Surprise!

The following post contains words, ideas and thoughts which most people may not agree with. If you feel interested enough to want to read this and are able to figure out how this post has been disguised via the miracles of the internet (namely, basic HTML coding) then please feel free to read on. If not, I can pretty much sum things up for you - if you either don't want to read this or are not very internet-savvy - by saying that the main point of this post comes down to the following: As people get older, the "magic" of Christmas gradually fades over time. I appear to have experienced this transition from excited child to world-weary adult in general over the last few years and have decided to use the Christmas period as a framing device for this observation.

I would like to stress that the following is not borne out of upset, greed or ungratefulness. As with anything, however, I will be frank and honest with every letter of this piece.

Christmas brings out the worst in people. It's supposed to be a time of giving and sharing and spending time with those you normally wouldn't. As humans, though, we are all egotists and we only really care about ourselves. The idea of receiving gifts as donated by others of those around us out of sheer good will and a generous dose of commercialisation makes us revert to our core, instinctive, Neanderthal ways. Basically, for many people, "Christmas" equals "I want stuff".

There's a quaint charm about the day itself. for many it follows a formula, or a tradition. Some families visit relatives whilst others have relatives visit them. Some families sit around the fire or, if you don't like in the countryside or the 1800s, the television and watch as the citizens of EastEnders, Emmerdale and Coronation Street suffer massive cast culls by way of "freak gas explosion" or "unfortunate lorry disaster". Some families drink copious amounts of alcohol and destroy the nifty gadgets they unwrapped mere hours ago through either clumsiness or shoddy craftsmanship. It's not all happy and wholesome, though. Some families are driven apart by work and location differences, most notably those carrying out military operations. Some people spend the time entirely alone and, in some cases, with absolutely nowhere to go.

What keeps Christmas so fresh, however, is the surprise of the gifts. Gifts are wrapped in all kinds of coloured paper, tied up with ribbons and bows and adorned with miniature greetings cards. Gifts appear in all manner of shapes and sizes, from the simple small boxes to the fucking frustrating to wrap giant fluffy teddy bears. Applying the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics to this whole bundle of nothing, the exact nature of the present is unknown to the receiver up until the very moment that the colourful veil is lifted, scrunched up and tossed into the bin bag in the middle of the room. Surprise! Now you know what's in that box! And best of all it's not a dead cat, unless you know some pretty fucked up people or you're actually into that sort of thing.

I personally have started to lose the magical unique feeling of Christmas only to have it replaced by laziness and mild indifference. I've reached a certain point in my life - one which I'm finding it extremely difficult to break away from - wherein the family and family friends surrounding me at this loving time have no idea who I am. Part of this stems from the fact that I don't really know who I am, I don't vocalise myself very much towards many people and very rarely speak of myself. Also, for this reason I have no idea what to gift to those around me so there's definitely a bit of tit-for-tat present swapping going on there.

The aforementioned notion of surprise is completely lost on me at this time and has been for some time now. This has come about when all of the gifts - and let me once again stress my gratitude for them as gifts are given by others at their own expense - that I receive are quite literally, without exaggeration or sardonic mocking, either items of clothing or deodorant gift sets. I've started to develop a certain paranoia that all my relatives only regard me as either naked or smelly or both. I've come to accept this over time, yet am made to feel something of an outcast and fairly insecure about myself when others - whether family or friends, loved ones or acquaintances - recite endless lists of received gadgets, games, box sets, booze, surprises and expectations as well as just the regular clothes and smellies and that. When I deliver my albeit shorter and less dazzling list, people end up surprised, which quite frankly is one luxury I don't feel I get any more.

Now that my fingers feel dirty for typing such anti-Christmassy Christmas musings, I feel obliged to point out that this year, my parents have decided to collaborate on the cost of a holiday for them and us kids at a later date; the exact details of this vacation are yet to be decided. This is a good thing and once again I would like express my gratitude. I wouldn't like to be known as a pissy little twat who takes to the internet to publicly complain about everything and everyone in their lives on the spur of the moment; I'll leave that to the kids on Twitter.

I would like to make it clear that what you have just read has not been written as a rant made out of shit wit, sarcasticness and cynicism. It is essentially an open letter to everyone and no-one borne out of bored honesty, stoicism, an aching head and a glass of port. Furthermore, this is has been written to get everything out before it devours me completely, purely for my own benefit. After all, it's that special time of year when we think about ourselves. I echo my prelude to this piece by saying - or rather typing - that all of the gifts I have received, however few, have been received with gratitude, and that I have simply written all of the above with brutal honesty.

Finally, I'd like to close by saying that I hope whoever may be reading this has enjoyed the Christmas period in whatever way they've experienced it. Enjoy the rest of the festive period because in 364 days time, it'll be "same old, same old" once again. Surprise!

Mystery

When the train gets held at the station, people naturally start to complain; no exceptions. Not even if a diabetic passenger collapses moments after boarding because he probably didn't eat breakfast that particular morning or something. In fact, anyone in the adjoining carriage will, by human law, poke their head out into the aisle and stare through the little sliver of window in the door between compartments to see the backs of a crowd blocking off the impromptu patient of Chester railway station's emergency medical team. The complaining people, all the while, speak in tones reminiscent of why you left the area to go to University in the first place.

Whilst at University, you spend far too long stressing about coursework; both your own and that of fellow students. The fellow students' workload is dumped upon you not by your own choice, however. Once a healthy and stable workmate/friend/peer/colleague relationship has been established, that virtually acts as an unspoken 'open-door policy' for your comrade to inflict their stress on others. Luckily, this phenomenon only every occurs for two days before an assignment deadline in intense concentration. Once it's over, everyone reverts back to their happy selves leaving them able to partake in social or, in some cases, anti-social events usually involving alcohol and mild embarrassment.

Around the "term ending" times - i.e. Christmas and Easter - the former working groups and subsequent social groups end up saying goodbyes and farewells to one another as they dread a whole three weeks away from each other's company. If you're lucky, in the run up to the Christmas break, one of your peers may happen upon ownership of a Drinking Roulette-based game which essentially consists of a cheap moulded plastic roulette wheel, ball-bearing and several numbered shot glasses. Sometimes these glasses become filled with cola or water, or even undiluted squash for the particularly daring. Other times, fruity ciders fill the thimble-sized receptacles, and sometimes your peers explore the reduced-and-unspecified shelves of the alcohol aisle in the Crewe branch of Tesco, which happens to exist on stilts above it's ground-level car park. This results in the acquisition of a £7 bottle of what can only be referred to as the "mystery drink", which looks like Jägermeister, pours like soy sauce and tastes like Italian pesto and industrial paint thinner.

Once goodbyes have been exchanged alongside sordid secrets - all of which remain inside the room in which they were once spake - there eventually comes a time where you return to a former dwelling and a former existence you tried so desperately to get away from a little over two years ago. However, aforementioned victims of (possibly) long standing medical conditions do their bit to impede your progress - or regress as it were - whilst the surrounding passengers remind you of the fact that such people actually do exist.

As a result, you end up sitting on a static vehicle covered in layers of clothing, surrounded by two small suitcases on wheels, suffering an aching shoulder from a bulging satchel and realising that Patrick Wolf's The Bachelor album is actually pretty decent and that it does not, in fact, finish after track three. All the while, you find that it's a little difficult trying to admire the quaint, bizarre confluence of what can only really be described as "electro-folk" when you're staring at deserted buildings and faded rubbish that lies amongst train tracks that have clearly been out of use for years.

Eventually, you should make it to your destination, albeit forty-five minutes later than you would've previously hoped and proceed to realise how little your life seems to amount to as well as how much you wish the diabetic bloke from the train a speedy recovery as you gulp down tea laced with a stupid amount of sugar.

The Main Distraction

A long, long time ago - so about a month - I had a weekly venting window on this very portion of webspace. The good thing is that it still exists. The bad thing, though, is that I've either gained more of a life or lost my enthusiasm for typing (or both) that it's constantly been slipping under my attention radar for me to give a crap. For this reason, more stuff has happened during my existing time that could potentially warrant noteworthiness right here, meaning that this particular blabble could either stretch to an obscene length or amount to a couple of paragraphs which simply state "stuff happened" and I can talk about my distaste for typing or something. Either way, I should really be doing assignment work right now so this is my obligatory distraction from doing that. and not just any distraction, no. This is the main distraction. The main attraction of distractions everywhere. Yes, I've already pointlessly chopped an onion, had a shower and stared at a static Facebook page for an hour and a half without actually doing anything on it. Now, come gather round, ye children, for a grand story of festive magnitude and other wintery delights (probably... I don't even know what I'm typing now [God, I hate this]) as I present my annual un-Christmassy Christmas tale. And in time-honoured tradition of the culture of Western media, I'm presenting it many, many weeks before the actual day of Christmas.

So I went home on a train at some point, which is always the best way to start a story of festive cheer. My journey was made easier by the technology in the palm of my hand - a mobile telephone I had aquired during the summer period, with snazzy features such as flipping graphics, internet access and a calendar which doesn't get used.
My mild Facebook addiction is now regularly satisfied whilst I'm on the go,
which pleases me so,
but the network which provides my access is oft slow
at fulfilling my demands, and I get all like "whoa".
I signed up to a certain mobile network which, for pseudo-legal reasons, I will not mention, but I will tell you that it rhymes with... oh shit, nothing actually rhymes with Orange. Anyway, over the latest months, the firm has been overtaken and rebranded by the somewhat phonetically screeching EE, meaning Everything Everywhere. However, in the light of my various train journeys which lacked suitable access, I feel that they should be obliged to rebrand to Everything Everywhere, Except Certain Sections Of Railway Lines Which Happen To Pass By Fields, Hills And Other Various Countryside Related Miscellanea, but somehow I feel that EEECSORLWHTPBFHAOVCRM doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Over the recent weeks, I've revelled in the initial bursts of joy of that annual office-party tradition of Secret Santa and cringed with horror at the actuality of that annual office-party tradition of Secret Santa. Currently, I belong to two Secret gifting groups: one consisting of coursemates, the other of University Archery enthusiasts. In each of these groups, however, it has quickly occurred to me - i.e. from the moment I've been given the name of a person I barely know within each group - that I don't want to do either any more. On top of this, one of the groups has suffered the mishap of a late withdrawal leaving several people in a stupour or some other word like that and as it currently stands, I have no idea what, if anything, I'm supposed to be buying for whom, if anyone. Picking out a name at random is all chance, of course. But when it comes to the names I personally end up resting upon, God or whoever or those head-fucky laws of chaos decide to pop up and be a complete dick. To those of you who happen to have your unknown gifts provided by me as a result of the naming goblins of Secret Santa, I hope I'm not ruining the surprise by informing you that you'll probably end up with a box of Quality Streets or something. Failing that, a white chocolate Magnum and hug.

And so once again, as November falls over into the four o'clock darkness and December turns our collective breaths into fog, my still somewhat-pubescent hormones have decided to latch onto one or two members of the fairer sex. Call it tradition. Girls are, like, my Coke advert. I don't particularly care about anyone or anything in any way other than platonic, but alas, for the third year in a row, my mindspace has wandered into the realm of "liking someone", rendering it completely useless when attempting to work towards important assignments. Apparently, it's a lot more important for me to shove my hands in my pockets, bunch my shoulders forward, smile sheepishly with my head down and twist one foot on the ground whilst anchored to one point by the toes. If personal history is anything to go by, this beautiful, wonderous, cutesy, disgusting, lovable, stupid bastard feeling will subside within a week or three, allowing me just enough time to not care that I'm spending the New Year period alone, again. For the time being though, to you who happens to have been affected by the perfectly normal, yet annoyingly human feelings conjured up by my brain, I hope not to frighten you away with the sheer sight of my face and to make things up to you at some point with a white chocolate Magnum and a hug. If those have already been taken, I'll consider the box of Quality Streets, but quite frankly my dear, I feel that might be taking things a little too fast.

These paragraphs are stupidly long. If you read them all, well done, but at the same time you might want to consider doing something with your life. Might I suggest a white chocolate Magnum and that you go... hug yourself.

The Future Is Not Orange

It's occurred to me that the reason I've not actually been doing any Uni work this third and final and oh so important of years is because I don't want it to be over. Plain and simple. I've very much enjoyed my time at University and, even though I still have a good six months left at it, my ever-planning mind can't help but look past those days and see me in a future that currently resembles something of a greyish blur like a stone landmark zooming past a train window, or a massive jelly made of obscurity.

In six months' time, I'll be all done with this undergraduate course, hopefully with a decent degree in hand, back in the town I grew up in, in a residence I didn't grow up in, attempting to pay my way in the world, spending countless hours in a retail assistant uniform, and filling whatever time I have left trying desperately to get noticed for my writing skills through avenues such as this piece of crap. The people I've met at University will merely fade into profile pictures and occasional text updates on how their individual lives have panned out since I last saw them.

That's not to say I won't have people back in my roots. Of course I have people there. But over time, the school links and the college links and the occasional drinking buddy links have snapped apart like old shoelaces, or new liquorice laces, and friendly gatherings seem fleeting at best whenever someone, anyone, arranges a night in or out. Try as we might to fight it but we've all grown up now. We all have other things to worry about and I fear I'm hurtling head-first into exactly the kind of life I never wanted; the kind where once you become an "adult" you relinquish all rights to the very notion of "fun" and become just another cog in the machine of mundane and lazily thought out metaphors. I remember growing up watching Friends and thinking that when I'm in my mid-twenties, I too will have a close-knit group of wacky comrades with whom I'll spend my days having jovial conversations, sharing takeaway dinners and occasionally poking the naked guy in the flat across the street using an obscene amount of chopsticks sellotaped together.

Don't even get me started on when, where or how I imagine myself engaging in a personal, romantic relationship with anyone.

My phone company recently merged and threw expensive technology at a bunch of British cities, mostly in the south. Before that, though, they used to tell people that the future was, in fact, orange. I regret to tell you, dear reader, that the future is not orange. The future isn't any colour. The future is a blank mesh of grey with bits of fluff and dust woven in to make it look at least lived in a bit. It could entail absolutely any situation with any people in any location, but I don't like staring gormlessly into that void for too long because it drives me crazy and makes me write something long and ridiculous like this. So with that in mind, I leave this place now to go rest my aching head and fall into a blank and boring dreamless sleep wherein all vague time parameters become a certain swirling shade of black.

I suppose this whole ramble only applies to me right now though, considering that for several million folks in the United States today, the future - apparently - is blue.

The Annual Sugar Rush

There's a poster at the Uni campus emblazoned with the words "Why Do We Fear?" which immediately put me in mind of our innate human nature wherein we are aware of our own mortality and try desperately to distract ourselves from the fact in our day to day lives. Eventually I concluded that the concept of fear simply boils down to just anticipation of a bleak or unwanted future in terms of the situations we may happen to face or those which happen to fall upon us through no choice of our own. However, it quickly occurred to me that the poster was really just put up to advertise a lecture to be given quite simply because it's Halloween.

As I type, I'm sitting in a cold house with the only heat in the room coming from my body itself and remnants of me using a hairdryer to quickly and effectively make a damp T-shirt suitable for wearing later on. I'm facing a Tesco Halloween make-up set of which I can guarantee that only the black, white and red blocks of the palette will be applied to my face and a vial of red food colouring which I intend to add to golden syrup to fashion an oozing, yet extremely edible, fake blood. Behind me are old clothes with which I've finally come to terms with the fact I don't wear any more and have set about ripping up. For tonight's drinking-excuse festivities, I've been informed to dress as a zombie.

The funny thing about University is that fancy dress evenings are a lot more strict than one would probably expect. All dressing up must be done to adhere to a specific theme whilst also proving wacky enough for the wearer to not present themselves in public in the same way on any normal day. This makes scouting around, spending money on clothes and accessories one would not normally wear on a daily basis necessary. Furthermore, after the night in question, the chances of such clothing props being used ever again slim to none.

It is at this point in the typing process that I find myself distracted by the TV and losing whatever train of thought I had with this thing for me to continue in such a way that the whole thing doesn't feel like I'm just grasping at straws or some other lazily constructed metaphor. I'm also in the middle of playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and am feeling a burning desire to ignore the rest of this and carry on with that again. In the same breath however, I don't possess nearly enough hypothetical money in-game than I have real money in reality so at least I feel like a king in this life as opposed to returning to a life of drudgery hacking away at things with a blade in a bid to find a girl in a pink dress who can't stay still long enough for me to find her.

Fortunately, the fancy dress themed evening of binge drinking and loud social merriment comes at little cost to me today further fuelled by the fact that I'll be vacating my current dwelling during the dark hours meaning that I won't have to suffer the clockwork knocking at the door of children in plastic masks holding out Asda carrier bags in the hope of experiencing the annual sugar rush. This didn't stop me from having to deal with some of the little tykes last night who seem to have decided that they don't like the way the Gregorian calendar is currently set up and figured All Hallow's Eve would be better suited to them a whole twenty-four hours earlier.

Once again, I come bumbling to no point whatsoever so in accordance with the reputation Halloween night has to uphold, I'll round off with some vaguely sounding scary words and frightening themes: ghoul, banshee, ectoplasmic, blood-curdling, fangs, the Monster Mash, daemons, fundamental extremism, Amy Winehouse.

Hardly Earth-Shattering

At the risk of fading further into obscurity that even I don't recognise me any more, I've stopped putting things here. Mostly, the reason for this has been some kind of amalgamation of getting on with life too much, consuming varying amounts of alcohol, sleeping and generally being a bit of a lazy arse in regards to remembering the fact that I wanted to keep this space regularly updated in the hope that it would keep me writing.

Over the last week or so, though, I've unashamedly, or very ashamedly (I'm not quite sure how to feel about it to be honest), been coasting. My work towards the most important year of my University course has seemed fairly lacklustre. That is when I look at my own work. I've simultaneously managed to worry and possibly belittle others on my course by workshopping (i.e. editing) their work with an overly critical mind, an inflated sense of self and a red Biro. The point at which hypocrisy hits is when I struggle to come up with original work of my own for my peers to scribble over and point at.

In stark contrast, my efforts in short fiction were recently commended during the currently ongoing Manchester Literature Festival. The University puts together a compilation of short stories annually and it just so happens that something I did managed to make it into the top half of all of them, thus making it to print. It's hardly Earth-shattering but the event did kill an afternoon, get me moderately light-headed on a glass of red and result in minor embarrassment dealt in the form of my parents' attendance. As of the time of typing this, my father's phone contains a however-long video clip of me stumbling over a short extract in the vicinity of a microphone and my mother currently possesses around six copies of the limited print-run anthology bearing signatures of myself and, in some cases, several of the other participants at the event as if we're rockstars, so that she can pass them on to whatever friends or family members she can coax into feigning interest.

So if I haven't been working to the fullest of my potential, what the heck have I been doing all this time? Well, drinking seems to make up most of that response. Why, in fact, that aforementioned vino at the anthology launch proved to be something of a "gateway drink" into what ended up being an afternoon and evening in a student bar in the middle of Manchester, during which certain amounts of money were exchanged for cocktail pitchers and the occasional thimble-sized plastic beaker of Goldschläger (which, by the way, in proper German should be pronounced "gold-sh-lay-ger" as opposed to its more popular Anglicised form "gold-sh-lah-ger", that kind of thing pisses me off ever so, you know).

Even tonight, after I've done this and finally dressed properly, I'm supposed to be joining my studently comrades for a good ol' binging session which will undoubtedly render me catatonic until tomorrow's early afternoon, by which point I should, in theory, be attending a seminar I should've prepared well in advance for. And by the same time on Friday I'll need some kind of original work to exist, at least in some kind of draft form, ready for other people to judge my writing ability which, quite frankly, feels to have dwindled since I've not been typing anything here for weeks at a time. Once everything goes to crap and I've stopped clutching the sides of my skull in despair, I may feel up to drowning my sorrows once more with that fresh bottle of Honey-infused Jack Daniels I bought yesterday.

More to do than can ever be done. More to find than can ever be found. It's the circle, the circle of life.

Somewhat Busy

Living without regular access to the internet is odd. This little portion of the web has been recently neglected as a result. Maybe it's only been a week, maybe it's been two, maybe it's been four years and I'm just still not ready to leave university behind all the while clasping my hands to my ears, shaking my head side to side and tunelessly chanting a constant "la la la" at real life because it doesn't actually exist yet. Oh yeah, also my eyes are closed during that bit too. However long it's been since I last used lettered keys to communicate with all those seven or so people that come here via a Facebook link, mis-typed Google search or spam email (probably, although I've not moved into the world of hacking yet, I'm not that techno-savvy), it feels like ages.

Anyway, I need to use email every now and then to facilitate my third year of degree study, which involves me bumming off the free WiFi on campus. Because of this, my Student Union surroundings with that scent of chips and gravy, occasional hubbub of idiot laughter and 4Music being streamed live on a projector sponsors my communications to classmates and random blog-stumblers alike. Why, even as I type, the voice of Peter Dickson is yelling at me buy things from KFC and now there's an extended featurette of Dappy from off of N-Dubz standing on a shallow bank fishing, I shit ye not.

So what's this one all about then? Something interesting must've happened in the last six years since I was last here, especially with it being the beginning of the university year. Well, yes, that's very true. Lot's of things have happened in the past decade, but as it happens now, I'm facing a somewhat busy afternoon and evening, a busy tomorrow, busy Friday, potentially busy Saturday, and a busy every single day for the next six months until I hand in final assignments. Add that to the fact that I really have to pee right now, I'll summarise the main points without too much elaborating. Heck, maybe they could pose as the bases of a few other blog posts later in the year when my brain dries up and my social life falls down a ravine into a pile of sewage or some other metaphor like that.

Lately, I've made new friends, watched TV, cooked food, spent an obscene amount of money on archery equipment, drank certain amounts of alcohol that cannot be described as copious and sung along with Coldplay from inside my iPod. Also I've walked a lot. A heck of a lot. Oh, plus I've had a distinct lack of doing work, hence why I'm now facing an awful lot of busy days and I still really badly need to pee, so bye.

Towel

As I type this, it's Sunday morning. I've been back in my student house for less than 24 hours and have probably spent half of that time not actually in the house. I'm moderately hungover and am currently lacking in healthy food stocks to ease the discomfort. I could do with a decent shower but don't have a clean towel. My bank balance is obscenely high and currently looks probably the healthiest it will look for at least seven more years, if we disregard a potential lottery win, freak fortune-finding occurrence in the middle of the street or ill-conceived attempt at ITV's The Cube.

On the hangover front, though, I've discovered the hard way that draught cider or even regular cider are not particularly adequate for binge-drinking purposes. At least not any more. I've never normally suffered headache-orientated "morning afters" but the sensation currently swirling around my stomach and other bits of digestive system seems all too unmanageable when trying to, you know, not stay motionless in bed all day long. On top of that, one has to contend with the fermented aftertaste of rotten apple and shouting that lingers on the back of the tongue and the fact that my toothbrush is actually located up a flight of stairs.

Since that last paragraph was ended, some four hours have passed for me, whereas four seconds have passed for you. If you're able to get your head around such a temporal issue without parts of your psyche drifting off and screaming, do feel free to continue. Anyway, I managed to get up, put fresh clothes on yet still feel unclean enough to want to shower. A towel needed to be purchased first, however, and fresh food wouldn't have gone a miss either. But you read all about that crap in paragraph one, rendering most of this irrelevant, other than for me to say that what I was going to say would happen earlier actually ended up happening.

I ventured out into the fresh-air based world and some fifteen minutes later I made it to a super-duper-hypermarket that was recently erected in the Crewe area. In the interest of not succumbing to blatant product promotion or whatever I feel inclined to mention that the supermarket is one of a well-known store chain. In the interest of being factually blunt, it was a Tesco Extra. Furthermore, it's on stilts; a ground-floor car-park with the entire store directly above it. As well as that, it's as big as a large village or a small town and quite frankly, I'm still not even sure I covered a quarter of the whole place, and that was after parting with sixty-five pounds in exchange for all kinds of fresh vegetables, fresh and frozen meats and poultry and a towel.

I've now cooked some of it, had a shower and gone back to bed to type this up. Looking back on this, all I've done is colourfully inform whatever poor bastard has decided to read this that I drank alcohol last night and went shopping today. Amount of time it took for me to settle straight back into student mode once again: twenty-four-and-a-bit hours... ish... probably.