2457: Time Away

Andie and I have spent a couple of days in Bournemouth, not for any particular reason, just to “get away” from it all. I won’t speak for Andie, but certainly in my case, it was much needed.

I’ve been wracked with stress and anxiety of months now, largely due to relentless feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness and uselessness due to the seemingly never-ending job hunt. I’ve described these feelings before, but they bear repeating: I know I have so much to offer the world, and it’s inordinately frustrating that it seems nigh impossible to convince the people who hold the pursestrings of that fact.

All that said, just before we left on Monday morning, I was contacted by a recruitment consultant for a job that I feel I can do, and I also put in an application for another job that I felt quite confident about. I’m not going to get my hopes up too much for either of them, but, well, they’re something at least, which is in stark contrast to the fat lot of nothing I’ve heard from a variety of employers for the last few months.

The time away has been nice, though it’s made me realise quite how much I carry stress in my body as well as my mind. Today in particular, I’ve just been absolutely exhausted, and all I’ve wanted to do is sleep. Quite a lot of today has been taken up with napping, to be perfectly honest, but it’s been nice; Andie could evidently do with a break, too, so it’s been thoroughly pleasant to be somewhere that we can just rest without having to worry about anything that we were supposed to be doing. Our only commitments each day have been getting up in time for breakfast, and getting somewhere in time for dinner service.

The hotel we’re staying at is really nice. It’s got a very 1950s Art Deco feel about it — including the stereotypical Art Deco font — but it doesn’t feel “old” at all. It’s in good condition and clearly very modern, but the overall aesthetic of it is clearly inspired by Art Deco.

There’s a poncey restaurant here, too; on our first day, we were fortunate enough to win a £25 voucher for it, so we had dinner there last night. The restaurant, I feel, struck a good balance between the “modern cooking” that I find so unsatisfying and providing actually flavoursome, generous portions of good food. I had some scallops for a starter, an excellent burger for a main and possibly the best trifle I’ve ever had, ever for dessert. (The custard clearly had cream in it, there was a big dollop of clotted cream on top and there were plenty of strawberries throughout.)

Tonight, meanwhile, we went to the hotel next door for dinner; as well as a fancy restaurant, they have a pub, so we enjoyed some hearty traditional British pub food. Even that was really good, though; I had a macaroni cheese that clearly had actual proper cheese in it rather than being a microwave jobby.

Back home tomorrow, and while I’m not sure I’d say I’m revitalised and refreshed — I still feel pretty tired — I do feel a little more inclined to face the challenges ahead. One day at a time, I guess.

1743: Sleepless in Perth

Andie and I are having a few nights away from home as we head up to Scotland (and back) for my friend Cat’s wedding. Cat lives in Aberdeen, so it’s quite a trek from the south coast, but we’ve made very good progress today — we got up to Perth by mid-afternoon, leaving us just a couple of hours’ drive to do to get to Aberdeen tomorrow.

Tonight we’re staying in a Premier Inn in Perth. I’d always assumed that Premier Inns were cheap-and-cheerful affairs on a similar level to Travelodge’s grotty-but-convenient charms, but I’ve actually been very impressed so far. The room is really nice — the bed is big (if surprisingly high off the floor), there’s a chaise-longue for reclining on (or for allowing a third person to sleep in the room, should that become necessary), the TV is a nice big Samsung HDTV (and even has extra HDMI, composite, audio and USB inputs built into the wall so you can connect your own devices) and the bathroom is pleasantly shiny, albeit somewhat short on pinchable cosmetic goods and sporting a public toilet-style sheet-by-sheet bog roll dispenser rather than regular toilet rolls.

The restaurant is dubbed Thyme and is open to members of the public who aren’t staying in the hotel. Normally I’d question whether or not anyone would ever want to come to a hotel restaurant if they aren’t staying in the hotel, but after most of a day’s worth of driving, Andie and I decided we didn’t really want to go out in search of dinner, so we went to give it a go — and, you know what? It was actually really, really good. Like, surprisingly so; it wasn’t what I’d call “cheap” but it also wasn’t extortionate hotel prices and, more importantly, it was actually excellent quality food: Andie had a frighteningly gigantic burger while I had, I think, the best rack of ribs I’ve ever had. Not bad for a chain restaurant in a cheapo chain hotel.

It’s almost a shame we don’t have more time to spend just relaxing here, though thankfully we did arrive early enough to be able to just chill out for a few hours without feeling like we immediately need to go to bed. It’s always nice to get away from the daily grind and have a bit of a change of scenery now and then, even if you’re not really doing anything specific while you’re away from home.

Of course, tomorrow we are doing something specific — we’re celebrating my friend’s marriage after a couple of hours’ driving — but for tonight, at least, we can just relax and enjoy that holiday-esque feeling of being far away from home in a comfortable room in a strange city. So I’m off to go and do just that, and try not to think about the exceedingly long drive back we have waiting for us on Tuesday!

1065: The Third

Pete slumped down into the chair in front of the hotel room desk and began to type.

“It has been a long day,” he wrote. It had been a long day, but not quite in the way he had anticipated when he woke up this morning. He was expecting a day of jury service followed by a bit of heavy lifting as he attempted to clear out the rest of his now-former residence in Chippenham, Wiltshire. Instead, what he got was a whole lot of sitting around in the courthouse until lunchtime before being apologetically told by the judge that the jury were being let go due to the fact that the trial they were sitting on had to be abandoned.

Pete paused, considering whether he should share further details of the trial in question now that he was technically allowed to, but that he wasn’t supposed to “publicise” it due to the fact it would be restarting with a new jury at some point in the future. He eventually decided against explicit details, and instead invited his readers to have a chat with him if they wanted to know the dirt. It was a moderately interesting case, after all, and it had left him with something of an interest in the law. He resolved to check whether or not Murder One was on Netflix when he finally got “proper Internet” back in his new place… and then hastily explained to his readers that the trial he was sitting on was not, in fact, a murder trial.

He let out a theatrical sigh and wondered what to write next. This hotel room wasn’t the most interesting place in the world, but at least it was warm, vaguely comfortable and had a bed in it, which was more than could be said for the floor he had been sleeping on last week. A “high-tech hobo,” he had called himself — essentially squatting in his own house due to the fact that pretty much all the furniture and other stuff had been moved out in preparation for his girlfriend Andie and him to start their new life in Southampton.

The weekend had been pleasant. The new flat was good, and a lot of stuff had already been unpacked and put in its place. His study still needed putting together, but the skeleton was there — bookshelves around the outside waiting for books and the music scores that had been boxed up for a while. He winced as he remembered how heavy the box that contained them was, and reminded himself to take extra boxes to repack them when he went to pick them up from Andie’s mother’s house.

“Wait a minute,” he said out loud, pausing the frantic clacking of his fingers on the laptop keyboard for a moment. “Why the hell am I writing this in the third person?”

No answer was forthcoming, for the room was otherwise devoid of life.

“I really, really need some sleep,” he said to himself, clicking the Publish button and flicking on the hotel’s painfully slow little kettle for a pre-bed drink.

1055: Tim’s Wedding Day

My friends Tim and Sophie got married today, and I’m sure they’ll be delighted I’m marking the occasion with a blog post hastily composed on my phone because the Wi-Fi at this hotel doesn’t seem to work properly.

It was a very nice wedding, all told. I know people always say that weddings are at least “nice” if not “beautiful” and “wonderful” and so on, but it really was. Taking place at Cain Manor, an old big house (remarkably similar to the one Tim grew up in) near Farnham in Surrey, the whole affair was pleasingly compact in nature — the ceremony started at 4, was over by 4.30 and after not too much milling around we were sat down waiting for dinner. An electrical mishap delayed the food a bit but even with that delay, it didn’t feel like there was too much standing around doing nothing, which was a blessed relief.

Tim and Sophie also decided not to have an official photographer either, which meant there was no standing around waiting for all that shenanigans either. I was relieved about that — one of my least favourite things about other people’s weddings is standing around in the cold while waiting for some person with a camera to finish shouting “Friends! University friends! Obscure cousins neither the bride nor the groom recognise!” Don’t get me wrong, wedding photographers do a great job and I know several people who make a good living from it, but man, that waiting around is dull. I can only imagine what it must be like for the bride and groom, having to pull increasingly-false smiles as their fingertips slowly succumb to frostbite and they’re surrounded by relatives they don’t know the names of.

Andie and I are back at the hotel we’re staying at now. It’s about 4 miles away from the wedding venue, and is called The Devil’s Punchbowl after the nearby park. It seems like a pleasant enough place, though it would be nice if we couldn’t hear all the drunkards in the pub part of the hotel doing karaoke, and it would also be nice if the Wi-Fi worked properly. The room also smells like a dental surgery for some reason, but that’s all right.

It’s been nice to get away for the day. There’s a super-stressful week coming up for both of us — I have jury duty and we’re moving house. I also have to squeeze my usual work in somewhere! Still, I’m not thinking about that right now. Just going to have a nice rest and return to stressing out tomorrow!

#oneaday Day 516: Away Game

Spending a weekend in markedly different surroundings to the place where you spend most of the rest of your week is an eminently worthwhile experience, particularly if you spend most of your week chained to a desk — whether that’s in a working-from-home sort of situation or the daily grind at an office. Over the last few weeks (and probably months) I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to spend some time away from the environment I spend the working week in, and it’s a healthy, positive experience.

The only frustrating thing about the whole shebang is the fact that most places I go away to are inevitably attached somehow to either my awesome girlfriend Andie, who currently lives 150 miles away from me; or to friends I left behind back in the Southampton area (about 120 miles away) when I was forced to depart last September.

In some senses, this is good, though, as it means I get completely out of the daily “grind”, as it were, by going somewhere markedly different from the places I see every day. Even if I do go out while I’m back at home, it’s inevitably to the same old places time after time — local shop, local supermarket, post office, local coffee house. And while I know Southampton and Winchester pretty well having spent the best part of 10 years living and working in the area, the fact I don’t live there now is enough to keep them feeling fresh, pleasant and not “new” as such, but places I feel I can rediscover each time I visit.

Now, granted, Southampton’s a bit of a shithole and if you want to do something on a Saturday night that isn’t getting pissed (and, by extension, into a fight) or going to the cinema, there’s actually really not a great deal to do — not in the town centre at least. But as I’ve said on several occasions in the past, it’s a place in which I lay down some “roots” and even if I end up never moving back there to live — which is looking increasingly likely — it will always be if not a “home” then certainly a home away from home.

Winchester, on the other hand, is a place I’d return to in a flash given the opportunity. My favourite place I’ve ever lived was in Winchester. It was a gorgeous big fully-furnished flat with a dishwasher, heated towel rails and a dressing room off the main bedroom. The furniture provided was good quality, not the usual hand-me-down shite, and while I was there, even though I was working a soul-crushingly awful job in the secondary music classrooms of Hampshire, it was a haven I could return to of an evening and feel like I had come “home”. Of course, as Sod’s Law tends to go, this dream-come-true of accommodation was snatched up by the landlord, who rather inconsiderately wanted to give it to their daughter, so we ended up living in a nice-ish cottage that was unfortunately afflicted with a great deal of damp and mould, and smelled disconcertingly of gas in the living room.

I often wonder where I’m going to end up next. I hope it’s somewhere good that I can lay down some roots once again and start afresh. For now, there are weekend escapes like the one I’m on now with Andie, and right this second, that’s the best life has to offer, so I’m damn well going to enjoy it.