On the Health Front.

I’m booked in for my next visit to the hospital tomorrow, this time to have ultrasound scans on both legs to see whether they can sort out the constricted arteries problem. And because it’s an early appointment, and the hospital is twenty miles away, and it’s normal to queue for up to half an hour for the car park, and then there’s the length of a very big building to walk searching for the requisite department, I have to be up approximately four hours before I normally get up. I’m really not designed for that sort of thing.

You know, up until two years ago I visited the doctor on average about once every five years, and it was usually for something minor which required nothing more than a short course of antibiotics. I’ve always been fit and healthy and free to get on with my life without let or hindrance. In the last twenty one months I’ve made eleven visits to the doctor, seventeen visits to the hospital, and had four stays in hospital. And in the course of all this I’ve had nineteen procedures including two operations, one set of X-rays, one ultrasound examination, multiple cystoscopies and CT scans, as well as too many blood and urine tests to bother counting. I currently have three unconnected issues ongoing.

Why now? Why all at once? Where has my life gone? Will it end soon or carry on until I fall off the conveyor belt?

Sorry for the whinge, but the wall doesn't bother listening to me any more.

Egghead.

So there I was, sitting in my car on the retail park in Ashbourne, munching my egg and cress sandwich and generally musing on the state of the world, when a scene was enacted in front of my eyes without forethought or provocation.

A mortuary attendant goes over to a cadaver lying on a slab and cuts its head off with a chopper. He carries the head to his desk, sets it upright on a plate, fetches one of those saws the pathologists use, and neatly trims off the top of the skull. He takes a teaspoon out of a drawer in his desk and proceeds to spoon out the brains and eat them. And then he stops and thinks for a moment.

He gets up and goes into the staff kitchen where he toasts two slices of bread and butters them. He collects the salt and pepper shakers from a cupboard and returns to his desk, seasons the brains, and uses the toast as a dip. He carries on munching quietly and nonchalantly while reading a magazine.

Now, what kind of mind manufactures such a horrific scene without forethought or provocation? It seems that mine does, so I asked myself why it should amuse me so.

Because it isn’t horrific, merely gross. If the head had remained attached to a live and conscious human being it would have been horrific. As it is, it’s surreal. And funny, which is why I do believe my talents are truly wasted on an uncomprehending world.

Considering Frugality.

There’s a coat I’ve had my eye on in a Uttoxeter charity shop for a few weeks. It’s a very smart coat – cream coloured moleskin, nearly new condition, tastefully designed, and originally from NEXT which is a good brand. And all for the absurdly low price of £4. £4 for a stylish NEXT coat. Who could possibly walk past without buying it?

Well, the first question I ask myself is: ‘Do I need another coat?’ to which the answer is a reluctant but truthful ‘no.’

The second consideration is more of a realisation than a question. I’ve got to that point in life where there’s no prospect of me looking good no matter what I wear, and nobody has the slightest reason to take a blind bit of notice of me anyway. I’m reminded of those elderly women who spend an inordinate proportion of their weekly pension having their hair styled, permed and coloured. It doesn’t disguise the fact that they’re deep into the rigours of physical degradation. It just means that their malformed bodies have purple wigs stuck on top of them. Where’s the point in that? There isn’t one.

And then I ask myself what else I could do with £4, and the first thing which springs to mind is that it pays for about eight hours worth of having the fan heater on in my office on cold winter nights. Now that does matter. I get miserable sitting in front of the computer feeling chilled, and my office is the warmest room in the house.

That settles the matter: somebody younger, and possibly poorer, than me can have the coat. I swell with pride at the realisation that my propensity for kindness is manifest yet again, and I walk past without buying it.

JJ and the Baby Thing.

I saw a young man and woman in the town today, pushing a buggy with a baby, appropriately supine, contained therein. They stopped a couple of times and fiddled with the plastic cover and the blankets, ensuring with commendable diligence that the little proto-human was as warm, dry and comfortable as babies have a right to be. It gave me a lift. It seemed a rare example of something right and proper in this absurd existence we humans live out for heaven-knows-what purpose.

And then there were two women standing talking, one of whom was carrying a little girl of maybe 12-15 months. The child and I exchanged glances, and the glances became longer stares, and I resorted to my very best Stan Laurel impression, and the kid smiled.

What is this connection I seem to have developed with babies over the last year or so? Dogs and horses I understand, but babies?

I remember being a baby, you know. I remember the feeling of delighted expectation when my mother approached with a spoon and a jar of Virol. (Virol was a brown paste consisting mainly of malt extract, although I learned only tonight that it also contained a little refined beef fat. I wasn’t a vegetarian in those days, much to my eternal shame, and I get my daily dose of beloved malt extract from quite a different source now.) I also remember the feeling of extreme annoyance when something I was being fed with a spoon dripped off my bottom lip and my mother scooped it up. I distinctly remember moving my head about – and probably making the odd unearthly noise or two – in the hope of circumventing the operation, and I remember feeling doubly irritated when the drips still got scooped. It probably explains my lifelong suspicion of women and things that drip.

And do you know that I haven’t met the Lady B’s little daughter yet? I’m told that she doesn’t have her mother’s eyes, but she does have her mother’s temperament. I didn’t enquire further, but I assume there’s reason to hope that another earthworm rescuer will soon be joining the ranks.

Late Scribbles.

I often wonder whether the clever people at YouTube have the facility to record every instance of somebody pressing the Sound Off button when the initial, ludicrously incongruous ad assails their reluctant senses, and how often people press the Skip Ad button as soon as it appears. And if they do have that facility, do they make the results known to their advertisers? Or is this just my cynical loner gene showing itself?

*  *  *

I can smell the scent of jasmine upstairs in my house again tonight. Where does it come from? Where does it go? One of my short stories – The Visitor – features that very phenomenon. In the story it transpires that the source of the scent is the butterfly deva come to take the protagonist for a ride in return for a place to hibernate over the winter. That’s a rather pleasanter prospect than the alternative: that there’s something wrong with my brain, rather like the David Niven character smelling fried onions in the film A Matter of Life and Death. Mind you, he did get the girl in the end.

From YouTube to the Abyss.

I swear I could make a full time career out of insulting most of the people who write comments on YouTube.

I read them, you know, I do. Lots of them. It’s like sitting on a chair in front of a stage watching a procession of Karl Pilkingtons saying their piece and then asking ‘what did you think of that?’ And I want to tell them, honestly and in well ordered English, precisely what I thought of that. Only I mustn’t because I’m trying to be a better person. And I don’t want to hurt or insult people anyway (apart from the likes of Trump and the other psychopaths running the world who exempt me from the karmic process because they’re not really people in the accepted sense of the word.) Hurting and insulting people is not what you do when you’re trying to be a better person.

So I stay quiet, and I congratulate myself for staying quiet, and then I remonstrate with myself because self-congratulation is yet another form of ego-projection, but I grudgingly accept it because it does at least ameliorate the frustration.

And then I go off onto one of my ‘what’s it all about?’ trips, in which I face the unanswerable question of whether this life is all there is, or whether it’s only a small part of a much larger existence. Because if there’s nothing beyond this pathetically short span of life I see slowly fading in the mirror, it really doesn’t matter a damn what I do. But that’s a recipe for anarchy, and anarchy can be pretty uncomfortable, which is perhaps why humans invented God and religion. Or perhaps they didn’t.

The search goes on. No gurus please.

Not a Fan of Bodies.

I will admit that certain parts of the human body are reasonably pleasing, but what about those which aren’t? These are the four Great Ugly Things – genitals, buttocks, noses and toes. I think it a reasonable hypothesis that the GUTs were designed by an incompetent assistant while the Great Architect was sleeping off the effects of a night with the nyads.

And that’s only on the outside. When you think of the stinky, slimy stuff slopping about on the inside, it really makes you wish you’d been born a tree.

And what’s kissing all about. Why do people have to press their slobbering mouths against other people’s slobbering mouths just to prove they like them? Do we not have language? Why do we have to eschew the primary means of communication and resort to a knocking of teeth and exchange of saliva? I mean, what person in his or her right mind would ever want somebody else’s saliva in their mouth?

As for sex, that particular form of recreation takes the biscuit for sheer grossness and absurdity. One person sticks a bit of itself into another person, makes a lot of silly noises which have nothing to do with the primary means of communication, and the result is a third little person who will go on to behave just as idiotically themselves one day. If God really is the omnipotent being we are led to believe, surely he would have been aware of the test tube and its potential application.

And that’s why I have serious reservations about those who enter the medical profession. What sort of person willingly devotes their life to touching the physical manifestation of other people? I watched them while I was in hospital, and when they turned their attention on me I was beside myself with incomprehension.

Discovering Local History.

Tonight I had cause to delve into the history of the locality where I grew up, and in so doing discovered a couple of interesting facts.

It seems the final resting place of Hugh Despenser the Younger was Hulton Abbey, the remains of which were about half a mile from the house where I lived. On the orders of Queen Isabella, poor old Hugh (or poor young Hugh to be precise) was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1326 for having been a favourite of her deposed husband, King Edward II. And maybe it should be pointed out that only part of poor Hugh rested in Hulton Abbey. Several bits of him had been set up on spikes atop the walls of various cities as a salutary lesson in the fate which may befall those who transgress the accepted mores of kingship. I expect the crows had the flesh and the dogs the bones.

But there was also an area of wild grassland just beyond the estate of houses on which my house was situated. It was called The Butts, and was where I spent many a happy summer’s day fishing for bullheads in the stream which ran through it. It was also the favourite location for games of cowboys and indians (in which I was always the cowboy called Jim. There was always a cowboy called Jim in westerns.)

I gather it was so named because it was where the local men practiced their archery skills during the Middle Ages, which was a legal requirement at a time when the French and English kings were squabbling over who owned which bits of France. The archers were indispensible to the need to remove a few French knights from the equation. It was how Henry V ended up in Paris long before the place became fashionable.

But the fact I found most interesting was a lot more up to date. I discovered that during WWII a German plane had crashed on The Butts, probably while returning home from a raid on Liverpool. Why did nobody ever tell me that? My best friend’s mother was Austrian and had a crush on Clark Gable, so surely she must have known.

Garden Stuff.

We had a rare dry day today, which afforded me the opportunity to trim and smarten up one of my tall hedges ready for the winter, and also give the lawn what I hope will be its last mow of the season. And I had my hair cut, which is in no way connected with the aforesaid.

What is connected with the garden, however, is this:

I’ve often wondered why some snail shells are empty, and so I asked the question of Google. It appears that snails are subjected to predation from things like mites and ants, which left me wishing I hadn’t asked the question at this time of night. My brain has an inconvenient habit of turning the day’s information into an impressive range of bad dreams, and I wish it didn’t.

A Mushroom Tale.

There was a knock at my door earlier. I looked at the clock and saw that it was 9pm. Hardly anybody ever knocks on my door at any time, and nobody ever knocks on my door at 9pm. I wondered whether it might be some local kids practicing for Halloween and opened the door tentatively. My old friend the llama was standing there large as life, his head cocked slightly to one side as is his wont.

‘Do you have any mushrooms?’ he asked without offering any sort of preliminary greeting.

‘Mushrooms?’

‘Mushrooms,’ he repeated.

‘I do actually. Why, do you want some?’

‘Certainly not. Can’t stand the horrid little things.’

‘So why did you come all this way to ask whether I have any?’

‘I didn’t come all this way, as you put it. I was in the vicinity and it occurred to me to wonder whether you have any mushrooms.’

‘Why would it occur to you to wonder such a thing if you don’t want any?’

‘Questions come and questions go, dear boy. Why would I waste my time deliberating over the value or origin of them?’

‘But that’s absurd.’

‘Maybe so, but it’s no more absurd than asking what time it is, or whether the train to Plymouth stops at Bristol on the way.’

‘That’s rubbish. Those questions are bound up with some form of rationale. They’re part of a wider issue to which they are pertinent.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear; what a lot you do have to learn about the nature of reality,’ he said with a sad and dismissive air. And then he turned and walked away, as he always does.

The night was cold and so I shut the door. There’s never any point in trying to follow a llama. It seemed natural in the circumstances to make a cup of tea, although I have no idea why.

*  *  *

Ten minutes later there was another knock on my door. I opened it again to find a young Chinese woman standing on the doorstep. I deduced with remarkable speed - not to mention alacrity - that it was the priestess come all the way from Stockholm to visit me. I've never met the priestess, but being possessed of all gentlemanly virtues I invited her in.

‘Would you like a mushroom?’ I asked.

‘A mushroom?’

‘A mushroom,’ I repeated.

‘You mean a magic mushroom?’

‘No, an ordinary mushroom.’

‘Why on earth would I want an ordinary mushroom?’

‘Yes or no?’

Have you ever seen a young Chinese woman frown deeply and cock her head to one side in the manner of a llama?