2018 – Going But Not Forgotten

I’ve always liked the years that end in eight. Especially their latter half. Big things seem to happen. In 1988, my first eight-ending year, my family moved house for the very first time – to the number “86” I have tattooed on my wrist. It happened in the late Spring and I hated the move – the upheaval of my young life, leaving friends and familiar things behind and finding myself lost and lonely in a new town, but by Christmas that year I was finally settling in. Getting to know the strange customs of my new school and finally replacing some of my old, lost, friends with new ones. The BBC’s November production of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe that year helped a lot. It was all anyone at school would talk about as we watched each new episode, week by week. It was the first thing my schoolmates did which I felt I was an equal part of. This wasn’t some long ago historical in-joke to which I was never quite privvy to the punchline; this was our thing. Together. We all started reading the C.S. Lewis books that Winter – the first series of novels I remember ever adoring. Mrs Yates, our teacher, encouraged it. As she encouraged reading in general. I remember she had a voice like Bill Oddie and we would sit and listen to her read stories at the end of each school day in that expressive Brummie brogue and be enrapt. I remember the Christmas of 1988, our first in the new house, being notable because it still felt like Christmas. Even though we were in this new place where so many things had been a struggle – once the tree and tinsel was up and the carols were sung, 86 could have been our old house; our new hometown could have been our last one. Wherever we were, Christmas would always be Christmas.

1998 was equally momentous for me, marking, as it did, the end of the secondary school that I hated and the freedom to leave it behind and go to a new sixth form college for the next stage of my education. Again – up to the summer, the year has been hell. Exams, stress, anxiety about not getting the grades that would permit me to leave the school and follow my friends to the nearby college. But once the exams began, 1998 started bearing its real fruits. A calm descended as my best friend and I used “study leave” as an excuse to watch horror movies, often walking to my house for lunch in between morning and afternoon exams to spend some time with Freddy Krueger or a questionable Stephen King adaptation. And the day I finished my GCSEs was the day I turned vegetarian. I haven’t eaten meat since June of 1998. Nor have I eaten at a McDonalds since that year as my fledgling political awareness moved into a more principled activism.

But none of this is even the biggest news of 1998. My band recorded our first full length album that summer – Shallow Permanence – and released our Forbidden Curriculum ep, alongside playing our first proper gigs in pubs like the Flapper and Firkin and The Old Railway (shout out to System Kicker and My Darling Nihilist – our first gig-mates, and Badger Promotions who turned the Old Railway into a scene). And I began studying this exciting new subject at sixth form called Philosophy for the very first time that September…the subject which would ultimately send me to university (where I would meet my wife), pay for my PhD, and eventually become my career.

I also fell in love for the first time in 1998. A girl from my sociology course. My first kiss. My first everything. I was a slow starter when it came to girls but I guess I was just waiting for the right one to come along. We would be together for the next two years. No one before that had seemed worth the bother.

Ten years later and 2008 had its own significance pre-determined by the Arts and Humanities Research Council three years before. The summer of 2008 was when my funding would run out. My first day studying for my PhD I met a man in his eighth year of one. He was talking about re-writing all he’d written so far, only this time as verse. The AHRC grant I had been awarded was for three years, but they allowed me a fourth “writing up” year without pay afterwards before my thesis had to be submitted. However, hearing the eight year and five year, six year and seven year odysseys of some of my fellow researchers at that initial meeting, I vowed that I would finish mine in the three years for which I was being paid and not end up forever tweaking an incomplete thesis in perpetuity.

And so I did. Submitting the finished thesis for its final viva voce as the third academic year wound down for the summer and passing the eventual interrogation with flying colours.

Part of the motivation for doing so was a newfound desire to get the hell out of academia, having fallen slowly out of love with it the more my university tried grooming me for a career in it. The more time I spent with full-time philosophers, the more disillusioned I would get. Lives wasted squabbling about words and their meaning without ever tackling the real-world issues to which those words were meant to be applied. Conference after conference bored me. Supposedly groundbreaking papers put me to sleep. And even my own work felt ground down by the pedantic grilling of colleagues and supervisors determined to take away all its balls and fury and make it publishable.

I far preferred the undergraduate seminars I taught each week on behalf of the university philosophy department, and the discussions I would have with my students were always much more enlightening than any of the so-called professional discussions I was engaged in about philosophy with my peers. So at some point it was decided, thanks to the amazing and supportive woman who would eventually be my wife, to just focus on what I enjoy in philosophy. Forget the whole career in academia thing. Take some time off once the PhD was finished to figure out what I really wanted to do. And when what I really wanted to do was write a novel, my wife-to-be said “sure, why not?” instead of “are you fucking crazy?” And so, by the autumn of 2008, that’s what I was doing – now a doctor, writing a novel (my second. The first was written throughout my undergraduate years) and living off savings (it paid not drinking alcohol throughout university!)

But writing that novel and finishing my PhD wasn’t the biggest thing that happened in 2008. Not by a long shot. First of all, after seven happy years in Cardiff, three of which were spent living with my wife-to-be, it was time to move back to the Midlands.

This was not my choice, having purposefully fled to Cardiff when choosing university courses so it was as far away from my parents and life at 86 as possible. However, L had come back to Cardiff from London to be with me because my PhD and funding was tied to the university there and the deal had always been that, having moved back to Wales for me, she would get to choose where we moved next once I was done. During the three years I’d been working on my doctorate, she had trained to be a teacher and the contract on her NQT job was due to come up that summer of 2008. Able to apply for any job anywhere in the whole country with the promise we would move there together, somehow we ended up moving back to Birmingham, just behind the Cadbury factory in Stirchley, and just twenty minutes away from each of my parents.

The move worked out in the end, but 2008, just like 1988, had a prolonged period of adjustment and disorientation as I suddenly found myself alone in a new home (L out working each day while I kept house and worked on my indulgence: the novel) with all the familiarities of the life I’d built in Cardiff thrown away. It was a tough time, but once again Christmas came through. I was ill, and I was worried about how demanding L’s new job was as well as what I was going to do for money once my savings ran out, but once the tree was up, and the music was playing, our new home became the same familiar grotto we’d started carving out in Cardiff. It was our first Christmas together, just the two of us, and it set the blueprint for every Christmas thereafter. By Christmas evening I just felt a deep contentment and a sense that, despite all the change, everything was going to be OK.

And yet even this great move back to Birmingham wasn’t the most important thing to come out of 2008. In the early hours of August 3rd, after a long drive back to Hyannis from spending L’s birthday in Provincetown, I proposed to her in the lounge of our old house on Oak Neck Road. We got engaged: the best decision we ever made in our lives.

So 2018 had a lot of high expectation going in. Would the familiar pattern of deep upheaval, stress, worry, but ultimately brilliant redemption and long term joy prevail or would this be the eight-ending year which finally broke the pattern?

The stress was certainly there at the start. The year was impeded early by my growing anxiety issues. Not about years ending in an eight, but about passing out. You see, the previous December (2017) my cat was being given some bad news at the vets and suddenly I found myself seeing stars and dropping to the floor. The only other time I’d done this was when my mom was hospitalised and on dialysis for the very first time. She was talking me through all that had happened to her and suddenly I couldn’t feel my face or keep my eyes open. Next thing I know I’m being wheeled outside by a nurse in a wheelchair I hadn’t previously been sitting in.

The random collapse at the vets affected me deeply. For a person with Health Anxiety Disorder, the idea that at any time my body might just give up, drop its blood pressure, and make me pass out was scary. The emetophobia I have struggled with since childhood is essentially the same fear: how do you cope with the fact that sometimes your body can just rebel and there is nothing you can do? Be it vomiting or passing out, the idea my body can do things over which I have absolutely no control is horrifying to me, and the incident in December dug its claws into my mind as the new year began. Much of 2018 has been a silent argument in my head about the possibility of passing out in weird and wonderful places. A level of anxiety not experienced since my earliest days not sleeping as a school kid whenever a stomach bug was going around…or those dark years at university when I always had to figure out where the nearest toilets would be before agreeing to leave the flat.

I am anything but sane when it comes to basic bodily functions. Every time I get a hold on one phobia or anxiety, another one seems to pop up to say hello.

So I didn’t start 2018 in the best mental state, but soon I began to feel like maybe my collapse really was just a stress reaction to what was happening to our cat and not the undiagnosed tumour that I originally feared. I was able to stop obsessing and focus on reality. And in reality, 2018 has been another eight-ending game changer of a year. It began in January when L changed jobs. After working in an independent boarding school for ten years which sucked every moment it could from you – late nights, Saturday school, occasional weekend functions – she was finally working at a regular 8:30am-4pm school like me. Obviously there were periods of adjustment at the start and learning new ways of doing things, not to mention having to plan every lesson from scratch after years with a successful back catalogue to fall back on, but the biggest personal change for me in 2018 was having evenings and weekends with my wife again! No more Saturdays working. No more all-nighters being pulled to please demanding fee-paying parents. We could actually relax at weekends. Go places. See people! And what’s not to love about leaving in convoy each morning, our two cars going to roughly the same place until the last ten minutes of our journey? Weirding out other drivers by simultaneously saluting Colonel Sanders at every KFC we pass and finding innovative ways to return to our convoy each time we are scuppered by difficult roundabouts or aggressive cut-ins?

And best of all: this year, and all subsequent years that we stay in our current jobs, we finally get snow days together! L’s old school didn’t have such a thing as a “snow day”. Being a boarding school with a wealth of live-in staff, there was no good reason to close the place if it snowed and every reason to keep it open. Many a year L would have to drive in in dangerous conditions while I enjoyed the safety and sanctuary of home. But now we work for the same employer and both schools rely heavily on the same external bus service to get pupils in. If the bus isn’t running, the school isn’t opening. And thanks to climate change and the “beast from the east” we got to enjoy several lazy snow days together in 2018. A real luxury after a decade without them.

2018 also marked a year of professional firsts for me. I wrote a new school policy, I led on a new school initiative, I hosted international visitors to our school on two separate occasions, I ran training sessions and staff CPD and generally gained a new confidence in my professional capabilities beyond my subject area (and an even more affirmed lack of interest in holding any senior management position within a school structure that would take me away from teaching RE and Philosophy!) I feel this year I have really been able to prioritise what is worth doing in teaching and jettison a lot of what isn’t. I have also been very happy to say no to bullshit and push back against snake oil and shitty ideas.

2018 has been creatively fulfilling too. As well as banging out a few more ANARCHOPHY songs here and there, I have been working on the most honest songwriting I have ever attempted, and making punk music the way I have always wanted to play it – punk in its purest, straight-ahead form – with the new Strangely Shaped By Fathers project. No longer burdened by guitarists who don’t actually listen to or like punk rock I have been able to simplify sounds and use my rudimentary abilities (such as they are) to write seven really solid and really interesting new tunes that actually sound on record the way they sounded like in my head. Half an album in and I’m really excited by where it’s all going musically, as well as finding it therapeutic to finally write about my family.

But it’s not just writing new songs. Playing guitar is once again now a permanent feature of my life and I play at least weekly, if not more regularly, a range of my songs both new and old. It has been great having that release again and feeling that sense of self it took many years and several false starts to fully redeem. It’s been nice to reacquaint myself with my own back catalogue and remember the simple joy of singing my heart out.

Writing too has been a big part of 2018- not just on this blog (though this is not nothing! So many thousands of words typed since this summer when my fleeting coffee-shop idea became an actual reality! Thank you for reading – especially epic lengthen blog posts like this!), or the page a day diary I have dutifully filled out every day with a page of journaling since January 1st, but once again picking up the novel I started two years ago and finally figuring out what I want it to be. The last few months I have added to it, and I feel 2019 will see new momentum come to the project. It is set at Christmas and this year I have been making many mental notes. I feel a distinct percolation occurring and brew point is nearly there. Meanwhile, although not my own accomplishment, I can’t quickly forget that 2018 was also the year my best friend, S. R. Masters released his first published novel, The Killer You Know, inspired by our mutual childhood. Considering how much we talked about and fantasised about publishing books back when we were kids, this is a crazy cool marker of another epic eight-ending year.

Improv has also been a source of some creative fulfilment this year – ten monthly shows plus the annual Improv Festival – albeit a creative outlet for which our audiences have been dwindling. It is a shame we felt the need to go on hiatus and create something new this October. An even greater shame that, as yet, that something new seems no closer to being realised than it did in November. I hope we manage to pull something out of the bag by next April, when we are due to return to the stage, and I end 2018 equal parts excited and nervous to see what, if anything, our January explorations will yield.

It’s nice to have such problems though – of a free evening do I write a song? Play music? Write a chapter of a novel? Write a blog? Improvise a sketch? Improvise an entire play? These are good dilemmas to have!

2018 also sees me in better physical health than I have been since probably 1998 when emetophobic anxiety mixed with punk rock energy made me near-anorexic in my food intake and calorie retention. Try getting fat when you stand playing bass guitar for eight hours a day and only pick at the bits you “trust” from a poorly cooked dinner.

All that changed in ’98 when I went vegetarian and cheese became king. Cheese and snacks. A lot of snacks. That first girl I fell in love with who I mentioned earlier – her mom used to fatten me up like a wicked witch from a Grimm tale. Boursin on toast for breakfast and a whole tub of humous to eat with Pringles and mini baby bells every day after college before a giant, cheese-heavy, dinner. I would probably have canteen pizza for lunch most days as well.

A combination of having to cook for myself (part of the deal of going vegetarian – mom only cooked veggie for me at first when she would be cooking veggie for everyone, so I started having to do a lot of cooking for myself), having people cook for me with no sense of healthy nutrition for vegetarians, and then going to university eventually and cooking for myself full time with no real conception of what might constitute a balanced diet meant that by 2001 I was a bonafide fat fuck and that just became my identity. I had no problem with being heavy, and I enjoyed the lifestyle which had created it. As I always told people: I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke, I don’t eat meat…can I please have crisps and chocolate?

But over the years I found myself only eating worse, never really getting any better.

By 2017 my asthma was worse than it had ever been, I sweated constantly, and it seemed odd to have health anxiety disorder about possible heart attacks and cancers and yet do nothing to actually help myself avoid those things.

Thanks to not being able to speak Vietnamese or Cambodian, a three week trip to South East Asia last summer detoxed me of the snacking addiction (I could barely figure out decent vegetarian options for my main meals each day that avoiding the ever-present fish sauce, let alone negotiate snacks as well) and when I came back home last August I decided to see how long I could keep the no snacking thing going. Add in a high blood pressure reading at my annual asthma check up (false, it transpired; the result of “white coat syndrome”, but real enough to motivate) and a decision to cut down my daily salt intake, and by January 2018 my everyday diet is finally what I guess it always should have been: three healthy meals a day and only occasional snacks.

Yesterday, Boxing Day 2018, I had my first taste of crisps since Boxing Day 2017. A year without crisps when, previous to that, I would eat at least one bag a day.

I never weigh myself so don’t know exactly how much weight I have lost this year, but I do know that just from eating better and doing ten minutes on a cross trainer three times a week I have dropped four waist sizes for my trousers and had to buy a new, smaller wedding ring after my first one just fell off. L too. We have both lost a lot of weight and both feel a lot healthier. My asthma is better. I don’t sweat anymore. I might still panic about passing out every now and again, but in reality I am in better shape than I have been in a decade. I even had my heart tested (after finally deciding to see a doctor about the vet incident) and my heart is in good nick.

Who knew? Healthy diet and regular exercise could make such a drastic difference?

This year I have had many heavyset men come up to me and ask me my secret. When I tell them it is just healthy diet and regular exercise, they all look deeply disappointed. No magic bullet. If they want it, they will have to put in the work.

So it’s been weird buying clothes that aren’t XL for literally the first time in my life (I liked wearing things baggy in the ’90s which helped a lot as the gut began to expand) but ultimately it feels like a positive (once I got over the health anxiety possibilities that I was losing the weight because I was dying! If it is disease doing this, then my wife has it too!) However it has been costly – so many new trousers and suits have had to be purchased! At the same time though, clothes formerly shrunk in the wash have gained an unexpected second life. So it’s sort of evening out.

Due to getting our weekends back in 2018, L and I have been able to do a lot of fun stuff this year. Shakespeare for one thing. I owe my life to Shakespeare (my parents met while studying the Bard at Birmingham University) and perhaps that, alongside years of unsolicited monologues from my mother, is what made me instinctively opposed to his work. I spent childhood running away from any attempt to indoctrinate me into liking him, be it at school or at home, but I’ve always regretted it and wished I had been more open minded. I “hate” Shakespeare, but quote him a lot. Even in some of my song lyrics! Being married to an English teacher, I have for a long time wanted to be reintroduced to Shakespeare and this year we finally had time to do it. I have seen Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. Hell, I even saw Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine because I was enjoying them so much and L has signed up as an RSC member for the 2019 season so we can continue the education into the new year.

But it’s not all been Shakespeare. We got to see Hamilton, A Monster Calls, Young Frankenstein, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Hadestown, and A Christmas Carol in London. Grief is the Thing With The Feathers in Dublin. Matilda, The Kite Runner, and The League of Gentlemen in Birmingham and Dear Evan Hansen in New York. We saw live performances from Chris Rock, Kendrick Lamar, Kamasi Washington, NOFX and Bad Cop/Bad Cop, Benjamin Zephaniah and so much wrestling! Progress shows in Birmingham and at Wembley and WWE NXT Takeover Brooklyn, Summerslam and Raw this summer and WWE NXTUK at the NEC.

And we went away to cool places. Dublin at Easter, the family holiday to Guernsey in May, the Peak District last half term, two awesome weeks road tripping from Boston to the Berkshires to Niagara to New York this summer. Plus friends we haven’t visited for years who we were finally able to see and stay the night.

So if I were to sum up 2018 it would be as a year when we finally were able to live right and prioritise doing the things we enjoy while limiting the bullshit. From physical health to mental health, in 2018 we did far more of what we needed and wanted to do and far less of the stuff that gets in the way. New jobs, new ways of living, new health, new weight. 2018, like its predecessors, has been another life changing, very good year. And like 1988, 1998, and 2008, I am hoping it has set the table for an even better nine-ending year! Watch this space – and happy new year!

Weight Watching On The Road

Sometime around February I realised my work clothes were feeling a little loose. My belt wasn’t really doing the trick anymore and I was spending a lot of time hitching up my trousers whenever I moved around. I used a different belt with my jeans and other non-work clothes, but when I unbuckled it, sure enough, my trousers fell to my ankles.

It all began in Vietnam the previous July. Finding vegetarian food there was hard enough, especially with the language barrier, so finding extra vegetarian snacks between the three main meals was out of the question. After three weeks away, I came back home and realised that life without snacking was pretty good. Maybe I could carry it on into real life.

Then, having not smacked between meals for a few months, another thing happened. My health anxiety played a neat trick on me and gave me sky-high blood pressure readings in October when I went for my annual asthma check up! The doctor was worried and booked me in for a 24 hour blood pressure monitoring to see if it was a true reading or just “white coat syndrome”. In the two weeks before I was booked to get the monitor I did a little reading about blood pressure and saw that salt was the main problem. Worrying that the reading might be real, I worked for that fortnight on cutting my salt down to the recommended limit of just 6g a day and was confronted with the eye opening horror of realising just how much salt was in everything I ate!

I blame the month I tried to go vegan. Every recipe I tried during that time had so much salt in it that when I tapped out on veganism and returned to mere vegetarianism, I still held this belief in the back of my mind that salt should be used liberally when cooking and was chucking extra salt into things hither and yon. But more than that were the cheeses and the processed foods that I ate. A simple staple like fajitas, because we were using pre-packaged spice mixes, plus the cheese, plus the tortillas, contained about 12g of salt each in that one meal alone. Crisps – my favourite thing in life since childhood; never a day going by without eating a bag – we’re obviously disastrous. And even bread – which I liked to add into every meal I could – was a goddamn liability.

Those two weeks meant a deep rethink of our cooking and eating habits, and when the 24 hour blood pressure monitoring came back with good news – my BP was fine, I was just panicking because of my inherent anxiety about doctors – we decided to keep the new low-salt regime in place. Cheesy sandwiches for lunch were replaced with salads, I started making my own salsas and sauces, so I could control how much salt and cheese was used, bread became a one meal a day thing instead of three, and I haven’t eaten a bag of crisps since Christmas.

When I bought some new suits for work, and jeans a size smaller, I noticed that I had lost some weight. When my wedding ring fell off my finger I realised I’d lost a lot. Being a fat man for most of my adult life, I had no idea what weight I used to be because I didn’t need scales to tell me that what I weighed was too much. So I don’t know how much weight exactly, but my face now has points and angles it didn’t have this time last year, I can feel things like my collar bone and ribs again, and as the summer term started at work a variety of similarly overweight colleagues at work would come, one by one, for various quiet words with me about what I’d done to lose all the weight.

My answer was: “eat terribly for thirty six years and then stop doing that.”

It’s also not insignificant that I went from doing no exercise at all, ever, for any reason, to running at least 2K three times a week on a cross trainer. It’s just ten minutes every other morning, but it means I can now do things like run for a bus without feeling a heart attack looming.

The colleagues who asked about what I was doing, and my next door neighbour who has already had one heart attack and is getting warmed by his doctor about a second, always seem a bit disappointed by my answer. As, I suppose, I would have been too: that eating healthily and doing exercise really does work. No gimmicks needed. Just stop eating shit stuff and replace it with something healthier.

I’m still eating what I want – having a takeaway pizza remains my favourite food in the world; we enjoyed a ton of Funfetti cakes for my wife’s recent birthday; and yesterday I ordered a delicious cup of maple walnut ice cream on Cape Cod – but I’m eating mainly three normal meals, sans additional unnecessary extras like bread or salt, and when I do snack it’s rare instead of every day.

Consider – a year ago I might have eaten breakfast (inspired by our Swedish friends) of toast with butter, marmite and cheese on it, had a lunch of a cheese and Quorn ham sandwich on white bread with a lot of mustard and mayo, come home from work and eaten a few biscuits as I waited for my wife to join me, then, when she did, had a slice of cake with a cup of coffee with her, then dinner – maybe a deeply cheesy pasta meal with accompanying half a baguette of garlic bread – and then perhaps even a few lines of chocolate later that night when feeling peckish once again.

Nowadays, the toast is still breakfast, but there’s no cheese. Lunch is a salad, or some hummus and veg, and dinner is perhaps roast veg and couscous. No snacks.

That alone makes a giant difference. So when a day does come along where I feel like getting ice cream at the cinema, fuck it, why not? As opposed to before, when that ice cream would very likely not be my first and only treat of the day, let alone the whole week.

Maintaining this regime however when travelling is already proving difficult. The plane did not help, offering as it does two odd little meals at weird times on top of traditional lunch in the country I left and dinner in my destination. Of course I could have refused the meals, but let’s face it: on a plane the meal really is the only interesting thing that happens. If you don’t get that little 10 minute break from the monotony to poke about in those little plastic boxes and wonder why airlines interpret “vegetarian” so strangely, you really are just choosing to spend 7 hours staring at a seat back.

Then there’s staying with other people. Yesterday we had a nice light breakfast at the hotel but when we arrived at my stepdad’s for lunch he decided we would have lunch “a few hours from now. Later this evening.” You know – 5ish. Lunchtime.

Last time we did a long road trip across America like this we ate a lot of salty snacks in the car as a cheap lunch. And the easy vegetarian options in most places are pizza and garden burgers – a lot of bread and cheese. The coffee cake alone at any Starbucks branch, unavailable in the UK, was a terrible daily staple. So we’re looking this trip to try and make some better choices as much as we can when travelling. Tricks learned from wrestlers on the road: getting the burger without the bun; ordering the dressing on the side. And, as much as we can, resisting the urge to get back into snacking despite the temptation of delicious cinnamon drizzled American snacks. No doubt we’ll have a few, but this time, for the first time, not all the snacks on offer need to be eaten!

The cool thing is, this will be hard, but it doesn’t feel like a burden. By spending a year genuinely changing our routines and instincts about food, it isn’t hardship to order something a little healthier, or have just one slice of pizza instead of two, it’s just the norm now. The hardship comes from having to remember to do it all the time in a country so inherently unhealthy as America when it comes to portion sizes, salt and cheese.

That said, maybe I could stand to put on a little weight these next few weeks and save myself some money. My new trousers are slipping down more, and I’m hitching up my belt again. My resized wedding ring is feeling a little loose…