The First Sign of Maturity

Being a mere 19, I can hardly call myself old, but at the very least I’d like to think that I could describe myself as mature (apart from when I’m around Will, of course). I’m definitely growing up, becoming a man, and – let’s face it – not getting any younger, even at this early stage of life. What that means is that there’s already been a point at which I’ve noticed my rapid ascent into adulthood, and that observations have been made about how I’m looking, talking, thinking and acting as a result of this. It’s not just me that the observations have come from, however, because the wider world has offered them too – and sometimes in very random and unexpected places. I don’t even necessarily have to look for them, because in an instant they’re as clear as day and right under my nose.

Let me tell you about one particular example that I noticed. It’s something very run of the mill, and not at all like the earth-shattering realisation of all the adult responsibilities you’ll soon have as you get older, but I nevertheless found it interesting as well as mildly amusing. During my lunch breaks at my recent place of work, I’d take my wheelchair up to a patch of grass in a public space to eat my sandwiches, and this meant that I could peoplewatch to my heart’s content whilst I was at it. Peoplewatching is one of the simplest pleasures that life can offer, so long as it’s done discreetly and without a weird hidden agenda, and in some cases even observing from a distance can reveal quite a lot about life and those in front of you. On one occasion, I was minding my own business with my ham, lettuce and mayonnaise sarnie when my eyes darted across to the ice-cream which was often nearby – and which always seemed to be there when it wasn’t sunny and there were few people around to buy from it! Sure enough, business was very slow, but the treats on offer did have one taker.

This was it – one of the moments where the innocence of youth very briefly gave way to a cynical, straight-faced, humourless adult. Standing before this ice-cream van, waiting to receive his Mr Whippy, was a little boy – and not a toddler. He was at least seven and certainly didn’t seem to be ill, and it wasn’t exactly the height of holiday season at this point either. Therefore, my brain came to an immediate but unexpected conclusion, namely one that automatically led me to silently utter five immortal words:

“Shouldn’t you be in school?”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was the moment when I truly shocked myself into realising that despite being in the spring of my years, I was definitely getting older and had encountered the titular “first sign of maturity”. My reaction to the sight of this little boy surprised me because I thought it unlike me to be so judgemental, and of course I knew very well that there could have been any number of legitimate reasons why he was eating ice-cream instead of sitting in class. In that case, then, perhaps it wasn’t a conscious exclamation at all, but the sort of outlook that arrives unannounced as you gradually experience all that life has to throw at you. If that’s true, then maybe it’s even more of an incentive to stay positive, open-minded and chirpy – and to be a bit more considerate when peoplewatching!

Mason

Please Leave a Message After The Tone

That’s it. I have passed the point of no return. What’s done is done and now I must face up to whatever is to come in the next minute or so. I take a deep breath, doing my best to calm and mentally prepare myself while I still can. Here I go – I raise my trembling hand to my ear, and it is greeted with a moment of eerie silence. Then the tones, in bursts of a single second each, ring deep into my mind for what seems like an eternity. Will they ever pick up? There is silence again, but I barely notice it before the sinister crackle…and then a warm and familiar voice. “Hello?”

Yes, the amateur sleuths amongst you may have worked out that I have just described the build-up to a phone call. This is an act to which millions around the world would not even give a second thought, but to me – even as I approach the ripe old age of 20 – it is still something strangely alien. Indeed, you’re reading a post by a man who would rather conveniently “forget” to plug the phone in at his last job, just so that he didn’t have to answer it and risk making a fool of himself. I don’t answer the phone at home either, and have been known to ignore its rings even if I’m sitting right next to it. The main reason for this is very simple, and I believe it is also commonly known as “verbal diarrhoea”. It doesn’t matter how meticulously I may have any phone call or response planned out in my head, because any hopes I hold of a seamless and flowing conversation are usually dashed as soon as I open my mouth. This is something my friend – who I am normally more than capable of speaking to without a problem – fully found out when I rang them the other day, while feeling the crushing pressure of sticking to the script I’d taken the time to form to myself beforehand.

The nervous gibberish that ultimately seeped out from between my lips seemed so incoherent that it’s a wonder we aren’t still finishing an originally straightforward exchange now. I’ll definitely have to apologise to my friend when I next see them – I feel like I wasted their time! Maybe I can also attribute my lack of phone confidence to the added pressure of trying to remember important information when it’s quite literally going in one ear and out of the other. It’s especially difficult if you’re frantically trying to find a pen or paper to record it on at the same time – if what someone is telling me is really so crucial, why can’t they just text me, email me or send me a letter, so I have whatever I need in black and white before my eyes? It’s reassuring to be able to see such things as many times as I want rather than to hear them once, which is why this blog’s email address is open to collate however many messages it may receive. Besides, I like reading, and responding to one gives me an opportunity to do that. Plus I’m a creative bloke, and I get to carefully consider and write a reply, so what’s not to like about that?

No phone calls please. I won’t be available – so you’ll have to leave a message after the tone. At least I can replay those!

Mason

Mudflap Manifesto

The closest I’ve ever come to living life on the edge was probably when I saved 90% of my make-or-break A-Level coursework on a small, wonky USB stick without a lid, which I believe got lost because Dad Hoovered it up one day. The lack of a tiny plastic cap should have made the stick susceptible to dust, Dorito crumbs and other miscellaneous kinds of damage, but it miraculously made it through the entire two years of sixth form unscathed – and I still have it today. It’s been lying on a side table in my living room for a while now, and sat there largely untouched until I decided to plug it back into my laptop out of curiosity the other day.

I began to rummage through what it held, and alongside the aforementioned College materials lay some projects I probably started, but never finished, in the common room whilst I was supposed to be doing something else for a lesson. That seems to be the way in which all the best memories came about – when the teacher had left the room and we swiftly concluded that we’d “do this work later”. If I wasn’t mucking about with Will and co, however, I’d be writing something of my own. According to a file saved on my stick, I sat down one day in February 2014 to begin work on an autobiographical book that I gave the first alliterative title to pop into my head – Mudflap Manifesto, as the title of this post would suggest. It was something that would explore my oft-referenced love of motorsport and its significance in my life, over chapters that would collectively be divided into named sections. It would appear that I only got 11 pages in before becoming distracted and abandoning the project, but when I re-read what I’d written the other day, I was fairly satisfied and convinced that I might have something worth finishing at some point. And that’s pretty rare, believe me – because when it comes to writing, I often think that I am my own harshest critic.

The first section of the book was simply entitled “Guys, I’ve got a great idea”, and it opened by recounting a collision my wheelchair once had with a bench in the College quad on a rainy day. I must have felt that this was a good starting point for the book because it led to a visit to the folks in the Motor Vehicle Department, who took out their tools to bash my footplate back into shape whilst various decommissioned cars were being tinkered with nearby. As I could see them up close, I began to reflect on my lifelong passion for them, and particularly for when they are being driven at serious speed. I asked myself questions about where its roots lay, and what my feelings and standout memories are in relation to it, and I ultimately decided that the best way to express the answers would be in prose on a page. So I began with this anecdote, before proceeding to talk about how my wheelchair has always been seen as a racier vehicle than it actually is, putting forward my pitch for a less elitist form of motorsport that anyone with a working wheelchair can enter as I then paced about memory lane and my countless racing memories. Predictably, I seemed to have done this eagerly and fondly – of course, I wouldn’t ever say that the introduction was perfect, but I’ve probably written worse!

One thing that’s even rarer than a passable piece of writing from me is me giving any kind of written attention to the countryside, which many people know has never really appealed to me. Within the context of the book, I talked about our local Somerset Stages Rally and how – from our first visit in 2004 to the present day – it has been the only thing to significantly pique my interest in our local green surroundings. Whether we locate ourselves on a crest, a hairpin bend or any other sort of corner, it’s always a spectacle and one we’re very lucky to play host to in our secluded part of the world. When it leaves town, however, the forest tracks and trees lose their sparkle completely until the following year, and so does the rest of the extensive Exmoor tundra. The hills give me nothing apart from an occasionally acceptable location in which to eat a McDonald’s as the sun goes down, or a reason to prolong a leisurely evening drive with Mum, Dad or Louis. Or do they? Upon discovering the brief beginnings of Mudflap Manifesto, which have not been added to, edited or saved since April three years ago, I’ve realised that the great outdoors appear to have given me something worthwhile to build on, and something that allows me to bring back more awesome memories and connections to the sport I love. And I owe it all, in turn, to a single moment of College quad recklessness, followed by one of many fruitful common room laziness moments. Time well spent, don’t you think?

Mason

Life Is An Epic

Yesterday, I took a break from my computer screen at work to pluck a strawberry from a box that was just in front of me on the desk. They had been brought in by one of my esteemed colleagues, and were accompanied by a selection of cupcakes which I had also eagerly sampled. I had so desperately craved the sugar rush I received from them, but then I felt a compulsion to be healthy, and if there was one fruit I was happy to consume with this in mind, it was the strawberry. A tender nugget of sweet and juicy wonder that captivates all who savour it – normally. Just a week before, Mum had bought strawberries at home that had perfectly matched that description, but on this occasion at work I wasn’t to be so lucky. As I reached forward and placed the scarlet delight between my lips, the smile I had formed in anticipation of its taste quickly faded from my face. This hadn’t been at all what I expected. I disposed of the stalk with a furrowed brow, before returning to my seat and carrying on with my day’s work.

Of course, the consumption of a strawberry is a fairly mundane thing, and normally it would have been met with an appropriately mundane response, like “ew, yuck!” Not this time, however. Instead, I found that my mind was instantly formulating a somewhat more exaggerated reaction to what had just occurred, and shortly afterwards I described the particular strawberry I’d eaten in my head as a “wet, mushy and tasteless globule of disappointment, which was squashed as though it had no structural integrity.” There have been better descriptions of such things, obviously, but what intrigued me the most was that on this occasion, trying to explain the situation to myself in a creative way was something that came instantly, like a natural reflex of the human body. The whole thing led me to a second thought, a question I asked myself – “could this be how writers think?” I wondered if they did this too, perhaps with anything that life threw at them as a mental exercise to keep the creative juices flowing (there’s that phrase again – isn’t it a cliché?)

I don’t know the answer for sure, but I personally might start doing it more often. It gave me the material I needed to create this post, after all! Maybe if I keep this mindset close, I’ll find that nothing in life is ever truly boring, and that with the right amount of time and careful consideration, I can enlighten myself in a small way every single day. People say that life is what we all make it – so why not try to make it something epic, even if it’s only known to us?

Mason

Little Red Book

What you’re reading now is the 100th Third Time Enabled post – and I can scarcely believe that as I write it. Seeing as I didn’t really expect to get this far when I started the blog, you’d think a milestone such as this would require an extensive and predictable commemorative post about how proud I am of it. However, I’m pretty sure I’ve done that before, so something else is in order. I originally had a list of 100 things that made Will, Emily, Tamara and myself happy in the pipeline, and whilst that would be an uplifting idea (and I am keeping it on the sidelines for the future), I didn’t feel like it would be enough on its own. It would be somewhat underwhelming and unable to work without something of substance alongside it – so I discarded that idea.

While mulling all this over, however, I did come to realise that lists are pretty helpful things; not only in terms of looking to the past, but also to the future, which is what I decided this post should do. This revised plan stemmed from one day just a few weeks ago, when I took the opportunity to go to a bookshop during a lunch break at work and invest in a shiny new red notebook. Its original purpose was to help me create the aforementioned list of 100, but in subsequent days it took on a new project – forming the step-by-step future of this blog. In it I wrote titles and topics, prioritising the things I want to cover most in future posts through orderly, numbered lists. It felt like an oddly therapeutic thing to do, but it also helped me to overcome a hurdle that I would say has probably been the thing stopping me from getting this post done for so long – nearly a month, to be precise!

Getting to a stage I never thought I would reach led me to ask myself “where exactly do I go from here?” I wondered if I would either end up disappointing people with everything I wrote or simply repeating myself like a parrot stuck in an endless loop. The worry became so great that I recently tried to delegate the task of writing this 100th post to Will, so that it could come from a different perspective, but I eventually realised that only facing this fear myself would ever get me past it. If you have writer’s block, the best cure is to write, and the new list – written in the latest in a long line of small books – has certainly helped me do that. It might be never-ending, and now I’m about to finish the post I’ve thought so hard about, I feel like the world is mine, Will’s, Emily’s and Tamara’s oyster. The only way is up. Sorry this has taken so long – but here’s to the next 100.

Mason