I feel my luck could change

I had my… seventh physiotherapy appointment this afternoon, I have only managed to attend two so far and this time it was the physiotherapist who phoned in sick. Fantastic! I fear this whole experiment is doomed; the particular guy I was seeing was only on a six-week secondment to Whitby. Bugger.

And today it hurts a lot. I am going to have to make another one of those trips to the doctor where I try to ask for a higher dose of painkiller without sounding like a wimp. Added to what I hope is only an increased tolerance to the medicine, my lymph-nodes have been up, my throat sore and my temperature all over the place for over week now and it’s getting worse. This is a dangerous time of year for me, much as I love the autumn. Here is a lovely picture taken in the Lake District last autumn by my genius yet ginger brother-in-law Adrian Taylor. I was there and it was that lovely.



I hate the up and down nature of my illness – it is the worst element. It makes it very difficult not to be anxious about my health because if I relapse now it could mean a crappy week or a crappy month or it could be Christmas before I’m back to where I am now. Of course, I can’t do much about it anyway so I really shouldn’t worry, but the uncertainty of the situation is intrinsically stressful. I would have to be in denial not to be just a little bit nervous.

Still I have been reading about Buddhism and disability, in particular the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is a physiological event, a combination of electrical and chemical activity. Pain only becomes suffering, the theory goes, when the mind thinks that it shouldn’t be happening, when the mind resists what is a natural and inevitable part of our experience. I am too tired to discuss why this might be a useful concept, but I think it might.

I owe a great number of letters and e-mails so please bear with me. Thanks to everyone who voted in my poll – wowza - I hope to be modelling the results for you at the end of the week.

Mind-Blowing Decisions

I am stuck. I need a new cardigan. I had one but I gave it to the charity shop accidently on purpose. But I can't decide which one. I like this one and I like this one too and two would be excessive and beyond my means. Purple or blue. Blue or purple. What do you think? I am really struggling with decisions at the moment but it's getting progressively cold. I've already got me legwarmers on.

Both cardigans are from Funky Ware and are of course Fair Trade. I mean, capitalist dogs don't make clothes like this. Following the success of my previous poll (the results of which I am um, yet to act upon), I thought I would leave it to you. This time I will do what you tell me. I think. Probably. I'll also only leave it a few days because as I said, it's getting right parky.

(I'm not just asking you for a filler or because I like running polls - I honestly can't make up my mind and I've been tyring to come to a decision all week).

Which cardigan should I buy?
	The Really Funky Blue One
	The Really Funky Purple One
	Neither You Tree-Hugging Lentil-Munching Patchouli-Scented Hippy!

Stone In Love

I decided to write about this, since it is such a big story both in terms of Disability and The Arts.

Trafalgar Square, as you really ought to know, was built to commemorate our victory over the French in the Battle of Trafalgar. The Square was to display statues of five British heroes;

Lord Nelson (whose column stands in the centre)

Henry Havelock and Charles James Napier (two random military bigwigs, nothing to do with Trafalgar, but they were involved in various conquests in Pakistan and India)

George IV (the most unpopular monarch since Richard III, but King at the time of Trafalgar)

William IV (the most unheard-of monarch since King Gerald-The-Pepperpot, but coming to the throne when Trafalgar Square was close to completion)

Actually, I have a great affection for William IV or “Sailor Bill” because he sounds like a jolly decent chap and is the one that everyone forgets when they recite the Kings and Queens of England since 1066. But alas funding ran out and his statue was never completed. So the fourth plinth stood empty for a hundred and fifty years.

Since 1999, the Royal Society of the Arts has been commissioning contemporary work to occupy this space, usually for a year or eighteen months. Contemporary art is and always has been controversial; it is the nature of the beast. But few people are criticising the lasted work, a sculpture reminiscent of the Classical style, for it’s artistic value.

This sculpture is of Allison Lapper, a modern artist by another artist Marc Quinn. People feel scandalised by this statue because:

• She’s a woman. Any representation of the female form was going to be controversial. There are still people in this country who believe the only statues of women should be of Queen Victoria or the Virgin Mary – two characters of equal sanctity in their minds. Think about it. You know these people exist.

• She’s naked. Traditionalists would argue than neither Nelson, Havelock, Napier or George IV were ever naked at any point during their lives ever. Nudity simply isn’t the British thing to do. And remember, public nudity is a punishable offence on the grounds of causing fear and alarm.

• She’s pregnant. Ew! Pregnant! Too much information! Roughly 30,000 women lose their jobs every year because they get the ridiculous idea that it is possible to combine procreation with employment. Their heads must be full of sugar and spice instead of cerebral tissue!


• She’s disabled.
  

This is also the first time that a human statue has been on the Fourth Plinth, so another argument goes that, in the spirit of the Square, we ought to have a national hero up there. Like who? Well, a war hero of course! War…. Hero…. Well the only person I can think of who has come out of conflict in a good light during my lifetime is Simon Weston. Of course he’s disabled too and not nearly so pretty as Ms Lapper.

Now, if this was to be installed permanently, I think we’d have to think very hard about it, but for an eighteen month period? How can anyone argue against it? It makes an excellent choice on account of the fact;

• She’s a woman. There are very few women among the statues of London and it is only this year that we finally erected a memorial to the Women of World War II. Despite the warnings of berks like Buerk, women are underrepresented in almost every area of public life. Just look at our government, our Labour government whose cabinet consists of six women and seventeen men.


• She’s pregnant, naked and strong. I could right a thesis on the importance of this. Suffice to say British women are pretty messed up when it comes to asserting control over our own bodies and reproductive autonomy. This is a lady who made a choice. When one in four pregnancies are ending in termination and God knows how many others are being kept when they are not wanted, it’s about time the rest of us followed suit, one way or another.

• She’s disabled and beautiful. Well, you can work that one out.

………………………..
I now have to recount a conversation I had about this with [...], who opts out of current affairs.

Goldfish : Someone suggested a statue of Nelson Mandela. I mean, he’s not British but he is an international hero and the fourth plinth is right outside South Africa House.
[...] : Yeah, but that would be terribly provocative.
Goldfish : Who to?
[...] : The South Africans
Goldfish: Why?
[...] : Well they’re not going to want a statue of Nelson Mandela sitting outside their embassy.
Goldfish: Why not? They did elect him president and everything.
[...] : Did they?
Goldfish: Yeah, ’cause like, Apartheid’s over now.
[...] :Oh right. Well then yeah, that’s a good idea I suppose.

Do you think I should bother telling him about the Berlin Wall as well?

Climbing Up The Walls

The four walls are creeping in on me just now. It’s been two weeks since I last left the house and… three, maybe four since I went out on non-medical related business. The time creeps up a bit. It is actually a good sign when I feel it at two weeks; means I’m not so bad. When I work it out and it’s been six or seven and I’ve only just noticed, I know I’ve been very ill. Well, both you and I know that I’m not very ill because I’m keeping this up pretty well just now. But it’s still been two weeks.

Of course it’s all relative. I know people who have been literally in the same room for a year. And others who get cabin fever after a weekend stuck indoors.

Now I’m getting excited/ panicked/ nauseous about my book again. During yet another troublesome night I began to go through (despite my conviction that I would leave it alone for a few days) and got through editing the first seven thousand words within a reasonable margin of satisfaction. As in, done and dusted.

I found my first major inconsistency. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had my protagonist’s parents living in Cornwall. This is an important fact for all sorts of reasons. However, within the second chapter I found a few sentences indicating that they were in a different time zone. Bugger.

I suppose it’s not major, but I hadn’t expected to find such a bloomer so early on in the book. I know there will be others and probably much worse; I’m just praying there’s nothing nearly so bad as the ones that turned up in my first draft.

I’m also having difficulty sorting out chapters. I naturally write in sections or scenes; stories are like that. But these vary greatly in size, sometimes as little as a thousand words, sometimes as long as three or four thousand. If I called each of these a chapter, I would probably have a book of fifty odd chapters! I could divide these scenes into larger chapters but even with this, unless I ignore what’s going on in the story at the time, I struggle to make such chapters even vaguely consistent lengths.

On top of this is the issue of naming chapters. It is terribly old fashioned, but a big part of me desperately wants to entitle every chapter. One of the favourite books of my childhood was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. I love that book for so many reasons, but one great thing about it and other books from that period is that the chapter titles are so very exciting such as I Run a Great Danger in the House of Shaws or The Flight In The Heather: The Heugh of Corrynakiegh.

I can’t be as close as I feel to finishing. I still have masses to do. And why does it make me feel like throwing up when I think about a time when it will all be done? I don’t understand that at all. I suppose it is a matter of what will I do then? And if it turns out, as it well might, that what I have written is rubbish or okay but nobody will publish it, then what the fuck am I going to do? What am I going to do with my life if the one avenue which might have made things okay is blocked off to me?

Hmm, sorry, I know. If this fails, I must try again or think of something else. There are a lot of opportunities in basket-weaving. I could work from home, weaving baskets and selling them on eBay. Baskets which attach to wheelchairs or mobility scooters perhaps. Or I could learn a bit more about computers and conduct major banking fraud from the comfort of my bed. Or perhaps I could invent something like, I don’t know, an ergonomic toothbrush.

For the time being, I certainly need to get out more.

102,950

Sometimes when I refer to my novel, I feel a fake. There are many days when little to no progress is achieved, sometimes weeks where nothing happens. Part of me feels like I've barely started with all I have to do.

So today I did a wordcount.

In fairness, it is still a big mess. I am going to leave it for a few days and then come back and work through the whole thing, tidying it up, rewriting bits that need rewriting. There are still bits I haven't written, but I don't want it to be much longer than this. 100,000 words is an effective doorstop as it is, especially as the first draft was about 75,000 (do did that happen?).

The word "fuck" appears 54 times. I have to do something about that.

In other news, I was forced to cancel my second acupuncture/ physiotherapy appointment. Next time, if I'm ill again, I will be kicked off the books. The reception didn't put it quite like that, but it is fair enough. Perhaps I'm just not well enough to do it just now. Which is depressing, because I actually feel like I'm doing all right except for the pain, yet it's not the pain that has stopped me going. I've had six physiotherapy appointments since mid-August and I've managed to attend two. And it was my idea, I asked for the referral.

Tragedy equals Comedy minus Timing

Last night I finished The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I expected it to be depressing. I thought it might be quite self-indulgent in the way veiled autobiographies often are, especially veiled autobiographies involving mental illness. However, in the end I found it funny more than anything else.

Oscar Wilde said something along the lines that a work of art (art in its widest sense) can’t be moral or immoral, it is either effective or ineffective. Because ultimately, art is a mirror. It tells us something about ourselves. So what the heck does it say about me, chuckling away to a book in which a young women descends into madness, first published a month before the author killed herself? Do I have a really sick sense of humour?

No, it was funny. The character of the narrator and protagonist was funny, with her bizarre romanticism (aspiring to collect male acquaintances with exotic names), her sexual frustration, her preoccupation with her own unfulfilled greatness, her inability to be truly ‘good’ like her prissy friends, or truly ‘bad’ like the vulgar Doreen, whose every word “was like a secret voice speaking out of my bones”. She treats everyone else with both disdain and admiration – although she rarely expresses any of this out loud. She desperately wants to be normal and happy but has a very limited view about what that means. She is a Bridget Jones with a high IQ and dodgy brain chemistry.

And her unhappiness is comic. When desperation sinks in, she is totally hapless in her attempts to escape from home or write her novel. Before she makes what might be considered an asserted effort at suicide, she makes pathetic, really laughable, gestures towards it, which she takes so very, very seriously.

The funniest thing about depression is that you do take it so damn seriously. I mean, often there is something, something at the root of it which you really ought to take seriously. But you wind up taking everything seriously, including yourself and all your ridiculous behaviour. Suffice to say that my elaborate plan to drown myself in a duck pond in the middle of the day, or to persuade a taxi-driver to drop me off on the tallest bridge in Suffolk, no questions asked, seem pretty funny to me now. Especially as I tried to exercise them both in the same afternoon, visiting a church in between (just to check there was no God) and doing a lot of walking round. This resulted in an immediate relapse in my physical health that put me in bed for two months solid. And this when it was my physical health that was making me so desperate in the first place… Come on, that is a bit funny, surely? I mean, who thinks about drowning in a duck pond anyway?

I supposed I can laugh quite easily at this because it was a long time ago, I was a teenager at the time and whilst at the time it seemed like the most dramatic incident in the history of everything, well, I just hadn’t been born. But even last year, when I went loopy, it was quite funny. It was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me. It wasn’t Plath’s Bell Jar. If the Bell Jar surrounding her had shattered and great shards of glass had fallen in on her, then that would have been closer to my experience.

However, my paranoia was, in a sense, a comedy of errors. For a start, there was discussion of my ‘crisis’ going on behind my back – I know that for sure now – just not nearly to the extent I imagined. So there were people revealing information that they shouldn’t, to my knowledge, have known. And then was the fact that I had a brain like mud and I didn’t know what I’d said to whom. I would often demand of someone, “How do you know that? Who told you that?!” only for them to reply “You did. Just now.”

Then there was my central delusion; the idea that my every thought was being leaked or projected out of my brain. This sounds funny by itself even though, my God, can you imagine it? My only way to describe this experience is if someone took all the sexual thoughts you ever had – but especially the really odd ones, the stuff you don’t yourself feel too comfortable about – made them into a graphic film and then broadcast this film on the television sets of everybody you knew. Everybody. Not just close friends and family, but everyone, your postman, your colleagues, your teachers from school, and of course, everyone who had ever featured in any of your fantasies. And they can’t turn their sets off.

This wasn’t quite what I imagined, but I was pretty sure that all my thoughts were leaking out and thus, everybody knew everything – they might as well have publicly broadcast my innermost everything.

Shame is not the word. Terror barely touches it. But it is kind of funny. I mean, really. I shuffle away from people who read their Horoscopes and yet I fell for this? Ha!

[It was a virus, apparently. Story of my life. It’s bad enough that every time I have a new and distressing symptom the GP feels my perpetually swollen lymph nodes and says, “It’s a virus.” Didn’t expect the bloody shrink to pull that one! My brain swole up, she said, blurring the lines. Hmm, the lines. Blurred. Fine.]

Perhaps I find humour in this stuff because the human situation is inherently comical. Our minds do not behave consistently with the reality of our lives. All sustained emotional distress is ironic, but then arguably so is contentment. We are programmed to fear death above all things and yet it is the one absolute certainty about our existence. At the same time, our minds have the capacity to turn upon us and consider death long before we've exhausted every other possibility. It is, after all, the last thing you do.

There's nothing much funny about Sylvia Plath killing herself at the age of thirty. One of the main sources of her unhappiness was the sense of being unable to fulfil a potential that she knew to be immense. And all that nonsense about sex, about men and women, marriage and babies. We may be destined to screw one another up just a little bit, but it's nothing worth dying for. Not nearly.

Suicide is really a lot of bad luck.

But if you can't laugh...

Poker Metaphors

My diet of Americana is taking it's toll. I have never played poker. I don't even begin to understand the rules. More a chess girl me. Or Scrabble. But here I am at a very crucial stage of my novel using poker-related metaphors.

Is this okay? I mean, gambling is one great big metaphor that can be applied to most decision-making and poker involving an element of deception... No, no, poker will not do. I am English for Jingo's sake! And I live in Yorkshire. If I want to gamble I make bets on whippets.

Jennifer decided to back Buster, the rather mangy whippet with a limp and half an ear missing and so she decided to meet John and hope nothing would happen. John, on the other hand, put all his money on Tiddles, a pedigree whippet with a taste for rabbit. By eck and hell, as like as maybe, 'appen by fireside. Tiddles won and Buster had a massive cardiac arrest half way down the track. Only when Jennifer woke up in John's bed the next morning did she remember the limp and realise her mistake.

Okay, poker it is.

And I don't have any characters called Jennifer and John and nobody ends up in bed together in case you were worried. I was just testing the water.