Only a tiny number of people can match my probably irrational loathing of the song ‘The Living Years’ by Mike and the Mechanics. The opening bars are to me the musical equivalent of fingernails down a blackboard. And yet I picked up on a sliver of the lyrics, beautifully sung, it must be said, by Paul Carrack, that has always captured my imagination. It goes like this:
‘So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
It’s the bitterness that lasts’
In fact, the rest of the lyrics, pompous and contrived though they are (in my opinion), hold a resonance for me, those dysfunctional relationships I have enjoyed – this is almost certainly not the right word – throughout my life.
This time, and you will appreciate that I cannot go into specifics “in the living years” – you will have to wait for the dead ones, assuming I am not the one who is dead – but I do wish there was some kind of handbook, a design for life, if you will, that I could call on, to tell me how to deal with relationships, particularly with people I love but don’t live very near to. Actually, everyone.
I have taken time to think too much about stuff in recent days and one thing I have realised, or maybe remembered, is that I like, I absolutely need, plenty of time on my own. When I was a young, I locked myself away with my train set and later my music. Wherever I am, I need ‘me’ time because I can feel my head starting to explode. Moreover, my recent ramblings about how I have increasingly turned into a hermit were wide of the mark. This is how I have always been. I am, on occasions, able to be with groups of people, family, friends or sometimes both. But it must be on my own terms or I become the moodiest fucker on earth.
‘Something’ has now happened in my life which I can neither explain nor write about (see ‘the living years’ stuff above) but it’s left me quite low. I don’t think I have consciously abandoned anyone, unless I really didn’t like them, but for all the ‘I’m alway there for you at the end of a phone’ kind stuff, I think – and in one real life, happening in plain sight – I’m being consciously abandoned. Worse still, I think I deserve it.
People must look at me and think: ‘What an absolute shit’. Anti-social, embittered, always angry, beyond help. Well, the beyond help bit is true, if the help you are referring to is NHS psychiatric services. I’ve been slowly slipping of the horizon of many people’s lives, quite possibly because of who and what I am.
Today, I’m not moving. I was going out in the hope of seeing people, but I’m not now. Instead, I’m going to think too much and wonder why it is that relationships are so hard and why I am so bad at them.
