Translate

Monday, May 07, 2018

Deprivation?


Resultado de imagen de passenger side air bag



A “passenger side air-bag replacement recall” for my car has left me bereft for a day – a whole day - without a car.  My car!

Irritatingly, I had to get back from the garage where the faulty car is now with a not-free taxi.  I think, since the fault is nothing to do with me, the firm could have paid for my return to car-less domesticity.  But they didn’t.  And now I have to endure that terrifying sense of isolation and fixity that a confirmed driver feels without his wheels.

I do still have the two wheels of my bike, my electric bike, but even with electrical assistance the range of operation that I am prepared to consider is remarkably restricted. 

As is usual for me, this typing is displacement activity for something else.  Through my interest in history and geography, I seem to have sold my financial soul to the National Geographic Magazine – not their famous monthly publication, but rather a series of their archaeological books which detail various famous sites throughout the world.  I don’t know how many volumes I thought the series comprised, but they seem to be never ending, and there is always something interesting enough to make me feel that the money that I am constantly spending is worth it. 

I particularly like the fact that they show imaginative reconstructions of how the wrecked sites would have looked in their original glory.  So, it was fascinating to see what the site at Petra would have looked like when it was a working trade centre.  I know that a further two volumes in the series are waiting for me in the Post Office in the centre of town, but without the car I am loath to make the journey to get them.  So, I type.

-          Later that day –

I obviously did not type with sufficient brio and conviction as the journey to the PO seemed like a logical and necessary thing.  I now have two more books on Tikal (of which I had never heard) and Saqqara (of which I had).  I have to admit that given the breadth and magnificence of the Mayan ruins of Tikal, I really think that I ought to have had that particular location stored somewhere in my brain.  But it wasn’t.  But now is.  It looks like the sort of place that would pass Dr Johnson’s test and actually be “worth going to see”!

As the accompanying text with the wonderful illustrations is in Spanish, I do tend to spend longer looking at the pictures than trying to work out what I am sure is fascinating information contained in the text.  To prove my point, I just opened the book on Saqqara at random and read a paragraph and, while I would be prepared to give a paraphrase of what it contained, I would not like a fluent Spanish speaker to check my summary.

It is true that I live in my own little “Magic Roundabout” world where I, just like Eric Thompson, use visual images to guide my textual understanding.  He made up stories based on watching the French originals of “The Magic Roundabout” and did not bother with a translation to guide him.  In much the same way I use my recognition of ‘pointers’ in Spanish conversations to guide my responses - however imaginative my use of language has been in deconstructing what I have been told. 

There is not always a perfect match between my inspirational appreciation of a foreign language and the poor natives who have to think about what I might have understood them to have said.  But it does lighten my days, even if it darkens theirs!

A real (and vital) test of my understanding of Spanish comes tomorrow when I go back to the hospital which is monitoring my medication for a ‘Control’.  At present I am administering a combination of injections and pills to keep me on the straight and narrow of health.  The future, I hope, holds a regime of medication that will do without the injections of rat poison because, let’s face it, that is what the ‘blood thinning’ agent that I am being given actually is!  So far, according to my rough calculations I have given myself over 200 injections in the war zone that used to be my tummy!  Enough, as they say, is enough and I would dearly love to take back the sharps box that I have borrowed from my medical centre complete with the empties!  But the reality is that I will probably need a few more ‘controls’ to get the medication right and that means that I will have to continue to administer the injections.

Because of my selective understanding I take most of my treatment on trust.  I have seen a few doctors and they have taken time and trouble to explain what is going on with the blood clots, embolisms and thrombosis, but the detail of my treatment is part of an ongoing routine that I do not really follow.  At present, for example, I do not get to see a doctor when I have my controls.  The blood drop test is administered by a nurse who passes on the information to a doctor who then decides what combination of medication I need to take until the next control.  The information comes in the form of a sheet with printed information about the amounts I need to take leading up to the next control.  Given the variety of combinations that I have already been through I do not think that we are getting any nearer to a finalized and regular dosage.  But I live in hope.  I have seen fellow patients with sheets that are obviously for whole months rather than the week that I have, so, probably, even at best, I will have a monthly visit instead of a weekly one.  But I will settle for that rather than the fatal alternative!


I continue to be surprised at the difference between my swimming and walking abilities.  As far as swimming is concerned I am now back to normal, indeed a recent swim was completed in a time that matched and bettered my pre-January times.  My walking is a different matter.

I find that walking more than a couple of hundred yards is a real physical effort and I am more than grateful that I purchased a collapsible shooting stick that is an efficient walking stick as well.  I was talk that the damage to my lungs might well be permanent and so I will have to make do with what is left.  I have also been told that there is no point in my exercising to the point of breathlessness as that could be dangerous and so everything has to be done in moderation – not my natural state!

Back in January my doctor told me that I would have to “find a new life” and I suppose that discovering how much I can do and how to cope with the difference that it makes is part of that discovery.

Rethinking a life style is not made any easier by the fact that, sitting here typing, I do not feel any different from what I felt before the pulmonary embolism was discovered, and if you watched me around the house you would see no difference: I walk around unaided and go up and down stairs without any noticeable ill effects; I use my bike to go to and fro and I am even marginally thinner!  But I am daunted by a walk through town, something that I would have not thought about for a moment before the illness.

We have a trip to Edinburgh planned for late July and that is going to have to be a very different experience from the other city breaks that we have had in the past.  Gone are the days when I used to enjoy getting lost in a city maze and walking my way back to something recognizable.  Things will have to be planned with busses, trains, taxis and resting stops.  I have even found that walking around a gallery is now something that needs to be thought about, and something that needs my shooting stick!

I do realize just how lucky I am that the embolism was discovered in time and that exhaustive and exhausting efforts are being made to treat me.  But it does not stop me feeling all the frustration that limitations on previous freedom impose.  Just like my car deprivation, so my personal movement deprivation prompts me to explore an area of essential self-reflection for survival.

-          Later that week –

Such is my indolence that weeks go by without my adding to my blog.  But today, today is going to be different.  Although this is being typed on my new computer and there is always a glitch or two before I understand what minor modifications are necessary for a new machine to fit into the old order!  Still, I am determined that this will be on the site today.  And I am further determined that I will get back into the routine of producing a daily blog.

What, you might well ask, am I doing rather than typing?  Well, the gruesome answer is that I am reading The Guardian.  The adjective is appropriate because I am becoming ever more depressed to find that my wishy-washy liberal (with a small ‘l’) pseudo socialist ideals are more and more distanced with what I can se going on in my immediate neighbourhood and indeed in the wider world.

Spanish politics are depressing in the extreme. The so-called Spanish government is characterized by rampant corruption, ineptitude and arrogance in roughly equal measures.  Wait, no, that’s not right: first and foremost, our government is systemically corrupt and corrupting.  If you wish to join me in my depression just Google “Spanish Corruption” and see the wealth of gob-stoppingly astonishing information of what PP and its minority government get away with!

Turning to Britain is hardly a relief.  The full horror of Brexit is getting clearer by the day as the poleaxed government, sorry “minority government” of the “hostile environment” May prevaricates its way towards disaster.  The “Windrush” Scandal has left me with a deep sense of shame and the continuing revelations about the Home Office demean one of the great offices of state.  I have no wish to be associated with such small-minded viciousness or the callous practioners who have engineered it.  And, yes May, I am referring to you and your disgraceful tenure at the Home Office / to say nothing of your awful premiership!

And then I turn to the United States of America - and I instantly look towards the Middle East for a more rational approach to political life!

Wherever I read in my Guardian, it merely fuels my frustration of a right thinking (in a left-wing sort of way) decent person whose reasonable view of the world seems to be at variance with the voting majority.  

 I know it is easy to turn to the plays of Ibsen and take Dr Stockman’s cry in “Enemy of the People” of “The majority is always wrong!” and feel justified in loneliness, but that is not enough.  Everywhere I look people seem to be willingly joining in a global danse macabre towards oblivion in which the dance steps seem to be way outside the normal rules of rhythmic movement!   

Facts now are more than elastic, and prejudice has become the new reality – or perhaps it always was the generally accepted reality, it is only now that supposedly intelligent organs of the establishment rise above factual refutation and demand that their prejudiced views become the accepted norm.  And yes, Donald Trump, I am referring to you.

Perhaps some of my misery is parasitic on the fact that my next ‘control’ is in five days’ time, with the same combination of injections and pills leading up to it.  It seems to me that my medics are no nearer to finding a workable system of user-friendly medication than they were months ago.  However, I live in hope that one day I will be presented with a sheet which covers a whole month of settled medication, rather than the few days at present!

The next control clashes with my Spanish lesson, and I have missed too many classes already to be jocose with missing more.

On the positive side: typing with my new laptop is a delight, and it makes me happy.  And that is a good thing.  And I have bought a new case for it.  And that makes me happy too.  Who truly worries about world destruction and the decimation of my pension through the devaluation of the pound when gadgets and their care can deflect a susceptible mind!

Saturday, March 03, 2018

Castelldefels, one winter's day

The way that the Spanish talk about their climate makes the British preoccupation with the weather look like a casual remark.  Each year that snow falls in Spain (as it does every year without fail) it is greeted as a unique phenomenon and one worthy of vast swathes of television time, showing presenters knee deep in the white stuff with a 'natural' background of snowball throwing kids.  The falling level of the reservoirs in the summer is painstakingly documented with drowned villages seeing the air again and spoken of in apocalyptic terms as if the rains of Februrary are never going to happen and fill them up again.  And so on for each season as highs and lows are lovingly relayed to appalled viewers who at least have a ready made topic of conversation for the rest of the day.
     This year we have, to be fair, had pretty bad weather.  At least we have if you are looking at the whole of Spain and not just at Catalonia and Castelldefels.
     Here in Castelldefels we usually get off lightly.  Snow in Barcelona (it does happen!) does not mean that anything falls on our little town.  Even The Beast from the East has not really had that much effect, though it has been cold and we have had torrential rain.
     In all the years that I have been living in Castelldefels I have never seen snow where I live, near the sea.  I have once seen snow on some of the surrounding hills, but in my front of back garden - never.
     It was therefore with something approaching shock that I looked out at the car park from my inside seat in the cafe in my local swimming pool and saw undeniable flakes of snow.  Not only did I note it down in my ever-ready notebook, but I took a (bad) photograph of it failing to stick on cars as proof that it actually did occur.
     It seemed fitting to note the occasion with a poem and the following is what, with the sun shining outside and the temperature at 16C or so, I have come up with.
     The last line is one of the main reasons that I live in Catalonia!


-->

Castelldefels, one winter’s day




Light touch weather,

fleeting, not to stay.



The hills greyscale in mist.

The ‘snow’ a gesture of thrown flakes:

they’re countable.



The kids’ gloved hands,

are raised in

supplication to the skies

to catch the drifting cold.



The stark-pruned spikey canopies

await the promised picturesque.



Lo!  They come again!

Rain’s ghosts!



Zigzags to blot

in spots so slight

the cold evaporates.



Beach side

no flurry fell.

White rain is for TV

and not for us.



And all too soon

the mundane wet will come,



and then, the sun.





Thursday, February 15, 2018

First steps!


Resultado de imagen de first stepsMy 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!


Resultado de imagen de pp criminals


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.

Friday, February 09, 2018

Life after hospital!

Resultado de imagen de out of 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.  
Resultado de imagen de pressure stockings         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!