I’m not good with tradition and convention. I don’t usually
partake or play. But, 2014 was a big year for me. It would seem a bit odd if I
wasn’t to make some sort of effort to mark it passing.
I could write a stack of stuff about how it felt and how
2015 is going to shape up, but I have a stack of posts that were written at the
time. I will let them tell the story.
So, as a slight alternative, I have pulled together a stack
of photographs from the year with some notes. Some have been posted on here
before, others appeared on Instagram and Flickr. Some have made all three. But some are new...
Anyway. As my Facebook messages have encouraged:
Read
Don’t Read
Enjoy
Don’t Enjoy
The choice is all yours. Choose your colour. Spin the wheel.
Where to start?
Here... In a toilet in London...
The view from the Management Suite Gents at Topshop Oxford Circus.
Loved that view.
The BT Tower will always be my London beacon. When I see it, I know that I am close to my true home. One day I will write about it's mystical properties and why it holds such a strong strong hold on my heart...
The Tower
A blue grey spire with a red light atop. Surrounded by trees. Dusk
I spent years away from Harrow. When I did visit, it was so different to the town I grew up that I really didn't respond to it well. This changed in the late noughties when i bought a property there and got to explore it all over again.
It - once again - became home.
Epping Forest
Battersea Power Station through the Rain
Parliament Hill... A Summer View
Through the process of sorting my life out to head out to Saudi Arabia, I managed to keep getting out and about in town and reminding myself of it's beauty. Hampstead Heath, Battersea on the way home from West Norwood Feast and green, green summer trees I found lost on the outskirts of Chingford.
The English countryside still inspired:
Detail... The Chilterns
Avenue. Pulborough Brooks
Pulborough Brooks. Sussex.
More Trees in The Chilterns. A dark wood, with a spot of sunlight.
But on a personal level. April 18th Stands out...
With Leyton Orient and Rotherham United dropping points, the win against Preston North End at Griffin Park meant that Brentford FC were promoted. Cue a pitch invasion...
Oh West London. Is Beautiful!
The Ealing Road End... Where a bit of my heart lives.
But Saudi Arabia - Bahrain and UAE - beckoned. And it's where I find myself today. Quite content...
I've found the whole experience inspiring and liberating. The key thing that I have been searching for is a change. Believe me, Saudi Arabia is a change. I miss the UK. I miss my home city and I miss my family and friends to bits but I have no regrets at the path that I have chosen in 2014.
It is good...
Camels
Corniche
Heineken Highway - The Causeway to Bahrain
Dawn over the Arabian Gulf
Palm Tree . Green to celebrate Saudi Arabia's national day.
Dusk on the long road home to Al Khobar
Bahrain
A Mosque in Dammam's Warehouse District
Outside Silver Tower - Al Khobar
Another Painted Isuzu lorry
Power & Communication. Al Khobar.
By the Pool in Bahrain
Got chatting to a fisherman on a lagoon next to Lulu Hypermarket. He proudly showed of the days catch.
If it stands still, it gathers dust. Love the cat footprints on the windscreen...
The church has a blue, grey spire and a red light atop that
guides planes to Northolt.
As a child I could see this church on a hill from my bedroom
window. Across the sports pitches and park, beyond the council flats and above
the grey gasometer, it sat looking back at me as I daydreamed. Staring into
space it would stare back at me.
I recall an incident from when I was eight or nine driving
back from a holiday. My brother – being three and a half years older and
therefore being far smugger – ripped me apart when I confidently told the whole
car that I could see Harrow Hill on the horizon despite only being half an hour
into a trip home from Wales. That is my only memory of that happening, but I am
assured by my mother that I would often look for or claim to see the church on
the hill in counties all across England and Wales. I would look for it. Hope
for it, even.
St Mary’s Church on Harrow Hill was a geographic comfort
blanket for me.
It was obviously something that I sought solace in.
Something permanent that meant safety and home.
If you knew which window to look out of, you could just
about make the church out from the flat that I have left behind me in South
Harrow. The flat that is built close to the site of the old gasomter. I didn’t
buy it for that view – although I fell in love with the view of Bentley Priory
three miles to the North the moment I saw it – but in my heart, I was still so
happy that I could see it.
St Mary’s still has a hold over me.
A Church on a Hill
And not much has changed in me since I was that nine year
old kid. I still like stability. I am not a risk taker.
So homesickness was inevitable.
But I planned as best I could. I kept talking to people back
home, I had my Saudi Fridge of friendship, threw myself onto Instagram and kept
recording. I started this account. All actions to try and warn it off. But, it
was going to happen eventually. CLICK HERE FOR SHAMELESS PLUG TO MY INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT
The Latest Version of my Saudi Fridge of Friendship
When it came it took me surprise and it hit me hard. Last
week, I would have done anything not to be in Saudi Arabia, or Bahrain or the
UAE. Any of them… The other Monday, I was in all three at one point or another
but I was yearning for home.
I yearned for London. I yearned for grey skies and twig
trees and rain and cold.
But mostly, I yearned to be closer to my friends.
I’m hardly the first to have had this feeling. I won’t be
the last but it is something that I have never ever encountered. Having lived
almost exclusively in London and trips/time away has always seemed holiday
like, I cannot recall a time of spending more than say three weeks away from
home. As I type I am reaching close to three months. One quarter of my contract
is done, I am planning my first return to the UK and home is in focus.
The catalyst, I guess, was seeing a friend for the weekend
over in Dubai. Alex travelled out and linked up with me after I had been to a
conference out there. We had some pints, explored, chatted life and bollocks.
We laughed. All was good. But it put my isolation into perspective.
I know that I am not alone. Certainly not as isolated as I
imagined that I would be. I’m lucky that I live in the same block as “Special K”
my friend and occasional boss. Colleagues pass through for a few days at a
time. I’ve got to know a few faces for a chat and find Al Khobar friendly and welcoming
but none of this is the same as being able to pick up the phone half hour
before the end of a shift and arrange to meet “whoever”.
Alex sent me a great email a few days later that explained
how pleased he was to see me. That I appeared the happiest and most positive
that he had seen me in years. He spoke of regret of missed opportunities and of
looking at opportunities to step away from London himself. He told me of two
incidents he had had in his first twenty four hours of being hassled by
beggars. And still, I wanted to be nowhere else than London!
In the background, work was becoming stressful for reasons
to dull to explain. I caught myself getting emotionally drawn into the issues and
taking things way out of my control quite personally, rather than standing back
and just “dealing” with them. I know of old, that this is a path best avoided.
There be dragons and shadows over my right shoulder controlling my mood if I
let that happen. All in; not a good week.
For the first time in years, though, I was fully aware of
everything going on around me as it happened. I was maintaining control. And I
sought my own route to get myself back in order. Time. Space. Sleep. Sunshine…
I shook myself down and sought comfort in literature, music
and friends… Thanks, as ever, to Mr Dent for the chat and Helena T for the cup
of tea x.
I found myself down by the sea at dusk last Sunday. The sun
setting behind me. The sea, smooth and calm rippling over the rocks at my feet.
As the light disappears the sea gets darker shades of grey, pink and blue. It’s
warm. I’m wearing a tee shirt. It’s December.
Dusk
I’m thinking about everything that I have achieved this last
year. Of heading out to the Middle East, of agreeing to live in an Islamic
country where so many of my own personal beliefs have to be parked up on a
daily basis to survive. Of facing up to my own unhappiness. Of changing career.
Of stepping away from the dull, throbbing, soulless, thankless routine of my
previous role to step outside my personal comfort zone to achieve it’s goals. Of
succeeding in that change. Thinking about the stress – the ongoing, endless,
hopeless stress – of renting my flat. Of leaving my parents and the fear
associated…
Not too bad for someone who is risk adverse.
Above me, swifts darted, whirled and danced through the sky.
Chattering.
And the sound took me back to summer evenings around dusk in
Rayners Lane. Of listening to the same noise from the same birds swooping above
the garden I could see from my childhood home’s bedroom window. And it made me
think about the church on a hill with a grey, blue spire and a red light atop
guiding planes to Northolt.
A year isn’t a long time. The World is quite a small place
if you think about it. Even for a boy from the suburbs of London.
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