I am
beginning to forget what it is like to have the unmediated sun on my skin and
feel the wind where my hair used to be!
I am
not yet at the stir-crazy point of my enforced house holiday, but I am getting
near.
I do
realise that thrombosis in the leg and embolisms in the lungs with an effected
heart demands certain restrictions if there is to be a realistic hope of
recuperation, so I am trying to keep to the outline of what I should be doing
and, more particularly, not doing.
Ideally,
I should spend my days sitting in my armchair and being waited on hand and
foot. Not bad, you might think – but
even slavish attention to one’s needs pales after a while. Or a week in my case. Not that I am not entirely grateful to Toni
for butlering about in a most professional manner and providing me with sugar,
fat and salt free dishes for my delectation.
I truly am grateful. But I cannot
walk very far (I mean, I can, but I mustn’t) and I can’t drive and I can’t swim
and I can’t ride my bike and I can’t go to the opera. Whoops, that last bit of self-denial makes me
appear more bourgeois than I care to appear, however accurate it may be in
reality.
The
point is, although I am working well in my enforced sedentary period of
acclimatising myself to a New Way of Life, I am constantly frustrated by having
to ask somebody else (aka Toni) to do the most trivial things for me if they
require any physical effort.
At
least this initial period of ‘rest’ should only take up the first two weeks,
and already I have sat my way staunchly through one half of the time. One week to go and I will be ale to go for a
short walk. Outside!
As
someone who has been driving since he was able to drive – that, I now realize, is half a century – it is much more difficult to adapt to not being able to get up
and go whenever I like. When you can’t,
you realise just how much you use the car (or bike) for all those little things
that are just out of reach, but no problem when you can slip into the car and
get it done in no time at all.
I am
sure that this experience will be a valuable life experience for me: I can’t
really afford for it to be anything else!
And I am sure that not being able to do so much (if only for a strictly
limited period) will (must) make me appreciate what I will be able to do soon
enough.
As
my existence has been circumscribed to contain only the living room and bedroom
(with excursions to the bathroom) I have had time to read the Guardian in
depth. With a short period where I
deviated towards the Independent, I have been a staunch Guardianista (and
indeed in the style of that newspaper I actually reversed the ‘a’ and ‘r’ in
the word!) and feel comfortable with the way that the news is reported and the
articles that sum up the quirkiness and essential intelligence of the paper.
But
it is also depressing as you surely feel yourself part of the minority/majority
(who knows?) that thinks Brexit is an act of national self-harm unparalleled in
our life times. But this feeling of
being on the right but losing side means that every opportunity to read about
Brexit is compulsive – and the Guardian provides many opportunities to do
exactly that. It is the same with 45 in
America where we (the Guardianistas) loathe and despise the man, but cannot
stop ourselves from reading about him as if we were all suffering from some
sort of addiction.
The
only respite from my misery is that the coverage of Catalonia is hardly as
exhaustive as the other two and therefore I do not sigh so much in that respect
– but television here more than makes up for that lack as the Spanish
government would rather talk about Catalonia than any of the corruption and
disasters that comprises their contemptible administration.
Meanwhile,
I am getting on with the poems drawn from the notes I made while in hospital. I have to admit that my hospital diary
stretches only over eight days. And did
I suffer! Well, the only pain that I felt
over that period was from the injections that I was given; the obtrusive
inflation of an automatic blood pressure cuff – this actually caused sores;
discomfort from an unyielding bed and a vigorously flesh pressing radiography
nurse. Hardly the stuff of great
drama. I didn’t feel truly ill when I
went into hospital and I felt much the same when I came out. There is no harrowing story of suffering and
no real learning or change of situation or comprehension at the end of it.
There
is, of course, the realization of just how lucky I have been: if this condition
had not been discovered at the time it was then it probably wouldn’t have been
discovered until it was too late! That
is something worth thinking about. But
my poetry has ever been the stuff of unexceptional observation and so my
observations throughout the week should play to my strength.
At
least that is my story and I’m sticking to it.
