Restless legs Unemployment should be recognised as a craft, if not as a full-blown profession. The many pitfalls and traps thrown at the dole-ite must be negotiated with no small measure of skill and expert insight. Never mind restart training and back-to-work classes. The DWP should run seminars on the best way to fill the dead time between getting up and the One O’Clock News, or on how to sit in a cafe and make a 50p cuppa and a copy of the Daily Record last all afternoon. I spent over a year out of regular work, first of all on occupational sick pay, then on incapacity benefit, and latterly as a freelance doing the odd article whenever I could be bothered. Superficially it was an easy life, with financial pressures eased by the facts my parents refused to charge me rent and I managed to squirrel away a small amount of savings. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too did my brain loathe the absence of the intrigues, internal politics and distractions of office life. So it endeavoured to come up with a few of its own. The biggest challenge faced by the benefit claimant is how to fill up the day. Generally I’d wake at about 8.30am, make myself a cup of tea, and wonder what on earth I was going to do until the evening. In the very early days of my recovery this wasn’t too much of an issue. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, but had a large pile of DVDs to get through. By the time I'd watched them all, however, I was well enough to get restless without being fit enough for employment. When the novelty of not having to hit deadlines and being free to amuse myself wore off, I was frozen by that dead chill: how do I fend off boredom? If the weather was ok, I could go for a walk: that’d take a hour and a bit if I paced it out. On the way home I could get a paper, and flicking through that would take me to lunch. The process of preparing, eating and washing up this meal could last me from 1pm to 2pm if I had the radio on. And then what? I could read a book (I could get through one a day for much of my convalescence), or email some friends, or plunder my record collection for something I hadn’t heard for a while. Anything to pad things out. Time slows down when it has no value, when the absence of deadlines takes away any premium from the ticking of the clock. But so too do the passage of routine events when you don’t have to rush them. Now I’m back at work I’ll be in and out of the bathroom within 10 minutes each morning. For much of last year it might have taken me an hour to get from nightclothes to shower to dressing gown to brushing my teeth to shaving and finally to getting dressed. There was no rush, why hurry things? If I got finished any quicker I’d just have to find something else to do. People assumed I must have been watching a lot of TV; in fact, I rarely switched it on before my parents got home. This was not because I think of myself as one of these terribly clever people who is much too smart to waste time on popular culture. Quite the opposite: my attention span is so short that the average half-hour programme is too much for me to concentrate on. That, and the fact that daytime telly is a profoundly depressing experience: endless adverts where Carol Vorderman and Phil “wife-beater” Tufnell implore those with poor credit ratings to fall deeper into debt might as well have been replaced with a big flashing sign reading YOU ARE WORTHLESS, LUMPEN FLOTSAM, DOLE BOY. Thank God, then, for the internet. Email kept me in contact with friends on the other side of the country and this blog gave me a task to focus on. As well as writing it, there was a stage after my brief flurry of minor press celebrity when my inbox was getting hundreds of new messages a week: apologies to anyone who didn’t get a reply during this time. And who needs TV when you’ve got YouTube? I could literally spend hours floating around the site watching three-minute clips of rubbish: Chaka Khan playing the drums , for instance, or Phil Collins wrestling with Ultimate Warrior. While singing Two Hearts. The digital music revolution helped keep me sane, too. Although I’m still too Luddite to work out how to illegally fileshare, the MySpace pages of new bands were probably my single biggest distraction. Filling up my iPod was a mammoth project that took a couple of months, and through my laptop I usually had 6 music on for most of the day. The advent of spring and summer made the task of keeping myself amused much easier. Though Dumfries is hardly a town brimming with distractions - once you’ve wandered along the High Street once you’ve done it a thousand times, and believe me, I did do it a thousand times - it is surrounded by spectacular countryside which, like some sort of Enid Blyton character, I spent a lot of time exploring. It was at this point that I stopped worrying and learned to love being unemployed - where would I rather have been, sweating in an office filing weather stories, or wandering through a forest in shorts feeling the sun on my face? As documented elsewhere, I started to develop an uncharacteristic interest in physical exercise. Initially my physiotherapist suggested I go to the gym as a way of working on my balance. But after a few painful initial sessions I found myself addicted. At the time I was focused on shedding some of the weight I had gained, but looking back this was probably a way of expending the surplus of energy and restlessness that I’ve accumulated. It is ironic, at the same time, that it took serious illness to get me fitter than I ever have been in my life. As I started to return to my keyboard, however, I found I was in suddenly caught between two stools. I lacked the affirmation that self-sufficiency and a permanent job provide. But likewise I was now clearly too healthy to be excused from duty. Whether rightly or wrongly, we define ourselves by our jobs: and “I’m a journalist” was clearly what I wanted to say, rather than “I sit in my parents front room scanning the job pages and then making myself a scone”. Friends would make jokes about being dole scum and so on, and I’d laugh along with them; but I’d feel a nagging twinge at my sense of self-respect whenever I thought about being out of work. Damn this protestant work ethic. The unemployed are always the first target for rightwingers: never mind millionaire tax-dodgers or corporate subsidy-junkies, who cost the taxpayer far more, it’s the poor sod on £56 a week who’s the real sponger. While I don’t excuse benefit fraud, I also know how low people’s self-esteem must be to see no other future for themselves other than depending on the largesse of the Job Centre. If anyone else finds themselves in a similar position, my advice is simple: embrace the dole, look for the positives in escaping the career treadmill, take the opportunity to enjoy the scenery. Do all the things you’d want to do if you weren’t too busy. Think of it as a gap year. But make sure when the novelty starts to wear off that you’ve got an exit strategy. Oh, and get a blog. That’s another hour of the day used up.

26.1.07 15:31 Permalink / 1 Comment / comment

Meanwhile at the bar, a drunkard muses "Oi, mate. What's wrong with your face?" In an earlier instalment I challenged the nation's drunks to come up with some epithets about my palsy. A couple of weeks ago, at the bar of a pub on Chalk Farm Road, one of them answered the call. He was well-spoken, floppy hair, trenchcoat, half-cut, exuding that innate belief in his own untouchability that tends to be the by-product of an expensive education. Why did he want to know, I asked, was he looking for a sore face himself? He turned pale. I'm far from a physically intimidating presence. But I do find that, in this part of the world at least, a Scottish accent growled at the correct pitch suggests an adolescence spent running with razor gangs and negotiating the social hierarchies of borstal, rather than one passed largely in my bedroom reading the NME. "No, no," he stammered. "I was worried about you. I thought you'd been punched or something." I haven't been punched, I muttered, willing the barman to return to my half-filled Guinness glass. Silence, and with it the implication that this is a dialogue in which I am not keen to engage. "So then, if you don't mind me asking, what is wrong with your face?"  I sighed. I don't mind people asking at all. Indeed, if I know someone beyond an entirely superficial level it seems unnatural if they don't broach the subject: it's literally staring right at them. I've talked to you lot about it plenty of times, after all, and am usually the first one in any company to start telling Elephant Man jokes. I do, however, prefer that when someone raises this, I have already established with them a more intimate relationship than, say, that of two complete strangers waiting at the same bar. "If you're that desperate to know, it's was caused by a brain tumour," I told him. I  then gave a one-sentence tutorial on the function of facial nerves, said that I'd looked a lot worse, and that I hopefully would eventually look a lot better. At this point he seemed to acknowledge that he had transgressed several social codes, and attempted to cover his tracks by dissembling. "Oh right, yeah, my father had a similar thing with his face," he blurted. Really? "Yeah, yeah, really. And I had a tumour as well. A tumour in my mouth. A mouth tumour. Although it wasn't as bad as yours, obviously." I raised by one functioning eyebrow. The barman arrived with my pint. I took it wordlessly and returned to my table. Amazingly, this was the first time anything like this has happened to me.

21.1.07 20:29 Permalink / 4 Comments / comment

A new career in a new town I lugged my bags onto the carriage, squeezed into my seat and bade farewell to familiar countryside as it began to whisk past me. "Train, heave on to Euston," warbled Morrissey though my headphones. "And do you think you've made the right decision this time?" Yes Moz, I thought, I do, I definitely do. I'm back. After more than a year of preparation, convalescence and then limbo at my parents' house 400 miles away, I am living in London again. I've got an Oyster card and a tube map and this fortnight's edition of Time Out. I no longer say hello when I sit next to strangers on buses. By default, I suppose, this marks the most significant stage in my recovery: a return to something roughly resembling the status quo ante. When my alarm bleeped for the first time at 6:15am, I heaved myself into the shower with the benign resignation of the seasoned commuter. I'd like to have shared all this news with you earlier, really I would, but I haven't had a moment to myself. Four days after Christmas I struggled on and off the train, then dumped my luggage at my old flat before taking off to the west country for hogmanay. In a cottage on the wonderfully-named Misery Farm near Weymouth, surrounded by friends, with the wind howling outside, I swigged from a bottle of Cava once the bells had pealed and declared that 2007 was going to be my year. Hungover and shaking off a cold, I trudged back to my temporary flat (myself and my old housemates will get a new place as soon as leases allow) in the capital before starting my new job. In between working a 40-hour week, settling in to my gaff and trips to the Neasden branch of Ikea, I've barely had time to reflect on my change in circumstances. Which is, of course, the entire point of coming back here in the first place. As I said just after Christmas, I thoroughly enjoyed 2006. I've been, in retrospect, thoroughly privileged to spend a year out from the normal grind. For the most part I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. I'm genuinely grateful that I had both family and state support networks that allowed me to do this - had I been an American with health insurance issues to worry about I've no idea what I would have done. And though I kept myself amused with light freelance work and, of course, this blog, that nagging voice that calls itself a work ethic kept telling me that I could not claim self-affirmation until I was standing fully on my own feet again. A few months back I answered a recruitment advert. My prospective employers called me down, first for a written test and then for an interview at the end of November. In the course of the latter I sat in collar and tie for the first time in over a year, explaining to a panel how my experience of illness had made me a better journalist. Not long after I came home from a morning run to find a missed call on my phone. The post was mine if I wanted it. I was looking for a job and then I found a job. (At this point it would, of course, seem natural to tell you what this job is. It's nothing very exciting, but my new employer has a policy on blogs that would require me to delete any politically contentious material and label the site with myriad disclaimers if I were to identify them. I really can't be bothered doing this, so anyone who is particularly interested can contact me via here and ask). Since then I've had so much to do I've barely had time to take stock. I've mentioned before that I don't feel fundamentally changed by my illness, and the ease with which I've (so far) slipped back into my routine would tend to confirm this. As I negotiate the rush-hour commute or sink into a pub chair at the end of the week, however, I know I have something back that has been missing since I last clocked in to an office in October 2005. I have the self-respect that comes from making my own way in the world - not a particularly spectacular achievement, but a crucial one for me nonetheless. I'm not claiming my life is the same as it was 18 months ago when my tumour was diagnosed. I'm working in a new office and living in a different place, and as well as my new trousers and scarf I've also picked up a facial palsy and a defunct right ear. In addition I've found myself in lasting debt to the people who were there for me when I needed them. But who would see a life stood still as something with which to be content? All I have done is catch up with the rest of the world, rejoin the human race: become not a victim or an invalid or a hospital case but just a Scottish bloke who lives in north London and drinks Guinness at the weekend. I'm happy just to once again be a face in the crowd, even if that face is still slightly wonky. So it would be counter-productive to make a fanfare about it, but still. I've won.

15.1.07 11:55 Permalink / 5 Comments / comment

Repetition I'm in The Guardian again today - my feature in G2 was apparently among the readers' favourites of 2006. Thanks very much to whoever nominated me. You can read extracts of the original extracts about halfway down here.

28.12.06 10:01 Permalink / 4 Comments / comment

Shake your hips An earthquake shook Dumfries this morning . I didn't notice; I was in Next for the sale, and the room was already reverberating with bargain-hunters elbowing each other in the face. That doesn't say much for my powers of perception: 3.5 on the Richter scale and I'm distracted by a couple of middle-aged women wrestling over a half-price sweater. It's appropriate that 2006 is ending with a bang, since it began for me with a whimper. I saw in the previous new year in on my parents' front room, the entertainment provided by The Big Lebowski on DVD and a lone dram of single malt. Just weeks after my operation, I was grateful above all else to be alive. But I vowed to myself that my next Hogmanay would include the elements that were missing from the occasion: the ability to function socially, the presence of people my own age, that kind of thing. After 2005's moments of high drama - being told I had the tumour, the op itself - 2006 was, by contrast, notable chiefly for its mundanity. I began it taking life at the slowest possible pace, walking with a crutch, still slightly spaced out from the drugs and having had my brain fiddled with. I marked my progress via incidents that would normally have been routine: going for a pint, taking the train, being able to drive again. Each of them remarkable only because they marked "the first time since..." None of these events, by themselves, gave any indication that I had reached any particular stage of recovery. Yet by the summer, I found myself by most measures recovered: my balance restored, my thought process functioning and so on. Try as I did to record the build-up to this, it still caught me by surprise. There was never any fanfare. No-one jumped out of a cake to tell me, "You're well again." It just sort of crept up on me. There were setbacks, of course, but none of them were particularly debilitating. The ulcer on my cornea did threaten to cost me my right eye, and looking back through my blog I realise this was the one point that I found myself succumbing to self-pity. But even then, what got to me (as when I found myself drowning in the bureaucracy of incapacity benefit) was not pain or discomfort but boredom. The physical demands of my experience were never all that great, to be honest. What I did find depressing - and I count my blessings that this was as bad as it got - was sitting in endless waiting rooms, at the mercy of other people's timetables. Brain tumours are not for people, like me, with short attention spans. But the rest of 2006, my low-key year, was pretty enjoyable. I read a lot of books and got into a lot of new music. In the process of aiding my recovery I got myself fit and started running and cycling (annoyingly, I haven't been for a jog since I pulled a calf muscle three weeks ago, but I'm determined to keep this up). I enjoyed the sunshine during the long, hot summer, explored the countryside and watched every game in the World Cup. I know I'm not supposed to admit this, given that the appeal of sick-lit depends on pathos and confronting adversity. But I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Given the choice, I would do it all again. I won't bore you all again with my views about how refreshing it all was to come off the career treadmill, because you've heard it from me before. And I continue to add the disclaimer that isolation from friends, the interruption of having any responsibility and purpose in life, are only things I could shrug off because I knew they were temporary. But the theme I've kept returning to in this diary is the idea that we only come by this realisation of truth, this knowledge of one's self, when we step outside our lives. Since the vast majority of us have neither the time nor the resources nor the inclination to do this, it takes a major setback before we are in a position to achieve this. That's why I thoroughly recommend going down with a brain tumour. It's just a question of learning to embrace the experience. My story isn't finished, of course. There are still things that can be done to compensate for my defunct right ear. And though my facial palsy has made a partial recovery - I'm not drooping anything like I did at the start of the year - I look forward to offering photographic evidence that I look, to all intents and purposes, normal. But in light of everything that's gone before, I'm not expecting any kind of overnight revolution. Slow and steady has worked well for me up until now. With the help of some people who know who they are, I've made sure that my resolution for 2006 will be realised. I'll be seeing in the bells this Sunday night in a cottage in the west country, getting legless with some old friends. Much as I'm grateful to my parents for all they've done for me, I'm sure they will be as relieved as I am that I won't be in their company on this occasion. I can feel it, 2007 is going to be my year. I have news that confirms this. But I'll let you know all about it once we're onto the new calendar. Everyone's had enough earthquakes for the time being.

26.12.06 17:46 Permalink / 3 Comments / comment

Get behind me, Santa Down the road in Carlisle, today is known as Black Eye Friday . Traditionally, workers in the town get the last afternoon before the pre-Christmas weekend off so they can go to the pub for a fight. I'm buying all my presents on this side of the border. It's been a funny old year, right enough, and I'll do my review of 2006 next week at the same time as all the papers. In the meantime, I intend to spend the next few days supping mulled wine, even though I can't stand the stuff, and eating turkey, although I'm not too keen on that either. Why can't deep-fried KFC-style chicken be the traditional festive poultry dish? No matter, I'm determined to get into the season of goodwill. Even if it means emptying Dumfries of sherry. As such I'd like to thank everyone who has read my blog this year, and posted comments or sent me emails when I was going up the wall with boredom. To you all I wish a very merry and culturally non-specific Winterval (ha, let's see if I can earn an irate mention in Richard Littlejohn's column).

22.12.06 14:57 Permalink / 2 Comments / comment

Is this music?   Yet another unforeseen benefit of brain surgery: I've been able to spend more time than usual over the last 12 months with my CD collection. Since 2006 has been very good indeed for new music, I'd like to thank my tumour for its impeccable timing. Confident that you'll all be just as appalled as I am by the NME's frankly wrong annual poll, I present the sounds that have rocked my world this year:   Singles Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop - Luke Haines You Made Me Like It - 1990s Crazy - Gnarls Barkley Ali In The Jungle - The Hours Gold Lion - Yeah Yeah Yeahs Standing In The Way Of Control - The Gossip Operated On EP - Union Of Knives Steady, As She Goes - The Raconteurs Whoo! Alright Yeah... Uh-Huh! - The Rapture Country Girl - Primal Scream   Albums Mr Beast - Mogwai Black Gold - King Biscuit Time Show Your Bones - Yeah Yeah Yeahs Bottoms of Barrels - Tilly and the Wall Ringleader of the Tormentors - Morrissey Voices of Animals and Men - The Young Knives Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not - Arctic Monkeys The Greatest - Cat Power First Impressions of Earth - The Strokes News And Tributes - The Futureheads

13.12.06 13:55 Permalink / 5 Comments / comment

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