Click. Whirr... Ping! Hello!

I know I said I wouldn't mention it again, but my mind came back over Christmas. Something knitted together, reactivated re-connected, whatever, in my head and my brain suddenly became illuminated like a whole night-time city seen from space.

I was quite miserable before Christmas as it was very evident from the inside that things were not as they once were. And I was bitterly upset by this. I felt slow, dull-witted and lacklustre and it hurt. I thought this was how I would be forever. And it could have been. That happens.

But somehow, it all switched back on again during the Christmas break. Suddenly, I seem to have all my faculties back. I don't know what caused it. Perhaps it was all the sleeping I did, or the respite from work, or all the company. I really couldn't say what.

I still get extremely tired in that unhealthy, impenetrable way that is familiar to me and only began last March. And I still become confused when there is a lot of information to process or when many voices talk at once, or even just one voice when I am trying to concentrate on something.
And I know that lots of people say "Oh, that happens to me too!" But there is a qualitative difference between usual, common-or-garden confusion and the sickening, lurching, spinning disorientation that I occasionally still experience. I also need to sleep a lot more than before - perhaps an hour a night more.
But these small inconveniences are all that appear to remain from my misfortune.

It's been ten months. I am back at last (at least I think so). And I am delighted.

So I just thought I would pop by and say hello.

I always wanted a treehouse

One of my friends, when I was about 11, had a lovely treehouse. We used to climb the 20 feet or so up the ladder into the hatch and a different world suddenly presented itself. It was in a lovely straight apple tree with an unusually long trunk. Apple trees are usually stumpy little things, especially these days when mechanical picking seems to be selected for. But this was a majestic specimen and rarely, as I remember, produced many apples. But as a site for a treehouse, it was perfect.

But then he had a garden that was an acre. In our diminutive (though large by modern standards) garden, there were only a couple of spindly silver birches and they rapidly outgrew the space and had to be cut down.
No chance fora treehouse there. I was envious.

My friend used to sleep out occasionally in his treehouse during the summer months. It was a six by four space with a felted roof which easily accommodated an eleven year old boy in a sleeping bag. This, we considered, was very cool.

A dark Boxing day landscape and some rain on the lens.

Today, we went for our Boxing day walk somewhere I wouldn't usually go. Our traditional walk was deemed unwise on account of the route skimming the edge of the Somerset Levels where at the moment, some villages are still cut off by floodwater after several weeks of watery isolation. Best not go there, we thought.

So we headed up towards the Cotswolds to the area I grew up in around Wotton Under Edge. It rained a lot, of course it did:  It hasn't stopped raining since April. But it was nevertheless very beautiful and I revisited some boyhood memories of fossil hunting and string spear-throwers. It's all a bit overgrown there now but when we were kids, the trampling of many pairs of juvenile feet kept the undergrowth down. All manner of games were played here and what finer playground could a ten year old lad and his friends hope for?

How could you NOT imagine hunting dinosaurs here?

It was, until that unreasonable tyrant puberty changed my motivations and made me feel acutely isolated and miserable, a great place to be a kid

And though I didn't really find myself experiencing any nostalgia for the place or the time, I did occasionally view it through the eyes of my ten-year-old self. It's strange revisiting somewhere from your distant past, but as I mentioned once before, memories are best viewed as just that and to attempt to recapture their atmosphere is usually a mistake. But I did stumble over some of that and I did get the urge to make a bow and arrow. But I didn't have any string and it was raining too hard anyway.

Looking at the small settlements, Wortley, Aderley, Nind, it struck me that the old ramshackle farms and crumbly buildings which used to house farm labourers are all now pristine, renovated and very des-res. Many of the old tumbledown cottages must now be worth half a million or so, with their limestone facades and in one case, thatched roof (we never had thatched roofs round there. What are they thinking?). One place even has a pair of stone stags on plinths. I know taste varies, but that is a bit tacky, surely? No, no, I shouldn't judge and perhaps they come to life at night and are joined in the garden by satyrs and centaurs. I like to think so.

There is, it seems, money about, if you look in the right places. And I do not begrudge this development: The places would surely have fallen down and been lost had they not been bought and done up. And it means there are plenty of people with sufficient disposable income to finance the local farmers' markets and enough pushy determination to keep the local schools open and to a high standard.

I always wanted one of these!

But in one garden, I saw this, and though I do not harbour any envy for the big, remote, beautiful farmhouses, I do envy these kids their tree house. I hope they use it and don't spend all their time on the PS3.

How Little and How Often?

I wonder who invented whisky. I just bought a bottle. It's a Birthday present for someone and it will be a few days before I give it to him. But it's ok. He won't read this so I won't spoil the surprise.
I don't like whisky. I had no idea which one to buy. Is Johnny Walker Red Label good? When I taste it, it makes me feel immediately nauseous. It's a taste I never developed and probably just as well. There are things such as skiing, motorbikes and whisky which I have avoided because I just know I will love them and if I get a taste for them, it will be my undoing. So, whisky will remain for me an unacquired taste.

The shops were as one would expect on Christmas eve: Lots of couples wandering along the aisles of Tesco's, Yate, desperately trying to remember what they came out for and how all this previously undesired stuff had found it's way into their trolley.

Very little here by way of inspiration. Everyone was surprisingly pretty much silent as they goggled at the shelves. Perhaps they had used up all their words for the year and had got to December with none of their allocation remaining. So maybe they could only point speechlessly at the pyramid of kitchen towels, half-price mince pies and bottles of Baileys and shrug. I know how they feel.
Words do seem to have a life of their own. These days I find them rather reticent. Whereas they used to flood into my head at the merest opportunity and overflow here, now, I have to squeeze them from my uncooperative brain and on to the page. I don't know why this is. It could be due to a lot of reasons, some neurological, some circumstantial, perhaps even some behavioural. Perhaps I don't need them any more?
Whatever: At some point in the last nine months I seem to have lost my Way With Words. And I miss it.

A friend who is a published author said that it is like any "muscle" by which I assume she means that it gets stronger with use (in which case, the iris, the tongue and those smooth muscles that produce peristalsis ought to be exempt from the catchall "any" as they don't get stronger with use.)
But I take her point.

And so, in an attempt to rediscover what it means to be articulate and to preserve what vocabulary as remains to me, I shall be jotting down the occasional thought here.

It seems to me that a wholesome home life is good for the soul. Yesterday I spent almost a whole day cutting, drilling and tapping M8 threads in steel plate for my van and I found it immensely rewarding. But when this kind of thing becomes your main passtime, spare waking moments tend to be spent on staring into space and thinking how to make a stool for the van which can be sat on but which will slide into the bed the rest of the time and contain all the frying pans etc. Mechanically, its inventive, but it does not inspire. Rather, it kind of calms. Which is ok if that is what you are after. But not all the time.

But I think the whole point of this blogging malarkey is for us all to find our way to a Vibrant Life of The Mind. Well, perhaps I shouldn't generalise for everyone, but that is a large part of it for me. That and the connection it feels it gives to Wider Humanity. At the moment, it is all a bit quiet in here and not vibrant enough. And nobody likes feeling lacklustre, out of touch and un-shiny, do they?

So, Little and Often is how it needs to be.

And as an afterthought, in no way connected: Does anyone ever get a word that decides to inhabit their brain for a day or so and pops up all the time in their mind's ear? For me, today, it is the word "Helminth". Such a fresh sounding word I feel (given what it denotes). Sorry. Complete non-sequiter there. I am hoping for more of that as the sudden changes of direction make life more interesting.

And that is enough rambling nonsense for today, I think.

A Very Mellow Weekend

This last weekend, after my five days in bed with flu and a 41C temperature, some friends, chancing catching my bug, came to stay. We had planned to go off in vans to Cornwall, but it was cold and we were all still hacking and coughing. So we thought we would have a quiet weekend.

I find it lovely if a little odd to be able to say that as an adult, I have known someone for thirty years. I am surely not old enough to have had effectively a thirty year friendship with someone I didn't meet as a child. But it is so and regularly, we meet up and spend lovely weekends together. Much beer and wine is drunk and some excellent food consumed, all the while enjoying the company and conversation of like-minded people. It's what life is all about, I think. 

This weekend, we went to Bath to the Christmas market, but it was far too busy and I confess I struggled a bit with the cognitive load of managing to avoid the trajectories of hundreds of people milling about. 

So, yesterday, we went for a quiet walk around Woodchester Mansion which I have written about here before. I snapped this picture of the quaint boathouse in which I am troubled now to see that the window is open. Who opened the window and why? In Summer, this is an idyllic spot, but on a Winter's day, there is a strange air about the place and one could almost imagine some troubled spirit standing looking out of the window. I am not usually given to such thoughts but it did feel mildly spooky, especially considering the unfinished mansion just up the valley. The Romans were here thousands of years ago and at the top of the valley, long barrows still exist where bronze age burials took place. It is a place of atmosphere.

So, on we went around the lakes, whilst buzzards wheeled above us in the still cold air and ducks quacked in the water with derisory laughs of ridicule at the muddy feet and hubris of we passers-by.

It was a lovely crisp day and the walk was just so wonderfully English - something I rarely consider since I was born here, live here and spend most of my time here. 

So, we walked and talked and there was a bonfire where some National trust volunteers were clearing dead wood, and the woodsmoke just smelt so right.

We returned to the van and drank tea, ate cake and talked some more. Gradually a Winter's day elided into a cold evening as the sun went down. Home called to us, with dinner already in the oven.

At home, I made mulled cider with an otherwise rather undistinguished apple wine from last year, some cider and assorted spices with brown sugar. In fact, I made about a gallon. 

Sitting round the table with friends and family, with a big joint of roast pork, home-grown roast potatoes, mulled cider and Jethro Tull "Solstice Bells" playing, the World was perfect for a moment. Outside, the dark Gloucestershire countryside was now asleep but still very present in the feeling of surrounding the room, the house, the town.

Banana & Ginger wine. A dessert wine of about 18% ABV. Small glasses only...

And now, my friends have gone home and I look at the gaps in my wine rack with a feeling of deep satisfaction. And it occurred to me that my banana and ginger wine needed bottling. And so having drunk the excess that wouldn't fit in the bottles, a feeling of general mellowness comes over me.
A very good long-weekend. And it's not even Christmas yet!

Revisiting Uncomfortable Places and a Resolution

I had intended specifically not to write about this, because it was something I didn't really want to remember. And I don't want to seem like I am going on about it. This is probably the last I shall say on the matter directly.

Last week, I went back, 32 weeks to the day, to where my sub-arachnoid haemorrhage happened. I decided to go to a dance at the venue where, eight months earlier, that horrible, sickening thing happened in my head and of which, mercifully, I remember very little.
I remember the song that was playing and the move I was attempting when, like a tube of toothpaste squeezed hard with the cap on, something burst into my head. Quite literally. And the yellow that flooded my vision, the whining noise like the noise from the test card, and the agonising explosion in my head that immediately ensued, it all came back to me, albeit in an attenuated way.
Initially, when I arrived, I couldn't walk into the room. I walked up to the door and it was as if there was a force-field off which I bounced, the way two strong magnets will repel each other in that weird way, authoritatively redirecting your hand along the lines of force.
Only it was my whole body that was redirected. To a chair in the foyer, where I sat and shook and probably looked utterly pathetic.

Some kind people who were there that night, came and sat with me and created an air of calm, for which I am grateful. So I determined to follow the comforting ritual of taking off my shoes and putting on my (new!) dance shoes. This seemed to allow me to roll along a well-worn path of familiarity and I managed to get the momentum up to carry me through the door and into the hall.
And, you know, I am quite astonished at the aversion I felt. Histrionics is something that normally seems incredibly irritating. But the strength of my feelings were quite overwhelming and very unexpected for a matter-of-fact chap like myself.
So, I danced, and being brain-stem stuff, the movement flowed and I felt at ease quite soon. However, I decided not to tempt fate and when "Moves like Jagger" came on, I sat down. No aversion per se, just prudence.

Well, here we are, eight months on, and more-or-less back to normal. Thinking is still a bit hard and I get distracted easily. This is frontal lobe stuff. Even now. But concentration has improved, possibly even to a better level than before, as I have had to consciously put in place strategies to cope. Attention is still a problem. Some voices will take hold of my attention for reasons I cannot fathom and will hold it against my will. Dragging it back to the task in hand can be hard or impossible and this makes me instantly confused and tired in a way I had not experienced before.

Sometimes, like when I was in the building society, trying to sort out some stuff for my mortgage, a (usually female - no idea why this is) voice will cut through my concentration like the sound of chalk scraping on a black board and it will be as if someone has hit me on the left hand (again, no idea why this should be) side of the head with a shovel and I will reel away in confusion. Certain "Teachery" voices do this repeatably. But I am getting better at "centering" myself and now don't have to go and have a lie down. Progress indeed!

And I confess, I don't feel as clever as before. Some raw mental horsepower seems missing. I cannot say whether this is because some circuits of my neural machinery suffered damage due to lack of blood flow or the interference from clots and "cellular debris" (as the neurologist delicately referred to the gumming up of the works caused by a bleed and subsequent healing). Or perhaps it is to do with my attitude: Where things seem tiresome, overly complicated or even merely irritating, I find I am unable to find the motivation to take it in. This is a problem at work where the majority of daily issues seem to fall into these categories. This also may be neural, or perhaps a new and semi-conscious indifference to minutiae. But I am working on this.

Writing, like this, also seems quite a challenge. Whereas it flowed before, now it feels "lumpy", like swallowing dry bread and trying to sing at the same time. Again, is this capability or motivation? I cannot say. I don't really know what to do about this.  need to think a bit more on it perhaps. Or maybe "just do it" (though often, I don't really feel like it)

But in general, reading how dreadfully affected so many SAH sufferers continue to be, even years later, I count myself lucky now to be as compos mentis as I am and fortunate at how physically well I have recovered. I was confused as to what to expect: It wasn't a big bleed by SAH standards and it could have been so much worse. Thank Nimodipine, I didn't get the spasms in my my blood vessels up there! That'll do for you, even with a lesser bleed, like mine!

But I am still surprised at the lingering effects now that the pain and tiredness has pretty much disappeared. Perhaps the remaining problems will mend, like the rest seem to have, or perhaps I will be like this forever. In which case, that's ok. I don't mind being a little bit less intelligent but a bit happier at being alive.

With my 32 week revisiting of the venue, I feel I have exorcised the final demon. The chapter is obviously not closed as I am still getting cognitive weirdness. But something has now resolved in me and I am calmer about everything.
So, with that experience laid to rest, I shall not mention it again. Case closed. Time to get on with working with what I find in my slightly rearranged brain. Let's see what it can do, shall we?

slowly, deliberately, seeking expression again.

Once more, I have resumed an aspect of my Old Life and am in Germany, at one of the hotels I used to frequent about once a month for the last 20 years or so. It feels both grindingly familiar and at the same time, very different.
It is nearly nine months since I was last here. Not a significantly long time in the Grand Scheme of Things, but a lifetime in what has transpired in the intervening time. I confess, I feel very different.
And perhaps this is what is at the root of this apparent paradox. Events which on the surface may appear familiar may be experienced in a profoundly different way based upon our internal state or attitude towards them. It's a perspective thing perhaps.

So, here I am in Paderborn, at the Arosa hotel awaiting a meeting about arcane technical and logistical matters and not feeling particular fussed about the whole thing. Time was, I would be very concerned to be making the right impression, to be ensuring my presentation said what I thought it ought to, to present the right image to represent my company.
Now, I feel that the overwhelmingly defining factor connecting myself to those I am meeting is our shared humanity. Ok, their business and mine are co-dependent and there are aspects of ours that if they were optimal, would be significantly less advantageous to them. That's business.

But underneath it all, we are people and this somehow renders these superficial differences irrelevant to me now. I feel much more connected to the human condition as I perceive it to be shared by myself and by others since my little mishap of earlier this year.

Feelings in general have been something I have been thinking about quite a lot in recent weeks. I have not felt like writing. Oh, there is material a-plenty. I ponder and muse about things as much as I ever did, possibly more, in fact, but I haven't had the urge to write the resultant thoughts down or share them. They are mine. Who else would be interested? And why should they be?
So, I haven't committed them to words. And to be frank, getting even this out of my head and onto the page has been like passing a kidney stone.

But here I am, in a familiar external landscape, looking out from a new internal landscape. It really is most interesting. Refreshing is perhaps a word I could use which encapsulates my feeling about it all. Refreshing and calming. Matters are not so pressing as I used to feel. And I wish I could share this realisation with all those people at the airport fretting loudly over the telephone about this deal or that appointment. It is surprising how little that previously seemed important enters into your thoughts when you are lying flat on your back in a hospital bed wondering if you will ever be the same again.

But feelings, they are slippery blighters aren't they! As Autumn progressed, I noticed that a calm and comforting melancholy came with it. Not that there is any Summer to mourn the passing of. Indeed, if ever there was a rubbish year in which to spend months of convalescence, this was it!
But it is very odd to experience feelings which are a melange of atmospheres and memories but for which words could not possibly exist.

The brown and orange leaves blowing about in the street, the damp coolness of the air, its woodiness hinting at decay and fruitfulness. Simultaneously, all these engender a feeling of.... what? Cosiness?
Retreat? Sanctuary? The sense of something having run its course as the Natural Order decrees? I really could not articulate it. But I know what it feels like. And I suspect, so do you. But we cannot explain it to each other, as we can't be sure what we feel is the same. We could just sit and both feel it perhaps, and know somehow that, probably, we are sharing a concensus on what Autumn feels like and represents.

And then there is the strangeness of the suddenness of the appearance of such feelings. They can lie dormant until called to mind by some time, event, song or scent. We may forget we were able to ever feel this way until reminded. And suddenly perhaps elation, inspiration, a sense of the world holding greater possibilities, erupts into us and we wonder where the feeling went in the interim. And we perhaps concern ourselves briefly with how we might retain such feelings to lift us out of the daily anaesthesia of routine and the seemingly endless supply of grey Autumnal days.

For instance: When Winter is relinquishing its grip and, perhaps in late March, the first smell of a cut lawn reaches us through our newly opened windows, how powerfully the feelings flood back. Suddenly, we remember there was Summer and we were really really ALIVE. And Summer smelt fresh and wonderful and brought us to life in a way we had forgotten. The scent of cut grass sets off a cascade of emotions: A feeling of hope, of possibility, of a more enlightened and carefree existence, floods into us and we cannot quite remember the ebbing away of this as Autumn crept upon us. But POW! Back it comes and we recognise it immediately and welcome its reminders of how invigorated we are able to feel.

What other feelings are lurking unremembered and inspirational somewhere within our memories, awaiting the trigger to awaken us to a different and elevated sense of existence? And how do we get to them? Or do we wait until it is their Time? If ever such a time should recur.

Gosh. Writing is hard. What used to flow, now has to be squeezed out unwillingly. It has been like moving furniture around in my head to get to the words and only finding some of the ones I wanted because others have fallen behind the piles of clutter and objects put aside in haste to keep even a basic level of access open. I wonder if it will get easier, or if I can even find the drive to find out.

Follow your dreams (to the dustbins)

The air smells different today. I couldn't say why. Smell seems to lack a coherent vocabulary to describe its characteristics. It is September and though no Summer was really forthcoming this year, the scent of crispness that displaces that of cleaning products and cooking smells, greets my previously housebound nose unexpectedly and I find it somehow viscerally disappointing without really knowing why. 

If Summer implies freedom, friendship, picnics in parks and carefree laughter on sunny days (though in reality this rarely happens. But the illusion persists despite our experience.) then surely, the onset of cooler, darker seasons must imply the loss of such freedoms: The closing down of "outdoors" and the moving to the smaller more isolated spaces of our social lives.

But today, the differences in the air brought by the changes to vegetation and meteorology appear to suggest a more profound change of emphasis with regard to mood. A more introspective, calmer period is dawning: The resumption of "Real Life" after the frivolity of summer days demands our sensible attention.

Ok, so there weren't really more than a handful of long, warm days this year. Summer was officially a washout. The worst, wettest, coolest here in over a hundred years. But the days were long, if filled with unreliable weather.

This morning, on my way to work, people seemed more focused, less jaunty. There is a sense that it is time to be serious now and to shoulder responsibilities more diligently. The time for carefree is over for now. Time to settle back into routine.

I awoke form a dream where I was in Helsinki and had to get to the airport to catch my flight home, but could not find a taxi. I walked unfamiliar streets that looked a bit like Birmingham and a bit like Oslo, and got increasingly agitated at the growing probability of not getting to the airport in time.

Then as dreams are wont to do, I was at home in my bed with no confusion at the sudden discontinuity. But the bin men were coming and there was a panic in my head because the garage is full of cardboard, the black bin is full of general rubbish and I could not remember which day it was to put out which bin. In my dream, I hauled impotently as I struggled to haul a green wheelie bin over huge bags of discarded cardboard packaging to the drive where the truck was already moving past to the next house.

I am not a believer in the symbolism of dreams. That the unconscious should construct elaborate metaphors involving snakes, horses, cardboard or thwarted travel plans seems unlikely. If I was concerned about the direction of my life, surely it would just say so by providing a dream in which I changed my job or moved out to live on my own? It wouldn't couch it in oblique terms of domestic waste and impossibly cluttered garages. Would it?

Perhaps the above is telling me that my life is full of baggage and if I don't sort it out, time will have passed and I will have missed the time for opportunities, whatever my unconscious might deem those to be. Or maybe I am just fed up with the enormous amount of recycling piling up in my house and don't want to be domestically immobilised by another two weeks' worth.

However, the very fact that I find myself dreaming of such mundane scenarios must surely ring alarm bells. Does life become so grindingly quotidian that rather than dreams providing us with unexplained powers of flight, exotic locations, or even nocturnal physical dalliances, it instead fills our sleeping emotional landscape with concerns about refuse collection? I would be perfectly happy to discuss possible meanings by the way. Perhaps I am mistaken and dreams do contain profound truths about our states of minds. It's just, the Freudian approach sound so "made up" and when given to such flights of fancy, anything can mean anything. It becomes subjective and unhelpful opinion. But I am willing to hear anyone's hypotheses on the subject.

However, with the winding down of outdoors life and summer pursuits, it seems the return to routine is having rather too prominent an effect on my unconscious which may be manifesting as dreams about dustbins.

Perhaps I really just need to get out more, despite the season.