JUST ANOTHER DAY...

April 25th, 2013

Interestingly, had he lived, April 25th would have been my father's 89th birthday, although this caused me to have anxiety attacks overnight because I am very suspicious of the confluence of "significant dates" in my life. If one "important" thing thing happens on a particular date, you can almost be certain that another will turn up to claim it which, under the current circumstances, did not bode well for a Thursday, and, as a great man once almost said, I never really did get the hang of Thursdays...

I really ought to apologise to you, my loyal reader, as to the monotony of the topics I'm covering at the moment, but, sadly, this really is the only thing going on and it is all rather all-consuming when it comes to my thoughts.

However, that said, my morning call to the hospital that day after another anxious night received the same response as the previous one, i.e, that mum had had another "settled" night and was "stable" which is about as good as it gets, especially when her son is out there writing it up for all the world to read if it wanted to (it doesn't...) and is using crass phrases like "We're just sitting around waiting for my mother to die..." in conversations with colleagues when feeling particularly stressed.

It all comes out of anxiety, of course, or the strange sense of guilt which comes from being utterly powerless to control the situation or the outcome. However, I battled on through a frustrating working day, rang the bank to warn them that the account ought to be pretty inactive at the moment, had a brief chat with my sister who has plans to go around to mum's flat and "deep clean" some of the more neglected areas, and staggered on through until it was time for me to head homewards, where there was at least some good news that I'll tell you about another day.

After a swift microwaved tea, I clambered back into the car and drove back to the familiar old car park with an almost perfect view of the ward my mother is in, and noticed my sister looking out of the window, waiting to warn me not to put my money into one of the "pay-and-display" machines because it was "eating your change" apparently.

And so I returned to the ward where my sister had been for most of the afternoon, reading between the x-rays, and did my usual visit, and mum slept through the entire thing, which is, I'm told, probably a good thing. At one point I went off and had a lengthy chat with a nurse who was fairly honest with me about the various drugs and fluids that they were putting into my mother as she slept, how they had plans for further scans in "a couple of weeks" (which is encouraging) but that long-term use of intravenous drips can cause infections and toxins to build up (which is not). As ever, whilst mum remains "stable" and the sleep is helping her to recuperate, they don't know yet how damaged she's going to be when and if she comes out of it, and things can, unfortunately, always change on a day-to-day basis, and a bad ten minutes is all it sometimes takes.

Interestingly, it turns out that the seizures of Tuesday might very well have been caused by the stroke of two-and-a-half years ago, because they are not yet convinced that she had another one after the one last Thursday, and won't know either way until she is more conscious, which all seems very strange.

After we said our goodbyes to mum after bringing her round ever so slightly to say hello, my sister and I returned to the car park for another "little chat" which was mostly about my pre-booked "weekend away" this weekend and whether I ought to go or not.

She remains adamant that I should, that I'd only be a couple of hours up the motorway if anything were to happen, and that I really need a break. I remain unconvinced for many of the very same reasons, but my presence at the bedside at the moment does seem to be rather redundant, and sometimes it's about deciding what you might have to live with if the worst happens.

We also discussed a plan to spruce up mum's kitchen, although I'm still rather reluctant to make decisions for mum until we're absolutely sure that she's no longer in a position to make them for herself. For me, it's still about respecting her life, and her living space, and her right to make choices, and I don't think any of us have the right to make those kinds of decisions for her until it becomes absoloutely necessary, although I'm fully willing to admit that I might be wrong about that.

Especially when I see her lying there like that, surrounded by tubes and needles and, perhaps luckily, totally oblivious to pretty much all of it...

THE WAITING ROOM

April 24th, 2013

So, with all that was going on, I went back to work anyway, although my brain was so mashed with worry that it wasn't the most productive, or the least tetchy, day I've ever spent there.

Still, I muddled through somehow. I rang the hospital and found out that my sister had already phoned, but I was able to be told what the administrator had overheard the nursing sister tell my sister which was, effectively, that mum had had a "settled" night... which I'm guessing is a term that we might be hearing a lot of, given that my call the next day got pretty much the same response.

My sister spent the day going back and forth on visits (11.00am - 1.00pm, 6.00pm until I arrived) and apparently, in lieu of having nothing much else to do, read crime thrillers at her, which, at least, the other patients seemed to appreciate. She also asked me to sub her a few quid because the petrol for the two journeys to and from Cornwall had stretched her limited finances a tad.

Eventually I arrived feeling fairly shattered for evening visiting which, at first, basically involved both of us having a conversation over the bed as mum lay oblivious between us. However, after sleeping for much of the day, mum sort of half-surfaced and immediately tried to get out of bed which led to us being shooed away whilst the nursing staff went about the business of sorting her out, and my sister remarked that this was the most active she'd seen her all day.

We retired to to that familiar old waiting room and chatted about high and low finance, whether we feel there's a legal case to consider over this situation, and other matters like the state of mum's flat and more of the banalities of day-to-day life when a relative is in such a condition and the future remains uncertain.

One of the other concerns is about my imminent weekend away which has been planned for months and has very specific calendar requirements, but which I'm still torn about whether to cancel or not. On the one hand, you simply don't want to be away if the worst happens, but equally, if mum remains "stable" it really ought not to be a problem. It's just one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations where just a little bit of time-travel or premonition would be very useful.

My sister is adamant that I ought to go.

The beloved is equally adamant that I might regret doing so.

I'm kind of leaving the decision as late as I can so that we can judge the wisdom of the final choice with the most information available, and am willing to be guided by what the nursing staff tell me, even though I know that there are no guarantees and things can change in minutes...

The nursing staff, of course, all remain rather lovely and patient and understanding, despite everything that they are having to be dealing with  and neither of us would wish to criticise any of them when we are fretting about the clerical error that seems to have brought us to this particularly unfortunate outcome, but the fact that we are even in this predicament seems to be solely down to one stupid mistake in the writing and dispensing of a particular drug combination that ought to be, at the very least, flagged up by a computer system if there's an accidental clash.

Or are we just scrabbling about trying to make sense of a situation that feels like nonsense when you're right in the middle of it...?

So, on the whole, the evening visit was not very productive, although I was at least able to return the paperback I'd inadvertently walked off with the day before.

Well, it was "World Book Day" I suppose, but that's not really an excuse.

I'd shoved it into my pocket at one point and found that it was still there when I eventually got home. It had turned into quite a nifty little thriller over the course of the hundred or so pages I'd read over the course of the day, and I was quite intrigued as to how it might end, so I'd ordered a copy off the internet overnight before returning it to the table in the waiting room.

Who knows... I may very well have to pick it up again another day...

THE LONGEST DAY...?

April 23rd, 2013 7.30am

It turned out to be a very long day.

I arrived at work, ready to start and was in the middle of writing an email when my mobile phone rang. It was a nurse from the hospital who had finally managed to track me down, as I would discover hours (days...?) later when I finally got an opportunity to check for any messages on my landline.

Of course, when the hospital rings you and demands your presence because "the doctors want to talk to you" you do think that this is some sort of code for "something we're not allowed to tell you over the phone" and so I immediately assumed that the worst had already happened and got rather upset (even surprisingly so) as I packed up the office, made a couple of telephone calls, dashed off an explanatory email to my colleagues, and got into my car and headed off stressfully through the morning rush hour traffic, assuming that the brutal parking problems at the hospital would make a bad ordeal worse. (Pauses to consider whether a "dire emotional stress" car park should be made available, or at least an amnesty for the lousy parking of those on mercy dash or similar...)

They mentioned that she'd had a number of seizures in the night and that kind of sounded to me like a preparational precursor to "We did everything we could... but..."

But I got there, and pumped as many pound coins into the parking machine as it would accept (although it rejected one of them, but my sanity was saved by finding two 50p coins in my other pocket) and dashed to the ward after stopping for a "comfort break" after my two early-morning buckets of coffee did their usual job on me. Minutes later, I strolled into the ward and was swiftly directed to the waiting or "family" room, and turned left instead of right and ended up opening the door of a mercifully empty staff changing room until I realised my mistake and worked out where I was supposed to be going.

After a nurse had settled me in and offered me the first of many rejected cups of tea, then the first of four conversations that I would have with doctors that day occurred. This was with a lovely young girl who looked barely old enough to be out of sixth form, but who obviously knew her stuff and explained what had happened overnight, what they were currently doing to combat the seizures, how they were just about to give mum a CT scan, and that remained optimistic and hopeful about the possibility of a certain amount of recovery. I was told that I would be able to see her in a few minutes, and so I sloped off to dispose off more coffee, and got back just in time to see the staff wheeling her off down the corridor for the promised scan...

She looked dreadful, and, after dashing to the car to get my phone charger because I'd spotted a handy plug socket, I parked myself in the waiting room, and wished that I'd brought a book with me because I was getting far, far too upset sitting there just thinking. Happily, I noticed a small selection of books on a table (rather tactlessly I thought,  they seemed to be mostly murder mysteries), and started reading one for a while until they all returned and I relocated to the bedside.

Sitting with mum on a very noisy and claustrophobic ward (I heard "I'm a believer " by the Monkees at one point which seemed somewhat surreal) was very, very upsetting, because she is, as the cliche goes, a shadow of her former self and I really began to feel that there was no "dignity" in this existence. The feisty, sometime annoying, always opinionated woman seems gone, replaced with a sleeping husk who can barely talk whenever she does happen to surface, and I suddenly found that I was missing her old, "spirited" and curmudgeonly self rather dreadfully.

As I read the paperback I'd chosen, her eyes would flicker occasionally and she would wake up in need of the loo and I would be dispatched back to the waiting room to read a little and await another recall, and this happened a few times until one of my absences corresponded with another seizure, and then she had yet another one whilst I was waiting for the nurse to do her checks.

Those are not pleasant to see, and as a team of doctors arrived, I was bustled out of the way and meandered back to the waiting room again, convinced that this might very well be the proverbial "it..."

Someone promised to come and get me when whatever the procedures that they wanted to do to control the seizures were done, but as I sat there for another two and a half hours unable to concentrate enough to read the book any more, I kind of got the impression that they'd forgotten I was there, and would have believed it if they hadn't kept sending people to talk to me and ask me to make decisions that I felt rather unqualified to make.

The second doctor came in and ushered some other people who were nattering out before closing the door behind him. This was my second experience of expecting the "We did everything we could... but..." conversation that day, so what he did talk about kind of washed over me, was all rather bewildering, and I pretty much forgot everything he told me almost immediately, but I got the distinct impression that he was a neurological specialist and many of the other issues of her medical history were of little interest to him. He went away, and accidentally locked me in, a fact which I didn't even notice until the third doctor tried to get in to talk to me and couldn't.

She was a very understanding consultant stroke specialist (I think) who talked a great deal of sense and had been the first person to diagnose mum's stroke the previous week, but she was also someone who had a terribly pragmatic air about her which was, at least, refreshingly frank. To be honest, talking to all three of them had managed to make me feel like I was totally stupid but, last time I looked, I wasn't actually stupid, even though I'm probably not as clever as they are, otherwise I might have been a doctor too.

This is not a criticism, by the way. I'm just very easily intimidated by intellect, and that day was no exception.

After she left, my long period of suspecting that I had been forgotten about started, and included nearly the entire period of afternoon visiting hours as people came into the room, grabbed chairs that were "too heavy" and went away wondering who that strange man must be, sitting there for no very good reason. I filled the time by ringing my sister for travel updates as she drove back north after only driving home the previous day, and working out that the room was just over eleven of my shoe lengths long by just over seven wide.

I hadn't been forgotten though, because a visitor from mum's church was pointed in my direction and we had a nice little chat until she had to go and complete the rounds of her visiting list and my refusal of any cups of tea seemed to leave her a little nonplussed by me.

After she'd gone, I wondered - I still do, to be honest - whether I was being to bleak about the outlook. I mean, I know that the outlook is bleak, but I wondered whether I should have been putting a more positive spin on things...? I wondered it again later on that evening when I spoke to another of mum's friends on the telephone when she rang for an update. The problem is that you can't really lie to people and be too optimistic, but equally, you don't want to turn out to be the boy who cried "wolf" either...

Equally that friend was the one who first mentioned "pathways" which seemed to get mentioned quite often that day once I'd picked up on the term. I thought that it was a charity, but it might be a system for helping people to just "slip away..." which sounds quite distasteful if you have to be the one making the call to allow it, but seems to make life "easier" for everyone else and makes me think of how the hospital were able to "time" another acquaintance's recent passing so that his family could be around him at the time...

This church friend was also the first person that day to remind me of the "cause and effect" problem with regard to my mother's condition, in that the mistake made in her discharge prescription from the last time she was sent home led to her being admitted four days later with stomach bleeds which meant that they had to withhold the Warfarin, which increased the chances of her having a stroke, which then, of course, actually happened and which then couldn't be treated with the usual blood thinners because of the ulcerated stomach...

Something to ponder upon there in the long, dark nights, I fear...

Meanwhile, my mother continued to sleep and my sister got ever closer and I kept on expecting the inevitable "it" to come but somehow it never did, at least not on St George's Day, as my mother continued to sleep and come around and sleep again, but to look at her really was just heartbreaking when I remembered how she usually is...

My sister arrived having made astonishing time (we'll draw a veil over quite how...) and went into full throttle "raging whirlwind" mode in a way that my passively sitting in a waiting room hadn't, so very quickly after that, my fourth conversation with a doctor that day happened, and it was once again the child-like first one I talked to that morning. I was surprised to find her still on duty as my sense of time was unravelling fast and I'd also got the impression that the lunchtime shift changes are what led to my slight sense of abandonment.

So, after another heartbreaking bedside visit, it was my sister who finally dragged me to a canteen for a cup of tea and a council of war, after I'd been refusing the drinks at least all day and, after one more return visit to the bedside, we decided to leave for the day, fully aware that we might be called back at any moment and knowing that the longest day might very well now be followed by a very long night.

I arrived home utterly exhausted and spent the evening dealing with messages and less than optimistic chat with the various old ladies and church ministers who wanted to know about what was happening. The minister had visited, he said, and prayed without knowing whether she could hear him, but I assured him that I was sure that it was some comfort to her, and meanwhile I found myself still wondering if I should be less "honest" with mum's friends when they ring, because there's always hope of a recovery, I suppose and I might still be painting far too pessimistic a picture I fear, and upsetting frail old ladies isn't something any of us ought to do...

So now we enter a strange kind of limbo... a waiting game where you want the situation to be over, but also don't want it to be over, if that doesn't sound too strange or heartless...? I want to return to my desk because I feel slightly less useless there than I do just sitting around in the hospital, even though sudden disappearing acts are still a possibility. Meanwhile, I dread the phone ringing, but also dread being too far from it in case it rings...

But then... Well, the doctors still talk of her having more scans in "a couple of weeks" so I'm kind of aware that we're not out of the woods as yet, and recovery is still an option, but also that this year's distractions might yet continue for some time to come...

THE HOUR

April 22nd, 2013 - 7.00pm

For me, it was perhaps the most unsettling and upsetting hour since this whole business began in the second week of January, if not since the whole unpleasant business began in November 2010.

My sister had been up and took on care duties for a couple of days, so I’d not heard anything for 48 hours or so, not since I’d left the two of them chatting at the hospital on Saturday afternoon, where mum had seemed much, much brighter since the previous low point of Thursday.

My sister was, however, at this point on the Monday evening, currently travelling home to the other end of the country and was effectively incommunicado.

I decided to make my usual evening visit and arrived to find my mother lying spark out on her right hand side, and fast asleep and, because I didn’t know whether this was because of some procedure which had taken place about which I didn’t know, I decided to let her sleep, and just sat in a chair at the end of a bed for a few minutes before deciding that I needed to find out more.

The staff were in a meeting, as they always seem to be when the visitors are visiting, so I headed off outside in search of a proper phone signal, but was unable to get hold of my sister, who was still in a car somewhere between where I was and Cornwall.

On my way back to mum’s bedside, I ran into a nurse I recognised who went off to find another nurse who was actually dealing with my mother’s treatment who arrived and seemed most eager to wake my mother up because she’d apparently been quite eager to talk to me earlier on.

I poked my nose around the corner of the ward and she had indeed shifted her position in her sleep but was by no means awake, but the nurse insisted that I returned to my chair at the foot of the bed, and then proceded to wake my mother up for possibly the most confusing and disturbing three-quarters of an hour of either of our lives together.

It could, of course, have been the drugs that they were pushing into her via the drip, or it could have just been that she’d been fast asleep and had been woken up so suddenly, but for much of that time she made little sense at all, and at least twice, she drifted off so completely in mid-thought that I actually thought that she’d gone and died on me…

It seemed much worse if she looked over to her right, and if she did that, the sentences would drift into nonsense, talking about the radiator cover, the instructions, people who weren’t there, floating words that were distracting her and “the people on the table…?”, although if she looked to her left, she started acting relatively “normally” again and fussing about her table being in the wrong place, her fellow patients, her weekend, her headaches, and other familiar complaints.

Having rearranged the furniture to her relative satisfaction, the unfortunate geography of this meant that I was now sitting on what was rapidly becoming the “wrong” side for lucid conversation, and, whilst I did my very best to talk calmly, softly and encouragingly about the future, my mind was screaming at me that this might be the very end and I could feel the tears pricking at my own eyes as one rolled down her cheek at one point.

At one point, she looked so like her own mother did in her last days that it quite shocked me, given that I had never really noticed any resemblance between them before.

Reluctantly, as the eight o’clock bell sounded, I left, after making sure with the nurse that someone was keeping a very careful eye on her, as I was convinced that she could slip away at any moment. I then had a very upsetting drive home, completely convinced that the telephone call would have already come from the hospital by the time I arrived there.

It hadn’t, of course, but I did now know from a voicemail message that my sister and her family had arrived home safely and, after a frustrating half hour of not being able to call her back, I did find out that she’d called the hospital and been told that mum was “fine…”, so I don’t think that all of my tales of doom and gloom were necessarily justified, and I got the distinct impression that everyone seemed to thik that I was being over-alarmist.

But I was still very worried, and went to bed completely convinced that the call would come overnight, which is never the most relaxing state of mind to be in when you really, really need to get some rest…

ANNOUNCEMENT

I ought to inform my regular readers (and anyone else, obviously) that your normal daily helpings of nonsense might be disrupted for a few days. My mother’s health has recently taken a distinct and dramatic turn for the worse and, whilst I tend to generally go with the “where there’s life there’s hope” philosophy, to be perfectly frank with you, the long-term (and even short-term) prognosis is not looking too promising at present (even “time-delaying” this posting seems to be tempting fate, if you know what I mean… after all, usually we are nearly always lagging a couple of days behind real life in these postings...) - although I’m always willing to be proved wrong about that, and accept that we might all be looking back and laughing at my dramatic over-reactions in a year or so... but quite honestly, I doubt it.

I’m sure that the long, dark and sleepless nights to come will find me tapping away at the keyboard trying to make some kind of sense out of the chaos that’s currently in my life and mind (for which I should apologise in advance) - after all, it’s what I do... -  but if you do come here looking for the usual fayre over the next few days, you might be disappointed to find nothing new to read about, at least for a little while, or at least nothing pleasant as this dark corner might get very dark indeed...

Unless, of course, I feel shallow enough to allow some of the vapid nonsense that I wrote before all this started to somehow escape into the big wide world with that vague sense of “not wanting to let people down” which sometimes overwhelms me rather pointlessly...

Or unless I do find the time and the energy to keep on writing about this and other stuff, of course, in which case this announcement is all going to seem a little bit misguided, I suppose…

Anyway, one way or another, I’m sure that I will return to torment your minds sometime in the near future, but until then…

See you on the other side… or even sooner, perhaps...

IT WON’T BE ME

“When I win the lottery…”

You don’t hear people say it much any more, do you? Or, to be more precise, I don’t hear people say it much any more. You, on the other hand might spend your days surrounded by the kind of dreamers who still have some hope in their lives, or you might very well be the kind of person who still dreams of a sudden fortune landing in your lap quite out of the blue and without having to really work for it, and good luck to you if you still are.

The truth is that, after a decade and a half or more, the fickle finger of fate has not picked me out and found me worthy of such riches and, perhaps, that’s not the worst thing.

There was a time, of course, when I was desperate for a random chance to drag me out of the crowd and help me to break away from the humdrum reality of my existence

Now I know that the humdrum reality was my existence.

In the meanwhile, most people, I imagine, have paid far more into the lottery pot than they’ve ever got out of it, despite the odd tenner here and there and the occasional slightly bigger prize. In the end you just have to be philosophical and look upon it as your own voluntary contribution to the arts, even if it’s not a selfless one because you were really, really hoping to get something for yourself out of it when you first placed your betting slip down on the counter.

And, when I think about it now, if it had happened, I suspect it might very well have ruined my life because I don’t think that I’d be very good at being wealthy, even though it would be nice to try it for a while I’m sure. Many of the clichéd trappings of wealth that you see on the telly just look ghastly to me and wouldn’t interest me at all, I fear.

Instead, I look at my life now and wonder whether the things I might spend such money on today might not be the same as they might have been fifteen or twenty years ago. The idea of a  collection of fast cars would no longer thrill me like it once might have done, and the big house in which to have Victorian-style Christmases only really works if you still have friends that you wish to interact with in that context and who don’t have other family commitments at that time of the year.

I’m more interested in travel than I once was, I suppose…

I do have dreamy nuggets of ideas, people I’d like to give a helping hand to and so forth, but I don’t suppose it’ll ever actually happen.

Then, you see, it’s started to become increasingly obvious that a “big” lottery win is no longer all that big any more, and to make a difference, it has to be a huge win, otherwise you’re still left relatively poor and facing the possibility of, horror of horrors, still having to think about working for a living...!

Once decent house can chew up a million in the blink of an eye, and maintaining and furnishing it might chew up another. Add a couple of cars and a holiday or three into the mix and you’ve blown a couple of million and you’ve barely even started.

A few weeks ago I was listening to the radio and I heard about the problems in a refugee camp at the edge of what I think was Malawi, but if it wasn’t, I’m sure that the people of Malawi will not notice my error. Basically, the aid worker being interviewed said that there was only one toilet for every three thousand people currently living in the camp and that it was getting worse by the day.

A quick calculation in my head worked out that if a rich philanthropist heard that and decided to do something about it, a thousand portable toilets would probably come to about a thousand pounds each if you included the chemicals needed maintain them, and that’s a million pounds gone before you charter the plane to get them there, and they are also going to get so ruined under those conditioned that you would be very unlikely to get any kind of return on your investment.

And that’s just partially addressing one problem in one camp, and I wouldn’t even be sure that I’d flown them to the correct country.

No wonder charities struggle. There are so many endless problems in need of so many costly solutions, that you really do begin to wonder whether any of the likes of me, living as we do surrounded by the trappings of the modern world, the computers, the televisions, the washing machines and the flushing toilets and the running water, have the right to dream of getting our hands on a couple of million and blowing it on the trappings of a vacuous lifestyle…

SHARP

I don't know when the world seems to be turning to chaos and madness all around us, and is full of bombs, and shootouts, and explosions, my silly little blog suddenly seems very tame and parochial in comparison to all of that stuff.

In the week of the Thatcher funeral, the Boston Bombing and manhunt, and the explosion in West, Texas, you could find me burbling on about old furniture and writing bad poetry about snow.

Somehow I suspect that I am failing to engage with society and my obsessions have become irrelevant.

I must try to become sharper, wittier, more “cutting edge” and “up-to-the-minute” and altogether more “edgy…” I need to be talking about the things that are happening in the world, even though it’s all far too depressing and there’s already far too many of us “reckoning” about stuff all over the place…

But then… Perhaps we all need a safe haven, somewhere to escape from the mainstream and the continual bombardment of rolling news and instant information about anything and everything which seems to be transforming us very quickly into the most impatient set of human beings ever to walk, run or drive across this sad and over-stretched little planet.

However, I find that I do rather enjoy the stomach-lurching excitement of rolling news occasionally, especially when a big and “important” news story is breaking. I can become a little obsessed with finding out what’s going on and how things have turned out, almost to the point of it transforming into a form of “NewsPorn” for want of a better phrase…

The same old familiar faces trying to feed a population hungry for more information whilst having absolutely nothing new to tell them; The endless hours of speculation and misinformation and repetition and “I reckons” from experts and idiots alike; The quiet desperation of being able to “go over to the weather” or when another news nugget is “just in” and able to be disseminated to the waiting masses, so that we can burble on with our own misguided and ill-informed ideas of what we “reckon” is really going on to anyone who’ll listen…

Boston, 2007

Not that it has any bearing upon anything in particular, but I went to Boston for a week once about half a decade ago… Nice place, although I struggled to find “affordable” eateries outside the harbour area, which is why the strangely named “does what it says on the tin” restaurant of “Legal Seafood” rather ironically positioned quite near to the aquarium became a bit of a favourite.

Perhaps, with this kind of insight and insider knowledge of the workings of the city, I should have been calling up the news stations and offering my expertise upon recent events. After all, they’re constantly asking questions like “Do YOU live in Boston? Have you, or anyone you know, been affected by these events? Do you have pictures or video that you’d like to share…?”

Nah, mate, I’d rather you journalists got away from your laptops and went off and did what you’re paid to do, and find out what’s really going on, rather than getting all of us ill-informed idiots to do your job for you…

Is that sharp enough of me to make my point, do you think…?

LOOK UP!

I know that nowadays most people seem to go into Manchester for the shopping or the concerts or the pubs and clubs, and that’s all well and good if you’re into that sort of thing, but the last time I was there (Saturday April 13th, 2013 - if you were wondering when the pictures were taken...) I didn’t really have anything much to do and I was able to take a step back and look up to a line above the shop fronts and I saw some terrific architecture that tend to spend a lot of time just not being noticed by all the busy people who are far too entranced by the shiny baubles and trinkets on display in the windows at ground level.

If you do have the time, though, it’s worth just taking a moment to look up, because there are some great buildings in Manchester, both modern and dating back to the boom years following the industrial revolution, as opposed to the other boom years which ripped the heart out of the city centre and led to the demise of many of the older buildings.

But there are enough of those fascinating and rather intricate old ones surviving amidst the gleaming glass and steel to give an impressive hint of the old city.

If you just look up…

GUMPTION

One of the things I did see, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say saw and heard, in town recently, and something which I thought must have taken a heck of a lot of gumption, was the girl who stood all alone in St Ann’s Square in the centre of a big city on a Saturday afternoon, belting our operatic arias for the general amusement (or otherwise) of passing strangers.

Strolling around town with that slightly purposeless “I know, I’ll head to a bookshop” air you sometimes have when you’ve been abandoned in favour of a haircut, I turned into the square just as she was finishing singing one, so I only got the last couple of bars, and, to be perfectly honest with you, I’d assumed it must have been some kind of P.A. system until I spotted her standing there all alone at the base of one of the statues.

I paused for a moment, but she stood there for a moment looking slightly awkward before turning around and looking for all the world as if she’d finished for the day, given an attempt at some spontaneous street theatre her very best shot and had decided to give it all up and go off to grow Begonias or something.

Perhaps I ought to explain; “Going off to grow some Begonias” is my own default position for implying that I should perhaps be doing something else rather that whatever it might be that I’m currently doing. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be any better at growing Begonias than I am at any of the other many things I demonstrate supreme inadequacy at doing, but it remains a handy “get out” phrase. For all I know, our budding opera star was also a prize-winning Begonia grower, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

A direct line to something almighty... presumably.

Anyway, as I barged my way through the Saturday shopping crowds towards Waterstones, and passed the very subtle advertising hoarding now almost completely concealing St Ann’s Church, she started singing another, and her voice was both beautiful and breathtaking as it cut through the gabble and the traffic noise of a busy old Saturday lunchtime.

I paused for a moment, as a tear almost formed in my eye at the sheer beauty of her voice and that moment, and I resolved to bung a quid into whatever hat or paper cup she was using to collect her cash in as I headed back in the other direction, but by the time I did that, she had gone, melted back into the crowd, and been replaced by two kids and a beatbox which didn’t have quite the same emotional resonance with me.

You could argue, of course, that if she’s going to be a professional singer one day (assuming that she isn’t already one) that standing up in front of a crowd of strangers is something that she’s going to have to get used to anyway, but I think that it would probably be far more easy to do that in the intimacy of a concert hall than in the high street where the passers-by are less likely to show restraint if they don’t like what it is you’re doing.

The cynic in me, of course, sensed a certain amount of opportunism. After all, was it not one of the “Footballing Cup of the World” tournaments that brought opera to the masses once upon a long ago by blurting out snatches of Nessun Dorma at every opportunity…?

And whilst we’re at it, have they not finally sorted out this Footballing Cup business yet and worked out who’s best at it once and for all...? Looking at it as a bit of an outsider, it seems a very indecisive business to me…

There were a heck of a lot of buskers that day. It must be a sign of the times, I suppose. A chance to use whatever skill it is you might have to amuse and entertain and (hopefully) make a few bob. After all, we all know that times are tough financially, possibly never more so for the students and the other youngsters, so if this is what they choose to do with their Saturdays, and people are prepared to give them a little something for their trouble, then why not? If nothing else, if they are planning upon having a career in the entertainment professions, then it’s probably pretty good experience for them, too.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that, even if I could sing (which I can’t…), I don’t think I’d’ve had the gumption to do something like that. Mind you, I still wonder how the singer in a band has the gumption to stand up in front of his mates and claim to be able sto sing, either… so well done to you if you’ve ever managed to do that, because you’re a far braver soul than I’m ever likely to be…

STROKE…?

It was obvious when you looked at her that something was wrong.

I arrived as a nurse was making the first of three attempts to draw blood from veins which had “blown” and mum was muttering about my sister coming to visit tomorrow and her son being there later. She really wasn’t able to see me as I sat six feet away at the end of the bed letting the professionals do their jobs, even when the nurse asked her “Is this your son?” and I waved, the response was still that I’d be coming later…

As I waited sister came over to speak to me about the fact that sometime earlier in the day, she’d had what they suspected to be a stroke and that they had done some MRI scans earlier which had been “inconclusive” and that she was due to have a (now finally being scheduled) gastroscopy because they needed to know whether the stomach problems she’d been admitted with nine days earlier meant that they couldn’t administer the necessary blood-thinning drugs.

I was being told all this because they had, apparently, been trying to ring my sister to let her know “all afternoon” but there was precious little evidence of this on any of her phones when I rang a few minutes later from the bedside and got through immediately.

Ah well, let’s be kind and say that, in all of the confusion, they perhaps got given an incorrect number…

Once the nurse had finally managed to draw blood and not answer my questions as to whether any of this might have been due to the “lump” mum had discovered in her throat and reported to the staff a couple of days earlier (“We’re waiting for haematology to come and have a look at it…”) I sat down next to the bed and held my mother’s hand.

She was, quite obviously, both very confused and quite distressed, not least from the various needle-pokes that she’d just endured, and I wasn’t really sure whether she was certain about who I was, or where I was, given her current state of partial blindness.

She couldn’t, for example, see me waving my right hand right in front of her face, but could see my left hand as I continued to hold hers with it. She was continuously looking around all the time as if discovering the world around her for the first time and finding it all rather baffling. The same thoughts would come to the forefront of her mind on a two minute cycle and get repeated as if they were occurring to her for the very first time…

And yet, she was still sharp as a tack when it came to the names of certain people who’d been to visit, or facts about their lives… So it was just the “right here, right now” that seemed to be causing problems.

Which is fair enough, I suppose… If I was going through something similar, I think I wouldn’t want to remember it either.

As I said, I did manage to telephone my sister to fill her in on developments, the timing of which were all rather unfortunate as she already had a drive up country to make a visit planned for the very next day. At one point I handed the phone to my mum who spoke to her for a while, but the entire conversation was already forgotten just ten minutes later.

The most heartbreaking thing was that she seemed so very scared to go to sleep that night whilst, at the same time, kept on worrying about whether she’d sleep and kept on repeating “I don’t know what’s going to happen…” and each time that I tried to reassure her, the same thought would pop into her head again shortly afterwards and get her all agitated again. Of course, I couldn’t quite work out whether she was scared to sleep because she thought that she might never wake up, or that she wanted to sleep but was worried that the general levels of noise on the ward would prevent her from doing so.

In the end, after a lot of dithering on my part, I decided that it would be better if I left, partly because I didn’t know what else to do, and partly because I kind of thought that staying might have convinced her that things were far worse than perhaps they were. After all, the staff were already discussing another brain scan in “about two weeks”, so they didn’t appear to have any immediate concerns about her imminent deterioration.

Leaving was very difficult, but I drove home even though I was fully expecting to get there and find that there’d already been a call asking me to urgently return, but that didn’t happen, so instead I just had a long and troubled night wondering about how things are going to unfold.

I dropped by again the following evening and am pleased to be able to say that she seemed a lot brighter, although she is far from being back to normal. We had conversations, and her memory seemed clearer, although her water jug seemed to confuse her a lot, and, although her eyesight is still very feeble, she was making a game attempt to fill in her meal requests for the following day when I arrived.

It’s difficult, really, because, whilst I have found my mother to sometimes be a very frustrating person, and we have sometimes had a very volatile relationship, at this moment I would rather have her like that than as she is now, because it just seems so damned unfair…

GRANDMA'S DRAWERS

I’ve been told recently that I have a tendency to dwell far too much in the past and that I should, perhaps, learn to get go, move on, and generally not brood upon the events of the long past, even though those same events are the ones that shaped me into the twisted and deformed creature I am nowadays, and that their effects are still resonating through me even now.

With that in mind, however, perhaps I do need to admit that it is at least possible that I’ve broken a few of my own rules recently; Simple, homespun fare like “Don’t blog angry” - stuff like that – and that the dark thoughts in my mind have been manifesting themselves in my words and twisting them in spiteful and virulent ways to make these pages a much more scary and downright hostile place to visit.

Well, it’s not for nothing that I call this a DARK corner of Lesser Blogfordshire, even though I sometimes forget the “dark” part and try to keep things light and frothy, but no-one could really ever say that they weren’t warned, and sometimes the strange mish-mash of ideas and events going on in my little world collide to produce the following smorgasbord of mixed thoughts, none of which mean much individually, but as a gestalt entity, possibly add up to slightly more…

Meanwhile, continuing with our loose recent theme of trying to let go of the past and embracing the future (what do you mean “you hadn’t noticed”…? Have you not been paying attention…?), here’s a picture of a set of drawers which I remember belonging to my grandmother back in the day. I vividly recall them sitting inside one of the fitted wardrobes in the second house my grandfather designed and built as if it was the only place they could think of putting them after they’d moved in.

The drawers used to smell of lavender and have old sheets of wrapping paper in the bottom of  each of them , presumably to protect something or other, and there’s a sheet of thickish glass cut to size that sits on the top of them to protect the surface, I suppose, although all I really remember is that they used to sandwich a doily between the two for no very good reason.

Anyway, it’s another piece of old furniture now on its way to charity as it has outlasted its usefulness in Blogfordshire Towers, but I thought that its passing needed noting.

Talking of drawers, I arrived at work the other day to find that the shutters were open, so I let myself in and busied myself with the most vital first task of the working day; boiling the kettle to make my coffee. By the time I had unpacked my stuff and was heading with my mug towards the kitchen, the shutters had been closed and I was shut inside the building, but by the time I had boiled the kettle, shoved the milk, the Instant and the hot water into my mug and was on my way back to my desk, someone else had arrived and opened them up again, none of these people having been remotely aware, I suspect, that I was busily brewing up inside.

Strangely enough, the first thought that popped into my mind after all this had been going on was “Those shutters are going up and down like a tart’s drawers this morning!” which might not be the most politically correct thought that I’ve ever had but perhaps merely proves that I watched far too much of “The Sweeney” when I was younger.

And finally, when we talk of things passing and “embracing the future”, it’s probably worth me adding the following comment which I posted in reply to someone else’s post-funeral blog after the final journey of the Baroness last Wednesday.

Whilst I was never a huge fan of Mrs T – my own thoughts upon her passing slipped almost unregarded into a particularly dark corner of Lesser Blogfordshire last week – I still think that it’s “right” and “proper” to respect the office of the Prime Minister, even if you didn’t particularly respect the person who once held that office.

After all, whilst there seem to be few who regard George W Bush as the finest President the United States ever had, you can be damned certain that, when the time comes, he’ll be seen off with all the due pomp and circumstance that that country gives to all of its former leaders, whatever their party, so why shouldn’t we do the same for ours?

THE MEMORY OF SNOW

I am far, far too exhausted to be able to dredge up any meaningful or even meaningless thoughts for you today, so instead, here’s a picture of some snow to remind us all just how cold it got recently, in April for Pete’s sake...!

It’s only a week or two ago,

But now sunlight warms our faces

We should try not to forget

The memory of snow.

The bitter cold and harshness

The slipping and the slide

The digging and the driving

Which is the reality of snow.

Winter begins to deliquesce,

And melts into Spring,

Bringing with it new life,

And just the memory of snow.