QBST.
At last. Sound a little horn that sounds like a bee playing a swing number in a little bee big band that sprays multicoloured pollen from the brass – the winter is over.
Bloody nora. What a long one. How long ago do bright young days of summer seem? The clocks going forward on Sunday morning has given the evenings a properly surreal sense of light and spring jollity, distinctly at odds with all we’ve become meteorologically accustomed to and with just about everything on the news.
Blossom in the garden? Fragrant fecundity on the air? Grass clippings on the garden path? Has the world gone mad?
Maybe. For in these times of upheaval and change and shifting social points of reference, I may be adding to the entropy of comfort.
Sunday morning I ran eleven kilometers in about an hour.
Me.
I know. Apologies for continuing to upset your understanding of the world.
—
Don’t feel too destablised. I plodded unathletically so you wouldn’t for a moment feel you couldn’t have done a more impressive job of it, had you seen me pass by. But, y’know – it’s further than I’ve ever run before without wising up and jogging off left into a café.
The Bournemouth Bay Run is next Sunday, and at least I now know what the distance will feel like. Of course, I bet I’m the sap who stays back with the two slow ones in solidarity for the team, while the others pee off for the glory. But still, I’m hardly doing this for glory, am I. My surest way to sporting glory is the one I’ve always instinctively adopted: don’t turn up in the first place. Lord, yes.
—
Still, the underlying nagging surreality of just about everything at the moment is there in the gorgeous weather too, it seems. For working here in the new studio with the windows and door open, birds twirpling and insects carousing and blooms swooning in the breeze, does all feel weirdly, oddly, disturbingly akin to working in the original shed – the one in my parents’ garden – more than twenty summers ago.
Which doesn’t feel much like having a job, it has to be said.
Sure, Typo has me busy with various honest bread & butter projects of graphic design and brand comms, while the wider creative To Do list includes some potentially groovy Momo-ey things ahead. So I am holding onto a sense of adult responsibility by confident fingernails, as always.
But… I dunno. The breeze isn’t filling the sails sufficiently at the moment, somehow. I recline at the tiller with a beer and squint up at the masthead as the wind arrow swings lazily against the blue canopy of sky sweeping overhead and it’s all very restoratively relaxing – but that drooping mainsail is a bit of a disappointment.
—
I think, in fact, it may turn out to be case of Quarter End Droop. Which there are sadly no mineral supplements you can take for.
What I mean is, that we have just three days left of the first quarter of 2011. Goodness knows why I now think in businessy fourths of the year, given that I work in the garden drawing boxes and playing the keyboard badly, but there we are. I am none-the-less psychologically at the end of a chapter this week. A pretty mentally full and, QED, tiring one.
And, as any professional athlete will tell you – and as I can now say from some experience – when a finishing line rounds into view you can basically start to give up.
Thing is, of course, there is much to be doing – Q2 is idly threatening to be a whole new tank of colourful goop to wade through, for which I must be prepped, trained and ready. Momo has gigs to prepare for in June, and sonic sessions are due to start on the great follow-up LP for Tempo next month – about which I am very excited, naturally. And along with all that hoo-hah goes branding development and video production ideas and band practice and costume hunting and… the whole bally shooting match, potentially. To say nothing of all kinds of other creative funny business to engage in while attempting to pay at least some of my bills with a semblance of dignity.
All of which really could turn 2011 into a slightly crazy year by the time the summer’s been shooed away by the next bleak midwinter. Man. I’m tired just writing that paragraph.
But from here in the spring garden, all that seems a long way off and not quite real. As I look up at those sails again, I am reminded of the depressing thought that the only way they will be filled is if I take a very deep breath myself…
Well, while this is a dispiriting thing when you’re only a quarter of the way into the course and you’re already knackered, I am reminded at least that not only is the sun out and the days longer, my aerobic fitness is improving all the time.
>breathes in sharply<