Tempus Fugit

Time is an enemy. It catches up and breaks you down. All of a sudden you are having a conversation with your 87 year-old mother. You're engagement photo from Tunisia is 17 years old. You are counting down waiting for the few snatched play-times with your growing kids, caught between watching them grow into characters and wanting time to freeze-frame. What can we do? Look back and count the cost of time wasted aimlessly waiting, or, count the fewer memories of time lived fully? I remember dragging my ass through college, hours every day... gone. A lost boy. A faceless institution. But I took a love of words from it and met some incredible people along the way. Before that I can count the lost five years when I nomadically plodded about once I'd left school. Or I can recognise the character that came out of those lean times.
And in recent years I've awoken to another fact. I always felt my Dad passed on too soon. I was twenty-three. He was seventy one. Since my daughters arrived in my life I've seen it differently. I was too caught up in myself at the time to see that those were twenty three years where we were really lucky to have each other and to share whatever we did. I never saw that perspective after his death. Felt hard done by for a while. Life is fleeting, harsh and nail-biting stuff with zero warranty. He taught me that. I have a feeling he enjoyed those years just as much as I'd like to replay them.
I look at how green I was in the late eighties/early nineties. I rode my bike with no coach or clue, putting myself to sleep at night dreaming about Belgian toothpaste, epic battles and success. Sure, at the time I wasn't happy when I couldn't win jack sh*t but now I'm so happy turning the pedals. I look at young fellas being coached and equipped and mentored and I can only feel pleased for them. Cycling has probably contributed to my being here right now, more than any other thing. Yes I could have ridden and finished the RAS in the early nineties [and most definitely NOT in the last 20 years] but sure, in the grand scheme of things I've smiled a lot through cycling. I didn't burn like a flare. I wasn't extinguished in the dark times either.
In a nutshell, I've managed to get a handle on time and it's effects. I know it's value. Despite what my wife may sometimes vocalise, I spend a huge amount of time not cycling! There's the time with that aforesaid 87 year-old, there's the crazy times around the town with the kids, in the café, chasing them around the fruit and veg in ALDI, staying up reading with them or having cheeky snuggles on the couch. I cycle probably 6 hours a week. And I enjoy it. Most of that is done out of the school gate. Sunday spins have me back in time to do the shopping and look out the supermarket window at local clubs cycling by.
I don't have a great routine. I just try to turn the stereo up. Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" is sublime when turned up to eleven. I drive quickly. I train harder. Or pick harder routes. I jettison anyone that tears time away from me. I read hard-boiled stuff like Raymond Chandler instead of literature. The coffee machine in my classroom is always on as I try to teach at a million miles an hour. I pitch my life experiences at 30 students every 40 minutes. At home Lavazza is the pout pourri replacement. I have repetitive strain injuries in my sense of humour from messaging the good mates I have. If they were in a quiz they'd be the quick-fire round!
I try desperately to kick chronology in the gut and buy more time. I'm trying to log this blog [written over lunch] before putting the sprogs to bed!! But I'll be back down the stairs to write a page of the novel.
Andy Dufresne gets the last words though; "Get busy living or get busy dying."

New tattoo

I'd like to think I move to the beat of a different drum. Doesn't everyone? A tattooed beat all of our own making. We all have a different reality deep in our subconscious. It's back there where we were little, hairy, hunter-gatherer types. Our way of being is decided for us long before we ever became aware of it. So though I'd like to think my slightly incessant sense of humour, my love of the outdoors and an awful disrespect for authority is a personal project and journey that I alone forged... the truth says different.
I have no idea who I am in reality. If I write drunk and edit sober then I'm of Norman descent via Flanders, farmers, educators, emigrants and tradesmen. I don't feel as though I belong to any of that bar the Flandrian part. 800 years ago that's where my namesake hailed from. A small region that prides itself on directness, a stubborn streak, and a sarcasm unparalleled in western Europe. Plus an affinity with the hard outdoors.
Today I coughed and spluttered and sounded like an East German female weight lifter every time I spoke. I belted out to the Saturday time trial league only to find that there were no other competitors. I had a chat about soccer with timekeeper/photographer/organiser/bastion of cycling Sean, then we called it a day. But somewhere in my sub-sub-conscious a troglodyte Norman with the unibrow and B.O. started to suggest I race anyway. So I couldn't breathe properly (hey maybe it was lack of oxygen to my brain?), knew I was racing myself only, and said flip it, let's do it! Would you believe it if I said I got a shudder down my spine as I started the stopwatch? I know, I know, it was probably just the Veno's cough syrup, Sinutab and vitamin D coursing through my oxygen-depleted veins.... But I'd like to think it was that inkling of ancestry, a dot of soil from a North Sea buffeted field.
Off I set, a sorry sight hurtling down the inclines and struggling up the drags with a stubborness and angst that belonged in De Panne instead of a rural corner of Wexford. I could have taken a shortcut, or turned around on the road. After all its not as if there was a witness. Hell I could have called a taxi! I was pumping amoebic horrors from my nose, leaving a trail Hansel and Gretel would have been proud of. And all to race myself because some glitch in my DNA bade me keep going. My ego would like to think I was tough to finish but really I didn't want to admit I'm sicker than my wife thinks. And there was that feeling that a little bit of cycling here and there keeps my hopes of having a decent season alive. My personal image now stands at 'Tough Flandrian skin wrapped around a soft, chocolate-fondant body'.