A Bit of a Retrospective.

This year has been something of a singular one in the life of JJ for reasons which will be obvious to those who sat through all the whingeing and moping I did during the first half of it. And so, it being the evening of 31^st December, I suppose I should write something of a retrospective. That’s what blogs are for, isn’t it? But what can I say that didn’t get said during the running, contemporary commentary?

Nothing much, except to offer a few minor observations and hope to be excused for indulging the trivial:

1. Matters which have interested me vaguely all my life were suddenly thrown into much sharper relief – issues like meaning, motivation and the awareness of mortality. They were elevated to a higher mental chamber where the light is brighter and the shadows behind the furniture all the deeper for it.

2. I got to learn quite a lot about those parts of the body which we don’t usually talk about, and quite a lot more about how the experts seek to find out what’s wrong with them.

3. I further got to learn that the experts aren’t always quite as expert as you’d like them to be. When I was in my fourth hour of quite extreme pain and asked the registrar: ‘… but I’d just drunk a litre of water. Where had it all gone?’ he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and said: ‘Dunno.’

4. I also learned just how much I kick and scream mentally at the feeling that my movements are being controlled by somebody holding a rope that’s tied around my neck. It was nothing new, but it became a whole lot clearer. As a result, the thought of tethered or trapped animals became more horrific than ever, and the knowledge that slavery, abuse and armed conflict still happen brought the human condition into even more abject perspective.

5. For eighteen hours I had a young Asian woman less than half my age playing the role of surrogate mother with ease and skill. I decided that nurses are pretty bloody fabulous.