A Fool Grows Wise

Each morning, when I drag
Out of my sleeping bag
Into the cold dawn air, my languid limbs
I bless the bag that keeps me warm
In frost and sleet and thunderstorm
And all the English weather’s whims.

Each evening, when I crawl
Into its folds, and fall
Asleep the moment that my eyelids shut,
I bless the bag that lets me sleep
So long, refreshingly and deep,
Within the draughty mountain hut.

In January or June,
Within this warm cocoon
I know a long and restful night will pass,
Though I am far from home and bed,
Without a pillow for my head
And with no mattress but the dewy grass.

And this, you see, is the problem with writing in metre. You scribble, and strike through, and scribble, counting stresses on your fingers and muttering rhyme words to yourself, and suddenly you realise you haven’t produced a poem but a jingle – something full of symettry, and alliteration, and vowel patterning, but completely destitute of any of the thought or feeling that made you want to write a poem in the first place. As I cannot find it in me to burden this glittering, silly little fragment with any more serious reflection, the only thing to do is continue in prose.

My sleeping bag is a Lamina O, which I bought for £99 three years ago from Cotswolds. It may have been the best purchase I’ve ever made. Quite apart from all the camping and sofa-surfing I’ve done over the years, my sleeping bag is, first and foremost, where all the work gets done. In the dark, skint days of my undergraduate, where it once dipped down to eight degrees celcius INSIDE my room, it was a haven of warmth, a cocoon of quiet reflection. I would do my reading in it, and write my essays in it; eat my dinner in it, and watch TV in it. If it had actually had legs, like one I saw in a hiking shop in the Lake District, I would never have taken it off. The basic format of my evening in, for a number of months, would be to get into my sleeping bag and read for my course until I nodded off mid-sentence (they may be great things to work in, but they don’t keep you awake!). I would then wake up around three AM in an extremely muzzy state, throw off all my clothes and tumble into my bed, which conveniently was only three feet away from the sofa where all the reading happened. Yes, I could have done all this under the duvet and saved myself the trip, but my bedsheets were never so versatile, and even more soporific than my sleeping bag.

Besides, there’s a feeling of smugness unique to the sleeping bag (and this is what I wanted to work into the poem, but couldn’t find the heart). Unlike the duvet, where there is always the risk of sticking my foot out of the covers into a frigid zone, or at least a colder part of the bed, a sleeping bag gives me complete enclosure. And with it, the delightful consciousness that it’s my own body heat, reflected back on me, that’s keeping me so nice and toasty. Never mind the radiators, or the gas fire, or the snow outside – while I’m in my sleeping bag, I’m entirely self-sufficient.

I suggested to a friend that this made the sleeping bag a fitting emblem of the happy bachelor state – of complete self-containedness and contentment with one’s wants. She just laughed. You can too – but I’ll be snug and warm inside my sleeping bag, so don’t expect me to care.

Last year, I worked from September to December and from April through to July as a bicycle courier in Cardiff, capital of Wales. A few qualifications are needed here. I was not one of those people on racing bikes with big yellow backpacks and alarmingly low life expectancies you see weaving through the midday traffic. My bike was a Dawes Discovery, equally well adapted to getting the shopping home or a cycle tour to Bristol, but not the fastest bike (34mph is about my record) and it was further encumbered by a great boxy trailer strapped on behind. For I wasn’t delivering business documents, but information packs: local travel information for Sustrans, a local transport charity, as part of their initiative to get the good folk of Cardiff out of their cars and onto bikes, buses, trains and their own two feet.

We were a ragtag bunch of indigent students, broke twenty-somethings balancing this with three other jobs as a leg-up to better employment, and a few enormous Poles and exubrant Greeks – as nice a bunch of people as you might find anywhere. When I tried to go full time at the end of the year, I found it rather frustrating – there simply weren’t enough shifts to go around, and a proper 9-4 day was hard to find. As a student job, nothing could have been better. The hours were easy and flexible, the money was surprisingly good (the 20p per mile travel expenses added up to a pretty good end of year bonus) and it was a terrific opportunity to explore areas of Cardiff that I never even knew existed – and I considered myself a particularly adventurous student. For the first time since my days of apple picking in the bright English autumn, I had a job I could enjoy. The outdoors, I decided, was the magical ingredient.

Of course, there were downsides. I had a couple of close shaves with white van man, there was the day some idiot kids tried to steal one of my bags, and though people were usually pleased to see me – one of the advantages of being delivery rather than canvassing, who often felt the sharp end of peoples tongues – I got a frosty reception more than once. The risk of a thorough drenching was possible all through, but winter added the additional terrors of hail and icy patches on the road, and summer the possibilities of sunstroke. I came back weak and dizzy from one shift and had to sit under a ice-cold shower for half an hour. And it was really quite unfortunate that I had to come into several of my lectures in lycra.

But on the other hand, there was the joy of discovering another of Cardiff’s innumerable suburban libraries, into which I often took a surreptitious detour to use the toilets and scan the graphic novels section for the latest Batman comic; the delight in finding a new shortcut, and the not-infrequent wrath at finding it so overly pedestrianised it was a struggle to get a bicycle through, never mind a bike and trailer; the delightful woman on Pen-y-dre, Rhiwbeina, who kept a sheep as a pet, and was kind enough to offer me a cup of tea while Nick the sheep gobbled up custard creams; and the hot day sweltering up and down the heights of Grand Avenue, where everyone I delivered to were offering me cokes and glasses of squash. I became so tanned I not only had watch marks, but little white cycling gloves as well.

I resigned at the end of July, partly because I was no longer comfortable with where we were delivering to (Cardiff has some nice areas, rich and poor, but Riverside was not a place I was comfortable leaving my bike, even for a couple of minutes – besides, it was too close to base to offer a full days work), partly because I was fed up of sleeping on the floor of my friend’s barely furnished apartment, and partly due to simple lonliness now that most of my student friends had come home. But in the glory days, when I was expertly balancing work with play with lectures on a sunny afternoon in October or July, it was enormous fun.

My friend Kristina has written about the perils of being a canvasser for the same charity here.

On my sleeping bag

Thoughts on being a bicycle courier