Without the Long-Term Commitment

So, you’ll know the moment – I’m sure you’ll know the moment – I think we all know the moment, when you are ill, or you’re low, or your mouth has run away with you – again – and you go to bed thinking “Things will be so much better in the morning. If I can just get a good night’s sleep, everything will be brighter: my cold will have gone, my mood will have lifted, I will not be outed as some kind of anti-religious bigot by the vicar’s wife.” Well, I have to tell you – I am sure you will already know – that things are seldom better in the morning: if you have a cold, the snot is still there, in fact it may have filled your entire head and congealed into something resembling a pea-green panna cotta. Colds do not get better overnight. Colds only ever improve following the consumption of malt whisky. Colds liquidize the brain and then let it dribble out through the nose. Every single thought is solidified into a single impulse to find a means of breathing that does not involve a slack jaw, permanent drool and the sound of a camel gargling custard.

It is a peculiar type of optimism that relies on sleep for a cure when sleep is so difficult to come by: when the difficulty in breathing is magnified ten-fold at the moment the head hits the pillow; when the face has closed the doors on oxygen. Sleep is not going to come easily, when the possibility of never waking up is so present.

Perhaps the belief that sleep will bring relief to aching bodily infrastructure is more logical. Muscles may well be able to use the hours of idleness to repair and refresh, but equally they may choose to use them to set like stone. A small 8pm tweak can easily turn into complete calcification by 8am, and joints that in youthful vigour would have used the hours of darkness to self-lubricate now throw up the barriers, sing La Marsellaise and declare that, henceforth, they ‘will not be moved’. Sleep, with age, merely allows the body to magnify its woes before the morning comes. Each ailment struggles to enhance its performance in a bodily version of Top Trumps. Tumbling into bed a fit and mobile man can, these days, precede the possibility of waking up with rigor mortis. Only the ability to moan loudly will stand between you and the hearse. An unexpected posterior eructation could be the only thing to alert those around you to the presence of enduring existence: “Excuse me for asking, but do corpses normally fart?”
“No vicar. Nor do they smell quite that bad.”

Sleep after a day of vigorous activity – which at this age could include anything from tying one’s own shoelaces to removing the cellophane from a ready meal – will almost certainly allow the introduction of superglue between all moveable surfaces. Both body and mind deteriorate through the night time hours. There are occasions when you may sleep for eight hours only to wake up years older and yet the medical mantra remains unchanged: “Get more sleep. It will all be better in the morning.” Try taking a worry to bed and see how much better that is after a night spent fixating on a worse-than-worse-case scenario that appears, with the breaking of dawn, to be the only viable outcome. What starts the evening as a flickering light bulb becomes bankruptcy, homelessness and a strange fungal infection that no amount of sleeping will put right.

Sleep is not medicine, it is a void into which the crap of the day falls and festers. I currently have the kind of cold that will only allow sleep if I take it in an upright position. When I wake in the morning – as long as I am not being too presumptuous in that assumption – it will not have gone. It will have taken its opportunities. Ancient man learned to sleep through the night because he came to realise what a pain in the butt staying awake could be: hours drag in the darkness, fires need stoking, feet need warming and the telly’s crap. Waking up is the only good news about waking up. (Not waking up is definitely bad news.) If I’m lucky, my cold will improve during the day and I will find the kind of sleep that feels as though it will not make things worse. And then I’ll need to pee – you know that moment – I’m sure you know that moment…

“Sleep is death without the long-term commitment.” – Lea Krinksky

The Ocean

My vision is folded – well demi-folded as only one contact lens has decided to jacknife in my eye – some distance away from a decent mirror and something with which to wash my fingers before poking them into my watering orbs. I’m not overly concerned, sooner or later I will blink and the offending lens will catapult itself forth, never to be seen (or see) again. My world will be hazy, but without a crease in it. At least an artificial one…

The way I see things has always been a little eccentric. My vision has always been a little bit like those mystery photographs of everyday objects you used to get in magazines (usually a corkscrew): I see the same as everybody else, but not necessarily in the same way.

Do you ever look at the horizon and wonder why, wherever you are, it remains in the same place and why if it doesn’t move, you can never touch it? Funny thing, the sea, don’t you think? It is fed billions of gallons of fresh water from rivers every day, yet it remains determinedly salty. Why? It can’t all be due to toddler wee. Conversely though, why are rivers not salty: they are made up from the same rain, they run over the same rocks (fundamentally) and the flow must make them every bit as astringent. I know – I believe – that climate change is causing sea levels to rise, but I am struggling to understand some basic principles. Thermodynamics are not my thing, but I’m pretty good at gin & tonic. I realise that ice-caps are melting, but I’ve seen ice melting in a full glass and it doesn’t overflow. I also know that the drink gets colder. If this is up-scaled, the oceans will not get higher but they will get colder. I might just have stumbled on the solution: the sea needs more gin.

The sea here is definitely warm, but I have no idea of whether it has always been that way. At home I live just a few minutes drive away from the east coast and the sea there is not warm. The sea is never warm. The Skegness foreshore is cold enough to cool the whole planet. People do swim there, but they are certifiably mad. There is no sane reason for entering water that is only survivable if you are covered in goose fat.

It is part of the human condition that we seek to create boundaries where none exist naturally. When I was at school there were five oceans (I think: my geographical knowledge has always been best described as ‘extremely dodgy’) Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic and Antarctic, but it’s all really just one body of water isn’t it? So, who decided to split it up and where to do it? Was it a few powerful nations saying ‘This is my fish. Go to another ocean to catch yours’, or is there some more scientific rationale – which would explain why I don’t know it?

In any case, it is hard to argue against the ocean itself being the mightiest of all powers. It is vast and its strength can be devastating. It will be the true ruler of the Earth until the Sun decides to throw in the towel and evaporates it all – and I won’t care by then as my view of the world will be exactly the same as everybody else’s…

But here comes the waves
down by the sea
Washing the eyes of the men
Who have died… The Ocean – Lou Reed

I am writing this piece whilst overlooking a section of coast that was devastated by the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 which caused an estimated 165,000 deaths. Whilst here we have spoken to people who experienced the destruction and we have seen photographs that will haunt me forever. Today the sea is a vast aquamarine millpond and I hope for the sake of these beautiful people that it will long remain so.

Feeling the Cold

I am cold.

There is something about being cold that is completely debilitating. Something that numbs the senses as much as the fingertips. Now, I think it only right to point out – lest you were to consider calling the emergency services – I am not talking life threatening here. Nothing close to hypothermic. What I am talking is ‘Below Optimal Operating Temperature’. I am talking chilled, not frozen. However, it is more than cold enough for me.

As the body becomes cold it begins to pump out all manner of messages to the brain, most of them telling it to stop whatever-it-is it is doing and figure out a way to get warm, that does not involve emigration.

I am old enough to remember life before central heating, when homes were occupied by small puddles of warmth within a sea of cold: the fire, the oven, the bedroom paraffin heater. I remember when the only way not to be cold in bed was to be covered in such a weight of woollen blanket that it was impossible to move. I remember the dread of having to vacate that woven cocoon in the morning.

In general, our lives now are not dogged by cold: our homes are warm, our shops and cafes are warm, our clothes are warm. We encounter cold much more infrequently and, when we do, we seek to find warmth with an increased alacrity. We do not seek warmth, we bathe in it.

I also remember draughts. Homes were full of draughts, the entry points of which had to be blocked by any means available: parcel tape around windows; paper over airbricks; giant, cloth-filled ‘sausages’ at the bottom of doors. This was the world of the draught-excluder. Unchecked draughts were the root of all illness: got a cold – you must have been sitting in a draught; got arthritis – you must have been sitting in a draught; T.B., Consumption, Pneumonia – all draught-related. Of course, the home with no draughts was also the home of suffocation – the price you had to pay.

This lack of ventilation also led to damp. Corners of rooms were routinely black with mould; windows ran with condensation; clothes were always heavy with moisture. On a wash day, the whole house could be fog-bound. A simple Sunday boil-up of spuds came with the threat of low-visibility across the English Channel.

I have always felt the cold. My gran said that I was ‘thin blooded’. I’m not sure what that meant, although I was thin. Mind you, I had that in common with virtually everybody I knew. If you weren’t skinny, then you were fat and therefore, presumably, not cold. I’m not sure why we were all so thin. We ate the kind of food that was not ready until it had had the living shit boiled out of it. Anything green required several hours of boiling before it was considered edible. A steak and kidney suet pudding may have to be boiled for several days in order to cook the three inch layer of suet which surrounded the gristle-bound lump of meat that lie at its core. These foods were meant to give us ‘a lining’, to keep out the cold.

Well, these days, I am more than adequately lined, but somehow, I still feel the cold and now, I know that it must be serious because my mind has thrown all of the words out of my head and is currently pleading for hot chocolate…

Under the Weather

…So here we are, my cold and I, trapped at home together with just an expectant laptop for company: eyes riveted to back of skull; tongue superglued to roof of mouth; nose dripping like newly installed washing machine. Try to bring focus to eyes that are vibrating like a tumble dryer with a dog in it. Laptop screen looks like amateur graffiti scrawled across a naked jogger’s buttocks. Try to listen to radio but, unless they’re playing Ethel Merman again, ears appear to be malfunctioning in some way. All sound seems to be filtered through several bales of cotton wool. Somehow, passageway between ears and brain is blocked like a service station latrine. Judging by unusual sounds reaching auditory cortex, ears may be stuffed with self-inflating sheep. Fevered brain is doing somersaults. Even beleaguered bladder has climbed aboard the trampoline. Just a cold – I know – just a cold, but, my age, who knows where it might lead…

Must grit teeth and try to write. Not easy as hands are employed in constant search for tissue and, anyway, dental bridge-work not really up to gritting these days. Nose glows like electricity smart meter with kettle on. Tissue feels like sandpaper. Hang on, tissue is sandpaper – no wonder couldn’t rub blemish out of front door yesterday. Must have been using Kleenex.

Sweating. Am wearing only boxer shorts. Thermometer shows body temperature normal. Shows room temperature 120˚. Central heating thermostat is stuck. Equatorial temperature in lounge bringing flies out of hibernation, blistering paint on radiators, melting curtains. Attempt to adjust thermostat. Search for superglue to reaffix little temperature knob to front of thermostat. Easy. Little knob no longer falls off thermostat. Unfortunately, little knob no longer turns either. Stuck somewhere between Timbuktu and summertime Mercury. Turn off central heating at boiler before house bricks melt. Temperature in house immediately drops to by twenty degrees. Flies are frozen on the wing; left gliding around the room like miniature microlight aircraft.

Nose running like rusted garden tap does not. Resume frantic search for tissues. Tissue box is empty. Blow nose on box. Ears screech. No, cat screeches; have stood on cat. Cat attempts to sharpen claws on leg. Flail at cat with one leg whilst attempting to shake him off with other. Become immediately aware of advisability of having at least fifty percent of available legs (eg one) firmly anchored to floor. Pick self up. Cat now sharpening claws on head. Cat 90% more effective than anti-dandruff shampoo. Take half a paracetemol – never take full dose: have vision of liver dissolving like new grouting on bathroom wall. Anyway, cannot read tablet box instructions to discern correct dosage. Contact lenses feel like dinner plates when I have cold and vision is filtered through net curtains. Looking out at the world is like my grandma looking out at next-door neighbours on a Saturday night. Would wear glasses, but put them down somewhere before lunch and have not been able to find them since. Can smell them though. Somewhere hot, little plastic molecules are reorganizing domestic arrangements. Head towards thick black smoke billowing from kitchen grill. Spectacles now smouldering black walnut. As is forgotten Welsh Rarebit. Remove battery from smoke alarm and realise that screeching in ears has not abated.

Common cold is very minor complaint – even for man – so why do I feel like death? (Once had a vision of death whilst travelling on the bus. Death is not a skeleton dressed in black. Death does not have name written in fire. Death drives a bottle green Toyota. Death is a double-glazing salesman with halitosis. Death has your name in his contacts list. He was given it by Facebook. Death is called Nigel.) This is the most trivial of illnesses, yet it manages to rob me of half of my ability to see, hear, smell, taste and breathe. God knows what an un-common cold must be like. Wonder if the Queen is immune to the common cold. Surely she cannot catch something so vulgar. I bet the footmen have it for her…

One of life’s great imponderables: why does huge, snotty sneeze always correspond with complete failure to locate tissues? Why does frantic dash around the house with mucus a-dangling always lead to empty cardboard tube where kitchen roll used to be? Ditto toilet roll. Where’s the bloody cat when you need it? Am left wondering where all this mucus actually comes from and, perhaps more worryingly, where it all goes when it is no longer dribbling out of my nose. Will explain to wife what happened to curtains later…

Mind is wandering. Could be delirium. Could be Buttercup Syrup overdose. Must concentrate. Must write blog before dark as all lights fused by decimated grill. Also candles melted by central heating and batteries welded to torch by strange green goo. Desperately need to stop nose running. A good strong blow should do it… There is nothing in human existence quite like the sound inside your ears when you have blown your nose and external air pressure struggles to restore some kind of equilibrium inside your head. Unless you have sat on the cat…

Hold tissue with one hand and type with other. Something real and contemporary. Something deep and satirical. Hard to be satirical with something buzzing in ears. More likely to be wasps than ideas. Wonder how to tackle wasps in ear? Perhaps should dangle over-ripe plum to side of head. Perhaps should have a root about with cotton bud. Wonder what to do when routine broggle leaves tiny cotton ‘bud’ in waxy recess of ear, other than look at little budless stick in dismay. Hopefully will fall out overnight – otherwise will book two weeks off work to visit A&E.

Very dark now. Cannot type in dark – especially as super-efficient laptop battery ran out after six minutes on stand-by and keyboard on mobile phone does not respond to mittened hands. Should go to bed. Need to rest. Lay head on pillow and go straight to sleep… soon… eventually… Nose immediately fills with God-knows-what. Eyes no longer close without strange rasping sound. Shattered taste buds detect faintest hint of yesterday’s sock and tonsils grow to size of Blue Whale’s adenoids (if you don’t believe they have them, look it up – I did). Brain works loose in skull and trickles out through nose…