Day 45. Read it in books (14/2/19)

Halfway through this morning's 5k (started at 7:15ish, back in the house by 8, currently waiting to give Matty a lift to school before I can get my shower after pleading and cajoling to get him out of bed for about twenty minutes) I had this entire blog written in my head.

It ended with "some days are neither cataclysmic nor seismic, either personally or globally, some days are just days and we move forward one at a time, changing slightly as we go."

I've no idea what preceded it though. It's all gone, vanished in the time that it took for me to turn the mac on and read this nonsensical fantasy on twitter that claims Jose Mourinho is coming to Everton.

(Soundtrack: Lauren Laverne's show doing Valentine's Day stuff. Just had Chet Baker doing Let's Get Lost which is imperiously fragile and we're now onto Kermit The Frog singing The Rainbow Connection. Honestly. And if you don't already know it, search it out, it's painfully beautiful. If you feel brave, head to YouTube and look for 'Kermit Jim Henson funeral'. Try not to fall apart.)

*And we return, about ninety minutes later: the car journey to and from Matt's school, the shower, the wash in the washer, the breakfast, the quick skim of the Guardian. And during the car journey back I had the blog completely in place again. It revolved around three TV programmes we'd watched recently but I'm damned if I...

And there it is. I had two. No idea what the third was. In the middle of writing the paragraph above, in fact roughly around the word 'watched', the third dropped back into place:

The last ever episode of Catastrophe

A documentary on 1951 New York centred on Thelonious Monk, Jackson Pollock, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Jack Kerouac. Which is a decent number of creatives to have in the same town at the same time

Here And Now. The latest show by Alan Ball, creator of the fantastic Six Feet Under and the seasons of True Blood that were genuinely excellent.

This involves all these, some decisions and some thoughts. Some small things. A small change I made last night that might be something bigger and more beneficial in the long run.

Let's work through these a little, shall we?

Here and Now is some kind of psychodrama soap; a family tale filled with touches of the supernatural. If we're honest, it's not quite there. It's kind of like being smashed across the temple with a hammer filled with ideologies. And I agree with all the ideologies I'm being smashed with but, god lad, do you have to be quite so on the nose. I think we're giving it one more episode to see if we're genuinely arsed or not.

But there's a scene in episode two where a newly created couple head out to nature. They walk into a waterfall, they recline in the back of a flatbed truck parked in a 'dark zone' and stare up at the Milky Way in all its glory, unobscured by light pollution and you think 'do these spots exist and how do we find them?'

And you think 'there are so many places to see, aren't there?'

Catastrophe has a similar moment. The show, starring Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan, as a transatlantic couple whose lives come together through nothing more complicated than casual sex and then immediately complicate had an incredibly strong first season: something new, edgy, adult, sharp, intelligent, witty. And then it dipped. We're in season four and it has, in all honesty and with all sadness, not worked for us. Until last night. Last night moved from London to somewhere around Boston. Somewhere with a beach and a small town. It moved from a holiday to a funeral for Rob (the character)'s mother. That his mother had been played throughout by Carrie Fisher added a huge amount of love to the show, from both the cast who clearly genuinely loved her on a personal level and the audience. I mean, who didn't love Carrie Fisher?

(6 Music now playing Tinseltown In The Rain by The Blue Nile. It might be coincidence but I tweeted the show before saying how great the music had been this morning and 'how about Tinseltown In The Rain?' "Do I love you, yes I love you, will we always be happy go lucky?" For my fantastic wife J.' I deleted the tweet immediately, thought I should have gone for "Slow Loving' by The Daintees. Didn't tweet again. They might just be playing this anyway but I'm taking this as a message from the universe. The Blue Nile are our band. Their songs are our songs.)

Anyway, there's a moment near the end of the show where they sit on a beach and talk about leaving London. Selling the house in London and buying something in Boston for actual cash. And J said, we could do that. We could go there.

Another place to see. Another of those so many places that there are that we haven't seen yet.

New York then. New York 1951. Why would you not want to be there, then? Why would you not want to sit in a smoke filled basement club in Greenwich Village and listen to Miles and Coltrane and Monk playing live. In front of you. In a room. You'd have to be mad. That's life in its very essence right there.

Is it too easy to love the big cities? Too obvious? We waited a long before we went to New York. We fell in love with New York immediately. We would move to Manhattan tomorrow. The same with Paris, same with Rome. Instant love affairs. Hotel rooms where you can open the window and let the city in, just breathe in the city and let it fill you. Discover its streets, live its culture.

Kerouac was there. 51. New York. 29 years old. Writing On The Road. One roll of paper, three weeks living on nothing but coffee and Benzedrine, just writing everything he had to say.

And watching that slice of the long gone past I wanted to be there and I wanted to read more and write more. I wanted the chance to do everything that I hadn't done yet.

J pointed out that there were two things she wanted to see: the Milky Way exposed in a dark spot and the Northern Lights. We'll make these things happen. We have places to see. The world is too beautiful to not see the fantastic things in it. Maybe we should all appreciate that idea all the time? Maybe we should all embrace that thought process? It'd sort out some major issues.

I pointed out that I'd read Kerouac's On The Road at 18 and was blown away by it. Hadn't read it since. Needed to read it again.

One of the things about being 55 is you know that it's all finite. There is far less ahead than there was before. There is only so much time to do the things you still want to do. But, also that the time that's left is still a lot and can be well spent.

I know the books I loved that I need to read again. I know the books that I haven't read yet but need to. I've read Lord Of The Rings twice, I highly doubt I'll ever read it again. But On The Road? Catch 22? Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance? Great Expectations? War And Peace? There's time to do all this.

So I changed something last night.

After J went to bed (10ish) I picked up a book. 'Heather, The Totality' by Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, probably the greatest thing that's ever been on TV.

128 pages long, it's a novella rather than a novel. James Ellroy's back cover blurb recommended that one should 'read this book in one gasping breath'.

So I did. Finished the rather fine little book by midnight. Ignored my nightly game of FIFA, turned the TV off, threw a bit of Satie followed by a bit of Eno onto the phone, instead of using it to wallow in Twitter and Facebook, and read. Added some actual value to my life.

Films to watch, books to read, music to listen to and make. Places to see. Time to cut out the things that have no value and just do what adds something.

Some days are neither cataclysmic nor seismic, either personally or globally, some days are just days and we move forward one at a time, changing slightly as we go.