A poem to end the month

January has come and gone
‘Twill not return again
A month of darkness, wetness, strangeness,
Panic, plans and pain.
Into Feb we march anew
Awaiting Spring with fervour
My wife will still be by my side
Although I don’t deserve her.
Winter will as Winter does
It’s days cannot be rushed
But, thank the Lord, it won’t be long
Til February’s crushed.
And so I sit here, full of hope
I see the evenings lighten
And when I think ‘twill soon be March
I feel my spirits brighten.

RC 31-1-18

Nearly Feb...

Sunday felt like Spring. Yesterday felt like Autumn. Today we’re back in Winter. What a strange world we live in here in Suffolk. At least it was very bright today so we saw lots of sun, despite it being so cold. Beautiful, in its Wintry way. 
My relationship status with my wife seems to change as often as the local weather. Friday evening was tense and quiet, but on Saturday we had a very pleasant day out. “I need to switch off and relax,“ spake Philippa, “If I sit at home I’ll just keep reaching for my notebook and trying to get work stuff to stick in my memory.” So we went for a bit of a drive, and we chatted on the way there, and we had a nice lunch when we got there, and we had a bit of a walk and then we left there and came home again. I won’t tell you where ‘there’ was as a man likes to have some secrets, even from his dedicated blog readers.  It was nice though, and much needed after a couple of weeks of discomfort betwixt us. 
Sunday night she was turning into a frightened schoolgirl again. Last night she came home looking like someone who had been overwhelmed by an onslaught of work and simultaneously uplifted by her ability to cope with it. I cooked her some tea and I ran her a bath and I felt I could do little else. Our existence is strange at the moment, but maybe that’s doing me good. It’s hard to take the person you live with for granted when their personality is changing hour by hour and you’re never really sure who you’ll be getting. 
Tonight she has been visiting relatives and friends, so it’s been my calmest evening for a fortnight. 

RC 30-1-18

reflect on past; consider future

I’m getting damn close to 2000 posts now. Maybe that would be a good time to call this whole thing off? I seem to remember considering packing it all in when I hit 1000, but then decided to continue. Trouble is, I now feel that I might be repeating myself and churning out the same old shit over and over again. I’d hate to become unoriginal and samey.
What do you mean - too late????!!!????!!

RC 29-1-18

Man in Pain

Every so often I get an obsessive thought stuck in my mind that I can’t get rid of. It rattles around my head, niggling away and nagging at me and ends up causing me no end of pain, even though it’s not real. The latest one is this - I’ve convinced myself that Philippa is having an affair. There’s no real evidence for this and no real change in her behaviour that might lead a sane man to question her commitment, but none of that matters; my imagination and insecurity is all that is needed to make it a plausible conclusion and one to worry about. 
I don’t have a great deal of experience with sex matters or relationships, but one thing I do now is how easy it is to talk unhappy people into bed. If you hit on someone with low self-esteem, you can flatter them and let them talk and tell them how worthwhile they are even though they can’t see it and it isn’t a great step from there to persuade them into the bedroom. I don’t mean to offend or be incorrect or insensitive, I can only speak as I’ve found; and I’ve done this to young women in the past, and I’ve had it done to me. When you’re feeling low, you want someone to lift you up. When you’re vulnerable, you’re an easy target.
And therein lies my anxiety.
Philippa is in the midst of a massive life change and is struggling to keep her head above water as she drifts in a sea of discomfort. I’m not sure what I can do to help, so I’ve retreated into myself and convinced myself that she’s seeking comfort and support from someone else. From that first tiny little nugget of doubt, I have built a mountain of internally fabricated evidence that the sane part of my mind is now finding insurmountable. I’ve thought it, so it must be real, that’s the way I’m thinking. 
And it hurts. 

RC 28-1-18

Random reflections, part... whatever

I have a little notebook in which I write down my thoughts and musings, so that I can get them out of my head. It helps me remember things I need to remember and allows me to forget things I am better off forgetting. Occasionally I expand on them and turn them into blog posts; often I just leave them on the page where they were hastily scribbled. Here’s a few from this weeK:

I’m enjoying listening to the radio coverage of the Australian Open tennis, but I’m sick of the BBC commentators verbally masturbating over Rafa Nadal.

Is it just me or are the radio ads they’re playing about the impending tax deadline REALLY chuffing annoying? It’s like they’ve been aimed at five-year-old children who can’t even spell their own names. I’m lucky in that I’m PAYE so I never have to worry about filling in and filing a tax return, but if I did I’d find the tone and content of these things incredibly patronising. In fact I think I’d ignore the deadlines just to get a bit of payback. That’d show the bastards. 

I call this one ‘Ode to the Lady in Leggings’:
Surely if you get to the point where your thighs are so thick you can’t walk properly, you might consider losing some weight and stop buying four-packs of Double Deckers every time you come to the garage????

RC 26-1-18

Chinese Burns Night

There is a truly wonderful Chinese restaurant and take-away not too far from where I work. Tonight we pushed the boat out and bought the £24.99 Set Menu Meal For Two, and also got a decent bottle of wine in. We did this for three reasons:
1. Philippa needed cheering up, and Chinese food is her favourite.
2. She came home moody again, so going to get food gave me an excuse to get out of the house for a while, and
3. It meant I could do the punny blog title you see above, linking the nature of our takeaway with the relevance of today’s date. I find that almost as delicious as the food I’ve just eaten!

RC 25-1-18

Midweek Meltdowns

Philippa is getting moodier and less confident as the days go by, and I continue to be the scratching post that she digs her claws into in an attempt to make herself feel better. Tonight I got a beating for mentioning her weekend unhappiness but NOT posting info about her first week at the doctors! I can’t win. She asks me not to write about her, then moaned like hell when I didn’t talk about her new job last week. She even accused me of DELIBERATELY timing my 1984th blog for the day she started, so I could make it about ME instead of HER. She also did a monologue about me expecting her to hold my hand and be a therapist whenever I’VE decided to change jobs, but then expecting her to just get on with it herself when SHE’S had a change of situation. I am, apparently, self-obsessed and unsupportive.
In unrelated news, I’ve been looking at one-bedroom bachelor pads for rent in a nearby town. 

RC 24-1-18

Triplets

3 Reasons I like the NFL, even though I’m not a big sports fan

It goes on for ages, so it’s a good excuse for long drinking time and lots of snacks.
There are loads of breaks in play, so you can nip off to the loo quite often.
All the participants wear helmets, so you’re not being exposed to the spectacle of self-obsessed, narcissistic, twenty-year-old millionaires constantly preening their poncey two-hundred-pound haircuts every time they think the camera is on them, like in other sports I could mention.  

3 facts about the Planet Earth that I WISH were true

There is a volcano on the island of Cuba that spews out lukewarm custard.
Every nation on Earth has at least one town called Vagina.
98% of Antarctic icebergs are shaped like Donald Trump’s fringe.

3 Truths about my childhood that I’ve never revealed in this blog

I once stole a bike from a friend of mine and blamed it on my sister.
I once ate a snail - complete with shell - to impress an older girl.
I once got pushed into a hawthorn hedge and nearly damaged my eye.

RC 23-1-18

reflections on a Sunday storm

I dealt with last nights unpleasantness at home by letting Philippa huff off to bed on her own and then sitting up watching American Football. Might not be the best way to handle that kind of situation, but the NFL Championship games only come round once a year.
Philippa was quite quiet this morning but was mostly nice to me. She was a bag of nerves though. It’s hard to see her struggling when she’s always been so confident, but it’s early days yet - this is only her second week in the job - and I have to have faith that things will improve. I know better than anyone how unsettled and unprofessional you feel when you start somewhere new; stumbling your way through basic tasks and constantly having to ask the same questions over and over again. The key is to relax and get on with it instead of trying to learn too much too quickly, but I think that’s the mistake Philippa is making. She’s charging in, trying to get herself up to speed, where what she needs to do is concentrate on learning one aspect of the job at a time and building her skill set that way.  I tried to explain this to her rationally last night but three things were working against me - 1. Alcohol in both our systems, 2. She wasn’t open to reason or logic, she was stuck in panic and confusion, and 3. I am really crap at putting decent thoughts into acceptable language. So when she started saying she’s made a mistake changing jobs and misses the comfortable feeling of the old place and is thinking of going back already, what I wanted to say was ‘you need to give yourself some time and let yourself settle in and then see how you feel.’ But what came out of my mouth was something like ‘don’t let your feelings of inadequacy cloud how happy you were about leaving’ which doesn’t sound good, I must admit. 

She needs to get through the next couple of months of uncertainty and discomfort before she finds her feet and gets used to the new routine and gets a bit of confidence. Trouble is, she doesn’t think she can last that long. 
She’ll get there - I know she will. And I’ll have to try and be supportive the best way I can - for a start I can work hard at not getting fed up with her and retreating into GamingWorld to avoid her! 

RC 22-1-18

Un-Happy Birthday Boxing Day

My wife had a bit of a meltdown tonight. Wine had been drunk and silly things were said and she threw herself off the deep end into a rant and a rave that I thought would never end. I know I make mistakes sometimes, but I honestly don’t think I’ve done anything to deserve what I had thrown at me. My suspicion is that she is not looking forward to her second week of training for the new job and needed someone to lash out at. 
It does seem to be the joyous truth about my marriage - I’m here to be blamed and shouted at when something else makes her feel uncomfortable.

But our trip away was lovely, by the way.

RC 21-1-18

33 years, 364 days, 11 hours (& counting)

It’s my birthday tomorrow (thank you) so don’t expect too much interaction from me over the next few days. Based on experience of previous years I will be self-indulgent, then tipsy, then hungover, then reflective, then back at work, then depressed, and in none of those states do I ever feel like blogging, so you’ll have to put up with a bit of silence I’m afraid.
For reasons I can’t quite remember now we’re having the weekend in Cambridge. Driving down tomorrow lunchtime (hopefully after some birthday lovin’ and then a slap-up birthday breakfast) having a nose-about and then staying overnight at some hotel that has a spa. We do like our spa sessions together. Nothing keeps the marriage fires burning like hot coals in a hot sauna and getting wet together in a cool pool.
While I try and get over the fact that I’ll be 34 tomorrow and will no longer have a sexy double-barrelled, double-numbered, palindromic age, I shall share with you:

A List Of Some Random Things I Have Learnt So Far In My Time On This Planet:

Doctors are obsessed with three things - bowel movements, antidepressants and blood pressure.
We never get the snow we want, or the sunshine we want, when we want it. We get the snow when we need to get places, and the sun when we’re stuck indoors. Weather is a bastard.
Lady Gaga has a great voice but a messed-up personality.
Fidget spinners are strangely satisfying to play with.
Writing a regular blog gives you an outlet for rage that you would normally direct at people physically, and so The Chesworth Chronicles has probably kept me out of prison.

RC 19-1-18

Quite a night

I had my return trip to the dentists today, and I think I’ll leave that topic there. Except to say that I came out with the taste of blood and an empty pocket. The only good thing about the whole experience is that I don’t have to go back again until July.

In other news - I’ve been awake since 5am because that awful wind was slamming straight into the back of our house. I lay there for a while waiting for the window to be blown in. I suggested something to Philippa that we could do to pass the time while we were both unable to sleep but she wasn’t impressed. Starting a new job on Monday has left her feeling tired, out of sorts and overwhelmed and me trying to talk her into a roll-around wasn’t helping, apparently.
I only have to drive a few miles to work but I saw two felled trees and a hedge that had blown over. 

That’s all for now 

RC 18-1-18

??

Not that I’m the kind of person to run with a half-baked idea for a few days and then give it up and move onto something else…. but I might take a break from my board game inventing and go back to spending time drumming.  Coming up with a brand new gaming creation is hard. The one good idea I’ve had looks like it would involve a LOT of research, and I really can’t be arsed to do it. Back in my uni days I would happily scour myself rigid sitting in the library or working on a computer, going over old notes and reading old articles and condensing them into manageable chunks to use in my essays. Nowadays it strikes me as a boring way to spend my time. Maybe I’ve just got more interests now. Back then I was struggling to fit in, fearful of failing my courses and dreading the thought of coming home at the end of each term. Now I have a wife, and a life, and a mum-free existence, and hobbies. Funny how things change.
What point was I trying to make when I started writing this? I can’t remember now. That’s another signifier of the person I wasn’t then, but am now - I have the short-term memory of a brain-dead, cranially-injured goldfish. 

17-1-18

1984 - a postscript

It never occurred to me until someone else pointed it out to me, but on top of the already delightful mixture of year-of-birth and number-of-posts that yesterdays posting brought about, there’s also the coincidence of it being linked by the number 1984. Which, of course, is the George Orwell novel that contained the concept of Big Brother, which some people see as a premonition of the state of the world we live in now, where our lives are dominated by electronics and we’re controlled from afar by corporations. Which is something I’ve pontificated about in this blog, and this blog only exists because our lives are dominated by electronics and controlled from afar by corporations!! Wheels within circles, and circles within wheels. 
I’m so happy. 

RC 16-1-18

Landmark day

This will be the 1984th posting that I’ve published in this blogsphere. This means - and this is the only time I will ever be able to say this - the number of blogs I’ve posted now matches the year I was born.
It would have been perfect if this had happened on my birthday, and I did seriously consider delaying this one just so that it happened that way. The tying-in of events and dates and numbers would have kept Rory a happy little bunny for decades, but I’m too impatient, and I want to write more this month, and there’s still a little paranoid part of me that goes to bed every night convinced I’ve spent my last day alive, so I never take it for granted that I’ll even make it to my birthday.
So here it is.
Blog no. 1984.
From someone who was born in 1984.
It all feels so gorgeous. 

RC 15-1-18

The Name Game

Possible names and themes for my board game:

Initialoetry - an expansion of my own online in-blog creation
Monopoludo - a weird hybrid mash-up of two existing ideas
Dig the Dog - some kind of ’identify the dog breed’ card-based shenanigans mixed with an element of ’chase the cat round the board.’  
Go for the Burn - an arsonists dream. With a touch of Trivial Pursuit.
Elementary - a quest to collect all the elements from the Periodic Table, while also having your knowledge of them tested.

I think the last one is definitely the one I might explore further. Completely original, lots of scope for some interesting questions, and something that I know enough about already to make a start without committing to months of research.

Or - here’s a revelation that I’m literally having as I’m typing this… Why not use the title of todays blog? Make a board game all about people’s monikers and where they come from and people who have similar handles and so forth and call it THE NAME GAME???
Brilliant! 

RC 14-1-18

New (non-blog related) Challenge

I’ve decided I’d like to invent a board game. I know it’s all mobile apps and PS4s these days, but I’m sure there are still people in the world who like to switch off technology and play a good old-fashioned board game. Trouble is, no-one’s inventing them anymore; and that’s where I come in!
How hard can it be? Monopoly started life as a tool to explain taxation. Two bored Canadian journalists designed Trivial Pursuit, and that sold something like 30 million copies. I’m sure I can use my intellect and skill set to come up with something original, exciting and challenging to play. I can run it through my head for the next couple of weeks and get an initial plan down by the end of January, then spend a couple of months developing it and building a prototype, and have a working model ready to test-drive by the end of March. It’ll help me deal with dark evenings and SAD until it’s light enough to cycle. I don’t know whether to start with a concept, a nice design, or a name for it, but I’m sure the answer will come if I relax and meditate and drink enough coffee. One thing I promise you - whatever I come up with I guarantee you it’ll have a better name than RUMMIKUB.

RC 13-1-18

More thoughts on 2018

Some other possible in-blog challenges I could try to achieve this year:

Type everything using only one finger.
Write them all in French.
Make every post exactly 300 words long.
Do them all as rhyming couplets.
Iambic pentameter???

RC 12-1-18

established blog seeks new year challenge (belatedly)

It’s about time I thought about a blog challenge to see me through 2018.
I didn’t really set one last year, but I managed to post a record number of blogs, so maybe that can count and give me a bit of a sense of achievement. Is it cheating yourself to set a challenge retrospectively? To look at what you did - by accident, I might add - and then back-date your own ambitions so you can make out you reached a goal, even thought the goal didn’t exist until after you’ve reached it?
I’m falling into over-thinking now so I’m going to go get a glass of water and then change the subject slightly.

Ok. I’m back.
I didn’t really set myself a challenge last year, but my goal in 2016 was to post a different number of blog entries in each month of the year, and I achieved it splendidly. It was even more impressive than the time I’d done it before (in my opinion) as the numbers were all consecutive, rather than just random ones. So maybe I’ll aim for that again in 2018, but do it IN NUMBER ORDER. So - for example - 13 blogs in Jan, 14 in Feb, 15 in March, etc. Sounds delightful, but am I confident that I’ll be up to writing 24 blog posts in December? With Christmas, our anniversary, and whatever else the Gods might deem to throw our way in the meantime? No, I’m not. So I shall have to go on a-thinking. 

RC 11-1-18

Quickaiku

January day
Dull, grim and lots of drizzle
I can’t wait for Spring

RC 10-1-18

Deep, man. Really deep.

Just a quick thought - we had Storm Eleanor hit the UK this week. I believe Storm Doris was about this time last year. Why is it that all our storms seem to be named after members of the Halesworth Ladies Knitting Circle?

RC 8-1-17

Wet and wild

I had today off, in lieu of all my extras over Christmas and New Year, so Philippa and I went for a relaxing spa day at a local leisure centre. It was nice, but the pool was full of families. I thought they’d all be back at school, but there seemed to be a lot of young ‘uns there waggling about between their armbands. Maybe they were all pre-school age and therefore not ‘playing hooky’ as I thought. Hard for me to tell when 98% of their body was underwater and I wasn’t wearing my glasses and my eyes were stinging from chlorine. All I know is, the calm relaxing atmosphere of the sauna gave way to a tumultuous nerve-shredding noise when you walked out to the pool area. Shrieks of laughter mixed with cries of fear, underpinned by the incessant droning of  maternal encouragement and noise of women yabbering on at each other like mad, presumably because they’ve been at home for two weeks and missed out on all the usual daily playground gossip and bitching. 
Most of it I could block out, but what tipped me over the edge and led to me heading for the showers was this - I was using one of the ‘swimming lanes’ to get in a few lengths of freestyle (or ‘forward crawl’ as I believe it‘s also known.) I was trying to use the technique they teach the professionals - keep your head down at all times, face under the water, tilting your head to the side every three strokes to breathe, using the gap under your armpit as you extend your arm over your head. I did this perfectly for a while, then had the horrible experience of opening my mouth wide to take in a huge gulp of air, only to have a sticking plaster float into my mouth as I went to breathe.
I don’t know which verruca-infested foot or scabby knee it came from, but I presume it was one of the children because it was small, and colourful, and had a shrivelled picture of what I think was supposed to be Spongebob on it. I spat it into my hand, resisted the urge to scream at everyone or vomit, and had a quiet word with the lifeguard. She wasn’t much help, but fortunately the person I spoke to on the way out seemed to be on their game, and we’ve been invited back next week for a freebie. We’ll take them up on that, but probably go later in the day. I’d rather be surrounded by sweaty, narcissistic beefcakes dropping into the pool for a cool-off after a gym session than swim through a gaggle of toddlers again. 
On a positive note, though - at least it wasn’t poo. 

RC 5-1-18

Down in the mouth

You say ‘po-tay-to’ I say ‘po-tar-toe’
You say ‘to-may-to’ I say ‘to-mar-toe’
You say ‘dentist’ I say ‘drill-wielding, gum-scraping, sadist, bib-wearing bastard.’
I do NOT like going to the dentist. The only thing I like worse than going to the dentist is going to the dentist a few days into a new year, when my teeth are coated in sugar from all the shit I’ve been eating over Christmas and the dentist is in a bad mood after having to do an emergency extraction for someone on Boxing Day. 
Every day I clean my teeth. TWICE, most days. I floss - not daily, I grant you, but I do it. I avoid hard things like peanuts and nougat as much as I can and I try not to grind my teeth when I’m angry. And STILL I get to lay in his chair and be lectured on oral hygiene and unreplaceable enamel and the long-term benefits of using expensive mouthwash (which just happens to be available from his receptionist.) STILL I get to spend 15 minutes every six months having what seems to be an entire set of tools from a medieval blacksmith forced into my mouth and rotated through every angle. Then, after spitting a mixture of blood, the roof of my own mouth and skin flakes from his fingers into his little mini-urinal of a bowl, I get to have him insist I come back in two weeks for ‘some precautionary X-rays’ and a ‘deep clean’ with a dental hygienist.
And of course I have to pay for all this.
You say ‘dentist’ I say ‘money-grabbing, pain-inducing, torturing fascist bastard.’

RC 4-1-18

Old Years News/New Years...what?

I didn’t plan this, but by posting blogs on New Years Eve and the day before I set a new record - 229 blogs in one calendar year! I’d like to set myself a challenge of hitting 250 this year, each of which will be 250 words long, but my New Years resolution was to be more realistic, and knowing myself as I do I don’t think it’s realistic to think I’ll stick to that and achieve it, so why set myself up for failure? Of course it’s also worth considering that I never stick to my New Years resolutions, so if I ignore my intention to be realistic then I can plough on with my intention to reach 250. But where does that leave me? What’s more important? What I am aiming for?  Who am I??? This whole way of thinking sets up a real paradoxical mind-melt of confusion that has left me lost. 
Good luck making sense of THAT.

RC 3-1-18

Crappy New Fear

I have been a strangely unhappy little wound up ball of anxiety today. I’m not sure why or where it’s come from. Could be the realisation hitting me that our lives have changed, and will change again when Philippa starts her new job, and I’m not sure how those changes will change HER. It could be the late night I had last night, sitting up until 2am watching fireworks and Jools Holland, coupled with an early start because my insomnia kicked in when I woke for a wee at 4.35 and I’ve been awake since. Or it could be the gut-shatteringly gargantuan amounts of shit food I’ve been consuming over the past 10 days or so. 
I think it’s probably that.
Sugary snacks, carbonated drinks, alcoholised puddings, lots of double cream, extra-caffeinated luxury coffee made using my Christmas present from Hannah; it’s no wonder my system is reacting with an array of symptoms that combine the full-on horror of Type 2 diabetes with the debilitating effects of heroin withdrawal. Maybe I need to have a few days detox. If I spend the next 72 hours eating healthily and drinking only water and the anxieties dissipate, I’ll know exactly what the problem was.
On the other hand, we still have lots of snacks left over, the supermarket is selling mince pies off cheap, and it’s only two weeks til my birthday, so maybe I should just plough on through and hope to hit a breakthrough point after which I feel better.

Happy 2018, all.

(Philippa, by the way, has been binge watching ‘The Big Bang Theory’ so she seems to be doing okay.)

RC 1-1-18