the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Well hello from what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-awake-o’clock, or as its better known, 6.07 am. I really did go to bed at just after midnight and just as with last night – is last night actually last night – and those preceding it, my mind was bedeviled by thoughts. As I wrote yesterday, the older one gets, the more one has to think about; what you should’ve done, what you shouldn’t have done, what might’ve happened had you, what might not have happened had you, that sort of thing. Except this time, I had my own ball of string to help me navigate my way back through the labyrinth ,well not back exactly but back to when it all started to go wrong, the moment when I chose the path which has by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, led me here.

I was ten’ish and it was time to chose which secondary school I’d be going to. In the usual course of events, one’s parents would see it as their solemn duty, nee privilege, to be entrusted so important an undertaking. Well, the problem was that my childhood didn’t follow the usual course of events. For all the interest my parents took, I’d have been better off hiring a firm of undertakers to help me. It was left down to me. I had to badger and cajole my mum to take me along to the local schools opening evenings. I was the child who asked all the questions, I was the child who would wander off to find the places they didn’t want you to see, I was the child who the pupils who’d been specially chosen to show the school in a good light hated. I was the one who studied and compared the prospectuses.

So how then did I get it so catastrophically wrong? Why then did I think that choosing a secondary school that no-one from my primary school was going to, indeed had ever been to, was a good idea? Why didn’t anyone point out the potential – which were soon to become all too real – pitfalls of such a choice? What was more pressing, more urgent, more deserving of their time to address? In what universe could anyone think ‘Sure, he’s only a child, but he’s always been a bit, y’know…so I’m sure it’ll all work out’

Looking back, that’s when it started to go wrong. The first decision I can remember taking about what direction I wanted my life to head in, was a complete disaster. Mind you, its not as if I’m the only person to have had these thoughts – or ones similar to them – at shitting-crikey o’clock.

Time for some music, methinks. I think this fits the mood rather nicely.