The car’s fan kicks in as the engine has been idling for too long now and my mind is turned back to the issue in hand. The problem, you see, is that taking the rubbish out is a rare event since I spend so little time at home, and so I am apt to remember doing it. Locking doors, however, is something I do all the time, so each individual occurrence blurs into an obscurity of infinite replicas. Perhaps if I mark out each time as unique by saying something memorable as I do it, it might stick better in my memory:
‘Jon Richardson is locking his front door in the rain and he had Shreddies for breakfast. Boobs.’
That kind of thing would be memorable. This is what I will do from now on, but this time I am just going to drive and when I get back tomorrow and find that the door was locked the whole time, I will treat myself to a smug, self-satisfied smile and know that I am getting better at life. In weeks and years gone by I would have gone back to check, but that was when I didn’t have Gemma to think about.
Gemma is the reason I am trying to be more normal, because I imagine that’s what she wants me to be. The best dating advice I can give you is that women like men who aren’t weird – and, I suppose, vice versa – and that’s probably where I have been going wrong for the last eight years. I am not a particularly attractive man, shorter than I would like and with too round a head to feel entirely comfortable when walking past a tennis court, but nor am I ugly enough to warrant the eight-year suspension from the opposite sex that I have been serving. My voice is rather too shrill and I tend to moan too much, but I suspect the main problem has been things like checking doors and getting uncomfortable because I feel that I have stepped on more cracks in the pavement with my left foot than my right – that’s what has marked me out for singledom. No one wants to walk the streets arm in arm with a man who occasionally breaks free to cross the road and step on a grid to ‘even things out’.
Having someone else to think about once more holds a light up to some of my more eccentric behaviours and I can see that parking by the roadside, yards from your house, and sitting in a catatonic state is not right. Life is about simply playing the odds and I have to concentrate on making myself a reliable target for love. Gemma and I are normal people and we go about our business normally, thinking about one another all the while. Besides, who would call at my house even if the door were unlocked? Swindon and its total isolation wins again!
Mirror, signal, manoeuvre. As I finally set off to my gig, I sing a song of victory to myself, a victory over the old me.
Hit the road, Jon, and don’t you go check that door.
13.02
THE MIGHWAY CODE
Approaching Birmingham I am finally starting to calm down and truly forget about things back in Swindon. For the first half an hour I realised that I had been kidding myself if I thought I could just drive away and not suffer any repercussions. The hardest moment came when I stopped for petrol, by which time I had not only become convinced that I left the door unlocked, but also wide open. I pictured vividly a burglar very casually walking up my stairs and taking my big TV from the living room, the closest thing I have to a friend in Swindon, before sauntering back out again and smiling at my next-door neighbour as he loaded it into the back of his van with all his other, much more hard-fought booty. The neighbours would, of course, do nothing.
Well, he can’t be a thief because he is so brazen and the door isn’t forced. Jon must be moving away to another town … Good! Stinking murdering paedo with his closed curtains and clean car.
My paranoia is simply because my SkyPlus recording system means that my television is now more reliable than any girlfriend I have ever had. In the days when you had to ask a partner to record Match of the Day for you, a really good one might remember nine times out of ten, but there would always be a time when they forgot, or couldn’t find a tape, or the time it had come on ten minutes earlier because there was no lottery so they missed the first match (the best match) because they were still watching Four Weddings and a Funeral on the other side. But with modern technology, one press of a button ensures that whatever the day, whatever the time, your favourite shows are always waiting for you and nothing is ever expected of you in return. If my television could make me a cup of tea in the morning and put it by my bed, and could drive me home from the pub when I am drunk, I would marry it instantly – though I might need to get a coaxial attachment for my penis. The TV really is enormous; stupidly large, given the size of my living room. I can never quite get far back enough to see what’s on all of it, but it’s good for watching football on. You can see why I would become so afraid of the thought of losing it all through sheer carelessness. Those feelings have now subsided.
Aside from having to concentrate on not having an accident caused by the lunacy of some drivers, I find driving to be an incredibly relaxing experience. I never feel more free than when behind the wheel of my car. It is only our autopilot that makes us turn left where we are supposed to and take the correct exit at a roundabout. The truth is that every time you get into your car there are an almost infinite number of possibilities open to you, and it is now possible to drive from the northernmost tip of Scotland to China and therefore anywhere in between! When you realise that this is possible, you cannot help but ask how many decisions you actually make in your life. By a decision made, I mean a conscious effort to take control of a situation rather than simply allowing yourself to respond in what you think is the correct way, given your track record and how you are perceived by the people around you.
Compared with this number, then ask yourself how many things just seem to happen? How many times have you got to work and been unable to remember quite how you got there, or gone through an entire week of your brief life without feeling as though you have done anything significant? In order to be absolutely sure that where you are going is the right choice you first have to consider and discount every other option available to you at that point. Would going to Tuscany make you happier than going to Asda? Would it make you happier in the short term but create problems in the long term, or is it a viable option for a permanent relocation? What about Munich? Of course you don’t do this; no one can live their life according to this set of guidelines or none of us would get anything done for spending our time thinking about the alternatives, but isn’t the very fact that there are that many alternatives in itself a wonderfully refreshing thought? Sometimes it can seem as if there are none, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. You just have to wake yourself up to noticing them, but most of us don’t.
I know that while I am almost certain to end up at my gig in Yorkshire, if I were to just keep on not taking the correct turn then I would be bound to end up somewhere unexpected. From the age of ten I remember being driven to school by my mum and feeling a nervous cramping in my stomach, a pressure that existed precisely because I had always been academically very successful up until that point. I had always done well in tests and exams, behaved well and done all my homework but even then to me that just meant that the one day it all collapsed around me everybody would laugh at me all the more. Teachers would be more disappointed in me than anyone else.
We thought you were one of the good ones, but you aren’t. You’ve let us all down by forgetting that calculator. What a pity.
There were brief moments of escapism from that tension inside me every few hundred yards though, brought on by the thought that one day my mum would look at me and my sister and say: ‘Look, I don’t want to go to work, you don’t want to go to school, so shall we just head off? I’m going to keep on going straight ahead and if you feel like we should take a turn, tell me and we will. We’ll just stop when we get hungry and nobody will ever be able to find us again.’
I think I could see that urge too, in her eyes, but whatever pressures were on me, a ten-year-old boy, to do what was expected of me, they must have been on her, a college head of department with two children, a hundred times over.