Mirror in the bathroom, recompense

[Self pitying post removed - too much whinging even by my standards]

I've not been well.

Afternoon Tea at the Wits End Café

A slight lie, but it made for a good title. I thought we were going to the Wits End Café at Sandsend. In the end we went to the Sandside Café which is at the other end of the village. Same difference; both very nice, although the Wits End is recommended if you come in the winter on account of the fact that it is (a) open and (b) they have a wood-burning stove and you can sit watching the dark skies and raging seas, drinking hot chocolate and feeling rather cosy.

My friend P and I got a taxi to Sandsend, the next village up the coast from Whitby and a very beautiful place indeed. We had apple pie and cream (and tea, obviously) at the Sandside Café and then strolled onto the beach.

Here are the two views, left and right (East and West) from where we were. You can see Whitby pier and the Abbey on the West Cliff. There were lots of people on the beach today, most of them turning rather red.



The sweetest thing we saw was a tiny little golden-haired cherub who was paddling in the brook with the ducks - he was little bigger than a duck himself. Obviously, he didn't get his photograph taken.

We went down to the beach and made our way to the water's edge bit by bit, having a sit down every ten yards or so. Then I had to do a dance in the sea; the first time I've set foot in the sea for some considerable time. P refused to join me on account of his delicate constitution and insistence that "That's nothing but freshly melted polar icecaps!"

You may notice that the horizon is on the wonk. This is a natural phenomenon exclusive to this stretch of coastline.

You may also observe that yes, this was the hottest July day since 1911 and yes, it was 36°C even in parts of North Yorkshire, and yes, I did remain modestly dressed. This is because I am a reptile and I was still a bit cold, even today.

On the subject of reptiles, our coast here is famous for its wealth of ancient fossils. Here is an Ichthyosaur what we uncovered on the beach. It swam in the sea here 118 million years ago. It still looks rather jolly after all these millennia.

I hadn't been out of the house (apart from to the doctor's) for five and a half weeks, so this was a very welcome excursion. And I didn't feel sick at all today. I began to doze on the beach but at that point we decided to head back. A lovely afternoon.

Ten Things

1. Since last report, the menacing spider has appeared twice on the inside of skirts as I have been pulling them on and once underneath a blanket I was pulling over my legs. I kid you not; this spider is out to get me.

2. I don't know how but I have injured my foot whilst asleep and it is now rather uncomfortable and stuck in a sort of twisted position. Being just a few paces behind the latest fashion, I have decided I have a fractured metatarsal.

3. On the plus side, the pills I've got for my nausea seem to be working, along with the ginger tea and other recommendations gratefully received. The stuff I have is called, uh... ranitidine? I asked the doctor what Mount Everest was like and he said, "High."

4. James Medhurst uses Big Brother to illustrate the argument for proportional representation.

5. Disability Nation have made massive improvements to their website. Their most recent podcast was about being gay and disabled, featuring someone from BFLAG - Blind Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

6. Guess what this picture on the right is before you click on it. Were you even in the right ball-park? I need reassurance (in other words, say you knew exactly).

7. I like the warm weather. It is warm. I don't have to wear socks twenty-four hours a day and I don't have to worry about how I'm going to get my hair dry when I wash it.

8. I like being grown-up; yesterday we had Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia Frozen Yoghurt with some Yorkshire Puddings for lunch. Another advantage of being grown-up is that you can make a den with furniture and blankets and stay in it all day. Also, people take you more and more seriously whilst you take yourself less and less seriously. Childhood was crap in comparison.

9. I still haven't finished about the Oddballs, but I am too tired today (don't cheer!).

10. I finally receieved Murderball from the DVD rental people, but I really couldn't be bothered with it so I sent it back unwatched. I now feel like a traitor to the cause. But I haven't actually heard anything good about it apart from the fact that it wasn't deeply patronising. Hardly a recommendation.

Poetry Corner - Impossible! (a villanelle)

A brief interlude from all that nonsense about Oddballs and an unwelcome return for Poetry Corner. This time, I am attempting to advance the cause of terrible angst-ridden poetry by promoting the villanelle. If you don’t know what a villanelle is, click here.

The great thing about writing bad poetry within such rigid constraints is that even if you started writing something with feeling, the pain is quickly dispersed by the form – whatever you do, it is going to sound ridiculous. I recommend that any poetry written between the ages of 13 and 18 should be written in this form

I was feeling rather overwhelmed with everything I need to do, want to do and feel compelled to do at the moment, but now I am much calmer.


Impossible!

I hope somehow I shall prevail,
O'er everything that I must do
Impossible! I’m bound to fail!

Try as I might, to no avail,
My breaking point is overdue.
I hope somehow I shall prevail.

Weak my mind and body frail
Yet maybe I can stumble through?
Impossible! I’m bound to fail!

Slow and steady, like a snail,
A viscous crunch beneath your shoe.
I hope somehow I shall prevail.

Perhaps if I can just exhale,
My face won't be so purplish-blue?
Impossible! I’m bound to fail!

Everything I try to do;
My life, this poem; a pile of poo!
I hope somehow I shall prevail.
Impossible! I’m bound to fail!


Previous Poetry Corners: Ode to my TENS machine/ I just want my body to work/ My fair-weather friend/ St. Valentine's Day Massacre

How To Be A Proper Oddball #2

Since I am going off on one, go check this out first.

I have harped on before about the value of the mutants; deviation being a necessary condition for progress, whether in evolutionary terms or in any area of human thought and experience. If nobody ever strays from beaten track, then there will only ever be one road, heading in one direction. Of course oddness is not a sufficient condition for greatness – some mutations, like freckles, make little difference to anything and others can be detrimental; some oddballs only demonstrate how not to go about things.

However, without some deviation, we never make any progress. People who achieve great things are necessarily extraordinary, usually in more than one aspect of their abilities and behaviours.

Which bares the question, why do we push difference out to the edge, why do we discourage variation when it is so very good for us? I guess in terms of the way we have run our lives for the last several hundred years, deviation has generally caused a lot of trouble to the individual. Most people have been bound to a particular life according to where they happened to be born and who they happened to be born to.

If you think about small, self-sufficient communities, everyone would have to play a different role and do what they’re best at. But when you have large-scale agriculture or industry, you end up with a large proportion of people doing the same thing, regardless of their individual talents and temperaments. Well, it’s easier that way, you may well say.

I’m not sure it is easier for the vast majority of people involved in such systems, where there is minimal flexibility between roles. Okay, so any community – whether a group of four people or the population of the planet, has to delegate. However, as Charles Dawson recently recalled; a hundred years ago ordinary people in this country were effectively owned by their employers. And today, very much of the food we consume in this country, along with our clothes, the components of our technology – very much of everything we’ve got is supplied by people who are living with similarly few opportunities.

People who may have the temperaments and abilities of great artists or scientists may have no choice but to be harvesting your coffee beans or taking up arms for the coltan in your mobile phone. Not that I want anyone to feel bad about this; we rarely have that information, and what information we do have is muddled in with all the other pieces of information about what is good or bad for the non-human environment, for animal welfare, let alone our own health.

Which is a rather big tangent, I know. But suffice to say that this is a bad situation for all of us. People say, but someone has to do the dirty work, the menial tasks, the boring shit and this is quite true. Only why should this be determined by accident of birth (or uh, the colour of a person’s skin)? And why must some of the most necessary of work be conducted under such poor conditions? It is no better that we have entire countries bound in the service of other countries than it was when most of us were serfs bound in the service of our masters.

However, that’s another three thousand, four hundred and fifty-two blog entries…

Trouble is that because of the legacy of serfdom (for lack of a better, all-encompassing word), because of the legacy of communities where there was really only one job and one lifestyle young people could contemplate, I believe we fear and discourage deviation – we discourage people from harnessing their talents and temperaments where that might mean living life in a completely different way. And yet in the West, we are the people with the greatest opportunities to experiment with living. We dishonour the entire world when we make choices in the name of normality. And people do, all the time. People aspire to it.

I haven't finished yet, I'm afraid. I'm close though.

How To Be A Proper Oddball #1

The thing that got me thinking about this was an article about Albert Camus’ The Outsider on the BBC News website. This article was deeply annoying on so many levels. The Outsider (at least the translation I remember reading) wasn’t about anyone breaking off from society; the anti-hero was very much part of the working week, merrily colluding with the misogyny and racism of the society in which he lived, and only fell foul of it all when he committed murder. He was only an outsider in so far that he appeared to be largely incapable of lying about his feelings – which is very interesting of course and makes it worthy of study – but that’s not the same as being a Rebel without a Cause.

Even Rebel without a Cause (and similar) was only about the socially sanctioned period of rebellion allowed to young men in Western society - which, being socially sanctioned, is no kind of rebellion at all (okay, so Rebel was one of the first honest presentations of this and one specific to that particular era). During this time, young men have long been expected to experiment with alcohol, sex and latterly the internal combustion engine, before they are obliged to calm down and get on with life. Young women do have a go of course, but this is generally considered a great social ill (heaven forfend, we might end up looking like wrinkly old prunes).

But true non-conformity doesn’t involve intoxication or murder, both of which represent a wasted opportunity. True non-conformity involves screwing up a set of rules, but then rewriting them and getting on with life in a different way. And all this begins with a difference in aspiration.

A real tyranny we have in our culture is the idea that we all want the same things and should want the same things. It makes perfect sense that we should have common values, a shared morality, but that’s another issue. In fact, when I have met people of questionable virtue, it is the common aspiration which is used as an excuse for selfishness; “I want the same things as everyone else, but I don’t have them and that’s not fair. That's why I am such an arsehole.”

Not just material things, but the whole magical package people think of as normality. In the UK, most people own their home, most people are married and most people have children. Most people work for someone else as part of a big organisation. I speculate that most people work in an office environment. For most people, television is their number one past-time. And most households run at least one car.

There are also a whole heap of things which many people consider normal, whether or not they are accessible to most of us; foreign holidays, a very specific version of Christmas, the lavish wedding, the Christian funeral, the latest mobile phone and so on.

There is nothing wrong with any of this; some of it makes perfect sense. Only none of these things are necessary or sufficient conditions for a happy or fulfilling life. And yet, say you want something rather different and you are an oddball.

For example, most people throughout human history have reproduced, which is great. We have it drummed into us from an early age that everyone wants children, everyone must have children and those who fail to are selfish, immature or cold and condemned to a fundamentally empty life.

But throughout all of human history, a proportion of people in any given society have not had children, whether through active choice or whether through infertility, celibacy or homosexuality. In some cases, this has freed these folks up to make extraordinary contributions to the sum of human knowledge; a disproportional number of Great Minds in history, whether in science, politics, philosophy or the arts happen to have been childless. Uh, quick brainstorm for examples:

Jane Austen, Simone de Beauvoir, Beethoven, all three Brontë sisters, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll , Descartes, Gallileo, Handel, Hendrix, David Hume, D H Lawrence, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, Michaelangelo, JS Mill, Issac Newton, Fred Nietzsche, Florence Nightingale, Alfred Nobel, Alexander Pope, JP Sartre, Tschaikovsky, Alan Turing, Van Gogh, Leonardo Da Vinci, Virginia Woolf, the Wright Brothers…

I hope that's all correct. There are loads more, I am sure - and I didn't include Buddha, Jesus or Socrates on account of the fact that we don't really know enough about them. So procreation is by no means imperative for living a worthwhile or happy life. And having children is of course the most sensible social convention we have. It is a really good thing that most people do want to have children.

However, most of our shared aspirations are merely based how things happen to be for people right now; like home-ownership and our relationship to work. A great deal of it comes from the way life is being sold to us, by governments and businesses. No great conspiracy, but so long as everyone wants (and fears) the same things, these entities know exactly how to make money and win votes. And our parents naturally want us to have lives rather like their own because they know how to guide us through that, having been there themselves.

But I'm not sure this does us a great deal of good, as individuals with a great variety of talents and temperaments. It might be relatively safe, the path of least resistance, but does it make us happy or use each of us to the best of our abilities? And is it is even sustainable?

This was more than one half hour period and I'm going to run out of time today so I'll continue this tomorrow (don't groan - was that a groan? Who groaned?!!). No, I'm not yet sure what I'm getting at either.

Turn and Face the Strain

Well today I decided to face my problem. As any keen observer will have noticed, a lot of the entries on this blog are me having a good old whinge about personal circumstances, cunningly disguised as some wider point about disability or certain sorts of impairment. Today I am openly whinging. Well, not exactly whinging, as I am looking towards a solution.

My health has picked up a bit. I am shamefully ungrateful for this, not because I am not pleased to be better, but because it doesn’t feel very much better and it is not nearly better enough. But, for example, I have managed to sustain a lower dose of opiate painkiller for a couple of months now. I'm wondering if I can drop my NSAIDS completely. Bad days I need more pain-relief, but that’s okay. I am spending fewer days entirely in bed and just now, and by a slight majority, most days I’m not actually falling asleep during daylight hours.

It’s really not enough, I don’t know why, considering what a hard time I had last winter, I can’t appreciate being able to do a little bit of something everyday – sometimes quite a lot of something all considered. But I don’t. I am still immensely frustrated. I have no serenity whatsoever. I know I cope better than some people, because I have known some people who really truly collapse in on themselves. But I also know that other people have carrying far greater burdens than my own without complaint.

Anyway, with one thing or another (I am short of time, as you'll see), I have decided to be more proactive. I am seeing how much I can achieve with half an hour's activity to half an hour's rest. Rest being proper, silent, eyes closed, bed rest. Activity being anything at all, including listening to radio programmes, watching DVDs and other activities other people might consider entirely passive.

I know this isn't practical to sustain everyday, and only ten minutes into my first rest period today [...] came into the bedroom and started talking to me about what we're going to have for lunch, but this is what I am doing. Wish me luck.

And that's half an hour's worth so I'm back to bed. Goes quick, doesn't it?

By the way, having fiddled with my template, can everyone still read everything okay? I realise that some of my older posts have been rendered in some hideously huge font, but do let me know if anything has gone really weird.