Is this a journal or a diary? Am I a journalist or a diarist?
Mostly, I've considered myself to be the former rather than the latter. However, in reading back over this year's entries into this ongoing text, I have the feeling that I've moved very much into the latter position. Something has changed.
This year has a very broken backed feel to it.
At this stage, just over three quarters of the way through the year, I find it very difficult to forge a link through to the beginning of the year. I was shocked to discover that events of the winter and spring ( say the Anti-War march and Covent Garden's Madama Butterfly) seem to belong to another time and not this year at all.
What has happened?
Well, I think it is tied up with why this journal has become more of a diary. The summer saw the beginnings of many upsets at work with the first round of redundancies signalling the beginnings of troublng times.
I've worked in many places. All have had their ups and downs. Every place has had its share of people who have not liked their work or the circumstances in which they worked. I have had times when I have not liked people I have worked with or have felt excluded from or at odds with management decisions which have impacted upon my work.
However, I have usually liked my work and I have usually (and more importantly) believed in my work.
I have worked in places in which their have been redundancies. I have never felt that my job was at threat but the process has been disruptive.
Now, I don't like the more administrative rôle that I have been sidelined into; I don't believe in the work that I am doing; and, fundamentally, I feel threatened as I have no long-term belief that the company I work for will exist in its current form in the medium term.
I've never felt exposed and vulnerable in the workplace in this way before. Through all sorts of triumphs and heartbreaks, I've always known that there would be a job for me to go to. I no longer have that faith in my current employer.
As I've mentioned before, Armistead Maupin has a line in one of his books about everyone wanting three things out of life - a hot job, a hot flat and a hot lover; the problem being that you can never have more than two of these things at any one time. And, at the moment, it is the turn of the job to be anything but hot.
Well, I have a very wonderful house and I love my Rossi dearly. My house affords me a great deal of refuge and comfort. It's the main place in all this world where I feel safe - safe as houses, in fact. Ross contributes to that. He's put so much effort into keeping the hearth warm for the weary traveller. However, he's so bound up with his own fears that I also feel stifled. I could do with more encouragement; I could do with more physical sollace; I could do with more sparkle.
But, at the very time when I have been coming to terms with the fact that these are unlikely whilst he is still working out his own destiny, I have entered a time in my life when these are the qualities that I most need from a partner. It's probably a testimony to the depth of our love for one another that this simple fact has not split us apart.
So, why do I think that this text has become a diary rather than a journal. The answer comes in a single word - fear. I am living with fear. Throughout the seven years of this output, I have written frankly and in depth about a vast range of feelings as I have passed through them. This year, not. More and more I have limited myself to a calendar of events and a round of reviews of spectacles witnessed. That's a diary and not a journal as I understand it.
Where does the depth of this fear come from? I keep coming back to events when I was nearly three in the spring of 1957. My grandfather had had a massive stroke the previous November paralysing his left side and depriving him of speech. When my dad asked the doctors what the family should do to aid his recovery, he was told that he should be kept quiet and still as he wouldn't last six months. Incidentally, he went on to live for another 13 years.
During that spring, my parents were in the process of moving from Wensley Road to Hazel Grove via Ladysmith Road where my nana and grandad lived. I've written about the difficulties of keeping a hyper-active two-and-a-half year old quiet in a house dominated by an invalid and a ticking clock.
What's become more clear to me in the past months is how displaced and fearful I felt. We were only there for a couple of months but that's to look at it in adult terms. For two-and-a-half year old David that would have been forever. Something bad had happened and I was powerless to make it better and I had a terrible feeling that it was my fault and that somehow I was being punished and, no matter how bright I was, nothing improved and, in fact, my main strategy, my brightness, seemed to have completely the opposite effect to what I had been used to.
I'm feeling like that now. I'm feeling powerless to change my job situation. I've made a number of applications. I've not had any interviews. I'm fearful that, at nearly fifty, I am unwanted and neglected. I am either over qualified or under-skilled. I'm going to have to leave training behind which will be such a waste as I am very good at it.
The trapped and hopeless two-and-a-half year old David is in the ascendent. And I'm afraid. I'm so afraid that it's taken me months to be able to write this.
It's one of the first proper journal entries in months.