On second thoughts...(no explanation necessary)

So we had another month's worth of rain on Monday, and things got seriously flooded around these parts. Sheffield was looking like a cross between New Orleans and Venice on the TV – cars getting washed away and people 'having to be rescued' from offices and factories – and even Wakefield got a bit of it. The river was about fifteen feet higher than normal, and just down the road from us a load of streets got flooded out and living rooms and carpets and rose bushes were all under water. Me and Arthur went down there about 10.30 at night and it was still all fire engines and rubber dinghies, and crowds sloshing about in the street, in the dirty brown water. I've never seen a flood before – but I've always wanted to. It was a real eye-opener, a real thing to see. It kind of felt like something, all those people milling around and you could just talk to anyone and take pictures of people's gardens, stuff you couldn't normally do. I mean, you've got to feel for them that's lost their TVs and sofas – but at the same time it was quite exciting. And old Arthur was like in his third heaven's finger or something…
    "It's like Arma-fucking-geddon," he was saying, shaking his hands like two gigantic pepper pots, "I'm fucking loving this, me." His eyes were on fire, I swear, reflecting those flashing lights and beaming out into the belaked gardens. "Long may it continue. This is what we need," he said, "the whole country underwater, something to shake things up. I love the sirens everywhere. I love all the traffic jams and people wandering all over the place, thinking how to get home, thinking where they're gonna stay, thinking everything they've worked for's gone down the pan, drowned in shitty brown water, one day's rain and all life's changed. Imagine if it rained for a week! Imagine forty days and forty nights. Imagine that!" His big mad hands were raising up now; he was preaching to the dark night sky and getting too worked up for my liking. There were old men in soggy wet slippers saying how they'd lived there sixty years and never seen anything like it; they were looking at him shiftily and slyly fingering their pockets. I didn't want to find out what they'd got in there; probably a pipe or something. Nobody needs that.
    "Let's go 'round the other side," I said, "check out Warwick Road, that's supposed to be the worst." I took his arm and started back through the crowd: an Asian woman in a pushchair; a bloke in sandals and shorts walking through the water towards a fire engine; some kids clambering up a wall to stare at a lady watching TV in her front room, her feet in wellies, ducks swimming 'round her ankles; some lady was being pulled towards her house in a dinghy, putting on a brave face, making grand declarations over and over, "I don't care, I'm not bothered, I just want to see it," etcetera, etcetera. Arthur was blind to it all. He was lost in his own soliloquy.
    "I hope it rains tomorrow," he said. "Oh water, keep on rising! Ruin us all with thy blessed wet goodness and save us from our so-called civilised society, our love of stuff, our blessed boring lives! I want it, man," he said, "I really do. You might think I'm being dramatic but I'd love to see that kind of thing: death and destruction, yeah! I've lived my whole life being promised this kind of thing and, now I ain't got so many years to go, I'm not kidding I'm gonna be feeling cheated if we don't get some of that. Polar ice caps? Global warming? Freaky weather and t'big old Earth tipping on its axis? Bring it on! I want wars, I want viruses – I want something that's gonna proper shake this world and change things beyond credit cards and buying stuff and finding your nice cosy house and that's it. Super Volcano? Hell yeah! You know there's one under Yellowstone National Park, right, in America? And it could go off any minute, and wipe out America, and kill half the planet – or it could go off in another ten thousand years; well I'm praying it's now; I'm praying it's before the end of my lifetime. Why not? I wanna see something, man. I wanna see some change. I'm bored of all this; I'd love for it to come. I feel like it's what's been promised to me…"
    We were up by the graveyard now – the graveyard I'd slept in a few years ago when my mum wasn't having me in the house. I liked it there. I liked it in this other graveyard I slept in too, in Norfolk. I've been thinking lately I was actually much happier when I was sleeping like that, living wild and free, away from a house, four walls, a computer, a television, car…maybe I should be getting back to that, back to being out there. I'm thinking I'm not really cut out for this; that I should be an explorer or something, permanently. Arthur would understand. Arthur probably knows exactly how I feel.
    "The problem is," he said, "it'll probably never happen. I mean, we've had the millennium – and that turned out to be a big fat zero – and ever since old Jesus walked the Earth and that mad bloke wrote the Revelation Christians have been getting up in arms every hundred years or so thinking something was gonna happen, this 'second coming', this 'apocalypse', this 'rapture' – all from some crazy-headed misreading of some crazy-headed gibberish-writing. Even the goddamned New Agers have got their apocalypse, with the Mayan Calendar and Twenty-Twelve and the Earth flipping upside down on its axis and everybody transmuting themselves onto their lightbodies. Man, can you believe I used to be into that shit! I tell you, there's gonna be a lot of disappointed New Agers come Twenty-Thirteen!" He laughs. "I wish it would come, though, I really do – it wouldn't bother me, I'd just be like, 'oh yeah, the change – right, head for the hills, and keep your heads, and lets see if we can survive – and thank God we'll never have to be ruled by our bank balances again.'" We were up by Jackson's now; he was shaking his head and smiling into the puddles. His hands had softened a little; they were kinder now and swung loosely by his sides, like two dripping puppy's ears. I told him I had to get some chocolate.
    "Get a double," he said, "I'm in the mood for some chocolate too."
    Jackson's seemed brighter than normal; it seemed like the flood was in the air there too. Had people been panic buying? Were the shelves of tins a little more threadbare than usual? Had anyone been in that day talking of anything other than the enormous puddle full of people and uniforms not a hundred metres away? It was an event, that was for sure.
    I picked up a newspaper and then decided – or realised – that there was nothing good in there. Same old shit – man, I could pick up a newspaper from any day over about the past ten years and I really couldn't have told you which was now and which was then. Somebody got blown up in the middle-east; some politician was making a fuck-up; somebody got caught with their hands in naughty forbidden pants; somebody was getting transferred and somebody wasn't liking it; money was going up or down and things were about to change for the better or the worse but never actually did. Chuck in a few specials every now and then, like some disaster, or some warning of disaster to come – bird flu? anthrax? world war three? (Arthur's right; they never do come) – and there's you news, today, yesterday, ten years ago and every tomorrow for years and decades to come, and none of it has ever made a blind bit of difference to my life, or to the life of anybody I have ever known, and I really can't see that it ever will. Can it really just be a big massive industry in filling space? In giving us something to talk about? That doesn't seem right – and yet the evidence is there as plain as a buttock on a chinaman's forehead.
    I bought my chocolate and left. I didn't say anything to the girls on the till there about rain or water or flooding or weather; I didn't want to be that predictable. I wanted to pretend it was normal, I guess, like I didn't care, as though I was refusing to make any drama out of the whole thing. If that makes any sense.
    "What do you think about the suffering, though?" I said, "all the houses and that destroyed. I mean, that's gotta suck for these people, right?" We were getting back into the crowds at the other end of the pond/lake/puddle; I couldn't really tell who was bereaved residents and who was gawkers like Arthur and I.
    "S'just stuff," he said, "we shouldn't be so attached. Carpets? Sofas? Livelihoods? Jobs? Just wait until the fabric of their society is ripped away from them! Then what will they care for carpets and toasters?"
    "But people have died, Arthur."
    "Yeah," he said, "and look at that – four people have died and look how that happened: three of them fell in rivers and one got his foot stuck trying to unblock a drain. Ridiculous. All totally avoidable. I mean, how stupid must we be? I mean, how easy is it to not fall into a river?" He laughed again; I laughed too. He had a point. "I love it the way we die in such stupid ways: trying to unblock drains; reaching for the last bit of Twix behind the sofa; rescuing dogs from up trees. Remember that story from out the Middle-East somewhere, about those people that were trying to rescue a chicken from a well, and the first one died, and loads more died trying to rescue him – and the chicken walked out of there alive! Ridiculous!" He shook his head, a bit of a guffaw. "And you know the kicker?" he said, "You know that guy who got stuck in the drain? Well, I saw his picture on telly, on the news – and there he was, sitting there in the bath! I mean, what a joke! I mean, in this day and age, when everyone has like a million pictures taken of themselves, is that really the best his family could find? Or were they like, 'take this one, it was his favourite, he woulda wanted that splashed all over the news and in the papers if anything happened to him'?" He shook his head again, wiped a bit of drool from the side of his mouth. He always drooled when he got excited about things. I handed him a bit of chocolate and took a bite myself.
    "That's pretty harsh Arthur," I said, "the bloke's got a family, you know."
    "I know," he said, "but listen – it's only a matter of time. Tragedy plus time always equals comedy – and for some of us that time equation is different."
    "An hour?" I said.
    "I move quick," he said, "stuff flows through me, time don't mean nothing. It takes time to process anything, but I process fast." He licked his lips and stuck out his hand for another bit of chocolate. "I got cleaned out," he said, "I'm like a refurbished bowel, my pipes are shiny clean and new, nothing sticks to me, it just flows right on through."
    "And you're a poet, Arthur," I said.
    "I am," he said, "I'm a poet and I didn't have an awareness of that fact."
    A fire engine swept past us and then with it some gentle shrieks of ladies and small children as the brown shit wave it generated rushed towards us. Ankles were wet and overrun; bodies dashed backwards in futile hops; some stumbled and almost fell – and me and Arthur, in a flash, had smoothly floated up the wall behind us and watched that killer wave lap against the bricks a foot beneath our feet. I was not wet and neither was he. There was something beautiful in all of that.

The other big thing that happened this week – apart from a little change of Prime Minister (like that's gonna make any difference to anything – unless he goes all Pol Pot or Mao Zedong and starts executing, oh, I dunno, all Lancastrians over five foot five) – was the introduction of the new no-smoking laws in public places. Now that is something to get excited about! For me, actually, it feels like one of the biggest things ever – and a real positive and huge change for the country. I mean, I abhor smoking – or, at least, being forced to partake in it whether I want to or not, and that's why I've barely been in a pub in the last nine years or so, since I got myself cleaned out and actually redeveloped some sort of sensitivity to my body and my environment. Since then, it's been pretty much impossible to be around cigarette smoke without feeling sick, without feeling like I couldn't breath, without getting a headache, and so I've avoided it like the plaque outside Arthur's old chip shop that reads "Sir John Betjeman lived here, 1921-1933" that instantly blinds anyone that steps within forty-four feet of it. Some people don't like that I've done that, I suppose, and feel like I'm being one of these wimpy, judgemental non-smokers who just want to put a downer on things – but it's nowhere near as complex as that, it's just a simple matter of self-preservation. I don't like stinking up my hair and clothes; I don't like having to struggle for breath, or feel like I'm eating the contents of an ashtray, or wake up the next day coughing like I might as well have been smoking the night before, for how shit I feel; I don't like any of it. And, of course, you try and explain this to smokers and I guess they just can't hear it – not necessarily because they're unable, but because they really can't relate. How can it be that the thing they suck into their lungs twenty times a day without ill effect can be so violently noxious to another practically identical member of their species in minute doses at a distance of fifty feet? Hey, nobody else seems to mind. And the thing is, before I'd sorted myself out – and after I'd first killed my sensitivities through abuse and neglect and ignorance (what some people erroneously call "tolerance") – I suppose I didn't mind either; I mean, I'd sat in pubs, sat next to smokers and, sure I'd had streaming eyes and needed fresh air every now and then, but not so much that it properly grabbed my attention. There was this one thing, though…
    (Some background first: I've never smoked – never even tried a cigarette – though I have inhaled the smoke from pot via various contraptions (between the ages of 21 and 23); I started going in pubs when I was about 14, to watch my dad play (they were real smoky affairs; I definitely remember having to step outside quite frequently in those first few years); about 16 I went to pubs, sat with smokers, drank lots of beer, and never thought twice about it, until I was just shy of 23; and then, at age 23, I wound up down in Mexico, quit drinking, got into healthy eating and bodily awareness, did lots of meditation and tai-chi and spiritual practice, kinda got in touch with myself, didn't hang around any smokers or smoky places, and that's pretty much how it's been for the last eight years.)
    So…back to this one thing: you see, there was this little period about five years ago when I was living in Dublin and wanting to get into playing music, and me and my chum started doing open mics and things at various pubs. I didn't particularly like hanging out in them, but I wanted to play and that was that, so I put up with it, even if I felt pretty crappy the next day sometimes. At the time, too, Dublin was like the smokiest place in the world, pubs so thick with the fog of it you couldn't see from one wall to the other (and God only knows how they've managed with the smoking ban over there – but from all accounts they have, so good luck to them.) Anyway, after a while of this I noticed this hard, pea-sized spherical lump under/inside my nipple – and it kind of occurred to me that it was something to do with smoking…
    The thing was, you see – and I never twigged this at the time – back when I was 14 and first doing the pub thing with my dad, the exact same thing had happened, and I remember very vividly rolling this thing around and squeezing it and wondering what the hell it was – and watching this dirty grey liquid drip out of my nipple from my squeezes and the whole thing was kind of spooky, to be honest. It preoccupied me for some time and then I guess I forgot about it – until those Dublin days when my pea-sized friend reappeared. Suddenly, it all made sense.
    It was smoking – it had to be. It had occurred to me only twice in my life, and both times were when I had gone into smoking environments in a relatively pure state: once from being my pubescent angel unexposed teen, and once from being my newly reborn clean-as youth. As soon as I stopped going to the open mics, the lump disappeared. Even that dirty thin grey stuff kinda looked like what you'd imagine smoke juice to look like. I wondered if my body had been turning all the smoke stuff I'd been taking in into those peas; I wondered if perhaps maybe that wasn't the very first little build-up of something that becomes cancer – or, at least, something along the way. I wondered too if that's what was going on in my body from second-hand exposure then what must it be like for full-blown smokers – and no wonder they stop listening to themselves, cut themselves off from their bodies, ignore all the coughs and splutters and headaches and sick feelings and build-ups and lung-cakes and tar. I guess that's what I had done too, in my teenage years – and what we all do with alcohol, until we build up our 'tolerance' (and how funny that we label an inability to feel our "tolerance"!) Naturally, of course, I haven't had any problems with these nipple-dwelling peas since I stopped going to smoky pubs – and for that I can only be grateful; it's nice to be able to put two decades-separated twos together and stumble on something cool and intriguing and exciting and all on my own. Sounds a bit weird, I know, but really makes sense to me – even if the doctors couldn't give a monkeys about my 'discovery'!

And now it's four thirty in the ay-em and I guess that's far too late for a chap like me to be sat up typing and crunching cereal and kinda watching/having on Big Brother in the corner of my eye when I've got work in the morning – oh! it is the morning! – and I haven't really been sleeping so good anyway. But how nice to write! And to get a few things off my chest! Or, rather, to just let the fingers flow and take me where they will and…and now there's no reason to say any more, just struggling to find an end. Where to end? How about here.