with brilliant characters, and, above all, funny. It's soon coming to an end, sadly, but I have no doubt I'll be re-reading it, sooner rather than later. It's one of my favourite stories, internet or printed, ever, and I have no hesitation in recommending it.
Maybe everything will turn out alright, you never know.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Bullet in the head

Or emasculation. That's what I deserve, apparently, for my filthy and unnatural desires, according to the commenters on a post about the failure of draconian punishment policies for 'paedophiles'. OK, well shoot me for something that, as far as I know, I was born with, but don't complain if 'they' then come and shoot you for being left-handed, or a mindless bigot.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Dogs and difficulties....and a little rapprochement

I have a confession to make, one which will probably upset almost as many people as any exposition of my sexual orientation or my atheism. I'm not a dog lover. In fact, I tend towards the attitude epitomised by a quote attributed to Alan Bennett - 'I wish dogs were like lions in the Serengeti, only five left and all male'. And after what happened as I was on my way to work last night, I'm no more of a 'canineophile' than I was before, although, to be fair to the animal concerned, the 'human factor' was more significant. I got to my 'local' station, to find it heavily populated by the Surrey Police, presumably targeting Saturday night revellers. Amongst the assembled 'forces' was a sniffer dog, which decided to take an interest in my bag. As a result, I was subjected to the humiliation of being searched on the station concourse, treated like some worthless criminal, particularly by a female officer who, if she'd ever known anything about dealing humanely with people, had evidently forgotten it, before they grudgingly concluded that what the dog had reacted to was my heart medication. Train the £@%&!?* dog properly, that's what I say. As a parting shot, the male officer involved said, with a detectable tone of irony, 'Thank you for your cooperation'. Like I had a choice. As a result, I was noticeably distrait for the first third of my shift at work, which was thoroughly messy - I'm sure at least one of my colleagues thought I probably was on something, even if the coppers hadn't had their fun. I managed to get through without doing anything deranged, but I wasn't anywhere near as sharp as I would have liked to have been.
I thought the difficulties were going to extend into my journey home this morning. I got to Paddington in good time, but because of the failure of a train going elsewhere, our train was 'pinched' to replace the failure. In the event, a replacement for our train did materialise, and we only left two or three minutes late, and I arrived back at our 'town' station on time, to be met by my wife and daughter. After the hiccups of recent days, first impressions were far from encouraging. My wife seemed very cool, as though she really didn't want to be there, and that her coming to meet me was a real effort, even though I'd said I was quite happy to go home on the bus - we're lucky enough to have an hourly service on a Sunday, unlike many places. My daughter was pleased to see me, but I didn't feel I could be too demonstrative in return, because I didn't want to antagonise my wife any further, as she's often said that my daughter and I have some sort of 'special relationship' which she's not party to. Basically, it was all very stilted and awkward, a feeling that continued into the shopping trip we undertook on the way back. By the time we got home, I was starting to feel very downhearted about things, wondering whether my fears about the end of it all weren't just paranoiac, but more substantial.
It took a bit of badinage on my part to break the mood, if I can say so without seeming immodest. I'd had an hour or so asleep, and was feeling a bit more human, when my wife came into the front room and mentioned the selection of 'reality' TV programmes that are on at the moment, and that she's following. I have not the slightest interest in any such programming, something my wife is well aware of, so that when I came out with a 'none of this is going to change my life' kind of comment, she wasn't too pleased, and parried with a remark about not being interested n the sort of things I like to watch. It could have led to another bout of acrimony, but, for once, I managed to say the right thing - 'At least we've got something in common, then, no interest in each others' interests!'. She got the humour, and the exchange ended in laughter when it could easily have ended in raised voices. The ice was broken, and the rest of the day has been pretty civilised, perhaps lubricated by my cooking a very pleasant, if I say so myself, lamb roast this evening - is the way to a woman's heart, sometimes, through her stomach, too, just like us blokes. I'd like to have a relaxed week off - we've got no money, so chilling out is about all I can afford to do - and if this afternoon is the precursor to that, I'll be more than happy.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

20

It was twenty years ago today, as the song goes. In around two and a half hours' time, it will be exactly 20 years, to the minute - 9:05 PM on November 12 1991, in a pub in Ashton-under-Lyne, under circumstances that seemed to have been concocted by fate with the maximum degree of unlikeliness possible. I'm talking about my first meeting with the young woman who would, some 18 months later, become my wife. How unlikely was it? Well, in the first place, the meeting wouldn't happened had I not been burgled that morning, because I was only there at the invitation of a friend of mine, who'd helped me to sort out the mess the burglars had left behind, his reasoning being that if I was left to my own devices I'd have gone out and got drunk - and he may well have been right. He was due to meet his fiancée, as she was at the time, in the aforementioned pub, which I'd never been in before, and only made one subsequent visit to, near where she worked, when she finished her late shift as a student nurse. I'd met her a few times before, but she wouldn't, of course, have known that I was going to be there, and, equally unbeknownst to my friend, she'd invited one of her work colleagues to come along. Thus it was that two people with at least a couple of degrees of separation came to meet, and I don't think it's too fanciful to say that if we hadn't met that night, we would probably never have met at all.
The question, of course, is whether, overall, that chance meeting was a good thing, for both of us, or not. I fell in love with her, rather quickly and pretty heavily - almost too quickly and heavily, because she came close, not long afterwards, to dumping me because I was being too intense (nothing new there, then!) - and, as is usual in my case, the love has remained, even in the difficult times of recent years, but does that, in itself, prove that it was the right thing to do to enter into a long-term relationship? Because, and although I might have wanted it not to be true at the time, I was gay then, and I'm gay now. Obviously, I'm at least functionally bisexual, because, amongst other things, my daughter came along in due course, but that doesn't change the fact that, ultimately, I'm a gay hebephile, attracted to the same group, pubescent boys, that I was attracted to when I was a pubescent boy myself. I've tried to be the best husband I can, but I've never been as good as my wife could have found in someone else, and never will be, because my deepest desires lie elsewhere. There's always that element of my playing a part, rather than my heart being 100% committed to where I am. And there is, of course, the possibility of my true self being unmasked, deliberately or accidentally, and my wife concluding that I've been maliciously deceiving her all these years. As I've said several times before, there are no easy answers. Would that there were.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Why can't this be love?

The song set the tone. Just as I was thinking about ringing my cousin to pass on my birthday greetings, Planet Rock played Why Can't This Be Love by Van Halen. A blast from the past, and no mistake. When he was about 14, we were out jaunting one weekend, and found ourselves in a pizza restaurant in Huddersfield (of all the romantic locations!).  The song came on the background music tape, and as I sat opposite him at our table, I looked into his eyes, and sung the song to him. At the end, he shrugged and said 'I don't know'. Of course, the reason why not is pretty obvious, with hindsight, the classic, almost clichéd 'gay boy falls for straight boy, heartache ensues' scenario, with the added twists of our being cousins and best friends, and the age difference between us, irrelevant now, as adults - he's only a year and a half younger than my wife - but a big issue back then. He remembered the day in the pizzeria, even if he didn't remember his eleventh on 11/11, and it all got a little bit emotional - I still love him, not in the same way as when he was 11, or 14, or 16, but love, all the same, and, in his own way, he still loves me, too, I think. He wants us to meet up soon - although we speak on the phone at intervals, I haven't actually seen him for nearly two years, after their proposed trip to Cornwall earlier this year fell through. I think it might well be time for me to take a trip to Manchester.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Meltdown and remembrance. And a 'he knows not what....' moment.

Not just financial meltdown, now, but relationship meltdown thrown in. Another seriously acrimonious phone call  last night, with the renaissance of a familiar question, aimed in my direction - 'Why are we bothering to carry on?'. Why, indeed? Tomorrow is the twentieth anniversary of the day my wife and I met, November 12 1991, and I'm starting to wonder, especially given that I'm off next week, and, at least theoretically, at home for eight days, whether we'll make it to 20 years and a week.
Another, older and arguably happier remembrance this morning, though. My cousin, my darling boy, has his 11/11/11 birthday today. I remembered another birthday, 30 years ago, when he was 11 on 11/11. Then, he was beautiful, special and my best friend. Now....he's still special, and still my best friend. I'll speak to him later, all being well, and no doubt embarrass him with my memories, but, hey, isn't that what best friends are for?!
He didn't know what he was saying, or, at least, who he was saying it to - one of my work colleagues, that is, overnight. He's not long since become a father for the first time, and it appears that his partner is expecting again, which led to a little discussion about parenthood. His first child being a daughter, he'd like the new arrival to be a boy. I mentioned some of my mixed feelings about having a daughter rather than a son (although, of course, had I had a son, especially one anything like a male version of what my daughter has become, the complications might have been insurmountable) and what I might have missed out on as a result. Out of the blue, he said 'You can have Jack, if you want'. His stepson, who's 12, apparently. It was only a lighthearted throwaway, of course - he gives the impression of being quite close to the boy, even though he's not his own 'flesh and blood' - but the irony of the remark almost made me laugh out loud. If nothing else, it's an indication that my mask is still reasonably intact. Whether, ultimately, that's good or bad is a moot point.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

How close?

How close can you come, that is, to calling your work colleagues a bunch of imbecilic bigots without actually doing it? Not much closer than I did towards the end of my shift this morning, I suspect. The exchange that so annoyed me was elicited by a throwaway news story, typical tabloid 'human interest' fodder, which someone had read, about a rugby player who'd had a stroke after a training accident, and had 'become gay' and retrained as a hairdresser after his recovery. How many mindless stereotypes and misconceptions can be fitted into one short sentence? No rugby players are gay? All male hairdressers are gay? Hairdressers never play rugby? A person's sexuality is set in tablets of stone? Needless to say, the conversation was littered with the usual offensive remarks about gays and all their works, winding me up still further. I think it was only the fact that the incident happened in the last hour of the shift, when the night shift relative quiet had been replaced by the beginning of the busier early morning period, where the position I was covering required something close to my full attention, that allowed me to keep my seething resentment of their stupidity in check. What are these people so afraid of, FFS? Because I can't envisage such prejudice and hatred being engendered by anything other than fear. Some people are gay, fucking get over it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Presumption

I've been reading online over the last day or two about the case of a high profile American Football coach who is accused of sexually assaulting several young boys in a coaching programme he was involved with, including accusations of rape. Rape, in particular, is a crime I find especially horrifying, rape of anyone, irrespective of age or gender, but particularly the rape of a boy, but, that being said, I have no idea whether the man is guilty or not - if he is, then he undoubtedly deserves to be punished - and I'm pretty certain those opining about the case have no more idea about his guilt or innocence than I do. What concerns me in this case is its illustration of a trend, in this country, as well as the US, of the presumption of guilt of the suspects in such cases, and others which invoke public 'revulsion' - the 'all Muslims are terrorists' meme springs to mind - rather than the suspect's traditional right of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. It isn't a new phenomenon, and one particular case, which happened around 15 years ago, in the area we used to live in prior to moving to Cornwall springs to mind. A local secondary school teacher was charged with sexually assaulting a 13 year old girl pupil of his after she made an allegation against him. There was local press coverage, with the predictable spin of child 'victims' needing to be protected from the 'evil predators' n their midst. Except that the 'victim' in this instance wasn't the person everyone assumed. 10 months later, after his name, career and reputation had been dragged through the dirt, the man was exonerated when the girl admitted to having fabricated the story to 'get back' at the teacher after he'd disciplined her for bad behaviour in class.
So, yes, punish the guilty, whether they be child rapists, terrorists or the 'white collar' criminals defrauding the 99%, but let's make sure they are guilty before assassinating their characters.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Quotidian

Routine. What you do every day. The same as the day before. Like this night shift week. Work, back to the accommodation, sleep, cyberspace, food, back to work. There's every chance that tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that will be the same. Yesterday was like that, today too, unless anything unexpected intervenes. Millions, billions of people are in the same sort of situation, going round and round the same hamster wheel day after day. Why? Apart from the biological imperative to pass on your genes to the next generation, why on earth do it? Slogging away, day after day, to try and provide a better 'standard of living' for you and yours, only to find, ultimately, that your efforts only really enrich the much-quoted 1%. The bankers, politicians and their assorted hangers-on, the so-called celebrities, famous for being famous and usually, these days, with little or no discernible talent, the magnates and oligarchs enriching themselves at the expense of destroying the jobs, the lives of their underlings. The age of 'greed is good' style over substance. What, for the 99%, is the point of colluding with a system that guarantees your own subjugation? The whole rotten, meretricious edifice ought to be swept away, as far as I'm concerned. But it never will be, because most people can't even see they're being subjugated. To quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four, not for the first time, 'Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious'. Who needs the Thought Police when you've got the tabloid press and its televisual equivalent, and 'reality' TV shows?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

One step forward, three back

I've spent something like 20 of the past 36 hours either at work or travelling to and from work, and most of the rest asleep. And where do we find ourselves at the end of it? Another lurching step towards financial meltdown. This is an old mantra, of course, but - why do I bother? It's like the myth of quicksand - the more you struggle to escape, the more quickly you're sucked under. Aside from the vanishingly unlikely chances of winning the lottery, the only way out of the vicious circle seems to be to pull the plug and be left with almost literally nothing to show for three decades and more of work. Or death. But that's not a preferred option.
Even finishing work early enough this morning to catch my preferred train back to 'domicile-ville' didn't work out as well as I'd hoped - on a train heavily patronised by cute boys, where did I end up? In a bay of seats surrounded by late teenage girls on their way to college! Most 'men of a certain age' would doubtless have enjoyed the experience, but, certainly in this context, I'm not 'most men'. Just my luck, I guess.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Tears on a train

Reading about someone losing the love of their life, in a heartbreakingly stupid, avoidable way. I would rather have been somewhere less public, if I'm being selfish, but I couldn't hold back the tears, anyway. Why does the world have to be such a disheartening place?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

As though nothing had happened

That was my wife's attitude this morning, after yesterday's spat. It's better than arguing, I suppose, but nothing ever gets resolved. It's all pretty academic, in the short term, at least, because I'll be heading back 'up country' in a couple of hours time, being on earlies, then nights, tomorrow. Keeping my nose to the grindstone, as ever.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Not happy

I'm not happy to be here. So I've been told this evening. Told, not asked. Well, actually, I'm thoroughly happy to be here. What I'm not happy about is being treated like the root of all evil, like everything I say or do is wrong. Especially what I say. And I'm not happy, while all this is going on, about still having to pretend I'm something I'm not. I'm so close to saying 'I'm gay, I'm a boylover. Take it or leave it.' If it wasn't for the effect it would have on my daughter, I can't see any way I wouldn't say it. There comes a point when it all becomes totally insupportable, and that point isn't that far away.
On the whole, I'd be far happier to sweep DBJ into my arms and spirit him away to some paradise island while he's still in my AoA. But as that's never going to happen, in this universe, at least, I'm willing to compromise and try to make the best of where I am. But that compromise is constantly being undermined. And I don't know how much more of it I can tolerate.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Cornwall, CJ....but no E

This is yesterday's post, really, but I literally fell asleep in the middle of writing it last night, a combination of not going to bed after nights, travelling and, I have to admit, a glass or three of Chardonnay conspiring to render me comatose at around 8:00.
I got back home at lunchtime yesterday after what was, particularly in its latter stages, a rather messy night shift, certainly a lot messier than I'd anticipated. I managed it pretty well, though, perhaps something approaching definitive proof that I've got over any lingering loss of confidence feelings after my screw-up in the summer and the subsequent disciplinary stuff.
The journey back was smooth enough - the main problem was hobbling up to the station after finishing my shift in time to get the first of three trains to take me home, given that I've been afflicted with yet another episode of gout over the past couple of days (the medication is finally coming to terms with it now, I think - I hope!). My wife met me at the 'town' station so I could drive home in her car after dropping her back at work, but her apparent altruism did have a small hidden agenda - the quid pro quo was my doing the shopping on the way back. To prove that virtue is sometimes its own reward, though, I did have a sweet encounter at the supermarket. Why he should have been there at lunchtime on a schoolday, I've no idea, but I came across an absolutely delicious boy, 12 or 13, really awesomely cute, in the store with an older woman (grandmother, at a guess, given their relative ages) - and I was treated to that most rare of gifts for a boylover, a moment of connection. He was struggling to heft a case of beer into a small space in the shopping trolley on the woman's behalf without crushing any of the other items (I was waiting to pick up my own case from the same display), which he managed just before I got the chance to offer my help. I made a light-hearted remark about his loading abilities, and he turned my way and smiled, lovely white teeth and all. Just an evanescent, never to be repeated moment - as with all such cuties, I haven't the slightest expectation of ever seeing him again - but none the worse for that. And CJ? That's what grandma called him, so the family nickname, I guess.
Being Thursday, I had another cutie on my mind, too - I was hoping E might have appeared to put a free paper through our door, but the publication he delivers evidently isn't a weekly thing (once a fortnight, I think), so I missed out on seeing him again. Two in one day would've been greedy, though, I suppose.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Maybe the name change was a good idea after all

Well, maybe Aristophanes wasn't too displeased with my 're-borrowing' of his imaginary placename. After quite some time of not doing anything very substantive with my fiction writing (although I liked Nostalgia, even if no-one else did - but then I would, I suppose, given the subject matter), I've actually spent a few solid hours this afternoon working on my Lucid/Lucent 'sort of' sequel, or the new story with the same principal characters, whatever it is, which has been in abeyance since June. It's still nowhere near being finished, but it's something like twice as long as it was six or seven hours ago. A temporary resuscitation of the muse, at least.
That apart, it's been a quiet day, waiting around to go in for my 'one night shift stand' tonight, but then I've got the bonus of a two and a bit day visit home to look forward to. Every little helps, as they say.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Prodding the shade of Aristophanes

For no better reason than that I can, the other blog has reverted to its original title. I like the word, so 'Nephelokokkygia' it is. I'm sure the 'relaunch' won't make the slightest difference to my paltry output, though.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Uncertainty

I'm in one of my periodic 'shall I, shan't I' moods about the blog. Most of the time, I feel positive about blogging and what I get out of it, and want to persevere, but then these dips, jitters, whatever you want to call them, creep up on me and make me wonder why I carry on. This one is more mysterious, in that I've had a small, but significant upturn in the interest in the blog, so I can't claim to be feeling neglected, and I've also been able to write regularly and reasonably fluently, albeit that I haven't come up with any devastatingly sparkling insights. Apart from the little hiccup at the beginning of last month, when I got myself upset over something I should have been more mature about, I haven't even had any emotional troubles. So why am I thinking of walking away, as it were? Maybe there isn't really any logic or reason to these things, just feelings that come and go without much connection to 'real life', whatever that cypher signifies.
Maybe if I could make at least a tiny ripple with my fiction writing it might help - I know most of the stories that have appeared in 'Cuckoos' recently have been short and self-indulgent, and that's down to me. I have been working, intermittently, on a more substantial piece, but it keeps stalling. I did think of 'bolting on' a chunk of plot from another unfinished story, but hybrids are often not all that robust, so I don't know whether it would be a good idea. More uncertainty. I need a good kick up the backside, I think.
This isn't a feeling I'm used to, really. I have my up moments, and down times, but this kind of 'stuck in the middle, stuck in neutral' prevarication isn't usually my thing. Getting vague in my old age, maybe.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B