Pete Hindle

I used to be seriously into music. Like, seriously spending all my money on CDs, reading about music, and playing instruments. I’ve mentioned a little just how staid my hometown is, but in middle school I was carting around a seriously boring instrument, the Bassoon (if you ever want to kill a kids interest in music, give them a bassoon). That basson was the closest I could get to rock and roll in Bedfordshire, so I dutifully joined the orchestra – and then found that I totally hated the entire orchestra experience.

Later on I would get a guitar, but after years of trying to herd stoned guys into doing something, I jacked it in and concentrated on getting enough qualifications to go to art college. These days my music skills are so rusty that although I can technically play the piano, violin, tabla, guitar, bass, and bassoon, it’s probably more accurate to say I can hold them in the right way to make a noise.

Still, that idea of being a musician still holds some sway. Perhaps I should pick up the cello that my Dad has here, and learn to play it? Surely I could get somewhere good within about six months… good enough to do a Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover, perhaps. Wait, I’ll just google it and see if anybody else is doing that…

Shitnuts.

On the other hand, it looks like nobody is doing Fugazi covers with a bassoon. That could be my big break-through.

Yesterday was a trip into London to meet up with my mother for lunch, and then look at some art galleries and bicycle shops around the Brick Lane area. It was nice to get out of the small town where I usually find myself, but after the bike ride on Tuesday I rapidly became too tired with all the walking that being in the capital entails. I took a train back to Biggleswade, and went to bed early.

Another odd thing about fatigue is that after a certain point of tiredness, it’s hard to get a good nights sleep. During the night I kept waking up with an enormous headache, like somebody battering me with a steel bar. I woke up at six and fixed myself breakfast, before going back to bed for another few hours. That headache is still lingering around, occasionally rubbing up against the left side of my brain.

When I woke up for the second time, the post had brought my appeal against my medical assessment. Apparently, because my original medical assessment didn’t show that I had fatigue I don’t have fatigue. Yeah, and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club. Thanks a bunch, whoever was in charge of that.

The good news for the week is that I won’t have to pay to go back to university. Huzzah! Lets do a dance. A predator dance:

Truth

I got lost on my bike today, and ended up doing a fantastically long ride by accident. So instead of writing anything useful I thought I’d share this advert with you…

It’s some sort of Russian translation device that allows Father Christmas to end up knocking boots and bumping uglies with people. Obviously, Father Christmas doesn’t need to translate “до бит” or “Могу ли я на вершине?” when in the bedroom. Also of note is the way it puts our puny iPhones to shame with its ability to instantly translate seductive murmurings. Perhaps it has a special “smooth talking” mode to help with chatting up people, although it would be terribly embarrassing if it got stuck in that mode when you are trying to hold a business meeting (“Darling, after the merger I’m going to make half your staff redundant. Because you’re so sexy!”).

If you are interested in this device, try giving those UK numbers a call. I have no connection to the object, and I wish all the best to those flogging it.

In a recent article for the Guardian, Charlie Brooker wrote this about the 13-year interregnum between Tory governments:

“…an entire generation grew up regarding the Tory government as something like rain, or wasps, or stomach flu: an unavoidable, undying source of dismay.

Until 1997, when they were eradicated overnight. It was as if scientists had suddenly discovered a cure for the common cold. A permanent millstone – gone! The initial glow of jubilation never completely faded. For years afterwards, simply knowing the Conservatives weren’t in power left me mildly delighted on a daily basis.”

I felt the same way about waking up somewhere that wasn’t Bedfordshire, and being back here again is no thrill. To give you a taste of what you are probably missing, Bedfordshire’s most sophisticated town is Luton, home to the ultra-right EDL, and the quickest way to start a fight in Biggeswade’s town centre is to call somebody gay. Or to say that they called you gay.

I’m pretty sure that “Mate, I’m cisgender” isn’t going to cut it as a retort, and anyway, these days I find it difficult to deal with more than a thimbleful of wine. So I’ve been avoiding the town centre, and occasionally voyaging out into the countryside on my bike. Such as it is.

Apart from the occasional glass of ginger wine, the lack of a social life, and the ever-present internet, this is pretty much the same lifestyle I had 13 years ago. Everything I worked for in the interim period has landed me back here, and like Brooker’s millstone of a Conservative government, I’m finding the weight something that drags me down.

Next: something that’s a little bit ‘up’, in this series of essays. Or a filler where I post a funny picture. One of the two.

Wondering how it’s going with my health and general welfare? Here’s the important news in a nutshell:

I will not be given any money from the benefits agency and I will have to pay to go back to university.

I got these two pieces of news today, when I seem to be suffering from one of the worst bouts of fatigue in a long time. Funny thing about fatigue: it sort of sneaks up on you. You can think you’re fine, until you try and make sense of the wardrobe options in B&Q, and then you realise that you’re too tired to move properly and end up in a Cafe Nero in St Neots, licking chocolate tortina from off the wrapper because it’s half term and the manager is at home looking after the kids so some sixth-formers who work there forgot to put anything in the chiller.

Unless I suddenly start to be able to pull money out of my butt, it looks like I’ll be staying in Bedfordshire for a little while longer. Actually, pulling money out of my butt sounds like an updating of fairy gold (or, possibly, a term used in the porn industry). I think we can all guess what magic butt-money turns into at sunrise.

It is now officially summer. And with summer, there comes the dreaded “Countryside Invite”. That’s my term for those parties that are held in the middle of nowhere, but that you have to attend. It’s usually a not-too-interesting event – a relatives birthday, an engagement party, or some sort of art event – but it’s the sort of invite that it’s very hard to turn down owing to emotional blackmailing.

It’ll usually be somewhere really hard to get to, making it doubly unappetising because you don’t really want to be there in the first place, but you have to go somewhere that the Daily Mail is regarded as being too liberal. Maybe you can cadge a lift, or perhaps there will be some sort of rudimentary public transport system that will take you to the village hall you need to be at, but don’t expect to be able to rely on that transportation in order to get home.

The event itself isn’t usually fun, because you are far from home, with people who you hardly know, and that’s a recipe for awkwardness. And then, at the end of the party, you’ll have to leave.

It’s at this point the true horror of the Countryside Invite makes itself known. Your reason for being in the countryside is now over, and you now face a journey back to civilisation that will form the backbone of your conversations with friends for the next few weeks.

I personally have jumped over rivers, slept on air-beds in the middle of nowhere, and walked home through fields of sleeping cows after these events. But this year, finding myself single and about 250 miles away from my friends, I think I’ll be able to dodge any of this seasons Countryside Invites. Thankfully.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be undertaking a residency at 25 Stratford grove this August, where I’ll be working with juggling. We had a brief run-through and experimentation with what you can do with juggling balls and a room full of artists on Sunday, when Carole Luby hosted an artists crit group. We spent some time in the garden, discussing various projects and working on our various sunburns, before heading inside to see a performance piece called “Queer Hope” by David Reynolds.

Arto Polus has some documentation of the day at his website, so please click through for the other serious artists, and a couple of pictures of me throwing balls around.

It was also nice to meet Andrej and Ewelina in person, finally, and I really enjoyed their company during the day. They are doing the Digital Media Mres that I’m now loosely attached to, so it was interesting to hear some other students talking about the course.

Above: Heaton Park, last weekend.

Like I said in my last post, I was back in Newcastle at the weekend. Luck had it that I came back for a scorchingly hot few days, and the local park became full of people. On one side of the park, there were families playing, a bowling green, and a coffee vendor. On the other side of the park, pictured above, there was a horde of students. These students clustered in groups of between two to thirty, and I felt far too intimidated to sit anywhere near all these young people being all hip. So I sat near the bowling green and read my book.

On Monday the weather changed, and the council sent some men to tidy up Heaton park. I was amused to see the leftovers:

Heaton Park is actually quite lovely, when you don’t have to kick half a dozen students out of the way to see the views. But I felt a little left out; I didn’t feel part of this world of young, lazing students, each posse blithely burning the shape of a disposable barbecue into the grass.

Heaton is a student area now, and for all that the council might talk about setting right “student ghettos”, they are ignoring the people like me who have lived on the edges of studenthood for a while. I chose to live in Heaton to get away from the reverse snobbery that other areas in the Tyne and Wear urban conurbation have; Sunderland might be a city, but it doesn’t have anything like Heaton. There’s no nice area with a choice of coffee shops in Gateshead’s Low Fell. There’s no late-night shopping strip in Fenham.

But that weekend, unable to get out of the house for fear of triggering my fatigue, I spent a lot of time looking out of the window. In the main, the people who live in Heaton have somewhere to go. Something to do. Last weekend, they might have been headed to the park to see their friends, but Monday meant that they were back at work, or back in the lecture hall. For me, it seemed like another day of an ongoing holiday.

Huck Scarry’s book “The World Around Us” has a brief introduction, where he talks about seeing the world from the window of his flat in Zurich. From my flat, I could see the inhabitants of Heaton pass by, sometimes headed out, sometimes headed home. The best seat in the flat is the one that lets you people-watch all the busy lives outside the window.

This final picture is of the watering of the bowling green. It was late on Sunday evening, in the magic hour, but still hot. The smell of the water jetting out over the grass was just right after such a long, dry day. We stood and watched the water droplets as they were whipped by the strong wind. For a little while, I’d got out past the window.

I lay in bed on Monday night, feeling pretty weird. I’d been back in Newcastle for four days, which is the longest I’d been away from home since I got sick. Unlike before, I’d taken it pretty easy, and restrained my impulse to schedule a dozen meetings for coffee every day.  In fact, by most standards, yesterday had been great – I’d seen my girlfriend, went for a walk in the park, hung out with my flatmates, been to a cafe for lunch, and packed in a few other things too. So why was I feeling so weird?

Six months ago, my Dad had driven to Newcastle to pick me up and take me back to my parents house in Biggleswade. I’d just got out of hospital, but I was far from well; I had a mysterious rash that covered my entire body, I was weak, and parts of me were swollen with arthritis. We all thought that these would go away (and I mean everyone, from doctors to parents to friends, right down the line to me) but three weeks later I was so sick I got dragged into hospital again*.

Somewhere around the 7th of December, I woke up on a hospital ward in Bedford and then had a massive rectal bleed. That mysterious rash that I mentioned earlier was the start of my vascular system shutting down, and when it became unable to pump blood around my internal organs, it started draining out the quickest way possible. Luckily, doctors were able to save my life, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this now.

I’ve spent the entire year so far recovering from that event. I’m a lot better now, but there’s still some lingering side effects – like fatigue, meaning that I get worn out from doing the simplest things. I’m not strong enough or well enough to live in my flat at the minute, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be well enough for another few months, by which time the lease on my flat will be over.

If I’m not well enough to live in my flat, you can bet I’m not well enough to work. As I was technically still a student when I got sick, I can’t have any welfare from the government – but I’ve obviously still got bills to pay. It looks like the only place I’ll be able to afford to live for a while is my parents house.

So, that night when I was lying in bed, it felt like I was moving out of Newcastle. Usually when you move it’s because you make a choice, and because you want to go somewhere new. This isn’t like that, and my reception on getting off the train at Biggleswade Station (nearly getting into a fight the very moment I stepped off the train) confirmed how I felt: I’m here, but I don’t want to be here.

* I don’t know why, but I always seem to get taken into hospital on a Friday. It’s really annoying – I assume that I’ll be fighting my way through an emergency room full of booze-damaged drunks.

Yesterday I took a trip into London by myself. I’d arranged to met up with Jock Mooney, who made this video:

We spent a few hours catching up, and then I set off for Camden’s juggling shop, Oddballs.

I’m not really into Camden. Maybe I’m too old, or maybe I’m just not sold on the commercial aspects of the area, but it felt like I was walking into a permanent half-term. Coming up to street level I was looking at the folk heading down into the tube, and by my reckoning it was a ratio of roughly three kids to one tramp. Once I reached the surface I couldn’t work out how to split my ratio between kids, hipsters, tramps and aging punks, so I set off to the juggling shop by walking half a mile in the wrong direction.

After figuring this out the hard way, I turned back and eventually made it into London’s only juggling shop. It’s tiny, and I had to dodge not only somebody flinging some pink fluffy poi around, but a white guy with dreds and a black eye demonstrating the basics of 423. Juggling might be something I do as a hobby, but it really does attract the “skeezy geezer” type. I made my purchases and beat a hasty exit.

This means I now own a total of eighteen juggling balls. Five regular balls, three bouncy balls (one of which has disappeared), four large thuds and my six new regular thuds. Thuds are slightly squishy bean-bags which are named after the noise they make when they hit the ground. Unlike regular balls they don’t roll away, making them easier to find.

Of course, I can’t juggle 18 balls at once. On the Dancey juggling index, 18 balls in two hands has a difficulty of 8.5263. This is determined by the equation

d=b/(h + h/b)

where d is difficulty, b is the amount of balls, and h is the number of hands doing the juggling.

Using this equation, throwing a ball from one hand to the other has a difficulty index of 0.25. Therefore, anybody who learns to juggle 18 balls at once would be some sort of ubermensch of juggling. Anyone smarter than me who wishes to test my maths on this could check out Jack Kalvan’s paper on the subject, but everybody else could just check out this amazing example of teamwork:

After about five hours of being in London I was physically and mentally shattered. I’m still in recovery, and I know the price for this short trip is going to be spending the next few days resting on the couch, despite the fact I did very little whilst in the city. This makes me feel like mild-mannered Clark Kent, only without the interesting day job at the Daily Planet.