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25 octobre Daft bugger You Tube Music Video to read along to - LAZY, Deep Purple
My mother doesn't have skin cancer. I spent the day with her today, driving her to the hospital to find out, and though she was stoical as ever (having been told by her family doctor that it was definitely malignant), she is a different woman now, dozing in an armchair, all the carefully held in tension released in a nice hot cup of tea.
Me on the other hand. Well. Mum asked me to take her because I am 'sensible' and won't 'fuss', but she didn't figure on either my current mood or the feelings it triggered. We sat side by side in the waiting room - everyone sneaking little looks around and wondering what was wrong with everyone else. There was a really handsome guy in the corner, nibbling his nails but looking otherwise very healthy, and next to him a tiny old lady in a wheelchair. She was about the size of a herring gull with the same bright beady eyes and pure white plumage. She smiled constantly, occasionally glancing curiously at my i-pod nano - which is about the size of a Nice biscuit - and the wires leading from it to my ears. I had put the thing on shuffle as both a distraction and as an oracular force. Currently it was giving me 'Lazy' by Deep Purple with both barrels which was the first thing to make me twitch for days. It was strange watching the doctors and nurses and the stream of patients to the backgroud of Deep Purple but I do recommend it.
Going through my mind were thoughts of death and abandonment. I had the same old feeling in the pit of my stomach that I suddenly recognised from before when I lost another parent, and I didn't like it. I was calm. I was sensible. I didnt fuss, but inside I was low, and I was as low as a woodlouse's gentialia before I heard about all this. I looked at mum's face next to me while some Irish music started up in my ears. It was half an hour after the scheduled appointment, but that's not bad. They took the bird lady in while I ran over how we would deal with what was to come next, thought about how very much I loathe hospitals, tried to conjure up the ghostly image of Dad leaning against one of the doors in his white coat, and then it was mum's turn and we went in.
The consultant looked younger than me. A woman with thick dark hair and green shoes. She smiled at mum and said, 'I see that Dr. Wilson has asked you to come and see me about the lesion on your face...' and mum said, 'Yes. That's right. I know its malignant isn't it. Dr. Wilson told me.' and then the consultant said 'No. Its not malignant. It's fine. I can tell just by looking.' and dear old mum looked almost cheated for a moment before saying, 'Oh! Oh really? How do you know?' Bless her. The doctor just smiled and said it was what she did all day, and that she was quite sure, and then she talked about what mum wanted to do about the unnattractive thing before we went out and had a cup of tea in the canteen while Spartacus played in my ears.
I did some shopping afterwards, still haunted by the niggling nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach. I haven't felt too well for a week now, and my throat is not right. I wondered maybe I had something sinister and terminal. I couldn't get it out of my head. Like some silly old woman I fussed and fiddled with it all round the shops..
'Try some mulled wine Sir?'
'No. No thank you.' (are you fucking joking? Apart from the fact its only October, why would I want mulled wine when I may have a serious disease?? Don't you realise how stupid it is wasting your life flogging mulled wine in a shopping centre when we're all going to die???!)
I went home and made a doctor's appointment for the morning. Mum said the worrying had tired her out and she settled with a cup of tea while I went upstairs to write this - to record what a limp-arsed idiot I truly am, and how glad I am that mum's initial diagnosis was wrong. When we came out of the hospital, the sky was leaden grey and dribbling rain. It was cold and the traffic was backed up. 'Ohh,' said mum - 'What a horrible day.' then, 'Actually, no - no it isn't - it's a WONDERFUL day' and she smiled again, properly this time.
I'm the one who feels as strained as an old teabag and just Tired,tired,tired,tired,tired.
15 octobre TreesYou tube video to read along with - Kate Rusby, Fare thee well (Growing up)
I was thinking about something today, and read this post of Jorge's. It fed the thought, and here it is:
When I was quite young, my aunt lived in a house near Esher. She had a wild garden with some interesting plants - my favourites being three apple trees up near the house. It was my game to climb into these trees, and make them, in my head, into a city. I'd climb around from branch to branch, chattting to unseen companions and fighting wars from the 'walkways'.
One day - perhaps I grew a little too big for the apple trees - I scrambled down and approached 'The Silver Birch'. This tree deserved its capital letters. It was a great king of trees, tall and straight as a ship's mast and home to birds and squirrels who rambled around listening to the the incessant whisperings of the wind in the long skeins of leaves. Well. This day without thinking, I tried as I had before to reach the lowest level of branches and found I'd mysteriously grown tall enough to reach them.
I climbed. First of all just up to a sturdy branch where I could sit and look down onto the tops of the apple trees, and then I turned round and climbed some more. I was heading for the crows nest, up in a windy sky where the wind was spraying me with salt and the ship was pitching into sparkling waters. I climbed until the branches became too thin to risk going any further, and then I perched on a branch, arms round the trunk, and looked around.
Isn't it great to be a child? Even now I can remember the feeling of utter joy and achievement as I sat in that tree with the ground so very far beneath me and the feel of the wind on my face. I was utterly unafraid, and I was bursting for someone to see me, so I called .....
'Muuuuuuuuuum........ Daaaaaaaaaaad.......... come and see where I am!'
After a long time, I saw people below me in the garden. They were looking for me - on the ground, in the apple trees, in the shed, anywhere but up, so I called again:
'Whooohooooo....... look where I am!'
And then they saw me.
Mum screamed; my uncle went to the foot of the tree, shading his eyes while he looked up. 'Be careful!' he shouted, 'Don't move!'
Mum was calling my dad, 'Oh my God,,,have you seen how high......... what if he falls?? Don't move!'
Suddenly I was afraid. Looking down, It came to me that going vertically down again would not be as easy as going up. My hands on the trunk began to sweat, I began to doubt. If the adults were scared, maybe I should be?
I can't remember much about getting down. Something about ladders and people coming up to meet me, gripping my feet and guiding my hands. I only remember how disappointed I was. I remember the first stirring of doubt and fear intruding on the magic of the moment, I remember that once down, I looked back up the tree and felt a fear that hadn't been there before. I had been robbed.
Of course - it was adults who had been there before me. Adults who saw only broken spines and loss; who knew more than I did about how the seemingly safe and certain can turn on you in an instant; about how fragile our happiness can be.
For me, I still feel the loss of that moment in the tree - that feeling of certainty, that nothing could possibly go wrong, that I could do anything, be anything.
Life has taught me, along with most others, the facts of life since then, and another thing I remember is that when some of the worst times were over and things were at peace again, the thing I valued most of all was that peace. Just to go to bed easy and get up again calm. Just to be alive when the wind is hurling you along a seafront, or the salt is whipping up from some small cliffs along a rocky coast, throwing rainbows into the blue air. Just to be loved, to be whole. What else really matters?
I'm still afraid because I've seen what comes, and I don't want to be.
I keep forgetting the only things that really matter, and I'm sorry for that.
This is a translation of the Forough Farrokhzad poem 'The Wind Will Carry Us' In my small night, alas, Listen. Now something is happening in the night The clouds have gathered like a bunch of mourners A moment Oh you who are so verdant ******** 4 octobre Had it you tube video - The beast in me.
Today for the first time, I felt like handing in my notice and going on the game or something less stressful. Is there anything in the world more dispiriting than trying to teach kids who don't want to know. Who come in wanting to do battle, who come in screaming and fighting, put their feet up on the desks, pull out i-pods and make up and think you are out of order to want to start a lesson when they are trying to have a conversation? I helped out a colleague today in a sink maths group of twelve kids who were like that. Twenty minutes after the lesson should have started they were still not ready. Two were running round the room, one was shouting out of the window to a friend, one was yelling at the teacher because he thought he was there to discuss his girlfriends arse instead of trying to bump his grades up to a level D.
'Will you sit down and let me start!' the maths teacher said, losing her cool.
'Whaaaat? I don' 'ave my book!'
'Why not?'
'I dunno, this is fucking boring anyway'
'If you think it's boring and you want to fail, fine. Will you let others work'
boy shouting - 'WHO IN HERE WANTS TO WORK?? NOBODY SEE NOW GET OUT OF MY FACE!'
Why do we bother? Why do I care about people who don't care? Who are proud to be ignorant and semi-literate? Who can insult me and abuse me but I cannot reply? Why do I do this? Today I felt like kicking their arses and telling them to shut up and sit down, that they were going to leave school unable to count or spell, and as ignorant as rocks. What stops me is knowing that they know that, and they don't even care.
Today, in over an hour, this is what one student wrote under the title 'All about me' after five spoon-fed lessons:
my name is ****** I live in **** wen I was five my dad leave and my mum I go toschool and I hate it and evywere is shit I dont like dooing n e thing becos it boreing
literally.
I've had it today.
A quiet night on the mountain. Owain makes a line from one side to the other, treading the same track. Behind him come the cows in a solid phalanx. Their sides are warm slabs of hillside you can rest your head on, their feet splayed like those of old ladies in too small shoes - farming ladies going across the granite to a dance at Porley Head. Glamour is a satin headscarf and, underneath the wellies, a pair of stockings.
Owain composes a poem to Myfanwy about owls and setting the lamps alone when dusk sets in. 'You left me,' Owain muses, 'so why will you not leave me?' Myfanwy's presence is the damp in the morning, and the shadow over the trees at night. Owain watches the shadows crowd the branches as he heaves open the barn door; hears them slipping in beside the big-arsed mountain cattle.
In the barn he knows the owls are there by the little bone parcels they leave on their crowdy beams. Owain takes them apart with his strong fingers and picks over the remants of the little lives - tiny leg bones, miniature skulls like eggshells. This is a small and simple ending - wrapped in gentle packaging and deposited where they bother no one.
As a child, Owain liked to try and identify the owl's dinner - but now he is grown, he sees his own bones in the hands of God, crumbled. Owain has lost his taste for God. Owain and the devil dance together on the hilltop juggling bones, laying out the bodies of the winter lambs lost to the snow. Owain's body is as cold as the inside of a flint nugget.
And so is mine right now. Forgive me for rambling. |
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