Blog Entry:14 chalked up, fucked up, and looking up
July 2022-September 2022
“No Jess! Wales is no where near that big”, “what the fuck happened to Suffolk and Norfolk?” “Why the fuck is Scotland three times bigger than it should be?” “fuck me, why is the Isle of White and Ireland the same size?!” ……. Whilst at the northern monkey’s house, enjoining a calm warm evening, I got to watch Paul and Jess, with Pauls local neighbour Kurt, recreate a vaguely resembling map of the UK with kids drawing chalk on Kurt’s driveway. I’m going to say it, this could have been any country, continent, hell it could have been a fucking blob test for all anyone could make out. I think when I said ‘vaguely resembled’ this was a huge compliment.
No, I am by no means Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid when it comes to architectural drawings, but I also wasn’t the one to proclaim I could “easily do it, give me some chalk” either! This story may seem nonchalant at first glance, and as much as it is our ‘couple thing’ to roast each other’s shortcomings and revel in their arrogant misguided errors, I have seen the UK from a bird’s eye view, something few have. This memory of how awesome it is to see that view daily, stops me dead. In that moment, that memory, panic creeped in again. This was becoming a more regular event, it’s my internal time clock reminding me, I need to refocus on flying.
I knew with the move, flying would have to be on hold, but thanks to Covid and no UK examiners in Calgary, I was way out of currency with all but my ATPL’s lapsed. This scenario could only have happened in extreme circumstances, I hate how much I have slipped back. I have a plan to re-validate them all and then convert them to Canadian equivalent (as for some reason flying a 152 in Canada is not even classed the same as in the UK), I feel the lack of, or near ‘non-existent’ airspace restrictions will ½ my workload for a start. For those in knowledge, I will be taking a three week holiday and in these three weeks, I intend on sitting one seminar, my SEP, FIC, MEP, ME-IR flight exams, and both medicals, while also prepping for my conversion exams…….., so on my return to Canada I can sit the ATP ground exams and the ME-IR flight test and, hopefully after haemorrhaging more money than UK politicians do on hookers and their second home in the Cotswolds, I will finally return to flying. Permanently!
My deadline is December 2023, that’s when my ATPL’s run out. I feel like time is just passing, I think I have suffered time-based anxiety for a while now, I’m constantly feeling like I’m running out of time. I don’t mean day to day either, I mean years passing in days! I have so much I want to achieve; it just isn’t happening fast enough. I know I’m not alone in this, I feel I could be a hybrid of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezo, and still feel like I should have achieved more. I have come to the realisation life is short, my sole focus is to do and achieve as much as I can.
Within days I was at Jess’s college, a building designed as a warped oversized Oxford style university that is less 1600 and more 1900 build, just purely to give the allure of pedigree. And again, I’m thinking about my flight qualifications. My issue is I ideally wanted PR before returning to the UK. This was becoming less and less likely. Jess would sit her exams soon and be done with school, giving us seven months to process the three-year extension……. the minimum I would need before returning. As I write this (mid-March 2023), this is still going through!! Still, I managed to get lots of editing done in fake Oxford and it made me think, I’ve been in Canada 1.5 years and all me and Jess have done is work, study, and push. Many thanks to the housing market in the UK and the C word, it feels like a constant 60-degree gradient climb, and going to sit at Jess’s college is one of my few outings I have had recently. I need to make faster progress, in pilot terms ‘I must not fall behind the aircraft!’.
If like a sick joke, days earlier I broken my hand, so for the immediate future can’t use my camara, fly, or even wipe my own fucking arse!! To indulge and fully understand I think 99.9999% of humans only wipe their arse with one hand, (to all the bi-handed shit wipers this is not relevant). To the rest of us mere mortals, if you want to understand how truly awkward losing your preferred hands ability to do that job is, just use your other hand next time. Saying it will be a ‘shit show’ is not inaccurate!
To make it worse, it was broken miss catching a ball in practice ……fucking practice! One moment and boom I had broken my little finger. I had initially thought it was a dislocation and pulled it straight again after it happened, but as much as the doctors initially praised my 80’s style Rambo approach to field medicine. He later confirmed the lower bone was actually in three pieces, they were adamant it would not need further work. This was three days after it happened, mainly thanks to Urgent Care. At this time let’s throw out a shout to Urgent Care in Cochrane and more specifically the short female security guard who denied me access seven minutes before they were meant to stop taking in people as she obviously wanted an early night. While explaining I think my finger is broken, she continued to push me out the entrance so she could lock the doors. ‘Jobs worth’ is an accurate description…….
Two weeks later and after and it had mostly knitted together, I had regained quite a bit of movement, but sadly it was very apparent it was not straight. So, It was off to Foothills Hospital and they were now doing surgery. The first hurdle is, they refused to operate without injecting my hand………. now I have had no medication of any sort since 16, except one course of antibiotics and two paracetamol. I’ve had a tooth out, fillings, a boxers break repaired, ripped all my shoulder apart and been stitched up twice, not to mention a few soft tissue injuries. I fucking hate needles and pharmaceutical drugs for that matter, But now they were forcing me to have an injection, and refusing to fix it without. I said when it was first examined it looked more bent than a night at the Blue Oyster bar with Ru-Paul, but no one listening gave two flying fucks, so when I told the surgeon “I heal quick” and she shrugged it off, I should have expected this to fall on deaf ears as well.
Two minutes later while she was pulling my finger like she was birthing a calf and the behemoth of a male nurse was holding my arm like it was a King Cobra with fangs out. She then said “this is weird, its not normally this hard ”……. usually in this circumstance my smut filled 12 year old humour would have be like “that’s what she said” but I was so fucked off and all I could think was “I fucking told you so” and reiterate don’t damage my fucking ligaments trying to rebreak my finger! This was topped off like whipped cream on a banoffee pie when she had to explain to the nurse (that was built like a brick shit house) how to use the medical version of a DeWalt house drill. So, while Thumbelina wrestled my figure in place, Goldbergs Jamaican second cousin drilled pins through my finger, which appeared to be the first time he had done this. Further reenforced as she reputedly kept having to re-instruct him on what to do…….. Fuck me!
I did get a nice souvenir of the day in the form of a picture of my pinned hand, and lots of wrapping to stop me from ripping the pins out or doing anything for that matter. Wearing a worried look on her face and hunting for an excuse as to why my finger only had half the movement it had before, I couldn’t help but wonder how long I would be before I get full motion back again, or more worryingly, would I get full motion!
We did get to see an old friend that I used to dance with. Her and her other half were looking at Cochrane in preparation to emigrating and it was weird seeing someone we knew here. This was technically our first UK visitors! Over the next weeks I would proceed to hand out lots of business card holders, flyers, and push for the company. Hopefully I would get more photography work and if it would coincide with my hand being fixed, that would be awesome. Around the end of June, I also took the plunge, purchasing camera and mapping equipment that’s iGuide compatible, allowing DanF40 Group to do accurate mapping and recreate full realtor walk-throughs. If we are not going to do weddings and babies, realtor work could be our consistent source of income. Taking financial risk is something I’m getting more comfortable with, but it still isn’t easy.
One of the outings we did embark on was a nerdy one, we secured tickets to the Calgary Observatory to see Jupiter and Saturn. This did please the inner nerd in me and Jess, and now I want a telescope and camara mount! Space is calming, something about sitting in the dark looking at stars is very therapeutic. This in turn kicked off a new binge watch. Now anyone between 33 and 40 would be in the right realm to remember the series, Star Trek Voyager. I never intentionally watched it, but when I would come home from school it was always on Sky One at that time 5-7 PM so sometimes it was all I had to watch. Well Jess had decided we should watch the series ……all 8 years’ worth! Over the next months we would get embarrassingly hooked on this, only to feel empty when we finally watched the 172nd last episode. At least it wasn’t as bad as the series Lost! To those who haven’t watched it, I can only assume it was called Lost as every minute you spent watching it was lost…..
Over the following weeks (mid to end of August) the Outlander was sold, Jess was sad as she had picked it. But we are now both working in Cochrane and did not need two cars, and the money could be reinvested and that was more beneficial. Also as winter was not far away it seemed a sensible time to sell a 4WD small family car. We would have a few photoshoots and I would finally go to Bass Pro which is basically an Early Learning Centre for grown men. (Canadians- google search “Early Learning Centre”. English- google search ‘Bass Pro”). I finally got a photo of the northern lights, we went for a few evening swims in the bow river and I finally started collecting shit for our studio build!! A collection amassing a zoom L20 sound board, condenser mic, piano, guitar, and a subscription to Logic Pro, so yes, I am pretty much Jimmy Irvine and Interscope records, in case you needed a comparison.
By September 12th the final rugby game of the season was here, I had been cleared to do “normal work” and as everyone else was injured (some a lot worse by far than me), I offered to play. Much to the disgust of Jess who thought I was a ‘stupid cunt’ for doing so, and she probably was not wrong. Now when I said injured, I wasn’t lying, one of the guys, we will call him ‘Bob’ for the mean time. Now this absolute legend was playing with a broken rib possibly two from a previous game, still suffering from a bad concussion and quite severely damage neck from an earlier game, that he was recovered from and a broken hand…. nothing to do with rugby. In the words of my Australian friend Alex, I believe he was ‘defending the honour of the realm’. To be honest the rest of the team weren’t a whole lot better! This was made so much better when we turned up we discovered we had two subs, Banff on the other had had nearly three teams worth of players …. but we are the Grizzlies so it didn’t matter. They could have bought a regiment of C5’s with seal team one, the SAS and the entire Roman army, we were still confident! And to be honest, aside from me inadvertently taking out Bob in practice, further damaging his already fucked ribs, the team was strong. The game was, on the whole, very good, Banff are a well-rounded team, aside from a very questionable tackle that took down one of us hard, and an extremely questionable call from a linesman. This guy must have had superman’s vision to be fit to make the call he did from the other side of the pitch, where his out of breath arse was still running from. The Grizzlies had scored, and the points were on the board, and all were running back to reset by the time he decided it was disallowed and that someone was ‘leaning over’ on the try … Now when I said someone got tackled hard, there was no exaggeration, but this absolute tank is from an era where no one cared if you were ‘offended’ and snowflakes were something that fell from the sky in winter. So, he was adamant he could just walk off his leg injury saying, “it’s just my hammy” and he tried to……. five minutes later when he fell over trying to do just that he found out, you can’t walk a broken leg off! This is the superhuman mind over matter strength of a true rugby player, absolute adamant that he had “just pulled a muscle” when in fact, he had clean snapped a bone in half!
Football players (soccer) spend 90 minutes pretending to be hurt to get free shit and an easy win, rugby is 80 minutes of trying to not let the other team see you bleed! I truly believe this and hockey are the most physically enduring games you can play and let’s not forget there’s no pads in rugby! When you finish a rugby game, you finish covered in mud, sweat and blood, and everything is left on that pitch. That’s why it’s the only true gentleman’s sport. Even after having his leg broken, this man shook all the other team’s hands and even gave them their trophy! When they redo the Oxford dictionary next the definition of ‘sportsmanship’ should just say RUGBY!
If you want to teach your kids mental and physical strength. How to build and be part of a team you can rely on, and how to think fast and execute decisions with lightning accuracy while under the pressure of real injury; rugby will teach you all of this. The following weekend was the rugby awards evening, this is the first sports awards evening I have been to since school and it felt so north American. Being from England, we didn’t have pep rallies, cheerleaders, mascots or any of the hype, and our awards evening were small. I’m also from a generation where every kid did not get an award for turning up!
The idea of getting a trophy for participating is something I strongly disagree with, and after many years my opinion is unchanged. I think this is why life hits most young adults hard, being congratulated for turning up is not how life works. You can try your hardest in life, put years of work in only to get crushed and left with nothing more than debt and a lesson learnt. I know people who have chosen work and the pursuit of money over all else and come out with a divorce where they lost half, and a broken family. Others have the opposite end they put their family in front of work or financial success’s and struggled. Even if you get everything right and strut that tightrope like a muscular, ripped, coked-up circus performer, you can still end up mentally broken, and for some the tightrope is just too challenging. In life you can do far more than just ‘turn up’ or ‘participate’ and not even a hearty ‘well done’ for it. If school could stop forcing focus onto who Shakespeare’s long lost friends, three cousins removed was, or what does the Sikh religion call their ceremonial dagger, and instead actually prepare kids for the freight train that was coming for them at the end of the school tunnel, who know, they might actually be prepped for the shit show they are walking into.
School should teach kids how to manage a credit card, budget monthly expenses, and find mental balance between work and enjoyment. The issue is this would mean the teachers would have to know this first to pass it on. When did it become an expectancy that if you don’t want to work, you should be supported to do fuck all, or a game of how much health care can you claim and fuck when did everyone start getting so fucking entitled. A few long months in retail has reminded me how much I don’t like a big percentage of the wider public. And, unlike management courses I recently attended would want you to believe, it’s not an age-related thing, or generational. Oh, how I wish it was that easy to assign blame!
Next time. October to January 1st we take photos in a creepy abandoned road stop at four in the morning, Jess walks across a stage in heels, it snows, Amazon FUCK UP, we don’t go snowboarding, I get some speakers, I write an article, I see my first hockey match and the Flames actually win! And I start the year in a hot spring. TTFN.
