Our Slovenly Descent

So we have been here now for what, 6, 7 weeks now.  Our bookshelf is laden, our mornings are short and our descent into slovenly abandon is almost complete.   After an initial, what now seems like a lively, landing into Fort Kochi, we are now languishing and lolling around the days, idly lumbering through the hours with very little intention.  Our days are defined by patterns of sleep and food.   This used to start with us ignoring the optimistically set alarm that both vowed to obey each morning, followed by the more realistic waking time of around 11.  Both of us were usually a little irked by our inability to rise and do nice functional things like take a stroll by the beach before breakfasting on a masala dosa and strong coffee.  So now we have decided to just accept that we are not morning people, we hated getting in the morning when we had to, now we don’t have to, it is insanity to try and force ourselves to.  And in accepting our penchant for sleeping long and waking late I have actually found a few more hours to my day.  Instead of going to bed at 12, and trying to sleep, tossing and turning in bed because I have risen late, I go to bed at 2.  My evenings have been transformed!

On waking and gently tugging ourselves from bed, a pan of water is set on the stove, and we offer persuasive discourse to each other about who has to leave the house to get the eggs for brunch omelettes.  Sometimes we just sack off the cooking, pull some not too smelly clothes (because we keep forgetting to get the washing sorted too) from the heap in the spare room, hide our eyes behind sunglasses and nip down to the City Light Hotel for an egg roast and parotha.  This, we have discovered, is the perfect hangover food.  Rich, greasy, eggy, spicy slop, served with greasy, floppy, delicious breads cooked on a very hot plate.  To be honest, I haven’t yet found a time when the egg roast is inappropriate.  

After breakfast we stare contentedly at each other and run through the same conversation about what we might do that day.  The conversation, really, just serves as a platitude to the little voice of Christian conditioning that tells us it is a sin to be idle.  We pay the little voice the necessary homages and then happily abandon our day to the whim of its will.  Shall we go for a walk?  No, it’s midday, it’s too hot.  Shall we get a bus to the beach?  But there is no shade at the beach, and it takes two hours to get there.  Shall we do just something?  But what something, we’re all out of ideas.  Let’s just mooch around again.

We then mentally disengage ourselves from each other, I go to the balcony and write, watch the exotic birds flit around through the trees surrounding me, listen to the excited whooping of the chipmonks and try not to play the irritatingly addictive spider solitaire that taunts me from my laptop.  I think I am addicted.  I can’t help myself, and as with all addictions I am filled with disgust for my weakness, and the blatant waste of life it provides.  It’s a stupid game, I know that, but it makes you think that you can get good at it, but it is just luck.  Luck of the flicker of pixelated cards.  Sometimes I have spent hours playing it.  In those times I think I hate myself a little bit.  

While I involve myself in imaginary world within my head, trying to find ever more eloquent ways of presenting my ideas, and not succumbing to the bad, bad, thing, Alex reads.  Sometimes, he ventures down to the book shop that buys in newspapers for him and picks up the newspapers that have been stacking up over the previous few days.  It is only a 15 minute walk, but sometimes, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day! 

At some point we will connect to the internet, scan through Facebook and Hotmail, look at the contact people have made, and figure I can’t be bothered to reply now, I’ll sort it out later.  Here lies Alex’s needy tick.  Facebook and the BBC website.  If he doesn’t check them at least 5 times a day he begins to get agitated.  I know when he’s checking.  I can see his little face fall slightly when he realises that no one has made any contact with him for the past 2 hours since he last checked, and he re-reads the inane drip-feed of peoples streams of consciousness posted up.   

About the most arduous thing in our day is keeping the vague notion of a social life going, and there is always at least one person we adopt and use as a safety net to prevent total insularity from occurring.  (To be honest, we probably go out much more than at home as every night is a potential weekend, but where we don’t do as much during the day, it doesn’t feel like we go out so much.)  And when they go, which they invariably do, we head to the Magic Tree Bar to pluck off a replacement.  It is quite easy to pick up a new friend there, the place seems to attract those who are similar in our lethargic approach to travelling.  We even managed to capture and convince one to stay on for a couple of weeks.  The place also comes alive with the local lads after closing time and as we are well known with them now, and they genuinely consider us friends, we can join in their party, which is pretty boisterous, energetic and fun.  Despite our complete ignorance of Malayalam, and their decent, but certainly not fluent, English, their sense of humour shines through.  They are a wild bunch, full of naughty antics and they often regale us with stories of their mischief, from losing all their possessions (and all their clothes other than a pair of Bermuda shorts) at Goan beach parties, to trying to escape the police in rickshaws.  They have quite a wicked idea of humour, which generally circulates around piss taking and pushing personal boundaries, where nobody and nothing is off limits. 

We are staying on in Kochi until the 10^th of February.  I don’t know what is going to happen to us.  Maybe we will withdraw further and further into luxurious laziness that we can indulge with no reason not to.  No cleaning, washing, cooking, working, daily commute, supermarket shopping, bills, tax, shit TV, unwanted obligations, MOT’s, services, petrol prices, rent, depressing talk of credit crunches, caring about our appearances, soggy cereal, grey skies, or expensive booze.  We are not completely static, yet.  We did manage to leave Kochi the other day.  We took a holiday within a holiday and caught a bus to Alleppy to see the backwaters for a little mini-break.  The food was better in Alleppy.   We wandered aimlessly for a day, mooching along the side of the lake, resting under the palm fringes, listening to the sound of the water gently lap at the edges of the bank when a boat glided by on its mirror calm surface.  The following day we got paddled around in a wooden canoe by an eager to please old man, who insisted on pointing out every trivial object his cataract bleary eyes made out.

‘Madam, madam, mr, mr, look, cat.’

‘Madam, madam, mr, mr, look, bamboo.’

‘Madam, madam, mr, mr, look, mango.’

The day drifted by with the gentle currents of the waterways, while we sat on decrepit plastic seats that buckled awkwardly when we leaned back on them, and as the roof to the canoe wasn’t long enough, we took turns to brave sunstroke wearing a little umbrella hat, donated by our captain.

I have to confess, even though I have Christian inklings of guilt at our very sumptuous laziness, it is pretty easy to ignore and, ultimately, I am loving it.  I believe Alex is to.  Every morning I wake, I am pleased, so pleased that I don’t have to work.  I don’t have to spend my day worrying about what someone else is expecting me to do.  I feel a little freer than I was at home.  Occasionally I think of our return and a little serpent of panic writhes through my body.  I already know that even though we have only been away 3 months, our return is going to be a challenge.  We are even trying to spend less and less money so we can spend, longer and longer away.  

Life, as it is at the moment, is beyond idyllic.  We are a King and Queen of beautiful inertia, and we love it.