Something New

I have time and yet my time elapses leaving me frustrated and disillusioned. Each day I age and I am aware of an accelerating sense of purposelessness, my sight is increasingly ineffectual in dim light and likewise my desire for life diminishes as the light of youth fades.

My daughter is a celebrity and I am not. She has a circle of self-defined fabulous friends and I have long walks alone with my dog. We rarely talk and when we do it is over the phone, she will set down the handset and use hands-free; we will converse about nothing, our words for all in her proximity to hear. The dog enjoys being out and about, when we are out she can run and run but when we return she will lay forlorn and wait for my wife to return. I am sure she lives for her predisposition to flush out game and my wife’s affections. All else is disappointment.

I live on the side of a hill and today the hill fog matches the colour of the walls of my bedroom. It is silent except for the ringing in my ears and a stiff wind that is shaking the trees, but only a fraction of the changing air pressure or the movement of the branches gets through my windows. I have some paid work to do but it is dull and I cannot help but put it off. There is wood to chop, a house to clean, some food to prepare. I have a friend to ring another to see. Tonight I plan to go to see people in a village pub near where I used to live, but I may not. I used to go frequently, local and accessible, although I was an outsider, and a socially inarticulate one at that, I got by. Sometimes I felt one of them, generally middle aged like myself or a little older.

At 5pm my daughter’s latest venture is on the second channel. It’s an hour or two away yet but I have yet to work out what I shall find as an excuse for not watching. Still, hosting a 5pm teen show should hopefully mean that she will be mostly covered up. Made me laugh yesterday to see a female journalist from the Daily Mail bemoaning a bar where the on-duty all-girl waiting staff was dressed not so much differently from off-duty porn stars. At 11pm my daughter will be making gags about porn and flirting outrageously with her guests. My daughter is on the Daily Mail’s hit list of inappropriate young women. Little do they know that their ageing proprietor has been sleeping with my daughter’s ‘second best friend’ on and off for a while now; maybe the journalist was disappointed with her own ability to reach the parts of the organisation that others could fellate so easily.

I could pose a few questions for the journalist. What is the good of drinking poison in the hope that revenge will be served upon those who’ve trespassed against us? Do I give something of value to myself when I am bitter about my failures? Why do I drink my own vitriolic poison and hope for the best? I don’t think she’ll get it though. Apparently during a photo opportunity outside the bar one of a passing group of lads shouted she should get her tits out and then had voluntarily retracted after noticing she didn’t have any. Her point was that nothing had moved on and that feminism had seemingly lost ground again to male chauvinism. And where’s the economic imperative in that love?