Finding my way

Maybe I read too many comics when I was little.

I have a desire to help people with my life.  In my romantic moments, I try to convince myself and others that this is what I really do in my sales role -- I help people to get the training they need.  Just like when I used to work ordering replacement parts for broken-down buses: I told myself I was helping save the planet with public transport, and my role was vital to getting these vehicles back on the road.  I never really manage to convince myself of these things.

So what, really, is helping people?  It's just too vague. 

Are we talking about charity? Medicine?  Law enforcement?  Deworming orphans in Rwanda?  Someone a few years ago suggested I join the Peace Corps, but it's not open to non-US citizens, and even then what would someone like me do afterwards?  I have even tried to join the military at one point, even if that was less for noble "I want to help people" reasons and more for selfish ones.  But even wanting to help people is selfish, as I once wrote in a blog post called Why I Hate Superman, because it's about satisfying me.

When I was hiking the Inca trail in Peru I had an idea. 

I would set up an adventure sport company that was dedicated to improving the lives of people in countries where it operated.  I was inspired in the town of Agua Calientes which seemed so dishevelled and broken down, and contrasting so starkly with a grand, expensive hotel for the rich tourists who wanted to visit Machu Picchu.  I thought to myself why couldn't some of that money go to the community?  Who knows, maybe it did -- maybe large sums was funding education and medical care. 

But what I conceived was that there are amazing, beautiful places around the world that are also suited to activities like mountain biking, all-terrain boarding, snowboarding, paragliding -- but also situated in deprived places.  So what if people came and they had their fun and then their money didn't go into making anyone richer, but instead was invested into schools and hospitals and water systems.  Apparently it's all been done before, though, and it's just not that easy to make profit with these adventure sports.


So, back to the drawing board with that one.

Struggling

I can't pretend things aren't tough at the moment. 

The girl is struggling some days to keep everything from getting to her -- the combination of living with my parents, living up to an hour outside of London, not being happy with things at her work, and the uncertainty with my work all piles up and threatens to overwhelm her.

For me, too.  I'm worried that my work will fire me as I'm just not making the sales required of me -- they told me in a recent meeting that hitting 50% of my monthly sales target doesn't even cover my wages.  Naturally, I'm looking for other jobs but that too adds another layer -- applying, trying to craftily interview without my current work finding out, dealing with rejection. 

The girl and I have considered that maybe I need to give up on marketing and communications altogether -- but in favour of what is hard to know.  I took a test online about what careers would suit me, but it didn't have any great answers -- it told me things like writer, web editor, graphic designer.  Creative jobs I aspire to sometimes, where I can also be left alone to work in peace.  But highly skilled and competitive fields.  As it is my job history looks a little too fragmented, not because I don't want to hold down a job, but the jobs I enjoy for one reason or another don't last.  I'm torn between wanting to make this one last when I often can't stand it, just to show commitment, and wanting to get out as quickly as I can to something I do enjoy and am good at.


Some days the girl looks at places to rent in London that fit within our budget, albeit tightly -- but then she feels despondent that I haven't the security we can rely on, and so we can't look at them.  I promise to try harder, to do better in work, to do better in my job search, but I often feel like I'm a failure.  This whole post seems so very familiar, why have things not moved on?  It's clearly something in my behaviour patterns, but I don't know how to break them.  It's bad enough when it's just me affected, but upsetting the girl or adding to her worries is even worse.

Shed your skin and let's get started

Here we are, it's early on a Sunday afternoon and the day has a slightly unreal feel to it.  A lot of my life often has a slightly unreal feel to it, stemming from how often I fall asleep when travelling -- that time just after waking up always feels slightly drained of colour, and still a little like a dream.  This way, most of the motorway service stations and petrol stations in the world feel like a dream -- unless I've been the one driving.  Train station almost certainly feel this way.  I don't quite know why this morning does, but I drank so much yesterday I might not be completely straight yet.

Because it was my birthday earlier in the week, I arranged to meet friends in London for a few civilised drinks yesterday, among the Shoreditch elite.  The bar I'd chosen, since I have come to consider it as my spiritual home, was promising to get busy -- since Saturday was a big day for sport, marking the start of the 6 Nations rugby tournament (with England playing Wales, and Ireland playing Italy), as well as a few premier league football games, but when the girl and I arrived shortly after 2 it was still just getting going. 

We were joined before too long by the girl's friend Sara, who is very lovely and someone I consider a friend in her own right these days rather than just one of the girl's mates.  We toasted my birthday and settled ourselves in on some big sofas, content to spend the rest of the day in good company.  And the company kept getting better, when guest of honour Conor, of radiogael.blogspot.com joined us.  I'm a big believer in making internet friends into real life friends -- as evidenced by the fact I will have been dating a fellow blogger for two years this year, and have met many other amazing and brilliant bloggers over recent years. 

I'm pleased to report that Conor is every bit as smart, funny and interesting in real life as he is on his highly-readable blog, and as is often the way it didn't feel like the first time we'd met.

As the day wore on and the bar filled up, Sara had to leave to prepare her flat for a party she was throwing that evening, but in her place we were shortly joined by the charismatic China Blue who was having a bad enough day, even before the general disarray of the London Underground.  I'd like to think that her day was improved by joining us, since I know that ours certainly was that much brighter for it.

As the rugby games finished and the afternoon turned into evening, we headed out into the night in search of food -- and luckily for us found it, with little fuss or hassle, in a much smarter city-types bar close to the station.  Sara had invited us to her house party that night, so we'd collectively agreed that a break from the drinks and some food would be in order before we were to set off to join the great and good of Notting Hill.

China Blue joined us for dinner, but decided she'd prefer to head home than to party into the night in Notting Hill -- so the three of us (the girl, Conor and myself) caught the tube out into the Notting Hill night, to what seemed like a very trendy party thrown by Sara and her flatmate. 

These parties always amuse me, since Sara is Australian (which might go without saying, since she's one of the girl's oldest friends) and her flatmate is South African.  The latter I hadn't even known until that day, when the more-perceptive Conor had noticed it immediately upon talking to her.  The part that amuses me is that other than the standard "how do you know the host" ice-breaker questions, people would always ask me where I was from -- and when I replied that I was English, they'd be surprised and tell me I was the first Englishman they had met that night.  Often the only one at the party.  People would presume I was Australian, like the girl and Sara, or South African like so many of the guests, or last night it was thought I might be Irish, like our good friend Conor.   My English accent was foreign and difficult to understand in the noisy party atmosphere.

I feel decidedly less travelled at these parties, but it was a lot of fun -- even if we didn't stay too late.  The three of us were worse for wear after the afternoon, but still a lot better than some of the party's guests, and together we caught a bus to guide us home -- sitting on the top deck, right at the front, we could spy on all the people out in the city...

And so here we are, the girl and I having a lazy Sunday at home with a couple of cats who are craving attention after being left alone all day yesterday.  I feel very lucky today, and the working week feels thankfully a long way off.

Another year older, and deeper in debt

This will be the last year I can count myself among the twenty-something bloggers -- so perhaps I should start looking for a 30-something community instead.  I turned 29 this week and once again have to stop and take stock of my life.

I can't remember how I celebrated my 19th birthday now, except that I was in my first year at university, in Derby.  Did I invite friends to come and see me, and were they too busy?  Did I visit my parents back home?  It's all a mystery to me now.  I guess it wasn't that spectacular.

29 was much better.  In a less than surprising turn of events, I invited friends from home to join me for a meal out locally -- with the idea that I could have a separate celebration in London for people I knew there, making it easy for everyone.  Friends at home didn't have to go to London, and people in London didn't have to trek out to the suburbs.  Except it didn't quite work out that way, and in the end all my friends at home except one -- and, of course, the girl -- couldn't or wouldn't come, so I ended up cancelling my meal out and instead ordering Chinese takeaway and watching a dvd.  I would pretty much live on Chinese takeout if I could get away with it.

On my birthday itself, the girl gave me what could be possibly one of the best gifts ever -- a week-long holiday in Barcelona, later this year when it's warmer.  And she didn't just give me a print-out of the booking confirmation page, she made a kind of flip-book to read that gave me little bits of info on each page to keep me guessing until the end.  We then headed into London to do what we had planned for last year, until the snow ruined everything -- which was visit the London Planetarium.

Except there is no London Planetarium any more, and hasn't been for years, it seems.  Now the only one is at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which was lucky because Greenwich is one of my favourite places to be, and so as well as Planetarium show we got to look round the museum of the Royal Observatory and learn all sorts of cool things about space.  I'm a big nerd about space, and for way longer than was really appropriate still had glow in the dark stars on my walls and ceiling.

This weekend is drinks in London with friends old and new, in my favourite bar in the world -- Kick, in Shoreditch.

That old factory sense

Following a conversation over lunch with her colleagues, the girl asked me the other night what my favourite smells were.

I consider scent to be one of the most under-rated senses -- you might consider not being able to live without hearing, or a life lived without sight, but rarely is a thought given to our sense of smell.  Which is funny, because it reportedly has the strongest link to memory recall.

I remember the time I spent in New York -- ten years ago this year, as it happens -- and how I later came to think of Manhatten as a city of smells.  I had a theory that you could navigate the city blind, going only by the unique smells individual blocks or streets had.  One street always had a guy selling roasted chestnuts, another place smelled like blocked drains, somewhere else might have smelled like fresh bread, yet another of steam from the subway.  I wonder now what I might remember from those days and nights, if I was just given the smells -- if the jazz club in an underground disused meat locker might have had a particular smell of sweat and candles, or what the sheets in the hostel smelled like.

I struggle to name five of my favourite smells, without resorting to cliche -- like the smell of fresh baked bread, or newly-mown grass.  But even those have strong memories attached to them, of walking past the supermarket every morning on the way to school, and on cold, frosty mornings feeling warmed by the smell of bread as it came out the vents of the shop's bakery.  Or summer Saturday afternoons when the grass had been cut...

It's strange in a way how we can't smell ourselves.  I know that I must have a distinct smell, the combination of my deodorant and aftershave mixed with whatever makes me smell like myself, but I wouldn't recognise it.  I'm always slightly surprised when someobody notices my aftershave, comments on it, or even can name it.

I came across a smell earlier I had forgotten about, and forgotten the memories of.  As I poured what was left of a forgotten glass of beer down the sink, it foamed up around the plughole, and I smiled as I remembered weekends when my Dad would pull the sofa in front of the tv to watch West Ham play football -- and the big glass mugs of beer he would have.  Sometimes as a kid he would let me take a sip, or I would just smell it and get the foam on my nose.  In years to come, what smells will remind me of here, and now?

And as ever, I turn it over to whoever may be reading -- what are your favourite smells?  And what stories do they tell?  Do you ever smell something and recall something you didn't even realise you had forgotten?  Tell me everything.