New Year's Eve 2015

Water, the New Year and the similarity of their forms.

I woke up on the 31st December slightly muzzy-headed from a 2:30am finish the night before and used the brightness of the day as a reason to get out for a walk.  I'm not a walker; it is too slow for me and my hands swell up, but my achilles tendon was tender which prevented me from running and I was keen to get outside.

The great hinge of New Year's Eve was approaching, accompanied by predictions of the direction the new year may bring.  Time to look back and look forward.  However, I felt annoyed by any self-imposed pressure to set something up for the new year - it will be what it will be; I didn't want to put anything in place right on the 1st January.

In the last few weeks the rain had veered between deluge and storm; many parts of the country were either under water or washed away, and the climb up the field out of Long Ashton gave some evidence of that, with grass pushing up and away from waterlogged soil.  I slipped and slid to the top, the sun offering a temporary and welcome respite from the rain that was forecast yet again.  I picked my way down to the stream crossing known to me as the gate with the rams, after a summer when two enormous sheep blocked the gate for weeks on end, like a reversed Billy Goats Gruff.  I stopped and watched the stream for a few moments.  It was flowing strongly and the water bounced and curved on and through, disappearing into the trees.  It was like the opposite of white noise - a sort of dark noise; each splash, gurgle and twist was unique, no rhythm, no repetition and no order but instead of irritation the water gave an opening of peace.  This brought on a sort of melancholy; I stared and thought, my heart sagging; pulling backwards.  The old year, the year gone, had brought loss and confusion, and the new year to come also offered no structure, each day unique and formless.  No plans, no resolutions, just a following of gravity; the pull of nature.
 I was stroked by the cool curves of the rivulets as they wove and twisted around each other, the water calming the murmurations of thoughts as they swirled and buzzed inside my head.

I walked on and up to the Jubilee stone; here too the puddles lay wide and obstructive.  Any bare soil was coated with a slick of mud that threatened my stability as I zigzagged toward the road, trying hard not to muddy my boots too much - I inherited them from my dad and they are getting old now and letting in little seeps of moisture.  The wind was stronger up on the hill, and the resulting drop in temperature and appearance of clouds caused me to speed up.  The trees harboured a good number of birds and each branch seemed to hold a worried blackbird or an angrily chirping blue tit.  One field contained a buzzard standing on the ground and looking rather puzzled to my fanciful eyes.  I have seen a lot of buzzards do this - I don't know if they have just caught something or actually land on the ground for a rest.  I often startle them when they are in trees and they take off in their muscular way, crashing through the branches and over to another perch away from this intruder.

My phone rang - my planned evening was cancelled.  New Years Eve was now to be a solo affair - an unexpected change.  How to make this positive?  Why not make a point of being on my own; write all evening, think about the passing year, wonder about the coming year.  Which direction?  I warily walked through a field with a bull in it; luckily he seemed more interested in grass than in me which was good because my pondering slowed me down to the point of catchability.

Another stream, this one a ditch really; it flows through a field and under the main road out of Bristol, through a culvert that also houses the footpath.  Out in the open, I stood and looked at the stream; someone had chopped and cleared all the trees around the water and exposed its course.  Branches lay around in piles, and planks had been wedged just above the surface of the water as if to catch any material kidnapped by the stream.  I wondered if this was a way of managing the speed of drainage; there has been a lot of talk recently of flooding being caused by water being channeled off the land too quickly.

Back home, just in time.  The rain suddenly appeared; lashed sideways and then turned into hail.  The relentless drive of the weather forced people to change what they were doing; cars even stopped briefly until they could see where they were going.  Everything got shaken up in the vortex; plastic bottles flew out of the recycling boxes, people ran into places to shelter.  The sun of just an hour earlier was forgotten about as something that happened in the distant past, barely memorable.

What would I have done on New Years Eve in the past?  Karin and I usually ended up with friends; it seems to be the way many of us acknowledge the changeover of the year.  It usually felt like a normal evening with friends until the very climax of the evening; deep embrace, eyes touching. A connection that said 'look at us being together, look at us, we came from that direction and we are heading in this direction'.  The flow of time which is formless and unstoppable has now left this behind and is instead dragging me along the course on my own - there is no point in looking where I am going because I can't affect the direction and it is obscured by twists and turns, branches, banks.
I decided to stay at home on my own - see what happens.  A way to break out of the rituals that threaten any individual interpretation of the evening.  Out of the groove, and then when out, find what I really need at this time.  After all, when have I ever spent New Year's Eve on my own?  Never.  It is a new experience.  Ride the flow.

At Anne and Gary's house New Year's Eve 2014

Christmas 2015

Christmas Eve; the morning has fallen out of the night with a deluge of rain.  Wind is pushing untethered objects around the garden and the gutters are discharging their contents with noisy splashing;  I suspect this year will be remembered for the flooding and unseasonably warm weather.
Christmas eve - surely a day to be roasting chestnuts on an open fire, not scurrying down to the Coop with a waterproof hood flopping over your head.

So this is Christmas

And what have you done

Another year over

And a new one just begun

Indeed.  A reconfigured Christmas, a variation on the usual confusion about precisely what we expect this festival to offer.  I have the children here - this ticks the 'family' box very confidently - and it is both lovely and exposing to have them here; exposing in the sense that we are thrust into a recognition of Karin's absence.  Emotions, feelings and positions are pushed to the fore.  

I have a sense of rebalance of roles - the bits that Karin contributed to family events are either taken up by someone else or discarded. The day has a different smell about it.  Of course all Christmasses are bound to be different but this one has much more - like looking round a corner.

 It's all very well talking about how things can be different, but there is so much change that there feels like nothing stable to act as an anchor.  It feels more like I am floating around; no expectation, no framework in which to place myself.  It is as if the floods outside have engulfed me so I am supported all the way round by water - but nothing solid to push against.  I must find my rocks, the constants.  My main rock isn't here now, so I need to identify the other ones that provide a stability, enabling me to keep moving forward.  Certain people, running, cycling, the woods on the hill, the house - a man needs a hearth.  And an established time for solitary reflection - a newly recognised comfort for me.  Push against these things to set off into the water.

Kain said last year that she was pretty confident that it would be her last Christmas.  How does anyone process the enormity of that statement?  How on earth did she process each landmark as they approached?  Her fortitude in recognising and accepting her situation became a characteristic of the last two years, and I don't know if I could have achieved the same if I was in her position.  

Nick told a story at the funeral of Karin laying cards out in a line to map out major events in the future and she was clear and accepting of the shortness of the timeline: quite calm.  I wonder what the other people in the group felt about this unequivocal and brutally functional statement.  How honest; and in that honesty, what a gift for the others to be made aware of the fleeting flash of life.

A gift then, a legacy.  The knowing that for each of us the future doesn't stretch forward for ever; it is framed at either end by a birth and a death, and this section of time itself is a tiny, measureable piece.  To me this feels easy to say but difficult to feel or understand;  Karin had the wisdom of knowing, really knowing, and gave us a little of this understanding.  What better time to receive a gift than at Christmas?

So, I start to identify new understandings, new anchors; objects to push against.  A new one is knowing how long I have - like all of us it isn't long and it is finite.  Having established that as a certainty I can see a little more of the picture through the sheeting rain and swirling waters that threaten to destabilise our lives and our thinking.

One more gift, as a post-script.  Laughter.  I am sure there is more to be written on this, but how to find joy in what you have is another lesson freely given to us by Karin.

Womens duathlon 2011

I found this - Karin rode a women's duathlon in 2011, and this was the entry on her Justgiving page - oddly devoid of punctuation but typically entertaining!  I have never seen anyone enjoy running and cycling so much in all my life.

ok, so here's the story:

in an excess of enthusiasm after i got my new bike, i boasted to ally that i was going to enter this duathlon.  then she said i should do it in aid of the harbour (see all about this most excellent charity on the left there).  so i said oh go on then.  then she came over all excitedly unnecessary and said she'd do it too.  then i said well if i'm going to raise money i should really do the longer event.  then izzy said oh well if you can do a duathlon so can i, even if i never run and only cycle 8mins to school a couple of times a week.  and i said go on then clever clogs.  so she did and ally did

and that's how we got ourselves into this blimmin' mess

so i'd be very grateful if you could spare a few of your hard-earned readies for the harbour - THANKS! xx

Merging

At what point do photo albums merge?  When a couple get together they bring their own collection of family events; birthdays, holidays, shaky action shots of the dog or flat landscapes that in no way resemble the steepness that inspired the camera being pulled out of the bag in the first place, and put them on the table like a hand of cards.  I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

When I met Karin I had one full album and another that had just been started; both blue and both made of those strange tacky leaves that you tack the pictures underneath: over the years the transparency becomes as dirtily opaque and obscuring as the fading memories.  In the first there was a picture of Portishead power station chimney falling as they demolished it, another of someone’s boot apparently hovering over Lulworth Cove on some holiday, and an image of us all standing at the foot of Cheddar Gorge the time Uncle David and Auntie Kay brought their children over from Canada. Through the lens of youthful optimism I thought I looked quite muscular without my age twelve shirt, but the picture in its brutal accuracy evidences just a stick-thin childishness.

Album two was later, obviously, because everyone knows photographs need to be in chronological order.  Moving into teenage interests; cycling, a couple of girlfriends (not, I hasten to add, at the same time, my teenage loins would have exploded; one at a time was plenty), a field trip to Sand Bay where the wind howled sand into our eyes all day – a huge price to pay for the lasting knowledge of plant succession. A school trip to Germany captured a good few pages.

 And that was it, very few images for twenty odd years of existence; more a sampler of the many other images sitting in the loops and folds of my brain.  The album is a treasure box but the memories are an archive: you don’t take pictures of mundane day-to-day existence (at least you didn’t then; the ubiquity of cameras on phones now capture every uneventful moment) but memories hold everything, all of it.  All that experience piles up and shapes you into who you are, and here I was, skinny, an anger that contrasted with my angelic complexion, and with enough restless energy to burst through the drifts of photographs to create a new understanding of the world.

Karin’s album seemed to be similar in structure but different in content; still the spiral binding that held those clingy pages together inside a padded cover, but the inside was sparse in landscapes and rich in people.  Parties; a satiny purple top that zinged against her autumnal hair like kinetic art; Yorkshire terriers, so many things that just wouldn’t look right in my album.  Different grandparents, people I didn’t know and some I was destined never to meet because they had died.  All labelled with whimsical comments on thin strips of blue paper. I had the chance to look upstream where she had come from, and she did the same with me, seeing the connections and influences cascading over rocks, until we sat at the confluence together, staring up, then down into the future.

Except of course, there is no future.  The future surely doesn’t exist until you get there, and then it changes its name and function to the present.  The future is a fiction, and I certainly couldn’t see it when I sat there in the watersmeet.  I couldn’t see the children, the houses, the melding of two people into a couple; all the things that were to come.  I can see them now of course – I can cast my eye all the way back from where I am now to where we were then, and see the whole journey laid out in a long and sometimes jumbled set of photographs; sometimes organised into albums, other times still in those card envelopes that came from Boots and more latterly, Bonusprint, still clinging onto the transparencies as if they are the origin of the image itself rather than the experience.

Our blended photographs started with serial rows of my stuff and her stuff, side by side – parallel lives, until bit by bit the odd picture migrated across – I had a picture of Karin in my set, she had one of me, then someone gave us a picture of each other, a mutual friend.  My closest friend Paul came to stay, and then he was our friend and the pictures and experiences united us.  I actually created our first mutual album many years later; the pictures had sat around in loose piles until I couldn’t stand it any longer and bought a whole set of albums with pockets in rather than the clingy static pages that failed to cling a few years later.  Karin couldn’t be bothered with photographs, and she certainly couldn’t be bothered with filing or displaying them.  Everything was about now; the past was gone and dwelling on it was a waste of time. 

The pictures started to increase in number when Elly was born – here was something to capture, something worth locking in.  Karin started to put some pictures on the wall in clip frames; she argued that at least they were used then instead of just sitting in boxes.

And so the records of her life and my life became the record of our life, and in our absence they stand as a publically open record of our experiences.  And in Karin’s absence many of them stand now as the only record.  However, Karin’s challenge to that was, what is the point of preserving a memory that belonged to someone who has gone?  The pictures I have serve as a time, a long time, where Karin and I shared our lives, but from now on photographs will have different content, different people; adding to the long thread of captured moments that stretch back.

Tales from the hospital, part one

I think it is time to break out some of the Facebook tales Karin wrote while in hospital.

We went to Hay on Wye for a four-day break, but had to leave early as she was so weak she couldn't even get to the toilet.  I went out running for an hour and when I got back I found she had fallen on her way to the bathroom.  So I packed our stuff in the car, made our apologies to the very concerned couple who owned the chalet, and headed for the oncology acute ward.

Over the next three weeks, they fiddled with her meds until some stability and strength was restored.  In that time, Karin's ipad got a good amount of use as she sat in bed and watched the world pass by; covertly writing down these little pieces of entertainment.  So here is the first one;

Tetchy Woman in the bed next to mine has adopted me as her pet hospital project.

This is a little strange, considering the day before yesterday I screamed at her for insulting the nurses - calling them slow bitches. "You're in a fucking hospital, not a hotel. Don't you order these poor women around as if they're your slaves. Wind your insult bearing neck in, pal."

I was ready to engage in a fisticuffs contest. Had my fists clenched and Mr Bishop my karate teacher’s instructions ringing in my ears - if it ever comes to the crunch, don't bother with the impressive stuff, just bash 'em right on the nose and skedaddle right out of there - like I was going to skedaddle anywhere...

The nurses formed a phalanx (I think) in front of me, with the tiniest one right out front and centre, giving Tetchy Woman The Look. I took time to admire the mother who had taught her. Perfect technique.

She raised a finger to the nasty woman and said quietly, "I don't appreciate you calling me and my colleagues slow, not to mention the other insult you felt it necessary to employ." she then turned the wagging finger on me. "Whilst we thank you for support in this matter, there is more than one side in this business that should be winding its insult bearing neck in."

Well, bugger me and all I was trying to do was beat up the bully on your behalf.

Anyway, now I am Tetchy Woman's best friend. Every time a nurse comes in, she shouts at them and tells them they should be looking after me because I'm much worse off than her - her, with her Chrons disease, metastatic kidney cancer and pneumonia in both lungs.

Even weirder is that she believes I have no left foot - it comes off and stays in the boot when I take it off, apparently. Also, because of the eye patch she believes I have no left eye. Even though I only wear the patch 70% of the time. She's also decided I clearly want to be a pirate because I wear black.

Ray Davies

Desert Island Discs is a perfect programme to drive to, and knowing that I had two days of driving to and from the university through lanes with poor radio signal, I set up my portable speaker with an SD card containing a number of podcasts of Desert Island Discs.  Unusually, the radio reception was pretty good, so I bowled along listening to radio 4 instead.  To my great surprise the one programme I had time to listen to during my journey was Desert Island Discs, with the psychologist Marjorie Wallace as the castaway.

Rain drifted from the side as I bowled through the countryside - the roads were coated in a soup of water, mud and  crushed leaves that threatened to disturb the stability of the car, but I happily splashed through, quite distracted.
Driving is so much easier when absorbed by an interesting programme, and I travelled unthinkingly while absorbed in someone else's life.  The traffic bissected the countryside and the rolling hills encroached on either side; the brown and gold of the leaves rich enough to be a verb rather than a noun.

However, I was halted in my easy flowing commute, because just as I was just thinking my way into the approach to the campus she introduced 'Days' by Ray Davies.

'Thank you for the days
those endless days you gave me'


The enormity and purity of the words matched the character of my recent journey and interlocked with my own thoughts and memories, creating an honest and clear reality that pulled tears from my eyes.
I sploshed into the nearest layby, wondering how someone could write a message so pure that it can find and draw out the emotion of loss in every person.

'I won't forget a single day, believe me'

Oh, the ache of the past!  That dull pulling, tugging.  Not forgetting means being dragged back and losing that carefree free-flow that characterised our years together. Backwards time standing still, photos next to each other but 10 years apart; like eating food you can't taste; pulling rawness out like a machete that only cuts when it isn't there.

The cars continued to shoot past me; the splashing wheels cutting through the matrix of leaves.  I was sat, still, timeless, static, just taking in the words.  But on the cars went, relentless; progressing despite the knowledge that most of them would repeat the journey tomorrow and the next day and the next.
I couldn't join the flow until I had finished the message, the message that Ray Davies was sharing with me - he was talking to someone else but I was picking up the message as if it was for me.

Drive on, sniff, draw the back of my hand across my eyes - will people see them red?  Spasmodic breathing calms to a gentle depth as I enter the campus - up the tediously long drive where I usually look for people I know but never see anyone, so by the time I am ready to get out of the car the retch of grief had passed.  Deep breath, shake myself out, meet and greet.

Facebook

Karin was the undoubted queen of Facebook (I think George Takei is probably the king) and it would be a terrible waste if some of her more entertaining comments were shared again.  There are quite a lot - when I could see that she was writing some very entertaining pieces I started saving them, but this was really only for a short period of time.  Obviously the time she wrote most on Facebook was when she had left work but was still able to construct sentences artfully.
So, to kick-start things, here are the first two on my list;

Public Advice Notice
I have just been given a Muller thick and creamy 'strawberry' yogurt to eat. 

If you are ever tempted by one of these, beware! They are the most artificial tasting and feeling yogurt I have ever had the misfortune of eating. Colour is an unappetising dirty pink; the texture is horribly reminiscent of Angel Delight (now I love Angel Delight, esp butterscotch flavour, but yogurts should be yogurts, not Angel Delight) 

My advice? Just don't go there.

Ingredients:
Yogurt, Strawberries (8%), Water, Fructose, Modified Maize Starch, Gelatine, Flavourings, Citric Acid, Stabiliser: Pectins; Sweetener: Aspartame; Beetroot Juice Concentrate. 

Mr W is something of a yogurt specialist, having worked in the Yeo Valley yogurt and cream dairy in his youth. His view on the ingredients above and what they mean for the manufacturing process is that basic yogurt is taken and stirred into a virtual liquid, before being 'stabilised' into a creamy mass - unnecessary ingredients for a yogurt include modified maize starch, gelatine, stabiliser and beetroot juice concentrate (which is supposed to make the yogurt look like it's got strawberries in it, which I suppose it has, all 8% of them).

Avoid avoid avoid!

and number two;

Clever clever body!

Had to go back to the Oncology Centre to have more needle sticks - boo hiss - but the lovely Fallon got a vein second try! Man,that was a relief.

Even better, my blood counts were stellar - white cells, Hb, neutrophils, platelets had all improved incredibly over just the past 24 hours. Well done, me. (I believe the secret to improved blood counts is half a perfectly ripe avocado mashed with a big dessertspoonful of mayo and a splash of Thai sweet chilli sauce, eaten for lunch with a teaspoon and with Carrs melts crackers.)

Clutching evidence in hand, off we, my dearest Ingrid (actually my only Ingrid, but she'd be my dearest if I had a football team of Ingrids to choose from) and me, trot to South Bristol Community Hospital for day 1 chemo. Welcome, Carboplatin - duck billed platypus drug - and Gemcitabine - pretty jewel drug.

Again, a suitable vein found on the second try. Nice cup of tea from the little cafe and a really lovely talk with MDI. Two and a half hours later, off we jolly well go; steroids, anti-emetics x2 and poo medicine in hand.

The whole experience about a million times better than I'd expected.

The first one a throwaway reflection, but the second one I think catalogues her clutching at positives in a sea of negatives.  Loving the company of a friend, reflecting on a pleasurable meal, her body's positive response, and one thing only Karin could do - be entertained by the names of her chemo drugs; all of which hurt her.

But also, the dread she felt at having to undergo chemotherapy.  The certainty of knowing that there will be sustained and constant discomfort - how do you deal with that?  How would you deal with it?  I don't know how I would cope, but looking at Karin's strategy of identifying and celebrating the pleasures in her daily life, now that is to be celebrated.

I don't understand - where is she?