Pre-Midwinter Notes

Eventually leave Charlie's house at 8:00am, after a 'quick pint' the night before turns into the opposite. Luke and Ray head off one way, Ian and me another. One of those bright and chilly December days. Bright sun blazing, slightly sunset-coloured on Wild Park on the hill. Are we really this far up Lewes Road? I eventually make it home about 10am. I sleep for five hours. That night, at Al's, I only drink three beers, and am unsurprisingly subdued.
We won the pub quiz last night.
Monday now. I have a slight headache. A sore throat. The precursor of a cold. I sit here in bed, listening to the sound of a saw or something. Some back garden piece of machinery. There was a dog barking a minute ago. Sunlight on the houses across the gardens.
Everything is so deep in December and wintry.
I imagine this is the kind of day I might find a lost area of woodland in a place I pass every day, or a secret room in a house - perhaps this one - I have known for years.

Winter Coming Down

Passed no pink childs' wellies on the way to work yesterday.
When I got to work (I work as a charity fundraiser) that I have been changed from a campaign I did OK on to one I do dreadfully on, and also that I hate. I don't connect with the campaign, the supporters. I find their ethos disturbing. I only agreed to work on the campaign at the time because I had not yet passed probation. I thought my chances of passing would be greater if I did agree to work for this religious charity (I am non-religious). This is in the last week of the campaign, when we are calling the 'dregs' of the campaign - the people who keep putting off taking the call (They say 'call me back another time!' instead of just saying 'I don't want to hear from you ever again!' and end up wasting everyones time). I didn't do well - of course - but it got me into worrying about my job again. It doesn't take much to worry me about my job and employment prospects. I have spent the last 13 months working where I am convinced that I am going to be led down the route of disciplinaries for not doing well, leading to me eventually being fired, and then having to work at some minimum wage job in a petrol station again. I spent the three years in my last job worrying about the same too.
Because I was in a different room, I did get to sit next to Aviva. I was telling her about my long, restless walks I do at the weekend. She said - quite without prompting - what was it I was looking for on these walks. This unnerved me as I had been doodling a comic strip about these long walks as I worked - the last panel (showing a younger me walking our old dog Bracken In what I presume might be Ickenham) had the words 'I spend the suburban evening searching for something I no longer believe exists'.
Not that I ever had any idea what it was anyway.

Pink Wellies

I walk into town with Andy. Andy needs to go to work (via Santander) and I need to go to work to check my hours for the week. Wintry day. Actually feels cold, and the light is a mockery of itself. Lazy light, gray and still half asleep. No, not sleep. The light looks ill it is so weak.

As we pass the Jewish school down the road we look down. There is a single pink wellington on the floor. A child's welly. Andy points it out. We look at it. It strikes us both as vaguely sinister though we cannot say why. We continue walking.

Further into town, near the big Tesco's, we look down again. There is the other pink wellington, the other half of a now permanently lost and homeless pair. The series of events that have led up to one pink wellington being outside of a school, and the other one being outside of Tesco's will never be solved.

I wonder if I'll pass them on the way to work today.