crap at friends

It’s one of those deeply embedded psychological niggles carried through life, how I am apparently bad at making and keeping friends. How I apparently alienate people. Even now, a proper adult somehow with a wife, and fatherhood pending, it is a thing I am angstily sucked back to.

What is actually wrong with me?  

It feels bad and arrogant to think or express in any type of way, but I occasionally wonder if it isn’t because most people are stupid and do not want to engage or discuss or converse on the same level. People are hostile when they sense someone is brighter than they are. Intelligence can be threatening and unattractive.

And yet I genuinely do not think I am all that intelligent. (Not just saying that to appear slightly less of a twat). I do not and cannot speak with any serious authority about anything. Neither specialist niche things not anything wider, difficult or complex: religion or politics or Big Stuff.

Perhaps I am just a boring, self-indulgent idiot. My wife recently fell asleep when I was attempting a sincere outpouring of feelings. She is quite pregnant and has rocky energy levels at the moment but this also happened before she was pregnant.

The difficulty of making friends in adulthood is a broadly known and relatively well discussed thing. But I found it hard to make friends right the way through. A loner in the primary school playground, on the periphery of friendship groups at big school, part of small aimless college sets, living alone for much of my twenties, terminal singledom – not for the want of trying though, man I tried hard. There were mates, football teams, old friends who came and went and occasionally still come and go but with ever-decreasing regularity.

For the last decade or so my work life has been isolated and confined. For the last few years or so my social life has been virtually non-existent. Stay home, read books, watch films, walk the dog, spend no money. Perhaps a once or twice a year drink with sporadic friends I don’t really know that well. My best mates are Spotify and Netflix and Kindle.

Impending parenthood presents a new opportunity. Many of the solid regular good adult friends you see around, of this early middle age, are friends because of their children. This commonly shared and synchronised interest in pregnancy, labour, childbirth, new babyhood – this stuff can bind you. Maybe more so for mums than dads, I don’t know.

Our formal NCT classes are over now, those groups where half dozen or so couples sit around in circles and are explained physiological things and poked into discussing their fears by a kind, mumsy sort of lady.

On one of the final meetings, when our couples separated and it was the men’s turn to go to the pub, I was the last to leave the community hall, exchanging a few words with my wife beforehand. Nobody waited, nobody told me where they were going, nobody let me know via the Whatsapp message group. After heading to an assumed pub and walking around for a while I had to message to ask, finding they had walked in completely the opposite direction and were in a different pub ten minutes’ walk away.

“Wouldn’t like to go to battle with you bastards!” I joked when I finally found them in a beer garden, “let’s just leave the prick there, eh?” And we all laughed like men. But I have always felt like the prick who is just left there. Yesterday I read a fantastic piece about childbirth and shared it to the group. Nobody replied for hours. Why? Because everyone thinks I’m a prick? But why does everyone think I’m a prick?

I don’t know.

What will happen the other side of the trauma, if and when we have our little bundles of joy and despair and angst: that is anyone’s guess. Will we actually bond better then, will we become like proper friends, or will that stuff be mainly for the mums again?


At June 2019.

We men didn’t bond better. The women did, after a fashion. Though it still appears a little fraught with social awkwardness and affecting total competence. No messages on the men’s Whatsapp group at all.


trying harder

It was like I’d suddenly announced a newly sprouted penis, such was my brother’s whooping theatrical incredulity at the news. On revealing the pregnancy to him and his wife at our childhood home, they seemed shocked and surprised and pleased. Their children, aged 11 and 8 and also in the near vicinity, understandably seemed more indifferent.  “Weird” was the verdict of my niece.

I sensed that although my brother and his wife had never probed and would never concede it, they had more or less assumed this was off the agenda for us. It would not happen. Perhaps it was wonder enough that I found someone with whom to share my life after so many barren years in my 20s, a period when they appeared to smirkingly speculate about my sexuality from time to time.

And now we appeared to have our modest lifestyle sorted: our dog, nice enough house and our relatively low income. It was clear I was not earning much money. My other half was doing ok in her steady job though and we were getting by. Surely we would not upset that with a new human being. That would be silly.

But this pregnancy news presents a whole other dimension.

Later on, after the initial shock had subsided, a mile or so into a long walk with the dogs and kids, my brother said, “well if you sat down with a spreadsheet it wouldn’t work, but…”  While this was eventually followed by a more positive spin and ways it could work out with the help of our parents, those words stuck with me. They rang around my head for days because I knew they held a cold bleak truth.

I still scrap by month to month, sniffing out the next few hundred quid, and the next few hundred quid. I work hard but continue to exist with horrible insecurity. My mental landscape is defined by my bank balance, how achievable the next bankable few hundred quid will be, when it will arrive in my account, how much I will have to politely chase for it, what the next job will be.

How sustainable is that when your wife has to go on an all too brief maternity leave, when you are looked upon to provide more, to ‘man up’, to try harder? It is not all that sustainable, admirable, manly or generally good.

Waves of sickening nausea are not currently hers alone. Profound worry now skewers me regularly, deep in the pit of my stomach. Guilt for my slightly indulgent lifestyle which I often feel when closing a book and finishing a coffee at lunchtime. Are you working hard enough? What more could you be doing? Are you just in essence a massively idle prick? Sometimes I voice this and am severely rebuked by my wife. ‘This is not helpful to you or me.’ Of course she is right, but it’s a program I have difficulty overwriting.

There was a meltdown of sorts while walking the dog alone a couple of days after telling my brother, back home. Leaning against a gate at a favourite spot, watching the sun set over the rolling green hills the bigness of it all came crashing in, the life-changingness, the responsibility, the finances, the money, the insufficient funds, the emasculating inadequacy, the potential being who will ultimately hate me for their boring empty scrimping frugal childhood. Panic and despair and frustration and stupidity and an almost out-of-body sensation. My red face and tears confused the dog. That was weird.

Should I look for other work and another reliable income stream? Easier said than done perhaps, but I suppose I should try. How I despise the idea of a boss, authority, judgement, tediously mind-numbing work. How will we manage with the dog? She could go and stay with my parents and their dog and that would be fine. I would hate it though. I would painfully miss the creature, the only thing that reliably makes me smile most days. And I would trade it for probable misery and money? Would I? Please no, don’t let it come to that.

Plenty of people do this though. They take on more work when faced with greater responsibility, arguably the ultimate domestic responsibility. They unthinkingly make sacrifices because they would do anything for their kids. I am no different and should accept it, buckle up.

Adaptability is something I have traditionally considered myself good at.  I have moved a few times across a central belt of Britain, had a number of very different jobs, experienced no small amount of change. A few years ago now, for around eighteen months I wrenched myself into a recruitment consultancy largely populated by idiots. It was awful but it was regular reasonable money.

This impending phase of work appears the most formidable: a biblical swell of digits which I will heroically surf upon or drown beneath or thrash through.  I cling with dumb hope to ideas: being miraculously saved by a huge job, a new professional relationship bearing spectacular fruit, an old one coming back around, offering something solid and dependable, some random opportunity. Wishful thinking.

first scan

Everything dissolves away when you see those wiggling pixels on that screen for the first time. All the cynicism, the fears and worry. It represents so much, that squirming shrimp-like shape, jiving around in its bat-cave, that tiny zone of distilled life where a pulsating beatbox can be seen jack-hammering away with absolute urgency. For a morbid moment you wonder about the entire working lifetime of that heart, where or when it will stop. Worst case scenario: weeks or months. Best case scenario: a century? That heart is the conductor, the boss. How little we think about our actual hearts, how much we unthinkingly bastardise the shape for emojis, the word to mean anything we have feelings about.

The detail is phenomenal. The arc of its head, the blimp of its nose, feet, toes. You will get photos printed, and accidentally avoid having to pay for them. Photos will be taken of those photos to email people. Your mum is desperate for you to tell your brother now, but you want to be able to see his face when you do. Not so easy.

Later that night you beat yourself up for not thinking to take a video on your phone.

Earlier that morning, while walking the dog, you had pondered again the whole ‘living in fear’ subject. It’s constantly hard for you to avoid, in large part due to your unpredictably sporadic work and finances. But you remind yourself this baby thing is no different to big relationship commitment. Never committing might often seem like the easiest option if you’ve been badly burnt or consistently suffer rejection, as I did for roughly a decade. There is no risk because there is no chance of being hurt, destroyed, or just as painful, having a relationship slowly and sadly fade out. Risk can be eliminated if you choose not to invest, not to work. A big part of boringly conventional life and love involves taking a deep breath and hopefully, cluelessly leaping into the unknown. It’s almost universally terrifying.

You squeeze her hand in the darkened room. The cheerful, likeable young Welshman, angles the screen towards her. You see tears glisten in her eyes and manage to contain your own.

connection speeds

For the past three years, approaching Christmas Day I’ve done a job at a children’s hospice. They arrange for an excellent Father Christmas to visit the place in an exciting way through some local emergency services and I take pictures of it.

This year the whole thing was marked by the absence of a huge character. In previous years this kid, aged 9 or 10, had been the biggest character by far. He was the boss kid, organised everyone into place, set the agenda, demanded people sing Christmas carols louder – although he was always the loudest. He was the first to run over and leap into Santa’s arms, improbably confident for any kid, endlessly energetic, he just did not stop.



Light Googling revealed local news articles saying the kid had an extremely obscure medical condition of the type only a handful of people suffer in the world. His parents had a number of his organs donated when he died. How must that itself affect you? Knowing your dearly beloved kid is being sliced up for his organs?  Perhaps the knowledge that parts of him are living on, helping other people live on, perhaps that outweighs it. It must.

Here was a kid infused with a life-force and energy so vivid and animated and in-your-face loud. In certain moods it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to find him an annoying little gobshite. Then you found out he died. It affected me more than I might have expected, because I dumbly hadn’t expected it. But if you keep going back to a children’s hospice for a few years running you are likely to encounter sad stuff.

But still… not him. Not THAT kid.





Last night, Christmas Eve Eve, we went to a drinks and nibbles evening at the house of some friends on the other side of town. It was an unusual thing for us to socialise like this. We don’t have many friends as a couple or go out that much generally. I can’t remember the last party or social gathering I or we went to at somebody’s home.




caravan of love (and loathing)






This is when it begins and my sap starts to rise.










friendship fades


Throughout pretty much all my twenties I considered myself quite a loner, I lived alone and did stuff alone, holiday, travel, meals, sex, gigs, endless cinema trips. You can scroll down a few years and see posts relating to this.


But I have never considered myself successful. You might try to spin it nicely for me if you are my mum or my wife or someone who likes me, but the objective truth is I have never been all that successful in anything. In fact, my current bank balances indicate I have never been less successful than I am right now.



Even then though, that one will probably fade in and out of your life. There might be a spell when you don’t see them for a year or two or three; perhaps longer, and you miss them from time to time. You wonder if they miss you, if you crop up on their friend landscape, in their dreams.













unfriendly rivalry









We were working at a thing recently, the only two of our kind at the thing, shoulder to shoulder, pointing our lenses. The people all looked and smiled down his lens of course, not knowing or caring who the hell I was. Mike was the Main Guy who everyone knew and this was his territory. He was all smooth-moving, elegant and waterproof. I was the bumbling interloper, the awkward fraud, the clumsy imposter. He was a few seconds late for one of the key moments which punctuated the event and a main organiser delayed proceedings, visibly flustered by his absence. “Where’s…  where’s Mike?” She vaguely appealed to me. Other people looked for him too, twitchy. I shrugged. While working at laptops a few feet apart, we both spoke to the person sitting between us. Between me and him though, as ever, not a glance, a nod, a word.  His pictures were everywhere the next day. Mine were nowhere.


when worry wains

Oh hello, how you doing? Good weekend? Mine?  Well yes actually, this May bank holiday weekend was excellent because we did very little indeed.  And I’m not just saying that because I don’t want to talk about my weekend because look, few hundred more words down there.

When a guy in the pool mentioned the upcoming bank holiday I was annoyed. Really? There’s another bank holiday? We only just had Easter. I was mainly annoyed because bank holidays and weekends don’t tend to mean as much to me as they might to those in regular employment. I still feel the press to work, to go and sit at my desk if I’m not out of the house working. And because the bank holiday would present yet another obstacle to me being paid by various clients.

Getting paid remains one of the most infuriating things about freelance life. A job is never over when you have delivered the work. The job is only ever over when you see the money in your bank account, and sometimes not even then. Between those two things there can be weeks and months, endless emails and phone calls politely prompting and reminding with appropriate levels of levity and seriousness. It is a battle to maintain tight-lipped professionalism when conducting a simple online transaction can be the simplest thing in the world, and when these are never monstrously large sums.  Naturally they matter to me though. I make very little money and every few pounds matters to me.

It is this worry and stress about getting paid and not getting paid which you live with, day to day, your mental climate dictated by what those numbers in your bank accounts say, how many digits long they are, how much they are likely to plummet with further outgoings, bills, monthly business expenses, mortgage payments. They impact your esteem and ego. Having recently calculated your annual income, it is pathetic, paltry, embarrassing. You are plainly not successful.

And yet here you are, existing actually quite nicely. How does that work? You like your lifestyle, your house, your wife, your dog, your walks. Outside of worrying about money and work, the car screwing up, scrimping a bit, never going on holiday, most other things are all pretty good thanks.

-But do I deserve this? Have I earned it?

Please shut that shit up right now brain, just for a moment, just for a weekend. Relax and enjoy what you have.

Nobody said that outside my brain. It was something that seeped in gradually as we sat there in our quite nice conservatory, reading our books and drinking tea, rain flecking the windows, clouds flying overhead, the dog grumbling and sighing on the floor. Simple pleasures. We could have been 10, 20, 40 years older. But we are certainly not young-young now.

Although that itself presented the topic of discussion which forever bubbles away under the surface. Children.

Do we want them? The selfish knee-jerk rationale for ‘certainly not now anyway’ is my perpetual floundering sense of worry about work and finances. Bringing anything else into that equation would probably send me spiralling towards nervous breakdown, or at least more consistent fear and self-loathing. Either way, it would not be good. Would it?

Although a flipside might be that it occupies me better and makes me feel like I do have a purpose and reason and I am not an entirely useless semi-unemployed piece of shit. (Unless I am entirely useless at it, which is possible). It could also be ok to flexibly work around. We could work it out. Could we?

But we are happyish now, with this, with us, our fur baby down there. This is ok. It would all be terrifying, and who knows if we even could have kids? 40 is now closer than 30. We are not exactly in the bloom of youth.

You live with a dark premonition of profound regret in later life. Isolation too, having no family and nobody around you. In later years you might see your extended family – niece, nephew, brother – maybe once or twice a year at best? So, no support, nobody who really gives a shit in a country with a massive ageing population and an NHS which could by then be fully disintegrated. And what if one of us dies much earlier than the other?

We had those discussions, as we do. They come and go at almost tidal intervals. Mostly though we enjoyed the house, the rain, the dog, our books, pockets of peaceful unoccupied space in our brains usually occupied by worry and stress, Mozart filtering through from the other room, still somehow feeling faintly fake (is this really our life now?) but fuckit, day bleeding slowly into night, just being there together and not doing much. The dog groaned loud and long, turned over. We both looked at her, the beautiful embodiment of calming therapy, then at each other, smiled. For a time it was peaceful and meditative, to be cherished.

Worry will come back, of course it will. Stress, anxiety, nerves, all that; you can’t keep them at bay indefinitely. But you can effectively keep it at arm’s length for a time. It turns out, surprisingly, in the right circumstances you actually can.

Dear April 2018 Me

The future leeringly dangles hopes and fears in our faces.














Lots of love,

March 2017 Me.

middle of the night

We woke at around 3.30am, I sensed me a little before you. The wind was howling as it had been for hours, rattling the blinds and slamming the window. It was somehow perceptible even through sleep, through dreams.

They were unpleasant dreams, both of ours, as edgy and unsettled as the weather outside. Perhaps because of it. Someone brutally attacking our dog while out on a walk in my dream, followed by a wider world issue, a war, trying to edit a photograph I’d taken of South America from space. It looked good and felt important.

In your dream my Mum had a stroke while we were on the phone to her. It upset you, clearly reopening your large allotment of brainspace dedicated to illness and death. It made me fearful.

Did we wake up around the same time or had one of us woken the other? Who can say? Now in this middle of the night unsettled wakefulness, everything seemed fearful. There was a grave sense of immediate dread. What was that creak? The dog shuffling round or an intruder come to kill us?

What if our fearful unconscious synchronisation of unpleasant dreams actually meant something? Like it might in a film. What if something had happened to Mum, or Dad?

Considering the reality was distressing. I realised how I take my Mum for granted, her permanent twittering, eminently mockable presence. I imagined what a colossal hole it would leave in our family if Boom, game’s up sorry, no more Mum. It wasn’t impossible. They were both of a certain age, although both in ostensibly rude health. It could change everything about our family. It was frightening and shocking to ponder the reality if death were to happen like that, rather than creep up quietly. She does so much, far more than Dad, more than she should. She moans but you suspect quietly loves most of it, feeling needed, being so much better at handywork than Dad.

Shit. I hope she’s ok.

Has North Korea tested another long range missile? Or maybe they’ve actually gone for it and made the Japanese mainland with one, sparking World War Three. Perhaps that howling wind isn’t entirely natural. The distant fallout from something? What if a major global incident like that happened in the middle of the night UK time, around 3 or 4am when most people are asleep, unsuspecting, not checking Twitter every half hour, able to slide away and die almost unconsciously as passive Putin’s shockwaves rippled out? Would that be the most humane way to conduct nuclear war and destroy a civilisation? Maybe it wouldn’t work like that.

The brain freewheeled on and on, entirely conscious. You tried to tame it, control it, put yourself on a football pitch because dreams of playing football were the best, if they stayed with you playing football. It didn’t work.

Everything was unstable, on edge, dark, unsettled. The wind flumped the window closed again. You got up to pee, I checked my mobile phone. Nothing.