the brilliantly leaping gazelle

As I write this, I sit on a sofa in a sitting room surrounded by rolls of bubble wrap, gaffer tape, and boxes that have been assembled and filled with things. Mainly my things, it has to be written, as every other potential storage area is, or is about to be used. Earlier on we finished packing away the last of my records. The writing it is less of wrench than it actually was. When we had finished, Paul, who was helping me, asked ‘What next?

That’s a good question.

Because what I wanted to do was to be transported back to the warm and cosy moments of bliss my body found just before I got out of bed this morning. And stay like that, for as long as I could. But I couldn’t. Paul is on the clock. So we had to continue packing. It’s a complete and utter head-fuck this packing malarkey. Aside from the physical practicalities –my brain damage means I can’t do the packing myself – there is also the emotional fallout. Which is a new thing.

Before my brain injury, I was pretty much always able to keep my emotions in check. But now? This move feels like I’m caught up in a tsunami of grief, never quite knowing when the next wave will engulf me, but knowing there will be a next one. I described packing up the records to Paul as like running up the steps to the guillotine.

Now rationally, I know it’s the very opposite of that. Moving in to share with Nosferatu will be an unquestionably good thing for me. Not sure about for her though. It’s just that I want to be at the point where the move has been done and is a memory, where everything is not like this. This I can do without. I hate these feelings and yet seem incapable of stopping them. When was last time I thought, ‘And I woke up from a coma for this? When I finished packing up my records. That’s when.

Before then, not for a good while.

So what next? Well that’s up to me, isn’t it?

(Or not, as according to my iTunes playlist it’s ‘Molly’ by Michael Nyman)

I went to the dentist yesterday to have a tooth out. Not, as no-one in the history has ever done, and popped in for some rollicking good fun. No, a trip to the dentist at my age can only involve a number of things, none of them good; bad news or very bad news, painful work or very painful work.

Long gone are the days of my childhood when a visit to the dentist would end with him giving me a lolly.

I went to see the dentist initially because of a slight discomfort in my teeth and gums, a slight discomfort that was only going to get worse if unchecked. And also because it had been a while since I’d last seen one; not for want of trying I hasten to add. My local hospital has a specialist dental unit which caters for people with disabilities. Like most things in the NHS, once you’re getting the treatment, it’s excellent. Getting to that point, however, and dealing with shocking inept bureaucracy, is another matter.

As I was lying there during the examination, I was aware that he was calling out words and numbers, that by comparison made ‘The Shipping Forecast’ comprehensible. Worse was to come when he’d finished. He declared that apart from some minor work – two fillings replaced and a tooth out is not minor – everything was fine. ‘Then what was it with all stuff you were saying to the nurse. Or are you playing Battleships to relive the tedium’, I thought. But instead just smiled and asked when he could fit me in

Wonderfully, I’d gone private, not because I think private healthcare is anything other than an abomination – which it is – but because I wanted the work over and done with by Christmas, and I knew they weren’t seeing NHS patients because of Covid. Their secretary could get a job at my local NHS dental hospital; they didn’t me see for years…

It’s always a bit disconcerting when a dentist wants to engage you in small talk before he gets down to business, the first time I saw him, he was curious as to how I’d acquired my brain injury. Really curious. My stock response of ‘Just bad luck’ seemed not to work. So he asked a couple more times and got the same answer.  He gave up, thankfully.

So this yesterday I had a tooth out. It wasn’t as bizarre as hearing the sound of a drill going at it in your mouth and not feeling any pain. Or the dentist wearing a head-torch that made me think of Orbital.  But still. I can’t remember having one out before, but I didn’t realise they pull actually it out. Yes, granted, they twat about with wiggling it a bit, but is essence is the same you did as a child, when a tooth was loose you loosened it until it fell out. At least he didn’t offer me some mouthwash, so that with my numb mouth I could dribble it out along with my dignity down my chin.

Mind you, the day got off to a good start, even though the rest of hasn’t lived up to it. I awoke early to find LMS in the kitchen, told her was going to the dentist later and had got up to have breakfast. ‘If your making porridge can I have some?’ In the pantheon of silly questions that’s right up there, but told her to check with her mum first.

We have a mutually beneficial arrangement, she makes me tea and I make her porridge. As I was drinking the tea, I asked her to have a check on the porridge and to tell me how it was looking.

“It’s looking cooking”, she said.

Yesterday’s news of a vaccine for the coronavirus was good news. And just in time for Christmas too!

How fortunate is that?

That’ll make enforcement of newly announced restrictions so much easier as well. If people hear ‘vaccine’ are they going to be overly concerned about when they’ll get it or will they just hear ‘there’s no need to worry’? And party on?  Be that as it may, I’m busy packing – well my trusted helpers are, I’m just directing operations and gritting my teeth when they’re not.

So I’ve got a lot to do and being lazy, I’m to copy and paste an excerpt part of a blog I wrote in April that seems highly apposite now:

Another (fantasy) concerns anti-vaccers, people who are so set against vaccination for their child, who believe that somehow there’s a conspiracy afoot involving the government, the pharmaceutical industry, Bigfoot and the entire medical establishment. That they have pulled back the curtain to reveal the truth, which they share with equally delusional fuckwits on social media.

My fantasy is this

That at some point a vaccine for CO-VID 19 is developed and a nationwide programme of vaccinations is announced and people arrive at testing centres to get it. A somebody armed only with a white coat, ridiculous hair and a clipboard checks people’s names in the queue to get in and every so often, asks a family to step out of the queue. “Yes, there’s a bit of a problem,” they say. The children can be vaccinated, so to can any adults in the family who didn’t post on social media about how vaccinations were part of some conspiracy orchestrated by people who orchestrate conspiracies. They’d have detailed social media evidence –twitter comments and reposts – blog articles, their entire internet browsing history, transcripts of every ‘phone call they’d ever made…the whole Snowden/Cambridge Analytica nightmare. If they didn’t believe in vaccinations then, what had changed, apart from their desire not to die?

It’s just a practical application of Darwinian principles isn’t it? If people are foolish enough too believe this nonsense, what other rubbish are they going to testiculate about? And do we want them to breed, to pass on their genes?  I mean humanity is fucked; we’re heading toward extinction, anyone with an I.Q larger than the radius of their kneecap can see that, but even so, do we want more mental pygmies?

No, in a word.

Actually thinking about it, if one were to tell conspiracy theorists that conspiracy theories did exist and that they were right all along and that the moon landings were faked, that the mafia killed JFK, that Elvis is still alive, that the Loch Ness monster is real.  Would they believe you or would they think it was yet another conspiracy theory?

But since we’re all living in ‘The Matrix’ anyway, none of this really matters… 

“A Brief History of Time’ is one of the greatest coffee table books ever written. In it, Steven Hawking discussed what exactly time was and what we thought we knew about time being one of them. Turned out that time was in fact many things, and most of us were wrong. I’m guessing that’s what the book said. I didn’t actually buy it. And the vast majority who did buy didn’t read it either, and those who did gave up after a few chapters because it was all too complicated. But that didn’t stop them leaving it displayed in a prominent position on the coffee table to impress their friends, because they were sort of people who read those kind of books –  the kind everyone is talking about

The reason I know time isn’t what we imagine it to be is not because Joe has been listening to podcasts where physicists discuss these things. He does though and has tried to explain things to me. However, like most people time for me is a constant, inasmuch my understanding of is that it consists of specific and never changing distances between measurements. So there are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in a hour and so on. You know this. I thought I knew this.

 Then I discovered that there exists ‘Parental Time’

“Parental Time’ only applies to the child of an exasperated parent. I’ve seen this phenomena first hand. The parent is trying to chivvy the child to do something. ‘I’ll count to five’, they’ll say. ‘1…2…3…3 and a half…4…I’m warning you no pudding for you if you don’t…4 and a half…5’. I sometimes have been given to wonder if indeed this house inhabits a part of the universe where my understanding of time is positively unhelpful.

It’s a bit like the ‘X Factor’, this Parental time. On the ‘X Factor’ they have this weird way of announcing that someone has won something. ‘And going through to the next round is…(a very long pause) Gary’. Maybe this phenomena only exists in the world of T.V. Could you order a meal like that? “And as a starter I’ll have the…’ No. You’d end up wearing, not eating, the starter.

And it’s contagious. Passed on from mother to daughter. I first became aware of this on Sunday morning when LMS knocked on my bedroom door so I could get up and make her porridge. To coax me out from under my duvet, she told me that she was making tea and that I could remain where I was for 10 minutes. “A fast 10 minutes’ she said, just in case I had any delusions that 10 minutes actually meant 10 minutes in the commonly accepted sense of people’s understanding.

It was prophetic that LMS has, for part of her online school lessons, been reading ‘A Christmas Carol’ by some bloke whose name no-one can ever remember, these last few days. I write prophetic, but in the light of an announcement by the government yesterday, ought that have been profitic?

According to the BBC

Covid: Shops in England can open 24 hours a day over Christmas

Shops in England will be allowed to stay open for 24 hours a day in the run-up to Christmas and in January, the housing secretary has said.

Local authorities will be able to temporarily waive the rules restricting retail opening hours.

Of course the Beeb found time to get a reaction from the British Retial Consortium, who welcomed the move. What a shock that was! They also found the time to get the views from someone from UK Hospitality who complained that their industry was something and needed more government support.

Sadly a lack of time prevented them from getting the views of the Trade Unions Congress or any organisation that represents the views of the workers. You know, the workers that’ll actually enable the shoppers to shop.

‘What did you get for Christmas, Dave?’ ‘Time and a half’

Scrooge would’ve been so proud.

Maybe it’s just me, but don’t you ever feel that other people seem more grown up than you? That by some kind of unspeakably cruel twist of fate, rather like Harry Potter finding out he was a wizard and setting off to Hogwarts to learn how to unlock his potential, some people have learnt how navigate the various transitions that ageing continually presents us with.

No?

You’ve never felt that?

You’ve never felt that the mysterious ways of the grown up were part of a secret world, not so secret that you didn’t know it existed, but secret enough for you never to be admitted. Never felt that at any second you’d feel a hand on your shoulder and a stern voice saying ‘Come along now. Enough’s enough, you’ve had your fun.’ and you’d have to put the clothes back in the dressing up box.  Never felt that other people were just born with dormant grown up gene, and at a certain age it would activate and they’d become better at being a grown up? Like getting married, staying married, buying a house, that sort of thing.

As I’ve always maintained, I’m basically a fourteen old boy trapped in the body of an old man. So the opposite of some priests. See what I mean? No grown up would think to write that, but a deeply immature juvenile might. And that’s how immature I am, that when I go to supermarkets and see mature cheddar cheese, my first thought is always ‘Where’s the immature cheddar then?’ When I say his to friends, they wear a smile that says ‘Just humour him’. Them more grown up people. The sort of people who know what a stopcock is and don’t think it the name you give your Mum when you hear your hear her coming up the stairs when you’re masturbating and suddenly stop.

I was reminded of this yesterday when Joe and Marge had a visit from Marge’s sister-in-law. They had a proper grown up chat about grown up things, the sort of things that in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, only men with mustard yellow cardigans and pipes were allowed to have. But equality being what it is, women can join in.

And then I remembered that before the brain injury, I was quite good at pretending to be grown up. I mean I never for one second thought I was one, but I did do a pretty convincing impersonation of one. People trusted me, they trusted me with really grown up things, things which, if they went wrong would’ve caused loss of life. I know. Fools!  After that performance ended, I somehow convinced grown ups who really should’ve known better, that I was the right person to help people cope with the worst experience of their life. Me?

It all seems like it happened to someone else. In point of fact it did. That person is gone, the only thing I have of his are his memories. And that memory of me isn’t shared by many other people now. It’s a bit like an old photograph, faded so much so that only a vague impression remains. If you don’t have a grown up job, don’t talk about grown up things, don’t have grown up hobbies, and don’t dress like a grown up, well other grown ups don’t see you as a grown up.

Instead, they’re the ones who might put a hand on my shoulder and with a stern voice says ‘Come along now. Enough’s enough, you’ve had your fun.’ 

One of the things I’ll miss when I leave here and return to North London is being able to play my music loud. Not that I’ve ever been able to play it really loud, you understand, but loud. Previous and present house-mates might take issue with my definition of loud and really loud, but firstly, Lauren Tate and secondly, they have all had quite questionable taste in music, so…

I had cause to reflect on this yesterday afternoon. Joe, Marge and LMS had gone outdoors to do whatever it is people go outside to do when it’s cold. Actually, I don’t think the weather made much of a difference one way or the other. They went somewhere out of the house. Marge asked if I’d join them. Resisting the temptation to exclaim that they looked as if their limbs and heads were securely attached, I made a noise that could easily have been misheard as ‘I might join you later’

But the voices in my head were screaming ‘Are you mad? Go outdoors? When if I stay indoors you’ll leave me alone in the house, with just me, my computer which when synced to my hi-fi means loud music therapy. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out’. Really? Pass up on the only opportunity I get to play music loud? When they’re all out of the house and there’s only me to please. Because I can’t convey exactly how fundamentally important music has been to me.

Always has. Ever since I was 13, and got a paper round just so I could save up enough money that I could afford a ghetto blaster one and persuade my Mum to let me have it in my room. It wasn’t long, thankfully, before I discovered pirate radio. It’s hard to convey just how little choice I had until that happy revelation. There was Radio One, Radio London and that was it. Chart based pop in the day and jangly guitar ear botheration at night. Great! My parent’s favourite album was ‘Distant Drums’ by Jim Reeves. You haven’t heard it? You’re lucky. Between him, ‘The Chieftains’’ and ‘The Dubliners’ my childhood was a sonic nightmare of Irish folk songs. Not that they used the stereogram that in the front room that much and when they did, I always associated it with the volume being turned down, never up. Even now I have a pathological resentment towards people who turn music down. Or talk over it. Or stop a track before it’s ended.

Anyway pirate radio. JFM, LWR, Solar, these were the big three. I fondly remember turning the radio’s tuning dial with the concentration and precision of a safecracker. The one thing that united the pirates was a deep and abiding love of the music, mostly funk and soul, then later a smattering of electro and early hip-hop, and their eagerness to share it. The next logical step was for me to buy a turntable to connect to the ghetto blaster so I could play the some of the records I’d heard on the radio. Buying them wasn’t a problem. I knew exactly what record shops to go to because they were name-checked by the D.J’s.

I’ve still got some the tapes I recorded off the pirates. And that’s the thing with music. The music you like, you might fall out of like with it, but the music you love, well…Its like an aural TARDIS, instantly transporting you back you that the time in your life when you first heard that song, that tune, who you were with, what you were doing, who you were doing. Or sometimes, it’s simply a great piece of music that needs to be played loud.

Which is odd, given as how Marge bought my speakers for me – I chose them – but she knew they’d be positioned directly under her room, perhaps she misguidedly thought it meant she could be all ambient police; enter the sitting room, declare the music was too loud and then leave. Not before turning the lights up. Or down.

But in North London I am reliably informed that my ‘offensively loud’ music will not be tolerated. Neighbours, apparently. I’ve never had to worry about them for over 30 years, having lived in places where that wasn’t a concern. Not that it would’ve affected the volume if I had, you understand, but still. Now I guess I’ll have to.

‘Offensively loud’. Is that even a thing?

Last night Marge told me that London was now under ‘Tier 2’ lockdown. Whatever that means. Marge did try and explain it me, but as she did, all I could think of was of football. Specifically, the football match between the Brits and the Germans on Christmas Day 1914. You know, the famous one, the one everyone goes on about, like it somehow meant something that some men took a break from trying to kill each other over some bit of land and had a kickabout on it instead.

I couldn’t help but think that the coronavirus isn’t going to give us a Christmas truce. It doesn’t care that we need a jolly. And it doesn’t care that we’re tired of it all, all of the this, all of the that, and especially tired of all of the other and we just want a few days off when we can just be.

If it did have a consciousness, it might conclude that the government’s scientific advisors have given their advice and the government had decided to do what is practicable and enforceable instead. That the government had looked back to last summer, the hordes of people swarming to the south coast in breach of the lockdown and decided, quite rationally that they didn’t want a repeat of people doing their own thing.

If Boris Johnson had wanted act statesmanlike, as if he was somehow above doing things based on political expediency but instead took the less popular but more courageous one, he could be fairly described acting like his political hero as Churchill, and acting in the national interest. Instead, he went for a quick win, and by so doing, inadvertently scored an own goal.

Yesterday’s post about guidelines also caused me to reflect on other non-words. By that I mean words that have a specific meaning when used in a specific context, but can also be used in a non-specific way, in a way that doesn’t commit the speaker to anything.

Goal is a textbook example of this. Used in relation to a specific context – a sports activity – a goal is the specific place that a team has to either attack or defend, lest their opponents manage to pass the ball through that space. If they do, they are said to have scored a goal, or earned a point. Fine. That makes sense. There’s no ambiguity about what a goal is that context. A goal is a goal.  However, when people talk about having a goal, it has an altogether different meaning. It is used to denote a target at which to aim or a point to be reached or an amount of something to be raised. Also if that goal is to achieved by collective endeavour, so much the better. It doesn’t imply that anyone is committed to undertake anything in pursuit of that goal. Nor is there a sense of having failed should that goal not be achieved. The fact that there was a goal is the important thing, not that it wasn’t attained.  

Same with ambition.  You hear a lot of talk about an ambition to achieve something.  Politicians use it all the time. An ambition is a good thing whether or not that ambition is ever translated into actual demonstrable results is another matter.  But it is enough that the ambition was there, the intention to do the thing, regardless if the thing was done or not.

Like is another example of a word having a specific meaning, to be keen on something or generally having positive feelings toward that it. But free of that contextual underpinning, it means nothing at all. Apart from someone feeling that they’ve said the right thing that is, and uttered a socially accepted form of bullshit. An example might be someone saying ‘I’d like to do x’ or ‘I’d really like if it…’ It doesn’t commit them to doing x or indeed ever making any attempts to achieve x.  The point is more that for the few seconds everyone feels good, the bullshitter and the person being bullshat.  The x isn’t important here. It can be anything at all. The fact that someone would life’ to do something is. They probably won’t.

But they’d like to.

I myself have exploited this linguistic loophole for wholly self-serving needs.  In a previous life one of my jobs involved dealing with, amongst other things people’s complaints.  So I quickly learnt that by saying ‘I’d like to say sorry for x’ was a neat way of not saying sorry at all.  Because they heard ‘sorry’ and I would say it with such an earnest and sorrowful look on my face, they never twigged that me saying I would like to do something wasn’t the same as me doing the thing.  I wasn’t saying sorry, just that I would like to say it. I wasn’t. And I had no intention of doing so either. But that was bye the bye, and almost always did pass them by.

So in that context ‘like’ has as much meaning as ‘guidelines’ as does ‘ambition’ as does ‘goal’. 

And wish. 

Not forgetting aspiration. 

Guidelines. It’s such a wonderfully opaque word isn’t it?  Guidelines don’t order, compel, or otherwise enforce compliance.  They’re basically advisory.  You can do this or not.  It’s up to you.  How you interpret them will differ to a greater or lesser extent than someone else. In most cases guidelines are wonderfully apt.

I receive personalisation to pay for my domestic care.  The great thing about this is that there are no hard and fast rules governing what my money can or can’t be spent on.  Yes there are guidelines, but social services haven’t seen fit to furnish me with these despite my continued requests.  Which leaves me with a pretty large grey area with which to play with. After all, if I haven’t seen the guidelines, it stands to reason that I can’t interpret them.

Therefore in some cases, interpreting guidelines according to one’s own needs is fine. As long as it has no detrimental effect on society, that is.

This isn’t true in a pandemic. Our actions are not consequence free. The interpretation of the guidelines by people last summer by vast swathes of people have bought us to this unfortunate yet preventable circumstance; one where yet more guidelines will be issued and which will be interpreted as before. Remember last summer? The crowded beaches? Of course people knew the guidelines said that they shouldn’t travel, but they also knew, they knew, even though it hadn’t been announced, that travel restrictions were going to be eased. Same with ‘Eat Out to Help Out’. The gastro-pub at the bottom of our road took part in this. On balmy summer evenings the street outside was chocca with people eating at tables. There wasn’t much evidence there of social distancing.

We are where we are because people interpret things according to their own needs and see no contradiction in blaming others for doing what they do.