Something I noticed on holiday: the difference between trains and planes. Yes, very funny. Haha. No – the difference in my thought processes when travelling on them.

See, I like being in transit. I’m not so fond of travelling (which is why I hadn’t been outside the UK in over half a decade until two weeks ago), but I like being in transit. Being between one place is for want of a better phrase, a magical experience for me. On the train, my brain runs nineteen to the dozen, and I find myself writing down ideas as fast as they occur to me. I’ve been known to spend 5 hours and more frantically scribbling down concepts, ideas, fragments and general thoughts. On a plane, on the other hand, my brain shuts down. I have to force myself to keep busy – reading, firming up old notes (try as I might, I can’t do anything new on a plane, only scratch at the edges of old ideas, and not always very successfully) but for the most part, I’m faintly zoned out.

God knows why this should be the case.

Clearly, the gods hate me. I re-join a mailing list that work has kept me away from for the last couple of months, because work seemed to have slacked off a bit. Then my workload goes and doubles, and I’m left running away from the list in order to stay on top of the job. About twenty minutes after I re-subscribed. That’s a special kind of embarrassing.

God, I’m shattered. A week in New Orleans, and one day of this con, and I’m more or less dead. This isn’t good. Three days of con to go, not enough money, not enough sleep, and plenty of bile ahead of me – god knows I could write a column right now and it would be solid hate. Now I’m off to watch a bunch of strangers eat food I don’t like. Wish me luck.

God, I hate getting ready to go on holiday. Last minute panics, wondering if I’ve forgotten anything, and general frantic effort. Still this time on Thursday, I’ll be somewhere over the USA.

This one I just want to talk about because it made me happy.

Topic #3: I’m cute.

Apparently. After all the other strangeness last night, amid the drunken revelry and general good craic, two strange women dragged me outside, in order to tell me that I was cute, and looked like a fun sort of person. Subtle, no? I’m not used to this sort of thing happening to me, I have to say.

Understand: I don’t like the way I look. “Cute” is about the last word I would use to describe myself. My little brother got all the “cute” genes in the family – I got the ones that make my brain run at along strange lines and at peculiar speeds, which seems like a pretty fair trade to me.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a good judge of how I look. And besides, what does it matter to me how I look? I’m not then one that has to look at me. The only impact it might have on me is my confidence. And if I’m not going to give a damn, what have a got to be self-concious about? Yeah, I don’t get folk lusting over me like happens to some of my friends. (Line of the night last night award goes to Joseph, who, when I asked him why he’d show Antony his sketchings and not me, replied “Because he’s cute, and you’re not.”) I don’t give a damn. Apparently, there are people out there that like the way I look. Maybe there aren’t many of them, and maybe they’re not the people I’d like them to be, but I’ll take my compliments where I can get them.

So, for today at least, I’m cute.

Topic #2: Compliments and self image.

This one’s just been on my mind, as anyone who reads this on a half-way regular basis will know. Why is it that pretty much without exception, none of my friends will believe it when I pay them a compliment? This really gets on my wick, this one does. I’m not a liar. I’m not mad. All joking aside, I’m not a freak or a muant. I’m not just saying these things to make them feel better, or because I want something. This is what I really think. And if I think it, I’m sure other people do, too.

Actually, that’s not entirely true: I do want something. I want to make my friends feel good about themselves. Which will, in turn, make me feel good about myself. So yes, I do want something. But I think I could be forgiven that ulterior motive, to be honest.

I appreciate that compliments often make people feel awkward or uncomfortable, which is why I don’t generally push it. And I know I can be just as bad, don’t get me wrong. But in the last week, no less than four people have basically said “It’s nice that you think that, but I’m not going to pay attention because XXXX”, or even just an outright “No, that’s not true.” I’m starting to wonder why if these people are willing to take me seriously in other ways and think my opinion might have some value on other matters, they cannot believe that I might not be right when I say something nice about them. And yeah, I write this knowing at at least two of them read this from time to time – you know fine well who you are, and you know fine well what I’ve said in the past, and still hold to be true. I’m sorry if you feel I’m not being honest with you, or whatever other reason you have for not listening to me today.

I just wish you bloody well would, now and again.

Well, that was a weird night. You’d have thought someone had looked inside my head and decided “Right. Enough with pontificating. Now you get the practical test.” A lot of the stuff that I’ve been pondering over the last month came up in all sorts of odd ways last night. The entire night felt faintly surreal.

Topic #1: Humans are scum.

So Stu, Andrea, Joseph and I are swapping relationship horror stories, because, y’know it seemed like a laugh at the time, and I come to the conclusion that I will never, ever understand how people can think that it’s normal or acceptable to treat other people like this. It really can’t be a minority of people who can see that there are just some things that you do not do, can it? I mean, I can’t imagine any of my friends pulling the kind of crap that we were talking about. What really chilled me about a couple of the stories is that these were people that had apparently seemed trustworthy.

I dunno how I’d handle it, were something like that to happen to me. I mean, I’ve had people treat me like shit, and like everyone else, I’ve had my heart broken. But I’ve never had someone I trusted stick the knife in and twist. I’ve had people I trusted do it to my friends and leave me to pick up the pieces, and that was shitty enough, thanks – even aside from what it did to the person they did it to, it left me wondering about how I could have trusted such a complete shitbag, and what the fuck was wrong with my judgement. And that was when I wasn’t the one with the sucking chest wound as a result.

I’ve been pondering the obligations that trust places on a person lately, because I’m taking yet another crack at writing that love story. On the one hand, it’s unreasonable to expect people to deny themselves in order to make another person happy. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be, but sadly, we’re only human. On the other, if someone puts their trust in you, they’ve made themselves very vulnerable to you, and it’s incumbent upon you to do your damndest to make sure that they don’t get hurt as a result. If that means you don’t get everything you want out of life: tough. Life sucks, get a hat. Yeah, sometimes it really is inevitable – if you can get through life without hurting anyone, you’re very, very fucking lucky, or just simply not human. But you can do your best to minimise the hurt. You can put what you really want on pause for a while, in order to do what you have to do gently. Most importantly: you can have the courage to be honest and forthright. Make no assumptions about others, and don’t allow them to make them about you. Maybe you won’t always manage it, but you can give it your best shot. 100% achievement is not required

Isn’t it nice to be able to theorise like that, when you don’t have to shove it up against the harsh reality of the world? I have no idea how well I do in applying that sort of thing to my own life – I hope I do OK, but I’m always suspicious of someone that claims to be nice, or to not tell lies, or any of the other usual self-aggrandising “I’m a nice person, you can trust me” shit that people come up with in a relation to stuff like this. It smacks of both arrogance and self-deception. Anyway, enough on this subject. Humans can be thoughtless arseholes, and it’s really bad. We ought to try and do better. End.

I’ve just found out that my ex-fiancee, Ellie, has just finished her (Biology) degree, got an excellent mark, and is now looking for places to do a PhD. This news makes me happy – she’s very bright and deserves to go far in her subject. She was the one that convinced me that science wasn’t the dull, dull stuff I’d been taught at school, but was vibrant, fascinating and utterly marvellous, for which I owe her a massive debt of gratitude. She also managed to convince me that history was interesting, too, after a slew of teachers had reduced it to dull dates and political movements. (I have an almighty chip on my shoulder about the way I was taught some subjects in school, now, although no-one has yet succeed in my challenge to make me interested in geography…)

I’m currently reading Age of Bronze and have just finished Surely You’re Joking, Mr Fenyman. The odds are pretty good that I’d never have looked at either of these books had it not been for her bullying me into sitting down and reading some of the books she owns. Mind you, she also forced me to watch both Pride and Prejudice and Titanic several times, so y’know, it all balances in the end.

What leaves me slightly saddened about all this is that I didn’t hear it from her, but from a mutual friend, in passing. I mean, yeah, I know we’d have been a disaster as a couple, long term. Yes, and all those other cliches that people trot out to explain why a relationship didn’t work, and convince themselves that it’s all for the best really. Bullshit. I’ve no way of knowing. It didn’t work out, and that’s an end of it. But anyway, this news kind of drives it home how we’ve manged to drift apart – we’re at opposite ends of the country, and haven’t spoken in something like six months.

I kind of regret that, just like I regret losing touch with so many of my friends up there.

But life moves on, I guess.

God, it’s hot. I hate weather like this – it makes me lethargic and useless. Give me something chill and fresh, and I’m full of life and vigor. In summer, I hibernate – my brain shuts off, and even reading takes up more energy than I have to spare. I hate it. I hate being asleep by half ten because I simply haven’t the energy to do anything else.

Why haven’t we invented climate control yet? I want it to be fucking snowing! I might be able to get something done, then.

Two weird things happened to me last night. One, I watched The Avengers. Yes, the movie. The really bad one. I don’t know why I did it. Two, I not only remembered what I dreamt, but it was deeply bizarre. It wasn’t actually a dream. It was a replay of a morning in my life, from January 1997, while I was living in Edinburgh. Like, a complete one, as far as I recall. I woke up and felt totally disoriented, like the last 4 and half years of my life hadn’t happened. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should be in The Living Room in Edinburgh, spending money I couldn’t afford on cheering my girlfriend up. (And wondering where my hair had gone…)

I haven’t thought about that morning in years, and suddenly, it’s all there, like it’s happening right now and I’m waking up discovering that there are cresent marks on my palms from where I had my fists clenched in my sleep and and was digging the nails in, like I did that morning. I’d put it down to doing that in my sleep, and the sensation triggering the memory, except that the clenched fists happened quite late on in the morning, and I recall dreaming a lot of what lead up to them beforehand…