The rather earnest man in the mirror

After reading my recent blog Beggars can't be choosers a friend of mine pointed out that my tone was something akin to Michael Jackson's in his Bad track Man in the Mirror.

Now, let me stress that I'm not saying that Man in the Mirror is bad - quite the contrary, in fact, and you know it. After hearing it unexpectedly piped from a tinny speaker in a hotel roof garden restaurant in Trivandrum at the beginning of the year, it enjoyed something of a renaissance on my iPod. Maybe I was feeling overly emotional on that particular evening because I recall my eyes brimmed with fresh, salty tears as I listened to Wacko Jacko sing about the kids in the street who follow each other on the wind.

I'm sure it had a lot to do with the nostalgia I experienced, hearing that song for the first time in years in such unusual circumstances. Indeed, it must have effected me quite profoundly for me to come home and write a blog in such a similarly earnest style, and this is my concern you see, that a few people might have got the wrong end of the stick about me.

I'm not very good at censoring myself. In truth, I don't care to. Re-reading my recent blogs, I couldn't help but think that maybe my tone could be construed as being a bit worthy, a bit self-righteous, a bit "Who the hell does he think he is anyway? Don't lecture me you sanctimonious hippy!" Do you know what I mean?

Well, I hope I didn't offend anyone and I accept - yay, welcome - any criticism you want to level at me. This is possibly the function of the blog in 21st Century society - a platform for an individual's freedom of thought and expression. If you think I'm offensive/judgmental then you should check out Nigga Knows Technology - it's some funny ass mutherfuckin' shit too, let me tell you.

Anyway, my point is that I don't think I take myself too seriously and if it's all the same to you I'd rather I wasn't perceived that way. Now, some of you might be wondering, who give's a shit? Well, you have a valid point - maybe you should get a blog and express it to the world.


Ramblin' Ollie's Final Thought

Is it uncool to enjoy Michael Jackson music these days? Granted, he is a really big weirdo and possibly a danger to children, but he has written some of the best pop songs ever, so I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Make that change!


Wait a minute - how cool is this?! Check out the site I got my Michael Jackson image from...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/totp2/features/wallpaper/

--------------------

Beggars can't be choosers

"'Ere, 'scuse me mate, can you do me a favour..?"

These were the first words I heard upon alighting the coach when I arrived in Bristol two months ago, fresh from India. They were uttered by a young man with pimples sporting a tracksuit and a baseball cap tipped at a jaunty angle - although there was nothing jaunty in his pale face with it's pockmarked skin and bloodshot eyes.

"I aint like a street beggar or nothin'..."

No, I thought, you're like a bus station beggar. I sighed as I stooped to pick up my bag.

"I lost me wallet and I needs fifty pee for me bus to Knowle..."

Disconcerted and embarrassed by my immediate confrontation with begging in Bristol, I mumbled some excuse about not having any change and walked away. I lied through my teeth actually - of course I had fifty pence - I just didn't want to give it to him. Funny how you always mutter, "Sorry, I haven't got any change," when you're confronted by a beggar, rather than, "Sorry, I'm not going to give you any of my change."

I made a conscious decision years ago to try not to ignore dodgy-looking characters in situations like this because there are plenty of people who do, who look at beggars as though they're not human or look through them as though they're simply not there... I can't help but think how awful it would feel to be treated like that, every day of your life, as though you're no longer a part of society, to feel as though you're not even worth a second glance or a second thought.

I've come across people on the street who look like they're poor and desperate but aren't actually begging for money - they just want to know what time it is or need a light for their cigarette - because they have a certain look, a certain vibe, they are disregarded by passers by. I met a guy the other day who thanked me profusely for stopping to give him a light because, as he explained, he'd asked about ten people and been completely ignored by most of them. It's almost as though many people resent being reminded that there are others in the world who are struggling to keep their heads above the water, who need a bit of help, or at the very least some compassion.

I'm not trying to paint myself as some kind of social hero here. I just think it's polite to listen and reply if someone asks you a question - it's the old-fashioned English gentleman in me rather than the new-age, politically correct hippy traveller! I mean, it's rude to ignore someone isn't it, even if they do have questionable hygiene or a drug problem?!

Equally, I'm not exaggerating my social conscience. It does take a bit of courage to stop and talk to beggars rather than brush past them, but not much. And rest assured there are plenty of dodgy-looking characters I keep plenty of distance from and don't talk to unless I'm compelled to - and even then I make sure I don't stop moving! I'm not so naive - there are criminals and crazies everywhere, I just think there's a big difference between fucked up people like that and those who are decent but have been unfortunate enough to end up on the streets, addicted to alcohol or drugs or involved in prostitution.

This reminds me of something that happened to me last week. I was on the street in Stokes Croft late on Saturday night when I was approached by a scruffy-looking couple who engaged me in conversation. As on numerous previous occasions I stopped and listened to what the couple had to say even though I knew it would involve a discussion about money at some point - specifically, their requirement for it. They got straight to the point.

"'Ere mate, you 'aven't got a poun' coin 'ave you to swap fer these coppers?"
The man extended a hand toward me, palm open. In it I could see a pile of small change. I studied him and his girlfriend briefly. They didn't appear any more respectable upon closer inspection, both of them pale, skinny and sickly-looking with lank, greasy hair and grimy, unwashed clothes. The girl had a unpleasant-looking sore on her upper lip.
"What for?" I asked bluntly.
"Well, the taxi driver 'ere won't take these coppers see? It's a quid in change 'ere I swear," the man said, proffering the coins for my inspection.
"Actually mate it's eighty-five pee," the girl piped up. The man shot her an annoyed glance.
"Um yeah, it is actually eight-five pee, she's right there..." he admitted.
I looked around. I couldn't see a taxi. Their story was barely plausible, but I was touched and amused by the girl's weird honesty in such circumstances. I quickly came to a decision.
"Alright, there you go," I said, fishing a pound coin out of my pocket and handing it to the girl.
"Aw, cheers mate, thas really good of you like," she said.
"No worries, I've got a tub for small change, I'll stick this lot in there."
"Yeah, good ideal," the man said in his broad west country accent as he emptied the small change into my hand. "Thanks a lot. 'Ave a good night mate!"
"You too. Take care..."

I walked off, counting the money the man had given me. Eighty-five pence exactly. I smiled and wondered what the couple were actually going to do with my golden nugget, given that it blatently wasn't for a taxi. Admittedly, I was feeling a bit slow-witted after five pints of cider, otherwise I would have worked it out sooner. I stopped in my tracks as an image of the couple came to me, wandering the streets begging for money. What happens when they've collected, say, five pounds, I thought? Ten pounds maybe? Why, they go looking for a drug dealer of course! But a drug dealer isn't going to accept a handful of coppers in exchange for a rock of crack or hit of smack is he? No, he's not going to want anything smaller than a pound coin.

My hard-earned money, still warm from my pocket, I daresay, was going to end up in the greedy clutches of an evil drug-dealer, via the grubby hands of a addicted beggar and his girlfriend. It's a lovely image, isn't it?

As I walked home, my pile of change jingling in my pocket where previously a pound coin had snugly sat, I contemplated this strange perspective on the seamier side of life that had been unexpectedly presented to me. I thought about the couple. I tried to imagine their lives. Was she a prostitute? Was he her pimp? Were they homeless? If not, what kind of home did they have? Did they have parents who worried about them? Or big brothers? Sisters? Friends? Were they abused? Did they abuse each other? Were they in love?

How many times must they have been around the viscious circle that I had just glimpsed a tiny edge of?

I confess I had tears in my eyes by the time I got to my front door. Empathy is a difficult thing to bear sometimes. It was at that moment that I had the idea to write this blog.

I suppose my attitude to giving beggars money is still developing, as is so much else about the way I look at the world. It's such a grey area, isn't it? A beggar is not such a worthy cause for charity, at least not when you hand one money on the street. The chances are that they will end up using it to buy booze or drugs. Once that was my excuse for never digging in my pockets for loose change, but so what if beggars ends up spending the money I give them on booze and drugs? Hell - that's what I'm going to spend it on so who am I to judge?!

I don't consider myself to be a particularly charitable person anyway. I'm not proud of the fact that when faced with images of victims of starvation, hurricanes or tsunamis on the television I feel a knife twist in my stomach and I promise myself I will make a donation to one charity or another and then promptly forget. Somehow the immediacy of the plight of the homeless on the streets of Bristol affects me in a different way. They do say that charity begins at home...

After two years away I've come home to see the same haggard faces on the streets in Stokes Croft as well as some new ones and there are some who are noticeably absent. There's one character in particular who I haven't seen since I returned but who was a fairly regular fixture in my life for the nine years I lived here before. Every few weeks I'd see him on the street, small, ragged and pale with a dirty blanket draped over his shoulders, he'd either be begging, wandering aimlessly or drugged out of his head in a gutter.

He was an efficent liar, which is what leads me to believe he was probably a drug addict. That, and the fact that he was often to be seen off his head in gutters. One night he stopped me and asked for some change as I was walking home drunk from a nightclub. I ended up giving him £10 because he convinced me that if he could afford to spend one more night in a hostel then he would be able to obtain the paperwork he needed to get a job he'd applied for. In the end I took a chance on him. I desperately wanted to believe that I could make a difference and he knew that and he preyed on it.

A couple of weeks later he tried to sell me the same story and I just told him he was a liar and carried on walking. Of course he didn't remember me.

I heard it once said that the majority of adults in this country are only two pay cheques away from being on the streets. Of course, it sounds like a blatently contrived statistic if you figure in all the people that most of us can rely on for support if things were to go wrong in our lives - parents, friends, partners - but what if there was no-one there to help you if you lost your job and couldn't find another? How many people must there be in Bristol alone who have nobody to look after them? How many of those lonely, luckless people have ended up on the streets because there was no-one there when they needed someone to protect them?

Some argue that people who find themselves in such desperate circumstances have only got themselves to blame, that it's an individual's choices in life that takes him or her along a particular path and if that path leads to self-destruction then, well, it's too bad - they should have made better choices. But that's the point isn't it? We can't understand their plight exactly because we have the luxury of choice and cannot imagine what it would be like not to have. What kind of choices does the abused child of an abused, drug-addicted single mother have?

No choice at all.

Next time you see a beggar sat huddled beneath a blanket in an underpass looking hopefully up at you as you stride past, don't feel the need to give them money, but at the very least try to look them in the eye and actually see them as you shake your head, remembering all the time that they are someone's son or someone's daughter, somone's brother or someone's sister, or at the very least, a child of God as you are.

----------------

Green and senseless land

I'm not an angry man. I am, as they say, slow to anger. I very rarely get angry with people. Usually inanimate objects bear the brunt of it - chair legs, door frames and anything else that might cause me to occasionally painfully stub one or another part of my body - but it's mostly computers that piss me off. Even the most foul-mouthed Tourettes sufferer would likely blush at the torrent of blue langauge that spills fluently from my lips when I'm forced to sit and wait for a computer to do something.

My lack of patience with computers aside, I'm sure most people who know me would agree that I am a chilled out kind of a guy. Since returning from India I think I've been even more shanthi than I was before. Sometimes I feel like I'm floating around in a lovely bubble, observing the world through serene eyes with infinite patience. Sometimes it feels like I can see beauty in even the ugliest thing and nothing bad can ever touch me. Yes, I know it all sounds a bit hippyish and fanciful but it's true.

When you're in a crazy country like India or Cambodia, there's an attitude you have to adopt in order to cope with the rigours of forty-eight hour bus journeys, pushy rickshaw drivers, filthy toilets, obtuse railway staff and belligerent soldiers. I call it traveller zen. It enables you to remain calm in pretty much any situation because you know you have absolutely no control over it's outcome. Getting angry is counter-productive. Your best bet is to simply smile.

Therefore, it's with a sense of despair rather than anger that I reflect now on some of the more unpleasant aspects of English society. I'm a little disillusioned today because amidst the unifying fervour of World Cup fever I see a country more divided than ever. I know - it's a bold statement to make, isn't it? That's why I'm not going to explain what I mean at this point. I need a bit of time to reflect on it, I think perhaps I should come back round to it via a different route. First I'll tell you what the particular catalyst for this feeling of disenchantment is.

Actually there are three stories to tell here, all of them linked - it's a sort of cute little triptych on the theme of hooliganism. Wait a minute, I'd better make sure I know what triptych actually means before I use it...

Okay - panic over, triptych is a bona fide word. It may be bloody pretentious but at least it's not incorrect.

Yesterday evening as I cycled out to watch the footy I felt a bit edgy, possibly because I didn't like the look of the pub my brother had picked to watch it in. I had my reasons. A few months ago, only days after I arrived back in Bristol, I happened to be standing opposite it waiting for a friend when I was very nearly run over. It was a chilly spring evening, I was sheltering from a light drizzle beneath my umbrella and feeling quite dapper with the collar of my winter coat turned up against the wind. I heard the deep growl of a car engine and turned to see a white van pass within inches of where I stood and screech to a halt on the pavement behind me.

Let me put it another way, just in case I'm not making myself clear. There was me, stood on the pavement, perhaps a foot from the kerb, facing towards the road. Then there was the van, passing behind me, being driven along the pavement between me and the shop fronts, travelling at a speed in excess of twenty miles an hour, which may not sound like much until I remind you that it was on the fucking pavement.

I stood there, incredulous, staring at the immobile van a few metres away. As I watched, the rear door opened and a burly, muscular man in a tight fitting t-shirt stepped out. He glanced contemptuously at me and then sauntered over the road and into the pub, his arms swinging in that strange, simian manner that top-heavy meatheads sometimes favour. Another man stepped out of the van onto the pavement and followed the first man into the pub. Another emerged. Then another... and another... and another. In all, about ten men - all of them clearly tanked up on booze - emerged from the van and walked into the pub over the road, some of them leered in my general direction but most of them ignored me.

I recall saying to myself at the time, "That is a pub I never want to enter."

I couldn't really understand why my sensitive brother would choose such a place, apart from the fact that it possibly had just the right British bulldog-esque, neo-fascist atmosphere needed for an authentic English football experience. I admit that I may have become a snob in the time I've been away, either that or my brother has become less discriminating. Either way, I'm sure you can understand that I wasn't particularly keen on watchingthe footy with the White Van Man Gang.

With a sigh I locked up my bike a few feet from the entrance and then stepped into the fray. As the door swung open I was hit by a wall of heat and noise. I squeezed through the crowd and looked around for my brother. I couldn't find him in the main bar. Feeling somewhat exasperated I ventured into the dim back room and found him stood at the rear of a crowd facing a huge screen on which Wayne Rooney was being interviewed in the build-up to the game. There was a buzz of frenzied conversation in the room and occasionally a hoot or a shout of "Rooooooonnneeeey!!!" I felt very out of place, despite the fact that I was wearing my England shirt.

I should really point out that my issue has got nothing to do with football per se or even the particular, peculiar drunken energy that is an integral part of watching a big game of it in an English pub. It's something else - something more fundamental, about people... I can't explain it now - I'll try again in a minute.

By the time the match kicked off I was in a state of excited anticipation and had pretty much forgotten my surroundings. The only thing I was aware of apart from the football was the heat and humidity in the room - actually very similar to the conditions on the pitch in Germany, which was nice. The next ninety minutes whizzed by, we were treated to a very entertaining and tensely emotional game of football.

But I'm not here to talk about football.

At the end of the match we finished our drinks and agreed to duck into another pub for a post-match debrief and one for the road, despite the fact that the landlord was endeavouring to persuade punters to stay with an offer of four pint pitchers of Carling for a fiver. Given the ludicrous prices of beer in Bristol I was quite tempted to save myself a couple of quid and stay in the shit hole but in retrospect I'm glad I left the pub when I did.

I stepped outside into the cool evening air with a significant sense of relief. I heard shouting and the sound of blaring horns and looked to see where the disturbance was coming from. A chubby man, topless apart from an England flag which he had draped around his shoulders superman-style was staggering down the street shaking his fists and swearing at passing cars. "Fookin' loada fookin' bollox... WANKERS!" was the general tone of his profanity. I quickly lost interest in this idiot excuse for a football fan and went to collect my bike. As I approached it I became aware that it looked like it had been moved. The closer I got to it the more I became convinced that it was somehow mangled - the back wheel was bent into an alarmingly unnatural shape.

"Oh shit," I thought, "My bike's been stomped!" Sure enough, it had. I quickly deduced that the drunk football fan had clearly been so upset by the 2-2 draw with Sweden that he stormed out of the pub and decided to exact retribution on the first malleable object in his path, which happened to be my bicycle which he proceeded to jump and down on. I suppose it's fortunate the first malleable object he'd come across wasn't someone's face and that I'd timed my exit from the pub so that I didn't catch him in the act - violence would have surely ensued and I'm not very good at that sort of thing - I am after all a lover not a fighter.

As I glared up the street at the retreating hooligan I realised that I felt more resignation than anger or annoyance. I wasn't even shocked or suprised. England has it's fair share of mindless thugs who need no excuse to resort to violence, I knew that sooner or later I would be directly affected.

I was very lucky while I was travelling - I wasn't a victim of crime at any point. Well, that's not quite true. I was regularly ripped off by rickshaw drivers, shop-keepers and hotel managers but those were harmless, impersonal kinds of crimes, committed with a smile and a bow and a certain amount of earthy sophistication - I was a western tourist so I had it coming basically. The first world has been ripping off the third world for hundreds of years - those guys deserve a bit of payback, don't they? Okay, so perhaps I was more fortunate than some - of course there's crime everywhere and some particularly nasty stuff goes on in Asia - but I had to come back to England to be a victim of it.

The bike-trouncing incident was not the first incident of a crime perpetrated against me since my return to these shores. I fell foul of a dispicable coat-lifter in a nightclub during my first weekend back in Bristol. I was on top of the world, waving my hands in the air in time to some banging breaks for the first time since Goa and grinning inanely to all and sundry, my hooded top just out of my eyeline a couple of metres away on the back of a chair. I looked once - it was there. I looked twice - it was gone!

The ironic thing is that it was a really shitty hoody that I'd bought for about 200 rupees in Ooty, an old hill station in southern India. If it had been worth anything at all or I thought anyone would be remotely interested in thieving it then I would have put it in the cloak room. I didn't care about the hoody but I did care about the rather expensive pair of spectacles that were in one of it's pockets. So, possibly the only item I own that I value but had absolutely no value to anyone else in the world got stolen. How annoying is that?!

It's the sheer pointlessness of the crime that pisses me off. The drunk football hooligan who vandalised my bike had just cause - if only in his own sad, dishevelled mind, but these nightclub thieves are something else, aren't they? I mean, really, stealing something from someone just for the sake of it! Boo! Hiss! Bad form! At least drug-addicted muggers are compelled to do what they do - compelled on a rather fundamental level actually. Let's face it, it's a compunction based on a physical imperative to feed their fiendish habits - not that I'm excusing their behaviour, I'm just trying to put nightclub theft into perspective.

Well, all I can say is, "Fookin' loada fookin' bollox... WANKERS!"

Having said that, I suddenly recall an incident in a nightclub in Australia last year... suddenly the word "hypocrite" springs alarmingly to mind. At the time I'd been living in Sydney for about three months and was spending a lot of time hanging out with a weird and wonderful French girl called Coralie, who was - to be frank - a bit of a liability.

It had been a crazy kind of a night (they usually were when Coralie was about) involving great handfuls of vitamin pills washed down with copious amounts of tequila, plenty of frank sexual conversation and cigarettes, a ride with strangers in a sports car to a random, terrible house party and a circuit of about half a dozen clubs before we ended up in Susie Q's on Oxford Street at 3am. We were actually on our way out of Suzie Q's at about 5am after a good couple of hours of boozing and boogying when I noticed that Coralie was clutching a jacket in her arms.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Well my friend," she slurred, her French accent thick with booze. She looked up at me and fluttered her eyelashes, a trademark gesture. "It is a present - for you!"
"Where did you get it from?"
"In there," she said, jerking her head once toward the club's entrance, a trace of annoyance in her tone as if the question was, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, inappropriate. "I took it - a gift for you!"

Coralie was very drunk, as she later proved by bedding a weird bloke dressed up in a fairy costume (that's Oxford Street for you), which sort of excuses her. On the other hand, I was pissed but with that strange, sober edge you sometimes get after you've drunk a lot and then danced a lot. Perhaps I should have stamped my authority self-righteously on the situation and taken the coat back inside. Instead I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Thanks! Aren't you a sweetie?" I kissed her on the forehead. "Shall we go and find another party..?"

Certainly in the days which followed, during moments of remorse, I thought about taking the jacket back to the club. But it was a gift, wasn't it, even if it was a rather fucked-up, unethical kind of a gift? Oh well - the karma came back around in the end. I'd been wondering what I'd done to deserve that bit of misfortune in that Bristol nightclub. The jacket Coralie nicked was probably some poor Aussie's favourite item of clothing in the whole world.

Anyway, I've ended up going seriously off-topic here. It's time I drew some conclusions...

Okay, so I may have spent the majority of this blog ranting about thugs and hooligans in this country but I now admit that there's usually two sides to every story. Nobody's perfect. Certainly I'm not. Alcohol has a lot to answer for. It makes you do things you wouldn't, in a normal state of mind, ever consider doing. It opens the way to something reckless, vicarious, primeval even, which is inside all of us. That bloke who trounced my bike may have had a really, really bad day and he might have felt much better after venting his frustration on my back wheel. The clubber who stole my hoody may have had a jacket stolen earlier in the evening, or perhaps last year, in Sydney. Who knows?

It's terribly sad though, isn't it, that we do these things to each other? Apart from smoking the occasional spliff and indulging in the odd bit of software fraud, I'm a law-abiding citizen and quite proud of the fact. I may say, "Can you smell bacon?" whenever I see a policeman but I find their presence reassuring. God knows, it would be a Battle Royale in the centre of Bristol every Saturday night if the police weren't around. I suppose that's what I mean - all this anger and agression, fear and bigotry, frustration and repression - it seems to overflow so often and lead to senseless violence. Forget about violent criminals and terrorists, when normal people are trying to fuck each other over then what hope is there?

The depressing thing is that England isn't that much different in this regard to every other country. I know - I've checked. Although my recent hippy lifestyle has brought me into contact with a different kind of world, there is still a seething underbelly of unpleasantness that can't be ignored, even when you are meditating on a moutain like a monk. It would be tempting to just keep travelling or find somewhere I'm not confronted with these things which upset me but that would just be a form of escape, wouldn't it? It would be like saying, "I give up! I'm running to the hills! Sod the rest of you!"

Well, I love England and I love Bristol - I've had an amazing time here with friends and family since I got back and I'm not planning on going anywhere soon - I've just also got to feeling a bit depressed about some of the mindlessness I've witnessed here. I know when I get badly drunk I lose the plot and end up stumbling around making terrible decisions, but when I was travelling I started to feel like I could be something more and that's what I'm striving for now - that's what I'm trying to express here. I'm sure it's a feeling that resonates with many of you.

Pint of vodka anyone?

--------------------------

The city of my birth

Bristol has been my home for most of my life. I was born here although my parents are originally from different parts of the country. They fell in love with the city when they visited friends here soon after they left the army to get married. In the seventies Bristol was a very different place and my experiences of the city as a child are vastly different from those I've had since I moved back here when I was eighteen.

My parents moved my family to Stoke-on-Trent when I was nine years old. I always say to people that I spent my formative years in Stoke although I guess that isn't entirely true - the last ten years of my life have been much more defining than those difficult years of teen angst. Some of my closest friends still live in Stoke but for as long as I can remember I felt drawn back to Bristol. I can't really say why although I suspect that many people who have chosen to make Bristol their home can probably relate to my deep love of the place.

My whole world when I was a child living in Bristol was the stretch of road I lived on, with my primary school at one end and my parents' church at the other. I have particularly strong memories of a few other places - particularly the majestic Clifton Suspension Bridge which spans the Avon Gorge and leads you out of the city into countryside. It must be distinct childhood memories of places like this that drew me inexorably back here.

I have brothers who have returned. Jacob probably came back for similar reasons to me but Tom was little more than a baby when we left. It must be the fierce love of the city that my parents share with Jacob and I that was the main factor in him choosing Bristol as his home. Lawrence may be coming to university here in September and Franco may even return soon - his girlfriend may be transferred here from Warwick. My parents would return here in a heartbeat if they could afford it but house prices in Bristol are shockingly high and the only way it will happen is if a few of their children end up making good and can help them buy a place. I'm sure it will happen sooner or later.

On my travels in Asia and Australia I thought often of Bristol and the life I left behind here. After leaving for the second time in my life I felt strongly that I would one day return. Two years have passed and here I am once again, finding my way in this great and diverse city and hoping that it will provide me with a living and a direction during a time of much change in my life.

This is the theme of this blog. I've returned home and am searching for a way to live my life which embraces everything I've learnt about myself and about the world while I've been away. I fear I may fall into the old traps, succumb to the ways I used to live which made me so unhappy I decided to leave in the first place. I'm looking for some balance between the person I was before I left and the person I am now that I'm back. I suspect this blog will chart my various successes and failures in this endeavour. I realise I'm still learning, I'm making the same mistakes I made which led me to feel the need to escape from my life in England.

I've realised that it's easy to be the person that you want to be when you're transpanted to a completely different environment and you have all the time in the world to explore yourself. When you're suddenly faced with pressures of time and money and responsibility the rush of life can leave you reeling and gasping for space. The months since my return have sped by, the summer will be gone before I know it. What will I have achieved when the leaves are falling from the trees? Will I have moved my life forward or will I wake up on one grey autumn morning and realise that nothing has changed?

--------------------

Hmm. I spent a bit of time reflecting on what I've written here and realised it is rather downbeat. I'm well known for my introspective nature but I'm not sure this accurately reflects the manner in which I'm anticipating the summer. Yes - it's going to be difficult and frustrating at times. I am struggling with this new lifestyle, with my re-insertion into this strange but familiar culture. For example, I'm frequently appalled by the behaviour of some of my fellow countrymen - and I know all too well that my own behaviour is occasionally less than immaculate. However, there are going to be some wonderful moments. Some of them will be completely unexpected. Others, I'm already looking forward to...

It will be a summer of festivals, large and small, mainstream and alternative - Ashton Court, Rodstock, V2006, Farmageddon, The Big Chill. There will be BBQs, house parties, gigs, club nights, endless summer evenings lazing in the park, camping by the seaside.

In the centre of it all - perhaps the linchpin holding it all together and one of the main reasons I decided to come home in the first place - my beautiful sister's wedding in July will be quirky and unique and unforgettable.

Welcome then to my summer in the city.

-------------------