Part 12 - The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Coder.

For the last two years or so I have been working in Kent.

Thing is, I live in London – making me one of the few people who commute from London to Kent every day. I know there’s not many of us, mainly because I used to see most of them every day – huddled together in a miserable group, watching the platform indicators waiting for the train that goes to Ashford, Dover or whatever other blighted place they were headed for.

There is something completely and utterly wrong about commuting out of London, or any large city for that matter. Here you are with all the disadvantages of living in a vast urban sprawl (pollution, overcrowding, lack of parking, vastly inflated living costs, crime - the usual guff) giving up the convenience of cheap, quick and generally reliable public transport. We are the anti-commuters, those who go against the flow of people flooding into Victoria, Paddington, Euston and Liverpool Street every day.

The morning herd. Definitely not yesterday.

Every day for three months I would wake up at dawn, drag myself to Ravenscourt Park for the early morning rush-hour tube journey to Victoria, mumble “Venti Americano” to the nice girl in Starbucks, nurse my horribly overpriced coffee on the (mercifully almost always empty) train to Kent, trudge down Maidstone High Street as the shops were beginning to show signs of life, stumble onto the 85 bus and finally, some three hours after leaving home in the dark, arrive at work in a housing estate somewhere in the supposed garden of England. Only to have to face the reverse journey back in the evening.

I just couldn’t handle it. Six hours of travelling a day just to do my job was too much. So, faced with a further six months of it, I caved in and rented a small bedsit in downtown Chatham.

I moved in to my little bolthole with a couple of framed Guinness posters, a set of speakers, a kettle and a fresh mattress…

My life was split in two. I was still the husband/father/householder/uncle/friend/whatever that I had been. My weekends, and occasional weekday evenings, were still spent fulfilling all the obligations that those roles, and others, demand of me. My weekends became busier than ever in a constant rush to get everything that needed to be done finished because I wouldn’t be there in the week.

But what about during the week?

I found myself, for the first time in years, with completely free time. Time when I wasn’t expected to take the rubbish out, or paint the bathroom, or pop out to the supermarket, or help with the homework, or make a cup of tea.

Chatham – the posh part.

Granted, that free time was spent in Chatham – one of the most depressing towns in England, if not Europe. Three pubs (all of them shite), three restaurants (if you can call the unholy trinity of KFC, Burger King and McDonald’s ‘restaurants’) and all the shops close half-way through the day. If you don’t have a car in Kent, it seems, then you don’t have a life… Still, I’m a fairly self-contained chap and I don’t mind my own company. I cocooned myself in my grotty little bed-sit and left the streets of Chatham at the mercy of the disenfranchised Kentish youth. I had a fridge, a cooker and a laptop PC – what need I for the distractions of the Medway nightlife?

I began spending my evenings in pure selfish indulgence. The constant compromise of married life, fatherhood and responsibility forgotten in an orgy of do-as-thou-wilt that Crowley would surely have approved of.

I began playing games regularly again. I’d never really stopped, but now, instead of my gaming time being restricted to stolen moments, I could devote entire guilt-free evenings to my passion. It wasn’t long before I’d invested in a cheap second-hand telly and a Dreamcast. And not long after that before I succumbed to temptation and bought a Gamecube.

I rekindled my love of programming for fun instead of profit, writing games for the Neo Geo Pocket. Coding for pleasure was something else that I thought I had lost long ago, and it was a surprise to find this creativity still lurking there, waiting for the space to break free again. I don’t expect my games to change the world, I never really expected anyone other than me to even look at them, but the experience of writing them has been a minor revelation.

Baby Neo Geo – pocket-sized redemption.

In short, faced with this late-found freedom, I remembered a lot of things that life, marriage, fatherhood, work and other people’s expectations had conspired to make me forget.

That initial six-month contract turned into twelve, then into eighteen and finally into two years or more. And, truth be told, it does get lonely. I do, despite all of the above, miss my family when I’m here. There have been times when, not counting morning greetings to work colleagues and brief conversations with bus drivers, I don’t talk to another living soul for days on end. And Chatham really is one of the most tedious places I have ever had the misfortune to exist in. But my time here is almost at an end and I won’t miss a single thing about the bloody county when it’s finished.

Apart from the solitude…

ahchay, March 2004

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