Month: July 2021

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Phew

I have been entirely, unintentionally, absent from here for the last week. In my defense, the last week has been particularly stressful for a number of reasons, even bearing in mind just how stressful the previous two weeks had been.

It’s not as if it was stressful for any one particular reason; there was no singular thing that made everything just a little more tiring and impossible to deal with, compared with other days, as much as I almost wish that was the case. (At least then, I’d have a good idea of what to blame, for want of a better way to put it.) Instead, it was a conflation of a bunch of small things — or maybe not entirely small, but at least small enough that I feel as if I should’ve been able to handle it without too much stress — that piled up on top of each other, Jenga-style, daring me to pull out a brick and see how quickly and loudly everything could fall over.

There are weeks (months, if you’re unlucky) when everything feels as if you’re stuck in a cosmic game of “Let’s See What Else Can Happen Now”; times when it feels as if the only respite from one particular problem is when another comes along to divert attention. That’s what it had felt like on a low level for the last few weeks, but last week was very firmly in the region of, just when you think you’ve got this one licked, get ready for its replacement. One of the pets was sick, and less than 24 hours after we get the “it’s okay really” notice from the vet, another one went down with an entirely different problem; it was that kind of week, over and over again.

(Sick pets, as everyone who has a pet knows, is the very worst type of stress because you just want to fix it but are operating in the dark at the very best of times.)

My fingers are crossed that this week will be different, if only because, surely that has to happen eventually. In the meantime, I’m planning on doing posts here every day through Friday to catch up; we’ll see together if the week’s insanity lightens up to allow that to happen, won’t we?

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The Fairest and Dearest

Entirely by accident I found out this weekend that Damon Albarn has a new single out — well, a new track, but those are the closest that we really come to singles in this digital landscape we’re in, let’s be honest — and it left me nostalgic for the musical world I grew up in.

Being British and of a certain age, I was a child of pop radio. Not the pop radio of the United States, where everything is sliced up into particular genres and demographics; the radio I listened to religiously was BBC Radio 1, which played “pop music” with all the vagueness and blurred boundaries that implied. That was part of the joy of it all, though: that if you listened for long enough (which, honestly, meant about half an hour at the most, less if it was a daytime, “mainstream,” show), you’d hear songs you absolutely hated, songs you were in love with, and at least one thing that you’d never heard before. Who didn’t want that?

The entire country listened to Radio 1, it felt like. (That there were so few alternatives helped with that, though; there’s nothing like a captive audience.) It meant that, when it was time to unveil a new single from a popular band or a new album track of some importance or whatever, it not only happened on Radio 1, but it became an event, something that would be teased and trailed, to ensure that you were definitely listening at the right time to hear it.

At the height of Britpop, this was how new Blur tracks — and new Oasis tracks, or anything else by a popular band of white men in tennis shoes holding guitars — were unleashed on the world: hyped across a day or so of shows before the hushed tones of Steve Lamacq or Jo Whiley quietly introduced them.

Three decades or so later, this is how I still expect to discover new Damon Albarn songs. Finding them on Spotify and going, “Wait, is this new?” really doesn’t have the same feel to it at all.

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Is Sizzlin’ Hot

I didn’t properly write about the heatwave, did I…? Let’s chalk that up to heat exhaustion and get it out the way now. (You think I’m joking about heat exhaustion; I’m not.)

I’ve been hot before; I’ve even suffered from dehydration so badly that I almost passed out, although I strongly suspect that’s not anything I should boast about as any kind of evidence that anything I have to say should be taken seriously. That said, take it at the very least as proof that I know what I’m talking about when I say that I’m familiar with heat that people should perhaps not be hanging around in, and then use that as the basis for my telling you that the heatwave in Portland was perhaps the hottest I can remember being in my entire life — and that it lasted for three whole days.

Sure, it got colder at night… but only colder, not necessarily “cold.” Instead, the lowest it managed was the temperature of a relatively hot day, and even that was in the middle of the night as I lay inside a house that never quite managed to get its own temperature below “you’re lying in a pool of your own sweat, sleep is an impossibility.” (At one point, the temperature outside was close to 115C, and inside, it was a “cool” 98C.)

The entire period was an exercise in patience, and in will power. You had to keep remembering that the forecast promised just three days of this particular hell, and you had to tell yourself that you weren’t actually as hot as you really were, while ensuring that you stayed hydrated and kept drinking all the water and ice cubes possible even though both the desire to never move ever again and the need to piss at almost all times were simultaneously overwhelming.

It was three days of barely eating, barely moving, and barely sleeping, all while the air felt so thick you should have been able to slice it with a bread knife. It was an endurance test, and one that I still feel has every chance of repeating whenever the air feels even the least bit warm.