Ssh, I’m not here.

I have gone away for a week. It’s a little odd, mentioning it, when this hallowed spot of internet greatness is often left to fester for weeks at a time, but seeing as I’ve put no little effort into actually writing some stuff and putting it up this week, it would seem churlish not to mention that there was a reason for nothing other than laziness. Or that thing I was saying the other day about writing too much at work.

So yes – nothing for a week. Unless I do write something, in which case there will be something, and not nothing. But that will be a bonus something. It’s a bit like that thing where they put ‘this space left intentionally blank’ on a piece of paper, which then ceases to be blank.

Anyway. I’m going camping. Ordinarily, I hate camping. I think I’m allergic to camping, it makes my face swell up and I can’t sleep and I get tired and grumpy. But this week I am camping with friends and I don’t have to cook, so obviously it’s going to be delightful. A big bag of fun.

I went to see Batman (the film).

I went to see the Dark Knight Rises on opening night. Booked tickets two months in advance for the IMAX and everything. And watch me try to convince myself that I’m not a total geek. But wait, don’t go, here be no spoilers, etc.

I went on my own. I’ve taken to going to the cinema on my own – it’s nice, I think, to be unencumbered by social niceties, to just be able to sit and concentrate and lose yourself in a thing.

You know how it is, you want to go and watch something, but no-one else you know wants to watch it, and so begins the interminable wait until it comes out on DVD, and then the longer wait until it gets to the top of your Lovefilm list, the mysterious hand of fate that picks the three things you wanted to watch the least this week and feeds them through your letterbox.

Besides, how do you get to be with someone when you’re watching a film anyway? Friend or stranger, when you’re all sitting with your faces forward, plugged into another stranger’s alternate reality, there’s only equality of strangerliness.

I sat there before the film began, picking out the weirdos on their own. Perhaps not picking them out, but they were jumping out at me. Bespectacled blokes, fighting a losing battle with middle age, furtive. I realised I was looking at myself.

It’s strange, that we can do so many things alone or together and it doesn’t make a difference, but going to the cinema or eating in a restaurant, it just feels like you’re breaking some sort of unspoken moral code.

I’m getting more used to lonesome film watching, but there’s still a lingering weirdness about the whole thing, and I still couldn’t sit and have dinner in a proper restaurant on my own. Certainly not with a book and a pair of burning cheeks, paranoid mind set to stun.

I sat and watched the film. I laughed. I gasped. I welled up. At all the wrong bits. The people around me were lost in their own thing, with their own people. At one point I nearly grabbed the arm of the man next to me. That would definitely have been socially unacceptable.

Words we used to use.

Isn’t it amazing when you think back to all the words you used to use, but you don’t use them anymore? Like dessicated. It’s the sort of word you would have briefly used when making cupcakes as a nine-year-old, adding dessicated coconut somewhere in the recipe. But now – dessiwhatwhat?

Technology is the biggest culprit here – remember when you used to need a modem to get on the internet for a few years in the 90s? To think that there was a time when you weren’t connected to the entire world for 24 hours a day, when you used to wait until you had about 10 emails before you’d fire up the bleeps and warbles because it was expensive to make that local phone call. Oh, back in the days when 90% of your emails were written by actual people who knew you.

Of course, that was when we called the internet ‘the information superhighway’. We would laugh at and taunt our 90s selves if we saw them now. Information superhighway? Give it a rest, idiots. To think of ourselves, sat there with freshly sharpened pencils and new shoes, all keen about our new technology. But who knew that at the end of that highway lay the information supercesspit?

It’s almost a grievance to me that we have to learn words that become almost instantaneously useless – someone had to go to all the bother of thinking up a name for a modem and we had to memorise it. Perhaps the modem would have lasted longer if it had a more iconic moniker like ‘mouse’. Everyone loves a mouse, it’s a classic example of zoomorphism, or whatever the expression is for turning things into animals. I can’t be bothered to learn it unless it’s going to be a thing.

Out for a drive in the night.

I love the twinkly new cat’s eyes that they’re using on the motorways these days. I think they must be powered LEDs, because they keep twinkling in your mirrors once you’ve gone by. Not like those rubbish old ones that could only reflect the efforts of what was being shone on to them. These new ones, they make me feel like I’m taking off from a darkened runway.

The effect was heightened the other week when I was in a car with engine noise so loud and rough that you could have genuinely thought for a second that you were in a small turboprop plane. I’ve only been in propellered planes a few times, but there’s a theatre to them that you don’t get with a jet plane’s clinical whumpf and kick in the back. A propeller plane drags its way into the air, claws at the wind and fights up into the atmosphere.

But even in a car, there’s something very exciting about driving at night, the way the entire world shrinks to whatever you can see within the bounds of your headlights. The eeriness of considering what might be beyond those boundaries, what could be hiding in the gloom. I used to have this scooter that I would ride back and forth between Bangor and Coventry when I was at university. Riding at night used to scare me, confined as I was to the deepest depths of country roads, banished from the motorway.

The romance and freedom of planes, of country roads, of driving at night. Maybe that’s my fascination with cars and travel, grasping after some freedom or romance I’ve conjured in my rather untamed imagination. Why else could I get so excited about sodding cat’s eyes?

About time, summer.

They say that two swallows don’t make a summer, but I think up until this last weekend many people would have taken two swallows for the whole summer. Probably even one swallow. A dead swallow. A dead swallow on a sunny day.

I hate to moan about the weather and that, because it’s like blogging about fish in barrels, but I have up to now been slightly snookered by the conditions. If you can have seasonally affected moods and get all sad, surely the opposite of wintry despair is true for the sunny summer months? A time of optimism, and skipping, chasing the ice cream van down the road.

You need the seasons for context – summer is all the better for a miserable winter, and winter all the worse for a nice summer. The more the seasons blur into one another, the more we don’t know whether we’re coming or going. A sunny morning is the sort of thing that sets off your day, but for the past few months I’ve not been able to decide my mood until mid-afternoon.

Which is to say, in a roundabout way, hello sunshine, and after a week of this all will be forgiven.

Basking in the garden.

WARNING: PORTIONS OF THIS POST HAVE BEEN PRERECORDED. Phone lines are now closed.

I am sitting with my laptop in the garden, musing and staring and writing this blog post, feel the warmth of the sun on my face even at half seven in the evening, feeling like there’s nothing better in the world to be doing.

This is probably the first time my laptop has been used outside of my bedroom, or maybe my parents’ living room when I go to visit. The great paradox of the miniaturised personal computer, this posterchild of portability, is that it has merely been freed to move from the desk to your bed, the desk rendered sadly obsolete by a covering of old bank statements and stinky candles.

I had this dream – nothing as grand as old Martin Luther thing’s – I had this dream that I would get myself a laptop and sit in coffee shops writing the next great novel, or some other superior work that would blow the world away. Of course, if I do happen to go to a coffee shop these days, my laptop has been left at home on my bed and the coffee shop happens to be inside a motorway service station. I order a large black americano and sit reading someone else’s superior work.

Likewise I miss living by the sea, this utopian fantasy built up in my head as if I would just pop to the beach of a warm evening and sit with a barbeque gazing into the waves. In my head this is what we used to do all the time way back when I lived in north Wales, but in reality I can pin down two occasions in six years when it actually happened.

Perhaps these things are more about the possibility rather than the probability or the actuality. Like life is one great promise of things to come, rather than the disappointment of what has come to pass. But do you know? I’d much rather put some effort into realised promise than the other way round. Definitely something to think about on a warm sunny evening, basking in the back garden.

The lone bloggerer returns.

I do so hate to write too much about writing, but I find myself having to do this periodically because of the intolerable gaps between posting. I hold my dear blog in such high esteem and it pains me to see it gathering dust from day to day, maintained only by disturbing google searches and the odd person curious to see whether silence has finally been broken.

And indeed today it has. I have this theory that there are only so many words in a day for any particular writer. More or less depending on your skill or willingness to trot out meaningless crap, but there is some sort of ceiling nonetheless. Thus, for the two weeks a month I spend feverishly tappeting away over a keyboard in order to get a magazine out to print, I find myself without any of that kick which brings a blog post into being.

Like a nursing heifer, I am professionally milked dry and have nothing left to share with my adoring public. Of course, given that I hold this belief that there are only so many words in me during a particular day, perhaps I should seek out employment that requires something more meaningful out of my brain, but this keyboard tappeting pays, as they say, the bills.