Bagel Belly Blog

Life

This one's for me.

When i was just a little boy... actually, when I was about 15, I was on holiday with my parents and my best friend from school. We were staying in a tent in the south of France, and there was a pool on site. We ate croissants every morning for breakfast, and were amused and amazed when our neighbours from back home ended up next to us on the day we left. Small world. (This was before we moved for the first time to West Hill. A discussion on the merits and drawbacks of moving is an entirely different conversation).

(Here's a funny thing ... try and google map your way to a childhood home whilst drunk, with only a slim recollection of the geography of the time. I'd planned to provide google map links to illustrate this tale, but damn it's tricky without remembering postcodes.)

On this holiday, we spent most of the time in the swimming pool. On one particular day, I got struck down with a hereditary affliction: cramp. Apparently my grandma suffered, and my dad suffers. So there I am, slightly surprised, in the middle of a swimming pool with one leg doubled-up in pain telling me "I ain't working any more". My friend, recalling his lifeguard training, tried to do the whole dragging me to the side of the pool thing. He didn't seem to appreciate the fact that I can swim with only one leg ;-)

As a result of a bad night's sleep, or possibly some excessively fast cycling, I woke up early this morning with a leg full of knots and pain. For the first time in a long while, I was screaming in pain as my leg cramped. It's the weirdest feeling - with no control whatsoever your muscles lock solid, and nothing you do can relieve the pain or ease the muscle. You kinda have to wait for it to unlock. And the pain can last a whole day.

So nowadays I'm not drowning in a pool, but the pain brings back some recollections of how I used to perceive life, when things were quite a lot simpler and there were less complications. Back then, I was absolutely sure that the eyes were a window on the soul, and that you could tell a lot about a person by looking them in the eye. Somewhere along the way I think I lost sight of this. I still have good reasons for what I do, but I don't know how I expected to find happiness by ignoring this basic truth.

(Limping home tonight, I notice that the second neighbour in a row has gutted their kitchen and is opting for a burnt terracota style paint job. I painted my kitchen that colour (or bright orange, as my friends like to refer to it) many years ago, and I'm thinking I need to paint it a different colour now that everyone else matches...)

So there I am tonight in a nightclub, with one leg barely prepared to take my weight, dancing my usual bizarre drunken flailing dance. And there's a girl across the room, and the first thing I notice is that I could spend the entire night staring into her eyes and I would be happy. And I'm reminded of the drowning episode, and of how I viewed life back then, and where I am right now. I'm mindful of some friends that were talking about how fairy-tale doesn't exist any more, and I can't help but think that it has to be worth waiting for.

I just need to pay more attention to the eyes.