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.