Nothing Cold Can Stay: A November Compendium

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• It’s Fireworks Fortnight in our village. It used to be just Fireworks Week, but then someone decided that wasn’t quite enough to cover the entire period from Halloween to Bonfire Night with a few extra days either side so the fireworks who weren’t free on weeknights didn’t feel sad and left out. Me? I don’t quite understand - particularly considering the current state of the planet - why the archetypal sound now widely accepted as representative of autumnal celebration is “full-scale industrial warfare unexpectedly breaks out in semi-rural garden”. The cats are scared. The most positive way I can look at it is that at least they’re not as quiveringly hide-under-the-bed terrified as other cats I’ve lived with in the past, and, soon, the firework people might finally take a break, until, of course, they begin to worry that, if they don't mark both occasions with a shitload of fake bomb sounds, New Year and Christmas might not officially exist. Like a lot of extraordinarily annoying things these days, including advertising and technology, fireworks are louder and more aggressive than they used to be and when I say that I’m aware of a temptation not to say it, because of how tediously middle-aged it makes me sound, but I’m simultaneously no less aware that fear of sounding tediously middle-aged is a frequent barrier to telling the truth. Yep, kids often like them. But some other kids are scared of them. What would we truly lose if they were banned? Anxious pets and wildlife... yet more pointless plastic released into the environment... antisocial moronic noise. Call me far-out and crazy but I reckon we can just about continue to cope, as a species, after that kind of bereavement.
• I'm trying to buy a house at the moment. I've tried to buy a house a couple of other times in the last few years and given up. Because I'm 50, the determination feels that bit stonier this time, despite financial obstacles. There's a sort of "now or never" awareness to it. Maybe I'll get scared and worn down again and accept that my lot is to be a renter forever (though not here, since our landlady has now made our rent unaffordable). But just maybe I'll grit my teeth and stick it out. Semi-nomadism has been a double-edged sword for me: relocating ten times since October 2013 has served my writing better than I could have ever predicted. Since those are also the years when I've become gradually more inseparable from my writing, that naturally means it's been good for me too. But, in other ways, I can see the corrosive effect of those moves. The upheaval. The expense. The social and administrative infantilisation. The back pain. The uncertainty. It would be quite pleasant for all that to stop. For us to embed ourselves somewhere, deep amidst some dependable structure destined to outlive us both. I talk about available mortgage terms and it suddenly feels like a conversation about the small print of my own death in a way that it definitely didn't just five years ago. I look at my record collection, wondering what I can bear to sell to boost my deposit, what is realistic to my listening future, and it becomes part of the same soberingly mortal conversation. I feel torn between a vestigial sentimental need to hold onto a semblance of material personal narrative and a lust for a nourishing minimalism: just us, our cats, a few books, the all-killer-no-filler LPs and 45s, a building that's ours and the sudden vanquishing of a stress, born of instability, that's been clawing at me for over a decade (or at least the swapping of it for another kind of stress). And I realise, in the process, thinking about the obsessive no-stone-unturned energy I've given to househunting over the last few years: there is another major potential plus to this, if it happens. It would finally get me off RightMove.