Croatia 0 England 3

It could all change of course. There's still nearly half an hour of play to go.

But: England beating Croatia by 3 goals so far, with the latter team rattled and in disarray?

Up to now, even under Capello (whom I'm prepared to give a lot of credit to), the changes in players, tactics and formation has seemed (despite glimmers and positive signs) still rather easy or safe to regard as a case of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

But this sounds (I'm listening on 5live) genuinely inspiring and exciting. Am I tempting fate?

Update: final score Croatia 1 England 4. Do we blame the atom smasher at Cern? Amazing stuff.

Welcome cat

Since I'm getting a number of different and random(ish) visitors thanks to Caroline's blog widget, I thought I would post something up that may be a little more initially welcoming (unless you hate or are phobic about cats) than a post about panic attacks.















If you want to read about panic attacks, just scroll down a little.

Update: if you did land here via the aforementioned widget, feel free to say hello and what choices got you here.

A little eternity (1996)

An all-too-familiar feeling. Vague physical discomfort, an outward symptom of something nagging incessantly at the back of my mind. Something trying to unseat me from within, make me feel unsafe. Unease. Disquiet.

Here I was in a little room used for consultations. A room seemingly without features, let alone any redeeming ones. Two people sat opposite me, one of whom looked at me intently. I was feeling like I wanted to get out of here at the earliest opportunity, wanted the questions to be over regardless of the outcome.

I desperately tried to control my breathing - and desperately tried to conceal the fact that I was desperately trying to control my breathing. What would they think if they knew? I felt dizzy - my thoughts, my pulse were starting to race seemingly in tandem and I felt short of breath. Try to ignore the thoughts which triggered this off: to delve into those thoughts felt like it was to delve into something very dark: was it something I had done, something remembered, something imaginary? I wasn't sure: but as painful as it would be to go through the whole process of trying to pinpoint those thoughts, analyse them, ruminate on them and somehow try to find a way of making everything ok again, it would be just as hard to temporarily banish them to the back of my unsettled mind.

But I had to. Somehow. Amidst the whirling thoughts and the physical symptoms which seemed to be gearing me up for confrontation or for getting the hell out of here.

I'm a bad person. I'm a mess. They know it. They can tell.

Next question.

Have you ever suffered anxiety or panic attacks?

I couldn't help but inwardly afford myself a bitter smile that this, of all questions, should come up right now. I tried to keep my voice even as the words came out.

Mumbled half-formed sentences followed.

Yes...sometimes it's difficult to cope. I get...it's like everything is...I get scared to go out because I. Er, it's like something's going to happen. Something bad.

I wished I could stop clenching my jaw. Were my attempts at breathing easily noticeable to them? Could they tell that this was what I was going through right now? That the words being spoken between us just felt like background noise in a room full of people shouting at each other? That it was a strain just to try and feel normal? Eye contact wasn't easy, but I had to do it, just because of that word: contact. It might help, just having these points of focus, but it might also serve to betray what I'm going through. Amidst all this, all that shouting in my head, a further question.

Are you able to tell anybody or get help when this happens?

Fucking hell, how patronising, I thought. How can you tell anybody when this happens? It's like running up to someone who thinks you're a fundamentally decent person and telling them that you're mad. You fear the response and that just makes the destructive cycle worse. You seal yourself in and just try and deal with the symptoms and rake over the thoughts - over and over, like some forced exercise in internal map reading, the terrain of which is harsh and unwelcoming.

A further mumbled answer.

More questions.

Do you take any medication?

Easy enough question to answer: factual rather than reliant on being able to express thoughts and feelings. Good: more like that please.

I felt shattered. The room wasn't getting any bigger or more inviting. The door was still the same distance from my seat, yet still seemed an eternity away. Freedom if I went through it now, before this was over, but what if there were consequences? The thoughts - including all those nameless, shapeless, malevolent ones - still whirled.

The voices spoken in the room still like something barely discernible in the background.

They must be able to tell. Or am I doing a convincing job of concealing this panic? Well they hadn't reacted to me any differently, we were still sat here.

More questions. We were finally away from the intrusive, searching questions and into the realms of the mundane. Name and address of GP, next of kin, thankfully no more delving into hospital admissions, how you behave when you're unwell, raking over painful personal history.

Finally, a perfunctory, almost businesslike, we'll be in touch - and I was free to go.

Fresh air. Space. Freedom - and I realised I had managed to control the panic attack. I was tired, unsettled, but much calmer. Maybe I was actually starting to get better at dealing with this.



The thing I should point out here is that - yes, I was the one who was having the panic symptoms: I was also the one who was asking the questions, carrying out the assessment not being on the receiving end of it.

Fromage

I was tired: just got back from a long day at work. Having just sat down with a cup of tea and finally begun to unwind, I was mildly irritated to have to get up to answer the phone.

I recognised the voice on the other end as a friend of mine. For the sake of cliche, I'll call him Jean-Paul. Should the nuance in the following account be too subtle, I'll point out - as an aid to context - that he's French.

Est-ce que je peu parle à Trouseurs?

I raised an eyebrow. It was odd, I thought, that the question was so awkwardly constructed, given that French was his native tongue. Nonetheless I was relieved that he had not referred to me as les Pantalons. Small mercies.

Oui, c'est moi, I replied wearily. The oui was pronounced, of course, to rhyme with c'est. I breathed a sigh, and was perturbed to note that I was exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke: I hadn't smoked for years. Why was there a Gauloise wedged between my index and middle finger?

I took another drag on the cigarette and, realising that I was trapped in a prison of meaninglessness, exhaled once more. The smoke danced and whirled and gradually dissipated against the light of the window.

I looked around. Must clean the flat, I thought - it had gone all grainy and black and white. It almost felt like there was a film noir soundtrack playing in the background. I turned off the record player, and the film noir soundtrack stopped playing.

Trouseueurs!

The voice snapped me out of my sense of ennui (do the French, I wondered, have a word for ennui?).

Pardon, Jean-Paul. C'est un problème?

He lowered his voice. Luckily, for the sake of the remainder of this post, he continued in English.

I've got the cheese.

Give me 20 minutes, I'll be right over.

Click. End of phone call.

Given that he lived just 4 minutes walk away, I was able to spend 15 minutes and 30 seconds relaxing and finishing my tea, followed by a further 30 seconds spent putting my shoes on. Exactly on time, I was chez Jean-Paul.

You'd better come in.

Logically, I went in, and followed him to the lounge. He gestured towards a seat: applying a similar kind of logic to just previously, I sat down.

One moment please.

He disappeared into the kitchen. Minutes passed before he reappeared, though that's hardly the right term: he could hardly be seen behind the sheer volume and variety of different cheeses he was carrying into the lounge with him.

He laid them all on the table, then went off again to get a selection of breads and cured meats. The next 2 hours were spent sampling the mind-boggling variety of flavours, textures and tastes - and combinations thereof.

Jean-Paul would discuss how this kind of cheese brought out a certain particular taste when tried with this kind of bread or this kind of meat. I would frown, thinking, surely I'm not going to get that? Each time I would be surprised as the sweetness of one kind of flavour served to enhance the bitterness of another, or how the herbs in a certain blend brought out hitherto latent properties and textures in another.

Eventually, we could eat no more.

A further hour later and we were both drinking pint after pint of tap water, given that our kidneys had all but shrivelled up to the size of raisins. I then stumbled home, as tired out as my belly was aching.


On the third week of every other month, I would get a similar call, and the scenario would play out again. Because on the third week of every other month, there was a French Farmer's Market in town, and it was the best stuff that Jean-Paul could get his hands on without actually bringing it back from France himself.

I've posted all this just because the memory makes me smile - and I really ought to get back in touch with Jean-Paul. Also, because I've found out I'll be heading to Paris for a weekend later this year. I've been to France often enough, but (apart from a changeover at the airport) never to Paris itself.

A wandering

I decided I would head out to the pub for a couple of pints last night. Being as I was at my mother's for the weekend, this meant a walk up a quiet but well-lit road, and I found myself posed with what could be described as a Scooby Doo scenario in reverse: Do I go the shortest route, up the road? Or do I go the long route away from the road and down the various lanes and paths?

I opted for the latter, and taking a quick turn onto the path just before the bridge, dissolved into the inky blackness (well I don't know about that last bit but I've always wanted to find an excuse to use those words).

I've written about these lanes and paths already, and find myself very much drawn to them whenever I'm back that way. To me personally, it feels like one of the last unspoilt spaces for my mind to occupy, and each visit feels like some kind of nourishment.

Such was the case last night.

The first stretch of the path is more like a tunnel, with trees either side stretching up high, intertwined and enmeshed above. Look to the left and there are fields and hedges, and distant lights, all seen intermittently through the natural barrier formed by the trees. To the right, a slope upwards - again policed by trees - to an A-road dual carriageway. Rather than serving to spoil these rural pockets, for me it enhances them: a constant, soothing background noise, the sense of people travelling to and from somewhere distant and exciting. As I advance steadily, the headlights of cars manage to bleed diffusely over towards the path and create a flickering, subtle, ghostly lightshow.

The effect at this time of night is most certainly eerie. Just to provide some context, here is the path in the light of an early midsummer evening:


Tonight, there is no such light, and I'm disconcerted by the fact that my eyesight isn't adjusting to the darkness at all, at certain points I feel like I might as well be walking with dark glasses on and a thick blanket draped over my head.

But it's quiet, apart from that background hum, to and from somewhere distant and exciting.

I feel a pulse of adrenaline - the old primal fears. What if someone's waiting behind a tree? I tell myself wryly that no one (else) would be mad enough to be wandering down here at this time of night.

I pause at a point where there is a gap in the trees above, and my eyes adjust a little. Up there, somewhere up on the slope, is where RM and I had sex. I smile at the thought and carry on. Over here is a little enclave where I used to sit with my sketchbook and notepads, feverishly scribbling or drawing, and drinking cans of Guinness. Everything here, even in the dark, feels layered: immediate barriers formed by fences, trees and hedges, providing a glimpse of a tantalising middle distance: so close but rendered somehow inaccessible.

The lights in the far distance seem impossibly romantic, and in my early youth I would imagine that they were like America. Even this path itself seemed somewhere different and exotic: there was enough space around it, and in my mind, to let that be the case.

I'm at the end of this first part , and I turn left onto the open stretch which forms one of my earliest memories. It's too dark for that to carry much resonance tonight though, and is more reminiscent of the times I've sat motionless and silent against one of the fence posts, watching foxes to-ing and fro-ing just a few yards away in the field. Or just being here and thinking, and being myself, by myself.

The hum of the road and the interplay of the lights. Everything in silhouette. The sky a muddy colour above where the streetlights are concentrated. Not right above where I am though, that's more of a Prussian blue, deep and endless. The occasional dark cloud tinged with russet.

I pause a while, and drink that beautiful background noise in. I used to come out here with sketchbooks and paint at this time of night, after the pub. I had to work out a system of how to use colours that I couldn't even see. Inadvertently scared the shit out of some unsuspecting bloke who happened to be taking his dog for a late evening walk.

Through the middle of this field, down to a strangely ornate gate in the hedge, and onto another
more definite path. Thick hedges on either side provide further clear delineations between near and middle distance, punctuated by the occasional tree, which positively looms. I can't help but think of the sheer weirdness of the countryside, these little pockets of space, this silence, the enveloping darkness, how much potential there is to project so many fears, fantasies and superstitions onto the surroundings, amplified by occasional unexplainable sounds.

I wonder if it's my imagination, the occasional movement in the periphery of my vision. One dark shape against another.

On I walk, past an intersection between three fields. There used to be an old, rusting piece of farming equipment here. I'd come out here at a similar time of night a few years ago and recorded the sound of it being repeatedly kicked and pushed and scraped, for a sound piece I was working on at the time. Once I was satisfied with the results I turned round to see the silhouette of a horse, presumably regarding me rather quizzically.

The path slopes upwards now, and again becomes more like a tunnel. I stumble towards the murky patch of light (well - not light, but less dark than the rest) I can see at the end of it. The sheer, enfolding darkness raises the pulse again, but I don't allow it to quicken my pace. I know this place better than I know anywhere, after all - and soon I'll be out in the open again. Over a stile, and out into an open field which will soon slope sharply downwards again.

It was here, at the top, in the open, that me and SB used to sit with cans of super-strength beer. We'd wax philosophical: the place lent itself to such musings as the nature of space and of infinity - here at the top of this hill, there was a sense of everything being below us except for the sky and the stars. There would always reach a point in our conversation where I would try and convince him that the fabric of space and time was curved, and he wouldn't be having any of it. As we continued to drink, the discussion would soon descend to cheap personal insults, then he would usually throw up and I'd feel superior even if I was more drunk than he.

This was half a life ago, and it makes me smile.

I start walking gingerly down the slope. Not because the path is precarious, but because I do not like the bit at the bottom of the slope one little bit. There's something about it. The darkness renders it indistinct - a dark mass of trees - but down there somewhere is a tiny footbridge over a brook. I reason to myself how silly it is that I can walk as far as this, through all this darkness, without any problem - that I can dismiss unreasonable thoughts, fears and superstitions as fantastic nonsense. For some reason, it's not as easy at this point to cast such things from my mind.

It's colder down there, I know it. Of course it is, because there's a brook, but it's not that kind of coldness I'm talking about. The darkness and the silhouettes on the rest of this walk feel quite diffuse and fuzzy, but down here it feels more like sharp spikes. Tales about the place abound - some feasible, some not.

I keep my pace steady.

I remember someone telling me that a marching band had been seen down here - he'd been walking nearby and heard music, and here was this phantom band marching right through (as in, right through) the trees. Bullshit, of course, and I remember wondering whether this guy had seen far too many reruns of Sapphire and Steel for his own good. Nonetheless, I stupidly find myself listening out for old marching music, and filling my mind with all sorts of ghostly images which serve to make me feel as nervous as I feel silly.

It's more overgrown than last time I was here, and I can't immediately see the way through to the bridge. I'm starting to flap a little, until I see a way through from one side. The adrenaline is really flowing and I'm feeling like a scared child.

Over the footbridge. Quick. And, despite myself, I run up the slope on the other side, relieved to get out of this particular trough. I curse myself for allowing such silliness to unsettle me, not to be able to dismiss it so easily.

This last field slopes upwards sharply and then opens out, a lone tree in the middle, still some distance away. The first time I walked up here on my own at night, I was relieved to have gotten over the bridge (in case of what, exactly?), only for my heart to nearly stop when I looked up the slope: it had been a foggy evening, and the lights from the farmhouse beyond the field had served to bathe it in a quite unearthly light. Up on a brow at the top of the slope were the silhouettes of six horses, standing in a row staring at me, their shadows slicing through the fog and into the distance like dark beams. It was quite a sight.

Tonight no such spectacle awaits but the two or three horses nearby come up very close to me, nudging against me almost aggressively. This unnerves me but I pat them and continue, relieved when they realise I have no food for them and plod off in another direction.

Upwards I go, the slope more gentle now. The hedgerows taper in and converge at another stile at the far end. I'm almost there. This final part is the darkest in a literal sense - a tiny path, completely enclosed overhead - but it doesn't perturb me, certainly not in the way that the bridge at the bottom of the field does. I clamber over and feel beer cans underfoot. It's impossibly dark, and I'm almost stumbling, but a short while later I'm out into the open, and on the road.

It's just a couple of minutes to the pub from here, and my pint feels well deserved.

All crunch and no credit

At the supermarket yesterday I decided to be a little more economical given just how much prices are rising. I was planning on making a chilli con carne, and I bought a lower-priced brand of minced beef - perhaps £1.60 lower than the stuff I normally get.

It didn't taste bad at all, but there were far too many gnarly bits of gristle in there (which reminded me why I always bought the more expensive stuff in the first place), and I had to pick one bit out which got stuck between my teeth. Later I realised that this particularly vindictive piece of gristle had managed to bring half of one of my fillings out with it as well.

So for a saving of less than two quid, I'm faced with possibly 10 or 20 (if not more) times that amount on dental work.

Bugger.



*Update Tuesday 26th Aug: tonight I will be having cheese and tomato sandwiches with houmous. More news as it happens.

Interval (the musical kind)

I'm a wreck, thanks to a piece of music:

Requiem For Dying Mothers, Pt 2, by Stars of the Lid.

Since I got back from Edinburgh, I've listened to it often - whether through the pc speakers, or on what might be termed my internal walkman, when I've been out and about.

It's a lush, majestic piece: I'll surely do it an injustice by trying to describe it in terms of form (you'll note also that I don't read music, otherwise I'd do a far better job technically in the following description) but, broadly speaking, it comprises of drones, loops, ambient washes of sound, reverb, and a gorgeous string section.

It also makes use of repetition.

But what really gets to me are the chord changes. It starts in C, centred around a simple but beautiful tonal phrase, which then liquidly changes to a G chord. This repeats a few times at a slow and stately pace over a rich palette of sonic layering and texture.

After perhaps the fourth repetition it morphs from C to B flat, with a slight change also in the tonal phrase: this too repeats for maybe four times. It's all held together delicately but beautifully by the various drones bleeding into one another as the whole piece unfolds.

And how it unfolds after this point.

Because after this last particular B flat, it does something simple and astonishing. It goes up to E flat - at the same stately pace - and then through a progression to B flat, F, and back to C. It then repeats this progression over and over, weaving textures in and out, before the string section comes in and takes the same progression through to the end of the piece, totalling 7 and a half minutes.

But the effect of that change from B flat to E flat the first time round: real lump-in-the-throat stuff. I still cannot get over how a sequence of chords and notes in a certain order can just cut right through to something in oneself that brings out such feeling.

In terms of how to describe the overall effect, I'm struck by the kind of bipolarity it leaves me conjuring with:

It's delicate and subtle, yet heavy and monolithic;

It's beautiful and bright, yet bleak and intense;

It's wordless, and speaks volumes to me.

But more than anything, there's that one, devastating moment.





*Update: as found by nmj, here's a link to the piece in question. There's some extra stuff at the end, but the actual track ends around the 7 mins 30 mark.