The End of an Era, The Beginning of Another

I’m not one for that ‘Live Laugh Love’, if I’m honest. In any encounter with that fashionably asinine sentiment- usually found in the wild in italics on bathroom walls, my response is frequently vocal and always abrupt. ‘Graffiti’, I am known to opine, ‘used to be funny at least’. That’s not to say that I don’t see the value in a pithy phrase, however. I have been known to utter a timely ‘I’ve seen these go wrong’ while someone close-by gears up to make a terrible error of judgement, or a knowing ‘hold my beer’ as I make a mistake all of my own. Of late though, I have been internally harangued by two snippets of advice I have in the past been guilty of doling out. The first came to me via a Shaolin Monk (you’re damned right these are the circles I drink in)*, who solemnly declared that to accept something new into your life, you must be prepared to make space for it by first removing something else. Simultaneously vague and axiomatic, but with a hard kernel of truth- by repeating one’s old patterns of behaviour, one excludes the possibility of growth in both the life and conceptual space one inhabits. 

This became pertinent last year when I first quit a bad job to make space for more learning. Then at Christmas just passed, a job I’d done at University for several years came to a natural end and I began looking for new ways to exchange my time for money. Last month, I was offered a new teaching post at a different institution, on the face of it the solution to pressing financial concerns. This, alongside a small permanent role I’d kept at University would sort it all out, I concluded. However, the feeling that I was being turned away from what I have set out to do not only endured but grew increasingly difficult to ignore. 

Truth is, I’ve been split too many ways of late. Not like that. I try to run my Conservation business and I genuinely love doing it; but demands elsewhere are frequent and varied. My current clients are marvellous, patient, people; and have been very supportive of my time away at college during their work; but their job had slowed to glacial pace. This proposed new arrangement threatened to push them even further down the pecking order, and that couldn’t be permitted. As it was developing, I would have (in no order of importance) three days at college, possibly two more of teaching, online teaching for university, as many days per week as I could make available to work on the buildings, a relationship to provide time and care for, two boats to look after, and a forge to build. No day off, and at that calculation not even any time for drinking with Shaolin Monks**. Jon Bon Jovi may only need to ‘sleep when [he’s] dead’ but I’ve been known to enjoy a nap every now and then at the very least. 

In the face of relentless work and life juggling, unsurprisingly, I fell ill over the winter. Even less surprising to me, I unravelled mentally shortly afterwards. The spinning plates came off their pins as the feeling of control, direction, and indeed any notion of self all spooled out like spilled camera film, if you’ll pardon a mixed metaphor. I’d welcomed a load of new things into my life without first ensuring I’d got any space for them, and illness had thrown a stark light on how overcrowded my life had become. Most importantly of all, several of the things I’d allowed to become prominent were things I did not want to do; but what to do about it all? 

The ongoing internal struggle sees the desire not to disappoint anyone fight it out with the need to preserve self and make real these projects and goals; and it’s a fierce battle. However, almost four years ago I gave up a whole life as the pull back to this watery life became irresistible, and along with it the need to get away from those comforts of modern life which had yielded only empty rewards. It would be the crime of a life to let that sacrifice wane in the face of just ‘being busy’, and whilst doing all the same things that had made me turn away before.

Over the dark days of midwinter, the choices were too many and too clamouring to make any headway, the options all stacked up in front of me blocking any view of the path through. However, resisting decisiveness is a kind of decisiveness of its own. If you cannot make your mind up, the world has a habit of doing it on your behalf; though it’s a gamble on how those chips will fall. Illness and the inability to work precipitated action, in the end. Picture the scene in the film where the lead is shown with a crescendo of white noise in their own head, maybe some breaking glass; all the drama. More accurately in this case a middle-aged man sat at a bar staring at the brick wall, nursing a drink, empty of drive. The malaise is symptomatic, the hyperstimulation of stress replaced by hypostimulation and indecision, and I can only tolerate it for so long. All of which brings me nicely to the second ‘earworm’ of unsolicited advice floating around in my head; ‘Make your mind up and just fucking get on with it’. Others may have said it with greater poetry, but the lesson will be the same- you’ll not get on, unless you actually get off your arse and get on. 

So, after some hesitation, I made my decision. Turning down work is always a risk, but I had to make more time for me, for my loved ones, and for the simple task of making this project a reality. Since I started writing this post I have served my notices and walked away from academia. It’s a huge thing mentally, to walk away from a crop I spent twenty years sewing and several years since reaping. As of this week I no longer have a University of Oxford staff card, no longer the email address that opened doors with its inherent gravitas. At one time I hoped to work there forever, to be that person, basking in reflected light from the stone walls that dazzled me the first time I laid eyes on them in 2001. But the truth is I am not that person. It’s not an admission of lack or defeat, more that the whole thing is a performance that asks too much for what it gives to me. I like working with old buildings and sites, working with dirty hands and dusty boots; I like talking about it for a living far less.

So, eight months after I walked away from Archaeology it’s time to conclude I won’t be walking back any time soon. Teaching, too; must now take an extended holiday from my world. I’ve resigned all my posts, and turned down others. I’ve handed back my institutional memberships, deleted the commitments from my diary. It all had to go, to make room for the new that is already too long in the coming. It represents the shedding of an artifice, it now seems. I don’t belong in those spaces not because I don’t belong as I used to fear, but because I don’t desire it. Moreso, the chasing of that life is ill-making; hammering myself into those shapes does neither the body or the mind any good. If I’m honest, I never made a very good scientist; it’s just not in my gift. I have swapped the analysis for hammer and tongs in the forge and hammer and chisel at the wall. If it’s simplicity I’ve been seeking, then I’ve definitely found it. I can only hope that without haste in the decision making, I will have less repenting with which to fill my leisure time.

In the weeks since I wrote the above lines- embargoed until my departure had been finalised- I’ve been busy. Constructive. The boat’s much talked about roof? Well, that’s finally being welded together. We built some staging on Murphy’s Game to finally enable its fitting, and as this wings its way to your inboxes the boat is heading into Tooley’s Boatyard in Banbury for some much-needed repairs, after almost a whole year of neglect. Once it comes out of dry dock then the first roof segments can go in, and with repaired steering gear and a properly functioning prop shaft it’ll be starting to take shape at last. Soon I will also be working in Tooley’s historic forge during demonstration days with volunteers, the first move towards that very definite end goal.

Work-wise, my long-suffering clients are seeing more of me at their property- their beautiful Ironstone house is already looking like it’s being worked on properly, and as the sun has broken out after another dismal Winter, the work accelerates with each lengthening day. 

The signs so far are good, my books are filling up with work and once the invoices start to be paid the tightness in the bank will ease, as too will the physical burden of a job indoors vanish from my waistline. 

Now, did someone mention a nap? I think I need a nap.

*I do not, and never have, drunk with Shaolin Monks. It’s called artistic licence.

**see above