It's been 5 years since anybody I was close to died, but I was kind of due for a respite. When I was 18 to 19 three close friends, my grandmother and my aunt died over two years, I sort of held my breath for a couple of years after that waiting for something else to happen.
I had forgotten you see, what I'm like when I'm dealing with something like this, and I have had no experience of dealing with it and having to work full time at the same time, painting a smile on every morning and all the while combating an aching sadness that seems to seep out of your chest, into your stomach and leave you stuck for words in very inopportune moments. I find that I either talk a lot, I mean, an awful lot, I seem to have to fill every minute with dialogue so that I can think about anything else but the thing which fills my brain, or I am totally disabled, I literally cannot make a single decision. Take last night, I went to Ikea to collect some living room furniture that (luckily) we had already decided on, and talked every single second of the hour or so we spent there, I talked about work, TV cabinets, Glenn, my mother, my grandparents, my weight, the mirror we've put in the bedroom, the car, it just went on and on and on. Then later at home, I couldn't decide whether or not to go to bed, I sat on the sofa at 11.15 and could not decide whether I should go to bed and try to sleep, or stay up and wait until I knew I could definately sleep, would I risk getting overtired if I did that? Would I spend hours lying awake if I went to bed? So I just sat there for about an hour, no TV on, just sitting and wondering what I should do, until finally Glenn came downstairs, I explained my predicament to him and he gently but firmly told me to go to bed.
So today was Uncle John's funeral and as someone said to me, it would be nice to think of funerals as celebrations of a persons life but there is so much emotion involved that it's very hard not to feel that pressure on your chest, weighing you down as you try and make cups of tea which people push a spoon around and watch their tears fall into. I looked through the photo albums of him as a young man on his wedding day and spent 20 minutes trying to decide whether I should sit down or not.
It's over now though, so eventually I expect I can start to feel like a normal person again, rather than a loose parcel which might fall apart if anyone pulls on the the strings too hard.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
All I wanted was a nice photograph of the two of us.....
... but apparently, Glenn finds it impossible to take it seriously. So instead of a nice photograph of the two of us, I have a dubious photograph of myself and a bug eyed drunk, possibly under the influence of non prescription drugs.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Untitled
My Uncle John passed away this afternoon at 5pm. He was old and had been ill for sometime. His wife, Aunty Chenda, died four years ago and he had become a shadow of the man he had been.
I've spent the last hour trying to find a poem to post as a sort of tribute to him so I can stop thinking about how incredibly sad it is, maybe I'll be able to find one in a few days but as I sit here now nothing seems to do him justice.
He was the kind of hard working man who won't be remembered by anybody except those who loved him and those who he loved, but we are many, and we will always remember him.
I've spent the last hour trying to find a poem to post as a sort of tribute to him so I can stop thinking about how incredibly sad it is, maybe I'll be able to find one in a few days but as I sit here now nothing seems to do him justice.
He was the kind of hard working man who won't be remembered by anybody except those who loved him and those who he loved, but we are many, and we will always remember him.
SYMPTOMS OF BEING OVER 25
1. You leave clubs before the end to "beat the rush".
2. You get more excited about having a roast on a Sunday than going clubbing.
3. You stop dreaming of becoming a professional footballer and start dreaming of having a son who might instead.
4. Before throwing the local paper away, you look through the property section.
5. You prefer Later with Jools Holland to Top of the Pops.
6. All of a sudden, Tony Blair is not 46, he's only 46.
7. Before going out anywhere, you ask what the parking is like.
8. Rather than throw a knackered pair of trainers out, you keep them because they'll be all right for the garden.
9. You buy your first ever T-shirt without anything written on it.
10. Instead of laughing at the innovations catalogue that falls out of thenewspaper, you suddenly see both the benefit and money saving properties ofa plastic winter cover for your garden bench and an electronic molerepellent for the lawn. Not to mention the plastic man for the car to deterwould-be thieves.
11. You start to worry about your parents' health.
12. You complain that ecstasy's "not as pure as it used to be coz you know that if you have some it will take about 48 hours to recover and anyway,you might look a bit of an idiot.
13. Sure, you have more disposable income, but everything you want to buycosts between 200 and 500 quid.
14. You don't get funny looks when you buy a Disney video or a Wallace and Gromit bubble bath, as the sales assistant assumes they are for your child.
15. All Pop music starts to sound crap.
16. You opt for Pizza Express over Pizza Hut because they don't have anypictures on the menus and anyway, they do a really nice half-bottle ofhouse white.
17. You become powerless to resist the lure of self-assembly furniture.
18. You always have enough milk in.19. To compensate for the fact that you have little desire to go clubbing,you instead frequent really loud tapas restaurants and franchise pubs with wacky names in the mistaken belief that you have not turned into your parents.
20. While flicking through the TV channels, you happen upon C4's Time Teamwith Tony Robinson. You get drawn in.
21. The benefits of a pension scheme become clear.
22. You go out of your way to pick up a colour chart from B&Q.
23. You wish you had a shed.
24. You have a shed.
25. You actually find yourself saying "They don't make 'em like thatanymore" and "I remember when there were only 3 TV channels" and "Ofcourse??in my day...."
26. Radio 2 play more songs you know than Radio 1 -and Jimmy Young has somereally interesting guests on.
27. Instead of tutting at old people who take ages to get off the bus, youtut at schoolchildren whose diction is poor.
28. When sitting outside a pub you become envious of their hanging baskets.
29. You make an effort to be in and out of the curry house by 11.
30. You come face to face with your own mortality for the first time, and the indestructibility of the 20s gives way to a realisation that you are but passing through this life and if you don't settle down soon and have kids you'll have no-one to look after you when you're old and frail and incontinent and you can't go on pissing your life up against a wall forever and think of how many brain cells you're destroying every time a swift half turns into 10 pints, and look at that, a full set of stainless steel saucepans for 99 quid, they cost as much as 35 each if you buy them separately, and you get a milk pan thrown in, ...
31. You find yourself saying "is it cold in here or is it just me?"
2. You get more excited about having a roast on a Sunday than going clubbing.
3. You stop dreaming of becoming a professional footballer and start dreaming of having a son who might instead.
4. Before throwing the local paper away, you look through the property section.
5. You prefer Later with Jools Holland to Top of the Pops.
6. All of a sudden, Tony Blair is not 46, he's only 46.
7. Before going out anywhere, you ask what the parking is like.
8. Rather than throw a knackered pair of trainers out, you keep them because they'll be all right for the garden.
9. You buy your first ever T-shirt without anything written on it.
10. Instead of laughing at the innovations catalogue that falls out of thenewspaper, you suddenly see both the benefit and money saving properties ofa plastic winter cover for your garden bench and an electronic molerepellent for the lawn. Not to mention the plastic man for the car to deterwould-be thieves.
11. You start to worry about your parents' health.
12. You complain that ecstasy's "not as pure as it used to be coz you know that if you have some it will take about 48 hours to recover and anyway,you might look a bit of an idiot.
13. Sure, you have more disposable income, but everything you want to buycosts between 200 and 500 quid.
14. You don't get funny looks when you buy a Disney video or a Wallace and Gromit bubble bath, as the sales assistant assumes they are for your child.
15. All Pop music starts to sound crap.
16. You opt for Pizza Express over Pizza Hut because they don't have anypictures on the menus and anyway, they do a really nice half-bottle ofhouse white.
17. You become powerless to resist the lure of self-assembly furniture.
18. You always have enough milk in.19. To compensate for the fact that you have little desire to go clubbing,you instead frequent really loud tapas restaurants and franchise pubs with wacky names in the mistaken belief that you have not turned into your parents.
20. While flicking through the TV channels, you happen upon C4's Time Teamwith Tony Robinson. You get drawn in.
21. The benefits of a pension scheme become clear.
22. You go out of your way to pick up a colour chart from B&Q.
23. You wish you had a shed.
24. You have a shed.
25. You actually find yourself saying "They don't make 'em like thatanymore" and "I remember when there were only 3 TV channels" and "Ofcourse??in my day...."
26. Radio 2 play more songs you know than Radio 1 -and Jimmy Young has somereally interesting guests on.
27. Instead of tutting at old people who take ages to get off the bus, youtut at schoolchildren whose diction is poor.
28. When sitting outside a pub you become envious of their hanging baskets.
29. You make an effort to be in and out of the curry house by 11.
30. You come face to face with your own mortality for the first time, and the indestructibility of the 20s gives way to a realisation that you are but passing through this life and if you don't settle down soon and have kids you'll have no-one to look after you when you're old and frail and incontinent and you can't go on pissing your life up against a wall forever and think of how many brain cells you're destroying every time a swift half turns into 10 pints, and look at that, a full set of stainless steel saucepans for 99 quid, they cost as much as 35 each if you buy them separately, and you get a milk pan thrown in, ...
31. You find yourself saying "is it cold in here or is it just me?"
The Great Gym Con
To join LA Fitness on the two for one premium package, you have to pay a month up front (£60), a per person admin charge ( totalling £50) and then pay another month (£60, which you get back when you leave but I'll be damned if I'll pay what is essentially a £60 deposit), so to join would cost us £170.
£170!!!!!!!
So I think we're going to give it a miss and I'll use the local pool and hotel gyms. Because I do not have many hundreds of pounds that I can just hand out to places in return for making me feel rubbish when I don't go.
£170!!!!!!!!!
Aren't these places supposed to sell you this service? Aren't they supposed to tell you you can join for practically nothing and then make money with sort of hidden costs like £1 to use a locker and £5 for a towel and £15 for a gym bag and stuff like that. Because if they did that, but let me join for nothing, I would feel so much better about spending almost £200 on feeling guilty when I don't go, because I wouldn't know that I was spending it.
Criminals.
£170!!!!!!!
So I think we're going to give it a miss and I'll use the local pool and hotel gyms. Because I do not have many hundreds of pounds that I can just hand out to places in return for making me feel rubbish when I don't go.
£170!!!!!!!!!
Aren't these places supposed to sell you this service? Aren't they supposed to tell you you can join for practically nothing and then make money with sort of hidden costs like £1 to use a locker and £5 for a towel and £15 for a gym bag and stuff like that. Because if they did that, but let me join for nothing, I would feel so much better about spending almost £200 on feeling guilty when I don't go, because I wouldn't know that I was spending it.
Criminals.
Friday, January 13, 2006
The rambling thoughts of a Claire Sweeney impersonator.
The thing about working for a company like mine is they reward you for loyalty. If you do whatever they want, whenever they want you to do it and never complain, and you do this for a number of years, then the rewards they give you are really quite spectacular.
The problem with this is on the way there, you have to do exactly that, you have to go as far as they want you to go, for as long as they want you to be there and when you’re there you have to do whatever they ask. And the whole time you’re doing it, you’re waiting for this big pay off that you’re supposed to be getting, and you’re waiting 3, 4, 5 years.
I suppose that’s the price you pay for working for a large corporation, you’re one of hundreds of small fish in a very large pond, where the big fish are few in number but great in size and invariably have the two things you neither have nor want – a penis and a golf handicap.
The questions that are troubling me at the moment is, when do you say enough is enough, when do you decide that you’ve waited long enough and it just isn’t worth it? When are you justified in quitting? When you have kids that you never see? When you’re so exhausted from it all that you’re suffering recurring migraines? When conversations with your boss about the annual pay review always end with “but as with everything in life, I can’t promise anything”? When is it time to jump off the ledge and try something else? Can you ever go down the ladder without feeling and looking like a failure? Can you quit this job that was meant to be your big career and just wait and see? I mean could you look your mother and your best friend in the eye and say “I tried, but you know what? I’m not like you, I haven’t got a vocation, I don’t know what I’m doing and maybe I’m just a bit lost right now, but I need something that means I can wake up in the morning feeling good about the day”.
I’m 25 this year and it feels like a watershed year, I’m still young enough to change my mind and mess things up but I have too many commitments to just abandon everything and start again. I now you’re probably reading this and thinking ‘doesn’t she think this every couple of months and she looks around and then gives up?’ and you’re right, I absolutely do, but this year is the year that I’m going to figure it out, one way or another this year is the year I stick or twist.
The problem with this is on the way there, you have to do exactly that, you have to go as far as they want you to go, for as long as they want you to be there and when you’re there you have to do whatever they ask. And the whole time you’re doing it, you’re waiting for this big pay off that you’re supposed to be getting, and you’re waiting 3, 4, 5 years.
I suppose that’s the price you pay for working for a large corporation, you’re one of hundreds of small fish in a very large pond, where the big fish are few in number but great in size and invariably have the two things you neither have nor want – a penis and a golf handicap.
The questions that are troubling me at the moment is, when do you say enough is enough, when do you decide that you’ve waited long enough and it just isn’t worth it? When are you justified in quitting? When you have kids that you never see? When you’re so exhausted from it all that you’re suffering recurring migraines? When conversations with your boss about the annual pay review always end with “but as with everything in life, I can’t promise anything”? When is it time to jump off the ledge and try something else? Can you ever go down the ladder without feeling and looking like a failure? Can you quit this job that was meant to be your big career and just wait and see? I mean could you look your mother and your best friend in the eye and say “I tried, but you know what? I’m not like you, I haven’t got a vocation, I don’t know what I’m doing and maybe I’m just a bit lost right now, but I need something that means I can wake up in the morning feeling good about the day”.
I’m 25 this year and it feels like a watershed year, I’m still young enough to change my mind and mess things up but I have too many commitments to just abandon everything and start again. I now you’re probably reading this and thinking ‘doesn’t she think this every couple of months and she looks around and then gives up?’ and you’re right, I absolutely do, but this year is the year that I’m going to figure it out, one way or another this year is the year I stick or twist.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Breakdance Mountain
Somewhere in America, several cinemas banned, or refused to show, the love story that is Brokeback Mountain.
The Guardian wrote this today;
"If you ask me he banned the wrong movie. Chronicles of Narnia made me think about Tilda Swinton riding me with a strap on. If that's not evidence of that movie brainwashing today's youth with unbiblical sexual practices, I don't know what is."
The Guardian wrote this today;
"If you ask me he banned the wrong movie. Chronicles of Narnia made me think about Tilda Swinton riding me with a strap on. If that's not evidence of that movie brainwashing today's youth with unbiblical sexual practices, I don't know what is."
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Overheard
Woman 1: Did you see 'Rebus' the other night'?
Woman 2: No, I liked that series though, with that nice man from
Four Weddings...
1: Oh it's not the man from four weddings anymore, it's the man
from Vice.
2: That's not Rebus
1: Yes, it's the new series, it's a new man playing Rebus
2: He can't be Rebus
1: Yeah, it's a new actor
2: Are you sure he's playing Rebus?
1: (exasperated now) Yes
2: You mean Detective Rebus?
1: Yes
2: 'Rebus' doesn't stand for anything, it's a man called Rebus?
1: Yes! It's the same show with a new actor.
2: I wouldn't like that, I like the man off Four Weddings
1: (who must be wishing she had never started this conversation)
Really? Well he's not in it anymore.
2: He probably is, you're probably thinking of something else.
1: Oh well then I must be... I'm going to the loo.
2: Oh I'll come with you!
1: That's.... grrrrreat.
Woman 2: No, I liked that series though, with that nice man from
Four Weddings...
1: Oh it's not the man from four weddings anymore, it's the man
from Vice.
2: That's not Rebus
1: Yes, it's the new series, it's a new man playing Rebus
2: He can't be Rebus
1: Yeah, it's a new actor
2: Are you sure he's playing Rebus?
1: (exasperated now) Yes
2: You mean Detective Rebus?
1: Yes
2: 'Rebus' doesn't stand for anything, it's a man called Rebus?
1: Yes! It's the same show with a new actor.
2: I wouldn't like that, I like the man off Four Weddings
1: (who must be wishing she had never started this conversation)
Really? Well he's not in it anymore.
2: He probably is, you're probably thinking of something else.
1: Oh well then I must be... I'm going to the loo.
2: Oh I'll come with you!
1: That's.... grrrrreat.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
The horror....
.... Of being compared to Claire Sweeney made me delete that whole 'Lost' post.
Cheers for that, am checking my reflection for toothy horse comparisons as we speak.
Cheers for that, am checking my reflection for toothy horse comparisons as we speak.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
When incompatible morning people live together.
On Tuesday morning when the world went back to work, Glenn and I were struggling to get out of bed and deal with the day. We have very different attitudes to getting ready in the morning, I get up about an hour and a half before I have to leave the house, that gives me 45 minutes to get ready and 45 minutes to do lunches, have a cup of tea, throw things in a bag, by the time I leave the house I am calm and awake. Glenn's alarm goes of 45 minutes before he has to leave, he sleeps for another 15 minutes, then spends 30 minutes rushing around like a man posessed and then he runs out of the house but usually in a pretty good mood, we are both strangely mornig people.
Except for yesterday. Yesterday was a baaad day. I was ok, I did what I normally do and I even made his lunch which is practically unheard of, he however was not is a good place, he was in a donotspeaktomeforIamawakewhenIshouldbeasleepwhywhywhyareyoustill
talkingyoucrazyawakepersondon'ttellmeaboutlunchIcouldn'tgiveacrapabout
lunchdidn'tyouhearme?ISHOULDBEASLEEP! So me being awake and organised was the last thing he wanted to be around. Then he couldn't find things and the world crashed on top of his head and he was buried underneath it and no one could hear his screams. I happened to mention that perhaps he would find life easier if he got up just a little bit earlier, like 7 instead of 7.15, then he could have just a bit more time in case of times like this. That was the wrong thing to say. I should have said something like, oh I don't know, something like... NOTHING AT ALL. He shouted something ahout me NOT FUCKING HELPING and then stormed off down the road in a huff. He was a 27 year old little boy in a huff.
So this morning, I got my revenge. I set his alarm for 7am without telling him. and I chuckled, yes chuckled to myself in the kitchen when I heard him get in the shower at 7.06, and I giggled in the car as I imagined him all ready at 7.25 and then he rang me;
G: Where are you?
H: On the motorway?
G: Left a bit early didn't you?
H: Trying to beat the traffic.
G: Uh, did you set my alarm earlier?
H: Nooooo....
G: You bloody liar!
H: Now why would I lie about something like that?
G: Well I'm all ready but I've got like, half an hour before I have to leave the house!
H: But look at how relaxed you are!
G: I'M NOT RELAXED WOMAN! I COULD HAVE HAD AN EXTRA HALF AN HOUR IN BED!
H: But you can do things now! Like have a cup of tea and..... uh.... other stuff....
G: You are a control freak.
H: Well, I'll see you later then! Ok! Love you!
G: Weird control freak! That's what you are!
H: Bye! Love you! Bye!
Now he is threatening to set my alarm for 4.30am tomorrow morning in an attempt to get me back, but I am the winner! I win! He is a LOSER! And I am the WINNER! I am the Queen! Yes! Yes I am!
Except for yesterday. Yesterday was a baaad day. I was ok, I did what I normally do and I even made his lunch which is practically unheard of, he however was not is a good place, he was in a donotspeaktomeforIamawakewhenIshouldbeasleepwhywhywhyareyoustill
talkingyoucrazyawakepersondon'ttellmeaboutlunchIcouldn'tgiveacrapabout
lunchdidn'tyouhearme?ISHOULDBEASLEEP! So me being awake and organised was the last thing he wanted to be around. Then he couldn't find things and the world crashed on top of his head and he was buried underneath it and no one could hear his screams. I happened to mention that perhaps he would find life easier if he got up just a little bit earlier, like 7 instead of 7.15, then he could have just a bit more time in case of times like this. That was the wrong thing to say. I should have said something like, oh I don't know, something like... NOTHING AT ALL. He shouted something ahout me NOT FUCKING HELPING and then stormed off down the road in a huff. He was a 27 year old little boy in a huff.
So this morning, I got my revenge. I set his alarm for 7am without telling him. and I chuckled, yes chuckled to myself in the kitchen when I heard him get in the shower at 7.06, and I giggled in the car as I imagined him all ready at 7.25 and then he rang me;
G: Where are you?
H: On the motorway?
G: Left a bit early didn't you?
H: Trying to beat the traffic.
G: Uh, did you set my alarm earlier?
H: Nooooo....
G: You bloody liar!
H: Now why would I lie about something like that?
G: Well I'm all ready but I've got like, half an hour before I have to leave the house!
H: But look at how relaxed you are!
G: I'M NOT RELAXED WOMAN! I COULD HAVE HAD AN EXTRA HALF AN HOUR IN BED!
H: But you can do things now! Like have a cup of tea and..... uh.... other stuff....
G: You are a control freak.
H: Well, I'll see you later then! Ok! Love you!
G: Weird control freak! That's what you are!
H: Bye! Love you! Bye!
Now he is threatening to set my alarm for 4.30am tomorrow morning in an attempt to get me back, but I am the winner! I win! He is a LOSER! And I am the WINNER! I am the Queen! Yes! Yes I am!
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Head. Up. Arse. (but in a good cause)
WARNING: As you read the below post, you are most likely going to think, especially toward the end, that I have my head up my arse, like riiiiiight up there, up through the sphincter and a good way into the bowels. That's ok, it's something I can live with.
I think I mentioned before that Christmas for me is always the time for having to spend time with family who you never normally see. This can sometimes be a Very Bad Thing and at other times, an unexpectedly good thing.
On New Years Day the other ‘alf and myself went with my parents to see my mothers twin sister who lives in Deepest, Darkest, Wales. She lives in the kind of place which has no road numbers or street names, no tarmac or signs; one year we had to call an ambulance for another aunt who knocked herself out on some crazy paving and it took 35 minutes to get there, hedges had to be trimmed back to make room for the width of it. My aunt lives there with my uncle, who is her second husband, and her daughter lives in the nearest village. My aunt is a psychiatric nurse who co-ordinates mental health care for South Wales, she is a bristly woman and it took all of us by surprise when, after the deeply unpleasant experience of her divorce and her daughter’s emerging mental disabilities, she fell in love with UncleP, an eminent consultant psychiatrist; they married and set up a new home for themselves in a converted barn as far away from other people as they could.
My Uncle is an extraordinary man. The reason for me writing this blog has largely been to document my experiences, daft conversations, things I love, places I have visited, and this man is once of the most interesting people I have ever met, and I am so fortunate to have come to be related to him.
Uncle P (and I'm calling him that because I'm fairly sure he wouldn't appreciate being written about on the internet like this) can be found on Google as the co-writer of several books on Anorexia and Bulimia, he has dedicated his life to the safe practise of psychiatry and recently, he spent several years assessing defendants for trial. If you met him within a professional capacity you may guess the breadth of his mental dexterity but never the huge expanse of knowledge he harbours. He used to take part in war re-enactments, the kind of thing where you get dressed up as a round head or a cavalier and re-do the battles as they were fought at the time, but he got thrown out because he kept winning the battles he was supposed to lose by bettering the tactics. He has a library that is overtaking the enormous house they live in and is thinking of converting the barn opposite to organise it properly. He has an impossibly large collection of pots and can tell you how and where they were made and the potter who made each of them. He once placed the winning bid on something in an auction and found himself accidentally in possession of one of Prince Charles’ dining chairs. His prize possession (of the moment) is a prefect copy of the Lindisfarne Gospels.
A little while ago, he became aware he was about to collapse, mentally as well as physically, he slowly realised that something was very, very wrong. A few weeks later he suffered a stroke.
It was not the kind of devastating stroke that you see affecting the very old, he suffered no paralysis but he is not as mentally agile as he once was, he struggles for words where he used to find joy in playing with them and he has not worked properly since. This has not stopped the requests from existing patients though, or the tributes from past patients flooding in. On Sunday my father, Uncle P and myself shared a bottle of Vintage 1977 Port and some of the finest sweet dessert wine from his extensive, labelled and incomprehensible (to me) wine cellar, following a long lunch of seafood, roast goose and tiramisu. As the evening came to an end and my mother (the only sober one left) started making rumblings about going home, he talked me through how he was re-arranging his library and recited Yeats’ ‘Prufrock’, he complained that it was the only Yeats poem he could recite anymore. The only thing I could remember from Prufrock was the repeated refrain ‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Micheal Angelo’, so the thought of being able to recite the whole thing, let alone more than one poem astonishes me.
I suppose I wanted to write about him because I have never been able to get to know anyone like him in a personal way before. He reminds me of lecturers at university who were alien to me, and I just don’t think people like him really exist anymore. Our society is too disposable, it’s too fast, no one spends a lifetime building anything like a library or a wine collection, no one my age can recite Yeats at will or explain why the Spanish eat so much Pork (something to do with the Mores apparently, in the 16th Century).
I have a hard time in the past wrestling with the question of why? Why are we here? Where did we come from? What is the point of it all? But history, the arts, architecture, music, these are the things which give it all meaning, these are the things are which set us apart from the animals, these are the reasons we are arrogant enough to believe we have a soul which can be saved or damned. This is what I realise when I look at what my uncle has spent his life appreciating, and how painful it is to see him fight to keep that.
I think I mentioned before that Christmas for me is always the time for having to spend time with family who you never normally see. This can sometimes be a Very Bad Thing and at other times, an unexpectedly good thing.
On New Years Day the other ‘alf and myself went with my parents to see my mothers twin sister who lives in Deepest, Darkest, Wales. She lives in the kind of place which has no road numbers or street names, no tarmac or signs; one year we had to call an ambulance for another aunt who knocked herself out on some crazy paving and it took 35 minutes to get there, hedges had to be trimmed back to make room for the width of it. My aunt lives there with my uncle, who is her second husband, and her daughter lives in the nearest village. My aunt is a psychiatric nurse who co-ordinates mental health care for South Wales, she is a bristly woman and it took all of us by surprise when, after the deeply unpleasant experience of her divorce and her daughter’s emerging mental disabilities, she fell in love with UncleP, an eminent consultant psychiatrist; they married and set up a new home for themselves in a converted barn as far away from other people as they could.
My Uncle is an extraordinary man. The reason for me writing this blog has largely been to document my experiences, daft conversations, things I love, places I have visited, and this man is once of the most interesting people I have ever met, and I am so fortunate to have come to be related to him.
Uncle P (and I'm calling him that because I'm fairly sure he wouldn't appreciate being written about on the internet like this) can be found on Google as the co-writer of several books on Anorexia and Bulimia, he has dedicated his life to the safe practise of psychiatry and recently, he spent several years assessing defendants for trial. If you met him within a professional capacity you may guess the breadth of his mental dexterity but never the huge expanse of knowledge he harbours. He used to take part in war re-enactments, the kind of thing where you get dressed up as a round head or a cavalier and re-do the battles as they were fought at the time, but he got thrown out because he kept winning the battles he was supposed to lose by bettering the tactics. He has a library that is overtaking the enormous house they live in and is thinking of converting the barn opposite to organise it properly. He has an impossibly large collection of pots and can tell you how and where they were made and the potter who made each of them. He once placed the winning bid on something in an auction and found himself accidentally in possession of one of Prince Charles’ dining chairs. His prize possession (of the moment) is a prefect copy of the Lindisfarne Gospels.
A little while ago, he became aware he was about to collapse, mentally as well as physically, he slowly realised that something was very, very wrong. A few weeks later he suffered a stroke.
It was not the kind of devastating stroke that you see affecting the very old, he suffered no paralysis but he is not as mentally agile as he once was, he struggles for words where he used to find joy in playing with them and he has not worked properly since. This has not stopped the requests from existing patients though, or the tributes from past patients flooding in. On Sunday my father, Uncle P and myself shared a bottle of Vintage 1977 Port and some of the finest sweet dessert wine from his extensive, labelled and incomprehensible (to me) wine cellar, following a long lunch of seafood, roast goose and tiramisu. As the evening came to an end and my mother (the only sober one left) started making rumblings about going home, he talked me through how he was re-arranging his library and recited Yeats’ ‘Prufrock’, he complained that it was the only Yeats poem he could recite anymore. The only thing I could remember from Prufrock was the repeated refrain ‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Micheal Angelo’, so the thought of being able to recite the whole thing, let alone more than one poem astonishes me.
I suppose I wanted to write about him because I have never been able to get to know anyone like him in a personal way before. He reminds me of lecturers at university who were alien to me, and I just don’t think people like him really exist anymore. Our society is too disposable, it’s too fast, no one spends a lifetime building anything like a library or a wine collection, no one my age can recite Yeats at will or explain why the Spanish eat so much Pork (something to do with the Mores apparently, in the 16th Century).
I have a hard time in the past wrestling with the question of why? Why are we here? Where did we come from? What is the point of it all? But history, the arts, architecture, music, these are the things which give it all meaning, these are the things are which set us apart from the animals, these are the reasons we are arrogant enough to believe we have a soul which can be saved or damned. This is what I realise when I look at what my uncle has spent his life appreciating, and how painful it is to see him fight to keep that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)