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[ 9 minute read ]

Only good for processing

The blackberry bushes, more a hedge really, along the road to the next village are liars. But they are super-good at reproducing. Not that I have found their offspring. The fruit looks great and there is, if I wanted to pick them, probably a whole bucketful ready to be picked. They don’t taste good, like the ones in my garden, and they are full of mature seeds. Practically inedible to humans, unless they are swallowed whole or unless a stick is used to dislodge the seeds from one’s teeth. Even the birds are wise to this and look skeptically at them. I never see any near the bushes, and as I say, there is a lot of fruit.

Most of the people I know in the village won’t pick these berries because they are only a pavement away from the traffic on the road. I suppose there might be less than three hundred vehicles a day passes them. What a waste. If I buy a sieve I could make wine I think, because the only useful derivative of them would be a blackberry juice that could be fermented. I don’t have a demi-john though.

I have just described most of my memories. Almost every one of them is barbed and shaded. I do have some good and clean memories of my children but in the main, all the others are stained and tainted by awkwardness and strife. I overlay the difficulty I had over the course of a event or circumstance. One might imagine casting mould over ripe fruit as being a good way of seeing what I do to my memories, but all my memories look good on the outside, or at first glance. It is the exploration of them that reveals the bitter seeds that make them unpalatable. I could be wrong in the process of how I perceive my memories. I could be sitting in a private cinema and the screen shows a happy time with good lighting and everything to a secret observer looks fine, but I throw a dark veil over my head and look only through that. I think there are two ways to overview this: There might not be any shadows in the scenes. It might be that I can read the meta-data for the 'film' now and see it all simultaneously, or it is already woven into the recording. I am beginning to think I am darkening my memories with leaching of my current sorrow, rage, and regret.

But I am not morose or depressed. I am merely processing my thoughts from a somewhat objective standpoint. I am trying to understand how I live the weird home-life that I do; how things that seem to matter to my neighbours and the world around me are merely gimcracks and gewgaw objects, and exercises of futility to me.

When I went to school for the first time, I wouldn't eat at school for three weeks. Just how significant that is, is outside of my ability to understand maternal deprivation at such a young age. Millions of people can say the same about how their child was unhappy going to school for the first time. I saw a little girl a few years ago, in an early September, hiding from the other kids who were laughing and playing in the playground. She was quietly keening. I knew exactly why. She just wanted to go home. At least, I think I know that. Of course, I summoned a playground monitor person. I soon blended in at school, but not before the school tried to stop me crying in class by making, first my sister sit with me, and then my brother when I still wouldn't stop crying. I remember my brother sitting with me when I was, I suppose five then. We sat right at the front of the class and he sat on my left. And, I remember me crying.

There is a whole story of a deliriously happy childhood that played out in parallel to horror, fear and psychological inner torture, that is my young past. I remember a good bit of it, and could easily write a book, if I was inclined to do so. I am not going to though. I don't want to fall down a well of self-pity. I would rather cherry-pick memories to add as special ingredients to how I process the world around me today. 

I have been homeless, deliberately so. I am resourceful and I am assured of it with memories of success by my own hand. I hitch-hiked to Greece to pick oranges in the European Winter; lying on frozen ground with no kip-mat and no tent, in minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 F.). Truth be told, most of the time, I didn't care if I died. I got hypothermia years later outside of Amien, France, doing a similar thing. You really don't want that!

It is not surprising to me that I have no washing machine; that I hand-wash all my clothes and bedding. It is not surprising to me that I have only recently acquired a fridge-freezer after having no cooling apparatus for over a decade. I know that warm weather spoils food, but I also know when it is spoiled and how to slow the spoiling down without refrigeration. I know what food to eat and what I can safely store and carry in a rucksack. It is not surprising to me that I have pitched a tent near to where I have started a job a long way from home, and only gone home for the weekends until I could save enough to own motorised transport. I learnt to do all this; live without luxuries when I was in my twenties and was already independent from the age of sixteen and working in Germany at age seventeen. Incidentally, I spend, on average, in the Summer months, £46.19 on electric for a 31 day month. You might not be surprised if I look at lamenting people with some skepticism. In Winter, I spend about £150 per month on electric. There is no gas supply to my home.

I live as though I am in the film, 'A Quiet Place'; the 2018 American post-apocalyptic horror film with aliens in it that have superb hearing and snatch anyone who makes the slightest noise. I live in a maisonette above someone else. I have learnt to move quietly and to be gentle in all my movement. I have little rubber cushions on all the kitchen cupboard doors to prevent them making a noise if I am a bit clumsy. They, below me, tell me they can only hear me if I drop something. Making noise, to me, will attract something akin to the aliens in 'A Quiet Place'. For me, this is my older brother, crazy from drugs, alcohol and grief. I expect to get attacked despite him no longer being alive. It is not a ghost that will attack me now; it is my memory. I learnt to live quietly when I lived in a wood, even though I was practiced from living with my brother. I didn't want to disturb the wildlife. All the time, still, I am afraid of the listening aliens. Not real aliens; my brother. If someone else makes a noise I am frozen. I cannot stop your noise or my neighbour's noise. I irrationally think I am going to get attacked.

I have strong memories of living frugally and being fine with it. Today, I sleep on a mattress on the floor; I don't have cupboards or wardrobes for my clothes or a chest of drawers; I don't have a sofa or armchairs; I don't have a television; I don't have baths or showers, I boil a kettle and use a bucket and a cup while I kneel in the bath; I have no need to listen to music or fill silence with noise, and I especially despise social media. I do, however, have a good reason for shying away from regarding digital chit-chat as beneficial. 

A long time ago, even before WiFi and mobile phones, I lived, by myself, in a house in a beautiful village with a river running through it. I was at home when there was a power-cut. Everything went silent. It wasn't the silence of the air not being disturbed. It was an inner silence similar to hearing the fridge running and then it stops and there is quiet. I stress that this was an inner silence. It was like a cold drink on a hot day. My thoughts were clear. It was refreshing. It was like breathing out after holding my breath. Typically, I had no noisy devices running, like a radio or telly, so the shaking of the air had not changed. After about a minute, the power came back on. I felt it more rather than had any solid reason to know it. I can't remember how I knew the power had gone off, I must have had something electrical running. Yet, the overall feeling I had when it came back on, was of fuzziness. I went under the stairs and turned the electric off at the mains. It had no effect. I was working on the principle that a house is enveloped in a magnetic field due to the electric wires running throughout every room. There was no longer silence. There have been short power-cuts recently. There has never been silence; mobile phones.

I once got a prolonged electric shock of 110V. I heard the hum of the electric, before I managed to escape the contact. 

Because I remember that, and have experienced the silence of Ireland, I despise radio waves. Even my laptop gives off superfluous harmonics, I think. Of course, there is nothing I can do because you all have mobile phones. See what I mean; the joy of silence in my memory is spoiled by my resentful attitude towards modern persons, relentlessly chatting. It is not their fault, it is mine. I am different, jaded by other people. I can despise you just because you are sociable. But I won't let you be sociable in my mind. I instead regard people as dopamine addicts, and feeble in their own esteem. I am not a nice person. I am mean and not at all charitable. 

Of course, I understand that someone brought up with being driven to school in a Rolls Royce would absolutely NEED to be surrounded by luxury as an adult to feel only normal. It is all relative. I grew up running around a three acre garden with animals everywhere. But all that is seared out of me. I know devastation; not like the devastation of wars. The devastation I know is a scribbling over my memories with graffiti using a permanent marker. Effectively, my upbringing both shapes the way I live and negates any enjoyment in the way I live. So, I can, with some effort, sympathise with many lamenting people who feel they cannot afford food or electric, but I feel that there is a solution at the same time. It, unfortunately, isn't an acceptable solution. 

Taking a few moments to sift through some memories.

Isn’t it strange that fruit is so abundant that we, where I am, don’t even bother with it. Even the apples left outside of people’s gardens stays in the cardboard boxes unwanted by the dog-walkers and school-kids. I think the sour ones deserve a bite if only for the contrast to expectations and as a new experience.