The guilt I feel is genuine, but in truth it is not so much guilt at having deceived my friends, but a still burning ember of disappointment deep in my soul at my failure to complete the book honestly. Yes, I take my life that seriously. My fear of failure is so extreme that even when on my own I find it difficult to accept mistakes. Like most men who live alone, there are tell-tale signs in my décor and furniture that I am a bachelor. There is, for example, no settee in my living room. I experimented with one for a while, but found that with space relatively tight in a living-room/diner, the room taken up by the extra seat simply could not be justified when weighed up against the number of visitors I receive. It was duly replaced by a leather reclining massage chair and, with some rejigging, the extra space was put to good use and allowed for the purchase of a much bigger television and a drinks table.
The most obvious sign of my singledom is probably the dartboard which hangs on the back of the door (or when the dartboard is put away behind the table, the thousands of tiny dart holes covering the door, but for a small circle in the upper middle). There is something in the rhythmic back and forth of darts, the clearly defined boundaries and the rewards it offers for accuracy and repetition that I enjoy. My favourite pub game is, of course, snooker. Any game whose rules basically amount to finding a table covered in mess and slowly and methodically putting it all away out of sight is one with which I can empathise emphatically.
As much as I enjoy darts, I must confess to not being very good at it, hence the holes in the door. And the door frame. And even the skirting board. The reason I am not very good at darts, and the reason I am not very good at many things, is my stubborn refusal to accept my shortcomings. Each time I throw a dart and miss my intended target, instead of trying to work out what went wrong and correct my technique for long-term success, I get so pissed off with myself that the next two darts are bound to be even wider off the mark than the first.
Professional players have reacted with greater calm and maturity to missing vital darts in World Championship finals than I have on my own at 2am on a wet Tuesday night in my shitty little flat. It won’t be long before the dartboard annoys me so much that I react as any true man might when threatened – by breaking it and hiding it in the garage. In my garage exists a shrine to the person I promised I would become; a man who can paint great works of art, play squash to international standards, and write and compose his own guitar concertos. The history of his heartache is etched across a landscape of broken-stringed racquets and half-painted canvases with the word ‘BASTARD’ drunkenly scrawled across them in black paint.
I cannot bear to be bad at things I love. I long to play the piano but the sound I make with my clumsy fingers crashing down irregularly on the keys is enough to shatter my spine. Like loving someone so much that all you can bear to do is strangle them to death for fear that they might not love you back, I can never go near a brand new piano in case of what might happen.
I hope that in these pages there will be some counsel for anyone who has ever lost their temper at an inanimate object, for those lost sheep who have sacrificed whole afternoons calling a biro a shiteater because it ran out part way through an important document. It is not the pen that is to blame, of course, but the entire cosmos that has decided to make you its victim for that day – but you can’t very well snap the cosmos in half and jump all over it can you? That is a much longer game.
RICHARDSON’S LAW OF MOMENTS
There will, of course, be a small number of people reading this who will not be able to associate at all with the desire to do things in a certain way time after time. If you think you fall into that category, then you should be made aware of this fact: I probably wouldn’t click with you if we met. I doubt it bothers you, since by nature you are probably an impulsive person who doesn’t carry with them the rejections of the past, preferring instead to ‘live for the moment’. Well, let me tell you that you can keep your moments; I for one do not like the present.
People who tell you that they live their lives in the moment are, in my experience, only doing so because they are afraid of their future or ashamed of their past. These are people for whom thinking of anything other than the fork in their hand or the song in their head or the next step they are going to take frightens them so much that they pretend it is some kind of inspiring and advisable philosophy to do simply whatever it occurs to them to do at that moment in time.
Not only does this life philosophy appal me, I am also annoyed by the fact that it is me who is preached at for having forgotten what it is to be truly alive. Optimists and thrill seekers are riddled with sicken-ingly sweet sayings and mottos that serve to reinforce their flawed beliefs. People who style their hair for hours to make it look as though it hasn’t been styled at all will send you emails with pictures of cats doing water sports and taglines like ‘Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.’
The problem with simplistic and poetic sentiments such as these is that they sound so nice and catchy. I can understand completely why people choose to think that way, of course. Who doesn’t want to believe that every day of their life is a perfectly wrapped gift from the hands of fate? Well, it isn’t, not as far as I am concerned. There are no easily quotable sayings about just knuckling down and getting on with life in all its inconsistent and unfair glory, and if there were, they wouldn’t rhyme or have witty wordplays so people would choose to ignore them. There is simply too much to be done for us all to go around ‘enjoying ourselves’. When the world is perfect, then we can all sit down and eat jelly beans, but for now the fact that things are going well for you just means that you are in a position to alleviate someone else’s suffering for a while.
Not living in the present doesn’t mean not enjoying life at all – far from it! Things can be enjoyed all the more when you appreciate the sacrifice and hard work that went into their organisation, like a slow-cooked piece of meat. All the gristle and toughness that were there at the beginning have been worn away through consistent application of heat over time to leave behind something as smooth as silk. Brace yourselves for plenty more unjustifiable food similes. When you plan your life properly every day can be as exciting as Christmas Eve and you never have to suffer the come-down that is Boxing Day. Just look at Boxing Day as the eve of the eve (and so on) of Christmas Eve.
I seem to be at a time of life where my thoughts are involuntarily turning towards more permanent things, relationships that will last and where I want to be when I settle down, but I also know that I’m still at an age when I should be enjoying my freedom and taking risks and making mistakes.
Apparently ‘making mistakes’ is what your youth is for and, whilst I can’t say I agree, I will certainly concede that life was a lot simpler when I wasn’t expected at all to be thinking long term and living from day-to-day was simply how it was. I am no longer sure that I am a better balanced person with a greater understanding of myself for having spent the last ten years taking life so seriously. Perhaps I should have spent more of my time in nightclubs, having promiscuous sex with people I never intended to see again? It just never appealed to me.
The last time I went back to a girl’s house for an impromptu house party I spent most of the night straightening out rugs, putting down coasters and alphabetising DVDs while all around me people got off with whoever was closest and gradually headed off to various rooms to make more mess, no doubt. I ended up getting violently drunk, tutting at a number of strangers and walking home. I only just about made it.
Personally I alphabetise my DVD collection, but like most of the things I do I maintain that this is nothing to do with OCD, this is simply common sense. How can you expect to find the film you are looking for if you do not have a system in place on the shelf? Given that