The housework continued - though I spent most of the morning out and about getting keys cut and buying toilet brushes whilst my wife stayed at home and assembled the stools for the breakfast bar (I know get us). I had baulked at assembling these chairs when I'd opened one box and been greeted by a confusing pile of parts, but my wife is made of stronger stuff and just got on with it. By the end of the day we had the kitchen at least pretty much as we wanted it. It's rather frighteningly grown-up and swish. I am going to have to buy another house to live in to avoid damaging it.
Weirdly my wife and I are reacting to the small scuffs and scrapes that have been created by moving furniture around in the opposite way to what I would have expected. She is blase and saying it's good the house will seem lived in, I am getting annoyed that I can't even keep something looking nice for a week.
The plan had been to have a holiday in the house throughout September - going out and enjoying London without work getting in the way and doing some site-seeing. But like a sit-com holiday our hotel isn't ready and we've having to build it ourselves and we both have writing work waiting to be done with deadlines looming. Which is probably why you have to actually physically leave your house and the country if you want a proper break.
At least this is a different kind of work and it's quite satisfying to have got even one of the rooms into a state that we're happy with. Though at the back of my mind is the constant thought that I need my next script to work or we're going to find it difficult to pay for what we've got. But I've found in the past that putting myself into debt is usually a great incentive for getting work done.
As usual when things are getting moved around I discover some forgotten bit of writing or hidden notebook a quarter full of a stalled diary. These usually come from a time when I am troubled or introspective with something to work through. Today I found one from November 2003,
when I was having a short break in Italy on my own. If you go back and read the sprawling blogs I wrote about that trip you might be surprised to find out that I also had time to write a sprawling diary as well, but I was on my own and spent a lot of time sitting in bars, talking to no one. I was clearly a bit unhappy at the time, though putting a brave face on it in both blog and diary. My love- life was typically complicated/seedy, though at least for this week I was away from that and seemingly incapable of interacting with strangers so not in any position to make it more complicated!
Reading it back I feel sorry for this younger man, stymied by his own self-consciousness, unclear about how to reconcile the different aspirations of his brain, his heart and his loins. This was all pre the Hercules show which I think did give me a bit of a boost in terms of taking a bit more of a chance on life and trying things outside of my comfort zone. But I took this holiday with no preparation, no booking ahead, ended up staying in pretty horrible hotels which overcharged and nervously walking around looking for places to eat and drink with no idea of what was good, scared of doing the wrong thing so usually ending up in fairly useless places. Too nervous to ask for assistant and too stupid to have planned ahead - I even allowed a man at a train station to take me out of a queue for accommodation and walk me to the hotel he "recommended". I knew I was being ripped off as it happened, but didn't have the confidence to tell him to piss off.
It's not like I was a child. I was 36 years old. But even though I wasn't a child I was still a child. I had some snapping out of stuff to be done and slowly over the next four years I would manage it. I haven't totally shaken off that self-conscious, self-defeating idiot, but he's a lot quieter these days. Though he still wastes too much of his time writing an account of his day (though only one a day now).
I have got a lot of mileage at looking back at the foolishness of the teenage me, but it's odd to think that I can look back at myself of a decade ago (within the lifetime of this blog) and slightly despair. He's a much bigger idiot than the teenage me and a lot less sweet. I wouldn't want anyone else reading that diary and would destroy it now except that I think it will probably be of use to me at some point. But what if I die quickly and unexpectedly before I can burn it?
And how will I burn this internet diary? The problem with blogs is that they are indestructible.
I use the blog and diaries for different functions and this diary was definitely written for me at the time to help me work through what I was thinking (though the 36 year old me still brags in a faux modest way about his indiscretions - I think in his mind thinking he's being a bit Charles Bukowski, when he's just being a bit of a horrible prick).
I think I have mused about this before, but our personalities change so much throughout our life that I wonder which version of us we get to be in Heaven. Hopefully not the gibbering, memory-less wreck we are when we're old, but equally I'd hope not the insecure yet brashly arrogant person of our youth. You may think we get to choose which us we get to be, but which version of us get to make that choice? I think I am pretty cool now and more together than I've been in my life, but the me of ten years time will probably think I am a dick and the me of ten years ago definitely would.
Who am I? Who are we? Can we only get a sense of ourselves at a decade's distance? Won't someone go back in time to Naples and give that stupid youngish man a hug and tell him to pull himself together?
I feel sorry for him aimlessly meandering around Italy, frittering away money and largely failing to seize the day. Though at least it's not as bad as the holiday he had alone in Mexico in 1999.
Ah how I wasted this precious gift of life. But most of us do.
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