Sweep it under the carpet.

Recently I have been plagued with feelings that I have let my life wind down a bit:

My job is a depressing waste of time counterweighted only by the fact that it requires about as much effort as lifting an empty box once every 20 minutes over a working day....interspersed with the occasional urgent lunge toward my telephone where I call my own answering machine and leave myself a message.

My social life is pottering along nicely but is only a hairsbreadth from becoming a close knit circuit of dinner parties and book reading meetings. That isn't due to a lack of opportunity to explore the surrounding world or even a lack of invitations to attend varied hedonistic occasion, it is more down to an internal sense of age.

So many weights begin to build upon social adventure as time passes...it hurts more in the morning that it used to....I’m more tired after work than I used to be....I’m reticent to skip sports lest I suddenly put on 40 stone and sound like I’m drowning in my own fat when I speak....I feel like I should be saving money not spending it and am aware that I might end up like a neglected old war veteran rationing the heating and attempting receding inside my own emotionally scarred memory bank to escape the cold....I feel like I used to be more fun, but I’m aware that I dislike that person as well on account of them being a super twat bag....I miss 3 day drinking binges with wild drug intake in a crack flat with only gnawed pieces of mouldy bread and 40 cans of lager for sustenance....but it would kill me and I’d have cunts for friends.....

and so on....

These things bother me sometimes despite the avenues of social exploration that I do adopt always resulting in a fine time and an anecdote or two, perhaps it is just the volume of opportunity that London offers making exploration seem a little less adventurous?

Regardless; I live in Stoke Newington, Hackney and recent event has evidenced quite nicely that my concerns are unnecessary and ill founded as I live in an area so absurd as to quite literally bring the sort of carefree nonsensical idiocy to my very front door.

From the street you must approach our basement flat abode by journeying down a set of steps into a large patio area suitable for BBQ's and the like. Under these steps is a cupboard guarded by a metal door and a bolt. In this cupboard is a dirty, damp stinking collection of our friend’s spare clothes and old bed linen. Quite recently the weather has become aggressively foul and this seems to have scattered and disturbed the local homeless community like ants facing an assault of boiling water. One of these street scavengers too shelter in our yard, a point that I was alerted to one morning as I strode naked into my room, glanced out of the window that was directly ahead of me and noticed a ragged looking fellow sat on a plastic chair and doffing his cap at me like an English gent on a Sunday who's garden I was passing.

Interestingly, when faced with a potentially violent, complete unknown loitering in your yard covered in mud and rain, the revealing of one's own birthday suit seems inconsequential.

Feeling a deep sense of empathy for his situation, I called in to working citing a tramp in my yard and stayed in bed allowing him shelter. The ambitious little fellow was not happy with his lot though and promptly smashed the lock of the cupboard off, bent the bolt and put up home in the musky under stair cubby hole, a veritable stig of the dump.

Being a natural coward, I stayed in bed until he left and told myself that I was being a Good Samaritan. Over the following week he returned on occasion to his newly found home to roost until my flat mate (a small girl from Birmingham) took up the man of the house mantra and shoed him away like a stray cat, though given her mindset I’m sure that had he in fact been a stray cat, or dressed as a cat, he would now be living in the flat and defecating in the cat litter box as freely as his cat suit would permit.

The ordeal over I gradually regained the confidence to walk through the yard as oppose to the all new head down dash attack that I had adopted. That is until but a few days later another one of club street roamer came strolling through our threshold gate and began plodding down the steps full of aplomb and as smiley and happy as lord.

He wanted to know if his chum 'was in'....was in? 'Was in' in so much as the cupboard was now his permanent abode? I wonder if he's informed the Post office of this new address and left a forwarding address at on top of the cardboard box that he used to live in.

Barely having recovered from the surprise at the audacity of our parasitic friend I was enjoying one of my favourite day's in the house with tea, biscuits, computer games, Father Ted DVD's and children’s TV(I’m hooked on the new adventures of Iron Man), when two burly looking men began sweeping up outside my front door. Disconcerting at the best of times but our front door has a glass transparent front and leads directly from the yard into the lounge.

So whilst naught but a couple of inches of glass separated me from these angry looking do-gooders, I pondered, 'how often can I ignore events like these before I begin awaking to a homeless sleeping next to me in bed and a behemoth of a man vacuuming my room?'

Before the full impact of that thought had reverberated through me one of them knocked on the door.

This was it, he obviously wanted to sweep up the kitchen wearing a dress, and I was doomed.

Apparently they were builders, and apparently they were sweeping up the mess that they had made but a few days earlier and apparently his broom had snapped so could he borrow mine?

In a flash I had provided my sweeping device, innocent as they motivations of these men, they made me uncomfortable and I wanted them gone. Some time later (there was a great deal of mess and my broom is of limited usefulness resembling more of old toothbrush than a method of 'sweeping' away rubble) a knock at the door, and the call of 'I’ll just leave it put here mate', though he didn't look that bright so probably miss-spelled his own sentence, 'out hear'....

Once I was sure that the coast was clear I poked my suspicious little head around the door fearing having to sign for delivery of a package that the tramp had ordered or something, perhaps a new welcome mat. The broom was leaning on the wall. Or rather, A broom was leaning on the wall. The Builder had swapped it for a white one of similar quality taking my blue one with him.

BUT WHY?

The brooms were of similar inefficient quality, this wasn't the alleged broken broom and presumably he had to go and get it, else never would have needed mine in the first place.....

Perhaps he fears the colour white? Or is so unhappy in his marriage that any variety of any kind is vital to the perpetuation of his bliss? 

I wish him well with his new broom and certainly haven't suffered for the replacement, but I am now acutely aware that I do not need to leave my own living room to endure anecdote provoking lunacy and that anyone who says that one is wasting one's life by just sitting in front of the TV is completely wrong, if anything to go out, to leave all of that to go on un-seen would be a crime.

After all, if a tramp moves in to a cupboard and no-one knew he's done it, would he have really moved in at all?

In Decision.

Decisions are the toughest part of life.

Not only does the approaching need for a decision drag in one hand a Christmas stocking brimming with glorious potential, but in the other a fettered old sack oozing putrefied dreams.

Should I go on holiday?

Should I leave my wife?

Should I hold up traffic by stopping and asking directions or just take this next left? It's probably left...

Should I call that client today?

Shall I pass the ball or shoot for goal?

Should I hand this wallet in or spend the money?

Should I vote for George Bush or just kill myself now?

Should I drown my housemates cat in the river or just club it to death with a hard back copy of Blitz Cat and then claim that the book 'fell' off the shelf?

(Are you technically a casualty of World War 2 if paraphernalia that only exists because of it kills you?)

There are endless decisions of every level of importance and every one of them right down to the subconscious and accidental shape our lives and consequently the existential reality of those around us in some sort of decision making Fantastic Mr. Fox Trot.

The Butterfly effect ones choices are immeasurable and unquantifiable, but conjecture is nonetheless interesting.

Last Friday night I stopped out after work for a drink in the White Horse pub Soho. From the window I could see the back of a theatre that the erstwhile Dylan Moran is performing in. He was standing out the back of theatre swilling a glass of wine and manically waving a cigarette as per his comedic persona. Either Dylan Moran has become his own character or Black Books is really more of a documentary.

That was at about 6pm and there was something seductive and vital about the way Moran carelessly swilled his health away whilst being entirely successful (appearing on the surface to do so without any effort and almost to hold success in contempt). Instantly I felt the need to regress to an infantile state of booze swilling, foot loose, foot uncertain, good time lovin' student Dom.

Luckily I had a party invitation ready and willing.

By 3am I was without my coat, my beloved mid nineties adidas tracksuit top, my mobile phone headphones and my mind...oh and my house key. Not noticing the lack of house key until I arrived at my front door the torrent of thoughts...'my housemates not in...should I go back to look for the key....I can't afford that taxi....can I smash a window?....what if I try to and the brick rebounds of the window and hits me in the face?...What would Bruce Willis do?....

Knowing that I had to be up in 5 hours anyway to get myself to Surrey to lose a game of horribly amateurish football to men better suited to sitting down in a curry house than running around, I just couldn't sanction the taxi spend to travel across London to stay within the protective walls of a friends sanctuary.

There is something about whistling wind and a border line Ice storm that makes a man covering his Torso in naught but a baby blue Childs 70's T-shirt feel vulnerable. Alone and vulnerable...in Hackney. The excuse to launch Rockets into the air and burn one's own hand off with fire sticks is definitely not lost on the children of Hackney and the 6th of November was not a good place to be drunk, cold and with no where to go. It felt similar to Stalingrad 1944 and had there been a fellow human around that I was capable of overpowering I would surely have panicked and eaten him.

As it was, I was a very lucky fellow. I use lucky in the broadest sense of the term, as there was a sleeping back out on our washing line that I had neglected to bring back into the house to see how long it would take for it to be stolen. It was of course damp and cold sort of like a corpse just pulled out of the Thames being pressed against your face. This was to be my plank of wood at sea, my puddle in the desert, my slippers in a snow storm.

Tucked away on the hard cold concrete floor with this wet bag pulled up over my head I was just well protected enough to doze off until morn and awake having absorbed the bag moisture into my now wrinkly skin. I looked like a man who had gone into a cocoon and emerged 60 years older, an age accelerating hibernation serving little to no use or purpose lest I need to enter a pruniest face competition or to go undercover in a care home.

Was this all Dylan Moran’s fault? It was his decision to emerge out the back of the theatre and be all physically charismatic and carefree...but who made the decision to send him out that way in the first place?....and who made the decision to build the theatre in the first place? I have much work to do if I am to identify the culprit and have my vengeance.

Perhaps though there are even worse consequences. Perhaps an inquisitive firework wielding child due to embark upon DofE the following week saw me clamber youthful and enthused into the embryonic sleeping rag and happened to be passing later that morning when I twitched and writhed until the sack spat me out, birthed like a sodden foal, reborn, an octogenarian. Fearing the consequences of entering a sleeping bag he refused to attend the DofE award opting instead to spend the time studying at school under the supervision of a teacher. The teacher was a lonely middle aged spinster with confidence problems and after a couple of days of proximity they find themselves in an impassioned embrace, the confused hormones of youth crashing into the menopause, a symphonic eruption. Inevitably, the ensuing media storm drives them both to move to Eastleigh for a fresh start, where the boredom results in their mutual premature deaths just 6 months later.

My fault? Or Dylan Moran’s?