Pulled on my way back from the Doctor's today, by complete accident.
Was just shuffling along, staring vacantly into the middle-distance, when all of a sudden a pair of Great Arms came zinging into sharp focus. Coming the other way was a terribly well presented skinhead, all muscle, dragging along a whimpering pitbull.
He was glaring back at me. With friendly menace.
But... alas, I was heading back for work, his flat was probably all horrid wallpaper, and I hate dogs.
Still, it was a strangely cheering moment.
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Illness update
Today I learned some interesting things. First of all, glad I didn't have full proper, or grown-up meningitis. Just a weird version someone got off a market stall.
Brilliantly, managed to finally speak to a Doctor at my local practice. To try and get an appointment before mid-April.
She was great, and bizarrely chatty - especially as illnesses are such tedious things.
But here are some great new things that she told me - The bizarrely horrible headaches I've been having aren't a sign that I'm still ill, merely that a lot of damaged brain tissue is healing. I should also be prepared for memory loss, lack of concentration, irritability, depression, and anxiety. And impairment of certain faculties.
This goes to explain why I can't remember how to make a webpage, can't balance properly, and am wandering around in a permanent state of anxious misery. Well, there are other reasons for the latter (which, I doubt I'm allowed to talk about) - but I'm certainly not coping with them well. Or... well, at all.
More can be found at BBC Health
Meningitis Recovery.
GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Now I know why I miss my happy pills so much. They were opiates.
Brilliantly, managed to finally speak to a Doctor at my local practice. To try and get an appointment before mid-April.
She was great, and bizarrely chatty - especially as illnesses are such tedious things.
But here are some great new things that she told me - The bizarrely horrible headaches I've been having aren't a sign that I'm still ill, merely that a lot of damaged brain tissue is healing. I should also be prepared for memory loss, lack of concentration, irritability, depression, and anxiety. And impairment of certain faculties.
This goes to explain why I can't remember how to make a webpage, can't balance properly, and am wandering around in a permanent state of anxious misery. Well, there are other reasons for the latter (which, I doubt I'm allowed to talk about) - but I'm certainly not coping with them well. Or... well, at all.
More can be found at BBC Health
Meningitis Recovery.
GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Now I know why I miss my happy pills so much. They were opiates.
Monday, March 29, 2004
Breakfast for the despondent
To give you an idea of the mood I'm in at the moment, my idea of a good breakfast is stale wine and anti-histamines.
Gives you a lovely artificial glow that lets you cope with at least the first two hours of the day.
Gives you a lovely artificial glow that lets you cope with at least the first two hours of the day.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Monday, March 22, 2004
The Guardian
Have spent a happy week reading The Guardian. Mostly the features section, but occasionally the actual, real news for grown ups. Although, just as reading the Telegraph news section makes you shudder with contempt for bigotry, the caring agenda of the Guardian does get a little wearing after a week. The whole attitude was neatly summed up by a charity insert which fell out onto the floor. It just said in block caps:
“WHY DON’T YOU CARE ENOUGH?”
The main joys I’ve learned are as follows.
The letters page has had a healthy, and, at times, worryingly well-informed correspondence over whether or not Sedna should really be called Mondas.
Apparently, George Bush’s 2004 re-election website had lovely posters that you could generate your own slogan for. According to the website wonkette.com, popular DIY “VOTE BUSH” posters included: “Prepare to die”, “Look out Syria”, “But not if you’re gay”, “Baby Jesus cries if you don’t vote Bush-Cheney 2004”, “Vote Ironically”. Then, apparently, the server got overloaded, and started sending people pages they hadn’t asked for. So, one woman who’d created an obscene slogan received “Sportsmen for Bush”, and is left wondering who ended up with her filthy version.
A wonderful review of Busted in concert by Alexis Petridis (nagging feeling he used to write for the Oxford Student when I was there. It’s a very familiar name, coming complete with that little stab of “he’s a success, you’re a failure” recognition). “They have attracted fans so young they make your average Westlife screamer look grizzled,” Petridis writes. “Next to me, two tiny girls start pinching and punching each other.”
“Singer Charlie Simpson signifies angst by clutching his head and narrowing his eyes. According to the gossips, Simpsons’ suffering is real. He also fronts a serious band, Flightstar, namechecks the Smashing Pumpkins in the tour programme (they apparently have “an amazing muff which helps them make very interesting sounds) and is allegedly tired of being a kindergarten pin-up.
“His behaviour on stage certainly sends out subtle messages regarding his future. He sings a solo number. He plays a guitar solo. He appears behind a drum kit and plays a solo on that too. You wonder which instrument he will favour next. The tuba? The church organ? Perhaps they’ll bring on an amazing big muff and he can make some very interesting sounds.”
“WHY DON’T YOU CARE ENOUGH?”
The main joys I’ve learned are as follows.
The letters page has had a healthy, and, at times, worryingly well-informed correspondence over whether or not Sedna should really be called Mondas.
Apparently, George Bush’s 2004 re-election website had lovely posters that you could generate your own slogan for. According to the website wonkette.com, popular DIY “VOTE BUSH” posters included: “Prepare to die”, “Look out Syria”, “But not if you’re gay”, “Baby Jesus cries if you don’t vote Bush-Cheney 2004”, “Vote Ironically”. Then, apparently, the server got overloaded, and started sending people pages they hadn’t asked for. So, one woman who’d created an obscene slogan received “Sportsmen for Bush”, and is left wondering who ended up with her filthy version.
A wonderful review of Busted in concert by Alexis Petridis (nagging feeling he used to write for the Oxford Student when I was there. It’s a very familiar name, coming complete with that little stab of “he’s a success, you’re a failure” recognition). “They have attracted fans so young they make your average Westlife screamer look grizzled,” Petridis writes. “Next to me, two tiny girls start pinching and punching each other.”
“Singer Charlie Simpson signifies angst by clutching his head and narrowing his eyes. According to the gossips, Simpsons’ suffering is real. He also fronts a serious band, Flightstar, namechecks the Smashing Pumpkins in the tour programme (they apparently have “an amazing muff which helps them make very interesting sounds) and is allegedly tired of being a kindergarten pin-up.
“His behaviour on stage certainly sends out subtle messages regarding his future. He sings a solo number. He plays a guitar solo. He appears behind a drum kit and plays a solo on that too. You wonder which instrument he will favour next. The tuba? The church organ? Perhaps they’ll bring on an amazing big muff and he can make some very interesting sounds.”
Killer Karate Granny
The Mrs Pollifax novels of Dorothy Gilman are so much better than they ought to be. There’s such a danger that they’d be twee. You only have to look at the crime section of an American bookshop to see the danger.
There are rack after rack of brightly jacketed crime series, each one billeted as “A [STRIKING NAME] MYSTERY”. Each one formulaicly unique, with it’s one-joke gimmick stretched out to a series of 27 mysteries with catchy titles, enthusiasm from the Washington Post, and very little between the glossy covers. There are Archaeologist detectives, Academic detectives, Hardboiled cops, Softboiled cops, Lesbian Pathologists, Gay dicks, and Cat detectives. And none of them are any better than they need to be.
So, you’d imagine that the Mrs Pollifax novels would be comfortably competent. After all – they’ve got a great central concept that needs little development. Mrs Pollifax, you see, is a granny who spies for the CIA, and, very occasionally, kills for them too.
Each book sees her summoned from her prize geraniums to undertake a purely routine courier mission that invariably goes wrong and involves her in guns, subterfuge, and hair-raising adventure against devious villains.
You can see the danger here, can’t you? Especially when I tell you that a Mrs Pollifax TV movie starred Angela Lansbury.
And yet the books are marvellous. True, they are comfort fodder – you’re spared from grisly 24-style torture scenes where Mrs Pollifax is gouged with DIY tools, or runs rampant in a mosque with a machete – but that doesn’t mean the books aren’t dark, and have a wonderful current of black comedy skipping nimbly through them.
When we first meet Mrs P, she is standing on her rooftop, among her prize geraniums, planning suicide. She’s widowed, she’s led a quiet life, her children are settled, and ahead of her is a lonely retirement of garden club gossip and decaffeinated tea. Suddenly, she has a flash of inspiration, and applies to the CIA to be a spy.
Of course, they laugh her out of the office… until a job comes up that needs an innocent courier to carry papers to a spy. A simple job that needs someone who looks absolutely unlike a spy. So Mrs P is summoned back, and sent off with a nice new hat. Naturally it all goes wrong…
And, within pages we’re hooked. I knew I adored Dorothy Gilman’s writing as soon as we got halfway through. So far, it had had it’s moments, but there was always that slight, nagging danger of it being no better than itself. Then Mrs P is discovered, captured, and she and her fellow spy are interrogated and tortured. And then, there is the most lovely scene where Mrs P is dragged into the torture chamber to face the ruthless new interrogator. The two eyeball each other, and Mrs P neatly, precisely settles, herself down in the rough chair with manacles, folds her hands, cocks her head on one side, and explains that she won’t talk, the next hour will be a waste of everyone’s time, and she’d far rather spend the time trying to sort out her interrogator’s quite obvious back trouble.
The fact that she later ends up shooting him doesn’t detract from her iron charm. She’s how Miss Marple would be if she ever put down her knitting, got off her arse and did something.
By about the sixth book (Mrs Pollifax On The China Station), there’s a formula going – always nearly too comfortable, but always redeemed by Gilman’s astute eye for character and dialogue. It’s a book of torture, death camps, betrayal and KGB double-cross, but it’s also about a holiday tour through China, with sight-seeing, romance, and poisoned raisins.
By the end, we’ve had a lot of grimness, a fair amount of horror, and Mrs P using her karate brown belt to deadly effect. We see Mrs P, broken, bandaged, and miserably alone, dragged into the office of the local head of the Chinese Secret Police at dawn. He tells her how much he admires her, how much she reminds him of his first wife (who he watched being tortured), and how he’s on to her. And she realises it’s not worth pretending to be a sweet old lady tourist any more, and the two of them settle down to have a quite remarkable, gently moving talk.
We also get to learn Mrs P’s quite remarkable maxim on life. Dorothy Parker was fired from Hollywood after telling a studio head “In all of human history, no one has ever had a happy ending.” We learn that Mrs P has her own take on these sentiments; “There are no happy endings. Only happy people.”
There are rack after rack of brightly jacketed crime series, each one billeted as “A [STRIKING NAME] MYSTERY”. Each one formulaicly unique, with it’s one-joke gimmick stretched out to a series of 27 mysteries with catchy titles, enthusiasm from the Washington Post, and very little between the glossy covers. There are Archaeologist detectives, Academic detectives, Hardboiled cops, Softboiled cops, Lesbian Pathologists, Gay dicks, and Cat detectives. And none of them are any better than they need to be.
So, you’d imagine that the Mrs Pollifax novels would be comfortably competent. After all – they’ve got a great central concept that needs little development. Mrs Pollifax, you see, is a granny who spies for the CIA, and, very occasionally, kills for them too.
Each book sees her summoned from her prize geraniums to undertake a purely routine courier mission that invariably goes wrong and involves her in guns, subterfuge, and hair-raising adventure against devious villains.
You can see the danger here, can’t you? Especially when I tell you that a Mrs Pollifax TV movie starred Angela Lansbury.
And yet the books are marvellous. True, they are comfort fodder – you’re spared from grisly 24-style torture scenes where Mrs Pollifax is gouged with DIY tools, or runs rampant in a mosque with a machete – but that doesn’t mean the books aren’t dark, and have a wonderful current of black comedy skipping nimbly through them.
When we first meet Mrs P, she is standing on her rooftop, among her prize geraniums, planning suicide. She’s widowed, she’s led a quiet life, her children are settled, and ahead of her is a lonely retirement of garden club gossip and decaffeinated tea. Suddenly, she has a flash of inspiration, and applies to the CIA to be a spy.
Of course, they laugh her out of the office… until a job comes up that needs an innocent courier to carry papers to a spy. A simple job that needs someone who looks absolutely unlike a spy. So Mrs P is summoned back, and sent off with a nice new hat. Naturally it all goes wrong…
And, within pages we’re hooked. I knew I adored Dorothy Gilman’s writing as soon as we got halfway through. So far, it had had it’s moments, but there was always that slight, nagging danger of it being no better than itself. Then Mrs P is discovered, captured, and she and her fellow spy are interrogated and tortured. And then, there is the most lovely scene where Mrs P is dragged into the torture chamber to face the ruthless new interrogator. The two eyeball each other, and Mrs P neatly, precisely settles, herself down in the rough chair with manacles, folds her hands, cocks her head on one side, and explains that she won’t talk, the next hour will be a waste of everyone’s time, and she’d far rather spend the time trying to sort out her interrogator’s quite obvious back trouble.
The fact that she later ends up shooting him doesn’t detract from her iron charm. She’s how Miss Marple would be if she ever put down her knitting, got off her arse and did something.
By about the sixth book (Mrs Pollifax On The China Station), there’s a formula going – always nearly too comfortable, but always redeemed by Gilman’s astute eye for character and dialogue. It’s a book of torture, death camps, betrayal and KGB double-cross, but it’s also about a holiday tour through China, with sight-seeing, romance, and poisoned raisins.
By the end, we’ve had a lot of grimness, a fair amount of horror, and Mrs P using her karate brown belt to deadly effect. We see Mrs P, broken, bandaged, and miserably alone, dragged into the office of the local head of the Chinese Secret Police at dawn. He tells her how much he admires her, how much she reminds him of his first wife (who he watched being tortured), and how he’s on to her. And she realises it’s not worth pretending to be a sweet old lady tourist any more, and the two of them settle down to have a quite remarkable, gently moving talk.
We also get to learn Mrs P’s quite remarkable maxim on life. Dorothy Parker was fired from Hollywood after telling a studio head “In all of human history, no one has ever had a happy ending.” We learn that Mrs P has her own take on these sentiments; “There are no happy endings. Only happy people.”
The DuMauriers
One of the books I’ve been reading is a history of the Du Maurier family, by Daphne Du Maurier, who wrote Rebecca, some books about Cornish grudges, and the bonkers time travel saga A House On The Strand.
The Du Mauriers is a marvellous book – terribly ahead of it’s time in that it’s novelised history (the kind of thing the 1980s thought they’d invented). It’s gripping, and upsetting and startlingly vivid, as she explains how her family evolved from the bastard offspring of a Duke’s prostitute and some penniless French nobles. It has everything – pettiness, insanity, and a wife whose husband leaves her on their wedding night while shaving.
One of the only disadvantages to this marvellous book is that Daphne insists on referring to household members by their childhood nicknames. So, George DuMaurier, artist, writer, and the inventor of the “Svengali” is referred to throughout as… Kicky.
The Du Mauriers is a marvellous book – terribly ahead of it’s time in that it’s novelised history (the kind of thing the 1980s thought they’d invented). It’s gripping, and upsetting and startlingly vivid, as she explains how her family evolved from the bastard offspring of a Duke’s prostitute and some penniless French nobles. It has everything – pettiness, insanity, and a wife whose husband leaves her on their wedding night while shaving.
One of the only disadvantages to this marvellous book is that Daphne insists on referring to household members by their childhood nicknames. So, George DuMaurier, artist, writer, and the inventor of the “Svengali” is referred to throughout as… Kicky.
Recovery Position
The last fornight has passed in a blurry haze, really. There’s been some food, some napping (I’ll miss my post-breakfast nap), and a lot of feebleness. Frankly, making it to the shops on my own is a struggle.
There’s been very little shaving (the whole idea of standing upright for long enough is just daft), so I’ve got to discover what I’d look like with a Really Big Beard (kinda old and mad).
There’s been a lot of… well, tiredness and other stuff. Thanks to my mum, my appetite’s back. Unfortunately, I’m now busily fighting off a whole host of other weird little attendant infections (a killer sore-throat from all that vomiting, lumps, bumps, and, oh my, chilblains). I guess, with my immune system down, there’s bugger all I can do except sit down, shiver, and steer clear of anyone with the sniffles.
Another weird side-effect is a lack of balance. Walking’s weird, standing still is weirder, and lordie knows when I’ll be able to ride my bike again.
I also get easily confused. Multi-tasking is beyond me, and quite often I’ll just go all quiet, or start mumbling confusedly like a pensioner. I’ve decided I like small shops with not too many people. The big ones just baffle me and I start staring at nappies, socks and Atomic Kitten VHSes.
However, I’m sure I’m better. There’s still nausea, but thankfully no vomiting, and I’m no longer agonisingly allergic to daylight (but I still look like I’ve given up sleeping and taken up boxing and cocaine). I guess I’ll have to get used to my slightly bloodshot, slightly startled panda expression.
There’s been very little shaving (the whole idea of standing upright for long enough is just daft), so I’ve got to discover what I’d look like with a Really Big Beard (kinda old and mad).
There’s been a lot of… well, tiredness and other stuff. Thanks to my mum, my appetite’s back. Unfortunately, I’m now busily fighting off a whole host of other weird little attendant infections (a killer sore-throat from all that vomiting, lumps, bumps, and, oh my, chilblains). I guess, with my immune system down, there’s bugger all I can do except sit down, shiver, and steer clear of anyone with the sniffles.
Another weird side-effect is a lack of balance. Walking’s weird, standing still is weirder, and lordie knows when I’ll be able to ride my bike again.
I also get easily confused. Multi-tasking is beyond me, and quite often I’ll just go all quiet, or start mumbling confusedly like a pensioner. I’ve decided I like small shops with not too many people. The big ones just baffle me and I start staring at nappies, socks and Atomic Kitten VHSes.
However, I’m sure I’m better. There’s still nausea, but thankfully no vomiting, and I’m no longer agonisingly allergic to daylight (but I still look like I’ve given up sleeping and taken up boxing and cocaine). I guess I’ll have to get used to my slightly bloodshot, slightly startled panda expression.
The Archers
Even the gays in the Archers are getting more action than me at the moment. I can barely lift my laptop, let alone [insert lengthy pun here].
Saturday, March 20, 2004
Friends
The nicest thing about the whole experience (apart from magic tremedol painkilling pills) was my friends.
Not only did ML come round every evening with gossip, but Sam and Kate turned up in hospital, Rick left work to see me, Lee gracefully admitted that my meningitis outranked his jetlag, Gemma and Serge came round on Gemma’s 30th birthday (with yoghurt and bog-roll), and my other Kate turned up on the Saturday evening and gave me soup. Plus work sent a really lovely card, and very kindly left me alone.
Not only did ML come round every evening with gossip, but Sam and Kate turned up in hospital, Rick left work to see me, Lee gracefully admitted that my meningitis outranked his jetlag, Gemma and Serge came round on Gemma’s 30th birthday (with yoghurt and bog-roll), and my other Kate turned up on the Saturday evening and gave me soup. Plus work sent a really lovely card, and very kindly left me alone.
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