The Long Watch

For the past couple of months I've been talking to a friend in the North. We were lovers briefly once and parted as friends many years ago. Selfishly, being where I am, I was delighted to hear from her, someone to talk to, a buffer against the loneliness, someone who had cared for me.

She has a partner, all going well if dull as far as I knew, so puzzled as to why the call. It soon came clear why she needed to talk to me. Her mother was dying slowly and painfully and she had moved in with her, to try to mend what had not been a close relationship and to help her Mum leave with as much dignity as she could give her. While her partner and family were nearby they were little help (partner scared of death, family squabbling and 'busy'), and the messy circumstances of her mother's illness were not what she had expected.

Her mum was, sad to say, needy and waspish, and the nearness of her death had not been acknowledged by her, making it difficult for my friend to connect and forgive and to gain the reconciliation she craved. She would call late at night in tears, pouring out her anger and fear. She too was frightened of death and watching her mother die so painfully, increased that fear. Because I was apart from it all and we had been close once meant she felt she could talk to me about her anger and despair without being judged.

So tough for her.
I seem to have seen more of death than most, been to too many funerals, seen bodies torn and crushed. Doesn't help. Other than to know I can get through it. I had sat once with a friend who was dying a similar death, but he was brave enough to make me go away, to take my memory of him intact. A gift beyond price looking back. We said our goodbyes, honestly and with love, eventually there was nothing more to be said and he had the grace to know that. In Pace Requiescat, Mick.

That wasn't to be for my northern friend. Or me. I wanted to help and think I did, listening, reassuring, through a crackly phone, time after time. Hate talking on phones, through texts. Big things, important things, love and concern can only really be expressed face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye. You should be there.

If I'm honest (and I am) I wanted it to stop, for her mother to die. There seemed no resolution possible without death for either of them, I could hear my friend ebbing and crumpling with every call. And, selfishly I know, I would put the phone down feeling darker, she having no idea how down I had been before she rang. Nor should she; it really, really, wasn't about me.

Finally, last night she called to say that her mum had died. They had managed an ending of sorts, she had been able to talk to her mum alone while she was (she believed) still concious without any of the family around, for a while. I'm glad for her, she had stood a long and hard watch, maybe the longest any of us can take, glad that she had at least that thin release.

Like many people I think she hoped that the dark glamour of the approach of Death, the Death Bed, as in so many books and films, will spontaneously produce solace, resolution a neat ending between the two of them. It rarely does of course, there is no third entity there, only two people with all the potential for misunderstanding and confusion there is between any two people at any other time. And there is no end, you go on. It can change those who see it though, the survivors. Apart from the impact of grief, if they embrace the true meaning of the event it can give them a fierce commitment to love and life, and to those they love who remain.

I hope she gained from it, but am not sure she did in my heart of hearts. As at sea, some people shouldn't do the long watches, not without someone who can standing by them; they are not for everyone and there is no shame in knowing that of yourself. Give what comfort you need to or can, be wary of the cost to your self and the people who rely on you, and expect nothing back.

My friend was generous in her thanks to me, said she couldn't have done it without me being on call, but that didn't make me feel any better. I don't think she should have been there on her own and feel bad about enabling that, if I'm honest.
And I am.

Don't expect to hear from her again.

Schadenfreude, sweet schadenfreude

The Wolf and cub went camping for the first time this year at DiveFest, the annoyingly fonted diving beano, held for the first time in the SW. The Wolf's cruel masters decided that the project he works for should have a 'presence' divers being one of the 'stakeholders' the project needs to 'engage with'. This 'fucked off' the Wolf who spends his time talking and arguing with these groups for a day job. Handing out leaflets to disinterested passers by over a weekend, like the poor cow who hands out rum flavoured cheese samples at the local Tescos, is not 'best practice', is not a 'targeted' use of his vast, cold, intellect.

Still, the firm paid for the Wolf cub and a hog roast ticket, so he could sell the trip to the cub as a camping trip at least.

Arriving at the site with White Zombie blasting out of his decrepit Disco (trying to drown out the ubiquitous acoustic drones of this weeks trendy surf croaker from the tents), the Wolf was unsurprised to see probably half a million quids worth of gleaming steroidal 4x4s, over-powered dual engined ribs and vast and complex polygonal canvas structures. These people have serious disposable income issues he thinks. While they like to present themselves as half-Jacques cousteau half-Attenboroughs piratical adventurers, mostly they are middle-class people who can't play golf, but still need A Life Style to reflect and display their status/credit access. Diving will do nicely. You need serious STUFF for that.

The Wolf spent a while diving himself in the past and loved the diving, but not the posturing and gear obsession that went with it. Most of the people he met were determined to tell him how much more their gear cost than his, and at which long range destination they had recently patronised the locals at. Underwater, to the Wolfs fishing conditioned eye, they were nervous and panicky, or operated at levels of idiocy which could potentially leave them and the Wolf dead very quickly in the event of an occurrence outside of the BSAC manual. Not all, to be fair, but most. Back to the woods for the Wolf.

The forecast looked satisfyingly grim, so Wolf and cub spent some time making sure the tent was well-pitched, muttering powerful Ray Mearisms, channelling his pudgy powers as they hammered in the pegs and twanged the guy ropes. They then sat in their luridly cheap deckchairs sipping a Guinness and a lemonade respectively, watching the newly arrived yuppies and their larvae began the construction of their yurt next door. The Wolf knows how expensive these yurt copies are and how they take an age to put up, even if you know what you are doing. Not having the benefit of computer designed mass produced frameworks and modern fabrics, they are neither as weatherproof or as stable as the Wolfs bargain bucket Halfords special. Fun to rent maybe thinks the Wolf, but buy? Presumably they are attractive because of their cost and the statement they make about you? Which from where the Wolf was sitting was screaming TOSSER, in an array of ersatz ethnic fabrics. Once up (a long way from erect in any sense of the word in the Wolfs opinion) the yurt was filled with an array of efnicky-looking stoves, folding divans and throws. Yep, throws. As fine an example of 'Glamping' as the Wolf had ever seen.

Later that night the first of the weekends succession of howling gales hit the raggle taggle middle manager gypsies-o. Nothing to the Wolf and cub, it's what happens every time they go camping (to the point where his son thinks wet weather is camping weather) so no drama. Suddenly, his sensitive ears picked up a blood curdling shriek of pain and loss from next door in the yurt "Do something Charles DON'T just bloody stand there, the salad is EVERYWHERE". The badly pitched yurt had begun to attempt to fly back to its ancestral home on the Mongolian steppes, leaving garlic crushers and drolly patterned wellies everywhere. "I am NEVER coming with you in this bloody ethnic hovel again Charles, what were you THINKING"
Of course the Wolf went to help, he's like that.
Can't stand by and watch a tossers tossed salad tossed...

Running for nothing

I'm about to go running again.
It always feels like I'm about to go to the dentist. And seeing as how I have been running every other day for a couple of months now that's a lot of angst. I read, and hear from my friends how much real runners miss it if they don't go, how much happier it makes them feel, but just don't get it. Feel good when I've finished yeah, but not when I'm doing it.

I'm not running to lose weight as don't need to, to look buff (any attempt to look good is doomed by the inherited arrangement of sensory organs on the front of my skull), and I'm plenty fit enough, but tell myself it's to keep from sinking into sad too easily. On average I guess it must be working as could easily imagine feeling worse - a sure sign you are not at the bottom of that particular well, no matter how lonely.

There is something about running that is just un-enjoyable to me. It's not the physical effort, tougher at my age than for most of course, but then I've worked far harder in my life and for far, far longer periods and didn't feel this kind of trepidation. I suspect it's partly where I run, either round and round a couple of football fields (boring), or up and down (but mainly up - 65% according to Google Earth) some steep hills on local roads (equally boring). Or it might be that I'm purposely running up hills because mentally I really don't like doing that, treating it as more of a mental test than a physical one?

Current scientific opinion seems to think that for the longest part of our existence as humans, we would have evolved partly as chase predators, hunting down, killing or wounding game, then chasing it down if necessary. There are even some reports of hunters literally running animals to death, by tracking them, disturbing them, tracking them again, disturbing them etc, until they collapse in exhaustion, without physically ever being able to keep up with them. We would then have to carry large amounts of the kill back to camp or whatever, which is why we (or maybe just the Wolf we's) respond so quickly to weight training. This would also explain our capacity for fast burst sprinting and for long distance running too. This is reason enough to use our bodies in that manner, and why we suffer over the long-term when we don't. And anyway what's the point of owning the killer-primate version of the V8 if you ain't going to floor the fucker every now and again?

So why not enjoy it? I used to run across the high moors near where I worked and enjoyed that far more. Every single step on the terrain was different, running through a many-coloured landscape that changed seasonally and every step of the way, felt far more challenging and rewarding. Even though the vast majority of the route had even more and steeper hills in it. Perhaps it was an atavistic sense of being in the right place that was being satisfied, and could distract me from the repetitive action involved? There was definitely a weird unconscious zen-like focus in action, deciding where your next step was going to fall on the uneven ground, which presumably occupied more of you head.

Hmm, maybe I should treat my self to the occasional trip up there again. On the other hand, if I started to enjoy it, wouldn't that reduce the mental toughening benefit? Maybe slip a sheet of sandpaper down my shorts. That should do it. On the other hand...

Sorry, got to go. The Wolf has just pointed out that I'm prognosticating and that I should shut up and get outside. Now it's bastard raining. Time to meld with the inner Wolf.
Running, more complicated than you think...

Time out

The wolf is sitting on a rock.
High over Hugh Town on St. Marys, looking over Crow Sound, across to other Scillies Islands, watching the sun set.
Thinking.

Nothing unusual about that. He's starting to think he should get one in his house, he spends so much of his time sitting on them looking at horizons, stars, pasts and futures. Why not sit on one and look at the TV? Well the dust for one thing. Shows up really quick on laminate floors. And them tiny little red mites than run around on them (they do, look real close), not sure about them. Wouldn't work.

It's not the rock that attracts the Wolf of course, it's the height they are at.
The height gives the Wolf an emotional distance, a breathing space, a meditative pause; time out.

The thoughts? Concerned.

The Wolf is involved in an extremely complex and important project that involves him convincing people he likes, respects and knows, the local fishing community, to work with people they consider, well, enemies really. And working to convince them to let go of areas, grounds, that are as important to them now as it was to their predecessors. The worst thing is, the Wolf knows exactly how much what they stand to lose has cost them in money, work, lives.

So many groups now lay claim over land- and sea-scapes that they have not proved or tested themselves against, have risked nothing for. Their claim is, in the Wolf's opinion, aesthetic. A genuine (but particular) appreciation of the beauty and intricacy of the environment, or even the half-arsed 'nature good/human bad' discourse, so common among the Children of the Supermarket Age* is considered enough to grant a superior, a higher claim on these conflicted territories. So many of them too, want to abstract the human from these areas, considering them un-natural destroyers, killers. These same groups of course, who really understand and appreciate these environments, should be allowed free access and any benefits that may accrue from that access. Of course. The New Enclosures, driven by the same moral righteousness and spurious confidence that "stole the common from under the goose".

These arguments are of course far more nuanced than the Wolf has allowed here, he is as guilty of the second as anyone else on landscapes where people have left or are scarce; the moors, the hills, mountains. But these are not places which communities harvest for a living, producing distinct and special cultures, one of which the Wolf once counted himself proud to be part of. Those communities matter, their difference is part of the hybrid vigour every culture needs, to be able to adapt and survive what the world throws at them. The Wolf believes with all his heart the potential loss of these sub-cultures to our larger society is as damaging as the economic loss will be the communities at risk.

As a society, we praise and nurture the multi-cultural (and why not where it genuinely enhances), the foreign and the exotic, and yet demean and demonise those indigenous sub-cultures that existed way before, and evolved in parallel with the rise of the modern consumer hegemony; the stroppy working class, the soldier and his love/hate garrison town, the farming communities, the fisher, the miner, the quarry man. Especially the ones which kill things for a living. This always makes the Wolf smile, as all animal life kills to live (all flesh is grass), and nothing dies of old age in the sea, ever. Not all animals are lucky enough to have others do it for them of course.

So why is the Wolf involved in this righteous (or wrongeous) campaign to 'nicen up' the idea of The Sea, one of many seemingly determined to emasculate this brawling, pugnacious, awkward and brilliant land? Well, he thinks there's a chance, just a chance maybe, this project could slow the erosion of the communities he loves, could maybe get people to mentally locate fishermen back into their rightful place as part of the marine environment and not just a blight on it, top predators along with the other big brained killer mammals out there. And that maybe, during the process, he can explain that world to those who who buy their fish in packets and risk nothing but a parking fine to earn their living.

But to do that he has to tell people that he likes, things they really don't want to hear, again and again.
And listen to people who he doesn't like, whining and fretting about a world they nothing of.
Again and again.

*The Wolf is a child of the Atomic Age. Way cooler....

Searching

Bunch of us went treasure hunting Saturday morning.
Me, a slightly hungover friend and our two very 'cited kids.

We were seeking a geocache, the altogether modern and less sinister version of the cold war 'dead letter box' or the blood gold of the unclaimed hoard. Geocaches are small containers hidden in distant carns, public buildings, crossroads, dead ends, secret gardens, derelict factories, galleries, ancient woods and lay-bys and...you name it. They are everywhere, probably one near you, but you will never find it, unless you are the sort of person who looks under things just because they have an underside. Or unless you are child.

Once hidden, their exact location is published on-line, on specialist sites, recorded using the GPS NAVSTAR Satellite system. This is used because the containers can be spectacularly small and inaccessible. They contain trade goods; social detritus, stories, gee-gaws, key rings, knick knacks, keepsakes, shiny things, poems, notes and chocolate. You can take anything you want from them but must replace it with something of equal or greater value, and you must not let any civilians see you. Cool eh?

Pause:
We were playing with a constellation of 30 odd satellites orbiting 20,000km above us, managed by the fucking United States Air Force 50th Space Wing (nope didn't make that up), picking up time signals accurate to within trillionths of a second on a tiny and cheap hand-held GPS receiver, giving us an accurate three-dimensional position fix to within a metre. To find a plastic lunch box full of the stuff that falls down the back of a sofa.
I love the Modern World.
Play:

So we crossed the moors, following but oblivious to the invisible lattice spun around the world by brilliant and unsung sorcerors, laughing and pointing and enjoying the beautiful May day, the molten yellow gorse and sparkling white hawthorn. We climbed one of the two loveliest hills in West Penwith and almost forgot what we there for. Around us, a turquoise horizon, defined by the Atlantic, above us, an endlessly deep and heart-breaking blue sky, pierced by swallows arcing across the many-coloured land, blacks, ochres, greens, dark reds, all the earth's shades; the shattered crumbs of the granite substrate, dragged to the fields edges and into a silicate lace across the moor, echoing the invisible web we followed here. And quiet, quiet enough to hear a cuckoo calling far across the hills. Can air taste, can it smell as blue as it looks?
Felt like it.

So yep, we found the cache; notes and poems were written, small goods weighed, examined and traded, all hidden from the eyes of the Real World and buried again with smiles and hopes, given meaning and worth by the quest and the act. All fun. But we also found the real treasure. Peace, beauty and the company of our friends in the sun, for a while.

And you know what? I really don't care how trite and commonplace that might look or sound, because it's true.
And worth searching for.

Wastelands

Being no stranger to wastelands, as poem, insomniac mindscape, metaphor or childhood playground, the Wolf is looking forward to seeing the new Wasteland exhibition at the Newlyn Gallery, by students of the first Curatorial MA at the University of Cornwall. A busy opening night, crammed with people mwaahing each other like it's 1999, is good for the gallery and social cohesion of the local art world, but not so good if you don't know anyone to mwaah with and can't see the art.

What he could see made him wonder what the claimed connection with the Eliot poem was. The Wolf has an intimate connection to the poem, having a line or two tattooed into his skin and loves it almost as much as he struggles to understand it. He first read it while at sea in an old copy of Eliot's collected work, which is when he realised that unlike novels, poems could be read again and again, without finishing them - a real boon on the 10 day trips he was enduring at the time.

The poem is famous for being Eliot's reaction to the fracturing of early 20th Century society and the absence of spiritual cohesion, desolate and multi-voiced, hopeless. And yet the Wolf (knowing no better when he first read it) paradoxically found it forming a coherent narrative, a gestalt. He also found much solace and instruction in The Wasteland, it's bare and broken terrain enabling him to gaze at himself without distraction and to try to work out how to get from Here to There. It's inclusion of the many voices, voices he recognised, he saw as a positive. The inclusion of the arcane symbolism of the Tarot, the mediaeval elements Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit allowed multiple personal interpretations, its unblinking reminders of death and loss implicit in life and it's final message of acceptance ("Shantih, shantih, shantih") fitted very well with his outlook as a fisherman. Many voices yes, but not a cacophony, all from one consciousness, so maybe not so much fractured as diffracted.
But, then he’s a Wolf so what does he know.

An easy hook to hang an exhibition on thinks the Wolf. If you are going to curate a show around the poem, you have a range of potential themes which you can use, other than the traditional God's Dead and We're All Fucked mantra/whine of the last 100 years. Disappointingly the theme used is the obvious one; fracture, alienation, collapse and of course the loss of the spiritual, which most of the works echo in some way at least.

The Wolf cannot understand why people think the modern world is devoid of spirituality, it’s chock full of the stuff; half-baked new-age energy bollocks, after-life millenarian schlock, Secret Lore paperbacks, anti-science medicine, nature worship, and all the global mono- and pantheistic religions, crushing women, dividing schools, tearing bloody chunks off of each other across the globe and still trying to tell the Wolf what he can and can't say about them. Seriously, that’s more than enough fucking spirituality for the Wolf.
Humans eh?

The Wolf takes a turn around the show again, without the crowds and without reading the notes - unless he draws a blank. He has three favourites, i.e., those which provoke the most reaction in him

The first Redressing the Balance is a ruined cardboard city emerging or subsiding into the sands, which works brilliantly. The Wolf thinks his son and his friend would love to wage war with their Space Marine models across this broken, desolate town. It also resonates with the endless images of real marines fighting and dying in dusty mud walled towns such as the Wolf sees nightly on TV. Seen like this, from a god-like perspective, hard to think it's worth dying for. And yet it could also represent the skeletal remains of a once vibrant and beautiful civilisation, something to be explored and re-imagined, that could enrich our present with exotic images and different perspectives if we could know it, something worth years of struggle and research perhaps. And, of course, the image of the ruined city, the fallen towers implies the end of all our works, ultimately. So what, thinks the Wolf, suddenly resentful. That's then, this is now. Enjoy. Where is the art that celebrates what we are, what have done?

The second is the Ruths, heavy training dummies lying on the floor and against the wall in positions implying attitudes of helplessness and vulnerability, but which are truly disturbing to the Wolf. Not so much the lazy half-arsed fetish reference (red and black latex [?] instead of canvas) but the inert 70kg dead weight, the mass of them. The Wolf has horrible memories of dragging the real thing up through several smoke-filled pitch black decks in a fire-fighting exercise that almost went wrong. An immense and hateful load that you cannot let go, but which could potentially destroy you. All sorts of resonances there for oppression, toxic relationships, memories of past pain or abuse, servitude etc, take your pick. The Wolf shudders. But can that sense of menace be experienced by anyone who has not carried a Ruth across their shoulders and felt that sullen oppressive weight? What do people see who haven’t carried them?

The last is Lucy Willows beautiful and intricate Memento Mori images, black and purple jewel-like glints in the corner of the gallery. The original Memento Mori as the Wolf understood it in earlier times was an artistic device, meant as a reminder to exult in life, to revel in it, bite hard on it, because it isn’t for ever. The later 19th Century ‘gothic’ sensibilities seemed to re-interpret the device as a call to fear death, rather than to embrace life, to walk through the valley in dread until the end, wailing; while those in the 20th referenced it by growing mysterious fringes and wearing black - whatever their complexion. Now that's scary.

There is an acknowledgement of death here, more fascination then obsession perhaps, and yet the pictures seem more concerned with the textured surface of the remains, the rich process of decay, the changing through time of the organic structure without the animation of life. In the Wolf’s mind Death occurs once and instantaneously; the gothic fetishisation of it into a looming presence, a state to be feared long before and after it occurs (rather than a dimensionless event to be avoided and not feared) is not for him, but the pictures fascinate him nevertheless. Sad and melancholic. Beautiful.

Although vaguely disappointed at first, the Wolf came away with an immense amount to think about, provoked both by the art he liked and didn’t like, triggering new avenues of thought and reflection. Sure, a couple of them failed to work at all for him, but still. The biggest failure to the Wolf was in the missed attempt to celebrate The Wasteland in any new or challenging way, which after all was the poem the exhibition supposedly had at its core.
But that’s today, tomorrow he might feel different.
Or he might be dead.

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

-T S Eliot. The Wasteland

Wolf at the Door

Today found the wolf grinning at strangers.
Probably as unsettling for the 'grinees'* as it was for the grinner. Smiling is something he does a lot, so as not to frighten people; grinning of course can go either way.

Having dropped his son at the rather excellent Exchange gallery in Penzance and while chatting to a couple of the delightful art folk who help run it, the wolf hears that there is a shortage of volunteers due to a sickie being thrown. Presuming it was to aid in the progress of the kinetic workshop his cub is enrolled in, he offers to help. After a few 'are you sure' volleys between the three parties concerned, and for whose benefit the wolf is not entirely sure, he is led to the reception desk, given a dead walkie talkie and told to welcome people to the gallery.

Settling behind the desk and fastening a 'welcoming' grin to the front of his skull, the bemused wolf considers his position. Presumably having walked in through the door, the punters clearly want to come in to the gallery. How exactly would having an unwashed (he had just completed his morning run and now hadn't had a chance to shower) heavily tattooed werewolf grimace at them enhance their experience of the delights on offer?

There is a folder marked FOH on the side of the desk which he picks up. He works out it must mean 'front of house' and is soon deeply immersed in the world of the volunteer grinner. He is fascinated by the utterly useless and pervasive HSE detail and particularly the advice given to dealing with potential trouble makers. This is looking up. There is a panic button. Maybe there will be assaults on the gallery by rabid Stuckists, or murderous and bereted watercolourists, distraught at the lack of hanging space given to sensitive studies of badgers, or pallid seascapes or of orchids captured in charcoal by sandal wearing 'alternatives'. Bring it on. The wolf has worked doors and is no stranger to the powerful metaphysical and philosophical significance of the door (having had a conversation on the way to the gallery with his cub, pointing out the doorway is never merely a gap in a barrier, it is always a transition from one social space to another) and the powerful emotions that they can generate.

Sadly there is none of this. The people who choose to walk through the door for the few hours the wolf has been given responsibility for are exactly the people you would expect to. Several of his friends walk by the gallery, all (one doing a double take and realising it can't possibly be the wolf), continue by. Those that do enter are what it is probably deeply un-PC to call middle class. So be it. They are.

He is cheered later though, by a conversation with one of the art pixies who ignites when she talks about her role in engaging children and (and local people) with the gallery - with Art really, although she doesn't say this. People who love what they do fascinate the wolf, those doing something he enjoys even more so. She is, in the wolf's opinion, luckier than she knows. His son is is arting his socks off in the room next door and here is someone employed specifically to make sure that he does. And that is an excellent use of a civilisation's resources, in the wolf's opinion.

Museums and galleries, commercial or otherwise are to the wolf one of the things that make civilisation worth it's salt, right up there with a professional army, V8s, democracy, free speech and the NHS. The display and exposition of others views and insights, past and contemporary have been a comfort and inspiration for the wolf over the years, and he is always disappointed that more people just don't get it. It doesn't matter whether you like what you see or not; if you don't like what you see then you are immediately challenged by it - which is in the wolf's opinion A Good Thing. An art gallery is not a massage parlour or a spa; it should be a blood soaked arena, or a lover's bed. Fighting or loving, you should respond to what you experience there with passion and with honesty above all else, always.

Later, another of the art folk is very concerned that the wolf may be getting bored with his duty, which is touching but misplaced. He loves the beautiful space he is sitting in, is being supplied with excellent coffee, is drunk on power (he has a badge!) and is watching people. What's to be bored about?
She gives him a cake as she does not realise this, which is a kind thing to do.
The wolf wishes it were a sausage roll, but accepts that Art can be challenging.
And bites it.




*copyright Martin Amis, London Fields. Sort of.

More Than You Think

The wolf was lucky enough to find himself alone on a certain beach early this (Sunday) morning.

Two hours of heaven before the arrival of anyone else, listening to the timeless roar and hiss of the waves; alone, but with a precious memory or two, leavening the solitude with a smile.

Climbing the narrow path up the cliff after having exposed his epidermis to enough radiation damage to make the wearing of white speedos almost inevitable this season, the wolf found himself walking behind a mother and her very young son, deep in conversation. His ears swivelled towards them...

"Mum, do you know what people taste like?"
"No I don't"
"I do"
"Well I don't want to know how you know. And anyway, eating people is wrong"

Well, the wolf can think of circumstances where it is ok (in a metaphoric sense), but yes, not until everyone involved is above the age of consent. What intrigued the wolf about this particular conversation however was that the boy was (obviously) not being metaphorical, and even more intriguing, his eyebrows did not meet in the middle.
Hmmm, maybe there are more werewolves out there than he had realised...

A Cup of Hot Water

Met with a friend the other day, someone I don't see much from year to year, but am very fond of. She lives in Bristol now but used to live in the hideous hippy hole of Totnes. A beautiful town reeking of incense and smugness. Some good bookshops though I have to admit. She was on her way back to Bristol after visiting friends down here, but we managed to meet for a coffee, or a cup of hot water in her case. Sure there's a reason for that, but too polite to ask. Cheap though.

She too is a parent and most of the time we talked about our children and how the choices we had made affected them, something that's been on my mind a lot as you may have noticed. My friend's children are older, teens, all different and all very strong personalities. I think she has done a fabulous of bringing them up, so was moved to find she has her doubts and concerns the same as I do, her move to Bristol being one of them. Of all the cities in the UK, Bristol is one of the few I could ever see myself in if I had to, a city in a beautiful area and on a human scale, so I understand why she chose it - especially after Totnes. Her children seem to have embraced it on the whole, but there is still a little residual anxiety I think. Not sure I could have made a move like that, and not sure why.

My choice has always been to live here, earning far less than I could have elsewhere maybe but giving my son a safe and beautiful environment to explore and grow into; to give him some kind of anchor, a home port, he could trace his life from. Failing to give him a family is a great shame to me, and I hope that the locus of a sense of place will ameliorate that, at least to an extent. I don't know. I had the opposite, a strong and loving family but no sense of home, of roots in the way many of my friends here do. Like I have said before, people are home to me, not places.

The slum clearances of the early 60's meant that I like many others was inserted into a strange New! planned environment, one without any past, which I am sure changed us, made us different from those who did. I think those of us who grew up in the New Towns had a true existential genesis; coming from somewhere(s) that no longer existed, atomised into nuclear family sized units. We grew raw and rough, becoming what we actually were, untouched by community and tradition. For good or ill, as many have pointed out since. It also gave me license to roam, to drift if I'm honest, with no pull of homesickness, or sense of place, of a true hearth, to tug me back to safety and conformity like the Mole in the Wind of the Willows (a darker and weirder book than most realise, read it again). Positive or negative? Don't know.

But what next? The wolf's son will grow and move away, will I still need or want to stay here? I fell in love with this land a long time ago and wonder now how I will look at it when I am truly alone, no partner, no son. Will it still be home? I think it might. When I first fell for it, I had no family, friends or lover, no reason, no plan, no hope, to draw or hold me here; it was no dream of mine, no imagined destination. It was a real and instant love, unexpected, almost unwanted, and visceral. True.

But now I wonder, after having had and lost so many during my life here, lost to the sea, to others, to time; who will I be when my duty to my son is no longer tied to his location and only to him?
Where should I be?

Epiphany

A sleepless night found me walking along the promenade watching the sun rise this morning. Something I used to see a lot at sea, and also in past lives labouring or shift-working. Rarely now.

Never, ever tired of it. It placed me on a rocky water-covered sphere, spinning its film of life around a nuclear furnace (thanks Bran), falling through the void; lifting the night and my heart however heavy, and for a time at least, making me connect with the celestial realm in its glorious, endless procession through the universe.

I will always remember this dawn as apart from all other's though, graced as it was by a sudden spear point of wild geese, flying out from the west toward the sun, their rasping calls fracturing the silence, making my heart shudder in my chest. Placing me for an instant in the Now, and in the Eternal simultaneously. Magic. Sun magic.
Sol Invictus.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver

For All Tomorrows Parties

It was my beloved son's birthday on Friday and for a slew of reasons it wasn't really that much fun. Skint, bad venue, stuff to sort with the ex, and the consequent mood of the two grown-ups there didn't help. So I decided to have another when he was back with me on the Monday, a chance also to celebrate the resolution of a long standing problem resolved on that miserable Friday.

That was a whole lot more fun, as three of his favourite people turned up, his mate from over the road and my best friend and her son, both dancing fools and, in the case of the mother, someone who can ignite children like fireworks. Much more like it, I thought, big present, party poppers and bombs, cake, cake, pizza, cake, balloons, LOUD music and pointless skidding on shiny floors. He, we, had a great time, felt like a big family for an hour or two there, something he's always wanted, and me too, I guess. I felt sad too though, because we are a small broken family in reality, and I kind of feel that was his last kids birthday party, a lost chance to have given him what he wanted, and another of the growing list of lasts to remember. And to hold fast to.

Afterwards, with the boy in bed sleeping (or reading under the covers with the sneaky-light my sister gave him i hope) I had the glitter festooned front room and the dying fire to myself. Looking at the mantelpiece I counted 7 birthday cards. All beautiful, funny, loving; all from people who genuinely loved him (mostly family), but not as many as in previous years. Easy to workout why. For one, the ex and me couldn't afford the 10 boy event parties we would normally have, loads of people in that particular boat this year, but it's more than that. He has lost friends, and has made very few at his new school.

Because my son is not in the least sporty, no football no rugby, not even surfing or skateboards, nor interested in brands or TV, he has always struggled to make many friends. His interests are wide and varied but not 'normal'. No problem with that, neither are mine. Because of all that, it took him a long time to find the good friends he had at his old school, but sadly none of them of them went to his new one. Even worse I guess, as in all Big Schools the fiercely conforming nature of kids is amplified and encouraged by the usual hegemony of team sports as THE school achievement, and reinforced by the burgeoning presence of Americanised 'scene' groupings. The desperate need for kids of that age to identify with a group (particularly among girls I think), media driven via shit like High School Musical, magazines and teen films, splinters the school into fractions whose main purpose is to exclude, rather than include.

Maybe it was always so, as a young wolf I felt much the same, but the pressures on conforming and the number of groups were far less, and the mobility more fluid. They were more about personality types which could change, than about looks, stance and clothing. Looking back, even the lesser pressures I felt caused me to turn inward, and I spent some very lonely and unhappy years being bullied and keeping it from my parents, because they wanted me to be happy and I didn't want to worry them. Then, suddenly, in my last years at Big School, the werewolf genes kicked in, and I grew hair and muscle and sharp teeth, and started collecting scalps, big time.

Satisfying but ultimately wasteful. I'm smart, me, and I should have used that to get out and up, instead of wasting my time on revenge for the time I was forced into the wary emotional stasis of being the outsider. Took me a long time to grow into myself, rather than the opposite of what I had been forced into becoming at school, longer than I want it take my son. That's if there was problem of course. No real reason to think my spastic, stuttering vector of a life would be necessarily visited on my son.

So the next day We had a long chat about the new living arrangements, school and friends and hope and fears, and how it was all going so far.
Which is when I heard the words I dreaded.
"Dad, they call me names..."

The Solace of Quantum

I've been thinking about Many Worlds lately.

Many Worlds is capitalised because it's a theory, first formalised by the late physicist Hugh Everett III, often thought of as one of the lost genii of the 20th Century. His theory gained little credence when he first proposed it, at least partly as the mathematics needed to describe it didn't exist. Since then, the mathematics needed to test and examine the theory have been developed, and his star has risen steadily as more and more physicists believe he is on to something. He was also the father of the brilliant Mark Everett, lead singer of the Eels who made a fascinating and moving documentary about their relationship and the underpinnings of the Many Worlds theory (see link at bottom of blog).

VERY briefly it says that due to the probabilistic nature of particle behaviour at the quantum level, every possible state of of every possible outcome, is. Every path a particle could have made, every path you could have taken and didn't, was made, in other parallel/branched/nested universes. This actually explains, very neatly, many of the otherwise mysterious observed behaviours of quantum level events. I've even seen a demonstration of the effect, the famous Double Slit photon Experiment, with my own eyes.

It has been suggested that this 'path branching' occurs only with the interaction of a concious mind (generated by our brains, which it turns out do operate at a quantum level) implying that our choices are more than just value based decisions; they are quantum knives, splitting maybes into worlds. And it could also be that we 'slip' between these worlds, these parallel branches more often than we realise, at least the ones that are closest to the sum over N value of our probable, potential states.
In my head anyway...

It certainly makes sense to me.
That may be because of my slightly were-mind, which obviously makes me feel not quite like everyone else, or the fact that compared to most people I seem to have had a succession of very different lives, so I am more likely to be seduced by the idea of alternate paths. I can point, as we all can, to times were a seemingly inconsequential decision was made which subsequently utterly transformed my life. Not getting a lift on a bike that crashed, hitching down to Cornwall for a couple of weeks, staying for another pint in the Swordid beer garden two summers ago.
Looking back, it's easy to see these nexuses, and to wonder what would have happened if... Well it seems one of you, somewhere, knows.

My acceptance may also be because I have actually experienced the shifts. Possibly. I have met a man I 'knew' had died, and have seen some odd things that don't seem to bother anyone else. Or is just that I was looking harder? I can remember coming ashore once when I was fishing, looking at the money I was being paid with and thinking when did fiver's get that small, and who the hell is that on the back?
Fishing is the kind of occupation that disassociates you from normal life though, so it may just have been the feeling of transience and Otherness that comes with the danger of the job and the way you are treated ashore. Or the Guinness I'd been drinking.

Or, it maybe that my life at the moment is so hilariously, relentlessly rubbish (barring the occasional day, and person and son - you know who you are) that I would believe anything, rather than that This Is All There Is.

There's two* possible ways of looking at all this I guess from a philosophical point of view, negatively and positively. It could release you from moderate behaviour and give you the ethical license to do anything you want, knowing that you are only one of an infinite series of Wolfs and therefore your wicked actions are statistically insignificant. For everyone you hurt, there are more that you didn't. Out There. Or you could be dead. Or everyone you have ever known could be. All of which are equally depressing conclusions.

Or, you could take the view that if you try to do the right thing for those that you love in this world, then that striving, that will to good, could be propagated through the worlds, increasing the amount of happy endings for you and your pack throughout the multiverse. The likelihood is, if you have loved someone in this world branch, you will love them in all the myriad branches since then. And who knows, in some of them they may love you too.

Somewhere out there, not many worlds away, there are countless Marroks, each shaving a little more than the previous Marrok and worrying a little more about when the next full moon is coming along.
Somewhere out there, there are a billion worlds, where all those I love are within reach and happy, where I am not alone. And that for me is a solace of sorts, for now.
In this world.

*actually there are shed loads if you think about it, but two will do for me thanks.

http://www.pbs.org/remotelyconnected/2008/10/parallel_lives_parallel_univer.html

Beneath the mundane

Having an empty weekend the wolf decides to try to fill it with a long walk in the sun and some Art. Plugging his head into the Yip-pod he sets off to the rather excellent Exchange Gallery in Penzance via Mousehole. If you knew where the wolf lives you'd realise how circuitous a route that is. And how much he has to think about.

Currently on display in the Exchange is Andy Currie's Turbulence, a title that has the wolf fighting not to make cheap jokes about a local Indian take-away. This is the second time he's seen the exhibition and he is as enthralled and intrigued as the first time.

Having no formal education in big first letter 'Art' has always pleased the wolf, knowing that his responses to what he sees are his own, and far outweighs the potential loss of nuance that a 'real' understanding of the cultural context of a work could bring. The wolf is arrogant enough to think that he has a cultural context of his own thank you, and analyses what he sees within that (and that of his friends and his son when they accompany him), in exactly the same way that he reads poetry; by making himself and his own experiences the measure of a work.

There are four pieces in the gallery, described as installations, but better and less pretentiously described in the wolf's opinion as kinetic sculptures. All are interesting but two absolutely entrance the wolf.

The first is called 28 Steel Rods, a set of fine steel bars, perhaps 4m long, hanging from what look like wiper motors and bent into shallow arcs by their contact with the floor below. The curvature of these arcs is constantly and rhythmically changed as tension is increased and released, snapping the bars into a random, infinite, yet constrained series of vertical compositions. These shapes provoke a strange nostalgia in the wolf and it takes him sometime to realise why.

In at least one of his previous lives the wolf was part-raised in a New Town, constructed in the 50's. The New Town centre in particular was decorated and detailed with sculpture, colour, murals and mosaics in the peculiarly resonant and optimistic abstract style associated with that decade. The wolf suspects that for most people within 10 years of his age range, 'old fashioned' chintz and Edwardian vernacular art provided much of the background detail of their early years. For the wolf, raised by commies, atheists and working class futurists in a town built to celebrate post-war optimism, abstraction, flat colour areas and the constructed relationship of surface and line remind him of a place he once thought of as home. And also trigger a sense of loss, of lost pasts and lost futures.

The second piece is called Dust Sheets and is in the picture above. It consists of seven plastic dust sheets coiling, tumbling and flexing above softly whirring domestic fans, and is wonderful. Again providing a glimpse of the infinite, bounded by the utterly mundane limits of its starting conditions (seven B&Q dust sheets, seven Argos fans), while every second revealing a new, beautiful, and transient form. The wolf is reminded of Blake's Auguries of Innocence (and incidentally one of his tattoos)

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

The wolf wonders at the dancing sheets, released from the search for pattern and meaning in his own life, at least for a while. There is something melancholy and something supra-natural about these forms, as if they are constantly attempting and constantly failing to describe something that is forever outside of human experience, unknowable: something powerful and mysterious. An inferred quantum level event of some kind perhaps, or the shadow (not the form) of a terrible angel's wings in motion. A disturbing and alien beauty.

Blake saw angels.
The wolf knows someone who once saw one too.
He wonders what they would make of this.
(strokes chin)

Time to walk back.

Fate and the Werewolf

There is
Apparently
Something easy
Something safe
In hurting me.

Ask Fate.

Try it -
Kick me stab me
Use me lose me
Ignore
And drain me.
Loads do.
Fate has.

Still...
I get up
I shudder
Shuffle and shrug
I uncoil and chuckle
And produce
A carnivore grin
That gleams and widens.

Wider than you.
Wider than you
Fate...

Crows

Today finds the man who thinks he's a wolf sitting on top of Kenidjack Carn.
He's watching a swirling gyre of crows roll and tumble over the moor that falls away below him toward Pendeen. Must be a hundred of them, more. Maybe they're rooks? He can hear a raven caw, somewhere. Just him and the crows. Or rooks.

The wind is surprisingly bitter. Bitter sweet really, thinks the wolf. He remembers running across these moors in another life, with a huge and beloved Alsatian by his side - Wraith. Huge, powerful, fearless and with a heart that could drive a V8 and a grin that could eat granite. Long gone, along with the life and home he once had here.

Choices made by someone the wolf once loved finished that life and broke that home, something he came to terms with a long, long time ago. The consequences of those past choices still cascade through the lives of people here and now though, and today the person responsible had to be held to account by the wolf.

Because of his love for his son, the wolf had to make that person make a decision that they did not want to, that may cause them pain for the rest of their lives. He did it without regret and would do it again because of his love for his son. But it caused him great sadness to see someone who was once in his care in so much pain. But there was no regret. And no pride.

The crows have gone.
It's getting darker and the wolf has calls to make and a fire to build in his house, something to watch through the night. He stands and stares across the moor through the broken pasts, through the billion possible futures, to the sea. He wishes he was going home but doesn't know where that is any more.
People are home to the wolf, not places.

Maybe one day.

Disco Dilemna

Fun evening tonight.

For someone who thinks they would rather live NOW, for all their admiration of our our tough and clever ancestors and their achievements, than at any other time in history it's been a toughy. While living NOW means I can read, have had an education, anti-biotics, the right to free speech, the ability to treat women as equals, procreation-free sex and the ability to say fuck off and die to any religion crazed loon I care too, living (right) NOW also means being skint. Not swede eating, child selling medieval skint, when being a serf dude meant hanging by your thumbs for the amusement of some inbred frog speaking member of the middle classes, but still, relatively and quantitatively, skint.

Among other things this means that my choice of personal transport (another NOW plus of course) is limited to vehicles from the recent past, a chronological upper limit of around 12+ years old. This can be cool, as I get to drive around in a small nostalgia bubble, lose no sleep over the depreciation (V = P(1-R)^n, like you didn't know) and am often on the right side of the component failure bath tub curve*.
Often, not always.

Tonight my old Land Rover Disco decided it was time to remind me that NOW is not some white clean i-pod shaped, photo-shopped vision of instant seamless gratification, however the consumer pornographers might try to convince otherwise, but that all the things we use and count on are fabricated from matter, and while it may or may not have a soul, it is most definitely base.

A couple of times lately I've waited for the coil to heat, turned the engine over and nothing has happened. Like any other shape-shifting killer primate with thumbs in the same situation, I automatically glare at the switch or key that has failed to initiate my desire and do it again. Sometimes it works and the monkey brain shrugs and gets on with Taking It All For Granted, something this generation more than any other seems to find very easy, gorged as it is with the surrounding media pap that waves stuff and aspirations at it, and tells it you can have it all and it always works. Bunch of arse.

My Dad and his generation would have been straight out with a spanner and a bit of bent wire fiddling and learning what had happened the first time, being a lot closer to the nuts and bolts of how stuff works. Sadly, I'm not and paid for it.

So, on the way back from fisherman bothering in St. Ives, did some shopping (fags and vodka, natch) jumped back into the 1990's turned the key and the sucker wouldn't start. No matter how much I stared at it. Swore like a deckhand in a wine bar for a minute (which did nothing) then got my Dad head on and lifted the bonnet. Lights didn't dim when I turned the key, so battery fine, starter not turning, ipso facto, current not getting to starter. Wiggled wires in that 'bloke who knows nothing but wants to look like he does' way for a while, then sat down and thought for a minute.

Being a werewolf from Essex has its pluses. One of which is having connections to (allegedly) Dodgy Geezers. Belled a couple of people who know people who know how to get pretty much any motor going whether the actual owner wants it to go or not and found out more than I need to know about the vagaries of the Disco ignition system. Turns out there's a sinister sounding module called The Spider, part of the immobilising circuit, which is prone to immobilising when you want it to be mobilising.

One way of bypassing it (allegedly) is to "beat the shit out of the fucker with a claw hammer 'til it falls out of the dash under the radio and boost the left input and output tabs with a bit of foil or a chewing gum wrapper", another is to "jump the coil 'though you'll have to stall it to stop the engine and leg it from there". After pointing out the beast was mine and that I wasn't in that much of a hurry, Crimepedia finally came up with the suggestion to pull a fuse, put it back, click alarm on and off and try it again. Which worked. Amazingly.

Moral of this story? Well, Take Nothing For Granted is sound enough, but It's Good To Know Dodgy Geezers opens up a whole dustbinful of relativism even for a half-arsed left-leaning libertarian like this particular werewolf. On the other (sinister) hand, at least I can chew it over with my strangely sharp canines, at home, Martini in hand, thanks to exactly that moral relativism.
Cheers!

*Also cool is being able to take my son back to Essex and show him What Cars May Come in our future...

Coming home

Back home and back down. Post-break blues eh? Killer.
Especially when you come back and find you and the rest of the world is much the same as you left it.

Some good memories though, wandering around the lonely heaths, valleys and woods of the New Forest. Ironic name, I'm told it's a relic of the post-glacial landscape our ancestors found when they crossed the land bridge to here. Magical. No, really.

Step away from the gated Barret homes and the Mercedes filled car parks around the forest and you are 10,000 years away, when spirits haunted the dark or drove the boar onto your spear. The Sidhe still inhabit the place, no more or less than when feared or placated by the tribes of the heath. Whether it's because I know the history, legends and tales, whether it's because being a werewolf makes me sensitive to such places, it reeks of Elsewhere. The tumuli that loom from the mists and woods have the same impact on me as Eliot's "places where prayer has been valid", the thinning of reality is palpable*.

For whatever reason the liminal** spaces, the sea, empty woods, open horizons, moors, heaths, airfields and even car parks, give me a sense that something has, or is about to happen. I put it down to a clearing of sensory inputs (just sky, land, rock or plane surfaces), allowing the antenna to tune, to attenuate the myriad choices that have been or will be made. My sense and delight of our deep, deep past is matched by my sense of the infinitely deep future, the choices and histories yet to be made. When faced with those sorts of infinities, you have to accept you are always halfway between the Beginning and the End, and wonder.

Or alternatively, accept that you should lay off the Martinis before writing blogs...

*note to self: more meat, less dictionaries in diet
** note to self: i won't tell you again...

Facing up

With friends in the New Forest, gathering in the kitchen at night, close to the fire. We weren't friends a day ago, as we had never met, but the person who bought us together was a shared friend, a nexus, and so by her grace, we are now.

A werewolf, a man touched by death and struck by lightning, an old sea dog who has swallowed the hook and lost a family, and our sad, beautiful host. All of us loners in one way or another, we have made our way to our friends house up the ancient track, like travellers passing through the Old Wood seeking shelter as night draws in.

I look around the pool of light over the table at these new friends of mine, listening as I drink (vodka, thanks). No one grabs and holds the focus; all listen, laugh, smile and share. None of us moan or whine about our lives, we are not here to bleat, we are telling stories, horrors, yarns, histories, all delivered in a way to entertain each other, to explain or delight, or sometimes, horrify.

We are all too old to give a fuck about face or status and span class and culture to the point it disappears. The same sort of thing that has gone on for a million nights around a million fires, on plains, in caves, taverns, inns, pubs and gods help us motorway services for all I know.

There's something else too. While we talk to entertain our new friends, we are also tracing our old wounds and scars, flexing stiffened joints delineating and defining our own experiences, who we were and what we are, through the looks, smiles, frowns and reactions and comments of others. Describing our lives and the things that have changed and made us, refracting through this shared prism. This too I suspect has gone on for ever. It's not obvious or even conscious, but it's there, and beyond price.

And you know what? You can't do it via text, email, phone or facebook.
Face it kids, literally, or lose it forever.

St. Valentine's Day

Hey. Happy Valentine's Day.
Or not.

Being half-cut at the fag-end of a dull day and start of a bleak night as I am is probably not the best time to be writing about stuff like this but it's my blog and I can do what I want. And sadly there's no one to tell me to get to bed, to kiss me until I shut up and do something constructive with my hands. There is however plenty of Lidls finest vodka left so what the fuck.

Valentine's Day. It's a tough one isn't it? If you are in a loving relationship then I hope you've already made it clear to your significant other that they are loved and valued, in which case the day could be looked on as merely an excuse for a night out, or sometimes just as a commercial itch, an itch ruthlessly exploited by commerce, a vaguely tawdry pastel coloured joke. Or it could be a really special day, an affirmation or even declaration if you are at the start of a Big Adventure. If you aren't with anyone, it becomes a technicolour, multi-media, 24-hour salt in the wound reminder that you are
On
Your
Own.
The echo that returns to you from the limits of your single space, suddenly defines a cave a whole lot larger than you thought it was. Scary. Lets go out and go mad and pretend we don't care! Ha ha ha ha ha ha Being on our own is brilliant! Look at me ! I'm happy! Don't look at me too close though! You might see something...sad!

Hang on Marrok, why shouldn't you celebrate being alone? Isn't love, fidelity, loyalty, sharing so impossibly 2oth Century? Why not enjoy living alone, forming connections and collaborations for sex or nights out on the piss or movies or interesting multi-media projects. The solace of casual sex is out there, uncomplicated, quick, clean, painless and utterly, desolately, empty. For me anyway. For those of you that it fits for now, well done. You have embraced what you are told is the zeitgeist. Just don't think it will fit for ever, zeitgeists have a habit of shifting. Hence the name.

On the other hand seeing as the chance of finding someone to share your life with who also considers that a worthwhile goal is diminishing, being incredibly unfashionable and un-post-modern, why bother even hoping there might be someone for you?

Well for one (ignoring the fact that the last two reasons are always good reasons to do or value something), all of our millions of ancestors did pair and maintain, in some way or another, and it paid off. We, and our so-called civilisation, are here. More importantly for me, the happiest I have ever been is in long term relationships (or what I thought would be). That goes for moments of insight, sexual ecstasy, general background contentment, financial security, periods of intense creativity and (unfashionable word-alert) joy. Coming from the union of two parents who loved each other until the day death parted them probably helps. To me it's not an outmoded idea or impossible fiction. I was there, I saw it. It worked.

OK, if you were or are in a relationship where that didn't happen, I'm sorry, just get over it or get the fuck out - it's not what I'm talking about. Doesn't mean it will never work, although it definitely won't if you keep telling yourself it won't - guaranteed. Yeah it's scary, but you need to throw the dice sometimes, to feel the wind of chance in your in your face again, flex and reach; otherwise you have every chance of hardening and shrinking into a smaller, brittle soul.

Yes I can survive and get by on my own. I'm a werewolf for fuck's sake and have nothing to prove. So what. The trouble is , I know that I can live with someone who loves me.

Being with someone for good (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), that loves you and that you love means you can start to relax into the ride. You deepen as a person, a whole raft of anxieties and neuroses that you thought defined you can fall away. You get a chance to rest properly too, to have a break and look around. Someone that you know you can trust can take a watch now and again. You get to know yourself, by talking to someone that knows you, really knows you; you get to grow. I know. I've been there one or twice. And who knows, maybe again one day.

So, raising a final martini to us all - drunk or sober, together or alone;
May we find, or keep, our heart's desire.
Happy Valentines Day!

"Let the people who never find true love
Keep saying there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die."

-Wislawa Szymborska