Saturday night and I’m home alone. The evening yawns before me like a cavernous gap of desperate emptiness waiting to be filled. Time was, finding myself in such a situation would inevitably lead to a gnawing despair, to the sense that there was a world of excitement and fun. A world of people who lived in adverts and tasted of heaven. I was Home Alone, and they were out there, alive and fragrant. For some reason, I always imagined they were fragrant. I suspect if imagined these happy peole were smelly, I probably wouldn’t have felt I was missing something. However, I digress.
I was in solitude, a sad doe-eyed loner. In my late twenties, there were a handful of nights I spent Saturday night alone, just me, a couple of bottle of Bulgarian red and a packet of fags on a hot date with Radiohead and Suede CDs. I don’t think I spent more than one Saturday night alone between the ages of seventeen and twenty five ( and that one night was an anomaly, and another story) , so when I hit a run of them, I really was in a state of mental disrepair.
Sometimes it happened because by cause I’d forgotten to arrange something to do, and would wake up in the Saturday morning fug, say hello to the day, and realise I’d got nothing on, and could get hold of no one. One of the drawbacks of living in London is that almost nothing is done last minute. The distances involved to meet anyone, whether a close friend or pissed acquaintance, is such that often weeks of planning are required. Going to the pub becomes the social equivalent of the storming of Omaha beach, and for a disorganised feckless little ne’er-do-well such as myself, unless someone else was doing the organising, I’d often be scrabbling round on a Thursday for something to do Saturday, hoping that my equally disorganised friends had not got themselves anything to do. Fortunately, this was mostly the case. However, those few weeks when I was alone were desparate and depressing. I felt like I’d hit the end of the line of the one-way train to solitude, and I was neve coming back.
Obviously I was over-reacting slightly. My essential point, however is that I hated spending Saturday nights alone, and if I’d been offered a party in exchange for a kidney I would have given it serious though. And after the first bottle of Bulgarian, as The Bends was drawing to a close, I’d have convinced myself that one kidney was enough, and two was being greedy.
I mention all this as a contrast to my present situation. It’s Saturday night, and not only am I spending the night alone, I have chosen to do so, and am looking forward to it with some relish. I want to watch some Teev and Deev. I have books to read, an X Box to play. A hot bath and cup of Hot Chocolate. Maybe smoke a few fags. My guitar is waving at me as I write this too, reminding me it has not been played for some days. I know there is a world of fragrant people out there, I walked past most of them when I popped out to buy some milk half an hour ago. But I am no longer the social junkie of my youth. Now I’m older, and I know people smell, and the pub will still be there tomorrow, and next week, I embrace the inner loner. Sometimes, you need to stop the world, get off, and gather yourself.
Besides, I’ve not had a night in since Monday, and both my kidneys hurt. Thank fuck I’ve got them both to share the burden.
No comments:
Post a Comment