The confusing view from the bridge

I nearly broke my finger yesterday. I was struck by the space that was around me, the utter lack of people and the utter lack of movement around me in the middle of a supposed shopping centre, and in the middle of this, my finger slipped in a gap on one of the insidious metal rails that surround Eastlands like an invading army and it jarred against a screw as it tumbled into the abyss, bending it back, bringing my thoughts back to immediacy. I've never broken a bone in my body - and to be honest, I don't do anything that would encourage the action, but for a moment I thought perhaps I had snapped the streak, but life moved on quickly because the pain went away after an hour. Could I have sued? Perhaps, but I'm not wired that way, not wired to seek damages from minor incidental contact. If I did, my relationships would probably be incredibly litigious adventures. The space surrounding me was so jarring, and so poetic in one sense, that I didn't mind a little bit of physical pain appreciating it. The shops seemed to be running entirely on empty, my usual joustabout with an adventurous single mother swinging a pram violently not even an issue. It was lunchtime, and yet there was no illumination to the place, no buzz, just space, vast cavernous space, like a parting of the bogans. I appreciate space now I'm older, although I can still hear my mother yapping in my ear that I shouldn't be such an old man. I can't help it. Space is a precious commodity to me - time and space to think isn't easy to get. The entire weekend being taken up being 100ed different people around the visitors but none of them myself was exhausting. Some school girls were by the side of the road today, having ploughed their car into the back of a tree, they were fine, but they were milling around, giggling nervously and looking a bit shaken. I don't miss having to explain my actions to others, I can say that, because one of them, all puppy fat and dimply freckles, was on the phone as I drove past, probably telling her Mum what had happened. Mum and her sister were talking last night about whether I could look after a wee "wean" - I think I could, but they think if the child started crying, I'd lose it. I think I could handle it, but knowing my Mother she'll bring a child around tonight for me to look after, just to prove a point. Still, at this point, I don't have any responsibilities to anyone but myself, and I quite like this, but I still feel like I don't get enough space and time to relax. My holidays are entirely spent in the lounge rooms of Scottish family members who promise to keep in touch but never do, or listening to what the recycling man thinks of me buying extra papers that increase his workload. My sleep is fitful, my dreams so vivid and colourful that I wake myself up in the middle of them trying to struggle through some imagined problem in 3hree dimensions. So this is probably as relaxed and carefree as I can feel, wandering around the aisles of KMart with nary a care in the world. There's a big red ball on the floor, spiky and pumped up and proud, just sitting there waiting to be kicked. With what can only be described as a gleeful punt with more oomph than grace, I smashed it against my better judgement hard against a pile of Miley Cyrus pencil cases, completely involuntarily and childlike, but then the eerieness crept in. There were no staff around, no customers, no one to stop this silly moment. I looked around, as the shelves gleamed and sparkled without no stock on them, and I wondered if this was what a recession was meant to feel like, a solitary vigil for the lonely shopper, no longer a slave to credit card debt, indulged enough to knock Miley down off the shelf. Or if it was just so rare that there was no one around, no one that I needed to avoid or talk to, that my mind simply couldn't cope with it. Or I was just a bit sleepy and hadn't woken up right and didn't notice a bunch of people wondering what the hell I was doing nor the security camera whirring away in the background.....

Peace of mind has been my greatest achievement in life. Sure, it's not climbing a mountain, it's not rafting down some mighty river, it's not even winning a Fantasy American Football title against all odds, but it's taken a long time and I'm glad that I've got there. I've still lost something in the transition though. When I went to my hippie primary school being encouraged to be arty and paint and sing Peter Coombe songs when we felt like it, I was the life and soul of the party, and I've never been that way again. I used to sit in the back of Dads Torana and they would bet me I couldn't be quiet for 5ive minutes, and I could never manage it. Not a single time. Mind you, there wasn't a single time that Chocolate Brown bomb would not feel like it was about to plough off the road. Now I could, and I think that's a positive and a negative. In silence, I am uncomfortable, if other people are around me. Well, generally. I've been positively gleeful in large crowds of shoppers and disconsolate in solitude with one other person around me, and I can never quite reconcile my feelings to a consistent level, but I do OK. Tasmania is good for thinking time - it encourages creatitivity I find. Long walks around Kingston can be quite inspiring, even if it's just my consistent participation in a Truman Show style farce where every time I step across a driveway a car pulls out and nearly flattens me. So few in number are the people that anytime you see someone, you have enough time where they aren't faceless, they seem to mean something, to represent something, to have a facial movement of vivid colour. I spent ten hours in London one night and can't tell you a thing about it, but the old copper haired jogger that strolls around, crystal clear, her movements aching but defiant. Mind you, I know a 4our year old who sits on her couch, watches The Wiggles, and tells her Dad to go away because she needs some me time or some alone time, and suggest he goes and does something else while she has it. When I walk around Kingston, each individual little It's not really like that in my home town in Scotland, and it isn't even that there's a vast disparity in population or better shops or restaurants where people gather and hide in food loving groups. It's just different, you get ensared in a hydra of detail and dogma and strange routines that stifle all independent thought, Marys tights ripping and the two stringed pie queue taking so much time to figure out night becomes day becomes night again. The positive of course is that you have people in your immediate vicinity who, for instance if you are making a short film as happened in my street, pitch in with sandwiches and script ideas - the negative is that you might have a wonderful idea for a piece of writing and lose it out of your beanie clad head as soon as you get old about Wee Wullies potato patch. The lasagne still haunts me from last time - there were no fewer than 4our phone calls checking whether I liked a lasagne that was cooked for me. It's no surprise that I hold Ayr train station to my heart - not that anyone who's been there would find it's mix of standard Twix stocking vending machines, threatening ambience and surly staff to be especially beautiful or inspiring, but it is to me. I walked across a bridge about 10en at night on my last holiday, and I had a complete surge of self confidence that I was doing this, that I was out, that I had gone to event X or whatever and been braver than the masses who told me to step outside the front door was to encourage a jolly old stabbing. As I walked across this little bridge between platform 1 and 2, a voice, clear as day, Ayrshire as Big Irene calling the police, thundered that it could murder a Twix. I took a step back, nervously, and looked around, before it dawned on me that it was actually my own voice, my own thoughts so clear, if for no other reason than in the hurly burly of street based lore, it was the first clear and independent thought I'd have time to hear since the plane landed. And of course, the machine was out of Twixes, which just made my brain have incredibly dark thoughts as the train click clacked through Ayrshire and empty badly lit fields, devoid of all poetry, but packed with functionality and usefulness...

That train ride was one thing, a moment of intriguing solitary thought that manifested itself in the form of a need for chocolate, but the casino down here sucks the life out of me - hanging around there for hours will only give someone the will to write sub Cure style poetry, and no one needs that. The local shopping centre isn't much better, but I like the poster that I walk past at the moment, a slightly bewildered girl with a polished model school smile advertising junky horrible bangles. It's so gaudy, it stands out as I walk about, as much as the big EXCITE sign that flickers above Nandos without a hint of irony and detachment. I don't feel especially excited - the sign just isn't that convincing - as I wander past unemployment row, a little section of shops that include a fast food restaurant, a video shop and a bookmakers, which to me just makes me feel like I'm partying like it's 1999 - a sandwich, a bet on a horse, and a rental of Jaws, fantastic, now only 5 more hours to kill until the missus gets home. It's funny to me that the most definable song devoted to partying in a specific year refers to a year I was unemployed, overweight, largely miserable and spent a full year getting better at Frogger. Well I guess it wasn't all bad. A cleaner polishes a sign for the Miley Cyrus film as I move slowly through the alleyway, and when he wants to remove it, maybe he can call on me to kick a ball at it to knock it over. He looks weary, perhaps he has some interesting opinions on Miley Cyrus and the culture of celebrity in the modern age. Perhaps he never thinks at all, and speaks in monosyllabic sentences that all end in the word nerfuckin. Who am I to judge a man at his work? Someone told me that there's been a huge rise in car thefts around the Eastlands carpark, a concession to Scottish style sweeping paranoia I suspect, but I still make the time to lock my car as a significant arctic blast hurts my spine. My car radio is still on, thumping some happy Jennifer Lopez song as the DJ says something about picking everyone up and making them feel good - she could only manage it by turning the wind off or flying me to Vegas. The cleaner retreats from view, professionally checking out his work as he walks off, I presume whistling. Mustn't stereotype. The air is grey and the place seems dark. There's a car park full of cars and no one moving around them. As I step away from the car, a man asks if it's hot enough for me, inverting the script as always so it's a joke, since it's freezing, although his timing is sub Cooper. I judge all comedy by Tommy Cooper, and if not Cooper, certainly Monkhouse. I shrug a quite feeble smile, because I'm not fully aware of what he said at first, and because the jagged yellow diamonds on his jumper are hurting my eyes. I find in these situations sure is is usually a pretty good non commital phrase. He seems happy enough with that, and shuffles off at the speed of senility across the car park. I don't know why people talk to me, my face is pretty clear. Who knows what thought strand he has disrupted. I can't remember, and I turn off Lopez and shuffle off in an aimless direction. Outside Nandos, some kids gather and lean with their back against the window, but they look so old, I have to check twice that they aren't washed up already, finished off amidst the gloom, although I must admit I never noticed today the sign that says EXCITE is part of a much larger set of glaring garish signs. Underneath signs that say ENTERTAIN and ENJOY, the kids slump without anything to do, one of them even on second glance noticably older, past school age, and munching on a chicken Taco so slowly it seems like it has to last all day. Throw in a frogger addiction, a moody girlfriend and a need to check e-mails every 5ive seconds, and there I was, a decade ago, hanging outside with a bunch of naughty kids. I move away from the mirror of poignant reflection, because I feel the need to get a sandwich incredibly quickly - once again food intrudes on a perfectly well formed thought strand - and even though I'm held up by the news Sandwich White Female has apparently picked up which causes a gaggle of non serving bakers, I don't mind, I've got thinking to do...

That train, of course, would have pulled into another train station, and then I'd have wandered down the steps to a taxi, and the taxi driver would have told me a lurid story of urban decay and by the time I hit my home of residence, I'd hit the pillow hard, maybe stir myself a cup of tea, and wonder why my adventures were so solitary. Ultimately in Scotland, there's not just space, there's distance, the daily adventures of Tasmania and the regional goings on of Hobart mean more to me than anything growing in Billies garden. It's impossible to reconcile. My reference points just don't match up. Plus, no one goes to the pub, no one goes for drinks in Scotland because they've convinced themselves a chib to the head is one step beyond. In Hobart, there's no chibs, and apparently no chips, a kerfuffling mix of ages behind the bar of this Kingston eatery gather together, 4our of them taking drink orders, with no one on the food part. I've come to appreciate this dis-organisation as part of this places charm, the gap between the garlic butter and the meal now stretching on into infinity. I'm telling my Mum my theory about Scotland, and she's not sure, but she's not ringing her friends there anymore. As the light dims and the last icy bit of coke is drunk, we say goodbye, and on my drive home, I stop in at the local store, and sure enough, another new family has taken over, and everything has been re-arranged. It's the kind of thing that takes to long to explain in Scotland, but here, everyone I know will appreciate it when I text them later. Somewhere in Scotland, my family exist frozen in many ways, going about their days, oblivious to what I'm doing, the pain in my finger. If I still lived in Scotland this would be a massively different set of words, different in tone and outlook. My finger though, it really hurts, it makes typing difficult, and in the solitude of my own home, given all the time in the world to do whatever I want, whether it be lying in the hammock, drinking a lime spider, or lying in the hammock with a lime spider...

I choose entirely to sook about my finger injury....