[picture of Darren]
The last couple of days have been a little frustrating. I have broken my routine a little, my routine, that is, of staying at home and writing for much if not most of my time, of close reads of short stories and novels, cooking and planning FF. Today I went over to Mum and Dad’s. I did so after having spent the morning reading a few stories, starting straight away on getting up with an O’Henry and a Chekhov on my MP3 player, and then writing an introduction of Darren, the underclass anti-hero of the novel, first on paper, and then finishing on dictaphone to try and get all the ideas out before I forgot them. I should have got right on back to it, since notes rarely translate into the kind of prose I was getting on with this morning, but that had taken me up to a quarter past one, and I had to cook, had to indeed Ready Steady Cook something out of a few pieces of veg that had gone past their best, and that after cleaning up the fetid mess of a kitchen left after several days of being on my own - the sink left half full in an aborted attempt at soaking the gram flour pancakes adhered to the stainless steel tray I had grabbed for a baking sheet cum frying pan, a new wooden chopping board now warped, food processor blades and the rest. No problem, I put on my Pimsleur Russian and quite enjoyed it, revising and talking out loud to myself Eesveneetya, vyee paneemayeetya paangleecky? Ja Nimnoga paneemayoo pa rrusky. until I burnt myself out and had to turn to beacon, the local station which was playing surprisingly tolerable songs. After dinner, a curry that had become a little watered down and insipid after I decided to fast-track it in the preasure cooker, I felt tired and could do little but practice pentatonic scales in front of Ready Steady Cook (actually, I do think a reclusive life of writing in the mornings and evenings, and having a kind of siesta in front of Ainsley and the boys could really suit me down to the ground: if there’s any budding benefactors reading, please take note).
I woke up a little after that, and found myself going outside and spending some time in the garden. Wonder of wonders, I didn’t even feel the need for my MP3 player when I was binding bamboo canes together with cable ties to make a frame for netting to protect my radishes (my first attempt at growing something) from the slugs that have really taken to my garden; ok so I wouldn’t really have been able to start chatting up imaginary Russian babes in the Pimsleur fashion with the lads behind constantly pacing up and down past their clothesline declaiming something into their mobiles that couldn’t possibly be kept inside, but the fact is that I didn’t even particularly feel the need, and I wasn’t even then that tired.
It was to my parents then. I have gone the last couple of days. The idea being that I would save time for writing, but of course, once I get back to the world of accessible broudband, I get caught up in a million things, such as the ongoing timehole of a correspondence with Audible.com about the fact that my Bleak House won’t sync with my Creative Zen MP3 player, and, of course, the maintenance of my blog, which in many ways is beyond me and which again and again I think I should never have started.
Anyway, Dad had rang BT over and over again, and found them absolutely piss pour. He was kept hanging on invariably for half an hour. Once after that time somebody picked up the phone, put him on to somebody else, he waited a further ten minutes and then, when they picked up the phone, the line dropped. Another time, having been waiting so long with the phone on speaker, he was so startled by them answering that he pressed the green button instead of speaker. Another, he had been waiting over half an hour when the message he was listening to changed. Instead of “we are extremely busy” he know heard “This office is open from x until 8 o’clock. This often is now closed” and the line went dead. This after they had bollocksed up our first order to install a line, cutting off the phone of the poor old woman who had moved out of this house, and doing so in such a way that her provider could not reconnect for two weeks (her son had the same trouble on the phone, once ringing up on his mobile while he was on hold to tell them not to put him on hold, and I have received the bill for the calls she made while she was mistakenly cut off at a time when I could still not use the phone; I discovered the fuck up by ringing the phone number that was supposed to be allocated to us to check if it had been activated at least for incoming calls and expecting perhaps for the phone beside me to ring, only to hear the voice of a charming elderly French lady). The whole thing is fucked, and is exactly the kind of thing which aggravates me - stealing my precious, and limited time.
Dad rang, and I was on the computer looking at ways of resolving the problem of needing a BT line to use other providers. (BT had threatened to bill us a full year’s line rental if we were to break the contract by going with another provider, and yet, of course, BT’s charges are very uncompetitive and it is important for us to have calls to the Czech Republic.) Really I was also looking at Aspie sites to try and submit my blogs, because familiar as I may be with performing these kind of solipsistic lucubrations it does seem a little more autistic than I am at this stage willing to consider myself to continually write a blog no fucker is reading (OK, so according to Anthony Storr, Isaac Newton did regularly give his lectures even whe nobody was in attendence of them, and presumeably there is the possibility, however remote, that people will at some stage learn of my site and begin to read even older posts, but still, you see what I mean.)
In any case I was of course getting annoyed, pulling faces every time anybody said anything to me. Eventually Dad got through and we sorted the phone line. Actually, thinking about it, that did lead to one thing which kind of made my day: put on the line to give my bank details I was told I have a very rich voice and asked whether I sing. I said no, and then, flattered, yes, occasionally, but very badly, and was drawn to admit that I play guitar and occasionally give it a stab, but not so far as to reveal that I was trying to sing Bob Dylan today. Anyway, I would be interested to hear any aspie experiences of phone line flirting, specifically with call centre types, because I do often find that although I feel very awkward on the phone and constantly talk over people and subject them to a kind of salutation inflation in which I cannot simply say hello or goodbye once, I find it easy at times to be uncharecteristically chatty with people in call centres, possibly because I often assume when talking to people that they would much rather be talking to someone else, doing something else than have to talk to me, whereas people stuck in call centres are obviously bored and will be glad of anything they can get. This time it wasn’t completely flirtatious and it did end a little awkwardly, partly, I suspected at the time, because my Dad’s phone manner, though very very useful, is very very pedantic, and very very aspie.
I’m tired, and getting off subject. What I really wanted to write about today was a couple of Dad’s observations.
Mum and Dad had been speaking about one of the neighbours. It’s a suburban avenue built some time I think in the sixties. They got there through bloody hard work from, not nothing, but nothing much, from coming over from farms on the West of Ireland to study to be a teacher (my Mum), and to study to being an electrician and television repair man (my Dad). They live in between a retired doctor and a retired headmaster, an old man from Scotland who is an alderman, I think, and staunch tory, who flew Sopwith Camels or some such in the war and used to play for the Baggies. It is this man they were discussing. They had heard something the night before from next door, as if someone were repeatedly opening and closing a door (it is a very quiet neighbourhood at night). He has been ill and they wondered if something had happened to him. Later, Mum heard from the other neighbour, the Welsh wife of the former headmaster, that there had been a funeral down the road, that a hearse had gone by.
What kind of a society do we live in, Dad asked, that a man may have died next door and we wouldn’t have heard about it? She wouldn’t have told us.
He told a couple of stories.
I may have told you this before, he said, but sometimes you listen and sometimes you don’t. When we first moved in, the first day, I took the lawnmower out and I was mowing when _____ next door came out. I stopped the lawmower and moved over a little towards her. We had moved in after the ____s who had moved out after fifteen years. She held her hand up and said “I’m late” annd got into her car. I’ve never forgotten that. it was totally socially unacceptable behaviour. And she may not have known it at the time but she was my doctor. Her surgery was across the road from Mum’s in Dudley.
He talked about how the welsh lady next door once saw this doctor at the hairdresser’s. She wasn’t sure who it was at first, but then recognised her. She greated her, and there was no response at all. “I don’t think she knew who I am,” she said. and this after living together therer two houses apart since the houses were built. He had a similar story to tell about a man the other side of the welsh lady and the headmaster, albeit on the corner, facing out to the next road. He was there fixing the guy’s TV and they got talking about the neighbours. He didn’t know a thing about the next door, even though their kids played together.
And I have noticed a couple of things myself. In those opposite, they might be outside when you come back from somewhere, doing the garden or some such, and they will walk away, affecting to pick up a garden tool or something. And ok, so I have fewer social skills than most and elicit that kind of behaviour in some people who would otherwise not do it, but my parents find the same, and though my Dad is quite capable of being plenty aspie, my mother is not and spends all her time in a pretty sociable environment in her school.
But then that’s why I keep a blog.