Sogger’s Blog

I ate a pizza last night and it had olives on it. I don’t particularly like olives. These were de-stoned, and I squashed one, only to feel a wave of revulsion when, as it split in two, I had a particularly nasty flashback. The squashed black olive, with the light catching it perfectly, looked like a tiny cockroach. If it had started scuttling round the plate, I would not have been surprised, and I would have been found running, screaming like a child, to the farthest place possible just so I wouldn’t have to look at it. My fear of cockroaches is not just psychological - I feel a physical revulsion which may seem childish, but let me explain its roots and see if you can forgive me.

I don’t think I ever saw a cockroach as a child. That was until I left home to go to the paragon of cleanliness that is Manchester where I lived in a student hall of residence. I had the corner room; the room which had the hot water pipes passing through it on their way round the building. This had the unfortunate consequence of being a particularly comfortable breeding ground for cockroaches. In the evening I would return, with a student-ess if lucky. Any amorous possibilities would soon be ruined, when, after turning the light on, a hundred cockroaches would scatter in every direction, ultimately making their way back to the water pipe, where they would, like firemen called on an emergency, slide down out of sight.

It was a revolting sight, and God knows what they got up to in the evening as I slept. Of course, I didn’t like to make a fuss and merely signalled the fact that the university, might, if they had the time, want to get rid of them. What I should have done is screamed, parked myself outside the headmaster’s (or whatever they call them) office, refused to move, demanded another room and refused to pay. Of course, I didn’t do any of that and spent a full academic year with the constant thought of what was happening under my bed, or, worse still, on it; reluctant to turn on the light and generally spending as much time as possible elsewhere (luckily, it being university, this was possible). A shameful existence, and something I find hard to believe I tolerated for such a long time. So now maybe you understand where the fear comes from, and I hope you can forgive me.

The winter after leaving university, I was invited to a friend’s house for the weekend. Irish, and with a fairly bohemian family (read, not particularly attentive to hygiene details), it was a great weekend - his extended family was over from Ireland and there was whiskey galore. All was going well and, for some reason, I was seated in the comfy chair. The lights were down and I think some kind of card-game was underway when, slowly, very very slowly, a cockroach crawled up the side of the arm, and onto my leg. This is not a particularly comfortable position to be in. What do you do? Scream and run away, putting a slur on the cleanliness of your host’s house? Or say nothing, sweat, grip the sides of the chair and hope it’s all over soon? Guess which option I went for? Remember that it’s a physical thing - I wanted to be sick. I couldn’t swat it off and risk it landing on the floor in the middle of the card game so I let it crawl right over my lap, down the other side and disappear into the depths of the chair. I quickly made my excuses, went to the bathroom and had a sit down for quite a long time. When I came back down, I sat down cross-legged on the floor where I sipped my Bushmills slightly too quickly with obvious consequences.

Need I say more? Yes? Well, how about the time I stayed in a dodgy hotel in Toulouse, only to find the biggest cockroach in the world slowly making its way across the bathroom floor in the morning. The only option was a smart smack with a shoe - a lovely crunching sound and a large stain on the floor are memories I still hold dear. I was booked into that hotel for 2 nights, but made my excuses and left. I decided to book into the Ibis: soul-less but clean. The fact that on arrival I had to report to the reception that they might want to move the guy from in front of their garage door because he was injecting something into his lower arm with a syringe (can’t think what) and might be blocking cars is neither here nor there.

But that’s a whole other story and here I rest my case (after checking inside for the presence of small black objects that resemble cockroaches).

In the previous post, I talked about the beauty and sparsity of pure silence. However, sometimes, it is not so much beautiful as excruciating. Let me elaborate…

I talked about a friend’s girlfriend, let’s call her C. C was going out with my friend, P, throughout our university “careers” and they were besotted with each other. We had a friend in common, B. B was besotted with his long-time girlfriend, J - they had been together, it seemed, since they were toddlers.

Pause for breath and if you are not following, give up now…

For reasons I haven’t really fathomed, B and C became closer and closer - P and J were edged out of the picture, so much so that after a drunken night out, C fell into the arms of B (I love a good euphemism), leading to good old fisticuffs between P and B and lots of tears thereafter.

This led to irreparable damage in P and C’s and B and J’s relationships and very soon, B and C were together and besotted with each other.

Now, C’s best friend was called E. E never quite got over the break and, for more reasons that I cannot fathom (I’m not very good at fathoming), she became closer and closer to P. So much so that after a while she fell for P (it’s euphemism city here). To summarise: C’s best friend is now with C’s ex-boyfriend.

Pause again for breath and if you still are not following, give up now…

Awkwardness ensued as C and E kept up their friendship, trying their hardest to keep B and P apart (which is only easy in an alphabetical sense). After a few years, B and C decided to get married. S (that’s me), E and several other friends, let’s call them F, were invited to the wedding and, inevitably, P was not.

We had a good time, although there was an undercurrent of feeling that it wasn’t quite the same now that P and C were not together. Of course, as it often does at weddings, feelings like that bubble to the surface after several drinks…

The surprise is that it wasn’t S, C, B, F or E that verbalised the feelings that many of us had. In fact, it was C’s aunty, let’s call her, erm, C’s aunty. She was obviously someone who liked a party and didn’t let her 60+ years get in the way (and why shouldn’t she?). After a few polite openers, she waded straight in with, “It’s such a shame that C never stayed with P: all the family preferred him - B is soooooo boring. Do any of you know what happened to P?”.

And now there is silence, nothing like the silence I previously spoke of - the music blared on, people kept laughing and drinking. For us however, time stood still and the silence between us for some time afterwards really did seem deafening. I realised that silence is a physical entity with several hands - hands that reach out, encircling and squeezing your bladder and lower bowels until you can stand it no more. I mumbled something about how we still saw him and that he was doing fine, but it seemed a bit cowardly given that E, his girlfriend of 2 years was sat with us. E kept quiet.

Strangely enough, we never saw much of B and C again afterwards but the remaining members of the group still hung out together. Unfortunately (for E anyway), a while later, P left E after meeting someone I will call ? (because I don’t know her name) and E decided to keep her distance from us afterwards. Unfortunately P also disappeared completely as, strangely, ? felt there was too much history in our rapidly disintegrating group. As I said, friends come and go, but, from now on I prefer to keep silent on the subject (and you probably prefer it that way too).

I had an outdoor experience with a friend’s girlfriend 20 years ago and I always hoped to repeat it, but with no luck until twice in the last two weeks: once in a forest with complete strangers and once, alone, on a ski-lift.

The experience? Silence - complete silence. I had never considered its existence before and, once I had, didn’t realise how difficult it is to come by. Go back 20 years: we had just finished our final exams at university and a group of us decided to go to the Peak District for the day. I have a photograph of the shiny, spotty, cocky lot of us - there are about 10 people in it: I can remember the names of 3 of them (didn’t I write before about how friends come and go?) .

We walked for about an hour up a hill and, for some reason, my friend’s girlfriend and I pulled ahead and reached the summit long before the others. Sitting and watching the others arrive, we both realised that there was absolutely no sound of any kind around us: no birds singing, no wind blowing, no cars in the distance, no planes overhead: nothing. It only lasted a minute or so, but it was overbearing (and don’t suggest it was some kind of sexual tension between us or conversational unease - it was pure silence). Ever since, when out in the countryside, I look out for it (why not look for it - you can’t hear it after all arf arf), but have never been able to repeat the experience…until two weeks ago.

A neighbour asked me if I’d like to go mountain-biking with him and some friends. After a while, struggling to keep up, I was separated from the group and found myself alone in the forest listening out for them in the distance. I was breathing hard, so held my breath and heard - nothing. It only lasted a few seconds. In this case, it was perforated by quad-bikers in the distance - fat blokes on fat bikes chewing up the countryside.

I supposed that this would be an experience for which I’d have to wait 20 years to experience again, but it happened again this week while on a skiing holiday. Late in the afternoon, I took a ski-lift alone to get to the top of the mountain and make the most of the late afternoon sunshine and the quieter slopes. Close to the top, I got the same sensation - just for a few moments there was no swish of skis slicing through the snow, whoops of joy or cries of pain. With Mont Blanc in the distance and the sun shining it was a great moment, all too rare.

I can’t wait to experience it again - I am a silence junkie who was finding it harder and harder to get a fix but I’m sated for the moment.

No polemic about noise pollution to finish this post, just a trailer for the next one, in which I’ll tell you about another type of silence that I experienced not with, but about the above friend’s girlfriend: pure embarrassed silence in this case…

…for simple reasons, i.e., it was cheap and my mate John generously offered to host it, I have got myself a dedicated website. It’s called www.soggers.com. From now on, it will replace the Blogger site. If you are a visitor to my blog, please update your bookmarks. If you use a feed, please update it to point to here.

I started the blog following a visit from John, not knowing what to write about. It seems to have settled down to 4 major themes:

1. France
2. England
3. Epilepsy
4. Nonsense

I thought this would be a good point to take stock so I asked myself, “Is anyone actually reading this stuff?” and if they are, “Which are the most popular posts?”. Luckily, Google Analytics is there to help me, so I am happy to inform you that, yes, much to my surprise, people are visiting the blog - it seems that I have had 1200 visits since I started, and that 250 of you actually come back for more - masochists!

The list of the most popular pages is interesting (to me) - here are the top 5. Note that most of them were stumbled on via search engines:

1. “Three things I dislike about France“. This was supposed to be an amusing piece, but has been picked up by search engines from people who really don’t like the French. I wrote “Some Things I Love About France” as a response when I saw that Google picked it out as the number one link for the search term “I hate French people”.
2. Saturday “Night Fever“. A classic film and a classic post
3. “Generic Medication Considered Harmful (By Me, At Least)”. Conspiracy theorists unite.
4. “Ca plane pour moi”. Lots of people out there still want to know the lyrics to this song!
5. “Epilepsy: it’s all in the mind“. Worried people wanting to know about their ailment?

I looked back through the posts (43 in 7 months), and decided to pick my own top 5, based on whether I enjoyed writing it and the reaction it provoked:

1. Saturday “Night Fever”. Makes me smile and cringe at the same time.
2. “Three things I dislike about France“. I just thought it was really funny and it was something I wanted to write well before I had a blog. I toned down the title after discovering that xenophobes loved it.
3. “Mon Pere, ce Héros“. Words never to be expressed aloud and one of the reasons I tell very few people about this blog - I’m just a frustrated, mono-syllabic northern lad at heart.
4. “The Brian Robson Experience“. A major turning point for me.
5. “Heisenberg’s Bicycle“. Concocted on a bike ride home from work, this post generated the most comments and seemed to amuse people.

Actually, there are several more that I really like, so the blogging experience has been a positive one. Interestingly, it seems that there is some crossover between the ones I like and the ones that readers most liked too. I guess that this should be no surprise really - birds of a feather flock together and all that.
Anyway, I have a few more posts up my sleeve yet, so stick around. See you in the new world.

A bit of pre-amble: From an English northern working-class background, I had the luck to have enough intelligence to get me good exam results and a degree from Manchester University (gained mostly by hanging onto the shirt-tails of someone far brighter than me). This led me to a career in IT at which I was, at best, average. I ran away to Australia for 7.5 months, screwed up another job when I got back (I still cringe about the time I tried to blag my way through a presentation on C++ to the rest of the company - it was on my CV, so I must know about it, right?).

Mostly through lack of options, I went back to Uni at Manchester to do a PhD (”A test of endurance rather than intelligence” so it suited me fine). During this time, what I thought were recurrent, lapses brought on by stress and tiredness turned out to be temporal lobe epilepsy. At the end of my PhD, I blagged my way into a job with colleagues from university. This turned out to be a turning point for me career-wise as I finally twigged what software development is all about and became, if I may be so bold, rather proficient (more later and again, throughout).

I got married during this time to a French girl, we have 2 children and 5 years ago moved to France. Now living in Lyon, I have carved a career in software development management and integrated pretty well into French society (although I have plenty of things to say about France and the French).

That’s about it really. The rest of this will elaborate on these themes until I run out of thoughts and motivation…here I go…