Now that you're not here

Saturday afternoon, just after midday, I got into London and met Tom. I had invited Tom to come and stay with me again now I'm back home, under the impression he was going away next weekend. But I was wrong, it was this weekend. So on Saturday I arranged to meet him in London, and spend the day with him before his flight to Japan.

Even though we never kept in close contact all that much, it seems so strange now that he's gone and I can't talk to him. Knowing that he's in Tokyo, probably drunk and jet-lagged, carrying a small fortune in Japanese Yen in cash on him. Or by now on (in? what's correct) some kind of orientation, where he will be saying moshimatsu in his thick Northern accent.

Who in Japan will ever tell him that Hull is grim and smells like fish? Who will beat to death the same joke about fish over and over again, and still make him laugh?

I worry about him out there, all on his own. I know he can take care of himself, he -- like me -- took himself around the USA one summer and lived and worked in New Orleans for a while without knowing anyone. Just the same, I worry how he will cope if his depression comes down on him and he realises that he's an 11-hour flight away from home, knows nobody and can barely speak the language. Maybe he will luck out and run into Scarlett Johansson while in Tokyo (like he said he was going to do).

Tom was a wholly different person on Saturday to the depressed, subdued guy who had stayed with me in Leicester shortly before I left. I don't know precisely what prompted the change, just as I was never really clear on what had got him so depressed to begin with. I give credit to a girl named Kim that was on the Jet program like him, and whom he'd met on the interview day in London. I won't divulge details, but I'm sure she had a part to play in cheering him up when I couldn't.

Tom and I wandered around Camden market, and he found a retro shop and bought himself a pair of 1970s-style football shorts. Even though he said the seams would probably split if he tried to play football in them, he was pleased to find them and sent text messages to friends telling them of his great find. We then spent most of the afternoon drinking in a bar and talking, like old times.

I took him to the airport, we met his family and he checked his baggage and the representatives from the Jet program. And I hugged him goodbye, and made my way home.

Even though I have written how I am sick of feeling impermanent and that nowhere is my home and starting over all the time, I was envious of him. I might just sign up myself and go try teach English to kids in Japan. It would only need to be for a year -- which out of a lifetime is nothing. I can settle down later.

---

This is Tom: Tom with his silly hair, playing with my digital camera. Currently speaking Japanese somewhere with a thick Northern accent...

On diaries and girlfriends

Before this diary, there was Open Diary, and I started on Open Diary as Sharkbait. The name didn't -- and doesn't -- really mean anything, it was going to be Sharky Sharky but I had email accounts and IM names with it and I wanted my diary to be private from Fiona.

I kept that diary for years, upgrading to Open Diary Plus when that was launched to be free of the pop ups and for the better service. But in the end, I didn't like how Open Diary was run. Some days it just didn't work, sometimes one thing after another would go wrong and stay wrong for days. What really got to me was when people were paying for subscriptions, but not having them recognised. The money would be taken, but the service wouldn't be provided.

Eventually it became time for me to leave my past behind and start over. I came here, after looking at what other sites were available. I liked how Stephen was involved in the community, and how it felt like more of a community. I liked how Stephen answered my emails, and asked me what I thought of d-x and how he explained the idea was for a place where people wanted to write better.

I've never regretted coming here. Until today.

No, only kidding.

All this is just nostalgia, because I was looking through my old open diary for a poem to show Diane, and I forgot that if I edited something my diary would show up as updated and everyone I knew there would be confused. But I can lose myself in reading entries written when I lived in Salt Lake, 3 years ago.

I'm toying with the idea of including a link here back to that diary -- entries written when I was 19 and fretting about my relationship with Fiona, notes from San on old entires -- after all, that's where the two of us met. I won't include such a link yet, though -- this diary was set up to free me from my past. To start over. But I wonder if knowing my past doesn't help understand me better. It's something to ponder.

Anti-social day

I feel like trash today. I didn't sleep very well last night I think, and today just feel run down and anti-social. It's funny, I'm sat around wondering abut calling my doctor. Not because I don't feel good, but because he apparently called wanting to speak to me over the weekend. I really don't know what he wants. I'm not expecting any sort of test results, nor any feedback from him on anything. I saw him last week and he changed my medication, and it's possible that with my moving and his surgery reopening my medical records weren't available to him at the time. In this case he could be concerned that my records show I'm all kinds of screwed up and he wants to talk to me about it or something. This seems kind of above and beyond the call of duty to me, especially since he wasn't overly concerned with talking to me about why I was on medication to begin with.

The other option is that I mentioned to him I needed a job. That here I am, a qualified journalist, and I can't get a job. He said something like he would keep his ear to the ground for me in case he heard of anything I might be suitable for. There's a chance, then, that this is why he called -- that he has heard of a job or recommended me for a job and wanted to tell me.

But it's the uncertainty, the fear that it could be the first option and not the second, that is stopping me from calling. I'm wrestling with whether it is better to not know. If it's about a job then surely it is better to call sooner rather than later? I don't expect to make a move any time soon.

On an unrelated topic, I finally got compensation through for my assault back in January. It's not a fortune, but I'm pleased enough that it has cleared my overdraft, cleared my credit card debts and given me some savings again. It also meant I could take San out to dinner on Friday night and buy her a pretty bracelet from Camden market. Of course, since my parents don't know I was assaulted I also haven't told them about my compensation and am having to be careful about my spending. I bought a usb device and a new pair of boots before I left Leicester -- knowing I had money coming -- and so have successfully avoided being asked where I got the money for those from. I have my reasons for keeping it from them -- mainly because it would be too difficult to explain who I got compensation from when I told them that I merely slipped on some ice and fractured my jaw. But it's also because I know they would want a share of the money.

I talked to the university before I left about getting a hardship grant from them, since I had to pay out for all my exams. They said they could give me £1500, if I met certain requirements. Once my parents found out about this they decided that the majority of this money should go to them, and not to me. I resented this at the time, but have since agreed to just keep £500 for myself, since they don't know about the other money. Out of this I will take them out to dinner this week.

I'm wondering to myself lately if maybe I should go travelling. I've got a little money and nothing really to do here right now, so it could be a good time to see something of the world. Most likely it's an idea I will do nothing more about -- yeah, I said I was feeling anti-social today.

Shannon

Shannon

For some reason this evening my thoughts are centred around a girl named Shannon, that I knew online several years ago -- when I first started a journal on Open Diary.

This isn't a tale of lost love, or undeclared crushes -- or even of two close friends losing each other. But she was a friend, and I can still remember random facts about her -- how she lived in Canada, and used the name Raven to begin with. Her diary was the sporadically updated type -- even more sporadic than is mine, but she had a very distinct writing style.

I don't recall now if she often wrote poetry, or if it was a rare occurrence. If I close my eyes and concentrate hard, I think I can visualise various poems of hers -- though I can't read what they say. I can almost see myself in the third person, sat here in front of her diary and reading her poetry. One poem stood out, though, it was called Lupine Dreams and I can always remember the first line read: "I dreamed of you as you ran with the wolves". I think she said it was inspired by a real dream of her boyfriend, and wolves.

She was an angry and depressed person -- as you might expect -- and I think she was about the age I am now, which would have given us something like a 5-year age gap. We'd talk late into the night on ICQ, and I think we even used voice-chat once or twice. What did we talk about? I can't remember. Probably Fiona, when I was with her. Her boyfriend, who she always referred to as "the boy". It was easy conversation, though it won't ever go down in history.

As I sit here and write I keep pausing and I will stare into space for a minute as I try to recall the names or nicknames of her coworkers from diary entries. I try to recall place names, or the type of job she did.

I'm sorry, Shannon, but I can't.

Just the other day a girl I knew from university -- a sort-of friend of Fiona's -- started talking to me on IM. We hadn't talked in about 4 years, or thereabouts, and to be honest I didn't much care for her when I knew her, let alone now. But maybe Shannon will one day resurface on yahoo, or maybe she never left but thinks it's been too long to talk to someone she didn't know that well to begin either way.

Just the same, I have a copy of her poem kept still, I like it so much. I've searched for the title online, but with no success. I've searched lines from it, but I get no results. She changed her name from ravengirl to Crimson raven, but there's no sense in searching those names -- they'd be too popular.

She's out there, somewhere, tonight. And I hope she's still writing.

"We were on a break" and jealousy issues

San has gone to the coast to celebrate her flatmate Krystina's birthday, along with (most of) her other flatmates, and most likely their boyfriends. I agreed to go, and was actually looking forward to it for a while -- then figured that I would hardly know anyone, and it wouldn't be much fun if San felt she had to keep me company the whole time rather than have fun. So I've stayed home, sending San with the card and the pretty stud earrings I bought for Krystina.

I spent most of yesterday in Camden, again -- this time with San and the additional company of her flatmate (from Leicester, like any flatmate of hers I mention) Natalie, since the two of them wanted to shop for something for Krystina and I just didn't want to have to wait another week to see San.

I don't remember how it started, but over lunch I was teasing San about this guy Sebastian she slept with when we were "on a break" this one time. The conversation had gone from a general discussion -- or rant, perhaps, on my part -- about how nobody ever says "I think we should see other people" without having somebody else in mind. That's probably where Sebastian came into it, I said that San had known perfectly well when she decided we should take a break that she wanted him. After all, he'd made it pretty clear what he wanted from her and she'd kept in contact with him.

It was about the time I was teasing San about him just wanting to be her "friend" that I said how she had been a really, really good friend to him all night. Yes, said San, that night, and the next night, and the night after that...

I stared at her.

What I'd always thought was a one night stand apparently wasn't at all. But we were on a break, says San. I don't hold it against her, I tell her, I was just 'surprised' and needed a minute to take it in. Natalie thought watching all this was hilarious.

San then picked up my phone and started looking through my inbox, and I went to the bathroom. When I came back, San showed me my phone and had highlighted the name Charley in my inbox. Yes, you know Charley, I told her. I've talked about her before, she's a friend of mine that was on the same Psychology course as Kirsty, her flatmate. San wanted to know why Charley had been thanking me for a lovely afternoon. Not that I felt I should have to justify or explain myself, but I told her that, yes, Charley is my friend and we hung out one afternoon. Seems when I was in the bathroom San had read my messages, found this one, got jealous, and toyed with the idea of calling her, to see who answered. Natalie had agreed with San this was just a little bit psychotic, and talked her out of it.

Everything's fine, though.

I'm no longer bothered by the idea of her spending several nights with Sebastian -- it caught me off-guard at the time and that is all. We were on a break, as she says, I just hadn't expected her to start up with someone else so quickly at the time. But it's all in the past. As for San's jealousy... I assured her that there's no funny stuff and it's all platonic. But it was because of a reaction like this I didn't tell her to begin with.

Don't get me wrong, I adore San. I miss her during the week, and love her for who she is, as a whole -- not in spite of her flaws, they just make up who she is. Like I say, everything's fine -- she's texting me today, in typical San fashion, saying she wants to live by the sea, but only in the summer when it's nice weather...

Cry as they all die blonde

I've been slacking off. There's been things I should have been writing down, but haven't. Instead I will make this entry a sort of mish-mash of recent happenings.

I was interviewed last week for a paper that for privacy reasons I will refer to only as "The Chronicle". I had sent them a speculative letter asking them to keep me on file for any vacancies that might come up, and they invited me for a preliminary interview, or an "informal interview".

I was mislead by the word informal. Even when i got there the news editor -- whom I remembered being a happy and laid back sort of guy from when I was on work experience -- led me to a meeting room and told me it was just an informal chat. The interview didn't go entirely badly, but I think that my nerves might have lead me to lose my train of thought once or twice. Also, I wasn't prepared for when I was asked to talk factually about the paper. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I must have appeared as a terrible journalist, since the first thing a decent journalist does is his research -- but I hadn't researched the paper. I'd read the paper and familiarised myself with the news locally, but nothing about circulation figures, that the paper is the oldest business in the area and is one of the oldest papers in the country.

I also had to do a kind of written test -- remember this isn't even the official interview, this is just to see if I am worth interviewing for a position. It might have gone well, or I might have crashed and burned -- trying to write 250 words and find the right news angle from a vicar's newsletter.

I am yet to hear back from my first interview -- the much nicer interview I had weeks back. I'm told this can be a good sign.

In non-journo news, I spent yesterday with San wandering around Camden. Camden is like no other place on earth. In fact, London is a very unique city in that it appears to be run entirely by people from other countries -- from waitresses to bar tenders to shop assistants in tourist shops, every last one of them speaking with an accent. It makes me smile. But Camden... one big melting pot of cultures and counter-cultures and people with sandwich boards and taxis trying to run you over as you cross the road, or markets mixing the sounds and smells together to just make that unique Camden feeling.

San and I are going to her flatmate Krystina's birthday next weekend, so I was looking for something to buy her and texting one of San's other flatmates asking for ideas and guidance. In the end, I bought her some pretty studs for her freshly-pierced ears. I miss being pierced myself.