If I Look Hard Enough
It occurred to me that it’s a year since my friend Colin died. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, but we were close when we were in our early twenties, before life happened and we drifted apart. It’s strange to think that he never knew the year we’ve just had. He was younger than me, too.
It will also soon be the first anniversary of me jotting something down every night to share with whoever reads this stuff. I’ve started to wonder lately when it will be the right time to go back to occasional posts rather than the nightly two or three hundred words plus a piece of music: on the first anniversary? when I get the vaccination? when some form of normalcy returns. whatever that might mean? I haven’t decided.
I’ve joked here before about every day being Groundhog Day, but the routine is real and unchanging. Soon, it will be warm enough to sit out the front in the sun again, to sort out the exercise bike in the garage, to replace the terracotta pots in the garden that didn’t survive the last two weeks of sub-zero temperatures. In the meantime, I sat in the recliner this morning with my book and a coffee, and I revised the old novel in the shed this afternoon. I watched some more Westworld. In the bigger cycle of things, I put in my two-monthly repeat prescription. Routine brings structure and something like comfort; it is also as much of a confining loop as the narratives of the hosts on Westworld. That was part of the theme of the programme, particularly series one and two, but it feels a bit more in your face this time.
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Music : Part of the mood detail of Westworld was the popular classics rearranged for player-piano in the saloon in Sweetwater. This was one of them. Paint it Black, remembering the time me and Colin and my friend Allan went to see the Rolling Stones at Murrayfield. Great gig.
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