Holland No More

This weekend will be the last time I'm in Holland for some time, and possibly the last time ever depending on what the future holds in terms of travel.

I leave my current job in a few days, on to pastures new in every area of my life, but I take with me some very good memories of my times in Holland.

Yesterday, when I arrived in Eindhoven, I dumped my bags at the hotel and went for a stroll into town to find something to eat and drink. As I walked I noticed several people dressed in orange shirts, but initially though nothing of it. Before long, however, the town began to fill up with hundreds, and then thousands of people - men, women and children alike - all dressed in orange. Some wore hats, some overalls, some sarongs, but everywhere was bathed in the orange glow that reflected from the acres of clothes that were packed into the town square and beyond.

It turned out that the Netherlands were playing Denmark just down the road at the PSV Eindhoven stadium, so we watched in the hotel bar while sinking a few cold ones.

I have fond memories of nights in two different, but virtually identical, rock bars - one in Rotterdam, the other in Amsterdam, and both times ending up deep in conversation with locals about this, that and the other. Tomorrow night I intend to revisit the one in Amsterdam, for one last goodbye to the city that I've become very familiar with over the last couple of years. It'll never top London or Paris, of course, but I've walked its streets enough to have discovered the real city beneath the public image of red lights and stag weekends, and it's a beautiful place.

I'll miss the trains, too - clean, fast, on time, and passing through beautiful countryside on the journey between Schiphol and Eindhoven. I remember accidentally getting off at the wrong stop the first time I took the train, and wandering around a pretty little town called 's-Hertogenbosch (or Den Bosch) for an hour before conceding that I was in the wrong place and that I would need to return to the train station and resume my journey. I've been meaning to go back on purpose but sadly the opportunity hasn't arisen. Oh well, been there once at least.

Eindhoven will remain in my heart, too, for its wonderful churches which I have photographed extensively and despite not being at all religious have stood inside and felt an undeniable calm that is absent from many of the churches I have been in.

So, I sit in the warehouse near Eersel, waiting as the clock moves ever nearer to midnight and the end of my final working day here. Outside it's dark and the neon signs that punctuate the industrial park are shining brightly. Ninety minutes to go and despite the slight feeling of contemplation that comes when something draws to an end, I feel energised and ready to leave this phase of my life behind and stride confidently into the future.....

Seconds Out....Round Two!

Be yourself, they say.

Wise words, I say, and something that I have always done when being interviewed for jobs throughout my entire career, and something that (fingers crossed) seems to have stood me in good stead once again.

Two days ago I went for an interview for a new position, based in London a very handy five minute walk from Liverpool Street station, and one that I think would be a very interesting and challenging role.

The interview lasted just shy of two hours, and my presence has been requested again tomorrow for a follow up. Now I'm not going to jinx anything, but let's just say that I have a quietly confident feeling about the whole thing.......which probably means that in a couple more days I'll be sobbing into my keyboard having not landed the job!

Thankfully I find myself in the great position of not having to worry about landing another job straight away, which will give me ample time to prepare for my move to Colchester in a few weeks, and then another couple of weeks to get the house as I like it, and more importantly all prepared for the three people who will be moving in with me and sharing my life going forwards.

In the meantime I have one final soujorn over to Holland with work followed by a weekend in Amsterdam with a friend from work, and then a weekend racing around catching up with friends in Nottingham the week after.

The recent hospital shenanigans aside, and thankfully Deborah is doing very well and becoming stronger by the day, I have to say that life is very, very good. I've never felt more creative, nor more loved and appreciated, all of which I am sure contributed to the relaxed person that I was walking into the interview on Tuesday. I even managed an online bout of Halo 3 with Professor TJ and Blessed Kitten the other night, and look forward to many more.

So, wish me luck for tomorrow, and I'll see you on the other side of my second interview.....

Next stop, Jaywick.

There are some places that when you find yourself in them, are a little too reminiscent of the Twilight Zone. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and in fact can be quite refreshing after the relative normality of the rest of the planet.

One such place is Jaywick, a suburb of an English seaside town called Clacton, located on the east coast in the county of Essex.

Clacton itself is nothing particularly special. But for the town's prefix on many of the shops and cafeterias, you could be in one of any number virtually identical seaside towns in the British Isles. It's a pleasant enough place, though, and has one of the finest fish and chip restaurants that I've ever had the pleasure of eating at.

Travel a couple of miles south, though, and you find yourself in Rod Serling territory.

Driving into Jaywick feels very much like stepping onto the backlot of Universal Studios, or onto the set of a movie. The houses on the sea front are essentially glorified beach huts that have outgrown themselves, and at regular intervals there are overgrown paths that lead from the beach into the suburb itself.

The first time I went there, about a year ago, there was hardly anybody on the streets, which gave the place the feeling of an old abandoned film set.

As we walked down on these overgrown paths, however, I noticed a house that was utterley destroyed. All of the windows were smashed, and the remains of curtains flapped lazily through the broken panes in the gentle breeze.

The house was at the end of the row, and faced the ocean, some several hundred yards away over what is ironically one of the most beautiful stretches of beach that I've ever seen around the coast of the UK.

Opposite it, was another empty house, this one burned out, the interior barely visible through the narrow windows.

As we stood looking at it, our curiosity piqued, a couple of small boys walked up to us and stood watching out fascination for a minute or two before one of them piped up, "There's a body in there, you know."

Of course, the rational side of my adult mind reasoned that this was impossible, that the house would have been searched by the fire brigade once they had put out the fire. However, there was a small region of my brain that couldn't help think that I wouldn't have been at all surprised if there had been a cadaver lurking in the shadowy interior.

While a part of me wanted to enter both houses and take photos, there was something just a little bit off about the place, and so we left.

A couple of days ago we were in the vicinity of Jaywick and out of curiosity I wanted to go and see whether anything had changed. Incredibly it hadn't, save for a gaggle of clearly local families sitting outside the pub that was at the other end of this particular overgrown walkway.

It was almost as if Jaywick had been left to die, like a terminally ill patient that nothing could be done for.

In a few weeks I'll be moving house, and we'll be living about fifteen miles from Jaywick. My curiosity refuses to let go of this strange suburb and so I know I'll be going back for a third time, to document it, and perhaps even get up the courage to enter the smashed up house.

Rod Serling would be proud of me, I'm sure, and I'll share my thoughts when I return from my adventure.

If I return.....

Quick, quick, slow.

Time. The one thing that we never seem to have enough of.

When I started this blog I vowed to write at least every other day, then it slipped to every third day for a while, and at the moment we're down to once a week (though there have been extraneous circumstance for this).

I've touched on this subject before, but there just doesn't seem to ever be enough time to write, to watch movies, to catch up regularly with friends. It seems to fly by, to disappear in the rear view mirror at an alarming rate.

Except sometimes it hits the brakes, it seems to stand still. Sometimes it even seems to stop.

Eleven days ago, when I got that first desperate phone call from Deborah screaming that she was being rushed into hospital the hundred minute drive over to Colchester seemed to take much, much longer.

For the whole journey I had a myriad of thoughts racing through my head. I didn't know what was wrong, and so my usually welcome fertile imagination turned on me. Suddenly my partner in crime had become my nemesis as I imagined everything from a false alarm to the unthinkable.

Sitting there in the accident and emergency unit as she lay on the bed in agony, the minutes stretched into hours as I willed the doctors and nurses to do something. They were, of course, doing their very best as quickly as they could, trying to comfort and treat everybody who was wheeled through the doors, but it wasn't fast enough. It never is when somebody you love is hurting.

I'm feeling this time slow down again tonight as I once more wait for news. I'm trying to occupy myself. I've watched a film. I've played GTA IV. Now I'm writing, drinking black coffee and smoking too many cigars. I sit. I wait. I worry.

Time. It always seem to go by too quickly.

Except when you want it to, and then it crawls......

Angels Among The Pain

Miss me?

Over the last week or so I've seen more of the inside of a hospital than I have for many years. Thankfully, for me anyway, I've been on the visiting side of the bed, but it does mean that I've seen the NHS in action up close and personal for the last six days and I'm happy to report that I'm impressed.

Despite the media reports of an implosion and general atrophy in our fine institution, the reality as I have seen it is that the system, in our case anyway, seems to be working well.

I got the call at 9pm last Wednesday evening and hit the road to drive the 60 miles to Colchester accident and emergency where Deborah had been admitted suffering from severe abdominal pains. By 1:30am she had been triaged, x-rayed, diagnosed, admitted and I was on my way home again, having made sure that she was comfortable, or as comfortable as the circumstances would allow anyway.

As she was taken to the ward, I walked behind a porter who was pushing her bed, and for a moment while we moved silently down the long empty corridors, I felt like Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back when he is escorting a carbon frozen Han Solo to his ship.

After midnight, hospitals are lonely, quiet places, where the faint sounds of beeping machines can be heard, and I was reminded of the previous September when Deborah and I had walked the corridors of another hospital, just a mile up the road as it happens, whose corridors had been long since abandoned, but where ghosts remained in the peeling paint on the walls, in the empty operating theatres and the vandalised wards.

During the day, the hospital is a completely different animal, the sounds of movement, and conversations between doctors and nurses, between nurses and patients, between patients and visitors. The human landscape is constantly shifting too. Each time I walk onto the ward it seems that at least one of the other patients are gone, replaced by another soul in need of care.

What is constant, though, is the dedication and the kindness of the nurses on the ward. While I was there yesterday Deborah had to undergo a particularly unpleasant procedure that I'll spare you the details of, but the tenderness in the nurse's actions and words were reassuring.

I don't think I could face the suffering and the pain that they have to deal with day in and day out - I wince at the though of an IV needle - but I am eternally grateful for these men and women who dedicate their lives to easing the suffering of others. It makes what I do seem somewhat irrelevant.

So tonight as I write this I raise a glass to these fine people, and hope - in the nicest possibly way - that I never find myself in their care.