Anchorage

I haven't posted a story on here in a while, and seeing as that is certainly one of the functions of this blog I suppose it's high time. Therefore...

It's quite short, I ran it off on a wet afternoon in the coffee shop. Any thoughts to verbalslapstick@gmail.com. Hope you enjoy it.

Bushes, barbecues and blatant sentimentalism

My last post was largely about sunshine, and the thought of sunshine can only lead to thoughts of barbecues. Surely eating outside, under the virgin sky, with a slab of meat thick enough to make your arteries shiver clenched between sauce-smeared fingers, surely this is the only way to be. Unless you’re a vegetarian. Or an agoraphobe.

Obviously barbecue season is a way off yet. It would be prudent to wait until the weather is a little more predictable in its generosity. No one likes eating in the wet and the cold; there are few things as pathetic as a rain-sodden barbecue. But I had a quick shufti outside at my back garden and thought to myself: “Yes, this is a beautiful and fertile land, here I may master the element of fire to enhance my repast. And probably have a few tinnies as well, and maybe watch the football through the living room window if I move the telly round a bit.”

It made me a bit nostalgic for other favourite barbecue spots as well. Firstly, the garden at my old house, which was a tangled and overgrown mass of briars and nettles when we moved in. I and my saintly, hard-working housemates transformed it over a weekend into a well-groomed and gravelled al-fresco paradise. I had the ‘before and after’ photos on my phone, and I would often amuse my friends and colleagues (and people on the tube. And sometimes people in the street) with the transformation, until I got wasted and lost my phone’s memory card in a club. Let that be a lesson to you, brethren.

The best place I ever had a barbecue was not particularly beautiful. Actually it was a scrubby patch of poured concrete and rotting litter out the front of my mate Mike’s house. It was bordered by a wall low enough to be fundamentally useless as a barrier, but high enough to fall over in the dark to comedic/painful effect. It was, therefore, completely open to the street.

So we’d kick back in ugly deck chairs, drink rubbish beer from warm cans and eat a beguiling but potentially lethal mix of frozen and scorched meat. Sometimes we’d chuck a vegetable kebab on there as well, although we would invariably burn that too. Tinny music would play through knackered speakers and all would be generally right with the world.

The best thing about it? People in the street would stop and say hello, with surprising frequency. Occasionally they’d be people we knew, and they were never too busy to scarf down a free burger, but more often than not they would be strangers who would pause and make time with us. It wasn’t anything particularly profound and I think we talked about the weather in every single case, but it was still pretty cool.

The front garden at my new house has a bush in it. It only needs the one, because the bush is unashamedly, ludicrously big. It takes up the entire space. I don’t really have a front garden, I just have an enormous shrub separating my kitchen from the street. It is so big and entrenched it could plausibly have already been there when construction began, and so the builders simply decided to build my house a metre of so further back. It’s straggly and itchy and I’m pretty sure it once ate a kid that was walking past. The only way I could have a barbecue in my front garden is if I threw a sheet over it and balanced on top, like a cloud from a Super Mario game.

So my front garden is, basically, useless. And it’s not the only one on my street that I would classify as such. Quite a few of them have impractically large pieces of arboreal nonsense taking up most of the space.

But, some might cry, the function of a front garden relates to more than its ability to contain a barbecue and a few chairs. This is a fair criticism (one which, as I hope I’ve made plain, I do not personally believe), and I will address is thus: what, in that case, is your front garden doing?

Is it beautiful? Is it a well kept and watered Eden, one that will both entrance and delight passers-by and show the whole world what a frightfully clever and organised chap or chapess you are? If so... well, good for you, I guess. You can go.

Or is it a grotty little mudhole that you barely have time to set foot in, let alone look after? Is it slowly filling up with crap and rubbish because you haven’t the time to get out and tidy it up? And it’s no good looking out of the window or up at the ceiling Mr. And Mrs. Majority, because I can see you back there looking sheepish.

All this got me thinking about wasted space, and how depressing we seem to find it. There’s always something nice about space which is being put to use, even if that use is simply letting nature do its thing. Apart from the 'hardy perennial crisp packet' and the rarer 'summertime used condom' there aren’t that many species flourishing in the front gardens of my street, and it’s a little disquieting to look at.

Picture a nasty, rain-soaked alley between two high-rises. All it has at the end is a crummy, tagged fence and, I don’t know, some mouldy cardboard boxes. Chuck some binbags down there as well. Looks rubbish, doesn’t it? Now picture the same alley, but build a solid little hut at the end, out of plywood, and put a motorcycle in it. Now it’s not just a crummy old alley, it’s a crummy old alley where you keep your motorcycle.

Am I the only one that seems to find the latter option preferable? Perhaps. But it always seems to me that a space being used for something is more... comforting, maybe, than one clearly going to waste.

Now, going out and tidying up your front garden is going to be a massive bugger. For one thing it’s probably still rainy outside, and it’s a whole lot of extra work that you could probably do without. I sympathise, I really do. I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to do about that bush.

But maybe somewhere down the line you might have a moment to step outside, and when you do, maybe you could give some thought to what you want the space to actually do. Obviously if I had my way you’d just gravel it, chuck some pot-plants on it and start making barbecue plans with your neighbours, but I can appreciate (just about) that that might not be everyone’s idea of a jolly.

There might be another use you could put it to, though. Or there might even be something you would quite like it to say about you, something you could achieve with a day or so’s hard work and then largely forget about. You could just plonk a sculpture out there. Or a birdbox. Or a plastic chair so that sometimes when the weather’s nice you can sit there with a cup of tea and watch the world go by. Just something, anything, that when you walk past it on the way back from work reminds you that this is my space, and this thing is what it is for.

I’m going to show that bush who’s boss at some point. I’ll probably shape it into something humorous first just to cripple its fighting spirit. And when I walk past where it used to rest I’ll occasionally think: “That’s where that bastard bush used to be. I remember how I laughed as I chucked its mangled carcass into the skip.” And, very briefly, I’ll smile to myself. It might work pretty well for you too. And if you do decide to put a barbecue out there, just remember who gave you the idea. I’ll bring buns, and mine’s a Kronenbourg. Cheers.

Grass is riz

For the first time in months, a shining beam of glorious light escapes from gunmetal cloud. The tiniest sensation of warmth tickles across bare skin and with it comes a sense of well-being and satisfaction that we had almost forgotten. We incline our collective faces to the sky for an instant before going back to what we were doing before. A circle of daffodils rise on a grass verge. We decide to leave the raincoat in the car. Spring is in the air.

And how welcome it is. On behalf of you, dear reader, allow me to raise my middle finger to rain, scream obscenities at snow and plant my metaphorical boot right in the metaphorical nadgers of winter in general. In six month's time the idea of snowy fields, cold noses and winter evenings might fill me with a wistful longing, but for now I’m happy for winter to piss off for good. It’s been a long, cold slog (I need not provide a link confirming this, you’ve all seen the flippin’ papers. We almost ran out of grit for the roads. Grit for the roads, people).

The cold months are of particular difficulty for sufferers of Seasonal Affective Disorder (known colloquially as the winter blues). S.A.D. is a mood disorder that may either contribute to clinical depression or affect people who have normal mental health through the rest of the year. I’ll give you the Wikipedia rundown to save you the time:

“Symptoms of SAD may consist of: difficulty waking up in the morning, tendency to oversleep as well as to overeat, and especially a craving for carbohydrates, which leads to weight gain. Other symptoms include a lack of energy, difficulty concentrating on completing tasks, and withdrawal from friends, family, and social activities. All of this leads to the depression, pessimism, and lack of pleasure which characterize a person suffering from this disorder.”

Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? Although S.A.D. is a recognised condition the symptoms above might sound familiar to many more people than have been actually diagnosed. The most important sufferer from these symptoms is, of course, me, and this weekend’s worth of sunshine has done me no end of good.

S.A.D. is generally believed to be related to the amount of light (specifically sunlight) that people are exposed to, largely because of the success rate of ‘light therapy,’ a treatment involving (shockingly) very bright lights. In as many as 85% of cases exposure to bright lights for a timed period each day leads to a reduction in symptoms, a pretty good statistic even allowing for the placebo effect.

Obviously there isn’t as much sunlight around during the winter, but even the average cloudy day is normally brighter than being inside. The problem is winter being such an icy bastard, and conditions generally keeping us indoors. This means less vitamin D (normally obtained from sunlight) and crucially, less exercise.

There are multiple studies linking exercise to increased well-being. Not only does the occasional run around make you physically fitter it also releases the delicious endorphins the keep you cheerful. Anybody that regularly goes jogging knows the feeling of satisfaction and self-righteousness that kicks in after you’ve been running for a while and it’s become clear you aren’t going to die. Very few of us do as much exercise as we ought to, and the rain and cold provide a huge stumbling block even if we were so inclined.

This leads to a depressive cycle that can, in some cases, become self-sustaining. You feel like crap because you aren’t getting enough exercise and vitamin D. So you can’t summon the strength to face the weather and go outside for longer than you can get away with. But the more depressed you get, the more you crave sugar and carbs (another acknowledged effect of S.A.D). Eating more combined with less exercise leads to weight gain, which makes you even more depressed, making you even less likely to face the weather and get some exercise.

Now, running around a bit isn’t going to fix all your problems. It is, however, a good way of reversing the above trend, and also serves to illustrate the following point:

In a self-sustaining cycle, removing one contributing factor may be enough to cause the system to decay entirely.

This is often proved, much to our detriment, in the various ecosystems that humanity likes to play merry hell with around the globe. Remove one element of, say, a food chain, and the rest of the system begins to degrade. A recently noticed and popularised example is the poor old honeybee, whose mysterious disappearance could lead to a devastating effect on world food sources.

However, sometimes a system that is generally agreed to be corrosive can be upset by the introduction of only one positive element. A mixture of problems that together are insurmountable can be rendered mundane by the loss of only one one. Just one action can be enough start a new, more amiable trend.

Knowing is, of course, half the battle, and the above realisation sure comes in handy. It certainly isn’t going to be blue skies from here on out (it’s only March) and there’s always the next winter to come. But taking one single action might prove to be the tipping point on a slide that is positive in nature. I would suggest using that as a motivating factor the next time the weather’s getting you down. Every run around, every visit to the gym, every minute spent out in daylight, every healthy meal you eat is... well, it’s nothing, on its own. But it’s the start of something else, a tiny part of a positive process, and I think remembering it makes things easier. When the weather outside is draggin' you down, it might make it easier if you think to yourself:

“Every moment spent outside is a bit more vitamin D, a bit more exercise, that will make me marginally fitter and marginally happier, and I’ll eat marginally less crap and so be more inclined to exercise, and if it keeps going like this I’ll be a fucking supermodel in six week’s time.”

Spring is sprung. Go outside and see.