Apologies for not writing more frequently. I’ve been agonizing (as only someone with nothing dreadfully important to do can) over a thing I’m writing for a games convention at the weekend and dithering as only an aged gentleman can.
But I have to share with you more news of my incompetence.
I acquired a while back a walking stick. One of Boots’ finest products, a three part steel tube that can be folded away, with the intention of using it to compensate for The Pain In My Right Foot, a condition that seems to dominate my days at the moment.
I’ve had it for nigh on six months or more now (the stick not the pain: the pain is nearer fourteen months) and just today I discovered (from making a sarky remark about walking sticks not coming with instruction manuals) that I’d been using it wrong all this time.
According to this training video on the NHS website I’m supposed to be using it on the left side of my body, not the right. This strikes me as counterintuitive: I’m trying to get the weight off my right foot and using the stick to bear the weight on that side seemed the obvious way to do it. Seems not.
I tried doing it the other way today… Either it made no difference or made it slightly worse. Perhaps I haven’t got the knack of it yet… Or perhaps I’m a perverse old bugger and will just have to go back to the way I was doing it before.
I had been congratulating myself on noticing the walking stick and crutch users much more since I became one myself. But obviously, as Sherlock Holmes says to Dr Watson, I see but I do not observe. Or maybe most of them are doing it the wrong way too.
Still no sign of an appointment from the foot specialist yet. Grump.
I hate getting up early in the morning so I tend to be cranky when young women ring up and want to Make Appointments for me. These always seem to require an early start. I’m even curt with the people from my doctor’s surgery (“You want to drag me all the way up to Cressex? Can’t you book me into the surgery five minutes walk from my front door? It’s why I registered with you!”) and they are presumed to be trying to do me good. So the young lady who called up last week from the water company (I nearly wrote ‘the Water Board’ which is showing my age) got the full Grumpy Old Git treatment. I let myself be persuaded partly out of awareness that I was being needlessly disagreeable and partly because she was wanting to send someone round to check for leaks and ways of saving water. I found my hypochondria extended to water related matters and if I didn’t have the check done I’d worry.
A Nice Young Man came round this morning and asked me a lot of questions before fitting a device to my ball-cock that would retrofit the loo to do either a full flush or a short one just like more modern toilets. He took out the bag of water absorbing gel that was the last New Fashionable Gadget to try to reduce consumption. I wonder what will replace this one and whether I will be around to see it.
He also left me an hourglass/egg timer thing which was supposed to encourage me to take less time in the shower. (See picture.) I balked at this and told him loudly that I was Retired, Dammit! I wasn’t watching any sort of timing device any longer and certainly not a four minute one.
And then I asked him (we’re getting to the point of this story now: be patient) whether he ever got those recurring dreams in which he found himself back in school, having to do it all over again. I was leading up to my explaining that when I retired my recurring dreams shifted from going back to school to having to go back to work.
And to my astonishment he said no, he’d never had dreams like that! All his dreams were focused on the future not the past! I was that astonished. I nearly lost it entirely, the smug young bugger! How dare he go around being all positive and focused! A little angst and worry would do him good!
(Seriously, I’ve never encountered someone who didn’t get that dream before. Well apart from Hartley Patterson whose dreamscape is seriously weird and deserves an investigation by someone who is in need of a PhD topic.)
I’m up early again tomorrow too to go up to the surgery in the Cressex to have a twenty-four hour blood pressure monitor fitted. I hope that it will show that the daily gym sessions I’ve been doing for the past week are helping. They certainly aren’t having any effect on my weight yet but I’m feeling a lot less seedy than I did before taking up raising my heart rate under controlled circumstances every day.
I find that playing the Grenadier Guards Band’s version of Sousa marches works best to keep me going on the rowing machine and the exercise bike. THE THUNDERER, LIBERTY BELL and EL CAPITAN make you really want to push on up that simulated hill.
And I received today something I’d been looking forward to a lot: my copies of the print version of the web comic NARBONIC which I Kickstarted some considerable time ago. Already re-reading the stories of Mad Science and True Love is keeping me from doing things I really ought to be doing.
In the TIMES today the big headline is about Michael Foot.
Yes, him. The chap who wore a donkey jacket at the Cenotaph and got horridly criticised for it. The caretaker leader of the Labour Party after the defeat of 1979 and through the early Thatcher years. Chap who lost the 1983 election.
Why yes, imagined reader, he is dead. Has been for eight years and he had been out of public life for some time before that. So this isn’t ‘Michael Foot is dead’.
It’s ‘Michael Foot was a Soviet agent’. Oh, boy.
It isn’t exactly astounding proof if you read the first paragraph (and that’s all I did as I passed by in Sainsbury’s). What we have is a Big Thick Book that the TIMES is pushing by an ex-MI6 chap saying that they (or at least he) thought that Foot had been a dupe but a dupe that accepted money from the Russians and therefore totally unsuited to become PM and that MI6 had issued Solemn Warnings when it looked like people might be so foolish as to vote Labour into power.
I bet you didn’t know this but it seems that issuing Solemn Warnings is one of MI6’s duties under our unwritten constitution. I don’t know what the recipients are supposed to do with them.
Now leaving aside the fact that 5 and 6 were always seeing Soviet agents everywhere except where they were subsequently proved to be why is this a headline now? It’s not even a new allegation: the SUNDAY TIMES tried publishing it while he was still alive and got successfully sued for it, a fact today’s story tries hard to make sound scandalous.
The answer to this makes me worry about my mental stability. It looks very like a propaganda exercise to tar the current Labour leadership with the same brush. I used to believe that people in serious positions of power didn’t play such childish games but in my old age I’m starting to believe the sort of conspiracy theories that I used to despise.
It’s me for the tinfoil hat soon.
Would people pretty, pretty please do something to restore my faith in human nature soon? Before I suffer any more stress and start self-publishing my book that contains infallible advice that all the governments of the world must follow to save the species. I am starting to believe I’m the smartest one on the planet and that can’t be healthy.
Those of you who know me and especially those of you who see me on a regular basis will know that for the past (ye gods! Can it be that long? Yes it must…) thirteen months I’ve been complaining about what has gone wrong with my right foot.
Basically, it has been hurting to walk on it and this has limited my mobility and the amount of exercise I can take. Where before I could walk all the way up Amersham Hill in the morning and all the way around the park twice in the afternoon now it’s all I can do to totter to the supermarket once a day and take the bus back. I use a walking stick and must remember to keep myself in paracetamol. (Any stronger painkillers give me constipation so they’re right out.)
I’ve had physiotherapy consultations, steroid injections into my heel (twice) and to be fair the pain has lessened but not enough to restore my quondam (1)mobility. There’s a consultation with a Big Time Doctor coming up but my case was marked ‘non-urgent’ so I’m still waiting.
And this has had bad effects on my general health. My weight has increased, my blood pressure is up (though the practice nurse is resistant to upping my medication because she thinks it might be due to my being in pain!) and I am feeling generally seedy.
You know me: I have both laziness and a tendency to assume the worst but I have finally decided to do something about this! I bought a day membership today for the Gym they have built at the back of where Woolworth’s used to be and popped in to discover what exercise machines they have which will not put a strain on my instep. The treadmills and the stairmasters are right out and I don’t think the peculiar combination thing with the levers is any better but the exercycles and the rowing machine don’t seem to stress me too much.
I fell out of the habit of using the gym in a fit of stinginess a few years back and if I hadn’t I’d probably be a lot fitter now than I actually am. Anyway I can fool myself into thinking £18.99 a month is a bargain because it’s ten quid less than I was paying at the Lido.
The Lido gym, parenthetically (2), had a view out over the swimming pool and this cheered my aging heart when I could ogle the young women in their bathing suits below. Not that the new gym has any lack of female pulchritude but I’m going to have to keep reminding myself that I am not many yards away and behind a glass window from the bottoms of the young ladies and I should not be creepy.
Anyway, the new place is on my route to the supermarkets so if I can work in a half-hour there nearly every day it may make a difference. Build up slow, Michael, remember about cool-down periods and only move on to the more complicated looking machines once ten minutes on the rowing machine doesn’t entirely knacker you.
All encouragement gratefully received! I’m only posting this so I’ll know that there’s someone somewhere I’m disappointing by failing to keep up my resolutions.
(1) Is that too much vocabulary?
(2) Again, am I overdoing the florid old actor-laddy dialogue?
I started this blog on the instructions advice of my friend Lindy. Lindy is one of the people who have known me longest: we were in primary school together. Therefore she knows my indolent and disorganised character all too well. She is full of activity, volunteering, being fit, writing and performing. She is all of three months younger than me and makes me feel very much older.
Lindy had encouraged me to enter a writing competition for a site that was seeking new volumes of essays. I managed to get shortlisted (1) which persuaded Lindy that the essay was my forte. Start a blog, Michael! Write frequently Michael!
I nodded. So here we are. There follows a brief bit of special pleading about why I’m not doing this more often.
Much of my web output at the moment is on a site called QUORA which is a general purpose Question-and-Answer site where I find time to spread my enlightenment and wisdom on many subjects, contemporary and historical, literary and political, philosophical and comic-book related.
It astounds me how much I know sometimes.
I was naturally pleased when one of my friends at my Wednesday night RPG (2) group said he had found me answering a question he was interested in managed to absorb several hours he won’t have back again diving into my content. I am now one of their ‘top writers’ (it says here) and if that impresses you, then you are the first of my acquaintance to be so moved.
I get to Quora about an hour into my morning ramble around the internet, sometime before I go for my daily walk and shop. It can then take up several hours of my day. I can answer interesting questions or stupid questions. I can argue with people who are Wrong On The Internet to my heart’s content and they can reply and tell me how I’m wrong. For a cranky old gentleman it’s a god-send though possibly not good for my blood pressure overall.
You too could put the world to rights. God knows, there’s a lot of it needs a proper seeing to.
And if you are feeling less cranky than I usually do you could help the kids with their homework. You can generally tell when they have cut and pasted their essay topics into Quora. If I actually find it to be a good question then I answer it anyway. What puzzles me are the people who would get a perfectly good answer if they just pasted the same question into Google.
I do get a little paranoid about the social media side of it. There are a lot of questions that are intended to stir things up rather than gather information. The Russian government (or posters indistinguishable from Russian paid trolls) seems to be very active whenever the slightest criticism of them: I expect them to be out in force over the naming of the two Novichok poisoners.
And there are a lot of questions that seem to have been written by badly programmed software. My leading theory is that it’s the equivalent of the agony column messages that in the last century were used to pass code alerts to secret agents.
Anyway that is my current excuse for why there is not more material in my blog.
(1) Note to self: Pad this blog with the stuff you wrote for the competition.
(2) that’s role-playing games not Rocket Propelled Grenades
It’s cold wet Bank Holiday Sunday in High Wycombe. The rain is coming down in buckets and I’ve dragged some frozen chili out of the fridge to ensure I don’t have to go shopping today, closed the windows and put some home-made bread in the oven. Only a week or so ago I was having to take a shower before I went to bed to get through the humid sweaty nights but now the English weather has worked its obnoxious miracle and I’m thinking that soon it will be time to turn the heaters back on after their summer break and start digging out wooly tops.
It was a pleasant autumnal day, the August Bank Holiday weekend twenty four years ago and the woods (Burnham Beeches I think) were looking particularly lovely as we drove to the hospital where my father had been taken, for the last visits just before and just after he passed away.
He had been complaining for several months before that he had felt something peculiar happen in the left side of his head. He said it felt as if something had ‘gone click’ behind his eye and he told all the doctors he could get to about it but they could see nothing abnormal. I often wonder if we had MRIs commonly available then whether they would have spotted anything.
He was also under unusual strain the Friday before he died. He had been summoned to court on a charge of careless driving, a thing that had never happened to him before and which I was never sure was justified then or after. He had been in a near collision at a tricky junction and the other driver was determined that it was all my dad’s fault.
Dad was a worrier and he let himself worry himself into a right state. He had gone to have his hair cut that morning and when he returned home he was standing in the living room when he said to my mum “I think I’m having a stroke” and fell full length on the floor.
I had, at last, moved out of the family home earlier that summer, to a council flat a few miles away. Dad had, of course, tried to take over the project, getting involved in a way that spoke volumes about how much he assumed I’d cock things up. We had quarrelled as we often did.
So I wasn’t there and Mum had got things together so well that she had Dad in the hospital and under care before she bothered to ring me and my brother to let us know. Her first call was full of optimism. Dad wasn’t dead and she’d spoken to him when he came around. There were some problems with his speech but people recovered from that with care and therapy.
But by the time the family had gathered to visit him that evening he had undergone another stroke. He knew us and understood us but wasn’t speaking.
On the Saturday he got seen by the doctor who had been treating him long term for his diabetes and he gave my mum, my brother and me the clear and definitive Word. The damage done by the first rupture in his brain (behind the left eye somewhere, oh yes) had led to further damage being done later and we could expect to see him leave us soon.
By now he very nearly unaware of our presence. He had slipped further when we went to see him Sunday morning and after we drove back to the family home the call came that he had gone.
It is the details that stay with me, rather than any great meaning. The doctor saying that he had seen this sort of progression with his own father (and me wondering if that was true or just a good line in reassurance), the trees turning golden as they underwent their yearly death, the last time Dad smiled at us, a rather rueful smile, my sister in law being the most tearful of us all.
I can’t just now find the poem I wrote for him afterwards, an apology, however partial for my churlishness in our last days together. He is still with me in my dreams and memory until I too go down into the darkness. Which I always worry will be sooner than I think when I get a pain in my left sinus and think: “Is today the day I feel ‘something go click’ there?”
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The picture above is Middle Pond at Burnham Beeches.
Those of you who are aware of the best body of writing that recent years have produced (I refer to the works of the late Sir Terence John Pratchett) will pick up the title of this new blog of mine in an instant.
That fortunate few will recognise that ‘room3b’ is the entirely fictional lecture room in which all classes at Unseen University take place. Members of the faculty dozing in their armchairs are said to be ‘asleep in room3b’. Their actual attendance would be counterproductive. Experimentation indicates that students pick up knowledge by a form of osmosis rather than by being talked at, a discovery that I wish my university had a clearer grasp of.
I’ve used ‘room3b’ as a tag for my on-line presence for a while and I see no need to change it now.
This will be for things I want to write about on various days, since I find I need a place to pontificate and I don’t want to give the copyright of all my words of wisdom to FACEBOOK.
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The picture above is the arms of the late Sir Terry. Don’t worry: not all of my material will be Discworld related. Even though the first full post will have an off-screen cameo by one of his leading characters.
Asleep in Room3b 