Current

I've many places across the city that I visit, regularly, so as to match a mood I may or may not be experiencing. Normally (whatever that is) it's a place/space wherein I seek privacy and to enjoy the silence of my own company.  It's called recharging batteries. My challenge is that as I get older those baterries (of mine) require more charging than, when like a mobile device, I was 'new'.

Tumultuous

This is the image that has been persistently presticked to the wall of my mind this last week.

It's the sight from my writing table at home and across Woodstock of the South-Easter waterfalling metric tons of cloud over Table Mountain to the far right of the pic, and over Devil's Peak larger than life - in the left half.

It's also symbolic of my emotional state the last one and a half months of 2020; perhaps I should not have been in bed and asleep by 21h45 on New Year's Eve?

However, another name for the South-Easter is the Cape Doctor; I'm (mostly) the eternal optimist.

One word? Tumultuous.

Timorous or bold?

I'm not at all surprised about long ago it is since I've written here, it's more like a gut-wrenching punch to my guts. So much so that I - initially - think a string of posts must have been lost, somehow deleted, I'm deeply consternated. Then I come to my senses.
Has been a bleak time.
Not even a single photo nor mention of Swaziland, Hanover, Berlin nor England. Fuck.
Listening: hey Google, play Annie Lennox on Spotify / thanks Google Nest.
Is this what it's come to, while others are terrified indoors and hiding from the plague while the death count mounts.
I bought a new bed yesterday, a proper adult one, and it arrived this morning. I'm not sure what to do with it. It's been just short of seven years of sleeping on a battered, extremely well-worn kingsize futon on my bedroom floor that ex-friends very kindly gifted me when I arrived in Woodstock mired in debt and on the very bones of my sorry ass.
Reading a Kindle version of Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor biography, 'An Adventure'; I've just completed the last of the paperback trilogy of his travels across Europe when he set out on foot in the 1930s to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. The first one I bought at the Book Lounge in 2017. Then I bought 'Between the Woods and the Water' at the cosy Waterstones in Petersfield in December 2018 before, finally, as a Christmas gift to myself, the third volume - 'The Broken Road' - at the same Waterstones this past December.
One paragraph in his biography struck a chord earlier today: "The pleasures of Paris at night were also becoming dangerously addictive. He had always resented going to bed, and revelled in the smoky world of tarts and nightclubs, all-night cafes, seedy bars and chance encounters." Other than the resenting going to bed part, that sums how I have been for most of my life, up until the last year and a half. I have shut down swathes of my life and crawled back into a shell that was last so prominent when I was growing up, that ended just before my moon began wondrously waxing. It's well past - well in my sex-orientated mind at least (it's a long and complicated story, that has enthralled many a therapist) -  full moon and I live in the perpetual zombie/living-dead notion that it's waning big time.
I have to end this self-isolation, but my relationship with God and my return to Catholicism are also intricately would up in my self-imposed status quo. 
Then, not much later, today, and totally related, the following also stopped me in my tracks, caused a sharp intake of breath:

The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life.

- Seamus Heaney (great Irish poet and Nobel laureate!)

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

(I need to do travel much more, but right outside of my comfort zone; or as my artist friend Harem strongly recommends: I need to live as if I'm starring in my own movie.)

Monday, 30 December 2019: Isle of Wight, a draft just re-discovered

I walked as far as I could along the seafront. Up until the fading light and my exhaustion caused me to turn back.

Then the long walk back to the ferry terminal where I’d arrived in bright and unusual for this time of the year winter sunshine earlier in the day.

Both esplanade coffeehouse’s I’d passed on my walk out along the coastline were closed in time with the fading dusk by my return walk and my regret at having walked so far. I also regretted having not stopped on my way out; it was that human thing of wondering what was around the next 'corner' of the coast that drove me forwards. In fact, I more than regret not stopping, I'm angry at myself.

Ryde, Isle of Wight. Just off the coast of Southampton and Portsmouth.

I was last here in 1986, that’s 33 years ago, wtf!

Was too tired to walk the mile-long historic wooden pier back to the ferry terminal, which is unusual for me... so I forked out the one pound seventy for the short ride.

What a blast from the past: It must have been a very old former underground tube train that had been put out to pasture here on the isle.

Only two carriages long. And very low on the tracks. The extremely comfortable seats with their springs sprung, well worn and sat out; the decor, colour scheme and furnishings taking me straight back to the London tube trains I obsessively haunted in 1986 and '87 as I trod the fine and sexual line between boyhood and becoming an adult.

Within four minutes I was at the terminal and within another four minutes relieved to be sitting on the much more clinical and sterile and (I suppose) practical ferry. Within another 13 minutes, we were disembarking at the Spinnaker near the Gunwharf Quays where everyone has that glint in their eye as they cruise the ‘premium retail space’. Portsmouth.

Then another train back to Petersfield, Hampshire.