...at work. With Friday off I can feel the bubbling optimism and joy sweeping through me. Christmas is marvellous but the greatest part is that I don't have to go to work. Yes I know that on January 3rd I will feel terribly depressed but that is in the future, far far away. At five o'clock this evening I hit the point where (apart from my annual Summer vacation) I have the maximum holiday in front of me.
Of course I assume I will be called upon (willingly I add) to do my share of sprout-peeling, toilet-cleaning and grocery-buying but my mood can be neither dimmed nor derailed. I tell myself I will dust my running shoes off, unpack my sketchbook and prepare my creative juices to explode into the vacuum. Usually it pans out to twelve days in an armchair stuffed full with calorific danger (me, not the armchair) with the only exercise being the lifting of the remote control to pause the sky plus whilst I do any business (pouring a drink) before returning to the cricket or the football.
I do without doubt, when faced by "spare time" always feel the urge to stretch my imagination, to write the great northern novel or paint the definitive study of Sheffield at dusk (or whatever). I know these desires are in there inside me struggling to manifest themselves. Even if they have not surfaced during the first 49 years it doesn't mean they might not suddenly escape. (image of Steve McQueen on his bike in "The Great Escape"). The truth is more likely to be that if I perform one task this holiday it will be to reduce the number of bookshelves surrounding the marital bed in the master bedroom. It feels like we are sleeping in a crowded, badly-designed Waterstones and I swear the books talk to me. I often will wake up and think where is that book, (for example, called Adam's Navel) governed by a totally irrational need to use this certain book and of course I can't find it. A reorganisation of reading matter would be helpful therefore to improve access to the books, to allow a deeper and more restful sleep (as being half-deaf I wouldn't hear the books talking in the night if they were in the attic), and to see what colour the wallpaper is (or was).
When I was at boarding school and I was longing for the holidays (and in a previous reincarnation of my current job when I was really, really unhappy) I use to create a chart to count down the hours until I would be free. When an hour went past I would tick it off (or colour the square in) first on a sheet of paper then on an excel spreadsheet (for recent bad times). Obviously overnight I would colour in an entire eight hours which make me feel far happier. This was not really born out of manic depression (although the citalopram does probably help) but rather from a sense of knowing that what I really wanted to do was not in that place but in a room of my own.
Therefore in these future twelve days (at present mercifully free from any extraneous commitments) my time is my own. Whether it is to write the Great Northern Novel or to paint the definitive study of Sheffield At Dusk (or whatever) these days seem to hold the possibility of promise. These twelve days also contain five lottery days, upon which numbers permitting, this delicious sense of freedom might (however unlikely) be extended even farther into the future. When I wake up I wake with the feeling of relaxed optimism. There will be no nausea of adrenalin surging through my body as I prepare to move through the days governed by management, by society, by convention or by pretence. Shackled by work and by fiscal famine (the necessity of one forcing the other) the day-to-day existence, the feudal servitude will be lifted for the holidays. For my twelve days of Christmas my motivations will be internal as opposed to external, ambitions genuinely fed by my perspective rather than anyone else's. I will arise and go and I will think "What shall I do today ?". The limitations are mine and I could ask for nothing more.
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