“This wasn’t part of the plan, was it?” my old friend in France messaged. My heart skipped a beat (and not just because of my autonomic neuropathy, for a change) as I thought about what he was going through. A mere three months after his wife of twelve years had died from a reoccurrence of her breast cancer, he remains bereft. Other issues (you know the kind; family disputes that strike at the very foundation of our world view) have crippled him before, during and since her passing, and the poor guy, whose heart is 24 carat gold or else I’m no judge at all, has been left reeling by the cruelty of people he once thought loved him.
​
By comparison, I’m having a cake walk.

Mmmmmmm. Cake...oops, sorry.

I know what he means, though. All he wanted was to enjoy the semi-retired life with his lady love, and to be left in peace to do so. All I want is to be healthy and to live a long life (largely because it means I get to enjoy the company of my loved ones for as long as I can), but right now my body seems to have other ideas. I’ve been in hospital again, for more surgery.

Several weeks after a man wearing scrubs (well actually, more than one; it was a two-team effort) inserted things up my hooter and messed about with the inside of my cranium and then plugged the hole with tissue taken from my left hip, I had an MRI to plan for some radiotherapy. That was a Saturday. A week later I was back in Vancouver General Hospital for ‘emergency’ surgery to remove some tumour tissue that had re-grown from the original operation site. I had suspected that something was amiss when the sight in one eye had again begun to deteriorate, but this was still a shock.

An even bigger shock was the extent of the ‘damage’ this time around, since the first surgery had been, to all intents and purposes, invisible. I am attaching a photo below…feel free to use it to keep the kids away from the ‘fridge.

Oddly enough, this surgery has been much more straightforward to come to terms with – certainly in terms of physical recovery. That ugly scar is healing well, I have been up on my back legs and out in the community – albeit gently – from a week after they took the top off my skull, and so far there are no signs of another resurgence. My fingers, toes, legs and eyes are firmly crossed that the path back to some kind of normality may be a swift and simple one.

I have even picked up my writing cudgels once more. I’m contributing to our local (very local) newspaper with short articles, I’ve sent an unpublished book to a friend, I’ve written a brief eulogy for her husband who died in the same week that I was re-admitted to hospital, and I have started to finally proof-read and edit an old piece of work with a view to self-publishing it later this year. I had almost forgotten how good it feels to write…

No, none of these things were ever in the plan, but then I am a notoriously poor planner. I’m so poor a planner, I stopped doing it years ago. I never planned to write, and I never planned to be sick, but since I’m doing the latter, I may as well make use of the enforced time spent on my over-sized derriere, and get some unplanned writing done.  

As the old medical adage goes: every surgery has a silver lining.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been something of a hypochondriac. I have, ever since I was a young child, worried and fretted about my health. Now, without wishing to be too stereotypical in my thinking (although I confess: a little stereotyping, along with home-made marmalade, helps me to feel safe), I have coped with this facet of my personality in a way that is frequently recognized as a male trait: I don’t tell doctors anything. There’s no use shaking your head and tut-tutting at the page; I’m not here with you, in fact I wrote this some time ago. But, anyway, I have been stuck in this particular rut for more decades than I prefer to count.

Until a few months ago. What began as a routine eyesight test for a new pair of glasses (going to the optometrist has never held much terror for me) suddenly took on a life of its own. Referral to a specialist resulted in a diagnosis of a stroke (what? eek!) and a second referral. A trip to Nanaimo to see a more special specialist had me being pushed into a CT scanner before lunch, and then after lunch being told that they had discovered a three centimetre tumour at the base of my brain. At that stage, it seemed too late to point out that I only wanted a new pair of glasses…

My reluctance to speak to doctors was entirely overwhelmed by what followed: surgery and ten days in hospital followed by…emergency surgery and a week in hospital (which, to be blunt, I felt was taking the joke too far). During that six/seven week period, my medical status was laid bare (along with other parts of me, not least my reticence to discuss symptoms for fear of being told bad news) and my reluctance to engage with the medical world was trampled underfoot.

Thank goodness.

The surgeries and recovery periods were no bed of roses (excuse me if my fingers tremble a little as I remember), but my life was put back on track – or at least it will be once all my treatments are finished. Had I – as I was accustomed to doing - continued to ignore the symptoms that I had been experiencing for more than six months, the outcome would have been very different.

Out of these experiences has come a new appreciation for the depth of love that my lovely lady holds for me (something else I was really not very good at), the importance of moving forward with gratitude and positive purpose, and the startled, fresh understanding that enemas are really not very nice at all. I have learned a great deal, as has my immediate family; they have learned about me, and I have learned about them. In many ways, I am humbled, richer and hopefully wiser for the lessons that I have been taught.

One day, though, I shall wreak a terrible revenge on that surgeon and tell him my life story…

Pain.

Lots of it. In fact, to use a medical term; shitloads of pain. But in completely the wrong place.

This is the enduring memory of regaining consciousness – or at least something approaching it – after spending (little did I know it at the time) twelve hours on the operating table.  The very first thing I had become aware of was the pain – in fact I shall stick my head over the hyperbole parapet and use the word ‘agony’ – followed by lots and lots of noise and a voice shouting my name. Following instructions and opening my eyes, there was a vaguely familiar face – my friendly neighbourhood neurosurgeon, no less…

He is smiling, and as I lie there in a hot pool of pain, I hate him for looking so bloody happy. “It’s all over!” he yells over the background cacophony, momentarily freezing my heart as I think he’s telling me I am dying. “It went very well! We’re very pleased!” he bawls, his smile broadening in what I can tell even then is a rather forced attempt to reassure me. Exhausted by the effort of despising him with every cell in my body, I fall back into my world of agony, the like of which I cannot remember experiencing before.
But it hurts in the wrong place.

I know, for example, that I have had an operation on my head. I can just about recall that it was supposed to entail a graft being taken from my left hip. However, although my nose is completely blocked, my head doesn’t seem to be hurting – at least not that I can tell through the incessant clamour of screaming nerves in the region of my right hip. It doesn’t occur to me that they may have taken the graft from there instead (as it turns out, they haven’t), I’m too busy being very confused and just a little terrified about the depth of that brutal, unremitting pain.

There follows the briefest moment of unconsciousness (it turns out to have been another two hours during which I was – I am told - at least semi-conscious) of which I now have no memory whatsoever. Suddenly, I’m in a different room. I’m lying on my left side and I’m cold - very cold. The pain is still there, but a little less all-consuming. The hated face has gone, and to my startled delight, my world fills with the most wonderful sound I have ever heard. It is my wife’s voice, and she is calling my name (excuse me for a moment…I must stop typing here; there seems to be something in my eye). With an effort, I rise through the fog to meet her. After what feels like ten minutes, my eyes open, and there she is. I’m lying on my left side and she is bending over me, softly calling me. She is smiling as my eyes open, but even then, even with the background of pain and sluggish wakefulness, I can see the lie behind that smile. She is beautiful, she is wonderful and I can feel my tears pooling in my eyes. Just to know she is there is a huge help.

​I am not alone.

She is deeply moved, scared and worried, I can see that much. Beyond her is my daughter, her face pale and shocked, and no wonder; before her lies little more than a remnant of the big, strong man she has grown up with. The man who has always protected her now stretched out on a bed, powerless and struggling. I remember my promise to myself and to my wife; I know what I must – what I should – do. As she leans to kiss my cheek, I try to speak but find my mouth painfully dry. “What did you say, my love?” she leans in again to try to hear me. “I’m still here!” I manage to whisper. A brief moment of shock passes over her face, followed by intense emotion as I try again. “I’m still in here!” My deepest fear – that I might not be the same person when I awoke – must be dispelled. I’m conscious of how terrible I must look, yet my focus is gripped by what she says next. “It’s been twelve hours! You were in for twelve hours!” she tells me, and it’s my turn to be shocked. Twelve bloody hours!

I’m forced to shift my attention again as my daughter steps forward and leans over me. “Hi dad!” she says in her soft, gentle voice, and behind her eyes I can see the tears waiting to flow. “Hello my gorgeous girl.” I croak, an emotional tremble making itself evident, and then again in case she too needs to know that the same person has returned to her life “I’m still in here!”. As her face dissolves in emotion, my eyes close and the room briefly becomes a place merely of confusing sounds. I can rest now. I have said what needs to be said. What I don’t know at that time is that the operation did indeed last twelve hours – having been scheduled for seven – and that my wife had been denied the chance to see me for another two hours while the post-operative team tried to stabilize me and make me comfortable. What agonies my daughter -and in particular my wife who had been waiting for fourteen hours - must have endured…

Next, my eyes open upon strangers’ faces. Someone shouts “…moving you in a moment!  One, two, three, go!” and I am dragged backwards, reigniting the white hot fire in my hip. To my embarrassment, a loud groan of agony escapes from me, and darkness kindly falls once more.

When my eyes open yet again, I’m moving. Voices – two of them – are complaining about the bed upon which I’m lying. It’s the wrong type of bed, apparently – not intended for an ICU patient - I’m very heavy (agreed) and the combination  is, apparently, difficult to steer. They are unhappily discussing their bad luck as I watch a clichéd scene of overhead lights passing from below my chin to above the top of my head. It’s reminiscent of a 1970s TV series, yet curiously reassuring; I’m moving away from the source of my distress, moving towards the next steps in my healing journey.

The worst is, I hope, over. A short journey in a brightly-lit elevator, another brief trip underneath stereotypical overhead lighting and into a dimly lit space – suddenly accompanied by muted beeping sounds -  and then finally a brightly lit, small room. I have arrived in the Neurological Intensive Care Unit just as the anaesthetic is losing its insidious grip upon me. Faces gather around, intravenous drips and monitoring devices are attached by invisible hands. I am more aware than ever of my utter helplessness.

For the first of many, many times over the next ten days, the standard mental acuity questions begin. “What’s your full name? Can you tell me the date? Do you know where you are?” Groggily, I do my best to make myself understood through the combination of anaesthesia, a horrendously swollen and sore throat (intubation for such a long time apparently – and understandably - has that effect), a painful, dry mouth and my ever-present English accent.

My recovery -beginning with the longest night of my life - is officially under way…and my hip still hurts like hell.    

Different rooms…

Only after we had been given an explanation for my symptoms did we begin to properly face up to them and accept their severity. I had first noticed a decline in my energy levels at a damned inconvenient  time; just as we were preparing to move house from suburbia and  take up residence on a small island (yes, really) off the coast of British Columbia. The timing was poor in more ways than one; aside from it making important, moving -related everyday tasks (including work) far more troublesome than they had any right to be,  it also gave me the perfect excuse to pretend it wasn’t really happening and to shrug it off as a combination of lack of sleep and advancing age.
​
Once we had moved house and had begun a planned extended break from work – with luxuries like a no0rmal sleep pattern thrown in as a bonus – things should have improved. But things did not. Again, with a strange twist of sardonic humour, the universe arranged for my wife and I to both undergo a period of extreme fatigue. Once more my symptoms were masked as we convinced ourselves that we were ‘decompressing’ after leaving the suburban way of life behind. It had never suited us, and fitting in with that whole ‘scene’ (man) had always been something of a deliberate effort for us both. It made sense to us that our eventual ‘escape’ had left us emotionally and to some extent physically exhausted.

In due course, my wife ‘recovered’ and regained her old energy levels. Her big fat (and getting fatter despite reducing his food intake) lummox of a husband, however, did not. In fact he got worse. I became more and more tired and listless. Mentally, I began to slow down too. Sleep came more and more easily to me and most strangely of all, my body changed shape at an alarming rate. What greeted me in the mirror one day was no longer something that I recognized as my own body. I was turning into a pear.

Through all this, as I have already mentioned, I became aware of a change in my eyesight. I had begun to not notice some things, and gradually my eyesight began to be consumed with a strange fogginess. From time to time I would think about it and conclude that I was simply aging, but for the overwhelming majority of the time I pretended that nothing was happening; that everything was really alright. Such is the lot of the hypochondriac in denial; I was too scared to face what I believed (something unknown yet fundamental) might be happening to me. I simply couldn’t face that reality, whatever it might be.

When my eyesight had deteriorated beyond the point of being ignored, I finally sought out professional advice and diagnosis. As it turned out, that initial diagnosis (a macular hole in my left eye) was completely wrong, but fortunately it entailed a referral to a more experienced specialist. His speculative diagnosis and referral to a neural ophthalmologist proved to be the game-changer, and a quick and painless CT scan revealed the truth about what was going on inside my head.

To be fair to the man, he was excellent. He showed us the images, gave us the news and discussed it with us in a compassionate yet professional way. He showed great empathy and patience, answering our questions gently and completely. We owe him our gratitude for the manner in which he dealt with the shocked couple before him. It was his office that we had left in a state of this-can’t-be-happening bewilderment, my life apparently in the balance, and with no positive absolutes to cling to. That was the moment when we had held each other and wept for a future that we thought had been ripped away from us. That was the moment I began to think about saying goodbye to my children.

Our next appointment was with the eminent surgeon, an appointment which first alerted us to the fact that the medical profession had decided what to do with me. Having steeled myself for an encounter with a grey-haired, rotund man (forgive my sexist moment) with impressively bristling eyebrows, I was surprised to find myself talking to  a slim, fit man of approximately forty, who appeared be in possession of completely tamed eyebrow hairs as well as a cheerful, if business-like demeanour. The meeting was intense, filled with lots of information, lots of questions, and lots of…other stuff. Once it was over, I was completely exhausted, both emotionally and physically.

They were going to go into my head through my nose, for goodness’ sake! I’d never heard of such a thing – hell, I’d never even considered such a thing was possible! The need for urgency, however, was clear. My physical condition had deteriorated rapidly to the point where simply walking a few hundred metres left me physically drained, and sleep filled most of my days. I was, in effect, winding down to a complete stop.

Three weeks later, then, my beautiful, strong, wonderful lady and I arrived at the hospital in Vancouver at the appointed time. That time, by the way, was 5.30a.m. I registered my presence and we waited together until I was called into the pre-op room. There, this magnificent woman whom I am so proud top call my wife, helped me struggle out of my clothes (I had been reduced to stumbling about) and into the standard hospital dignity-absorbing gown.  After twenty minutes of waiting and talking to one another against a backdrop of beeping monitors and hushed voices, we said our goodbyes (I struggling to hold it together – and I don’t mean the gown), she was escorted to a waiting room and I was wheeled on a gurney out of pre-op and admitted to hospital for the first time since I was a toddler. It’s fair to assume that I was somewhat apprehensive about having things pushed up my nose and into my skull.

At this point  - I am advised by my erstwhile, medically-trained spouse, due to the drugs they gave me before anaesthetizing me – time starts misbehaving itself in my memory (what there is of it). I was semi-conscious when they wheeled me into the suite of operating theatres. Amid great hustle and bustle I  asked whomever might be listening how many operating rooms there were (for some reason it suddenly seemed relevant), and being informed that there was a suite of twelve theatres. I recall being quietly terrified by the appearance of the suite, which to my addled mind had the appearance of a white-tiled butcher’s shop. Or abattoir.

Somebody greeted me in a hale-and-hearty kind of way as my immense gown-covered bulk arrived under the lights in THE room. I managed a feeble mumble in reply. A different voice began to talk to me and unseen hands began to pull at my hands and arms. The voice said “Now I’m just going to give you some medication in a moment.” and I watched an oxygen mask  (which seemed far too small)  descend onto my face – I swear it was exactly like a cheesy movie representation – I remember one breath, one blink, and then…

In and out of…

Sight.

It began almost a year ago. I was, I thought, simply experiencing the same sort of deterioration in my eyesight that I’d witnessed my father undergo many years before. Focusing was less and less straightforward, my glasses needed updating  and age was creeping up on me in other ways; less energy, a slowing metabolism resulting in weight gain as well a hundred little symptoms which reminded me of the onset of true middle age. I thought. I’d always had ‘floaters’ in my eyes despite – until the age of forty anyway – having eyesight which was so good, it astonished anyone required to measure it. I had in the past been suspected of cheating in eyesight tests for police advanced driving (not so), but now my eyes were, I felt, beginning that long slow decline to permanent spectacles.  One of the floaters in my eye seemed to be more troublesome – more noticeable – than before. The decline seemed inevitable with the passage of time.

In the spring of 2017 I had an eye test and purchased some new spectacles. Two weeks later, they were ready for me. Immediately, I could tell that they were not working, but the rest of my life seemed to always divert me from going back to remonstrate with the optician (why, by the way, do these people always have raging halitosis?). Fast forward a couple of months and something new is becoming evident. We had just moved to our home on a small island, and life seemed good. But my energy was still decreasing – in fact I was starting to sleep almost every day in the afternoon. My eyes were deteriorating, and there now seemed to be a fixed floater in my left eye. One day, while driving slowly through a village, I simply didn’t see a car heading towards us until it was almost upon us. Something wasn’t right.

As a diabetic for twenty-two years, the onset of blindness has always been a threat, and one of my greatest fears. Losing my sight would change my life so drastically, I have trouble imagining how I would cope. This was partly why I basically ignored my new symptom for several months; why I convinced myself (at least partially) that everything was actually OK, and that I simply needed to wear glasses full time. It took me three months, however, to take the logical step of having my eyesight tested once more.

The optometrist – a very pleasant young lady sporting surprisingly tight clothing and truly appalling halitosis (why do these people….?) tested me thoroughly and diagnosed me with a new problem. I had, it seemed, a ‘macular hole’ in my left eye; a serious but manageable situation. A little shaken by this unexpected development, I dutifully made an appointment to see a specialist for confirmation and treatment.

Several weeks later, therefore, I dragged myself along (my energy levels were by now very low and I had put on a great deal of weight without changing my eating pattern) to the specialist where I underwent a number of vision tests. The rather shy young man (yes, you guessed it: halitosis) finished his overview of my results. In my left eye the results were very clear; I was missing a full quarter of my field of vision. My right eye was almost as bad. Holy shit, I thought; it’s worse than I imagined. “You don’t have a macular hole.” he said quietly. As I stifled outraged thoughts of “Well why the hell did she tell me that I did?”, he continued. “In fact I don’t think that this is a problem with your eyes at all. It’s either an optic nerve issue…” (Holy shit!) “…or it could be something…” and here he paused ever-so-slightly; “…something growing in your brain.” At this point I gave up on ‘Holy shit’ (it suddenly seemed inadequate) and began thinking in terms of “Fucking hell!”

Another referral to the next level of specialist followed and two months later I lay in a CT scanner while pictures were taken of the inside of my head. In the intervening months I had quite successfully convinced myself that I had some optic nerve problems. It was inconvenient and maybe life-changing, and the idea was not welcome at all. When, therefore, my wife and I sat down with the doctor and he said “Well I think I can see where the problem is.”, I had a pretty good idea of what might come next.

Not for the first time (as you will know if you follow my other adventures in life), I was wide of the mark. The doctor pointed to his computer screen as he swivelled it – bearing a picture of the inside of my head -  towards us. “Here it is.” he said. I looked at the point he was indicating and my insides performed a somersault. “You have a tumour.” I was already ahead of him, however. I could see it on the screen, right down at the base of my brain. It looked as if it were in the worst place imaginable.  “Oh shit.” I said out loud, and looked at my lovely wife, whose face seemed like an immobile, pale mask.

Shit, shit, shit. A tumour. In my brain. Death, I thought.

The rest of that conversation – conducted very skilfully and with great empathy by the doctor – is preserved as a blur in my memory. All that seemed to count was that I had a brain tumour; that this wasn’t happening to someone else (as it surely should….not to me!) after all. It was, of course, very real. It was my turn to have this conversation and to face a bleak future – if I had a future at all. Holy fucking shit, I thought (well if you can’t use profanities at such a time, when can you?) as plans were made to see surgeons and undergo further tests. Holy….

As we left that hospital, we bumped into one of our new, friendly neighbours who was helping an aged, ailing man into the building. Perhaps he wondered why we seemed distant, devoid of small talk, and why our smiles didn’t seem to reach our eyes. The truth was that we had no time for social interaction. We needed one another, we needed privacy, and we needed to come to terms with the conversation that we had just experienced. We said our goodbyes – perhaps a little too hastily – and stumbled to our parked car.

The doors closed upon the outside world, bringing a sudden painful silence. I took a deep breath, looked at the love of my life alongside me, and as her eyes filled with tears, I began to cry.
​

You’re due an explanation. Even by my normally rather feeble standards, I’ve left it far, far too long to contribute to my own blog.
Had I been writing this a little more than three weeks ago, I would have struggled to find an explanation for my absence, apart from a general lack of enthusiasm to commit my thoughts to print. Today, I have more information; information which sheds some light upon my recent literary shyness. It seems that I have been unwell. More than that; I have been - and currently remain – what is generally considered to be ‘seriously’ ill, thanks to the presence of a moderately-sized tumour deep within what passes for my brain.
My wife and I have tried to come up with a name for the tumour; something appropriately combative or disrespectful through which to convey our lack of appreciation for its existence. Sadly, perhaps, I keep reverting to ‘Timmy’….it seems to be suitably demeaning (with my apologies to anyone out there by the name of Timothy) and ever-so-slightly silly. Timmy is approximately 3cm in diameter (which sounds fucking huge to me, but I’ll nevertheless try to be modest and stick with ‘moderately-sized’ for now) and resides on top of my hypothalamus and pituitary gland.
How rude!
I’ll resist the temptation to bore you with a description of the symptoms and the short story of the discovery of Timmy (the wittle wascal), but suffice to say it came as a complete surprise, and not a very nice one at that. It’s the kind of thing that normally only happens to other – usually anonymous or at least unknown – people; the kind of thing you only hear about third hand.  The kind of thing you find yourself thinking “Shit, glad that’s never happened to me!”  about.
Well, now it has indeed happened to me.
I suppose there was no reason why it shouldn’t. That doesn’t mean that I feel any less victimized, however. Over the last few weeks I’ve ridden the same emotional roller coaster that so many people have found themselves upon; the one that makes us realize how fortunate we have been, how many things we are grateful for, and how much we would dread leaving them all behind.
Currently, my thoughts have centred round the most valued things of all; my loved ones. I have cried a great deal at the thought of being gone and leaving them in grief (they’d better be grieving, or else I’d be haunting them) and the prospect of the process of leaving them in full awareness of what is coming down the line. The horror of such thoughts is overwhelming and even now, far too painful to revisit with you. Let’s leave it here; a possibility that is acknowledged without further attention being given to it.
Today, I’m awaiting my surgery day (I was originally told  that it was probably inoperable) with no little trepidation  and steadily worsening symptoms. My eyesight is deteriorating, and my short term memory seems to be faltering a little. I’m devoid of energy (this is the second attempt to finish  writing this short post) and experiencing a number of other niggling annoyances which plague each day. I sleep a lot, but my night time rest is disrupted and unsatisfying. I’m unable to work and so we will have to explore the mysteries of the welfare system and discover what we can ask for in support. Shit.
So, please forgive me if my posts are less than frequent (!) but I will try to keep you up to speed and share my thoughts of the process with you (hopefully without becoming too dramatic or maudlin) and hopefully emerge on the other side pf the treatment process as a beautiful butterfly (now there’s a weird idea) with the rest of a long life to look forward to…
 
It is, as they say, all part of life’s rich tapestry. I suppose.
​

Since I am awful at self-promotion, I'm going to let the latest Amazon review do the heavy lifting for me regarding 'Signs of )a) Life'...

"​Laugh? I almost did...

Seriously, a very funny book. Apart from the bits where it's not meant to be funny. At least, I hoped I laughed in the right places. And cried in the bits that were sad bits. Maybe I'll never know.

Liam's childhood experiences sound very much like my own: brought up in a pleasant little seaside suburban town, being unfortunately bright enough to go to the all boys grammar school and thus missing out on any interaction with the opposite sex (although at least Liam didn't have one older and two younger sisters - twins at that - too deal with). Although I think I beat him in the shy/sensitive/antisocial stakes: while Liam was at least taking part in extracurricular rugby matches, I was sat in my room reading Marvel comics. And while he was experiencing his first awkward encounters with the local girl at the bus stop, I was sat in my room reading Marvel comics. And when he was a wet behind the ears bobby on the beat in dullest suburbia, I was sat in my room reading Marvel comics and smoking crack cocaine... or down the pub, most likely. Yeah, it was down the pub, I'm sure - I never did smoke crack...

Oh, sorry, I was meant to be reviewing the book... Buy this book! Buy it now! Don't think twice! Get it on Kindle coz it's a bargain at a couple of quid! You'll cry with laughter! You'll wince with recognition! You'll feel vaguely nauseous during the sex scenes! You realize that fart gags are STILL funny, even as an adult!

Laugh?

I did. "

Sometimes. That seems to be how I write. Just sometimes. Having a grasshopper for a mind (in both size and habit means that I find it hard to maintain a train of thought for a decent length of time. As an example of the suffering I’m enduring, I have the line of that bloody song running through my head now – and have ever since I wrote the first word of this post. You know the one: “Sometimes when we touch, the honesty’s too much….”.

Just lately I’ve been going through yet another crisis of confidence, although a review of my book did help me to feel a little better about what I am trying to do. I’ve been feeling more and more like I’m not a real writer.  As much as I have railed against it, and as much as I have yelled and about it or held my breath until I’m sick, the effect of all that internet ‘advice’ about writing has been remorseless and seemingly unavoidable.

Part of it is that nobody seems to regard memoir writers as writers. Fiction seems to be where the glory and the accolades are at. Here, I must pause because my poor typing skills have just prompted the spell-checking program to substitute ‘accolades’ with ‘coolades’, and I feel the need to curse the universe just a tiny little bit. Even worse, ‘coolades’ isn’t a word at all, which means that the spell-checking software is entirely innocent, and I must have typed it all by myself without any electronic influence. I am therefore, now instead cursing (gently, because I need them), my two main typing fingers  - appropriately enough, the middle finger of each hand.

So; sometimes (when we touch….etc.). A friend has suggested - bluntly but not unreasonably – that instead of a pure memoir, in my next (currently being written) book I might construct a story arc into which I can weave my genuine experiences. I like this idea, although it does mean extra work for me, since I am committed to my original writing goal of getting down on paper (so to speak), as many memories as I can, so that my descendants might one day enjoy exploring them, and by extension, my personality. It means writing a memoir and then writing a story within which some memories are preserved.  Both projects appeal to me for different reasons, not least because it breathes a little freshness into a project that had begun to drift into the mental doldrums.

By way of refreshment, I’m also re-visiting a couple of fiction projects (that’s not to say that they’re fictional projects; they are real proj….oh you know what I mean) and doing a little editing as a precursor to continuing them with my creative juices reinvigorated. As I may have told you before today, one is a crime story (admittedly formulaic in nature, but I justify it to myself by convincing myself that it’s only an experiment) while the other is a fantasy-ish thing about a time-travelling dog and his human companions. OK, I admit it; it’s about the dog’s human companions. That project has stalled because I’m trying to avoid being formulaic.
​
In among this, I’m still trying to work up the courage to properly explore the world of freelance writing. I’ve never dealt well with having my work rejected (which makes that part of writing a really fun thing to do….not….) and I think that’s what is holding me back from diving in and just having a go at something. I know, however, that common sense dictates that it’s the way for me to go next. So I will.
 
Sometime.
​

​This passage contains a little coarse language, however i'm operating on the basis that we're all grown-ups here, and can deal with the occasional expletive. If we can't all deal with such things, then I think some of us might need to listen to people a little more closely.

Origins
With a distinct “Oof!”, I bounced off the unyielding door, a door which – and I mention this purely in the interests of historical accuracy - had a large metal 'H' screwed onto it. Not painted; screwed on. Even then - at a time in my life when the word was replete among the comics of the era - I didn’t often say “Oof!”. In fact, I don’t think anybody outside of ‘The Beano’ usually did, but in my defence, if I hadn’t been eleven years old, fresh out of catholic primary school and sincerely afraid of going to hell for doing so, I’d have said “Fuck!” and probably with some feeling. However, at that point I hadn't begun my swearing career, and 'Fuck' was yet to become my favourite word, although that process would not take very much longer.

1976 was a momentous year for more than one reason – each of them enough to justify a well-rounded expletive (and trust me; I got around to that within a matter of days). Most important of all, it was the year of the United Kingdom's best summer in living memory, and as a freshly-released primary school pupil I was gloriously free to enjoy the sunny, hot weather for a whole six weeks before embarking upon the greatest - and therefore the scariest - adventure of my short life; starting secondary school.

It was a summer of bright colours, sunburn, a plague of ladybirds, scorched grass and lots of time spent at the local open-air swimming pool (which, in deference to the roasting air temperatures, consistently offered water cold enough to turn a human body an interesting shade of blue within ten minutes); a summer for being outside every day without ever getting rained on. The light that summer was somehow special, the traditional family beach holiday was the best holiday ever (no rain!), and by beginning secondary school I was – as far as I was concerned, anyway – going to finally be growing up.

Walking - with that peculiar stiff-armed ‘walk’ that kids do when they’re actually running on school grounds but pretending to themselves and everyone in authority that it really isn’t the case - to the school bus taking me home from my tiny primary school for the very last time, I was unknowingly leaving behind something precious; something really quite wonderful and which I would fail to appreciate for many years. Perhaps it was a good thing that I was blissfully ignorant of reality. It hadn’t dawned on me that I was leaving behind all of my best friends, many of whom I would not see again for fully twenty five years, and even more – including my best and closest friend ever -  whom I would never see again. I had no idea; I wasn’t able to imagine that far into the future.

Had I but realised the brutal, absolute finality of that last day at Our Assumption of Catholic Guilt Primary School, I would have cried my little heart out. I’d have pleaded for those days to never end. I would have sobbed uncontrollably and yearned for the open, innocent and honest friendships that I had enjoyed so completely for the previous six or seven years. I would have looked into my future with horror – even if unnecessarily - instead of with mere trepidation and a little excitement.  However, being too young and just a little too stupid to fully grasp what was happening, I scuttled along that concrete driveway towards the school bus which would take me home one last time. My heart, in its innocence, was singing. I had, after all, six entire glorious weeks - almost half a lifetime - to prepare myself for the next phase of my life.

The sense of loss which embraces the ripping away of those friends is still very real to me more than forty years later, and although at the time I blundered into my future wrapped in a cloak of ignorance, I’m now grateful that I was spared that particular agony of awareness at such a young age. Even as things are, the scars have not healed. This is how I know with utter certainty that, had I but realized the truth – had I but paid attention to what  was happening - I would have cried like never before.

My primary school had been an ostensibly genteel, if not quite completely gentle establishment. The Catholic Church, with its history of vile oppression, torture and brutal warfare against people who had the temerity to have grown up somewhere else (and therefore to have not been ‘blessed’ with the chilled-out preaching of a hippy Palestinian carpenter), officially strongly disapproved of any un-Christian nastiness in the schoolyard or classrooms. This was unless such nastiness was perpetrated by a teacher upon a child up to and including the age of eleven (basically, the smaller, the better). Nuns were, of course, exempt from all the rules - including the laws of the land – when it came to cruelty towards children. In the case of nuns engaged in the training of young minds, the idea seemed to be that psychopathy was a desired character trait.

I was fortunate to have been taught (with one glaring exception during my very first school year when I encountered a lady of whom it is rumoured that she went on to join the East German secret police humiliation squads) by a series of compassionate and caring teachers. Authority figures, however, were not in short supply; the deputy head of my junior school – together with the rather more remote and aloof headmaster-man himself - scared the crap out of me, mostly because both wielded the ultimate punishment in times of moral or ethical crisis: the cane.

The cane was a terrifyingly thin piece of bamboo (it looked as if it could slice clean through a human torso when in the expert hands of a senior teacher) with a hooked end, exactly like every instrument of evil schoolroom torture I had seen in the old black ‘n white movies. The cane promised unimaginable pain and humiliation, followed by the very worst consequence of all. The worst thing that could happen (there was no question about this) was to  have one’s parents called in to explain why the teacher had been forced – forced, you understand – to thrash their recalcitrant offspring with a piece of desiccated vegetation. It went without saying that parents always took the teacher’s side. It was what parents/adults did; they banded together against the kids. We knew and understood it; as good Catholic children we were after all – and we were reminded of it every Sunday just in case it slipped our sinful minds – basically unworthy, and therefore by default deserving of punishment. We didn’t know quite what we were unworthy of (it was all kept deliberately vague, I think in order to avoid awkward questions), just that we fundamentally were – and this was a notion with the full support of the regularly visiting priests, of course. Yep, we Catholic kids were utterly and irredeemably unworthy, and that was that. We knew our place...

By today’s standards, the prevailing attitude towards children was leaning towards the brutal end of the spectrum, but in truth, it could have been much worse. Through some curious twist of church bureaucracy we were a delightfully nun-free school, however my elder sisters (ten and thirteen years my seniors respectively) had both told stories of pure terror about their secondary school days, populated as they were with pupil-beating nuns, whose manifestation of devout worship seemed to be ruthless -if righteous - cruelty towards powerless children. Typically, the only time I saw a nun was at church (they would occasionally turn up in very slow-moving packs of dried-up, twittering, rosary bead-fiddling biddies) but they tended to be very elderly examples, and well past their best child-thrashing age. Nuns in school, it became clear, were an entirely different kettle of wimples (now there’s a fascinating mental image) and were, I was solemnly advised, to be avoided at all costs.
​
The one brief incursion into my childhood by one of those pious, cowled monsters occurred when, in order to replace a teacher who had rather selfishly fallen ill, we were ‘blessed’ with a temporary visitation by the redoubtable Sister Presumpta (not her real name; that was, of course, Attila). A middle-aged (and thereby to our eyes, ancient) woman who obviously worked out with heavy weights each morning after a light breakfast of nails and broken glass, she ruled her unfortunate class with a rod of iron (and the thin edge of a ruler across the back of the hand) for several weeks. When not actually engaged in torturing people, she patrolled the corridors like a black Dalek, grim-faced, black-eyed and ready to pounce with ridiculous – and awesomely righteous - outrage upon even the most inconsequential misdemeanour. Sister Presumpta was, it’s fair to say, universally feared and despised – except of course by the headmaster and his deputy, both of whom seemed to revere her as a saintly influence who was doing both of them (and us) a huge favour by gracing us with her presence. It was her ghastly – if thankfully brief – reign of terror that began to sow the tiny seeds of doubt in my mind about the notion of a ‘merciful’ God and church. Upon reflection, she did some good, then.

The main weapon of choice at Catholic school – just as in the churches - was psychological torture. In particular, the Catholic church and its followers were very big on the twin virtues of  guilt and humiliation, and Catholic schools were the places where this message was most insidiously reinforced. Never a moment slipped by without our unworthiness (at least as far as the school leadership was concerned) being made apparent, as was the underlying – and traditional - sense of an afterlife filled with pain and horror, because (as we were constantly reminded) we were all sinners. The paradox of Catholic belief (at least among every Catholic I ever knew) seemed to be that we were all somehow born rotten to the core and had to spend the rest of our lives making amends for being so sinful before even drawing our first breath (which, as it turned out, was all Eve’s fault), but also that everyone we ever knew who had died, had quite definitely – no question about it - made it to heaven. To even entertain a thought that it might not be so was considered very bad form.  This puzzled me at the time, because I was aware of quite a lot of people who didn’t seem to be the kind of person that God would want to have in heaven, yet not a single one of my ancestors had apparently failed to make the grade. Statistically, this seemed an unlikely state of affairs.

I was never sure how that mental somersault worked, but by golly, I was assured that every one of my long-dead grandparents were looking down upon me and wagging a reproving finger whenever I stepped out of line. Yes, that’s right; they were all dead. Not one of them had stuck around into my childhood; only one hanging around long enough to see me reach the age of a few weeks old. I thought that was rather bad form, actually. Of course I couldn’t say anything; they were watching me from above, with much disapproval.

Our innate sinfulness and their aloofness allowed Mr. Barker (the deputy head) and Mr. Fillmore (the big cheese himself) to regard the small, unworthy people in their charge with permanent expressions of distaste, if not at times outright disgust. Each of them prowled the school corridors with a look about them as if they were unable to shake a foul smell; an expression that would intensify when in direct contact with a child. I felt their respective contempt on two occasions in four years, both of which left me quivering with self-loathing and fear in equal measure. It’s now a little too late to thank them for their influence over my adolescence (both having doubtless made full and frank confessions of their lives of sin, received absolution and therefore risen to eternal life in paradise, from where they are wagging their holy canes at me right at this very moment), so I won’t bother. The miserable bastards.

Mr. Barker was a very tall, very thin and very creepy-looking man. If he was alive today, he’d be an internet meme, but only rated for ‘Teen’. His height was bad enough for a child who was already small for his age, but compounding his looming creepiness was a permanently pale countenance, emphasised by a fierce blue beard shadow even at the start of the day. Steely, dark eyes peered out malevolently at the world as he bestrode the corridors and revelled in his power as the not-quite-but-almost boss of the school. He was never seen to smile (not even if a child tripped and injured themselves right in front of him), and the consensus was that he never blinked. Rumour also had it that he was indeed married, but kept his poor wife locked up in the house when he was at work. How the heck the person who started that one came up with it, I’ll never know - but I believed it for several years. He was that kind of man.

Mr. Barker always, always dressed in a brown suit with drainpipe trousers. The suit – made of high quality rayon - rustled slightly as he walked, the interlocking, agitated fibres generating thousands of volts of static electricity. Every ten or twelve paces, he would pause to ground himself on a metal window frame or door handle, the pain of each static shock strengthening his resolve to never stop hating the children under his supervision. Mr. Barker, through word and deed, was the grim reaper whom we all feared. Following my innate sense of self-preservation, I kept my distance and allowed my unreasoning terror of him to quietly and steadily develop.

Until…

At one point in my third year at the school, together with a couple of my friends, I took to spending time inside the classroom at lunchtimes. There we would read, tell each other silly stories, and draw. It was simple stuff, innocent and utterly harmless. Staying indoors wasn’t exactly banned, but was definitely frowned upon (the school didn’t usually bother with ‘gently discouraging’ anything, and leapt straight into thundering disapproval), since the merciful Lord’s fresh air was deemed to be good for us. Other teachers had seen the three of us making our own fun and had quietly warned us to not make any noise (for reasons not well explained), but otherwise left us alone, since we were doing no harm and not actually breaking any rules.
​
One day we all decided (for the same reasons that kids will stand in the shower with their raincoat on, or watch TV lying upside down on the settee, or try to drink milk through their nose) to sit underneath one of the classroom tables and read a favourite story from the library shelf. It felt a little like camping – it was fun! For a while we giggled and chortled (quietly) at something very innocent, but were interrupted by the shock of a huge BANG on the top of the table. For the first time in my life, I farted with fright. I looked up to see – to my horror – a pair of brown drainpipe trouser legs standing motionless right next to the table, the occasional crackle of high voltage sparks playing across the surface of them. Mr. Barker, the seeker of all things sinful, had found us.

His curiously high-pitched and hoarse voice reached out to us in a dry, rasping whiplash; “Come OUT of there at ONCE!”. The indignation in his tone was palpable, as was the gently crackling magnetic field being generated by his suit. We didn’t even look at one another, so deep was our terror. Trembling, we emerged from underneath the table to stand, huddled together for protection, under the distant gaze (he was very, very tall) of the fearsome electrode-man. Above him boiled and rolled a black cloud, from which lightning bolts flickered and jabbed. Obviously he hadn’t grounded himself in the last few minutes…either that, or I was hallucinating. “WHAT do you mean…” he hissed, baring discoloured, narrow teeth in oversized gums; “…by this BIZARRE behaviour?”.

I was nine years old, and had absolutely no idea what the question actually meant. Nobody had ever used the word ‘bizarre’ towards me before. As for what did I mean…well…I didn’t mean anything! I was just quietly having fun. I doubled the amplitude of my trembling. “WELL?” roared the mighty pipe cleaner, flaring his impressive nostrils. My dad had big nostrils – with bits of hair poking out of them - but Mr. Barker had him beaten on that count by several dozen as far as I could tell. “I don’t know sir.” a small, reedy voice said. I was a little shocked to realize that it had found its way out of my own mouth.
​
I knew instinctively that – feeble, contrite voice or not - this was a poor response. He flared his mighty air intakes again; “YOU DON’T KNOW?” he bellowed (as well as he could, with his sinister, hoarse voice), his eyes widening to pin-pricks. “You don’t KNOW? How can you not KNOW? What on EARTH would lead you to…to…sit under a table at…at…lunch hour?” The latter part of the question was delivered with an almost hysterical emphasis ( his question prompting me to wonder if he thought that sitting under a table at some other time of the day was perfectly acceptable), and I could see some white, foamy spittle forming at the corner of his mouth. I took that to be a bad sign, and allowed my bottom lip to quiver accordingly. To my left, my good friend Paul took a leadership role and managed to burst into tears, with the accompaniment of soft sobs and the gentle vibration of his mop of blonde, curly hair.

The great man hissed again, warming to his task now that he had caused some real distress for at least two children; “I have never come across behaviour of this kind before; I find it quite incomprehensible.” I found his sentences pretty hard to understand too, but I decided not to mention it. I was still a little fixated by the spittle, and was feeling queasy. “You boys...” he went on “…will stand outside my office in silence for the REST of the lunch hour. THEN I will decide what to do with you…”. The last part was left hanging in the air, as if everything up to and including public execution might be one of the options he was considering. I wouldn’t have put it past him, but of course the prospect of the application of the cane to my nether regions was uppermost in my thoughts. Trying my damnedest not to wet my shorts, with my two fellow criminals I dutifully made my way along the corridor, past the open door of the staff room  to the wall adjacent to Rayon Man’s office, there to wait under a large, depressing crucifix (bearing a gory and most unhappy-looking Jesus) in unabashed fear while our fate was decided.

As it turned out, no further punishment was ever forthcoming. This may have been due to the reaction of the deputy headmaster’s colleagues, because as we passed the staff room door, I had caught a glimpse of my own teacher, Mrs. Hill, with an expression upon her face of mixed puzzlement and irritation. She was an eminently sensible and caring lady, and would never have handled the ‘situation’ (not that there really had been one) in the same way. I’ll never know, but I hope she placed a metaphorical rocket up the idiot’s back passage. Nevertheless, the damage had been done; I was terrified and traumatized for the rest of the week and despite all the government information films of the era encouraging us to do so, you’d never again have found me sheltering under a desk or table in the event of a nuclear attack. The petty fool would probably have been pleased about that.

Worse, however, was to come. The day that I incurred the wrath of my headmaster is one that even now conjures up memories of dreadful shame and humiliation. Once again, the issue was almost non-existent, given that I was only ten years old and very much in the process of learning about the world. The entire school had been tasked with obtaining sponsorship funds for some Catholic charity (something like supporting the Pontiff’s laundry bill; all those whites don’t clean themselves…) and several of us had come up short of the target that our erstwhile headmaster had set for us. In my case, the lack of sponsors was the result of: a) most of my extended family not being on speaking terms with my parents, b) the neighbourhood around my home having been saturated by fellow pupils on the same mission and c) this one most of all - the fact that I was excruciatingly shy, and found it desperately difficult to knock on a stranger’s door for any reason, let alone to ask for money. My parents had spent my entire life inculcating me with the idea that I was to never ever accept money from anyone. Ever. As in: never. I didn’t know why, but I suspected it might be an obscure kind of sin. Of course, this being a Catholic school - and a school of the mid-1970s to boot, excuses of any kind were treated with dismissive distaste, and so on the day of the deadline I was feeling very nervous.

Each day began with a morning assembly of all the pupils, from the tiny infants all the way up to the big kids of ‘Junior 4’ – a full eleven years old and therefore almost adults in our eyes. The assembly ran as normal; prayers, announcements, more prayers, a hymn and finally a word or two from Mr. Fillmore. He was an imposing figure (to us at least); mid fifties, always clad in a suit (he dabbled with more daring colours than did the very brown Mr. Barker; grey or beige for instance), the morning light reflecting importantly from his bald pate and his lumpy, hooked nose doing its very best to touch his chin. He always looked pissed off, but he rarely spoke to the pupils on a personal level.

“Two weeks ago, you were all given sponsorship forms to take home and complete. You were all expected to return those forms yesterday, filled with sponsors to support this great and holy cause (the pope’s undies must have had terrible skid marks that week). Most of you have fulfilled the expectations that I had of you.” This was about as supportive as he got, but then his face darkened. “SOME of you, however, have failed miserably!” My heart beat quickened as I sensed trouble. “The following uncaring and uncharitable people will go to my office immediately and wait for me there.” He read out five names, including my own – at which point some poo might have come out - and one of my friends. The school was small enough for us all to know everyone (with the exception of the tiny infants, whom we haughty ten year-olds regarded with the bored curiosity that a dog might have for an old toy) by name, and being called out like this was a deep humiliation. One after the other we stood, red-faced, and endured the righteous gaze of two hundred ‘caring’ pupils who instinctively summoned up their latent Catholic judgement and found us wanting, based entirely upon the headmaster’s comments. Like condemned prisoners, under the withering glare of hundreds of righteous eyes we trudged out of the hall in silence while Mr. Fillmore regarded us grimly and worked on his expression of contempt.

Thirty seconds later we all stood with our knees gently trembling outside the headmaster’s office, situated at the very end of a long corridor and next to the teacher’s and other adult’s school entrance (we were never allowed to use this door). We stood in silence as the school secretary’s typewriter clacked away in the background, certain that she too knew just how awful and uncharitable each of us was. After what seemed like an hour but was in reality just a few minutes, we heard the rest of the school leave the hall in a hubbub of noise, and sure enough, moments later, Mr. Fillmore strode around the corner and into view. He wore an even deeper expression of distaste than usual. My thoughts once again went to the cane, and whether or not this was going to be the worst day of my school life.

The great man swept past us all and into his office without a glance. His silence and diffidence was almost worse than anything he could say. Almost. Within a few seconds he was out again, glaring at us and shaking his head. He regarded these five  children, young people whose lives, in that moment, he had the power to influence one way or another “You…disgust me.” he said. The words were shocking, humiliating, crushing. “You clearly don’t CARE about people less fortunate than yourselves, do you? DO YOU?” He waited for a response – an admission that we were what he had decided we must be. I kept my mouth shut for fear of what might happen if I did or didn’t agree with his opinion of me. For the next five minutes he berated us and our appalling attitude to charitable causes, our lack of feeling for others, and the shame that we had brought upon the school, our families and the church. I’d never been told that I was quite such a worthless piece of shit before, and the effect was very disturbing. Biting our lips, we dumbly accepted the blank sponsorship forms that he thrust at us with instructions to fill them and at his behest, stumbled in a depressed haze back to our classrooms, there to once again be subjected to the withering gaze of our peers. It wasn’t exactly Victorian England and I wasn't being forced to climb up sooty chimney stacks for a penny a day, but there were times when – having no past lives to compare our lot with - being a kid in the seventies could be extremely difficult.  Looking back now,

I’d much rather have had my backside whacked. At least I might have been able to forget that pain.

The change from primary to secondary education was a major landmark. In the spring of our final year of primary school, we were one day ushered into the school hall and pushed towards the first written examination of our young lives. The ‘Eleven Plus’ as it was universally known, was THE examination which had the potential to determine how the rest of your life would pan out. It really was that significant, although at the time I viewed it purely as the means to get to the same school that my brother occasionally spoke about in glowing terms – or so it seemed. A ‘pass’ at this level meant being eligible to attend a grammar school, considered to be the upper echelon of secondary education. A ‘fail’ on the other hand held the prospect of sliding down a grubby slope and into a Comprehensive school, which, despite the title, offered a far less complete or rounded educational experience to students who were – how do I put this delicately – regarded (unfairly, I should say) by the system as the likely cannon fodder for the economy. Most of us were desperate to pass this first and hugely important test. The minority who couldn’t have given a brass donkey’s ding dong about whether or not they passed - at least according to the system - in all likelihood headed for a place more suited to their approach to life.

Secondary, or ‘big’ school as we had always thought of it up to that point, was the beginning of a new phase of our lives, as well as the end of many things which belonged to young childhood. It was the end of wearing shorts to school, for one thing. This was something to which all the boys – and in particular, our blotchy, hairless and consequently frost-bitten legs - eagerly looked forward. Long trousers as part of our school uniform would be a welcome sign of maturity, as well as legitimate protection from exposure-related injuries. The end would also prove to be nigh for things such as privacy (shared changing rooms/showers!), being called by our first names and for the most part, being taught by teachers who genuinely cared about their charges (Messrs. Fillmore and Barker as well as any type of nun notwithstanding). It was also the final hurrah for the days when we constructed our sentences without using the word ‘fuck’ or one of its derivatives at least three times(for example: “The fucking fucker’s fucked!”).

It wasn’t quite the end of childhood, but for one small, insecure urchin with a painfully spherical haircut, it certainly marked a formal transition from being an insignificant - yet relatively content -  little boy into a Grammar School student (one of the top two percent, dontcha know, what?) who was by reason of his achievements to that point, a person with potential – and even a leader of the future.

How wrong they were...