No, I haven't forgotten about it here.
I'm just too tired in the evenings to get anything sensible written here. I'm just about holding it together through the day but by the time I get home from work my powers of invention have deserted me completely. I mean, I'm just rambling now.
Not that I can sleep at the moment, of course. Oh no. So I listen to music and I read. Refilling myself with words, almost. Refuelling. Recharging.
I'm quite prepared to accept the statistics that show that air travel is safer than driving, crossing the road, hanging wallpaper and combing your hair. You know what I mean.
Until I moved to Ireland I had never flown in an aeroplane. Even now I've only flown three times. There's an impression of safety that one gets though. I know that planes crash occasionally, killing hundreds of people but it's removed somehow. It's something that happens a long way away and is only seen on the news.
On Thursday a plane crashed while trying to land in fog at Cork Airport, which is about five minutes brisk walk from the Airport Business Park where I work. I think I maybe even heard it happen. There were 12 people on board the place, six of whom survived. Two of them walked away from it, miraculously. Everyone I spoke with in our building was very upset and shaken by it. Having something like this happen so close to you brings home somehow just how quickly things can go wrong. My deepest sympathies to the families and friends of those who weren't lucky.
A young lady of my acquaintance celebrated her 13th birthday this weekend. This set me thinking - what can I remember of being 13?
The year was 1979 and the world was a very different place. I was at an all-boys school and was painfully shy. I was no athlete or sportsman and was no academic high-flier either. I was spectacularly ordinary, I guess.
One way in which I might not have been so ordinary is that I was aware of what was going on around the world. Dad always had the 9 o'clock news on the TV and I'd gotten into the habit of watching the early evening news myself. Add to this the fact that I would always read the newspaper and I was pretty clued-in.
I remember that in 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister and both Lord Mountbatten and Airey Neave met untimely ends. The Shah left Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini moved back in and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That's without looking stuff up. All of that is more what happened in the year I was 13 than what it was like to be 13, though.
It's nearly 32 years ago and I'm a little foggy about it, to be honest. I remember being shy, as I said, and quiet. I remember being anxious, ready to see the worst in everything and probably more than a little paranoid. How much of this is typical among 13-year old boys I couldn't say. I wasn't an only child but the nearest of my sisters to me in age was 16 years older than I was so I may as well have been an only child. Effectively I was brought up by five adults - my parents and brother and sisters. Did this make me different to other kids? I guess that everyone is different in some way or another and that's as far as I'm going with this at this time of night.
Courtesy of the Random Word Generator, today's word is "Dustbin".
A dustbin today is almost a redundant concept. The nearest we might get to one is a bin in a kitchen for waste. The Wheelie Bins that are ubiquitous on our streets on collection today are almost nothing like the dustbins we had when I was a child. They were actually made out of metal, can you imagine that? They looked a little like this
although not as shiny, usually.
The rattle of a dustbin lid being replaced is one of those sounds that resonates through the years. It reminds me of school holidays when I'd be at home for the collection and could watch through the window, not being allowed outside in case I got in the way.
Never mind mechanical contrivances to lift them, readers of A Certain Age will probably remember that these things were manually lifted and emptied into a Dustcart by a breed known as Dustmen. These guys were strange and almost kind of otherworldly to me when I was five or six. Tradesmen who visited the house were respectful and deferential but the dustmen were filled with pet names and nicknames for everyone. And for some reason they had to have gifts when they made their last rounds before Christmas - a peculiarity of my mother's that I've never understood.
I'm sorry that it's been so long. I didn't mean to leave it longer than a week.
I've got into the swing of things in the new job and when I've got home in the evenings I've just been chilling. I honestly haven't thought about blogging before tonight. What I have been trying to do is ensure that all the music I have on my iPod is backed up on a spare hard disk and that it has all the relevant artwork. Slightly OCD here remember? I now need to summon up the courage to sync the iPod with the backed up memory... oh, and the patience. It's likely to take a little while.
I am also pleased to say that I'm still not smoking. It's been very difficult sometimes but I'm just about coping. Strangely, I can still almost taste cigarettes in my mouth sometimes, which is a little disconcerting. One thing I've noticed is that when passing someone smoking in the street I'm now aware that I don't like the smell of cigarettes very much. I think I'm done for good this time.
After the kind of gap of gap I've left since I last blogged there ought to be something more profound for me to say. And there is. But it's a little late for that.
