Not long now...

It's Friday evening. On Monday morning in the middle of still Sunday night really, I will be off to the airport, where I will board an aeroplane bound for New York. And when I get there, I will see my Susan, hold her, and spend eleven wonderful weeks with her, her family and friends.

She's been writing list after list, of things to do, things to eat, things to see, things to buy, things to cook. She's a list maker, and also a folder user, which will benefit me greatly in the years to come: no more wondering where the hell that electricity bill has disappeared to! No more panicking because I can't find the prescription the doctor gave me just that morning! I will learn to live with her organisationalism (don't care, it's a word NOW), she will learn to live with my scatterism (ditto), we will reach amicable accommodations together. We do so already, mostly without rancour or unpleasantness, although there is on both sides the occasional dropped jaw or raised eyebrow, and sometimes both at once. But most of the time there's only ONE side, called Us; Cameron and Susan; Susan and Cameron.

We're an And now. As in John AND Yoko, Romeo AND Juliet, fish AND chips, bagels AND more bagels. I have never been more certain of anything in my life, and I know, not just feel or think but know, that nor has Susan.

They say that relationships, marriages, take work. They're right. And we're working on this one, out of a shared Love and a shared determination to succeed. Sometimes it takes surprisingly HARD work, and when that's the case, there's a satisfaction of enormous proportions in it when we come out on the other side of it knowing we've done a good job together and put another potential obstacle behind us. We joke and laugh often, talk about films and art and culture, and language, often; discuss serious issues frequently and share always. We don't always agree about everything, but we have a set of shared assumptions that means major conflicts are rare to the point of non-existence.

Sound idyllic? Does it? Well, sorry, but it is. I am hugely happy. It's odd being so happy while still being aware, inside my head, of suffering from depression. Most of the time the depression is fairly distant, more than a memory but less than a spectre. Sometimes it looms larger, when I become aware of still living on a different continent from her or when we have a fight (they're inevitably about really silly little things, all sound and fury but signifying nothing, but they hurt terribly). On occasions like that there are still clouds above my head; but they're little grey ones, not at all the thunderous black devils that used to be there.

Wow. I started this post just because I wanted to write something and wanted to tell you all how exciting it is to be me, here, now. It's taken itself in unexpected directions. Probably not unpredictable ones though. I love it when a piece of writing does that, when I start with a vague idea of what I'm about to write and then the words themselves take over and I end up writing something completely different. Sometimes comedy turns into tragedy or whimsy turns into nostalgia, or nostalgia into feminism. Sometimes even the form changes, and a poem becomes a fairy tale. Once, a poem about a paragraph long got sculpted down to four words, while on another occasion one which felt just not quite right was studied and worried over for two days before I realised that what it needed was to start with a comma. With the comma in place, I felt like baby bear.

I think this post is done now.

Poems.

I told you there would be occasional poetry infesting this blog, so here goes. Some new works.

SALMON
That's the last time I smoke a salmon,
he promised himself as giant multi-
coloured pink swirls adorned the wall
that way and this, swishily and swervily,
shrinkily and growily. Sometimes he
wished vaguely that he had taken the
builder, whose name was Barry, for
his word and added the other three,
but tonight he just enjoyed the show.
Until Anita the average anteater
started nibbling the wooden chips in
his paper, rendering the article about
those Moldavian decorators illegible
except for the word "EXCLUSIVE",
which on its own was of limited value,
as Anita solemnly agreed with an
uproarious grin. Then she hid behind
the surprised old man on the pavement,
who stayed where he was to avoid her
blushes.

WORSE
How awful to live in the World of Better,
where people always say "well that could
have gone better" and measure their
distance from perfection, rarely knowing
satisfaction. Surely preferable in the World
of Worse, where it could always be worse,
where people are aware of their distance
from total disaster, where there can be true
joy at its aversion.


APPLES
People said the old woman downstairs
was a witch, and they also said that blue
apples and green apples were different
to the core.

Susan.

These are the first two poems I wrote for her:

NEW

New York. New York. New York.

There. Now it's been named

THREE times.

AIRPORT

There was some tension and some
teariness, some coffee, toast and
bacon. With ketchup. She laughed
and said she had never seen such a
thing in New York, and what with
that and the deep fried pizza we
talked about opening a Scottish
health food store there. Then we
took photos of each other on our
mobile phones and went to her gate,
spoke silently with hands together;
we held and kissed one another, and
parted. I stood and watched her
until she turned a corner, and
dreamed about her coming the
other way on her next visit as tears

thought about it.

She's visited here twice now, we're engaged and wearing betrothal rings, which you can see in the picture there. And now the plan is for me to go over there for Christmas and New Year, spend the festive season with her and meet her family and friends. And buy engagement rings together, of course. It all just depends on finance (not the rings, which needn't cost much, but the flight), which is why a DONATE button has suddenly appeared here. I am scrimping and saving, have a tin (which once contained a bottle of fine malt whisky) for spare change and contributions, but that isn't going to raise the £500 we need to reach. Please don't feel pressured, but any small amount you feel able to give to send me to another continent for a couple of weeks to be with my Woman would be gratefully received.

Sorry to seem so mercenary on Dodophobia, but needs must.

Once unto the breach...

Well, here we go, my first ever blog post. I suppose a self-introduction might be in order for those who don't know me who might one day accidentally stumble across this.

I'm 44, Scottish, Atheist, engaged to Susan, have a heart condition and am suffering from depression (Prozac and half a pharmacy help wonderfully), have in the past suffered three strokes (I thought it was only two but the other day I discovered that the first one had in fact been two and was massive) and two heart attacks, and have a non-malignant brain tumour which is doing absolutely nothing and so is really quite friendly as brain tumours go. It is "probably" a craniopharyngioma, so it has a very friendly and wonderful name, too, which I would love to use in a song, but there could conceivably be scansion problems with it. ("Oh sweet craniopharyngioma, how I love your internalistic aroma..."; you'd have to be Paul Simon to sing it properly, although if he wrote it at least it would be better).

I tend not to write songs, but I do write poetry, and this blog will on occasion be a vehicle for new pieces, and even more occasionally for old ones, such as the one that has inspired the blog's title. Which is Dodophobia. Would you like to hear it? Oh all right then, as you've twisted my arm.

DODOPHOBIA
I bet I suffer terribly from dodophobia.

Now I know some of you are sitting there saying "THAT'S not poetry!" but it is, and I shall tell you why; because I say it is. Poetry has nothing to do with rhyme or scansion, it is simply a way of using words artistically to create mood and image in the mind of the perceiver. In this case, the mood is mostly just humour, but with a thoughtful aftertaste, I hope. That is, I hope you will continue thinking about it and its possible meaning after you have moved on to another webpage, after having had an initial giggle or snigger.

Actually, not just poetry but all art forms are art if their creators say they are (or if they don't but the thing has an artistic effect on you), and for the same reasons. All it's about is the provoking of thought or feeling, so if a pile of bricks (to choose an entirely random example) makes you angry or causes you to ruminate on the nature of art (for instance) then of COURSE it's bloody art! And art of all kinds, including poetry, is everywhere around us, occasionally deliberately created.

Also I will share with you, whether you like it or not, my thoughts and feelings about whatever enters my mind to mention. Could be anything, anything at all, because my brain goes off on all sorts of tangents at times.

And I think that's quite enough for now.

Enjoy.