For some indescribably wonderful reason I have been in the most intensely good mood for the last few days. I am now at the point where I consider this mood and think that it must have a limit somewhere. But it just goes on...

Logically thinking, why on earth would I be happy? It's been raining for 5 weeks! But on further reflection I have come to the conclusion that my happiness was borne out of a complex array of feelings that stem from my general ease in my job role after months of 'settling in' and a better idea of what I want to do with my life, meaning a greater sense of belonging in this crazy world. So there.

On even further reflection I wouldn't actually describe it as happiness. I feel it is more an intense release of enthusiasm. Ideas are bubbling over in my head, I am constantly switched on, constantly wanting to know what's happening next and CONSTANTLY feeling frustrated when that energy can't be channeled effectively enough. It's scaring me slightly! But I am humbled at the same time to have unlocked such a panoply of excitement. I don't know how but I suddenly feel that things are possible, that I can go for what I want to do -essentially the world is my oyster.
In London I am surrounded by young, good-looking and sometimes enthusiastic professionals. They do work hard and play hard and the economic climate doesn't seem to have dampened their spirit one jot. I would be lying if I said I didn't want to be one of these people, if only for the perceived glamour. But I also want to be one those people who's exhausted by their work and feels good because it is worth it.

Maybe I am wildly naive, or plain idealistic but still, I am not going to tread on my good-humour- it's spurring me on. I am quietly anxious that this good feeling won't last but I am determined to use it effectively while it's here. Being positive is a big motivator in life, I have no time for pessimism.

I am not really sure what caused this feeling, as I have probably already said. But hey, go with the flow...

This blog entry would perhaps be better if relegated to the privacy of a journal, but I think it is important to share good emotions sometimes. The bad news that pervades so much in this world all too often sets the tone, and what with the wet winter and the dark days, I think it all the more important to remember that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
I went to a friend's house last night, and after a few glasses of wine we got the music on and got dancing in the most cringe-worthy and disjointed fashion, oh but I did have fun! and I do believe it got rid of my cold. There was no reason for the dancing except to just let go and enjoy ourselves.

So, dear reader I hope you are not reading this and feeling disgusted at my impossibly nascent good-humour. I hope instead you are reading this and feeling a bit better about the world, perhaps? because honestly I can think of no good reason why I should feel so good, except that I just do.

An Average Day?

Hello dear readers, I hope some of you are still there and check in occasionally to see what purls of wisdom I have purveyed. Of course I have purveyed nothing recently. I am the only person I can blame for my lack of bloggging -not good form for a man who wants to write for a living. Truth be told there has been resistance in anything to do with writing. I have been rushing about distracting myself with daily life but have been bothered constantly by a sub-conscious feeling. It is like the nagging voice of my mother, and it is telling me that I should be focusing more on what I want to do!

But what is it I want to do? That is a tricky question and I would be being hard on myself to expect to answer it at the age of 23. How many of you know what you want to do? Do any of you have a plan? I don't know and have perhaps been over-burdening myself with the pressure that I must figure out my future plan all in one go and that is probably why I haven't got very far! So baby steps, baby steps...

First of all I am going to be more self--disciplined and make writing a part of my daily life. Even if nothing particularly exciting has happened in the day, I will still write.

I would like to posit that there is always something worth writing about even on the most mundane of days. That is a theory I am going to put to the test. I am going to observe events in my normal daily routine and attempt to write about it, no matter how insignificant they may seem. I believe that with the creativity of language you can make anything interesting and even funny.

In which case, what better way to start than with today - a wet and highly average Monday morning.

After having arrived at work in one shape and remarkably unscathed and dry considering the weather's tormented tendencies these days, I sat down at my desk and did what millions of people across the world do each day - switched on my computer. I then proceeded to the kitchen where I filled the kettle and made my breakfast - a pretty average day so far you might say and you will probably add a pretty boring day as well. Just bare with me.

Once breakfast was safely consumed (I say safely because I have the tendency to attempt multi-tasking when eating, i.e I attempt to read off a computer screen and chew at the same time. Having obviously progressed not much further than Neanderthal eating skills, I tend to accidentally swallow unchewed pieces of granola which then lead to the delightful tune of an epiglottis in flux.) Where was I, oh yes once breakfast was safely consumed with no projectile Heimlich removers employed, I proceeded to gulp my tea (another potential mine-field for me: having not learned from the breakfast that multi-tasking is hazardous, I continue on my path of most-probable doom until inevitably one gulp too much ends up in splattered tea all over my desk-top and most definitely the poor unfortunate colleague sitting opposite me. It is at this point that I retire to the 'restroom' - I need a rest by then, and clean myself up) All this and I haven't even started work yet!

So at about 10.00am and by the time I had finally surpassed my usual morning calamities, I accompanied my colleagues to see the venue for our in-house conference 'Energy Choices'. It is held in Church House, right beside Westminster Abbey and is in itself part of a world-unesco heritage site. It is in a beautiful location and as you step into the Dean's Yard off the abbey, you try hard to believe you are still in London such is the tranquility offset partly by the historic aesthetic. In one of our main conference rooms a plaque tells how Churchill's most solemn speech to the nation, made at Britain's darkest hour in 1940 was broadcast from that very room. It also told of many other occasions during the war when he would broadcast from there.

After this, I went back to work and sat for the rest of the day in meetings. I can give you an idea of how bored I was: At one particularly low point I tried in my head to work out the percentage of one sixth of 60 million. The reason for this being I had read a BBC article the previous day on the perception of overcrowding in Britain. It stated that only 12% of British land is actually developed. Marc then challenged me to ask how much of London counted as a proportion of the population. To cut a very long story short, I had reached the point where I thought I could keep myself amused with mental arithmetic! And the horrifying truth? It did keep me amused. I was also quick to find out how amusing it was for my colleagues as apparently the expression I pull when trying to work out complex sums is akin to a baby that is in the process of filling its nappy.

Once the meetings were over, my manager and I trundled back to our desks bleary-eyed and docile - I'm sure they put something in that ventilation system. My work day was fast-approaching its end, and it had flown by. All that was left for me to do was make the misguided decision to take the Tube home at rush-hour. I pressed my 'bad' place so far into a woman's behind just to nudge myself in that that I felt it appropriate to coo to her in a silly voice "oh this is rather cosy!" -no need to state the bleeding obvious.

I leave it there, as you can see it was an average day and really nothing spectacular happened but I did manage to say something about it. Farewell for now.

Jason Hawkes Photography

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/more_of_london_from_above_at_n.html

I must recommend the above link for the fantastic photography of London. It is my home city but it is easy to forget what it truly looks like when you are so determinedly hunched into your daily routine.

Jason Hawkes took these photos from a helicopter (which cost a vast amount of money to rent) and flew over the Capital snapping these shots of iconic landmarks. In order to achieve the clarity in such a turbulent machine, he used very slow shutter speeds and has the camera fixed on a specially constructed mount with gyro stabilizers.

Good work Jason!

My Week So Far...

I am officially bored. Normally I come home after a frenzied day in the office, the booming voices of my dear colleagues still reverberating around in my head. By this point in the day my synapses are close to snap and I just want to chill out on the couch. But this week the office has been eerily calm and at occasional moments so quiet that apart from the mesmeric whir of the computer machines, you would be forgiven for expecting tumbleweed to skip past and then for Clint Eastwood to appear from the Nuclear Library (in my head a Saloon bar) and challenge me to a duel. As you can probably tell I am bored at work as well!

So I arrive home from the unusually peaceful office somewhat hungry for excitement and it is then that I realize just how calm and quiet my house is. Shame.
But that's how I feel this evening. This week did start out a lot worse. On Monday evening after a day of bothersome toothache, I unwittingly chewed on a piece of stale bread and it caused reverberations of nerve pain through my face so acute that I thought I was going to be physically sick.
So I swore almightily and heartily (softened slightly by the hand clamped to my jaw) and lay on the couch with the expression someone adopts when told their £300 00 car has been smashed. Having adopted said expression for over 12 hours, it is safe to say that I have acquired 56 new wrinkles. (a very exact figure you may say but I do lean in close to the mirror and count)

I went to the dentist the following morning and parked my car ever so slightly illegally in Tesco car park - I don't care though, Tesco have enough money and the very slight inner socialist in me feels smug. I went to the dentist where they know me so well by now that I need not present myself, I just sat there grimace
set and gaze aimed at the tv screen (which seems to perpetually broadcast This Morning - I thought Gigantic Bosum, aka Fern Britten had left)

After what seemed an age (and I know it was because my gaze was so fixed and mesmerized to the TV that I looked like an extra from Shaun of the Dead) the dentist finally called me in.
Now I know my dentist to be the most modest man in the world, so I always try to make that extra effort to convey just how much pain I have been in. I record pneumatic drill noises and inform him that that is mere birdsong compared with the pain in my head, I remind him of atomic explosions in the Far East and insist to him that all this is nothing comparable with my throbbing jaw.
With the explanation over and done with he looks at me in his deadpan way, sighs and says 'right I suppose we had better x-ray it then'. (I have by now had so many x-rays that I could provide half the electricity supply for a nuclear power plant)

He tells me there seems to be nothing untoward on the x-ray (it seems to me that there is nothing on it at all, I suggest they invest in new equipment). He then informs me of his pleasure that there is no swelling in the gum - hurrah! my day has been made, he has finally cracked a comment that is less underwhelming than Titanic.

I leave the dentist clutching a bag of antibiotics and mildly confused still about what could be torturing my root-canaled tooth. I then proceed straight to work whereby I attempt to eat in such a way that A: avoids half of my mouth, and B: makes me look cool. It so happens that one of my work colleagues fears I am having a stroke and starts repeating the FAST mantra out loud in the office.

So there chums is just a little insight into my week so far. In other news, today I happened to see a lorry massacre a bunch of flowers and last night I cooked a salmon risotto so immense it could happily have assisted the UN in their world-hunger relief programme. (it was also so thick it would have insulated an Inuit's igloo)

Goodbye for now.

There is something nagging...

Do you ever have that feeling that beneath the surface, under that thick layer that acts as your buffer to the world, there is something nagging at you? It gnaws subconsciously like a small itch - you always know it is there and it is hard to ignore. I have had that feeling for about two weeks now. I do think of myself as self-aware and I wonder if perhaps other people experience similar feelings constantly but choose (consciously or sub-consciously) to ignore it. It is simply a feeling that something is not right...

The funny thing about life is that it is often impossible to rationally explain away the feelings we experience. I like to sit and muse on them, and then prescribe rational causes in the hope that it will make everything better - for example, I have sat recently and said to myself 'you have just left university, your life has changed, you have started a new job, you have left your friend base in Brighton and have not yet re-established that work/friend balance that is the key to sanity in your new life"...blah blah blah...Presto! I have solved the problem, now what? not so fast. Once these feelings have been given a good dose of rationale, the brain still likes to lay out its cognitive complexities - put simply: the irrational will always win out. I can stand there when my heart is pounding and wonder 'why am I anxious?' and I can confidently conclude that there is no problem, but then I realize that I have to just let it be - eventually the irrational mind will catch up.

So, having said all this, it is in fact true to say that on face value life is swell at the moment. I am on Jury Service. Here you would expect me to be able to relate many interesting anecdotes about the whole process, including the intimate insight that I must be gaining into the court system. Unfortunately, I have spent the first 2 and a bit days sitting in an airport-style waiting lounge where time seems to stop completely and everything in the vicinity dulls into the same grey never-ending pallour.

On the first day I arrived at 9.00am to be shown a DVD with all the information we required on court procedure and an explanation of the civic importance of jury service. I then sat. And waited. I read my book, played tetris 400 times, read Time Out from cover to cover, had lunch, and continued to sit.

Eventually at 3.30 my name was called! I hurried to a register call and was escorted down with 18 others to a court room. Inside we found a modern court and lots of bewigged individuals. The court clerk then read out 12 names randomly from the jury list and unfortunately I was not one of them. I was sent back upstairs where I was told I could leave.

The following day was much the same, except that when my name was called, it was simply to be told I could go home. (This was 5 hours after I had arrived.) On Friday I arrived at 10.15 am. I was told I could leave at 10.40am. I look on the bright side -it was a sunny day and I was free for the whole afternoon to play!

Despite my above explanation of what must seem like jaw-slackening boredom, Jury Service is very interesting. It is unique in that you are put together with a comprehensive and wide-ranging selection of society - people from all walks of life in one room, speaking to people they would perhaps never speak to normally. And oh my do they speak! forget the famous eye-averted etiquette of the London Underground -everyone's blabbing away here and in a way that reaffirms in one's mind that the majority of people are sane and pleasant individuals.

I do however hope that next week I am assigned to a trial because there is only so much sitting around I can contentedly take before I start to sway back and forth with a demented fixed gaze. Watch this space.

Monday evening, an average day at work - except I narrowly avoided being consumed by a giant pelican in St James Park at lunch. A more intensely zombified Monday than the usual head-lolling stupor, I got up this morning to take Marc to Clapham Junction at 6.00AM - for a 23 year old who is still trying desperately to come to grips with non-student hours, I consider that a remarkable achievement.

So as I sit at my desk quietly astonished that my head is still balancing after 16 hours on the go, I put finger to keypad and try to heave up something interesting from my bleary whirl of thoughts. Spent Saturday enjoying what could be one of the last great sunny outdoor days. Now it's blowy and decidedly hostile out there. I have already started to make some nice comforting autumn food - cauliflower cheese with a generous sprinkle of nutmeg kept me cosy on Saturday. But defiantly I cling still to summer -I went to McDonalds (a place you won't find me often) and bought chocolate ice cream and sat on the King's Road slurping away to the sunset (and a fit topless builder...) and as my mind trails off into a moment of glazed wonder, I recollect myself and give a little jig - water is needed.

I have sat here for 3 minutes now thinking of something else to write. I have come to the conclusion that I am indeed very tired and that writing something is better than writing nothing. I am going to stagger the two feet or so that makes up the walk to my bed, I will climb in and gratefully become oblivious to that mad world for another night. Oh I can't wait. Good Night.

Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks, But You Can Try.

It's a great pleasure to be living in London again. Yes it's noisy but it's got a vibe that only one other city across the Atlantic could match in my opinion. I went to Parliament this morning, having alighted the bus early due to traffic - a problem compounded by the emergency vehicles desperately trying to wriggle through to reach the foreboding concrete edifice of St Thomas' Hospital. I walked along the riverbank and crossed Westminster Bridge- thankfully tourist free at this time in the morning. I was due at Parliament to attend a working group on Nuclear Energy and the meeting was about New Build in the UK. In all honesty not much of huge interest was covered - I am still at that beginning stage in the job where I am starting to get to grips with the industry jargon and the different processes however there is still that part of me that feigns interest and instead tries to plan my holiday in my head - a much more fulfilling task.

Once the meeting came to an end, my colleague Mikey and I wondered into the House of Lords - a chamber of quite remarkable opulence (and a few sleepy lords) We briefly marveled at the architecture and the fact that we had been able to wonder in without security noticing, that was until the security guard (whose main weapon of terror were her abnormally large bosoms) sternly moved us on. A nice little out of office excursion which almost turned into a trip to the Tower of London!

One thing I am quietly pondering at the moment is the symbolic shift and general upheaval in my life that has occur ed since finishing university. I have moved, started a full-time job and completely broken with the way of life I was accustomed to leading before. Curiously my actual reality is a steady and straightforward existence- which goes in complete contrast to the symbolic and momentous change that has taken place in the last month. It is for this reason that I find myself enclosed in moments of panic in the most mundane of daily tasks. Yesterday whilst choosing yoghurt in Sainsbury's a sudden wave of dreariness and fatigue spread over me and my legs felt all a quiver. I am vaguely aware of the stress associated with picking one's brand of petit filous but on some level I sensed this unease to stem from a much deeper sense of panic - my subconscious telling me that my life has completely changed, therefore alarm bells sound because of the fact that my life is so calm and easy.

Another example is when traveling on the tube, I get hot. It's summer, it is warmer down there than most cattle would care to endure and so I do get ridiculously hot. But I then get nervous that people will notice me sweat. Therefore I sweat more until people notice the intense heat emanating from my body and think I am unwell. It's then that I start to hyperventilate and move towards the doors in the desperate attempt to escape. I sit at a tube station until I cool, I attempt the next tube and I arrive at work late every day. I say that though, but with each day it gets better and I get used to it. Welcome to London.

I don't miss Brighton and this isn't from a lack of sentimentality but rather it was time for me to move on and 4 years of being a student was enough - you can have too much of a good thing. (just wait till I've been in the job for 6 months, I'll be desperate to go back).

I have certain things that I want to do now I don't have the what was omnipresent degree work to do:

I want to cook more and experiment more. Up till now I have been quite successful with my culinary endeavours, however I don't feel I have delved enough into the luxurious, the greedy, the sickly and the explosive. That is what I shall do next.

I want to write more - but not just this old stuff, I want to try and get things published. Must endeavour to make contacts and network (must also endeavour to not make blog sound like Bridget Jones' Diary).

I want to eat healthily, maintain calm composure and sit in the lotus position at all possible times, blah blah blah - you get it.

I could go on, but with the danger of boring you to the point of minor paralysis I will instead stop and go and make something explosive. Thanks for reading. Oh, and please comment!