Warm Recollections #14
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
There’s something slightly nightmarish about knowing you look forty or fifty or sixty on the outside and yet still feel not so much young as — sometimes — positively childlike on the inside. Buried alive.
Re-plotting a novel is like playing three dimensional chess with pieces made of mercury.
On a plane, the bathroom is the only backstage area, and you spend mere minutes in there over the course of a very long flight. Perhaps this is one of the reasons flights are so tiring. Constant performance.
One of the ways in which being a parent changes your sense of self is how much you end up being referred to — and referring to yourself — in the third person. ‘Bring it to Daddy’, or ‘Mummy needs to…’ You take on a semi-mythic quality. You are a ‘Daddy’ now, not just the vague half-arsed bundle of psychological clutter and impulse you feel most of the time. You join the archetype.
Departure math: a tired and hassled inability to work out — given the time flight boarding is scheduled for, journey to airport variability, pre-international flight lead time, uncertainty about the duration of the security process — what time you have to leave the hotel. Which for me inevitably involves rounding up the projected time required for each stage, and then rounding up the result… and thus sometimes arriving at the airport the day before my fucking flight.
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JFC first and last just summed me up. Damn you.
I'm assuming playing three dimensional chess with pieces made of mercury is an unpleasant experience? Also possibly fatal?
I'm now the oldest guy on a building site filled with baby faced young tradesmen and women. I fucking hate it! Even when I show how cool and groovy I am when I chat with the young people about the hip and happening trends of the moment, I still feel old. Tru dat!
My identity amongst family now consists of being called Grandad. I bloody love it! Although over a number of years I've Pavlovianly trained my grandchildren to also add "best grandad ever". I think I deserve it.
My brother and I were at boarding school for 3yrs when we were young army brats. We had to go from Liverpool to Gutersloh via Luton airport on our own. We would have been around 8 or 9 years old. We would worry about being late for the plane. This would happen sometimes but they ALWAYS held the plane for us. Walking on to the plane to take our seats as furious adults gazed with undisguised hostility at us was something of a gauntlet😁