Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard

Perhaps you noticed, though you probably didn’t, that I haven’t posted much over the last three weeks. There was a good reason for this – I was, sharp intake of breath, moving house.

As the picture above suitably illustrates moving is as dull as the cardboard boxes you use for it. It’s a miserable endeavour as you’re overwhelmed into a frenzied rush to do everything too quickly, as there seems to be so much to do when armed with the faulty perception that time is dissipating fast. The rushing about leads to even more bruised knuckles and ankles than you’d normally suffer, plus the pulled back muscles from moving furniture up and down flights of stairs. Actually, moving a king sized mattress is the worst, it’s murder, given how heavy and difficult to balance it is.

Why do we fall into such a destructive pathology when moving? It’s partly irritability at the upsetting of settled routines and processes you’ve tailored to a specific home environment that you’re now willingly vanquishing, married with the temporary uncertainty of their revival at the other end. Pre-occupied by concerns that in retrospect are frivolous and ridiculous, you then develop temporary malaises and queer obsessions that corner you into making illogical decisions, because god forbid it’s a terrible error that you should have to double-handle something. And after all of this comes the worst part; the utterly demoralising prospect of sorting through the chaos and of unpacking stuff you just packed earlier that day. As an experience this only favourably compares to solemnly unwrapping a shit Christmas present you bought for yourself.

I’ll miss Maryhill, for its mutant squirrels, that I could hear the River Kelvin running from my window, its widening demographic and its hodgepodge schizoid topography caused by misguided forays into modernism. I’ll miss Maryhill Road, mainly for its shopping convenience and its abundance of buses and fatal accident inquiries. Watching the drivers on Maryhill Road squabble for parking spaces outside Jaconelli’s is sociology at its most fascinating, and witnessing the bus drivers all trying to avoid potholes created by small meteors, or, more likely, a combination of cheap Glasgow City Council tarmac meeting the rancid contents of stomachs being evacuated on a Saturday night, was the definition of light entertainment.

Anyway, so on to Knightswood. Maryhill it is not. Knightswood is the surface of the dark side of the moon. Its many streets are all indistinguishable from the next, filled with rows of identikit ex local authority council housing of same the size and design, clad with the same robust but cheap rough casting, and painted in that agonising hospital waiting room colour palette that we all privately despise, but within such a milieu we’re loathe to see the monotony of this characteristic broken as we’re often pray to being comforted by our conformity to uniformity.

In time I’ll reconcile with the truth that it was all worth it. I now not only have a garden, but a south facing garden that will see the sun on the fourteen days a year it appears for more than an hour at a time (or I’m I being too optimistic?). I’m no Sarah Beeny, but there’s plenty of scope to convert the attic space into another room, perhaps a master bedroom with en suite (maybe a bidet too?), or two smaller bedrooms to increase the appeal to some cunty nuclear family. These are manoeuvres that intend to add value to the property, but to realise it I’ll need to move, won’t I? The scars caused by the last move haven’t even formed scabs yet – literally – so it’s far more likely I’ll be motivated to do the loft conversion for the kind of living space I’ll use constructively.

Plus there’s Swans in Knightswood Park. They’re fascinating creatures, with their thousand yard stares, exaggerated robotic poses, and that they’re fed better than nine percent of Glasgow’s weans. Seeing Swans sleeping at night for the first time was a macabre sight, they appear as headless vessels floating seamlessly on the water, but this may have been abetted by the additional presence of two dogs being walked near the water’s edge, both with flashing collars (just in case you shouldn’t see the act good detail), generously sniffing each other’s ringpieces.

In truth this is just a filler piece to inure myself to one of my old processes: that it’s time to get back down to writing regularly. I now have a place to sit down, think and to write, so no excuses. Plus, I’ve just been reminded of another motivation – WordPress are charging me £65 to remove the ads on my blog for the next calendar year. This will only benefit my three and a half readers or whoever is unlucky enough to happen across this blog, but still, I’ll have to make that extortion count, even if this additional cost for blogging, nor my content on it for that matter, isn’t helping me pay off my mortgage. C’est la vie.