Back to Milton Keynes
March 27, 2008 at 8:32 pm | Personal | No comment
I wasn’t really cold, just my hands, the idea of three pairs of gloves hadn’t worked.
Bombing down the A34 at 1am is a fairly serene experience, so much so that I often had to be careful not to be distracted by the stars, as target fixation dictated that rather than poetically drifting towards the stars, in cruel reality I drifted towards oncoming traffic.
This trip was not quite so calm however, as after picking up my ‘repaired’ motorbike from Milton Keynes and whiling away a few hours with Chim, I set off into the night and discovered that my main headlight wasn’t working.
“Never fear!” I thought to myself as I switched to high-beam and immediately illuminated a bleary-eyed owl in a nearby tree instead of the road surface I’d intended.
Fortunately the scatter of light that made it to the ground was enough to crawl my way through the unilluminated sections of the A421 by positioning myself a couple of feet to the left of the cat’s eyes.
I reflected upon the day that was now technically yesterday, pleased at my own strength of will in not going to see Kim, despite being sorely tempted.
She had sent me a message on Facebook the previous night saying that things weren’t going well and that her mother was trying to stop her from going to the adult-literacy evening-class that I’d paid up for her. Fortunately Kim was ignoring her for the egocentric destructive old bat that she was.
The previous day I had daydreamed about playing the night in shining armour, turning up unannounced at her doorstep to see the all-encompassing grin that spread across her face as she leapt into my arms.
But I knew it would make nothing better, and would make everything worse.
At the beginning of the week I had been starting to feel depressed by loneliness and a fatalistic view of my trip that saw my loneliness pervading.
It would have been a wonderful few hours as Kim and I caught up in more ways than one.
Kim would have exercised her special talent of making me feel the most intelligent, capable, stable and important person in the world.
I may even have started to wonder why I was going away…
But in the end I would have gone, I would have had to suffer the heart-wrenching minutes a second time as she saw me slip through her fingers into the night and tried desperately to make me stay.
It would have taken her back to the beginning of the month, and all the progress she’d made in getting over me would have been shattered and for naught.
I knew all this, but still in my heart of hearts I wanted to go and see her, and make everything all better, if only for a while.
The night before I went to Milton Keynes I had a dream, I’ve been dreaming a lot lately, after the past 10 years with probably fewer than 10 dreams remembered I’ve had three in a row…
The dream started with me travelling on the coach to Milton Keynes, whiling away the hours reading, the next thing I knew I woke up (still within the dream) on the floor of Kim’s living room, with a thumping hangover and Kim and her mother standing over me disapprovingly.
For reasons I couldn’t fathom Kim was angry with me, and I knew that I had fallen from my pedestal of her opinion and that she would never respect me again.
Then I woke up for the second time.
The dream had served a very stark purpose, it effectively destroyed my subconscious desire to go and see Kim; I was free to visit Milton Keynes without the temptation to see her again.
The day in Milton Keynes was spent mostly in Ye Olde Swan in Woughton on the Green, which was only ever ‘my local’ in spirit, as my true local was ‘The Eagle’ where you were as likely to get a slit throat as a pint.
I whiled away an hour or so waiting for Chim by sitting in my favourite chair at my favourite table with a half of Fosters, alas I had come a day too early to get a half of Staropramen.
When Chim arrived I was standing outside the pub next to my bike, desperately trying to get it on to the centre stand so I could see how much coolant my leaky radiator had wept.
He grasped the bike firmly by the grab handles and irritatingly hefted it on to the stand first time, I made a mental note to step up my fitness regime.
We passed a couple of alcohol free hours talking about our respective life-changing-trips before heading off to town to play pool and catch a movie, though in fact the game of pool seemed to revolve primarily around us potting the white in increasingly complex and convoluted ways.
When the film had finished we walked slowly around the outside of the Xscape building, discussing the highlights and flaws of the film, before wishing each other luck and going our separate ways, we were unlikely to see each other for a very long time.
I coiled the back-breakingly heavy Almax chain into my rucksack, sat astride my bike and left Milton Keynes for the last time.