Tag: sad

August 11th – It’s silly, I know. I’m being ridiculous. I’m aware that it’s just my overreaction to the sudden lack of sunshine. But today, I was sad. I was ill with the IBS and I was pining for summer, for in the gloom which would, in any other year be normal, I started to pine for summer.

It’s ridiculous. I feel deep down like summer has ended and that’s it.

I took a short circuit round Brownhills, late. The rain came on heavily. For once, being out made me sad, not happy. The greyness had flooded into me. All I wanted to do was go home, curl up and sleep.

The brightness was there, though: In the poisonous white bryony in the hedge at Home Farm, Sandhills, and in the yellow water flowers near Newtown.

But even they couldn’t lift me. I went home, listened to sad music and went to bed early.

July 17th – Following the news of the sad loss of fellow blogger and friend The Plastic Hippo, today was difficult, sad and low. He followed this journal avidly.

I fought through it, and carried on. But it was hard.

I never realised that you could feel such loss for someone you knew so little about.

As I climbed the steps from Shenstone station, the sky was dramatic and beautiful. And beneath it, I was hollow.

Goodbye, pal. 

April 5th – I keep going on about this to the point that readers must be sick to death of it, but Spring seems alternately on my shoulders and miles away.

Stood on Catshill Junction Bridge, looking at the leafless trees, muddy wet towpaths and general lack of green, spring seems delayed.

We need warm weather, clear skies and all this will just bolt into life.

It ain’t too much to ask, is it? A bit of happiness from the sun?

March 28th – Daffodils. We all love them. I don’t think it’s possible to dislike these jolly, bright spring staples; yellow, white and orange, growing in gardens, verges, hedgerows, woodland and wasteland.

I adore them because they symbolise a new year beginning of light, long days, good rides and beautiful nature.

They are stunning in the huge displays they form, but while those are undoubtedly wonderful, I’d like to hear it for the solitary soldiers of spring – the loners, the brave, singular blooms you see dotted about.

Often on verges or poor ground, they may be the tentative start of a new patch in coming years, destined to multiply and impress from a single bulb that got there – who knows how?

They may be the last remnant of a patch decimated by disease (as large daffodil colonies often are) or disturbed by man.

They may not be perfect. They may be tatty, small or distorted. They may be eking out the last scrap of nutrition from a poor clump of soil, or harassed by traffic, animals or the wind, but they’ve done it, the lonely, single flowers. They put on a show for us.

Let’s hear it for the tenacious, bold one-offs!

February 14th – What an awful day.I battled into Walsall against an evil headwind. I had a hospital appointment that took forever, and when I came out there was heavy rain.

I arrived at work soaked and grumpy.

The way home was just as rain-soaked, but at least the wind was assisting me.

Cycling at the moment is a real challenge. I can see spring. I can taste it. It’s in the light, the flowers, the landscape. But this bad weather seems endless.

I will of course hang in there. But my goodness, this is hard going.

February 1st – On my way back, the weather was more patchy, but changing trains at Aston midday, I thought of the great genius that was Nuala Hussey’s Stranded in Stechford (she lived for a while near the station) and of the incongruity of the Britannia Hotel, still with the great lady resplendent, enthroned on the roof, but no longer atop a hotel with dreams of majesty but a backstreet cafe.

Aston has changed since I was a teenager, exploring this place and the love I found near here. We drank in pubs long closed, and laughed and dreamed and made friends and argued and loved. We still do most of those things, of course, but Aston, like many places of my youth, is lost to me now. All of the faces I knew here except one have gone as I grow old, either lost, separated or drifted apart, but whenever I stand on these platforms, high above the sprawling morass below, I remember those days and it makes me sad.

Although I’m sad for the people I no longer see, I’m most sad for lost sense of belonging, and for my youth. But all through my life I’ve passed through places like this, made them mine for a while, then life took me to other places, with different horizons, and life moved on.

Aston is just a wind-blown, suburban and somewhat desolate railway station; two platforms and a junction. But there are ghosts here. And they haunt me so.

I felt old. But like my ghost, my spirit remains. 

The train came, I hauled my bike onto it and I sat down.

‘Are you OK?’ asked a lady in the opposite seat.

Caught unaware, I wiped my eyes. ‘Just the wind I think’ I said, ineffectually.

‘It’s getting colder’ she replied. And offered me a tissue.

January 24th – The awful news of the tragic, senseless death has left me, like many other local people, hollow, hurting and shell shocked. It has cast a long shadow over the town and a community reels in shock.

Getting to work after riding in a torrential, early morning downpour, I was wet, spare, lost and disheartened.

But then, on the grass outside the front of my workplace, I noticed specks of white in the gloom I expected to be spilled polystyrene or litter.

They wer daisies. optimistic, bright, open daisies, pushing for the sky, hopeful of sun, better days and spring.

And after finding them, I was just a little bit lighter.

December 2nd – The Drunken Duck in Walsall Wood High Street is a sad case of a pub that’s been reborn so many times even the Dalai Lama would blush. A succession of landlords have had a go, and left; each time a new dawn predicted.

The pub shut again a week ago leaving drinkers to go elsewhere, and remains shut pending new management.

I noted with wry amusement the fact that the last band scheduled to appear her was ‘Broken Promise’ – how dreadfully appropriate.