Untitled II

Last night when I finally got in from a very long day, I went out to the garage to see my boy.

Dad had laid him on an arrangement of flowers. He was curled up, so tightly you might have thought he was sleeping, if his eyes weren't in that almost-open state, just ever so slightly. He was tiny, a fraction of his former size. His leg was shaved and red, from the drip. But other than that, he was my boy. His coat was beautiful, pristine, perfect. A slight smile, or his mouth shaped so I could convince myself as such.

I have seen dead cats before. But to see my boy there, still, it was a very strange feeling. I kept watching, subconsciously to check to see if he was breathing, as I had done for all our cats when their sleep tilted them so close to the edge of not breathing before their lungs would expand and I would sigh with relief.

I couldn't sleep last night. First thoughts of him out in the garage, then flooded with worry, anxiety, events, things I needed to do over the next year. Far, far into the distance, yet last night they all seemed upon me, an unwelcome distraction that ensured I lay awake for hours, tossing and turning, hot and cold and hot and cold all over again, as my boyfriend slept beside me.

This morning I am exhausted, but a little better. Tonight we are burying my boy in the garden, and in a wonderful notion, we are burying him with our dog's ashes, no longer to preside in a box under my parent's bed (my sister is greatly relieved of this and said at least our friends will now think we have some semblance of a normal family), underneath some flowerbulbs, I forget which, my dad did tell me, but I retained little of yesterday.

In writing this I have saved myself the consistent apologies I slip in and around my sadness when talking to my friends. The I'm sorrys placed as a full stop, but then swiftly changed to a comma, leading once again into more sadness, yet littered with more apologies. I don't know why I don't have the courage in my own emotions to be able to express them clearly to even my closest of friends, cushioning, padding, injecting weak humour to ease them, show them that it's all right really, I'm fine. It is as if their possibly non-existent inaudible thoughts are deafening me with their boredom, or disbelief over this much emotion being shed over an animal, or some other inhibiting thought.

And that, I think, for the most part is this chapter over. I will check on him later, we will bury him tonight. I will then allow the floodgates to be broken by those interchangeable phrases, those 'he had a good life's, those 'he was a good age's to be spoken and accept them, with no repercussions.

Incidentally, Blogger's irratic spell checker suggested boiler plate as a handy alternative spelling for flowerbulb, just in case I wanted to review my ill-chosen characters.

Over a cat, and companion

Here I am, on my way home.

Today was long. It seems forever ago since I was talking about my boy in present tense.

My parents have been to the vets, I imagine he is home now, I imagine they are burying him, or have done by now. I am relieved, I am so exhausted, but at least it is over, he isn’t in pain anymore, he is sleeping, by now. It happened so fast yet the last 24 hours have hung past my eyes like droplets of treacle sinking.

My boyfriend is driving to pick up his exhausted, sad, tired girlfriend.

So many sad phone calls and conversations today, and a goodbye I didn’t get to make. I texted my goodbye, in the hope my dad would tell him, whisper to him, even after, just to make sure he knew the words I wanted to say. As if he knew, as if he would understand. He could have spoken Cornish, I imagine. And there it is, our intense desire to anthropomorphise our animals, our faithful companions. He was probably never aware that he was mine, or I was his. What were his thoughts, if animals have thoughts beyond instincts and decisions and need. He liked his food, his cuddles. So do I. Common ground goes a long way for cementing dear relationships.

I will miss him terribly. I wish it were tomorrow, I wish I was sat at my computer, in my cosy office, Newfy at my feet, Radio 4 kneading my brain. I wish today was over, I had a cup of tea by my desk, and feelings were memories, or the start of memories, or the knowledge that it wouldn’t be all that long, not really, not in the grand scheme of things. When I publish this, it will be, unless I crank my Acer back on at home, nameless this one. My old laptop was named after my Grandma, dearly departed, a woman with a grin full of promises of cake and cuddles. My sister’s rubber plant was given the same name. This one, Acer, Aces, Laptop, Lappy, PC, nothing all that emotive or personal. It is a little slow to start up these days, now an old lady (man?) in its 9th month (suffering under the fat, tense fingers of the WebStress, darting over its keys, weighing it down with unnecessary cumbersome PSDs and half-started, sadly neglected tales, not stories, too much in their infancy to be a story, more of a flicker of an idea, a thought not quite promised, not quite there.

An hour to wish and dream and want away. Work to do, but no inclination or desire to do it, despite its promise of taking my mind off of things. My friends, my family have been wonderful today. I wish they all knew how much I wrapped myself in their support and comfort. I will sleep tonight in my boyfriend’s arms. He will protect me tonight.

A sad day.

Untitled

Last night we arrived home from spending the weekend with my boyfriend’s sister and her fiancé to find out my cat had to be taken to the vet yesterday afternoon with kidney failure.

He is currently on a drip, somewhere white-walled, coming to an end. He has kidney failure. He will either fade away naturally (I tried to write die but it looked too harsh, too abrupt) or we will have to have him put down. There is a chance today won’t be that day, but if it isn’t not today, then tomorrow, or in a few days. His kidneys, my mum said, have shrunk, as has he. Yesterday, she said, he couldn’t even drink water.

Only 3 days previously we had rushed our elderly female cat (she is an impressive 16, while he and our other female cat trail behind at 14) to the vet, of the expected same problem. Our first cat, years ago, 14 in fact, died of kidney failure. She was bleeding, uncomfortable, distressed. We assumed the same thing, the worst.

She is riding the slow, gentle, sleep-ridden route to recovery slowly, apparently with a bad case of cystitis. We relaxed, settled in the knowledge that as she was the most elderly and frail of our three cats, and if she was okay everyone was okay.

My boy is a wanderer. I got him shortly after my previous cat, Old Lady’s brother, decided to abandon me to settle in a barn two miles away. I had open ended visiting rights, but my Sunday afternoon visits, seated on bales of hay, lost their novelty after a while. He is the half-brother of my older cat and near enough the spit of him, a rich, tortoise shell Abyssinian-cross-Siamese-cross-moggy.

My boy will often disappear for days, or weeks, on end, coming home with a belly full of rabbit, or rat, pester the other females and settle to sleep. He is an attention slut, offering continuous, disturbingly loud purrs to any who he coerces into offering him affection. He head-butts his way under my chin, onto my lap, giving so much gratitude in return you find it hard pushed to feel shunned when he offers such a display to the next visitor. He is not my cat, I am one of his many mistresses, waiting, waiting for his return, to abandon my duties and direct my love and affection to him.

I wonder how I would feel if this had happened when I wasn’t living at home. To have not have seen him for such a very long time. As it was he had been away for a week this time, I had missed his vocal demands, for affection, for attention, to be guided towards the food bowl that he was usually inches away from but unable to locate, an apt hunter but not exactly the brightest spark. My parents, wary of age and noticing how much weight he had shed when we had seen him previously, went out to collect him from his usual digs, a barn just up the road.

In half an hour, when my dad phones the vet, we will know. When I publish this post, things may be very different.

I am on the train to London. I don’t want to be here, on this train, full of strangers, two boys in front of me watching a film clearly ruffling the macs and suits and heels of winter, in their pestered silence, inaudible sighs, but silent nonetheless, as is the way of the English.

Had the meeting not been previously postponed so I could attend, I would have cancelled. But as it is here I am, covered in the remains of an explosive untidy crunchy bar, desperate for a coffee, cheeks stiff from tears, on the way to a client meeting to discuss growth, potential and how they can spend more money with us.

Maybe it is for the best, at least I am doing something. But I could, I argue, be doing something which mirrors my current activities in the comfort of my office at home, Newfy at my feet. She is currently on day-release to a local kennels, next to another chocolate, 4 month old male Newfy, who is probably more fun than her tap-tap-tapping mum who occasionally breaks from her mouse-moving to entertain, oh so briefly, her frustrated self, so I suspect it may be difficult to entice her back home this evening.

I am hurting. It is a private hurt, a sadness, a loss. It is often difficult for people to understand someone’s losing of a pet. People feel uncomfortable, awkward. They say things that they mean that you don’t want to hear, or that they don’t mean that you don’t want to hear. It is a pet, after all. It is an animal, a companion, a creature of entertainment, of comfort and distraction.

Or they may regale you with tales of when their cat/dog/guinea pig/snake/chinchilla died, citing common ground, an ‘I’ve been there too’, an easy way around addressing your grief through distraction, a phenomenon that I have never quite understood, or at least not understood why it occurs with pets and distant relatives (Grandparents may also fall into this category, but on a case by case basis). There is an unspoken hierarchy with pets, the allotted grieving time, the unwritten aching volume. My sister’s hamster, the Devil Incarnate, the bloody little bugger, died twice and I can’t remember anyone feeling overly distraught about the whole thing. The first time, my grandparents nearly buried the damn thing but he pulled himself back from the light, ran back down the tunnel, teeth gnashing. I suspect the volume of bloody he had consumed in his short life had given him some sort of vampire-esque reincarnation, to which we were all a little disappointed (I cannot remember if my sister was upset on either of the occasions where he bit the dust, and my apologies to her if on reading this it stirs some previously suppressed and unwanted emotion). Generally speaking, rodents are granted a moderate amount of grieving time. We have had many ducks in our Cornish lives, each one in turn, not being wonderfully bright, being eaten by a fox (or, on one occasion, next door’s dog), or else escaping to prevent being eaten. This high turnover of bird life did not allow a substantial amount of grieving time, certainly not in the latter stages when it seemed quite exciting if, in the morning, they were still there. Dogs, mans best friend, alongside perhaps horses, are probably given the largest amount of time to grieve. My dad’s dog was put down approximately 6 years ago, but he is still there, in a little wooden box, beneath his bed and who was ‘brought out to meet Newfy’ when we first brought her home (my boyfriend has suggested we sprinkle his ashes into Newfy’s food so they could ‘be together’, which wasn’t received wonderfully well by myself). Cats, by their very nature, are different. Independent, stubborn, each allowing you to care for them, to love them, to pat them and cuddle them and love them just enough that they will always break your heart. They get close, close, close, but not close enough that they are yours.

Last night my tears were hysterical when my parents broke the news to me. They fell out of me violently, in bursts, in breaths.

This morning I am tired, exhausted, numb, sad. My dreams were flooded last night, with thoughts, memories of moments that didn’t quite happen, or not quite in that way.

I have a long day ahead. It is 9am now.

Later...

I am now in work, publishing this post, at 13:29.

He is no better, we are waiting.

I Stress Therefore I Am

I appear to be turning into someone that I'm not altogether fond of, or comfortable with.

Certainly during the hours of 7 and 5 when I'm sat at my computer (interspersed with treacle-dripped, apple-of-my-eye loving looks at Newfy asleep by my side or gnawing softly on something that she shouldn’t, and some gallivanting around the garden in wellies holding a slobber-soaked toy while Newfy out runs and out plays me).

I know this person though. I know this familiar sensation. I should have expected it, or put up the emotional sandbags to quell the onslaught.

I should have spotted the signs, like the onset of a cold, you know its there however many vitamin tablets and Echinacea capsules you drown your body in, in a vain attempt to fend off threatening sniffles and snuffles and a whole world of miserableness.

I was about to say I couldn’t remember when exactly said person arrived, suitcases shipped in from wherever remote location I had managed to detain them for a good few months. But I do remember.

Things had been going okay, work wise. I’d sunk my over-sized canines into a meaty project (a virtual one naturally, for a WebStress sometimes-vegan) that, although the deadlines where completely unachievable and the workload was equally so, I was enjoying. It was…well, fun. I was, naturally, stressed. But it was a stress that I could feed off, thrive off, run my energy from. I’m sure if they found a way to harness the great power that stress conducts through me then we’d be in the money and the world would be a less polluted place (although severely short on teabags).

Then I had an offer.

Most people when their bosses offer them a substantial pay rise, a personal development grant and a promotion (to be in a position that they had promoted me to last year which has, as of yet, failed to be addressed) would be having kittens.

Not the WebStress.

But the catch?

Move to London. Or, as my boss eagerly put it in a desperate attempt to whet my appetite, to entice me back to those South Easterly climes, the commutable London area.

My boss left me to think about it, to resume our conversation the following Monday.

That Monday came and went, as did every day following that. Now it is 10 days since that conversation and my boss has not yet broached the topic again with me.

My silence, I imagine, speaks volumes. At the time I was polite, courteous, saying I would discuss the matter with my boyfriend. My discussion with my boyfriend went along the lines of ‘well, I’m not bloody going’ (it was slightly lengthier than that, but mostly just alternative arrangements of that sentence repeated, with a number of expletives scattered throughout for good measure).

There was an unspoken subtext though, in my declining of this proposal.

This is perhaps the third or fourth time I have turned down such a lucrative position (or at least ‘such a position’, the word lucrative could have been added if the pay rise was not significantly less than I am aware the company would be offering a new recruit for the same role). That is not counting the times where it has been casually slipped into conversation, embedded in rose petal praise.

I am deeply flattered. But I am also deeply frustrated. They were waiting, I know, until a suitable time had passed that my boyfriend had been back in the UK. His departure, after all, was the reason that they let me leave London but continue my role.

I am exceptionally lucky, I am aware, that my company were flexible enough to let me stay whilst working remotely. I have a lifestyle that suits me well: my pathetically weak immune system is not assaulted by the continual wave of public transport germs, I am in the countryside, my commuting time is roughly 30 seconds.

However, that luck was a result of a verbal resignation on my part, forcing a retraction of their previous comments of not letting me if they wanted to keep me.

And the subtext? That if I don’t accept this, they’ll employ someone to take the job that they gave me previously in a now seemingly redundant promotion. I will, although they won’t get rid of me, be essentially demoted. I’m not jumping to conclusions – this is what they said last time (which was postponed due to the onset of Christmas).

This is my choice, I understand. I am not going anywhere, so the choice has been revoked and I have unwittingly signed my own contractual agreements.

I am acutely aware that I won’t cope well with someone being employed for a substantial more than me, gazumping my role, to do the job that I have been doing for the past year and being my superior. I don’t have a problem with authority, only when that authority was previously mine.

While this may appear irrelevant to my stress levels, my brain, in its eccentric wiring, has fused the various thought fragments together in a spectacular explosion of stress to have caused the resurfacing of the fact that I really don’t like what I’m doing and am not wonderfully happy about the whole thing. Coupled with Christmas already upon our clients, a time where all the hard work of instilling good practice, form and function into their processes is swiftly abandoned and replaced with erratic, incomprehensible and unachievable decisions.

With every link in a chain of events that has formed over these past weeks, I have noticed a frown permanently embed itself within my forehead, a tension wind itself around my back and fingers, a frustration that cannot be subdued and an anger I don’t know how to abate. I am snappy, difficult and not very nice. Out of hours, at least, I manage to redeem myself from within this stress riddled cocoon, but during hours I imagine my PMs are all too glad that I’m several hundred miles away so when they finish briefing me in they don’t have to hear the expletive littered grumblings, rumblings and ramblings of a WebStress who is, to put it mildly, not very happy.
I must remember at times like this that I am being paid for my job. And paid well, for being in the South West. My mum does her best to subdue my temper with this reminder, although it isn’t always greeted with a sedated, understanding response. It is not my God-given right to enjoy my job. I have a job to pay the bills, to enjoy the rest of my life. In time things will change, things may change, eventually.

But that doesn’t quite work with me. I wish it did, I wish I could convince myself otherwise. I wish I could entice my thoughts around to this way of thinking, to make myself understand, to subdue the frustration.

I work hard, I work long hours, I work consistently and methodically (most of the time). I put energy into what I do, whole-hearted attempts, ideas dragged from my hibernating creativity, disturbing the sleeping mammal that buries itself deep within the depths of my subconscious to just try something different, something new. I have been told, in this job as in others, that I am not ‘pixel perfect’, that I am not the greatest designer, that I don’t live and breathe imagination, that I don’t excite the creative juices needed to allow new designs to thrive on. But I do try. I really do.

I have ideas in my head. They are there, waiting. For my tax bill to be paid? For myself to become so despondent that I leave? For a mortgage to be achieved? For children to be born? I don’t know.

But they are there, all of them, huddled together, screwed up tight, bunched together, occasionally allowed their playtime, their exercise, allowed to infect every thought, every action, until I am forced to rubber-band them back together, causing a knot within me.

There's one for you, nineteen for me...

This morning I logged on excitedly to read Cash Loan's comment to my blog last night, my appetite for replies being whetted by seeing their teaser message hover above my Gmail notifier.

Unfortunately, Cash Loan wasn't, disappointingly, offering me a Cash Loan but trying to find one themselves – either Payday Loans or Cash in Advance they weren’t fussy. Luckily, with my deep rooted knowledge in how the web works, I was able to discover a link subtly hidden within their message for such a blog as they were after. If they had such insight into the way of the web themselves, they need not have posted at all on my blog, merely have found the way to the generous and un-fussy blog themselves (I have refrained from visiting it myself).

I have decided not to publish Cash Loan's poignant and thought provoking message this morning, but would like to take the opportunity to thank them for preying on me, rather than some other hapless blogger who may, just may click on the link and, God forbid, even follow what ludicrous offer said blog may offer in order to receive ‘great wads of cash’.

However much I detest spamming (although I do quite like the inspired way that blog spam leads in with a nice bit of flattery, before conveying its unwanted and intrusive message), Cash Loan struck a chord.

Last night, I completed my tax return for 05/06.

I am not good at maths at the best of times. I needed a maths tutor to scrape my GCSE up to somewhere near my other grades in year 11. From the heady heights of a B, I then repeated my maths GSCE no less than three years later in my first year at University. Apparently, 39% is officially not a pass, the official fail cut off is 35% so I was laughing (or, actually, a little bit tearful, but a pass is a pass nonetheless and who needs to know how to draw matrices anyway).

Maths and money together form an all-powerful, terrifying evil Mumm-Ra The Ever Living power in my life (I, of course, am assuming the character of the swift, sexy and agile beauty that is Cheetara, if anyone’s interested). They unite together to form this omnipotent living dead terror, that haunts me in the night and thrives feeding off my never-decreasing overdraft, hidden in the harmless paper leaves of every invoice and pay check like a snake curled seemingly innocently in the long grass.

I am not bad with money. I don’t buy clothes, or if I do they come from one of several high street supermarket chains, or if I’m feeling fit and healthy, from a lengthy rifle through the disarrayed rails of TK Maxx. I have not bought an item of clothing since I arrived in New Zealand in July, and my luggage did not.

I don’t buy CDs, I don’t eat expensive food (I know exactly how much a tin of beans cost), I don’t drink vast quantities of alcohol (unless someone else is paying, naturally).

I have been self employed on and off since I left University. This is now my fourth tax return and I am well aware that the Tax Man will strip me of every penny that I have saved to offer in sacrifice to his all-consuming self at the end of January each year.

Last year, having been self employed for only 3 months of the year 04/05 in total, passed by relatively uneventfully. I even got a healthy rebate and praised the Tax Man for his generosity in giving me money back I thought had been consumed by the Inland Revenue forever. I am painfully honest, every invoice, every receipt is noted and accounted for. My tax bill, in reflection, doesn’t really so much as reward me for good behaviour as mock me for being a sincere and law abiding citizen. However, once a year tax has to be paid, and I have to be financially crippled.

Of course I have a tax account. Of course I put money into my tax account, each month (or whenever a client sees fit to pay me, which rarely coincides with being 30 days after I’ve actually invoiced them).

Well, I did anyway.

Until my car died.

My tax bill, now hitting double figured because the nice people at the Inland Revenue thought it would be a good idea to not only rip the very financial heart out of me but plunge me into further debt by demanding a contribution to the next tax year, would have been achievable without that great dark ink stain, swelling to form a financial vortex on my otherwise relatively stable financial situation.

Last night, looking back at my purchase, my beautiful Honda Civic complete with climate control (nope, still not sure exactly what it does other than blow cold air whatever setting I have it on) and a vast array of warning lights (you haven’t got your seatbelt on, the door is open, the door is open AND you haven’t got your seatbelt on, oh look and now someone in the back has taken theirs off too, and just a reminder it is under 3 degrees outside so it might be icy so they really do need to put their seatbelts on), I would have rather had the funds to pay my tax bill and had our uncomfortable yet reliable-to-the-moment-it-started-spewing-yellow-liquid-from-the-water-tank Rover 214 which has no doubt been mended swiftly and is giving its new owner many hours of pleasure after a devastating purchase for £50 earlier this year.

On the other hand, Newfy wouldn’t have fitted in the Rover 214. Whether that means that we would have had to get a smaller dog to fit the car, or a larger car to fit the dog, I’m not sure.

There were consultations with my mum last night. She is like Arch Angel Gabriel’s secretary, who has tight control of his purse strings and a strong hold of his wayward ego. No money for that miracle this month. You’ll have to hold off that vision until the gas bill has been paid and then we’ll see what we have left over. She won’t buckle to a trembled bottom lip, owing money is debt and debt needs to be solved, end of. She effectively manages a budget of millions and deals with my personal crisis of a few thousand with the same swift, unfaltering approach.

Then, once she had left me to wallow in my own self pity, came the tears. The tears cascaded into a massive messy pool of wailing and blubbing and an attempt to solve my financial crisis by blindly and erratically searching on the internet to see if the Inland Revenue were flexible on this sort of thing.

My boyfriend came to mend my fractured self later in the evening, himself in a substantial amount of debt following his return from New Zealand. I wailed uncontrollably that things just weren’t fair, that I’d worked so hard in a job I didn’t like, in a career I hated, putting in every hour freelancing to top up my salary.

The evening was resolved by the realisation that drastic measures were needed. I am, to put it bluntly, suffering a financial embuggerment. I have no money. I am skint. I am worse than skint, I am awaiting a huge financial shafting like a hurricane advancing on the horizon. This isn’t the usual I am variably skint, no money to go to this gig but enough money to put petrol in the car. This is no holds barred, completely and totally without cash. I have money in my account at the moment, but that money is tainted, marked with the blood red stain of the Tax Man, awaiting its collection patiently, awaiting to be invested, to be counted, to join the millions of virtual coins that will give themselves up to the Inland Revenue on January 31st.

I am poor to the point that even visiting friends, my one indulgence, my addictive expensive hobby (living in Cornwall, everywhere is a long way) will have to be instantly curtailed. Phone calls will dissolve into text messages until my free ones are used up, when emails will have to finally take their place.

Of course I understand taxes are needed. I understand what they are for. I am happy to contribute to the state, to stand up and be counted. I just wish they didn’t want to count quite so much.

I hope my family and friends appreciate heartfelt messages in Christmas cards instead of gifts this year. Although I have a few quid I can redeem in Tesco online if anyone fancies a festive pork pie or Christmas croissant.

The Prodigal WebStress Returns

It has taken me just over a month to write my 101st blog.

Not to say that its actually taken me an entire month to write the blog itself, just to find my way back to my blog.

I did think at one stage, in the murky weeks within this post and the last, that I might never write in it again. Something in a time that had past, a part of my life that had concluded, like my never cared for and much neglected MySpace page (of which I apologise to all those people who send me messages demanding some vague acknowledgement of my virtual presence and remain reciprocal comment/message-neglected).

In The Exhaustion, the few weeks directly following my last blog, where poorliness fused with exhaustion effortlessly to allow puppy wee to wash over and consume me (not literally), I couldn't imagine ever managing to scrape back the time I had once taken for granted in writing my blogs. As Newfy grew, so frustratingly did my workload and, sadly, my backfat as my once rigorous and almost commendable exercise regime deflated and sat neglected in an uncomfortable position not exactly at the back of my mind, more in-mind-just-enough-to-enduce-guilt-but-not-enough-to-get-up-at-5am-to-fit-in.

Every second became a precious commodity. Every moment of my time calculated and assigned to a specific task, whether I was willing or not. My day became like a Rubix Cube - slide one event here, slot another in here. Newfy's toilet and exercise breaks were fitted in and around angry Skype faces and verbal abuse to my long suffering Project Managers about various clients clients and unsavoury feedback that triggered yet more angry Skype faces and verbal abuse, sleep was fitted in and around Newfy's night time excrement escapades.

Despite my exhaustion, I look back over the last month and fondly regard it, now in the comfortable and safe haze of complete night's sleep and non-ammonia smelling floors, as the happiest month of my year so far.

Newfy is now roughly the size of a small car (if a small car were the same size as a Labrador, but it all depends which angle you're looking from). She urinates only in the house now when she is desperate or over excited (much like I imagine my bladder will go as I imagine incontinence will welcome me with open arms like an old friend in my advancing years) and sleeps beside me during the day, waking only to eat and humour me and act vaguely puppy like by playing with various bits of foliage in the garden. My boyfriend and I are the overly proud and doting parents who say ‘I know other people say their dogs are clever but Newfy really is’ in sycophantic tones that even induce nausea in me on occasions.

Gradually my life is resuming, she is moulding around fragments of a life that I once had, or rather they are fitting themselves gradually in and around her. Work is subsiding, or at least sheer exhaustion and overwhelming despondence has finally reunited my overly zealous working attitude with a healthy dose of remembering that I don’t actually like being a web designer, especially not one that has to pander to the ever changing, continually erratic and constantly unfathomable ideas of agency clients.

It is at least a position that I am familiar with, a bed of nails but a bed nonetheless, selling my soul as a creative whore, legs in the air, yes I’ll make that rollover in pink and orange, yes I’ll put an unsightly flash across a once beautiful banner, yes I’ll change that back to the version I originally designed despite introducing several stages of ill conceived redesigns commissioned by your oh so misguided selves, lie back and think of England, its only a job, its only money.

A brief engagement with inciting passion, commitment and enthusiasm in my job was swiftly rewarded with the reminder that I don’t really like my chosen vocation after all and once reunited with my former WebStress self, after a short deviation into the un-chartered territory of entertaining the notion of career potential, I began this morning to, well, not so much as relax, but start to sow the formerly nurtured but now sadly neglected delicate seedlings of understanding that if I work every conceivable moment the work still won’t get done so a few mislaid time fragments to return to a fraction of the normal abuse of time that most workers harness throughout their day isn’t such a bad thing.

I didn’t get it quite right today. But I did finish bang on time, if I’m honest a good 10 minutes before hand (but my conscience wasn’t happy about it, I had some serious negotiation to do). The fact that I had started an hour and ten minutes earlier than normal somewhat overshadows this achievement, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

So in recapturing elements of my former life, I have gained back the ability to sit at my computer out-of-hours without feeling physically sick, and tonight, after a dry-run writing a few severely neglected correspondence yesterday, I have been able to type, Flash’s Actionscript panel folded neatly away, Photoshop hidden out of view, work email closed and almost-kind-of-not-really-but-it’s-a-good-first-try forgotten.

Returning to my blog has been like the awkward meeting of two once inseparable, dependent soul mates. Over the last month I have laid in bed at night, seeing the paragraphs trickle into formation, an endless conversation with myself, like I would have done with my stories if I had been writing my blog and filtered out these thoughts that I was so used to exhaling during stolen moments during my day.

It hasn’t been effortless. It is strange to see my uncensored words, my fingers typically only escaping from their design confines during the day for restrained, polite work emails. I have said nothing. It is rare when I write I write anything of intention. Paragraphs will appear sailing away from the vague area of concern. But it is also rare that I sit down to write without knowing what I will write about, without knowing where to start. I wasn’t intending to do a catch-up, but it has unfolded that way, in uneasy chunks, a fragment and then an abrupt turn, too many thoughts, too many lost over this last month.

Tomorrow I will attempt to at least in some way talk about something vaguely topical.

Perhaps a witty and informative discussion on the recent revelation that pasties may not, after all, have originated from Cornwall, and may be a conception of our smug Devonian neighbours as cited on the BBC news website today (I was not too concerned at this revelation as the Cornish have a somewhat tentative evidence of cave paintings indicating their presence in 8,000BC Cornwall).

Perhaps.