Ghost of Freedom

Swirling thoughts will oft
set one to wondering just
what are memories?
~An untitled haiku, by Colin Pollard

Funny things, memories.  I remember starting this post a couple of times, but I can’t remember what went into it.  Seems as though this place is in need of a Spring cleaning.  Admittedly, it’s not quite Spring yet, and this cold snap is reminiscent of the weather round about the turn of the year.  Still, better early than never.

I’ve been finding myself recently delving into quite deep introspection, not really sure why, but the mental journeys are… oddly enlightening.  You reach a place where something just clicks, and you think - “Ah, so that’s why I’m like that.”  Each time one of these little revelations happens, another part of you is accepted, and you take one step closer to… something.  Wholeness? A greater sense of self? I don’t know for sure.  Then a different type of mental journey starts, as a sort of unwinding from the higher reaches of self-analysis.  I fall back into memories.  Climb hills I’ve climbed before, run paths I’ve ran along.  Such familiar places that the pictures of them in my mind are beautifully clear.  Unfamiliar, even fictional, ones stand out, as though I know them intimately.  I’m there, running along the ridge, the ground passing swiftly beneath me.  I’m there, on top of the mountain, watching the clouds drift, their shadows passing slowly across the landscape.  I’m there, sitting on a ledge halfway up a cliff-face, leaning back against the rock.  And I feel at peace.  It may sound idealistic, eccentric, delusional even, but it is what it is.  Memories are powerful things.

Forest of Unicorns

There may well have been unicorns in the forests in Germany, but sad to say, I didn’t see any.  For those who read and didn’t know I went to Germany last week – I went to Germany last week and am now back.  For those who read and did know I went to Germany last week – I’m back from Germany.  Now count how many times I’ve written the word Germany in this entry, multiply that number by 5, add 3, switch the two digits of the number you end up with around, and I’ll come back to that later.

Travelling is rather stressful, and it takes a day or two to stop feeling like you’re still on the move.  That said, the experience is definitely worth it.  Even though the saying “time flies when you’re having fun” holds true, in a seemingly short space of time, you garner memories that will stay with you.  I was reading a philosophy book (The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands) which said that we humans have a tendency to look to the past and the future, but not often to the present.  In my view, we look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, we enjoy things better in retrospect.  “Remember that time we went camping and got absolutely soaked pitching the tents?” “Yeah, that was fantastic.”  What I want to make clear at this point is that Germany wasn’t something I enjoy(ed) purely in retrospect.  The trip was, at the time, fantastic.  In spite of some rather crazy weather.  Konstanz (known in English as Constance) lies at the head of the Bodensee (known in English as Lake Constance), which itself borders on the Swiss Alps.  Storms in summer come pretty regularly, but only stay in one place for 15-20 minutes.  At least they did when we were there.  It’s a really dramatic sight watching them come across the lake, I think I managed to get a photo of two storms converging on one another, I’ll know when I finally get around to uploading them.

Which reminds me, take one off that number you were working on.

So, now that the train’s finally stopped chugging along in my head, I’ve come back to regularity: the occasional working day, playing games I’d forgotten I had, housework, trying to find numbers where there’s next to nothing to play around with.  If anyone’s ever played Timesplitters 2 by the way, see if you can get the Lemming Award.  A little tip though, it’s only really funny in multiplayer mode.

Alrighty, for those who ended up with the number 82, I admire your rose-tinted glasses.  For those who didn’t, I’d be interested to know your answer.  For those who ended up with 82 and are now confused, I will clarify things in my next entry.

Travel in Stygian

A quick word about the title – don’t.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can move swiftly on to some good news. I have received three out of four unconditional offers from the universities I applied for to do a Masters course. One of which was the one I was hoping for, which was the Management of IT course at Nottingham. Another bit of sort of good news is I might, possibly, have a part-time job starting soon. The interview lasted about five minutes, at the end of which I was told, right, you’ve got the job. But I’ll only be starting work there when the current part-time person leaves/gets another job/gets bored/gets ill/dies in a completely innocent and non-circumspect way, none of which I’d wish on them. Honest.

The job centre is grating on my nerves at the moment. Because of the length of time I’ve been claiming for, I now have to go in every week and have to be willing to commute for up to an hour and a half. And it’s not as if going in every week will help any more than the fortnightly trip. Either they’ll say there’s nothing going, or they’ll say that there is something going, in which case I’ll say yes, I know, because it’s the only thing going. More often than not I’ll have already applied for it. The sooner I start work and stop going to that gods-forsaken building, the better.

Anyway, enough of me complaining, and with news out of the way, I can get to the main part of the post.

My thoughts recently have mostly been on writing. Truth be told, I haven’t actually written down all that much, but simply thinking about it is giving me inspiration, and at the moment I’m just writing down some of the better ideas that crop up because I know I’ll forget them if I don’t. The main focus of my ideas has been on characterisation, which I think some authors (I’d name names, but none immediately spring to mind) tend to overlook. It’s all about empathy. If you can’t empathise with a character, you don’t care what happens to them and you end up losing interest in the plot. Even if the plotline’s a good one, it won’t help if the character doesn’t grab you by the shirt and pull you head first into the pages. So my focus at the moment is making my characters relatable. Of course, not every character will endear you to them. Some are downright nasty. Which is all well and good really.

The best thing though, in my experience of writing, the absolute best thing that can happen is when a character (your own creation, whose every detail you thought you knew) surprises you. Sometimes I’ve found that, even as I’m writing, characters will take on lives of their own. It seems odd, but my characters do surprise me. And this spurs me on to challenge them further, see how they react, what they do, and I quickly find that I’m not so much writing the story as being drawn along with it, pulled into the world I’ve created. It’s as though all I’m effectively doing is watching a film and recording it in words. This is the job I want, this is what I really want to make a career out of, but reality gets in the way. So for now, it will remain a hobby, and for now, that’ll do for me.

Lazy Eye

If I took the time to explain every time a huge gap appeared in the timeframe of my blog, I’d be writing more excuses than what I actually want to write about.  Not only is that not fun for me, I know from experience that it’s also not that fun to read, so the less time dwelt on it, the better.  Now, three major things of note have cropped up since the last time I posted.  First of which being the Cartmel trail race.  I was taking part in it for two reasons: I wanted to see if I could do it, and everyone who finished got some of Cartmel’s famous sticky toffee pudding.  Now to weave the tale…

The drive down through the Lakes that morning was stunning.  There was barely a cloud in the sky, and the mountain tops were clear.  A good day for a run, even though it was only 3° C (37° F).  When we got to Cartmel, we had some time before the race started, so we went for a wander round the town.  I know quaint English country village is a cliché, but that’s really what the place was.  Little cottages and terrace houses, a huge church, and a racecourse just outside the town itself where the race was starting from.  At the starting line, all sorts of people lined up.  Old, young, chubby, thin.  It was actually impossible to feel out of place.  We set off to the music of Franz Ferdinand playing through a set of loudspeakers nearby.  Whoever thought that was a good idea, I don’t know, but it was played at the start of the last race I took part in as well.  The race would be 16km (10 miles), so I set off at a steady pace, barely taking note of how fast others were going.  I managed to keep up with my dad and sister for the first kilometre, but then I was hampered by a stitch, which unfortunately became a theme for the next 7 kilometres (I’d prefer to measure in miles, but this is how the race was split up).  It having warmed up to 5° when we left the car, I was surprised when, just a short way into the race, the heat of the sun started blazing down.  I’d started the race in a t-shirt, fleece and windproof jacket, but I was soon down to just my t-shirt.  I’d decided not to carry any water with me as well, so when the first water station came up half-way through the race, it was a huge relief.  I was getting into my stride at that point as well, my stitches had gone, and the bulk of the uphill was over as well.

In races, you find yourself running in and around the same group of people throughout.  I was honestly quite surprised at the group I found myself with.  One person had absolutely no breathing pattern and seemed to wheeze a lot.  Another was clearly overweight, and a third person, only just within earshot behind me sounded like he was retching every two-hundred yards or so.  On the downhill sections, I was able to overtake the group, but found myself running level with them on the flats and uphills of the race.  I know I’m not especially quick, and I haven’t been training that long, but their speed surprised me.

The second water station at around 13 km was another huge relief.  I’d been feeling a bit dizzy before that, and my pace had slowed, but a drink of water and several jelly beans later, I was running back at my usual pace.  I actually had enough, if you’ll excuse the car metaphor, left in the tank to manage a sprint finish.  Results published later showed I ran the race in 2 hours 13 minutes, beating my aim of 2½ hours.  It was also revealed after the race that they had in fact measured it incorrectly.  16km became 18km.  Which was nice.

Event number two is the job interview I had, which is the furthest any application I’ve sent off since Christmas has been.  I didn’t get the job, but the interview itself was a positive thing.

Finally, the third event of note – Cockermouth Company of Archers Easter Egg Shoot.  I surprised myself (again) by coming second in the senior archers’ head-to-head competition.  For those of you who don’t know how archery scoring works, this is a really good achievement.  For those who do know how it works, know that I was helped massively by my handicap of 35 (the person who won had a handicap of 44).  After that came the fun bit.  Some of the junior archers (I assume) had made large Easter egg targets, onto which were stuck balloons, and, later, teddy bears.  Suffice to say, aiming for those was extremely tempting.  So, in the spirit of Lent, I gave into that temptation.  I pierced two balloons and a teddy bear, the latter of which I still have, though I removed the arrow from it.  As the saying goes – all fun and games!