I Know Now What I Knew Then

Yesterday a neighbour stopped me in the street as I was walking home:

“Alright mate, haven’t seen you around for a while”
“Heeyyy! Yeah, I’ve been in Japan for a year teaching Eng-”
“That’s great so me and the wife we had a garden business”
“Um…Right, yes, I see your van parked out here, with the banners, how long have you bee-”
“But we’re winding it down see – we have another income stream that pays us whether we work or not! And this is backed by a major British Plc! It’s a great opportunity to work from home and make money!”
“Ah. Umm...”
“I've got a DVD in the house, come and have a look, you can make loads of money just by recommending your friends!”
“Ah, well you see-”
“It’ll only take a minute…”

He’s a friend of my mother so I had to be polite. But then he took my arm, to lead me. I subtley shook free and he looked at me askance. The rest of the conversation was markedly less friendly.
See, I’m not a toucher. Many times good friends have hugged me or laid a friendly hand on my shoulder and I tense up. A psychologist would say I wasn’t held enough as a child. It's nothing personal; try as I might, I just do not know how to respond. I once tried to be more ‘touch-feely’ by laying a friendly hand on a friend's back, but being unused to this kind of thing I over-did it and ended up caressing his shoulder which, you can imagine, was not good. So anyway - I’m sorry, I’m just not a toucher.


I have seriously missed the comforts of Toyama since being home: my friends, the carefree lifestyle, the unqualified respect, the reliable trains, the martinis, and the bowling. I can't do much about these things, except for the bowling. A few weeks ago Robin and I headed down to Cardiff's premier bowling establishment. Sorry, Cardiff's only bowling establishment.


Yeah, bowling!


Strut. See me strut?


Do not click on the image to see the score.

We also went back to Swansea, to see how the place had changed since our halcyon days of university. It was a dump back then, but we were all far too drunk to care. Swansea has had all sorts of money poured into it since then for regeneration projects and I have to say, well, it is pretty much still a dump.


Where the money went: the cutting-edge 'Technium' at the university.


...nobody wants to go shopping though, right?


Look at the lovely, um, the lovely fountain.


Oh, hey everyone! It's okay - they've got a Starbucks!

Walking around the city centre I was struck by how many people there were with prams and children running around all over the place like they owned it. It’s the same in Cardiff – people with kids everywhere. Well, young women with kids. Okay - teenagers. Teenagers with their illegitimate children. Anyway, I’m not anti-child, but these little, er, darlings are everywhere, swearing their lovely little heads off – seriously, words I didn’t even know when I was fifteen – and their parents are chasing them around screaming at them about how exactly they’re going to f***ing batter them if they don’t f***ing behave. I don't know. Maybe it’s because they didn’t get enough love when they were kids themselves. Maybe they weren’t held enough; they're not touchers. When I have a family of my own I’m going to make sure to touch my children all the time.