Picture the scene. A hefty 15 year old boy, lay aloft (it is aloft) a Thuka (knowing the age group sleeping in their beds, they could’ve chosen their name more carefully) cabin bed sobbing into an already fairly snottily covered pillow one Thursday morning in 2004. My mum, because she’s still a saint, gallops up the stairs to tend to her inconsolable eldest son.
“To break from protocol, we’re going to play that beautiful song again, straight away” Jo Wiley told the abundance of (I’m hypothesising) brickies, cabbies, students, ‘keyworkers’ and the like falling apart by their newly purchased DAB radios. “It’s The Streets, mum, it’s like he knows my life”.
I can’t remember exactly what part of my life Mike Skinner had been privy to at the time. It couldn’t be the 93% attendance record at school because that was deemed by the schools as ‘for my eyes only’, and it couldn’t be the fact my WWF wall tidy was fraying quicker than The Rock could smell;
I must not have received the text reply I was holding out for as I probably bravely penned to an unsuspecting recipient:
“Nobody sed it wz easy, It’s such a shame for us to part, Nobody sed it wz easy, No1 eva sed it it wud b this hard, I’m goin bk 2 the start.”
Tb. Luv u x x x
NME wrote at the time that Dry Your Eyes was “a hairs on the back of your neck song for jilted lovers”. “Rarely before had Skinner sounded so poignant and vulnerable, and, well, normal” Tony Naylor so concisely put. I returned to this song so many times over the fifteen years of relational turmoil that followed.
The fact I can’t remember if this rejection was from C or H, or maybe even the fact I thought it could’ve been a yes from J but she was still with R, but then I enticed her with a shared train journey to see Muse meaning it turned out not to be a rejection either way J meant that it wasn’t all that bad. But in those 9:02 minutes I felt like he knew whatever ever it was that I was going through. Side note: he must’ve had my number as the preceding single ‘Fit but You Know It’ seemed to contain musings that only the snowman with its secret pocket had been stored with.
The take home, tissues were needed on more than one occasion.
This week there was a change to Monday’s television schedule. Boris once again requested that we’d stay home and limit our interaction with the outside world. The very same day, I had earlier responded to a Facebook post asking me to rate how I was feeling by way of a coloured heart. I responded with a red heart – ‘I was doing great’. A mere twelve hours later, in one single moment my life had turned round.
Okay, that is a slight exaggeration but the new year, new me-moon certainly felt more like same shit, different day. Skinner writes that ‘the world feels like it’s caved in, proper sorry frown’. I didn’t sleep on Monday night. Restless. Anxious. Somewhat overwhelmed. I felt the weight of the family’s finances collapsed upon my chest. All plans of being creative, of rediscovering my artistry felt like they had to be shelved. And, the 2 stone weight loss that had been achieved before Christmas seemed like the dying embers of an open fire. Or perhaps a better metaphor would be simply asking the question: what’s the opposite to a tyre puncture?
Lying wide eyed as my partner and son slept, I didn’t know how we were going to cope with the mental, productive, financial and emotional complexities of another full lockdown. In that moment, that red heart emoji was certainly bleeding its colour.
There’s a meme being passed around the internet – there always is – that says “thank you for my seven day trial but I’d like to cancel my subscription to 2021”. So much of day to day life is transient, I’ve learned anyway. ‘It was best of times and it’s the worst of times.’ I always I like to turn to The Office in times of writing and there’s a moment where David Brent describes life as just a series of peaks and troughs. “You don’t know whether you’re in a trough until you’re climbing out, or on a peak until you’re coming down”.
I’m writing this at the end of the first week of lockdown 3 probably somewhere between okay and great. On Tuesday I reached out to my coach to ask for help in processing these ever fluctuating feelings, trying to work out how to support my family, run the business that pays our bills but still find time to strike a creative match, once daily. We walked and talked (holding a two metre stick between us at all times), it always feels so good to talk. In a mere hour of passing time I had felt the feelings, acknowledged how they were affecting me and put in place a strategy to restart.
BIR style Chicken Tikka Masala
New year, new me? I’m pretty sure this is actually the wettest dry January since records began. Instead, I invite you to embrace a ‘new year, same me’. You don’t have to change everything, it’s about being just a little more ready for not knowing what’s round the corner. Reach out, get mind fit. Set some little goals. Achieve them. (We’ve already a restaurant style curry from scratch this weekend!) There’ll be a forever of Mike Skinner moments, but it’s only a 4:32 minute song. There’s always a follow up single (Blinded by the Lights, if you’re asking).
Always feel the feelings. Even the tough ones. Even when they flip your life upside down. It’s so easy in times of stress to feel helpless, however I am so grateful to the years of process that reminds me to ‘dry my eyes mate, there’s plenty more fish in the sea’. That’s a metaphor, not always an excuse to join Tinder.
It’s Joel, actually. 