My brain is numb

 Sertraline

Can't live with it; can't live without it.

It's the reason I don't get angry anymore. It's also the reason I don't get sad anymore. I still enjoy things. I feel bad for people who are suffering. 

But it was Mat's funeral the other day. And I didn't feel overwhelmingly sad.

I wanted to feel. But that part of my brain is just...inaccessible.

I've always found funerals odd. When my friend Jon passed away 30 years ago I didn't cry. It all just felt, unreal. That he's no longer there - that he's just gone.

I looked at the wicker coffin knowing Mat's body was in there. So tangible, feet away. 

Just wake him up. 

He can't be gone!

I was moved by Suzy's eulogy, and felt for brave Freya as she did her reading then came back and collapsed in tears on the pew. 

While Sertraline stops my anger, it also shuts down emotions I want to have - to be able to share that sense of grief with others. 

To feel pain.

I know it's in there. 

This is the down-side of the drugs. They top and tail your emotions so only a thinnish line in middle is available.

A single layer of lasagne with a thin coating of ragu and no béchamel sauce.

I daren't come off the stuff though as the flip side is insta-rage. 

It would just be nice to have the odd window.

The odd window

"Cranky-Pants! Cranky-Pants! Cranky-Pants!"

I have a cold. Don't come near me, not because I will spray you with mucus but because I will bite your head off. 

Actually, it's very minor, but these days we all have to isolate when we have colds don't we? Back in the day you just went to work and got on with it. 

When I worked as a banker mason in a workshop I got paid by the hour. 

Don't turn up: don't get paid.

It took me years to get over that mentality. When I worked at the BBC I couldn't believe how many days people had off ill, and it was never questioned. They'd be off one day - back the next with no discernible thing wrong with them.

Probably all the BAD drugs people did back then.

The worst part of me having a cold is how horrible I become. I bite the heads off of medium-sized dogs, and bark at people in the service industry as I can no longer understand or speak their language.

So I just stay in nowadays lest I get into a massive ding-dong with a sabre-toothed librarian or 16 year old cashier-ninja.

A woman I worked with many years ago used to call me "cranky pants" whenever I was grumpy, which was most of the time.

I'm not like that anymore due to all the GOOD drugs I take.

I'm bendigedig me.

The world is rubbish

Just watched Margaret Atwood talking about The Handmaid's Tale. 

She quoted William Gibson by saying the future is here but it's not evenly distributed. She wrote the Handmaid's Tale not as a science fiction but as a portentous work like 1984. 

I wrongly believed 1984 was Orwell's prediction of Britain's future, but it was an allegory of the Soviet Union and was just 1948 backwards - the year he completed it. 

So a lot of those sci-fi tales or fables take something prevalent in the NOW and then crank it up and place it in a seemingly utopian setting, which then reveals itself to be utterly dystopian.

Oh god, I'm starting to sound like a bloody art student.

I still can't understand why it's still neck and neck in the US elections. 

I don't understand why anyone thinking what Putin has done in Ukraine is justifiable.

Ditto with Israel carpet-bombing Gaza.

I know the world is a complex place, a mess of geopolitics, vested interests and bare-faced greed, but some things are just plain wrong.

As usual, I'll just blame the internet.

"You got to look it up." They say, as though everything on the internet justifies their version of events.

Information is not knowledge.

And it all contributes to me swearing very loudly, basket in hand, at the terrible pizza selection in Tescos.

As you were.

Dust

That weird hinterland

I'm glad my last post about Mat went down well with those closest to him. I'm often told I'm too honest - say stuff that should remain unsaid. Too personal, too embarrassing to be shared. 

Maybe it's because some friends of mine when I was 18 said they didn't know me as I guess I didn't want to show any vulnerabilities. Since then I've tried to be more me. 

It's been a struggle, with my inclination to share the WRONG stuff.

(Apparently.)

At least I trod the correct path with the last post. Last thing I'd want to do is upset people, especially those who matter most to me. 

So now the wait for the funeral, which will be a huge affair. Mat was very popular. 

Mat wasn't a divisive figure in any way. He was very thoughtful, upfront and decent. He didn't suffer fools, but who of us do?

Tolerance? Mehhhh.

Funerals are weird things - Nervousness, sombreness, grief,  more grief, relief that that part of the day is over, then revelry - celebration of the life lived. 

The older I get the more I appreciate and understand the nature of funerals. There are many ways to deal with death - every culture has theirs. None of them I guess are 100% the correct answer, but at least they are a response and provide a collective grieving period, and a conduit for feelings and the many emotions, which is cathartic.

My world

...is shrinking ever more. Now I have 2 screens I would say I now only need half the space of my mancave. 

I've played over 600 hours of Baldur's Gate 3. That's a lot of hours. 

The other side of my room full of books and a nice chair to read in, is barely used. 

Perhaps I could rent it out?

The screens are too tempting. 

That's really rubbish. 

I'm also forgetting to write my diary every other night. Not that there's much to go in there, but pages are left blank. It's a catharsis thing as I never read them, but I have kept them all since 1986.

Philippa Perry in her book "How to stay sane" recommends keeping a diary and meditation. It's excellent advice, although I've dropped the meditation bit.

I let a friend of mine read my diary when I was at art college. She said "I wish I was you, Geraint."

She wasn't being sarcastic (I'm sure!), but I've always wondered what she meant by that.

I'm not reading anything either. I sat in a cafe to read "Vecna: Eve of Ruin" and read the first chapter. But it's taken me a week to get round to doing just that.

I am witness to certain faculties eroding.

On the upside...I completed my 5th or 6th run-through of Baldur's Gate 3 on the PC. Only 600 hours of my life has been spent playing this game.

Still, I'm a long way off Larry who has spent 7,650 hours of his life (10 and a half months) playing Lord of The Rings Online. 

There's a challenge...

Alchohol

The sad 60 year old sat at the bar embarrassing himself in his drunkeness, trying to flirt with the young bar staff and whom no one wishes to engage with.

The lost old guys who drink steadily from 11 till 4 everyday at Wetherspoon's. Resigned to their fates, they vacate their seats one at a time until they are entirely replaced by another group of unhappy old men.

I don't and I won't be any of those people.

I drank too much on Saturday night after a lovely evening with Nerys and Ben. I just stopped in at The White Hart on the way home and had probably 3 more drinks. I bumped into a nice person who'd just finished work. It was 12.30 when I got home.

The next day was a write-off.

I've pretty much disgusted myself at my own inability to stop once I start. So much so that I haven't drunk  for 3 days. I don't feel any compunction to do so either.

I usually have a couple of beers after DMing on a Thursday just to decompress after the event.

But it's too expensive to drink and it is doing my brain no good at all. That and ultra-processed food. 

(Probably.)

My mate, Mat

 When the good are taken too soon

You’ve probably heard that quote from Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’. The girl whose entire life is horses is asked to define a horse. She can’t. Then the teacher asks favourite know-it-all Bitzer who gives a dictionary definition: "Bovine quadruped. Graminivorous,. Forty teeth…."

"There you go girl!" snaps the teacher "Now you know what a horse is."

Charles Fort - 'one measures the circumference of a circle beginning anywhere.' 

So here is an impression of my dear old friend, starting....somewhere.

Random memories of my friend and erstwhile enemy, Matthew Hardyman.

Snippets of our lives which will be meaningless to most or maybe all of you.

Mat was going to be my new Power of Attorney. How ironic that he went before me.

I have to admit my guilt: while others would have broken down I slept after having been given the news, having been unable to process it on the day. I couldn't understand why I wasn't breaking down as everyone else would, as society expects? 

Is it even reality? You're hoping you're in some insane lucid dream that will end soon and everything will be back to normal, although you know. 

You know.

The mere incomprehensibility of Mat not being in my life - let alone his family's - anymore was enough. 

Another number to remove from the favourites of my iPhone. 

So that night I ran a game of D&D for my group in Wells. It’s a weekly commitment and I didn’t feel like staying in and beating myself up for not being all emotional. 

I came back in a good mood, then went to sleep.

In the morning the meaning of it all began to drip-drip in to my consciousness.

Matt and I off our heads in a pub in Green Lanes, Haringey in 1993, alternating hysterical laughter with appalling gut ache.

Racing down to Dorset in Mat’s Renault 5 GT Turbo to reach Mark who’d crashed his supremely dodgy mini van with retread tyres on the way to his first day at Bournemouth college.

We shared a flat for a few years. He’d use everything in the kitchen to make a meal, then go out leaving it all everywhere. He either didn’t understand what was wrong with leaving a mess, or didn’t care.

He could be quite arrogant.

Arguing about him not doing the washing up; Mat finally conceding after 2 hours that he didn’t really like doing the washing up.

His confidence at a young age to argue the facts with anyone. So much so that a garage he harangued so much (where his appallingly unreliable GT Turbo often ended up) were pissed off enough to send him an invoice addressed to “Matthew Hardlyaman”.

He was thick-skinned enough to laugh at it though. That was a trait which took me a long time to assimilate. 

He was a rock. More rational and forensic than anyone anyone else I knew, I would come to him with work or relationship dilemmas and he would always - clinically - lay the arguments flat out and analyse them. 

A complete, instant dissection.

In relationships I naturally accepted that everything was my fault, being the man. But Mat had that barrister’s gift of seeing through the guff and grasping the brass tacks of any given situation. And he did it with such a calm dismantling of the arguments. It was wonderful. If he had been a therapist he could have charged twice the going rate.

I always felt so much calmer and in fact, often rearmed for the next sortie in my many disastrous relationships.  

I don't have that cornerman any more. 

Phobias: Mat had a texture problem with wet wood, so wooden spoons and wooden chopsticks were no-gos.

When writing these eulogies they’re only ever the finished article for a few hours, then something else is remembered. I've been trying to write this for days and it will never be the finished article.

Ah yes, Mat’s fashion choices!

The leather waistcoat, white denim jacket, and some designer black t-shirt with red zips all over it. 

T-shirts always tucked in.

(Of course, all my fashion choices were great….)

Early 90s again; I was on a disastrous date complete with (I’m not kidding) a leper doing card tricks at our table (the gods were doing their utmost to keep me and the awful female from coupling up) and as a coup de grace they sent Mat along to ‘give me a hand.’ Despite me looking him squarely in the eye and telling him in no uncertain terms to 'eff off', he thought I was joking and stayed.

Mat’s incredulity that a nice but dim someone at his university had applied at the same time for the diplomatic service and had got in while he hadn’t even had an interview. Mat’s brilliant gift of the gab combined with his natural confidence made him a fortune doing telesales, but also drove him nuts, so he then applied for the Bar. 

I remember him saying that he couldn’t believe you could get paid for arguing.

Mat always wanted a family. After an unsuccessful first marriage, he then met Suzy. He was overjoyed when Freya arrived in their lives, and then Saffron. He now had a loving family and a dream house. 

Unlike me both Mat and Suzy did grown-up jobs, endlessly juggling duties and work with military-standard organisation.

I'm godfather to his youngest daughter who is a total headcase. 

Good. 

In an increasingly homogenised and commodified world, we need characters - people who are bold enough to stand out and be individuals

So much to say. But with the memories I have that play back in my mind, he’s not really gone. Because I’ll always have those to relive time and again.

Top 500 barrister, MJ Hardyman.