Hurrah - later today I shall walk up to Eastleigh to pile a Sunday carvery red-cabbaged plate in the Toby Carvery with some people I like and some others who I don't know but maybe will like too. Double-hurrah - tomorrow it is off to London again for long walks and a concert. Yes life feels like a bit of a holiday. Always. It's why I've almost never had a proper holiday - how can you have a holiday in a life that is already a total holiday ? Even when I had jobs my life felt like a holiday - even more of a holiday than these jobless years - they contained even more laughter.
The only "proper" holiday I've had as an adult was that thing in Midhurst in the middle of the pandemic, me and my then-girlfriend, just us two alone in the Angel (?) hotel on the high street, with one person running the whole place and cooking us breakfast. It was wonderful.
In these days today when absolutely everyone I know is really quietly cracking up and depressed and adrift and doesn't know what to do with themselves - I know that I too must be a bit lost - I know this because a week or two ago I took the advice of many friends over recent years (decades) and booked myself a proper solo holiday. Not a looking-for-a-shag sort of holiday. Not a cultural thing. Not an adventurous thing at all. It is a week up in Northumberland - and the fact that I still call it Northumberland says something about how holidays are so wrong for me.
When I started telling people that I had done this they all changed their advice. "Where will you be staying ?" "A hotel in Newcastle." "You're fucking crazy, Newcastle's an even bigger shit-hole than Southampton." Well I know that's not true - no city is a bigger shit-hole than Southampton. The day before yesterday, when my ex-girlfriend was driving me home from her office we passed Ikea and watched the German tourists just off the boat trying to cross the 6-lane road with no lights to tell them when it was safe - you just start crossing the road and hope that the traffic lights stay red for the traffic, otherwise you get killed. And indeed someone will have to get killed before anyone does anything so obvious about it. Welcome to Britain.
Despite being a grumpy misanthrope, I am actually much more cheerful than the average Brit, I am much more confident, I am good with strangers and have no problem breaking the ice. I am bad at small-talk - ie I have no patience for it. It's not that I'm "deep" or anything clever. It's just that the weather's the weather, the past is the past, you went on ten holidays last year and are gagging to tell me about them, but I am not interested, I am on this holiday right now, off to Eastleigh for the yorkie and roasties in gravy soup, off to Camden and Wigmore Hall tomorrow, off to Northumberland later this year.
And I don't want to talk much more about the only holiday I've ever had, I want to talk about the ones I am going to have and why I am having them. Why am I having them ? Because they are part of the work that I do, the discipline that I need, the punctuations between the books I read and the music I make and (happiest of all) the opening of a charity shop door to look at the CDs and DVDs and books and I am still hooked on small backpacks and jumpers and shoes/boots - I've tried to give these things up - but what would fill the time instead ? - nothing is as much fun as the driftings I do between the things that other people pretend to find interesting.
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recorded this morning, photo Camden late last year
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