First steps!

My third week out of hospital and my first walks outside the house and my first trips to the local shops in the car!

It is a sign of how limiting the thrombosis and embolism are that such ‘easy’ actions I now regard as worthy of note.  Yesterday, with all the confidence of an idiot, I did rather too much and today I am aware that I did so.  I cannot say, in all truthfulness that I am actually suffering, but I am sitting down and biding my time before another foray into the lairs of commercialism!

I have not been idle in these last few weeks and have been working on the notes that I made during my stay in hospital and have worked them up into a series of poems that are part of my new chapbook called, “A Point of Blue”.

This chapbook comprises not only the dozen or so poems directly related to my stay (including one about the flowers that I was given!) but also half a dozen prose pieces to accompany them.  I have also included ‘drawings’ that I did on my reMarkable tablet that may be, “little more than glorified doodles” but they also, “come as near as I am ever going to get to some form of non-literary meditation”.  High-sounding words!  But this collection is best described as “a wry mixture of prose poetry and ‘drawings’” where, in spite of the seriousness of the condition, I am still able to get some humour out of the situation!

The chapbook is in process of being published and will have an ISBN number and will be one sale at €5 in the Euro zone and £5 in the UK.

I am pleased with how this chapbook has turned out and I am looking forward to comments about the content!

Next week will be a significant one for me as I intend to go to the opera.  The next opera in my season ticket is Romeo and Juliette by Gounod.  I have never seen this opera, although I know one or two of the arias, and I do not intend to let this opportunity slip!  I have book an hotel room for a night in Barcelona and the walk to the Liceu is very short.  We will have to see how it goes.  The only problem is that I have to inject myself at 9.00pm and that might be a little disconcerting for the audience if I do it during the performance!

Meanwhile the political situation in Spain becomes ever more murky.  On the television today there are scenes of pensioners throughout the country protesting and demonstrating about the derisory 0.25% increase – well below the rate of inflation, for yet another year – while the political fall out from the various corruption trials for members of the right wing minority government of PP continue to shock. 

It is becoming even clearer that the party is systemically corrupt and the frankly disgusting antics of the leader of Cs as he expresses his shock and distaste for the party that his group of sluttish politicos helped elect to government, masks the fact that the dyed in the wool sheer badness of PP was abundantly clear to even the most politically inept neophyte when his bunch of opportunistic riffraff voted for them.

More and more of the people who are in the courts being processed through the glacially slow judicial system are singing and implicating all the top echelon of PP.  The latest phase of this farce is the ex-treasurer of PP (all of the treasurers of PP in the history of the party have been accused of malpractice – and I’m using that word because they have not yet been sentenced and put in the prison that they richly deserve) has given evidence in the Valencia parliament about the funding of a past PP campaign.  As the national treasurer he has asserted that he no knowledge or control over the finances of the regional PP in Valencia.  In other words, he has thrown the past PP politicos in Valencia under the proverbial bus and washed his hands of a responsibility that you might, possibly have expected a national treasurer to have some knowledge about.  Especially as the campaign was such a major part of the national campaign and all the political leaders of PP were there to soak up the paid-for adulation!

In spite of the overwhelming evidence of corruption, I have no real expectation that any of the major political characters in PP will resign or have judgements (official judgements that is, in the court of public opinion they are guilty as sin!) against them. 

But, as always I live in hope and always believe that justice, will, eventually triumph.

Life after hospital!

It has now been a fortnight since I came out of my rather unexpected stay in hospital.  During that time I have been subjected (is that the right word I wonder?) to enforced (yes it is!) idleness.  Bodily idleness that is, where I have been encouraged to sit in my armchair and rest.  

            Going up stairs has to be done three at a time and then a pause and then the next three.  The third floor of the house has been deemed out of bounds and so has going outside.  Though I did, but that was only to let the doctor in, so I don’t think it counts as an official act of disobedience.  

         During this period I have also been wearing ‘pressure stockings’ where the impossibility of my getting the damn things on, has been the daily task of Toni – after which he usually needs a sustain cup of coffee to get him back to normal.  

            Also during this period I have been injecting myself twice daily with Clexane – which I suspect is just a fancy name for some form of rat poison that is being used to thin my blood.

            Today the stockings don’t have to be worn.  I can begin to walk about a little more and I can start looking forward to a real walk to sit on a bench by the sea – which I haven’t seen for a fortnight.

             My diet has been reasonably exemplary and, to be truthful, I am getting just a tiny bit stir-crazy.

            Not that I have been staring blankly at the wall during this period, I have been busy.  Busy is a sedentary way.

            During my time in hospital I was never far from my trusty notebook in which, each day, I write thoughts banal and halfway original in the hope that some of them might be the basis for a poem in the future.

            As I had never stayed in hospital before, I reasoned that it had to be the stuff of some sort of writing and I therefore wrote daily about what was happening and tried to sketch out my feelings and observations. 

            Reading over my notes and responses, the one thing that leaps out from the pages is not my fear about what was happening to me, but rather the composition of the meals that the hospital offered.  Each lunch and dinner is lovingly and compulsively detailed together with my evaluation, reflecting perhaps a natural obsession for those caught up in the institution of healing!

            Obviously, I do also comment on how I was living and what was done to me: the blood tests, the scans, the daily routines of blood pressure, temperature etc., the injections and drips, the oxygen masks, the smocks, the toilets, the showers, the structure of the day, the different people who came in and out of the ward.  It was all new, and at the same time, from past visits, from television shows, documentaries, friends’ explanations, and general knowledge, quite old as well.  The key difference was that I was the patient rather than the observer; the person things were happening to rather than the general landscape of ‘other’.

            As I began to work through my notebook I discovered some aspects that suggested poems at once, but there were other areas of experience that seemed to be better suited to prose, so I worked on the basis that what I was going to produce would be better suited to a mixture rather than being a ‘pure’ chapbook of poetry.  I also did some ‘drawings’/doodles while I was in hospital and, if I ever find a way of getting them from my reMarkable electronic tablet and into my computer I will be adding those to the mix!

            The working title of the chapbook is “A Point of Blue”, a reference to one of the completed poems based on the scrap of sky that I could see from my bedside chair alongside bed 13.2 next to the window in the ward, but I also like the ambiguity that the title holds as well.  An uninspiring view that ironically inspired me to write!

            I have a draft of the book that is almost ready: I have one more prose piece to write and get the ‘drawings’ in place and it will be ready for publication.  I also have a photo of me resplendent in smock and oxygen mask that I will consider for the dedication page perhaps!

            Now to make publication a reality!