On falling in love with a potential killer

My love affair with the drug otherwise known as ‘coffee’ has something of the inevitable about it; like most relationships people have with suspected killers I know it’s not good for me but I’m irresistibly compelled to keep on coming back for more.  Basically I love the stuff, which as I’m an aspiring writer is probably a good thing.  I’ve got a Jewish friend who doesn’t like smoked salmon and so all her Jewish family and friends proclaim that she “isn’t really Jewish”.   It’s the same thing with coffee and writing, so my success must be guaranteed, surely?

Coffee seems to be synonymous with work and productivity – or at least, a chat over a coffee is viewed as more productive than a chat over a cuppa, which you’d assume as more of a therapeutic chat.   The evidence of that is clear in my office, where people’s diaries are littered with “coffee catch-ups” even if they don’t actually drink the stuff.    I can’t start the day without my morning Americano (black and sludgy, as it should be) and as I drink it I feel a potent surge of optimism about the day ahead that is rarely matched by its actual events.  Coffee, for me, inspires potential.  Coffee was partly responsible for the productivity of the Industrial Revolution back in the day, as workers previous to that period tended to drink gin as a pick-me-up instead (this is one of those ‘fascinating’ facts I regale people in the office with from time to time, at which they feign general interest and enlightenment).

The media report its dubious findings on coffee sporadically, in the manner of a long-term schizophrenic everybody's stopped listening to.  A little while ago I read that three cups of coffee a day staved off Alzheimer’s; a week later I read that it can also cause heart attacks (what a dilemma, eh?)  Then last week I read that “3 or more cups of coffee a day can cause death in the under-55s”  in a seemingly unsubstantiated article.  Regardless, we coffee drinkers don’t care.  If anything it gives a sexy, scary edge to our drink of choice that’s utterly conducive to its “hard man” reputation of the soft drink world.   Before long even James Bond will have abandoned his Martini in favour of a “black coffee… ground, not instant”.

Post-birthday musings

How would you define what a “conventional” life is, in this day and age?  Is it still to grow up, learn to drive, get a good education, get married, have a career of sorts, buy a house, celebrate your golden wedding anniversary with your great-grandchildren, then it’s off to see out the rest of your life in a nursing home? 

It sometimes seems to me that a lot of people are desperate to conform to what is already here and known as being “the right way”.  Why do women want to join the clergy; why do gay people want to get married?  Why do people constantly want to join institutions that intrinsically reject them, instead of shrugging their shoulders and forging their own, completely different, ways ahead?  I wonder if people really think about these conformities, or if they’re simply knee-jerk reactions to the humiliation and upset of being rejected.

I ask all this because, at thirty-six, I still haven’t learned to drive.  I also never learned to ride a bicycle.  I haven’t bought a house and have no real plans to do so.  I tried marriage, but it didn’t work out for me.  I don’t want to have children, which is nothing to do with “focusing on my career” because I don’t really consider that I have one in particular; just a job that pays the bills while I concentrate on other, also largely meaningless, things like painting, writing and learning complicated languages I won’t use. 

If you’ll excuse the proclamations here, I don’t tend to shout about these things, or indeed discuss them very often.  But they are markers of being ever-so-slightly different; things I’m aware of especially when asked for the reason I don’t drive, or don’t want children or don’t really care about having a “permanent roof over your head”.  The answer is that in the main, these aspects of life just don’t interest me enough.   But lately I’ve been asking myself; am I just trying to rebel against conformity in my own silly little way?  Or just carry on drifting through life without really committing to anything?  Perhaps it’s a combination of both; I must admit that if I were to take my driving test again and pass (after six fails in between the years 1995 – 2004 when I did half-heartedly attempt it) there would be a tiny part of me that would feel disappointment at having done something so normal; something people would tell me, with a natural note of smugness, would vastly improve my independence.

During the course of my separation and impending divorce I’ve been reading a lot of Stoic philosophy, which has only concreted my “don’t commit to anything in case it doesn’t work out” stance.  It seems silly, applying Stoic philosophy to something like a driving test, but that’s just it – everything is so transient, including driving licences and houses, that it’s hard for me to dredge up a lot of interest in them.  Eventually I won’t be around any more and there’ll be no need for that driving licence, and somebody else will buy and live in my house.   So it’s easy to think “what’s the point?” about everything.

Might as well face it... I'm addicted to change

I bought Tristan Prettyman’s new album, ‘Cedar and Gold’ last week.  It’s hauntingly beautiful and knowing; much more mature and heady than her previous work, which I largely put down to the fact that it’s a break-up album.  And as I listened to it, drinking in all the raw emotion, it dawned on me that some of my favourite things to listen to are indeed break-up albums (Bon Iver’s ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ and Noah and the Whale’s ‘First Day of Spring’ are two classics that immediately spring to mind).

Which is when it hit me… people effecting major life changes is something of an obsession with me.  Not just in listening fodder, but in books, newspaper articles, bus queues; people’s life stories fascinate me if they contain something about a sea change.  I remember quotes people I’ve never met have made about moving house, getting married, getting divorced, having near-death experiences and trekking the Andes, more than I remember important things people close to me have said.   I watch closely to see how people cope; what happens to them before, during and after these seismic life shifts of theirs.  Perhaps it was only a matter of time, regardless of what I was doing in my life, before I effected a seismic life shift of my own.

And now, after a year of desperately trying to get back on my feet in a stable job and a stable home, (both of which I’ve sort-of managed) I find myself wanting to start another one.  Recently I was out for dinner with two friends who are the same age as me.  The conversation turned, as I’m assuming it often does between as-yet-childless women in their thirties, to whether or not we would have children (for the record, me and one other friend said we definitely wouldn't, while the other ummed and ahhed a bit). 

I said I wanted to make some big changes to my life very soon, and that having a child would limit this (though some would say that’s a supreme irony since having a child probably is the hugest life change a person can make!) - due to the fact that once you’re a parent it’s not your own sea changes that matter anymore, but your child’s.  Call that a selfish perspective if you like, but I like to think of it more as self-awareness.  Cheers.  Anyway, one of my friends stared at me over her glass of sauvignon blanc and said “For God’s sake, hasn’t your life changed enough over the past year?!”  The comment shocked me a bit; not only because she was right but because I’d actually forgotten that my life now is utterly, completely different to what it was this time last year, and even more so from that of the year before last.

I'm getting ever-closer to the mechanics of change by the fact that I even work for a change management consultancy these days, although change in business isn’t a subject I’m so passionate about.  This is mainly because change in business never amounts to very much more than a middle-aged man in a suit telling us all to incorporate more thinking/creativity time into our daily routines (for numerous examples just have a look at the astronomical pile of business change manuals in most bookshops and libraries up and down the country… go on, pick one up and have a look at the author’s picture inside or on the back of the jacket.  Rarely will you feel inspired to do anything different other than roll your eyes and head for the nearest alcohol-selling emporium). 

But back to me and my life… I know a change will be coming again soon.  I’m just buggered if I know what it’ll end up being.