Its just over 2 months since I moved from the grim post-defunct industrial miasma that is more popularly known as ‘The Midlands’ to the somewhat more genteel, Harry Potteresque, cobbled stoned confection of Edinburgh.
As I’ve written in a previous blog, Edinburgh is really beautiful…well, most of it is. I’ve been working as a note-taker and personal tutor for an HNC student at a further education college in the Granton/Ferry road district of the city since early September.
I’m enjoying it a lot, but the early morning starts and bus travel has become a bit of a drag now that the honeymoon period is over and the damp Scottish winter is drawing in.
My girlfriend lives in a small village just on the outskirts of Edinburgh in West Lothian, I found lodgings in an adjacent village a couple of miles away and decided to make the move ‘up North’ because I was in love and knew that I would die lonely and regretful if I didn’t grab this opportunity (I am a bit indecisive sometimes – well a lot) and attempt to make a fresh start.
I have hardly any family left, just one sister and a very strange and deranged father: no kids, parents, ex-wives etc, I felt so incredibly free – thanks to my girlfriend though, who gave me a well needed kick up the arse to remind me of this on several occasions. Having both lived alone for a number of years we thought it wise to live within easy reach of each other while we got to know each other better on the more day-to-day domestic level (living in the same country really has improved our relationship as you can probably imagine).
All I took to Scotland were a few clothes, my favourite old battered guitar, about twenty of my most cherished books, laptop, passport, birth certificate, a wad of photo’s, paintbrushes and various other odds and ends. I sold everything else – white goods, furniture, most of my books, CD/DVD’s, electronic stuff – It was old anyway and I was glad to have a purge and make a few quid. All this moving lark was done courtesy of cheap online train bookings.
It is amazing though, when you finally think: okay what do I really need? What is essentially me? What can I live without? The answer for me was quite a lot really.
I used to be a bit of a hoarder in the past; stuff accumulated which I came to feel had a kind of psychic-organic quality, it had grown to be part of me, who I was, my essence - or so I thought.
Really I was just very insecure, and virtually all my collective shit was a patchwork armour to hold me back, protect me from the seemingly alien larger world, and of course it acted like a set of mirrors or idiot boards reminding me that I’m ME,
That’s the problem of course, I’d grown out of THAT ME many years before and my stuff was keeping me anchored to the spot - I was drowning. I’m 44 but was starting to feel 64 or 74 back in the Heart of Darkness of the midlands.
I’m naturally a bit of a miserable bastard and not a gushing everybody’s mate type of person, but my ‘new life’ does seem a hell of a lot better: more interesting, stimulating, sociable, loving and creative than it was before, so 8 out of ten so far.
But really, anybody’s life is about ‘Experience’: the sensation of living through interesting perceptions and stimulations, seeing other perspectives and meeting new people.
I feel more comfortable in myself since I’ve learned to embrace the chaos and not to resist change, not to be scared shitless by the thought of different ME’s, morphing into different lives and pathways. Hope this doesn’t sound like esoteric hippie jive talk, its just me attempting to articulate and comprehend the newness and change in my life.
(incidentally, if you’ve always felt there is more than a grain of salt in the Punk adage “Never trust a hippie”, I’ve been reading Emmett Grogan’s account of the 60’s Haight-Ashbury/Summer of love thing called ‘Ringolevio’, and its fascinating to read such an intelligent social/economic/hilarious deconstruction of the ‘tune in-drop out’ aesthetic by someone who was at the centre of it all. Anyway I digress too much, and shall review it at length at a later date).
No comments:
Post a Comment