Inpursuitof

Wake up after a night with friends having a few drinks. Head’s a little fuzzy, belly is having a sulk. It wasn’t a Katy Perry ‘Friday Night’ affair but there’s a nagging sensation that something, nae, everything is wrong. Quietly, terribly, wrong. You might know the feeling.

Some people wake up with a hint of paranoia after a night of not-heavy drinking. They remember everything but somehow something gets lost in translation, there’s an uncertaintity about the facts. Me, I wake up with deep feeling of unease, like everything’s so tentative and it’s all about to fall apart. The feeling increases until the overriding urge is to run very far away from everything. I wonder if that’s what drives people to travel for very long periods of time, not the urge to see new things, not really, but the urge not to see the old things. The urge not to put down roots in case they’re hacked away from under you. One of the biggest reasons for expectant fathers to leave is a fear of having someone always tied to you.

There’s a condition called a dissociative fugue state, which means a person forgets who they are and goes wandering. It’s interesting that alcohol can bring about that kind of feeling, that as a poison it doesn’t just work on your body but your mind. It brings about that kind of feeling, that feeling and so many others, and yet we still use it. We ply ourselves with it and make it an intrinsic part of our society. I guess there’s a reasonable trade-off between the good times and the weirdness of the day after. Who knows? I just might not drink if we’re ever expecting kids…

1) A gingerbread man and some lottery tickets

2) A cyclist who didn’t realise we were just waiting for him to pedal faster

3) Clamber, and family Clamber.