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After the initial positivity of speaking to many of my creditors over the past month, I had to deal with the big one at the end of last week. This was HSBC. I’d banked with them for around 15 years and up until now felt some loyalty there. I’d made a point of not maxing out the overdraft now and trying to settle things on good terms. The last time I spoke with Stepchange they told me that HSBC were happy to let them manage things on my behalf. So it came as a massive shock when I had to speak with someone there for over an hour and they denied ever hearing anything from Stepchange. I was grilled on why I was struggling now even though I explained my situation with my tax bills multiple times. I explained that my income should pick up once the new tax year starts but that I would not manage to pay much back until after I had paid my tax bill. I think this advisor was not happy that I had opened a new bank account elsewhere and now I’m glad that I did this as I can well imagine HSBC being one to help themselves to all of my income to pay back what I owe them.

My loyalty was definitely misplaced; I think I might not have ended up in such a mess if I had switched my bank account years ago. I did think of it around three or four years ago when we had initially cleared everything with that secured loan. I opened a Monzo account and had planned to use that for everyday spending whilst keeping HSBC for my income and bills. In hindsight I should have made a completely clean break, but also I don’t think Monzo is quite as good as Starling who I’m now using. The tools these “challenger” banks have to help split up income into different saving or spending amounts and to analyse spending are on another level compared to the likes of HSBC and actually make budgeting possible when we’re all moving away from having cash in our pockets.

Word of the day here is “kanban”. In the same way that kanban is a tool to visualise work that can sometimes be a bit intangible, now that we spend more contactless, with cards or phones, it is good to have tools to visualise this spending. So I say, “Goodbye, HSBC! And thanks for all the fish.” Though, in point of fact, I suspect the interest I’ve been charged by HSBC means that they should probably be thanking me. That’s a task for another day. One day I’m going to add up all the interest these people have taken from me.

I felt very low when I last posted here but now I think it needed to be done. At some point maybe I can start at the beginning; I don’t feel quite ready to face those demons now. 

I had a fresh start three years ago but made the mistake of doing it wrong. It was an easy fix. My lesson from today is please don’t go down the route of a consolidation loan. I tried it many times. Too many times. It was suggested by my bank in 2015 and that’s how it all started. It ended up with me having a secured loan on the house.

Then at the start of the year when it was all going wrong I planned to take another loan. In some ways I’m grateful that it was pulled and the next best one was terrible even to my desperate mind. I looked for another way and have decided to go into a management plan. So far all the creditors I have had to speak to have been quite, dare I say it, kind. I am under no illusion though that they were happy to squeeze me for all they could by putting up my interest rates. Genuinely I think this should be classed as an addiction. I got myself addicted to credit and the feeling of buying things. 

It put it into perspective when one company took off the late payment fee and waived two months of interest after I told them about my difficulties. I saw that the interest was around £50 per month and I’ve been paying that for probably a year, maybe two. I feel that they have had all they can and now can take the hit of having to stop charging interest.

This is very difficult. I never really intended to write about this but I need an outlet. I’m in a lot of debt. Such a lot. I had been managing just about, but then I was hit by a big tax bill and loss of income. I regret everything that brought me to this point and I’m not sure how to carry on at times. I hate that I’ve brought my children into this situation. I look at photos of happier times and think they won’t know that feeling again for another six to eight years now.

So last time I started writing about the origins of Trip Thirty Five. Why did I choose this? And I stopped. It’s difficult. What really struck me was the difference between how I remembered my relationship with my father and how others remembered him.

I think in part we do try to see the good in people. I remember when a teacher of mine died quite unexpectedly. Now I feared this man whenever we had to have a lesson with him. And whilst I still do describe the fear he would instill in me, I also acknowledge that he was a great teacher. Anyway, I digress a little there. I think the point is that the way in which we remember or feel for someone or something is coloured by context and emotion. We experience each other through different lenses of interpretation.

At the time, growing up, I would think why am I going through all of this? I didn’t remember and maybe didn’t appreciate the happier times. Then going through some old drawers, probably looking for paperwork, I came across an old photo album. We used to have so many that my dad had filled with photos from his Olympus Trip 35. Filled with so many happy memories. I can’t help but think that if he didn’t want those moments he wouldn’t have invested so much in taking those photos. He loved that camera, kept it in a black leather case, only brought it out for special occasions. And I can still hear the high-pitched whine the flash made as it charged. These were the days when the whole process had to be carefully executed so as not to waste a frame, but he still took and kept the photos.

After seeing all of that I know that he did care in his own way and in my youth I didn’t really appreciate the sacrifices that were made. To borrow from the film “Inception” again, that was my moment of catharsis. So I guess this is my homage to my dad and his Olympus Trip 35. I suppose I want to try to live more intentionally each day. I want to appreciate the things I have and encourage my kids to do the same. I can wish that things might have been different back then, but I can’t go back and change anything, so I need to try to look to the future.

After my dad passed away I went through a rollercoaster of emotion. Is that what I’m meant to write? I don’t think I did though. I felt numb. Emptyness. Perhaps a disconnect. We did not have an easy relationship. I’ll be honest with that. I do not remember, or at that moment I did not remember an easy, happy childhood.

People would describe great kindness from my father. At the time I felt conflicted. But now I appreciate this was something of a truth that I had chosen to forget. To use another film reference, this is the line from Inception:

Cobb: [about Mal] She had locked something away, something deep inside her. The truth that she had once known, but… she chose to forget.

I had chosen to forget this in order to match a new reality or view that was more congruent with periods of trauma. And then to be conflicted again with the opposite… well I have to try to rebuild.

OK so it’s getting late. I’ll do the origins of Trip Thirty Five next time.

I’m not entirely sure where to start. Do I start at the beginning? Where is the beginning of this story? It’s an odd feeling though. I have a feeling, I cannot really explain why, but I feel like this is not a linear set of events. Or at least I’m not able to describe this in a linear fashion.

Maybe that’s just me though. A lot of people in my life have commented that I do not work or think or converse in a conventional linear structure. And so maybe that is just coming out in an exaggerated way here and now. I can, however, start at a fixed point a short while before I started this blog, which was the passing of my father towards the end of the last year.

Goodbye and hello.

Or what is it that they say in Tron? No, not the remake with the de-aged Jeff Bridges. Or the remake with what’s-his-name? Genuinely I cannot recall. Anyway that isn’t important. No time for looking that up. The line is:

“Here goes nothing.”
Well, what I meant was…
Actually, what we propose to do is to change something into nothing and back again.
Then you might just as well have said, “Here goes something.
“Here comes nothing.”

Tron, 1982

I think this is all quite fitting really for a blog started after a death.

The idea of de-aging and trying to reverse that process. The idea of something becoming physically nothing, but still existing as a representation in some kind of alternate space. It’s even more apt thinking about the full conversation there: change something into nothing and back again.

I have a lot of deep issues to try to untangle…