Day 18: Breakfast

It's 3:33pm and I am yet to have breakfast.
I can count the number of times I have eaten breakfast in the last month on one hand. Comfortably.
I "get" breakfast and its ever-en-vogue sister brunch, but it simply doesn't factor in my alimentary arsenal.
It being the 'most important meal of the day, perhaps I am missing something, (or just enjoy being contrary) but I never wake up hungry.
If I were, or ever am, hungry at whichever single figure triggers my alarm, I would eat, but as someone who is perennially late anyway, I'm not sure where I would find the time.
Food, drink and mealtimes can form a massive part of a culture. In Spain, for example, the late evening meals preceded by the cornerstone of Spanish life that is tapas and drinks with friends, sees the proper ceremony and habitual, unspoken importance afforded to that beautiful combination of good friends, good food, good booze. Rent is cheap in Madrid, and with good reason: I can't imagine anyone spends any time at home. Instead, they are drawn together as the light fades, in simple celebration of the day, and seemingly of life itself, the warmth of the day diffused somehow more slowly among the huddles of laughter and familiarity, spilling out on to squares and street corners with the overwhelming feeling of there being nowhere else in the world that any one, or anyone, need be.
I get the distinct feeling that in Madrid, no-one does anything alone. From couples, to huge groups of friends crammed noisily around cafe tables, or scattered companionably across any spare space on the ground, Madrid is for lovers, both romantic and platonic.
Perhaps my distrust of breakfast nods to an affinity with Madrileños and their culture of later-in-the-day. There is a sense here that time spent with friends and for yourself is the most important of all, and that anything else has its place, and its function, but that's it. Instead of a feeling of frantically wringing every last minute from the precious hours between work, it feels very much more a case of life, punctuated by work, and not the other way around.
I might just stick around. At least for breakfast.

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Day 17: What I would like to spend my next 25 years doing

More.
More of what I love, more of what makes me happy.
More of the things I know and love, and more of the things that I don't. Yet.
More sitting in parks in warm, sunny places with a notebook, pen and the assembled untold stories of the people passing by.
More laughing.
More late nights, more long afternoons, more adventures.
More handwriting letters.
More work that doesn't feel like work.
More letting go.
More time spent with friends.
More trusting my own instinct, and well, more writing.

Bring it on.

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Day 16: Accents

Accents are a distinguishing thing.

Patchwork and nuanced they hint at a back story, mottled and daubed with flecks of countries, conversations and circumstances we have known. It's through this inflection and intonation that we map the journeys of others, the rivers of speech patterns carving their way through both home soil and foreign lands.

Exposed to a new city for the first time accents become the gatekeeper to both existence and experience, at once possessing the unique ability to both alienate and ingratiate at any given moment. Schrödinger's acceptance.

Just today, in the space of 7-or-so short hours in Madrid I have found myself in conversation with an Italian-born Madrileño of 7 months who, upon learning we were Welsh and not English, happily regaled us with the story of his time spent in Burryport where none of the locals could understand his decidedly international accent, and quite frankly neither could he theirs. He commented at this point that in contrast he could very clearly understand us, and that we "spoke English very well."

It sounds obvious, but I think it takes a level of foreign language learning to become sympathetic to the plight of the foreign ear battling with the native tongue. You become unconsciously aware of that split-second between words, making sure to allow just enough time for translation and meaning to collide somewhere in the depths of the synapses. Instinctively you learn to look for and recognise that split-second flicker of approval and comprehension that flashes across the eyes and down to the corners of the mouth with a slight nod of the head, signalling for you to carry on the sentence. You become aware of your vocabulary, not so as to dumb down, but simply ensuring that you don't inadvertently default to the kind of linguistic riddles that we have such a bad habit of, like, falling in to.

There is always the argument for speaking as much of a native language as possible when travelling, but it can be a minefield.
Accent, intonation, speed, vocabulary, and even simply your own panicked brain can seem to conspire to leave you standing at the front of a queue of people, open-mouthed and silently floundering as you fail to process fast enough the simple question of whether or not you would like a bag.

Yeah, thanks for that.

Accents can conjure a whole host of emotions. When, far from home, your ear happens upon a familiar lilt, that easiest of conversations, the simplest of interactions, that mere acknowledgement can make all those miles feel that much shorter. Conversely, it can have you sidling down the nearest side street, denying any kind of connection to that most obnoxiously "other."

Accents are to speech as dynamics and articulation are to melody and music: the colour, intensity, and, well, je ne sais quoi that brings the bare bones of language to life.

After all, it's not what you say, it's how you say it.

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Day 15: Glasses vs. Contact Lenses

I have never worn contact lenses.
I've never really had a desire to.
Some people want to be rid of glasses, of contacts, so completely that they take lasers to their eyes in an effort to permanently negate the need for them.
I on the other hand like wearing glasses. I like the way I look wearing them (let alone the fact that I can actually see what I look like when I wear them)
In the same way that I like make-up, I like being able to fashion a face that I want to present to the world, and my glasses play a part in that.
When I was first prescribed glasses I jumped at the chance. The same happened with braces back in my early teens. In both cases I was not in dire need of their functions, but still I eagerly accepted the offer.
A chance to alter my appearance in a non-invasive way, a chance to change something about myself and to impose some kind of autonomy.
I make no secret of the fact that body image is something I have struggled with massively over the past decade, and well before that too. I get frustrated and at times bored of some of those thought patterns that even now have a tendency to creep back in, so much so that as a compromise I opt to try and change something about myself that is at least somewhat removed from that familiar ache of feeling entirely ill at ease within your own skin. Hair colour, hair cut, piercing, new make-up: small steps to alter the narrative, to nudge the familiar sequence off course. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but we can all attest to the fact that even now it's fun to play dress-up: an escape from all sorts, not just the dark, heavy stuff.
I have left it too late to blog again and as midnight approaches along with the prospect of a 4:30am wake-up call, it's high time I slipped my glasses off the bridge of my nose and allowed my eyes to rest as they seem so intent upon doing. Simple. Chalk that one up as another win for glasses.

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Day 14: An empty mind

These are simply words to fill a page, words to fulfill an obligation.
I am the very definition of spent, and it is sheer determination alone guiding my finger touches across this keyboard.
When I set myself this challenge I'd not really comprehended the task I was undertaking. 40 days is a surprisingly long time, and I'm not even halfway there yet.
I am enjoying the routine of writing every day, the inevitable bout of creativity that I can hang the day upon, but on days like today when I'm already mentally 12 sheep down, it is harnessing more brainpower than it should.
There is no point to this post, no meandering narrative or pithy conclusion.
I've hit a temporary wall: not a lack of motivation, but a lack of headspace.
While my brain has emptied of the requisite words to wax lyrical on a given topic, it is only because they have been crowded out by duty and expectation.
The kind of tired that sits either side of the bridge of your nose, bisecting thought, reason and function.
The longer I stare at this screen the less I am convinced that the holes in my head will act as any kind of outlet so instead I will give in to their weight and endeavour to empty my mind to sleep.
Until tomorrow
x

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Day 13: The History of the Pub

An experiment.

How I came to be sitting in this pub; a literal history of the people in this pub.

Literally. In an effort to in-absolutely-no-way pass off some of my writing burden I asked the 6 people assembled to write a line on the topic of how they came to be sitting where they are.
In the pub.

1. Once dragged around pubs as a child. Simultaneously "encouraged" to maintain my violin. I appreciate these influences for they have combined so that I can be sitting in this pub with my desk partner and fellow orchestra-ers.

2. Over the hills, further away, around the black ice at the edge of the world, down the bottle and up the barrel.

3. A time honoured tradition of wandering from rehearsal to public house. Tradition became habit and I'm here every week. It's not the impy though.

4. Cheers!

5. Je ne sais pas... J ai suivi la lumiere...

6. Red wine fanatic, what can I say?


It's an interesting thing to think about, how you've come to be sitting somewhere.
It's also interesting to see how people choose to respond to a brief when they have a phone shoved in front of them at the pub and are asked to write a sentence.
I have come to be sitting in this pub due to a series of fortunate events, with a few less-than-fortunate ones along the way.
Life has conspired to make me think about fate and circumstance a lot recently. How the little details of life collide seemingly at random knocking certain things off kilter and surreptitiously sliding others to the forefront of our consciousness.
That one aspect of your life where you can pinpoint the exact decision, one way or the other, that brought you to a certain place, or put you on a certain path. That one person you seem to always see on that one bus you only catch from time to time.
Is it the universe telling us something? Is it fate, or destiny, or some other force of nature compelling us towards certain people, places or things?
Or is it the human condition: the desire for more, the desire to see more, the desire for more from the everyday than we feel we have been assigned.
There's something wonderful in the idea that we're not just clusters of sinew and cells scattering at random across the vast expanse of the universe.
I like serendipity, and circumstance, and the idea that maybe, just maybe, certain things are simply meant to be.
Perhaps sometimes we engineer our own circumstance and find ourselves where we need to be entirely off our own backs, but once in a while it's quite nice to believe in a certain kind of magic.

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Day 12: Sleep

We spend a third of our lives sleeping.

We sleep in, with, and around.

Encouraged by those around us we sleep on it, sleep it off and often lose it altogether.

Sleep is the facilitator of dreams.

The measured, calm overseer indulging the boisterous puppy of dreams.

The facilitator, yes, but in its own right the thing our bodies crave the most at the end of a long day, the thing most notable by its absence and when it evades us.

Physically we cannot fight it. 

The gentle figure who really does know best, calmly, quietly nudging with slow-blinking eyes, nodding heads and increasingly heavy limbs in a measured crescendo towards all-out slumber.

The full stop, new sentence at the end of a day to forget; the semi-colon of excitement and anticipation cascading from one day to the next.

Sleep is the one great leveller: it is its only cure. 

Great men and women; warmongers and thieves. 

Sometimes we should let sleeping dogs lie.

And on that note, to sleep.

Perchance to dream.

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