Black & Blue

The world of a synaesthete is a strange one. Not to them, but to me. I cannot quite manage to imagine hearing, tasting and smelling colours. And yet I think there are times when our lives do exist in a portion of that.
When our days feel black.
When our souls feel bruised and we are filled with a taste of black and blue.
Feeling blue is more than sensation, it has a taste. Bitter, sour, rank.
But the sensation is there too, sharp but numb.

A cloud of colour surrounds you. The darkness that you are ensconced within as you try for sleep takes on a different edge. The pale ceiling glows at you through the darkness in the room as you lay, staring heavenwards, hoping that your mind will clear of the torrent of images, thoughts, stresses and sadnesses that flow so unchecked. You will it to stop, for things to become serene. That you won't have to climb from the warm bed with its new sheets you love so. That you won't have to open the drawer which contains those magic pills the kindly doctor prescribed for you so that sleep will always come. The magic pill will force the tide of sleep to come in and you will welcome it. For the respite until the morning.

You take the pill. You wait for it to work. Wonder when each of the thoughts clamouring for your attention will slowly be pushed aside as the depth of sleep swallows you. And you hope that the dreams tonight will be happy, free. Carefree.

And when the waking world finally, once again, becomes the one you inhabit, you hope the colour changes.
That the black recedes, that it doesn't fade to blue and that the loneliness is gone.
But it's just another day to live through. To exist in. And it's not quite enough.

Song Of The Week IX

I love Disney. I do.

I remember crying at the end of Beauty and the Beast, sitting in the cinema and wondering if it wasn't a little tragic that I was crying over animation. But then I guess people had been crying over Bambi for years before.

At some point Disney made it acceptable for adults to go and see animation without feeling it necessary to borrow a child as an excuse to go. I think Aladdin was one of those movies that made it ok.

I love this song and invariably when I'm making cd's for the car this one ends up on it. I do remember many years ago, making tapes for the car and after a night on the town, friends and I would drive around singing Disney tracks at the tops of our voices. I know more words to Disney songs than will ever be cool to admit to.
So here it is, Friend Like Me from Aladdin...

Ticklish

More of the random...

I'm unbearably ticklish.
On my knees.

I am not even slightly ticklish on my feet.

Yes, I am a freak of nature.

As If By Magic...

I turned the shower on this morning and while it warmed up I popped into my bedroom to brush my hair, makes it easier to comb through after you wash it, don't you know.

I walked back into the bathroom and Mifford was patiently sitting with her back to me, staring at the shower curtain as she does most days while I shower, waiting for me to re-emerge and give her her own shower of attention.

I don't think she realised that I wasn't actually in the shower.
I called to her and she jumped over a foot in the air in fright.
It might be wrong, but I laughed. I laughed so hard I had to sit down and catch my breath.

The look on her face clearly said two things:
1, How the fuck did you do that? You were in the shower and now you're behind me? How is that even possible?
2, You're laughing at me? I will not forget this indignity. I will save this moment and take revenge at a later date. Then we'll see who's laughing.

I'm a little afraid.
And yet still laughing to myself.

Flowers, Facts & Valentines

Looming on the horizon is yet another celebration that I have little love for. Which rather ruins the point of it I guess.
St. Valentines Day is growing ever closer, I really can't be alone in my lack of love for this event can I?
What's to look forward to? Brown envelopes with bills dropping through the letterbox instead of lovely red envelopes with SWALK stamped across their rear? Hmm, I see no fun in brown envelopes at all, they only ever contain bad news.

And I realised it's absolutely ages since I was sent flowers. In fact it was back in the days I worked at British Telecom, answering calls from customers less than cheerfully advising me there was a fault on their line.
I remember chatting one night with Colin, one of the resource managers, when he spotted a gentleman on the CCTV monitor at the front door. The gentleman in question was bearing a huge bouquet of flowers and Colin dashed off to catch him before he gave up ringing the bell.
I sauntered back to my seat, inwardly cursing the lucky receiver of the bouquet. I put my headset on and took a call, yet another cheerless customer unlikely to be thrilled by the weeks of delays BT were suffering with.
Colin finally reappeared with the bouquet in his arms, breathing heavily from the run down the flights of stairs.
All heads turned in his direction as one and all watched to see who would be the lucky recipient. He headed towards my bank of desks, looking me straight in the eye and grinning. I had a customer rambling in my ear and I pointed at my chest in that farcical manner whilst mouthing 'me'? My eyebrows were acquainting themselves with my hairline as I put my customer on hold and took the flowers from Colin.
They were beautiful and I was glad of all the envious stares from around the office as my smile threatened to tear across my cheeks.

That must be ten years ago now with only one bouquet delivery in the meantime. Is it that guys don't send flowers any more? Or is it that they don't send them to me?!

However, as I mentioned Valentines is looming and I'm sure the sale of red roses is about to rocket. I might be strange, (Ha! No might about it!) but a random fact is that I hate red roses, they smack of a lack of imagination, they smack of a last minute gift and whilst I'm sure that's not always true I've never liked them.
I had a date once and the guy in question showed up with a bunch of red roses and I immediately felt that it didn't bode well. I was right, by the way.
They just don't work for me.
Now yellow roses? That's a different kettle of fish. I think they're lovely.
Although, and here's another random fact, daisies and tulips are by far my favourite flowers.
I've always carried a secret (not so secret now) wish that a date would turn up with a tiny posy of freshly picked little white daisies.

But then I still have a stone that was given to me, simply because its finder thought it was beautiful and made him think of me. I'll never forget how ridiculous he said he felt buying a jiffy envelope to send a stone in.

I've been given some truly wonderful gifts in my life and it's the ones that you know the other has given because they know you'll love that count the most I think.
Damn it all, at the end of it, despite my reluctance to like Valentines Day, I'm an old romantic at heart after all.

Song Of The Week VIII

On Tuesday evening I popped over to Manchester as a friend had bought me a ticket to see Mindy Smith. I first saw her perform at the Cambridge Folk Festival a few years ago and thought she was wonderful.
Her beautiful voice takes my breath away and the lyrics to her songs are stunning.
On Tuesday she said that sometimes you hear a song and think that it was written specifically for you, I feel that about a number of her songs and it was wonderful to be able to get to one of only three dates she was playing here in the UK.
It was a small, basement venue and it suited her perfectly. I like the intimate gigs, where you sit literally feet from the artist and where everyone is respectful as they listen quietly. I hate it when I pay to see an artist and am forced to listen to the yelled conversation of the people immediately behind me.

I digress, as always, so she's song of the week and this is such a very, very beautiful song, written about the death of her mother, but applicable to so many situations.


I hope you love it. It was hard to choose just one.

I read a review about her once, and I paraphrase, but they said what a shame it was that for someone so young she had experienced so much trauma and heartbreak, but what a benefit to us that she has written such deeply touching and personal songs about those events, for our lives are the richer for it.

Scrambled

I'm really quite ridiculous. I'm addicted to the game of Scramble on Facebook and find myself in the live rooms frequently. I feel this determination to get onto the leaderboard, which features the top ten players. But every time I do I get freaked out and stop playing until I drop off the board.
That's nuts right?
Yesterday I was staring at the board and typing away, word after word after word, feeling quite smug that I was finding a steady stream when I realised, out of the corner of my eye I had, by some freak of nature, hit the number one spot. I immediately stopped typing until I'd dropped down!
Just moments ago I made it to third place and had to close the screen down when I'd officially had the best result ever. Why is this?

The chat window within the game is always filled with conversations, and nine times out of ten the conversation revolves around the fact that those on the leaderboard must be cheating.

This intrigues me. Why is it that, as soon as people are seen to be better at something we must assume they can't possibly be capable of such feats. We're happy to accept that if we tried to compete in the Olympics that the likelihood is we'd be beaten shamelessly in every event, but in something simple like a Boggle-style game we can't conceive that someone might just be good at that.
There are a number of videos on youtube evidencing the fact that these people type so fast and recognise words at such speed it scares me a little. I touch type, but I make frequent mistakes when I'm trying to enter the words and end up repeating some and neglecting others.

At the end of each game when the list of words that would have scored appears there are usually a huge amount of words that I don't recognise and I've always felt I had a real passion for words. Whilst my vocabulary is some distance from an impressive level, I like to think it's decent, but as from the last game, words like; miaoued, mabes, geoids and beedi have never been used in speech. Indeed, I have no clue what they mean. With the exception of the first one, which I have suspicion about.

Anyway, I have to deal with my obsession. My desk is littered with papers, and on each is scrawled word combinations, so that I remember to get them all. Such as: teas, taes, seat, tae, tea, eat, ate, tae, eta...
Oh good god, I really must get out more.