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July 9th, 2009
07:07 am - The music of the unemployed
Koi: Designed by Sipho Mabona. Folded by backwards7.
Wednesday 8th July
My okay, rather than sparkling, interview with chemotherapy yielded predictably okay results. These came phrased as a wordy email informing me that they will be looking elsewhere to fill the vacant position on reception.
At the same time, in some wry stroke of good fortune, I won tickets to see Tinariwen at the Camden Roundhouse on Thursday. They are a Tuareg band who, according to their Wikipedia entry, play Tishoumaren - the music of the unemployed. If I had got the job I may have felt bad about going.
Earlier in the day Vicky called me from Radiotherapy. I was watering the garden at the time so she left a message on our machine asking me to get back to her. I returned her call, hoping that whatever she wanted wouldn’t involve me having to scrape the last five days of beard growth off my face, before walking to the hospital.
It turns out we have new volunteers coming into the department on Thursday and Friday and I will be training them.
* * * * *
I am in a strange relationship with the Robin who visits our garden. He has very tatty plumage which makes me think that he is probably an adult. Up until quite recently he was probably running himself ragged looking after a brood of baby robins.
Last week I saw him moving around in the branches of the apple tree, getting a good look at me from different angles. I lay in the hammock making what I hope were encouraging bird noises.
A couple of days later I was eating my breakfast on the mossy patio just outside the kitchen. He alighted on the backrest of the chair opposite.
“Would you like a corner of my toast?” I asked him.
Apparently that was too forward and he made a hasty retreat back to the safety of the tree.
This morning I was sorting through the post, with the kitchen door wide open behind me. I turned around to see him perched in the entrance. As soon as he saw that I was looking, he lost his nerve and took flight, skimming across the lawn and over the fence.
Current Music: The Breeders - We're Gonna Rise
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July 7th, 2009
12:37 pm - Hide and seek
The Chemotherapy Department at Southend Hospital has long been on the verge of relocating to new, purpose-built premises elsewhere on the site. They were initially supposed to move in August. Now they’re tentatively saying the end of 2009.
At present, the department is shoehorned into a cramped wing along the main corridor. On Wednesday I went there for a job interview. I sat down in the small waiting area which was crowded with patients. After a few minutes K appeared and told me that the interviews were overrunning by about half an hour. She suggested that I went up to the restaurant and had a coffee.
Instead I wandered over to the Radiotherapy reception. I took the letters out of the printer and started putting them into envelopes. A woman approached the desk and enquired after the whereabouts of the Heart and Chest Clinic; she expressed surprise when I directed her to the first floor, even though this was clearly stated in the letter she had given me.
Eventually Vicky looked up from her computer and said:
“Okay Mark what are you doing here?”
I told her about the job on reception. There followed some debate among the girls over who would be conducting the interview.
“You don’t think it would be Doctor Robinson?” said Jan.
Vicky: “It’s possible but I doubt it.”
I kept quiet, although privately I wouldn’t have minded going head to head with Dr Robinson. She doesn’t suffer fools and you always know where you stand with her.
After about 25 minutes I returned to Chemotherapy. They still weren’t ready for me. I sat in the waiting area, listening to an elderly couple bicker over the logistics of transferring photographs from their daughter’s mobile phone onto their home computer. The man was of the opinion that this would be a task comparable with the construction of Stonehenge.
Eventually K came and got me. We left Chemotherapy and began walking along the main corridor towards Cardigan Wing.
“Are we going up to the leukaemia offices?” I asked.
“The interviews are being held in Neo Natal.”
“Why are they doing it there? Is it a question of finding a spare room?”
“The problem with interviewing within the department is that the nurses are always getting called away. They try to hold the interviews in places where they won’t be disturbed.”
I was extremely amused by the thought that my interview would be taking place undercover, conducted by hospital employees hiding in the last place they thought anyone would look for them.
In a room right next to the entrance to the Neo Natal department, a pair of tables had been pushed together. Scattered across the surface were numerous plastic drinking cups. Some were empty while others were filled with different levels of water. I added my own empty cup to the collection.
The panel consisted of a senior Chemo nurse and a woman from Human Resources. Although they were outwardly friendly, I got the impression that they would both rather have been somewhere else. Throughout the interview I was acutely aware of the Human Resources lady tuning in and out of our conversation. I was caught off-guard by how few questions they asked me. By comparison, the previous interview I had with Rehabilitation was intense and very detailed. Later I mentioned to Vicky how disappointed I was that I hadn’t been given the opportunity to show off my knowledge of chemotherapy.
“Why didn’t you bring it up?” she said.
Going on the offensive like that never occurred to me. It wasn’t a bad interview; there was just no connection. The second I walked out of the door I was hit by a torrent of things that I should have said.
Back at home I set the hose on the garden, moving it from bed to bed at five minute intervals. Lying in the hammock I watched a flock of newly-fledged birds exploring the apple tree. Their small round bodies were out of proportion with their long, upwardly-tilted tail feathers; their scruffy half-adult / half-juvenile plumage hampering identification. One of the birds hopped down through the branches until he was roughly two feet above my head, where he regarded curiously with one eye. He was new to the world and possessed none of the fears and anxieties that come as part and parcel with knowledge.
Current Music: Moby - I Love To Move In Here
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July 4th, 2009
04:28 pm - Keiichi
Rest in peace Auguste.
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June 30th, 2009
06:39 pm - Eden on a budget
Here we all are: The heaving, cash-strapped mass of 2.261 million employed united by the good weather, rising together on the upward swell of a heat wave that promises to last all week.
Foggy mornings giving way to blue sky. People sitting on the beach looking at the sea. Groups of people perched on the sea wall, congregating around plastic pint glasses. The smell of warm beer. Plastic and aluminium cafe furniture scattered in a haphazard fashion along dirty tarmac pavements. A Coastguard vehicle weaving through the traffic at the Kursaal Junction with its siren blaring, turning right and speeding away in the opposite direction to the sea. A man with no shirt standing by the pedestrian crossing yelling: “Oh mate, you’re going the wrong way.”
This morning I traipsed around the garden applying the hose and the watering cans to the potted plants and the flower beds. Watching bumble bees bending the delicate heads of the bell flowers on the rockery; wasps going in and out of the holes in the wall vent, next to the garage.
Later, moving between the garden and the computer, reciting facts about chemotherapy under my breath in preparation for a job interview at the hospital tomorrow. An empty coke can on the glass-topped table, vibrating to the noise coming out of the speakers. The jet from the hose creating a perfectly circular, glassy rainbow as the spray diffused outward.
Lying in the hammock beneath a mobile composed of freshly-washed shirts and trousers, dangling on hangers from the branches. Too hot to read or even to contemplate the small birds gazing down inquisitively from between the withered leaves. Better to watch the world through the irregular gauze of a straw hat; to doze; to listen to the shriek of a Green Woodpecker on the golf course and feel the flies tickling my bare feet.
Current Music: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Stranger Than Kindness
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June 25th, 2009
10:55 am - String theory
Among the litany of perplexing existential conundrums that continually occupy the minds of mankind’s most brilliant and enlightened thinkers, the most baffling of all must be the question: How long is a piece of string?
String is without a doubt one of the most useful materials we have at our disposal. It can fasten objects to other objects. It can go around corners. Twisted together it forms the elemental isotope - Rope, used in the shipping industry for tethering boats to harbour walls, and also for ascending vertical surfaces where there are no stairs. Whittled down to its core, string becomes thread, which is used in embroidery and in stitching Iron Maiden patches onto frayed denim jackets.
Yet for as long as we remain incognisant of the length of a piece of string, it remains essentially useless. Imagine a scenario where we wanted to erect a tightrope between two points: We would never know in advance whether we had sufficient string available to stretch to the other side. This is why tightrope-walking remains a theoretical concept; the fever dream of madmen and opium addicts.
It seems that, for as long as this question remains unanswered, the human race will constantly have to scale down its lofty ambitions, in case the string we have at our disposal isn’t long enough for the purpose we have in mind for it.
A couple of days ago I sought the answer to a question of a more personal nature: How long will it be before my jobseekers allowance claim (initially made on 14th May, with the accompanying promise that it would be processed within ten days) was resolved, and the Department of Work and Pensions started drip-feeding money into my bank account?
The answer, I was assured by the man on the other end of the Benefits Enquiries Hotline, was equal to the length of a piece of string. At long last, and by a stroke of pure good fortune, I had another variable to work with in the ‘How long is a piece of string?’ problem. I have now phrased this as the equation X=Y, where X is the length of time that it will take to process my benefit claim, and Y is the length of a piece of string.
Since I am promised that at some point in the near future X will be resolved, all that is required is an equation that will accurately convert units of time into units of spatial measurement. I will leave that task to more brilliant minds than my own, confident that my contribution will guarantee me a small footnote in the pages of scientific history.
Current Music: Jane's Addiction - Three Days
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June 22nd, 2009
12:32 pm - A sea change
(Lunar Moth: Designed by Michael LaFosse. Folded by backwards7)
On Wednesday I went for a job interview with Southend Hospital. It was for a position as a Rehabilitation Assistant. There were actually three jobs on the table. The one that I wanted was a part-time role in Orthopaedics.
Strangely the interviews were held at the Westcliff Hotel rather than at the hospital. I turned down the offer of a lift and walked there. Having arrived ridiculously early, I spent a half-hour cooling-off in one of the Victorian shelters in the cliff-top gardens.
The ground floor of the hotel is a darkened warren of bars and function rooms. A woman who had been lingering just inside the entrance guided me through the interior, which seemed to be much larger than the outside of the building suggests. In one of the rooms a pair of tables had been pushed together and covered with a white cloth. Jugs of water and orange squash, glasses, and laminated job descriptions had been laid out on top. A computer-operated projector beamed a PowerPoint presentation onto a bare white wall.
Next to the double doors, a pair of women dressed in hospital uniforms were scanning identification documents. I found them polite but a little stand-offish. They talked more with the other two candidates in the room – a couple of smartly dressed women, one of whom was armed with a colour-indexed ring binder that was about the same thickness as my copy of the Chambers Dictionary. They both seemed to be incredibly composed and well-prepared. By eavesdropping on their conversations I learned that one of them already worked in the hospital. The other also worked in healthcare and was in the process of relocating from Ireland.
I fished a forlorn-looking plastic wallet from out of my rucksack and busied myself filling-in the plethora forms that had been sent to me through the post, double checking the ones that I had already completed. The finished health questionnaire looked bad. I wanted to add “But I’m ok” in brackets next to some of my answers.
After a while I was lead to a room at the front of the hotel. A small bay window looked-out across the bare Thames estuary. The interview panel consisted of three women. They each took turns asking me a series of questions. The tone throughout was very supportive and they made me feel like the answers I gave had merit. The whole thing lasted about half an hour.
I returned home to find another interview offer waiting for me in my email inbox – this one for a Receptionist Position in the new Chemotherapy Unit. I set up a date, but immediately afterwards felt drained of energy and had to lie down. This exhaustion carried over into the next day. On Thursday afternoon I awoke on the floor of my bedroom. The air felt humid as if there had been a sudden change in atmospheric conditions during the few hours I had been asleep.
When I checked my email there was a run of four new messages. The first three were rejection letters for jobs that I can’t even remember applying for. The last was from the Rehab Department informing me that my application had failed. I thought about this for a while, letting the news twist and turn in my mind; suddenly finding fault with the answers I had given during the interview. After a few hours I sat down in front of the computer and started researching chemotherapy.
Current Music: Kenickie - How I Was Made
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June 16th, 2009
12:13 pm - Jailbirds
A couple of weeks ago my mother and I went to see S_____ at Blundeston prison. It was a better visit than the last time, which in retrospect was a complete disaster. We used to think that by listening to his stories about the more unpleasant aspects of prison life, we helping him to get things off his chest. All we were really doing was giving him free rein to dwell on an unpleasant set of circumstances that he had no control over. We’ve got it worked out now: When we sense him brooding on his situation one of us will step in and steer him back onto a more positive topic. It’s transparently obvious what we’re doing, but it seems to work.
They’ve made some changes to the prison since we were last there in February. The visitor’s centre, where you wait before being called over to the main block, has been redecorated. In the lobby they’ve taken down some of the mirror glass that made it so oppressive. At the same time they’ve upped the security. The posters warning against smuggling drugs into the prison have been replaced by new posters stressing the problems of prisoners gaining access to mobile phones. We were both searched much more thoroughly than on previous occasions. I am now on very intimate terms with Prince the drugs dog and also his owner, who gave me a very comprehensive pat down.
“There’s no dignity in here,” said S_____ with a wry smile when we told him. Apparently a few days ago one of the prisoners lost the plot and started talking to himself in his cell. The guards heard him and thought that he had a mobile. Four of them turned the place over. When they didn’t find anything they made him shit on a newspaper on the off-chance that he was concealing a phone or a sim card up his back passage.
I changed the subject and asked S_____ what he had been doing in the workshop. It turns out that he’s been helping out with the construction of an aviary in the yard.
“What are they going to put in there?”
“Owls and birds of prey.”
“Rescue birds?”
“yeah, I suppose.”
“Won’t the prisoners use them to smuggle out messages?” asked my mother.
“We’re not in Hogwarts mum. Harry Potter doesn’t live here. ”
We laughed about it but she did have a point. If there’s one thing that HMP Blundeston’s not short of its resourcefulness. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit that causes pieces of chicken and wraps of spices to disappear from the kitchens, later to be transformed into curries in the prisoner’s kettles, with the bones boiled down to make soup. We discovered that the source of the hand-drawn Birthday cards S_____ has been sending us, are several sheets of white card that he obtained from the print shop in exchange for the bags of crisps he is given for his Saturday meal. He cuts these into smaller pieces using his razor and paints them using a small water colour set bequeathed to him by a former block mate.
In the past we’ve never been clear on how much time S_____ was going to serve. His release date has been something perpetually lingering on the horizon. Now that there’s a definitive end in sight there has been talk of him moving to a D cat open prison for the last few months of his sentence. This came up as a possibility before. On that occasion his request was turned down because he refused to admit guilt for the crimes, which he strongly maintains he did not commit. This time around the prison is pushing for him to be moved, so there may be a more positive outcome.
As part of his pre-release program, he signed-up for a course where he had to write down the story of his life. The idea is that you come to terms with your past and look for patterns of behaviour that might cause you to reoffend. After you’ve finished your potted biography you have to share what you’ve written with other members of the group.
I’ve always inferred that S_____ had a pretty hard upbringing, simply because of the person he is. We’ve never talked about it before but he mentioned a few things to us on Friday. Some of his earliest memories are of being beaten. It’s touching that he’s still on good terms with his parents given all that happened.
My mother asked him: “Do people cry when they read out their stories?”
“Oh yeah. By the time I reached the last page I was bawling. After I’d finished I telephoned my Dad. I felt like I’d dobbed him in.”
Over his shoulder I watched a man in prison blues tossing his little boy so high into the air, that the kid was in danger of hitting his head on the ceiling.
Towards the end of our visit we got to talking about the films that the prison screens every week. Prisoners with privileges can tune into them on their television sets. My mother queried whether these films were vetted to screen out anything with sex and violence. This seemed to annoy S_____.
One thing that’s definitely changed since he went inside is that when he gets pissed off he affects the posture and speech patterns of someone with severe mental and physical disabilities. It’s unpleasant for us and undignified for him but I think understand why he does it: From his perspective it’s an non-threatening and submissive way of venting frustration in an environment where he doesn’t have the freedom to lose his temper. He lives on the third floor of his cell block. The prison guards generally stay on the ground floor. If he earns himself a beating he has three flights of stairs to negotiate before he makes it to safety.
“By the time you get to the bottom, there’s not much left of you.”
He leaned forward in his chair. A mysterious key that was fastened to a ring on his belt and tucked up into his shirt emerged through the gap between the two bottommost buttons.
Current Music: Aimee Mann - Little Tornado
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June 1st, 2009
06:15 am - Nitwits
So utterly shattered on Sunday.
By early evening I had passed out on the floor of my room. I awoke at around half past one. Unsure of what to do with myself, I dedicated an hour to a miserable trawl through a couple of job search websites. I scanned an impenetrable medical journal article concerning the paucity of genetic markers that indicate the presence of bile duct cancer. In my room I arranged a big pile of loose paper into a series of smaller piles.
I was terribly unwell in the week. Jack was ill too; thanks to his robust immune system, fortified by regular doses of fruit salad, he was tearing around the house only a few hours after being violently sick.
We spent the mornings raking through a plastic crate of Lego bricks. He regaled me with stories of his home life - The time last week when he plucked-up the courage to ride on the Log Flume at Lego land. Melissa told me that he stood in the queue for the ride trembling with fear. Before the steep drop down into the plunge pool his father had told him to scream any word he liked as loud as he could.
Jack raised his fist to the heavens and shouted “REVENGE!”
* * * * *
Jack knows nothing of the German atrocities of World War II, but instinctively despises the Nazi’s because Indiana Jones does.
“They’re nitwits,” he remarked as we gleefully destroyed the rickety three-storey Lego hotel that we had built the previous day, agreeing that our rampant destruction made us feel like Godzilla.
“You’ve hit the nail on the head there Jack. They were nitwits.”
Current Music: The Divine Comedy - Mastermind
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May 24th, 2009
10:04 am - We didn't see you on Sunday
The house comes alive when my brother and his family visit. Ordinarily we’re a loose knit bunch moving through our own separate orbits. My parents are gracefully advancing towards old age, and in my father’s case, imminent retirement. My brother treads water as a driving instructor – a job that he hates, but lacks the motivation to leave. I am unwell; caught between a perpetual search for employment and the hackneyed good cop / bad cop routine of the job centre. On Saturday I applied or a position as a clerk at the hospital. I am quite optimistic about it. In the meantime I have asked the voluntary services people if they can find me something to do at the hospital on Monday.
This morning has been bright and sunny. I met my nephew, Jack in the breakfast room. It can’t be much more than a month since I last saw him but he seems much taller than before. He was clutching a giant box of Lego – a tank from the Star Wars prequels.
“When I’ve built this, I’m going to fire the missiles at your body,” he announced.
Yesterday he went to Legoland as part of his belated birthday celebrations.
I stood on the steps outside the kitchen door and watched the starlings perched on the mesh chimney covers. A grey squirrel was crouched down low on the bird table, gnawing at the ruins of a Christmas cake. Overhead a pair of swallows arced across the blue sky.
The suburban idyll was disrupted by my mother who regards all squirrels with open hostility. She chased the poor animal halfway down the garden. It bounded away in a very half-hearted fashion and did a U-turn the moment she turned her back on it.
It’s day one of the Southend air show. I won’t go as it clashes with the Monaco Grand Prix.
Current Music: The Handsome Family - The Lonliness of Magnets
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May 23rd, 2009
11:53 am - Some kinks
On Friday afternoon they tested the fire alarm in the Radiotherapy Department. This caused all the fire doors to close automatically, effectively separating that part of the hospital into compartments which are supposed to help contain a real inferno.
Unfortunately once the doors closed no one was able to open them again. I came back from the staffroom carrying a plastic Christmas tray with three mugs of tea balanced on it, to find a doctor and pair of elderly patients trapped at the end of the connecting corridor. Through the long panes of glass in the double doors we could see another small group of patients waiting to come through for their clinic and treatment appointments.
“It was very kind of you to make us tea while we wait,” said the elderly man.
The maintenance crew arrived and dismantled part of the control panel. The doors still wouldn’t open. At this point the doctor wandered off.
“How did we get round this last time?” said one of the technicians as he fingered the keypad.
Current Music: The Reverend Horton Heat - Livin' on the Edge (of Houston)
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May 13th, 2009
01:35 pm - A large quantity of balls
I woke up this morning surrounded by hundreds of tiny polystyrene balls. The zipper on the beanbag that I was partially sprawled over, had split during the night and its contents were spread across the carpet in small drifts. I had also been liberally coated; there were nuggets of Styrofoam clinging to my two-day stubble, buried in my hair, and lodged in the grooves of my cardigan.
The extent of the mess was so great that my instincts screamed at me to immediately move all my furniture and belongings to a different room in the house, and only return when the polystyrene had decomposed, been eaten by pigeons, or blown away by the wind.
Instead I got down on my knees and began to laboriously scoop the balls up by hand, returning them to their navy-blue corduroy sack.
I really need to make more of an effort to sleep in my own bed.
Current Music: The Manic Street Preachers - The Girl Who Wanted To Be God
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May 11th, 2009
07:08 am - 12 steps, then another step
ONE
It’s a quarter past eight in the morning. I am five minutes from the hospital, weaving in-and-out between small groups of teenagers who crowd the pavement on their way to school. The rush hour traffic is building to a peak and I have to stop at the pedestrian crossing. On the opposite side of the road the paving stones are outlined in what appears to be purple chalk. After I cross I realise that it’s the powdery lavender-coloured blossom being shed by a bush that overhangs a low garden wall.
TWO
Sarah is relating an encounter she had with an elderly patient earlier in the week. Their conversation went something like this:
OLD MAN: “What does oncology mean?”
SARAH: “It’s the study of abnormal cells.”
OLD MAN: “What, like police cells?”
SARAH: (Attempts to gauge whether he is joking. Decides that he isn’t) “No, cells in your body.”
OLD MAN: “Ah, police cells.”
THREE
Through the pane of the automatic door, I watch the sky rapidly turn overcast. One of the radiotherapy wheelchairs returns to the department with rain on the seat. My hands smell unpleasantly of rubber bands.
FOUR
Nicolai tells me that Vicky is considering setting up a help desk in the lobby and that I will be sitting behind it. She indicates a large picnic table with foldaway legs, leaning against the wall of the corridor outside her office. I greet the news with enthusiasm; inwardly I am not over the moon and can think of several reasons why it’s a bad idea:
We share the lobby with the Rehabilitation Reception. It’s their waiting area and while it’s never overflowing with patients, putting a table in the middle of it is going to reduce the number of seats available. It could also impede the passage of beds and wheelchairs.
The other problem is that a good 50% of the work I do requires me to be in the office. I can’t take sensitive information into a public area which means that a lot of the jobs that I do now will be off limits to me.
If it happens I’ll adapt, but I don’t see the logic in creating a set of circumstances where I am guaranteed to be less effective than I was before.
FIVE
I walk a patient and his wife down the corridor to the simulator waiting room. When we arrive the couple refuse to believe that I have taken them to the right place and mill around outside. I politely indicate a sign above our heads that identifies our location as the CT SIM waiting area. The man remains unconvinced. He tells me that the letter he received said that he would be given a glass of water before the scan. I gently explain to him that if he takes a seat a nurse will come and prepare him for treatment. This appears to pacify him and I return to the front desk.
A few minutes later the couple pass by reception and begin asking other members of staff, most of them unconnected with the oncology department, for the location of the CT SIM waiting area. Eventually someone escorts them back to the waiting room.
These people aren’t stupid; they’re disoriented. A vague letter has given them expectations that don’t correspond with reality. This makes them doubt the information they are being told. It would have caused them less anxiety and been easier all round if the procedures were explained to them in person when they arrived.
SIX
An elderly couple asks me for directions to Urology. Past experience has taught me to make sure that they mean Urology and not Neurology. With their destination confirmed I suddenly realise that I have no idea where the Urology department is located. Sarah doesn’t know either. The wall map – our last resort – is unilluminating. I direct them down the corridor to the help desk. As they leave I jokingly ask them if they will come back after they’ve been seen and tell me where the department is.
SEVEN
I’m up on the 1st floor outside the clinic, waiting with an empty trolley for the lift to arrive. Across the small courtyard a pair of women are sitting in profile at one of the tables in the restaurant. Their heads are obscured by frosted glass. At the bottom the pane is clear. I watch two pairs of hands engage each other in a graceful arcing dialogue, and wonder if the conversation taking place above is as elegant.
EIGHT
Patient medical records sometimes run to several volumes. These are fastened together with elasticated bands that are supposed to stop them from getting separated. As with most systems the weak link is the human element:
A woman telephones the clinic very distressed because she has been refused a repeat prescription for her pain medication. The nurses need her hospital notes to resolve the issue but they only have the second volume. Usually finding missing files falls to the runner, but it’s urgent and I enjoy the detective work.
I spend 20 minutes charging around the hospital, visiting a ward and a couple of the secretaries’ offices. In the end it’s Dr A____’s secretary, Cathy who solves the mystery of the notes' present location. I rush off to the mezzanine to retrieve them.
NINE
I’m in the otherwise empty staffroom making tea for the secretaries when I suddenly come over lightheaded and have to steady myself on the counter to avoid collapsing. This has been a problem of late and I imagine that it’s linked to my other health problems. I lie down on one of the chairs with my legs bent at the knees and my feet planted on the floor, listening to the muffled roar of the kettle as it boils and the vertical blinds stirring in the light breeze.
TEN
A patient accidentally spills a cup of water in the lobby. I scrounge a wad of paper towels from one of the Linacs and mop it up before someone slips over on it. An elderly woman seated opposite says:
“I bet that’s not in your job description.”
ELEVEN
The elderly couple, who I met earlier in the day return from the Urology Department with news of its location.
TWELVE
4:30pm: The lobby is deserted, save for a middle-aged man and his five very bored and restless children. The children have clearly just been picked up from school and would rather be anywhere but here. Vicky sends me over to the radiotherapy store cupboard with a box of folders. As I tap the code into the lock and open the door, five inquisitive faces crane their necks in an attempt to catch a glimpse of what must be the most boring room in the hospital.
THIRTEEN
5:00pm: I’m done for the day. While it wasn’t quite as hectic as last week, it was still hard work. If you take into account my journey to and from the hospital, by the time I arrive home I will have easily walked in excess of ten miles - probably quite a bit more.
Current Music: Brian Eno - Music For Airports 1/1
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May 1st, 2009
06:28 am - The art of shreading
24th April – Hospital
A few weeks ago the paper shredder in reception began to make a disturbing clunking noise, like a sick outboard motor. Prior to this, the business end of the machine had been upside down on the counter and I had been poking mechanism with an unravelled paper clip in an attempt to unclog a serious paper jam. The received wisdom was that I had somehow broken it, although I maintain that it was already broken. During my absence the shredder was opened up by the maintenance department and pronounced dead. The following week we took possession of the one which had previously occupied the office of the Chief Supervisor – Nicolai.
This morning, Nicolai came into reception with a wad of documents, which she began feeding into the shredder.
“Look, it’s silly you doing this,” “I said. “If you leave anything that you want shredded somewhere where I can get to it, then I’ll do it for you.”
A couple of hours later I was standing in Nicolai’s office. We were both staring at empty, red plastic filing tray which had been labelled “READING.”
“It used to be the reading tray. Now it’s the shredding tray,” she explained.
“So anything in the reading tray – books, magazines and so forth, I’m going assume you want shredded.”
“Yes, any books you find in there you can shred.”
“You know if you added an ‘S’ and an ‘H’ to ‘reading’ it would spell...”
“Shreading!”
“It’s a new word that describes the act of reading a document as it gets drawn into a paper shredder.”
“It encourages you to read faster!”
Back at reception everyone had gone to lunch. Sarah was preparing one of the Monday clinics. Part of the job entails placing the patient folders onto a trolley in ascending order of hospital number. Occasionally a patient will accumulate enough paperwork to completely fill one folder, at which point a second file is opened and the two are bound together by an elasticated band of cloth, which keeps them from getting separated. On rare occasions three files are required. Today we encountered a patient with six files to their name, amounting to over two feet of notes. We piled them up on the desk. With Sarah pushing down on the top to keep them stationary, I managed to stretch a couple of bands around the stack. I almost gave myself a hernia loading it back onto the trolley.
Later, Charlotte recounted an incident that had occurred earlier in the week. She had been about to leave the office. As she reached for the door it had opened. Her hand connected with the space which had previously been filled by the door handle and was now occupied by Dr ______’s crotch. Apparently he will no longer meet her eye, or talk to her.
“It’s not the first time something like this has happened,” she said.
“Charlotte!”
“Well you known how when I walk, I swing my arms...”
Current Music: The Horrors - Who Can Say
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April 28th, 2009
10:48 am - After turning off the light
(Cross-posted from linebyline)
In 2003 I attended a Labour Party gathering that took place in the back room of Silver’s restaurant, just around the corner from Number 10. We were there to discuss making inroads into renewable sources of energy, ahead of an EU resolution in 2004. The purpose of the meeting was for everyone to get their ideas on the table in an informal setting.
Of course very little meaningful discussion took place. To my great displeasure I found myself ostracised from the hub of the conversation, boxed into a corner, right at the end of one of the long tables. The elderly man sitting next to me turned out to be John Sprigg - a former backbencher during the Wilson government, who I recall had briefly risen to the frontline of the party and served as Health Minister. I jokingly remarked that he shared a common name with one of the pioneers of solar energy.
“I share a common body with him too,” he replied.
My curiosity was aroused and I asked him about the Sprigg Solar Battery. I can now admit that my enquiry wasn’t entirely altruistic. At the time I was on the board of a company that was bidding for contracts to provide government buildings – hospitals, libraries and so forth, with solar panels. The Managing Director of the company – I will spare his blushes and not mention him by name – had expressed an interest in securing existing solar technology that was either unpatented, or where the original patents had expired. Luckily for me Sprigg seemed only too happy to divulge the details of his solar cell:
“It was a happy accident really. Before the war I was a partner at a vetinary practice in the Cotswolds. At the time a big problem was a disease known as Bovine Itching. It caused cows to develop a skin irritation which they would attempt to alleviate by rubbing themselves against trees and fences; even rough patches of ground. This caused terrible abrasions to their bodies and made them susceptible to infection from flies and parasites.
“We – well I say we, I mean researchers in the Netherlands - had discovered that the disease was caused by otherwise harmless photoreceptive bacteria which give off heat and create irritation as they proliferate. In the absence of any drug or vaccine, the inhumane solution was to quarantine infected herds inside darkened barns for a period of about a fortnight - roughly twice the amount of time needed to kill the bacteria.
“A few years later I was a researcher at a government laboratory in Limehouse. Our brief was to come up with alternative power sources that would replace our nation’s dwindling supplies of conventional fossil fuels. The brass in the army was particularly interested in renewable sources of energy that could be used by soldiers serving in the field.
“I remembered the Bovine Itching disease from my time as a vet. After a few months I managed to develop a weak solar battery that was basically a six-inch square of cow hide infected with the bacteria. I showed this to a man from the MOD. He wanted to know about storage - how long the battery would retain a charge after turning off the light. I was just beginning to explore this avenue of research when the Germans started their air raids on London. I went home one evening and returned the next morning to a pile of rubble where the laboratory had been.
“After that we never quite regained our stride. Also there were concerns that the bacteria might escape from the battery and cross over to humans. There had already been a few cases of it causing itching in farmers. Eventually more efficient solar cells were developed and my technology became obsolete.”
I mentioned my encounter with John Sprigg to my benefactors at the solar energy company. They agreed to have a look at the technology. A few weeks later I found myself at the centre of an ugly scandal that was partly engineered by one of the tabloids. I was forced to step down from the board of company directors. Eventually I was asked to resign as an MP, which I did. Later I received word from a former colleague that the Spriggs cell was a nonstarter; every bit as inefficient as its inventor remembered it to be.
I bring this up now, because over the weekend I read in the paper that Blenheim House - a large and rather ugly low-rise block of council housing in East London was demolished. While excavating the foundations, construction engineers uncovered the remains of John Sprigg's wartime lab.
Current Music: Talk Talk - Time It's Time
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April 18th, 2009
12:39 pm - Girl Power
Friday, 3pm: The radiotherapy secretaries were agonising over whether to have a biscuit with their afternoon tea. Eventually they bowed to their perpetual diets and decided that they wouldn’t. I started to remark that one of the benefits of being male is not feeling any pressure to watch your figure. I got as far as:
“Speaking as a man...”
At which point the three women present spontaneously burst into fits of laughter, as if I had just uttered the most ridiculously false statement they had ever heard in their lives. I shut up and went back to drinking my tea, pondering the smooth region of my groin, formerly home to my penis which had been callously airbrushed from existence by yet another group of women.
Robin the Radiographer was sending a fax. In an attempt at male solidarity, he mentioned that, earlier in the day, one of the female patients had requested a real man to take her to the Linac machine, only to express deep disappointment when he had showed up.
Later Charlotte recounted how she had thrown her boyfriend’s clothes out of the back window of her flat and then kicked him out through the front door. He was left with no option other than to walk around to the rear of the property in his socks and underwear to retrieve his scattered garments. None of this would have happened if, during them middle of an argument, he hadn’t spoken the fatal words:
“When you’re a bit more adult...”
On Monday there is a bake-off. Everyone is encouraged to bring in home-cooked food. I won’t be there but I scanned the list of proposed dishes that had been blu-tacked to one of the cupboard doors. Among the sensible offerings of “curry” and “a cake of some description,” someone has offered to provide “drinks”. Another person has written: “Tesco.”
Current Music: Regina Spektor - December
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April 15th, 2009
03:15 pm - Calm waves and smooth moon
It’s been quiet these past couple of days. I miss my niece and my nephew, who are the closest thing I will ever have to a family of my own.
This is cross-posted from line-by-line. It’s supposed to be a kind of prose poem.
Calm waves and smooth moon
A movement between two poles. Along a line between compass points. An arrow pointing in both directions.
Between the coast of West Africa and the Canary Islands; sometimes onward to Spain. Between calm waves and smooth moon. Camel Moths flitting around the campfires of the dry Sahara. And in the taverns of Gran Canaria, the Common Wolf Moth, caught between candle and lantern pane.
Between mudflat and huller; customs man and deck buzzard
Between the fences and the meadows. The spring calves that swooned in the unseasonal, late-night heat. The maternal lowing of the cows that soothed a mind worn to a smooth pebble by the sound of waves. The bovine grind of their coarse molars crushing the dandelions stems. Blue tongues lapping the tree sap that turned their saliva venomous and induced palsy in all who drunk the tainted milk.
The clacking of the owl looms in the mown field. Woollen clothes for the winter. Light cotton garments for the summer; a gauze thin enough for the sun to shine through. The framed vibrations of those nocturnal weavers, causing the ground to erupt into earthen volcanoes. The surfacing moles offered a glimpse of the full moon; Velveteen subterraneans, caught between bedrock and sky rock.
Scattered among the loot, we found two routed armies of silver and gold chessmen. Their ranks kept the village in wedding rings for three decades. Year upon year, piece by piece these veteran soldiers left behind their former careers of regimented move and countermove and returned to the maelstrom of family life; its fickle currents and shifting undertows. Where try as he might, no man can steer a straight passage between two points, but is instead pulled askew, off-course and off-balance, and is eventually dragged under.
So did we navigators fail and drown. With mourner’s coin in our pockets we eked-out an impoverished eternity around the lighthouse beacon of the church, that is built upon a spreading reef, formed from the stones of dead men.
Current Music: Richard Youngs - Life On A Beam
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April 6th, 2009
03:12 pm - "One of those evil magicians..."
It’s been a bad fortnight but things are looking up: My brother, Simon, and his family arrived today and will be staying with us all week. Simon has shaved off his beard. Strangely he looks older without it. Neither of us is ageing well. His wife, Melissa, has acquired a fringe which will take a bit of getting used to.
My young nephew, Jack, and my slightly older niece, Beth, are full of energy, stored up during the car journey from Newark. We have just had the following conversation:
Jack: Uncle Alan...
Beth: That’s Sharne’s uncle.
Jack: He can do magic.
Beth: Yeah. Cause he had a toy in his hands and we all blew and he opened his hands and it was gone!
Jack And it went into... It was actually in the lounge.
Beth: And he [Uncle Alan] said it was in Liam’s room and my friend’s brother and Liam trashed the whole room looking for it.
(Everybody collapses into laughter)
Simon: He sounds like one of those evil magicians to me.
Jack: And Mark, there were loads of toys and books in this cupboard and he [Liam] got every single thing out of the cupboard and threw them everywhere.
(More laughter)
Jack: He’s [Liam] not very nice. I actually think he might be the Devil.
Beth: He’s three. He’s Sharne and Danielle’s little brother and Sharne says he’s an evil little brother.
Jack: He is mad. He uses me as a boxing bag!
Beth: And he called Jack smelly.
Jack: (wounded) Yeah!
Current Music: Blind Melon - No Rain
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March 24th, 2009
05:20 pm - “I have seen the speed of things”
At the hospital everybody goes about their business with a different pace of urgency. The patients generally move the slowest; although they often harbour the most unrealistic expectations of how fast the nurses and the admin staff can get things done. At the other end of the spectrum are the NHS Doctors, who often seem to function on several different planes of existence at once.
The consultant I saw yesterday was a big personality: A combination of youth, arrogance, deep knowledge and enthusiasm - positive and negative traits, jostling for position inside a man who was moving too fast for them to settle into a cohesive personality. Throughout our meeting I felt as if he was testing me. I liked him.
“Do you drink alcohol?” he enquired, as he waited for the computer in the corner of the room to start up.
“I haven’t had a drink since May 2007.”
“Good grief. Why ever not?”
“There’s something not quite right with my liver.”
“Yes, I read about that in your notes.”
He called-up the results of my latest blood test on the screen.
“Your liver functions are slightly abnormal. That was on the 2nd of March”
“How do the numbers compare to the last time?”
“I’ll show you. You’ll like this:”
He clicked the mouse. The columns of data disappeared, replaced by a graph - a black line spiking into a series of valleys and peaks, always pulling-up short of the horizontal divider that marks the beginning of normal functions.
The screen changed again, this time to a photo-scan of a letter written by the Senior Consultant, stating the case for Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis.
“I know what PSC is,” I said. “I’ve read about it, and I’ve talked to a couple of people who have it.”
The doctor moved away from the computer and returned to his desk.
“Okay, so explain PSC to me,” he said.
I gave him a short description of the disease and its progression.
“That’s right. Some people get diagnosed with it and they go downhill very fast. That happens only in a minority of cases. In most sufferers it progresses very slowly.”
“I also know that there are certain cancers associated with it.”
“Can you name some the cancers that are associated with PSC?”
“I know that there’s a bad one and that it’s hard to detect early.”
“Cholangiocarcinoma?”
“It sounds wonderful rolling off the tongue like that.”
We talked for a while about the increased risks in this area.
“I’m going to start you on a new drug. Have you heard of Ursodeoxycholic Acid?”
“It doesn’t ring any bells.”
“Can you guess where it comes from? I’ll be well impressed if you can.”
I shook my head.
“If I say Ursae Majoris to you...”
“You mean the great bear?”
“Yes. It’s bear bile. They used to make the drug from actual bear gall bladders. Now it’s synthetic. The great thing about it is that there are no side effects. You could probably eat your own body weight in it and still be alright...”
It was the frankest conversation that I’ve had with a doctor. I thought about it on the walk back home; about how it was time to face-up to reality. No more putting my hands over my eyes and catching glimpses of facts and figures through spread fingers.
Today I’ve been reading through a summary of a workshop on PSC. The unsympathetic medical prose pulls no punches. It’s like being on the receiving end of a series of hammer blows that leave you stunned and off-kilter. The average survivability for PSC sufferers is 12-17 years - The length of a childhood. Not much time to do anything other than live your life. Plans for relationships; careers; footholds on the property ladder – they all seem pointless when you know with a degree of certainty that you will cut down prematurely and in mid-stride.
Current Music: Dave Graney 'N' The Coral Snakes - I Held The Cool Breeze
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March 22nd, 2009
12:19 pm - Surfer's hop
February 21st 2009
La Gomera
I was sitting out on my parent’s balcony, eating goat’s milk yoghurt with honey stirred into it. Looking beyond the palms and the cacti that filled the terraced gardens, and across the broad spread of the Atlantic Ocean; shallow coastal reefs revealed as patches of white surf; a three-masted ship anchored to the horizon. The sky had separated into even strata – A band of pale blue, an opaque strip of white cloud and then more blue.
There was an induction meeting in the covered area beside the main pool; the wind blowing through a gap in the structure, making a sound like a chair being dragged interminably over paving stones. A sudden gust caught the notice board that displayed a map of the island, lifting it from the seat where it had been propped-up and dashing it on the patio.
Paco proudly announced that the old wooden tables from the outdoor bar had been recycled and turned into decking elsewhere in the gardens. A few days later we came across some of it – a small footbridge that crosses a ditch, joining the site with the coastal path. I could see the round holes where the umbrella poles used to go.
* * * * *
The trail down to the village of Playa Santiago meanders steeply back and forth along the cliff face. There are no railings. The top part of the path has been paved with smooth flagstones that would be treacherous in the rain. Where the paving ends mid-row, the older path takes over and the earth is cut into long, stone-capped stairs.
We walked alongside a row of houses that were clustered together at the top of the cliff: An open concrete yard with an aviary full of tiny birds, built against the wall of the adjoining building. Next to it, a brown dog sprawled on his side, a length of chain linking his neck to a nearby kennel; a raised pink scar on the back of one of his hind legs attracting flies; the black line of his jaw spreading along his face towards his ear, as we journeyed past.
Where the houses stopped the path looked down onto waste ground, perhaps 100 feet below. A dumping spot for builders’ refuse and the broken plastic skeletons of ubiquitous sun loungers. Halfway down the trial in the bushes I noticed a ruptured suitcase – brightly coloured holiday clothing spilling into the undergrowth.
Playa Santiago is a sleepy town composed of tiny shops and bars. At the far end of the bay, a road bordered by small banana plantations takes you to the head of a stony beach, where there is a pair of cafes. The nearest of these is an open concrete structure, painted in a variety of colours; tables inside and out; Chill-out music on the stereo; Insect sculptures fashioned from recycled metal adorning the ceiling and the walls; lumps of igneous rock and painted stones decorating the surfaces. A small dog with a terracotta scarf tied around its neck explored the floor around our feet. We sipped on our drinks; picked at rings of fried calamari and tuna croquettes; dipped pieces of white bread into red and green mojo sauces.
After we had eaten I wandered a short way down towards the shoreline; the smooth stones underfoot decreasing in size until I was walking on a glistening bed of coarse black grit that resembled caviar. Despite the calm weather, large breakers were tumbling over themselves, exploding in dramatic white spray as they rolled up on land. Finally one charged up the beach faster and harder than I had anticipated, prompting some furious back-peddling, my reverse momentum shifting me off balance, so that I even when I had reached safely, I had to keep going to avoid falling flat on my arse. The display was watched with amusement by my father from the confines of the cafe.
As we left, thunderheads were smouldering over the centre of the island blurring the craggy fringes of distant mountains into an oily smudge. Everything here seems to be in the process of diffusing into its surroundings. On my way back up the cliff path I paused and looked back across the town. The sea and sky had joined so perfectly that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began: The absent horizon leaving, in its wake, a taste of the infinite.
Current Music: The Doors - I Can't See Your Face In My Mind
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March 12th, 2009
10:43 am - Mount Tidy
February 20th, 2009
Tenerife / La Gomera
At mid-day I looked out through the portal window of the plane and saw Mount Teide; a splayed peak with vestiges of snow clinging to the summit. Its lower reaches were submerged in a bank of dense cloud rising up on the horizon.
Below us there was blue-green water. A white yacht sailing off a rocky coast fringed with spreading surf. Then an incohesive brown landscape, recipient of the spotty attentions of man: The sketched-out foundations of roads and buildings bulldozed into the soil; Rubble-strewn waste ground, dabbed with scrub; Banana plantations swaddled in plastic. A row of blocky, terracotta-coloured apartments lined both sides of an isolated street that stood incongruously in the middle of remote farmland - a piece of the suburbs transplanted to the country, the freshly laid pavement and asphalt regressing to dirt track at the point where the houses stopped.
We disembarked at Tenerife airport. At the Travel Shop a Holiday Property Bond rep told us that the coach wouldn’t leave for the port until 2 o’clock. We slid our bags and cases into the luggage compartment and walked to the taxi rank.
* * * * *
“Los Christianos?” said my father “...The harbour?”
“Harbour?” replied the taxi driver.
The car crept out of the airport parking lot and joined with the motorway traffic. The corporate logos of large out-of-town stores flashed past my window; the golden arches of a MacDonald’s looming over the crash barrier. A repetitive dance track - massed trumpets marshalled into an aggressive beat - emanated at a low volume from the car radio. After about ten minutes we took an exit ramp, descending into the town, backtracking along streets that took us parallel to the coast. The taxi made a left turn, climbed a short distance up a hill and stopped outside a hotel called ‘The Harbour’.
“ No...” said my father. “Not a hotel, the port... Gomera ferry.”
“Ah, ferry.”
The driver swung the car around and we returned the way we had come.
At the port the afternoon ferry was already in dock. We walked from the taxi rank, following the quayside back into town. Small fish flitted over the rocks at the bottom of the harbour. On the surface, pieces of white bread bobbed unnoticed, the current lining them up along a seaweed-clad mooring rope that lay flat on the water. Near the shore, wooden kiosks advertised fishing trips.
Los Christianos radiated outwards and upwards from the cramped bay - a grey volcanic beach, dotted with no swimming signs and scattered rows of empty sun loungers. We sat down outside one of the cafes that crowded the pedestrian-only concourse and ordered drinks. In the awning above us, an almost fully-fledged Ring-Necked Dove peered over the lip of a fragile-looking nest and screeched at its mother. I sipped my coke and gave silent thanks that we weren’t eating at the ‘Colon Restaurant’ which I had spotted across the way.
* * * * *
From the deck of the ferry I could see our destination: A gloomy silhouette on the horizon, visible almost as soon as we left port. A little over an hour later the boat docked at the Gomeran capital - San Sebastián. We descended onto the quay and milled around with the other Property Bond people. My mother pointed to some buildings on a steep cliff overlooking the town:
“That’s the Parador Hotel where the green parrot lives. We might go there if we come here for the day.”
An HPB rep informed us that the coach wasn’t big enough to transport everyone to the El Balcon. She asked for seven or eight people willing to travel there by minibus instead. We volunteered thinking that a smaller vehicle would make shorter work of the winding roads. The rest of the holiday makers boarded the coach and disappeared. We were left standing on the dock for the next twenty minutes waiting for our transport to arrive.
La Gomera is a volcanic island; a crumbling landscape of scree and loose boulders. Exposed cliff faces reveal a jumbled strata - vertical columns of rock resting on top of reddish bands of ferrous, clay-rich soil. There is an absence of grass. Plant life consists of small shrubs, palm trees and prickly pear cacti, mostly missing their protective spines.
The bond site is located on the south side of the island in the sea cliffs above the village of Playa Santiago. It has been constructed on a series of walled terraces, with the apartments and villas overlooking sloping gardens. We signed the register and picked up our keys. My parents went to their apartment. My brother, Tom, and I went to ours, promising to rejoin them after an evening swim.
By the time we had unpacked and collected our swimming towels from reception the rectangular laps pool had been covered. We peered through fogged plate glass windows at a small indoor pool, but were unable to find a way in and so headed for the main pool – an unheated, irregularly-shaped basin located on the bottom-most terrace.
Despite the influx of guests the grounds were deserted. The patio bar was closed. I perched on the end of a sun lounger and undressed.
“Ah, it’s freezing” said Tom.
“It can’t be that bad. The sun’s been on it all day.”
He was right. The water was ice cold. I waded out up to my waist before taking the plunge. Next to me I could hear choppy strokes of my brother’s front crawl. At the far end I scrabbled up a gentle slope, thrusting one arm out, grabbing hold of an aluminium railing pole and hauling myself onto the artificial bank, leaving my legs trailing in the shallow water behind me. I lay there in the dying evening light, out of breath, my skin tingling, nursing the kind of chilled headache you get from eating ice-cream too quickly. Fifteen feet below, a fenced-in children’s playground occupied a narrow strip of land. Beyond that was the cliff path. Then the Atlantic ocean stretching onward into infinity.
Four stray cats paraded past the bar area in a single-file, pausing to inspect the two figures in the water before continuing on their way. We swam oblique, half-hearted lengths to different points of the pool. I took shelter under a marginally warmer torrent of water that poured from a stainless steel spout. Occasionally something in the mechanism would cause it to sputter and make a sound like frantic wing beats.
My brother climbed out and towelled off. A few minutes later, with the cold deadening my limbs, I joined him. As we gathered up our clothes and belongings a seagull, which had been watching us from one of the aluminium poles, swooped down and alighted on the surface.
Current Music: The Dream Syndicate - When You Smile
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