Another penny drops

Whenever life has allowed, I have kept moving. Other side of town, other side of the country, other side of the world; it's all good. Much of the push has been the search for a place where I could feel more at home, feel less of a misfit. Of course I was always a misfit wherever I went, but in each place the misfit experience was different, which had novelty value if nothing else. Lesson 1 was that if you're going to be a misfit anyway, it's much better to be in a place where you look and sound like one, because at least there you're not expected to fit in.

Lesson 2 has been staring me in the face since I was 8 years old but, in characteristic fashion, I've only just discovered it. Everywhere I've gone, no matter how "good" the culture was, the people I got along with best were those who also came from somewhere else.

Now I understand the value of moving away. It's less about where I'm going to, and more about not being where I'm from. The actual destination may be less important than I thought...

The call of the whiled

I wandered through a cemetery today. Just a wee one - never knew it was there even though I'd been to that particular place many times. Cemeteries are interesting and not. They're kind of like call centres in that everyone's allocated their little cubicle, everyone's checked their humanity in at the gate, and hardly anyone seems to be there by choice, but kind of not because just about everyone who's stuck there seems to feel so strongly about it.

Since this was such a tiny call centre I fancied my chances of tapping the wires without everyone drowning each other out, so as I passed the last cubicle with its rotting wrought iron footrail I popped the obvious question. Was this a fulfilled, restful soul?

Apparently not. All I got was a feeble but toxic tingling in my back that wore off completely at ten paces and left only an aftertaste of pity. No "oh, the osteoporosis has flared up again but it's great not having to bale that bloody hay every summer, and really, I've never felt better - how are you?"; or "hey, doesn't my cubicle look great? see, I decked it out with this wrought iron footrail. it looks so much more permanent than Alice's silly flowerpot"; or perhaps a "gosh it was great seeing the looks on the kids' faces when they learned we'd spent their inheritance"; not even a "thanks for asking". Dead people have no manners these days.

It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have been selected to receive a free mobile phone.

Love and cultural differences

Such as only happen with women from my own country. It seems a certain female noticed a certain male put out subtle "physical" signals, and wanted them, but was sufficiently preoccupied observing them that she neglected to offer any response whatsoever. The male thus became reasonably certain that this was not a desired course of action, or he was until he was set upon and kissed.

A certain female now feels a right royal goose. And so she ought.

So if you live in a country where half the women complain that they go to bars and no men come and talk to them, and the other half complain that they can't sit in a bar and have a drink without men coming up and talking to them, don't complain to me. And really, why complain at all when you can date foreigners instead? They make so much more sense.

But in an unusual twist, this locally-grown one still talks to me. Or at least, she did today.

A funny thing happened on the way to the crematorium

Not that I'm planning on leaving behind anything worth burning. As life has gone along I've always gravitated towards the people I connected with rather than whoever my family or peers would have chosen for me. As a child this more often than not meant the other misfits my own age, or the elderly. Unfortunately I didn't get as much time with the elderly as I would have liked as my mother was convinced they were so fragile that letting a child go near them would cause them a heart attack (unquote).

Once in my twenties I pretty much understood what the pattern was. They were people who thought about life and weren't afraid to admit it. Needless to say I've had a few good chats with people challenging various blockages and crises in themselves. Half my romantic attachments could be placed in the same category.

More than half my romantic attachments also belong in the "older woman" category. Despite my penchant for thinking about things, this was never something I needed to think about. It has been rare for me to connect with a woman anywhere near or below my own age, and moreso if they were single. Of course I became aware of the younger-man-older-woman thing (hereafter YMOWT) but I never personally saw it as a choice because younger women just didn't happen.

But I did think about the YMOWT. The strongest theory kicking about seems to be an alignment of sexual appetite, which to me explained why a relationship might be stable, but never accounted for how people get together in the first place. In hindsight, I believe I underestimated the extent to which we project our sexuality and sensuality.

It's always been bleeding obvious to me that sexual "approval" is one of, if not the, biggest drivers of human societies (not to mention economies). I've always marvelled at the silent games of attraction played in the street, in workplaces, in supermarkets, and in time I learned to play them.

As I played these games as a younger man I soon learned that, amongst those women who played them too, the older did so with far more assurance and poise than the younger. Hardly surprising - experience is a wonderful teacher - but the primary sense I got from the younger woman was fear. In turn I learned to play by different rules according to a woman's age and the level of confidence she projected. If she was under 30 I would play gently, over 40 and I could throw at her whatever she looked able to handle. Under 20 and I would not even go as far as to look at her directly.

Now, according to the YMOWT, when a man reaches middle-age he flips from older women to younger ones. I always saw middle-age as the time I could start picking on women my own age. When I qualified a couple of years ago I was curious to see if anything would happen. And something is happening. The younger women aren't too scared anymore.

If there was one rule I always took for granted in this country it was that I do not catch a younger woman's eye (you're right, this isn't Spain). Actually I never really expect to catch a woman's eye, but if she's young I know it won't happen. Er, make that "wouldn't happen".

Now if a younger (say, <23) woman sees that I will play the game with her, she expects me to catch her eye, and will virtually stop and wait for it before departing satisfied with the attention. It took a few months of wondering why younger women seemed to be taking longer to go past before I cottoned on. Oh, and maybe the one who fetched and held my eye and remained transfixed in fear until I smiled at her.

As a corollary to this, there's also been a change in how males of the same age respond to me. In a manner perfectly consistent with them perceiving me as a competitor for "their" women, from any distance they start shaping up to me and asserting themselves by, for example, standing in my path or placing me in theirs. When they get closer and see the grey hair, they shrink, and slink away.

At the same time I've been trying to gauge any change in how older women respond. If anything they've become bolder too. And silly games aside, so have children and animals. So it's not them. It's me. Life is a curious thing.

If you must compare yourself to others

Compare yourself to who you can be. Not to what everyone else seems to be.

Love and revision

After clearing her inbox she decides that maybe she wouldn't mind seeing me again. This time something's different. She's calmer, and showing signs of a more balanced (read positive) outlook, something she needs more than a man anyway. I'll tell her that if I have to.

Keeping it simple

You have two eyes. Keep one on the things that might harm you. With the other, look for the beauty you can have, share, give, or create.

Love and coincidence

For the next 48 hours I vacillate. Do I tell her the things I had hoped to show her, or do I walk away quietly? At the rate I'm going it'll be the latter.

I'm on my way to the osteopath. In my regular stupor I get on the right tram thinking it's the wrong tram, and get off at the wrong stop, condemning myself to a 15-minute uphill walk my body doesn't particularly need right now. I'm still cursing myself ten minutes later as I pass a supermarket. The footpath is narrow; the doors open as I pass and I step aside to avoid a collision. It's her.

Instinctively I keep walking. When a woman has just told a man to go away, it is not taken for granted that she'll be happy to see him 48 hours later. But her face lights up and I cannot help but stop. She starts putting her bags down and asks if I have time to stop, but I don't. As we part I tell her that it would be nice to see her, and her face twists in pain. I think mine may have followed.

But it resolves the question. When I get home, I write what I wanted to say, and I send it. Immediately I know I've done the right thing. And I am free again.

How to improve your sense of humour

Some years ago I heard some statistic on how many people live with chronic pain and immediately thought how awful that would be. I didn't realise at the time that I was one of them, and had been almost all my life. (OK, I'm a frog. Boil me.) And I can tell you that the worst thing about chronic pain isn't the actual pain.

No, the worst thing about chronic pain is the wall it erects between you and the rest of human experience.

It starts with not wanting to participate in what everyone else seems to think is great fun, because you know that it isn't. You move on to living vicariously, maintaining contact with feeling by inducing it in others. As the wall builds itself higher even this disappears from view. Forced back upon yourself, you start to fantasise about release, of destroying the source of torment.

You wonder how anyone can have a job and a family at the same time. Or start a business. Or play sport. Or dance. Time passes, and you wonder how anyone can have a job or a family. Sport, well that's clearly played by robots.

You pick up a newspaper and read that so many people have died, and your first thought is, "so what's the problem?" A friend loses his young wife to cancer before their first anniversary and your first thought is, "why couldn't I take her place?" Your best friend from school, now raising a couple of young kids, emails 20 years later to say he's in chemo, and you send back a chirpy message welcoming him to the one-day-at-a-time club. It doesn't fully register that his reply is neither timely nor chirpy.

Your favourite people are the precious few who can alternately shine through the fog, and grant peace. Much of the darkness in the human psyche feels like damp, trodden pasture smelling rather freshly of livestock, that you have to camp by overnight because it's got dark and you're still an hour's ride from the next town; OK, maybe not quite like that, and perhaps a little more scary, but you get the idea. It's still cold and squishes between your toes, though. Anyway... You realise that you could walk outside and make - or ruin - someone's day, save - or take - someone's life, after which you could shrug and not feel a thing. At least, you could on the days you go outside. All your favourite films are about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

You know you are sane, perhaps more than most, but you are not sure whether this is of any comfort. It certainly doesn't help you interact with 90% of the population. You no longer see good and evil, just response to circumstance. You assess people not by how high they've climbed, but what they've had to climb through. You check between their toes for mudstains.

Then, 30 years down the road, you find the first practitioner who recognises that there's a problem. Naturally the dominant medical establishment assures you that in spite of five years of university training, and rather more robust diagnostic methods than spouting a dismissive opinion from the far side of a desk, such practitioners haven't a clue what they're doing. You resolve never again to visit a member of the dominant medical establishment, at least not for any kind of health problem. After all, if it killed you it would hardly be a backward step.

Eventually you get a diagnosis. And a probable prognosis. And it's not bad. They just can't tell you when it might happen. So you go along with it, figuring the worst thing that can happen is that you'll die of something else in the meantime. Actually, that's the second worst thing. The worst thing is not dying of something else in the meantime.

But over time, something changes. You spend less and less time fantasising about smashing in your skull. You start to become curious again. What does it feel like to not be in pain? What would it feel like to be able to relax? And if I felt like that, who would I be? How fast could I run? What could I lead? Would I want my life? And what would I want to do with it?

Now, if that isn't funny, I don't know what is.

Love and other blows to the head

We meet. We like that enough to do it again. And again. And again. And by now it's clear she's one of those special ones, equal parts passion and sensibility. Certainly not shallow. Certainly not normal. Troubled, scarred, but determinedly positive. Unabashedly afraid, yet unafraid to act.

We are different. We like different things. We will likely never grow together, we likely do not belong together. But for now, we have much to give one another, for however long whatever lasts.

She visits my place for the first time, just for a couple of hours on her way to work. Not far out of her way; she can almost see her house from my living room window. She is smarting from a freshly served parking ticket, but that is soon forgotten over a cup of tea and some old-time songs that her father used to play. But after an hour or so she starts to become edgy. Soon after she says she must go. She goes quiet, appears troubled. She retrieves the parking ticket from her pocket. I put my hand on her shoulder; it doesn't seem to help. I suggest meeting again; she doesn't want to discuss it. Suddenly she advances towards me and kisses me fully and firmly on the lips. Twice. Then she runs to the door, and leaves.

48 hours later she calls and says she doesn't want us to see each other any more.