A dark smudge on a grey horizon

Once again I assure you all that normal service will be resumed soon….

I am extremely lucky to have met some wonderful human beings in my life. I have adopted my own ‘sister’ and have friends who demonstrate that it’s not all about family. I have great friends who look out for the mess of a human that I am and they do it tirelessly despite the lack of any reward.

I am far from normal and very hard to understand, hell I haven’t much of a clue how I work and I have been me for 45 years! Whilst nobody understands me I have friends that accept my own level of insanity. These amazing people realise that 130 hr weeks are normal for me but question me when I ‘overdo’ it. They send me food parcels when they realise that I may not have eaten for a couple of weeks which is just a little longer than normal.

Unfortunately I have never been able to translate this into my love life. I have met, and slept with, some of the lowest forms of life out there. I have actually risked my life for people who I shouldn’t ever have acknowledged in the first place. Most importantly I have created two wonderful people with something that should have either been put down or sterilised. I remain immensely sorry for the mother that I , unwittingly, inflicted on my children and only hope that they can both realise this and accept an old man’s apology.

For those who wonder on my single status let me share the meaning of the tattoo on my right hip. That tattoo simply says ‘played 14-07-07’, the date is far later than it should be but it was intended to match the ‘player’ tattoo on one of my more dangerous ‘liaisons’. Should you be somebody who is privileged to see this tattoo, it is shown rarely, please don’t think that you can add the end date or that you can be the one that ends the game. It doesn’t matter who or what you are, I have been played by the best and for the worst of all stakes so you are not good enough to end this.

Make no mistake I am not ‘damaged’ I am not ‘troubled’ I am not a basket case who can be rescued, I am not waiting for the right woman to save me. I am broken, not chipped, not worn I am shattered, destroyed and, quite simply, toxic. As an Engineer I am, above all , logical and 45 years tells me a story that can’t be changed. Don’t ever think you can save me because there is nothing to save and for you there is everything to lose. Some dark souls can’t be saved and are better left to wander….

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Crocodile induced volume disparity

Firstly to follow on from my earlier post here are some examples of  ‘just past time’ reasoning. I share this for two reasons; firstly you can smile when you realise that you have used ‘that one’ and secondly so that you realise that the sober one behind the bar knows what is happening:

• Hearing failure – You may have called last orders or even time but they were outside/in the toilet/on the phone/talking and so they missed it. Here is the thing it is your responsibility to keep an eye on the time and ensure that your orders are made in a timely manner, if you didn’t hear us or see the associated rush to the bar or change in lighting levels then that’s tough.
• Volume disparity – Your mates have full drinks and you don’t so could you just have one to drink while you wait for them? This is invariably coupled with assurances of discretion such that nobody will know that they had another drink. At this point we are already eyeing your friends drinks and wondering how quickly we can get them done plus we know that when you get one they will all want one. It has been a long night and we are not going to let you make it longer.
• Taxi –The taxi, which you have just decided to call, is going to be another half an hour so can you have a drink while you wait? Just like the whole lost orders scenario some small level of planning is required from you with regards to onward transportation, if you have failed in this aspect then the issues is all of your own making. You are, of course, welcome to sit on the pavement and await your belated chariot.
• I am a friend of the governor – He always lets me have a sneaky one. No he doesn’t and, further, as a landlord he has no friends, jog on.
• I have been trying to get them down here all night – A favourite of the late arriving crowd and often coupled with exaggerated claims of distance travelled. We will tolerate this one if you can show us physical evidence of your tussle with a crocodile or wild bear en route otherwise no dice. What actually happened is that you were passing and saw the lights on so thought that you would chance your arm, consider it chanced and good night.
• They all have a drink – Another favourite of the late arrival. You are correct that they all have a drink, we are very much aware of that and are eagerly watching every mouthful disappear, however they purchased their beverage during the course of our trading night. We accept that we have to wait for people to finish their drinks and go home, that is what we do, we are not so keen on adding to the numbers.

There are many, many more and I will come back to this list in due course but that can be your starter for ten.

 

The rarest, the bravest and little spiders

Time is really rushing by now, the pub opens at the end of next week and there is still so much to do. I had an overnight visit from Dave and his lad last night the extra labour was a real help but just having friends around and taking some time (only a little) to relax helps even more. It is odd when people visit me now as I am fiercely protective of both my little island and my little pub and desperately want people to love them both. You will notice that a stroll along the cliff is obligatory for all visitors and like a proud new father I will be a pace behind you waiting for you to be stunned. I don’t expect the pub to stun you, any sign of me being stunned is simply because I am punch drunk, but I do want you to like it. The pub is not just a home and business it is very much my baby and when you scatter those few favourable words about you can be certain that I snatch every single one and file it.

After some work yesterday I took a break to walk down the cliff with the lads and then back up to the Crab for dinner, since I never eat out alone this is a rare treat. When Dave tired they went back to the hotel and I returned to work, its pub time that is just how it is. Walking around the bay and down into the old village I was reminded once again what a truly stunning place this is and how lucky I am to be able to live here despite the distance it puts between me and friends. So how is it all going? Well the roofers are mob handed and on target to get the scaffold down by opening, they will go on to do the roofs at the rear during trading. The stonemason thinks he will just make it but had disappeared today to have a baby, well observe the process at least! Baby arrival also put one of my beer installs at risk but I think that is now resolved. Beer survey is tomorrow but install is next Thursday, horribly close to opening but they assure me that it is no risk.

My water softener engineer arrives tomorrow from Reading, oddly water softener engineers don’t occur on the island and we have to import. The water softener service is an unexpected expense but I am assured that it is good for another 20 years and is a very expensive piece of kit so it is a sensible expense. The decoration that remains is to complete one room of the right hand bar (I always label them from behind the bar rather than the street) the front door, window reveals and the gents toilets. In truth there is lots more to do but that is to my eye and not yours. One of the benefits of visiting the Crab last night was to cast an eye over the decoration and recalibrate my aspirations. I still have mountains to do but am hopeful of getting the bar vacated for cleaning by the weekend just have to set a stop on what I am going to achieve before opening. Having the lads here meant the morning kerb crawl from Rich’s boys took all of 10 minutes and I got to wave goodbye to 12 yards of rubbish that has been cluttering the place up although I have to apologise for exposing the big brave men to island spiders and to Jo for having to console her ‘brave soldiers’ when they get home. The opening is definitely happening despite the incredulous looks that I receive when I say this (Thanks Ad for the “oh this month”).

How am I in the midst of all this? Well I am 1 stone down from the pub diet but its a stone that I didn’t need, I am exhausted and very conscious that I am missing lots of details. The cash and time burn is astonishing even for somebody who predicted massive problems and I have taken to never getting out of ‘scruffs’ since I live on a building site there seems little point. I think the best description came from one of the trades who was looking around the pub appreciatively. I asked him if he fancied a pub and without hesitation he answered “No, have you looked in a mirror? we reckon you are on fast forward, you are actually ageing in front of our eyes”. The most important thing though is that I love it, I love my pub, love the island and the people and love the fact that my passion for this place can drive me into 18 hour days continuously now for over three weeks.

Garbage pixies and hammocks

One of the last few weekends for me on the big island and it was a scorcher. One of the great things about living right on the seafront is that on a sunny day the sound of families playing in the sand fills the apartment. I should caveat that last sentence by saying that it is not such a delight when working night shifts.

Today the ocean is like glass and the sun is continuing to grace us with its presence as the garbage pixies go about their way. For those of you not familiar with garbage pixies allow me to enlighten you. Garbage pixies are mythical beasts that exist solely in the minds of tourists who nurture and protect them for fear that they may be connected to other ethereal beings such as santa’s elves.

The garbage pixies are never seen but legend tells that they congregate around coastal areas with occasional forays inland to visit camp sites. The pixies put great value in garbage, hence the name, and use it for clothing, building materials and food. As I walked to the station this morning I passed repeated offerings made by the tourists to support the garbage pixies. An offering fit for the king of the pixies was laid out along the beach, the roads and almost every available surface. I could almost hear the pixie’s squeal of delight as they counted the used diapers (great for fertilising pixie herb gardens) chip wrappers and bottles.

In case you think that when I am not at the pub I am not working on her then let me put your mind at rest. This weekend has produced the supplier shortlist for fridges and furniture and the supplier ‘long’ list for plumbers. Each of these subjects will be followed up in the week to settle on a supplier of choice. One of the oddities of island life is that the cost of shipping can swing supplier choices dramatically with some accepting the cost and others outright refusing. Roofing quotes are being dissected before they are given an urgent green light with asbestos being an unwelcome tax on that task.

Supplier negotiations are progressing well and should be at least partially concluded this week. Finally I am hopeful of seeing the artwork for the return of the Plough this weekend. I am now officially sick of living between an apartment that is boxed for moving and a pub that I haven’t moved into yet. Pressure of time means that every time I use something I feel compelled to put it in a box ready for moving but I have nowhere to put the boxes!

There are a couple of regular questions that come up with respect to the pub, for the sake of efficiency I will answer them here. The first is accommodation or rather the provision of accommodation. I do not have letting rooms at the pub, there are no camping facilities and I cannot accommodate sleeping bags or hammocks within the bar. There is an excellent and incredibly good value B&B over the road who will look after you if you mention the pub, I will give you their details that is as far as I go on that front. In short, whilst I would love to see you, I own a pub not a hostel or a holiday home.

The second question is invariably “are you excited” I could answer this by directing you to look at previous posts but that is just a tad lazy. Between me and the opening is a single solid month of work all to be achieved whilst living on a building site and pouring money into the bottomless pit I call home. That is such a scope of work that to be honest I can’t see past it at the moment I don’t mean that in a negative way it is just rather ‘all consuming’ right now. Am I nervous? Yes and rightly so given all the plates that I have spinning. But am I excited? I guess the right answer is not yet. Be ‘

N.B. There is no such thing as a garbage pixie nor is there any use for your discarded diapers just because we are near the ocean doesn’t mean the normal rules of civilisation don’t apply

Well I got to thinking ……

I have some theories to share with you today, they are not new theories but theories whose supporting evidence has been refreshed.

To start let me recount that at the grand age of 41 I am still capable of hard labour, this witnessed by a recent plumbing task. I merrily spent twelve hours hanging off 2′ pipe wrenches and clambering around like a monkey that had been painted in pipe compound, just like a 20 year old. That’s the thing with those of us that are manual workers, forget all those cucumber eye patches and retinoid D face packs girls, a bit of grease and sweat knocks 20 years off us every time.

It would be wrong of me not to acknowledge that I am not quite the 20 year old anymore, indeed I have a significantly higher surgical steel percentage than I did then. I am so used to not having the full use of my wrists that it barely slows me down and the effect is less noticeable when I am in my natural environment,  who knows maybe those people that swear WD40 soothes their arthritis are onto something*. When I awoke at 3 am the following morning I will acknowledge however that Ms Nature was making herself busy and I was in some pain as a result of my earlier exertions.

Now I could wax lyrical in order to describe the level of pain in this particular interaction with the nefarious witch but I prefer a simple example. At 3 am I considered that Ibuprofen would be a reasonable concession and set about taking some, the first challenge was to get them out of the packet. It transpired that I was physically incapable of pressing tablets from those irritating blister packs, just couldn’t do it, so I resorted to slashing at the packs with a handy knife. Having removed the tablets and corralled the larger pieces into my hand I proceeded to throw them at the kitchen worktop. Why would I throw them at the worktop you may ask, indeed I asked the same question of myself and at 3am it took some figuring out I can tell you! In order to scoop something and throw it into your mouth you need to rotate your wrist** an ability that I had apparently lost hence the empty, but expectant, mouth. If a picture paints a thousand words then picture me, having swept the various pieces of tablet into a pile, sucking them off the kitchen worktop at 3am I think that explains it.

I cite this as a piece of evidence that the mind is certainly stronger than the body and secondly that I am still better than Ms Nature.

Next up I would like to recount a conversation that I had recently with a friend, its an oddly common conversation for single guys well at least for me. My position on relationships is well recorded, like rap music they are just not for me. When I debate this with female friends they invariably hit the point that ‘not all women are bad/wicked/like that’ which is odd because I have never claimed that, indeed some of my best friends are female. The truth is that I could make Mother Theresa into a venom spitting dragon, hell I don’t even get on with Ms Nature! For me this is all simple logic, if you put me in a room with a broken machine and a set of spanners then I will get dirty and it will get fixed, if you put me in a relationship with a woman she will turn into something out of the predator and try and kill me it is just what happens.

As always the debate rounded on the point that “the right one is out there” a statement that I have always taken to be rather more threatening than comforting. I can’t help that this statement is akin to shining a torch under your 6 year olds bed and saying “look no monsters, but there will be one day” keep your threats to yourself thank you very much. So the debate follows the standard form of bad experiences and determination ‘not to be beaten’ and ‘not to give up’ which all sounds very admirable but is it? Surely when faced with repeated disaster a wise person gives up, this is not failure this is education.

I got to thinking about this blind faith that my female friends exhibit in the certainty of love. At first I though that generations of reading Mills and Boon had somehow leached into the X chromosome so that women came preloaded with a cache of romantic fiction but that was too easy an answer, after all there must have been a time before romantic novels surely? I wondered if it was something that governments were doping Rosé wine with, after all if there is a more accurate female deployment system I have yet to hear of it, but hey the world has enough conspiracy theories.  That’s when it struck me, it  unique to women’s DNA because otherwise the human race wouldn’t be here! Before you start mailing me burning bras stick with me, I have a theory.

If both sexes had the blind faith gene we wouldn’t have survived past the first generation or, maybe if we were lucky, the second. Think back to our early days as a species when your man was out hunter gathering, his Mrs had to have blind faith that he would return and not leave her to starve. There were no cell phones, no Facebook to keep a watchful eye, having somebody check your phone is nowhere near as detrimental to gossip as having to ask them to light the fire for your smoke signals. But the world was a lovely place and your man would go about his hunting and gathering and your woman would wait, supported by her blind faith gene, for his return it all worked you see. Now you may be wondering how I am so certain that man doesn’t possess the blind faith gene, well perhaps another example is in order.

Man 1 meets man 2,3 &4 to head off and hunt for their families but its a bad day and, as they often did, they have to go for the veggie option and rely on the gatherers gene. They come across a large bush laden with red berries and man 1 steps up for the taste test after having lost the toss, he wolfs down a brightly coloured berry and they all wait. After man 1 dies a hideously painful death and his corpse lays at the foot of the tree what does man 2 do? of course he rallies the troops and they return to tell Mavis that Bob died a hero. But what if the male of the species carried the blind faith gene? well of course man 2 would presume that this was just bad luck and have at another berry, eventually man 4 would be standing at the top of a convenient pile of corpses thinking “what were the odds, still the right one for me must be here I won’t give up”. Disaster, nobody to tell Mavis and the girls that the men aren’t returning, they will simply be left trying to eat blind faith sandwiches until the end.

So there you have it, don’t ask us if we believe in love or that everyone is part of some couple sealed in fate. It isn’t our fault that we look at you like you are talking Martian, its simple genetics.

The author would like to point out that this is a scientific article and that he has nothing against the fairer sex, indeed he is quite fond of a fair number of them.

 

*of course they aren’t any more than those who believe that the magical fluid is extracted from the ear wax of sperm whales!

**you just had to try it didn’t you? sometimes I despair I really do

Its all for giggles

Since I have been ‘off grid’ for the last few months I have relied on friends to maintain the day to day aspects of my life, let me acknowledge now that I am incredibly blessed to have top friends and their support has been invaluable.

Now that I have made that clear I can recount the story of my return home. Andrew and Helen had left my flat in perfect readiness with the staples of milk, butter, beer and diet Irn Bru all safely chilling in the fridge in fact I could have comfortably hibernated on the provisions in place. A card sat on the table along with a bottle bag, the latter containing a bottle of Cilit Bang cleaner which I presumed was there to help me clean up. A DVD had been left for entertainment and, somewhat oddly, a packet of cheese strings was prominently displayed in the fridge. Whilst some of these gifts seemed rather odd I paid them little regard, except that is for the DVD. The DVD was Alan Carr a man that I passionately detest.

I couldn’t just bin the DVD and I didn’t want to return it off hand in case it had been chosen carefully or perhaps by their daughter so I pondered for a day or so before enquiring of Helen whose idea it had been. Having been reassured that it was Andrew’s choice I manned up and returned the DVD with a little speech recounting how grateful I was but that I really couldn’t abide the content, the answer came mid sentence “I know”. He then proceeded to remind me of the communication that I had sent home some weeks previously in which I detailed just what long term exposure to the TV can do to a man. I had explained that that the merest hint of an advertisement for the Carr was enough to drive me into a psychotic rage and that the cheese string advert had got me to the stage where I had dreams of meeting the character in the street and tearing his silly yellow head off!

So this post is testament to the Raymonds for remembering a rant for longer than I did and, in enacting it, causing me to normalise such things as a ‘gift’ of kitchen cleaner, thanks guys!

Bitten by draughty bugs and nailing it

I visited my old pub yesterday for a couple of pints and was very pleased to meet up with a couple of my very supportive customers. After exchanging the usual pleasantries we got to “what are you doing now” and I explained that I was still working through the fall out of the accident before finding a pub. I think this is the only business where that line is met with a look made up of incredulity and sympathy. Luckily I had Andrew with me who just gave a sage nod to indicate that he understood the ‘bug that bites you’.

The old pub is blooming, doing well despite some significant inflation at the pumps! But what is really nice to hear, some three years after I left, is that “the atmosphere has gone” and that “it’s just not fun now”. That I can generate an atmosphere that people enjoy from no more than a cold draughty building and hard work is testament to my choice of trade and to coin a phrase “you’re too kind”. The old girl is different now, prices reflect the investment that has been made and the place is operating to a long term plan. It is not that it is not fun or that it has no atmosphere it is simply that it is different.

Whenever I have these conversations they are followed by an evening of reflection, I revisit my view of the world and challenge it. Once again I have come out the other side without a shadow of a doubt, I know where I belong and it’s in my pub. It’s been a long road and there are a few more twists in it yet but the destination remains fixed. I look forward to cold nights trying to mentally guide people through the door as much as I look forward to busy nights that fly by. Most importantly I look forward to creating more memories, being an influence and a feature in more people’s lives and writing that story.

As you know I don’t generally promote things on the blog and today is no exception. I would like to make special mention of a friend though because, well because she deserves a special mention. I proof read a small piece that she has written at the request of a hospital, it will be used to help parents come to terms with using the words ‘cancer’ and ‘child’ in the same sentence.

It is but a few paragraphs written in the self-effacing prose of an author who seeks invisibility but it is written from the heart. Short, abrupt sentences bring to life the staccato thoughts that come to us all when something is too dark, too terrifying to process. Despite the eloquence of this emotional script it was sent to me couched in self criticism, challenge and debate as to its value. I just wanted to take this opportunity to say “Barbie you nailed it”