Here Is The News

It's all bits of life, isn't it?

Very sad to hear of Lewis Collins death, suffering from some sort of cancer for five years. I think I'll assume it's bowel, a nasty enough disease to fell a Professional hidden behind previously washboard abs. The breathtaking raid at the end of Who Dares Wins left a permanent mark on boys such as I.

But it puts into perspective the papped photographs I saw a couple of years ago, claiming he was dishevelled. Of course he was. Life had taken on a new perspective.

It's annoying when we only hear half the story but the medical detail is important now that the nature of celebrity is seeing our own lives reflected in little fragments.

What else do we have this week? 

"I'm a Celebrity Jungle..." celebrates a man who can't tell the time or do up his own shoelaces, because he doesn't "need to".

TV presenter Melanie Sykes (43) most famous for doing some TV presenting and tweeting pictures of herself in lingerie, has been arrested for assaulting her toyboy roofer (27) and husband of a few months.

Strictly contestant and Countdown mathematician Rachel Riley splits up from her millionaire husband after 16 months of marriage.

They've grown apart, apparently.

So that's the news.

I hope you've learned something.

I haven't!

Hanging by a Thread

Have you ever felt that you are hanging by a thread?

Have you ever felt you are holding onto something by a thread?

Have you ever felt someone is holding on to you by a thread?

You might feel this way through hope or expectation, but the thread isn't an idea. It's real. 

Maybe it's not a thread at all. Maybe it's a rope, maybe it's a steel rope. The sort they suspend bridges with.

If you're holding onto something by a thread, maybe you're responsible for its strength? 

If the thread wasn't there, maybe it would fall.

That's the thing about threads.

They can suspend (actors playing) super heroes. They can make David Copperfield fly. You don't see them. But they're there. Vital. An invisible source of essential support.

Powerful. Flexible. Essential. Beautiful. 

Ask any spider.

If you're holding onto something by a thread, you might be the strength behind the something you're holding on to. 

Not just the thread.

Don't Ask Me For The Moon.

Do you have a song you like?

No, really. Really like? 

At work. At play. At school. Anytime.

No, you're not taking this seriously.

I blame myself. Some would argue that that makes you a lucky half-wit. Not me. It's not a bet. I'm no politician. As I say, I blame myself (and possibly a Merlot of questionable accomplishment). 

Don't think me too aggressive. Maybe I work too hard but I'm not a man with a gun. Let's try again.

Do you have a song you LIKE? I'm only asking. (If you don't ask, you don't get). But by "like" I mean universally,like. In the dark. In broad daylight. When you've prayed for rain. 

Now. 

Soon. 

Forever.

OK, I'll spell it out for you.

I'm talking about a song you "Like" enough to ... oh well, here we go... write out the lyrics. There I've said it. This is not a song you'd draw straws for. 

It's...stopping the tape, pushing the knob to pause play, wrestling with misunderheard words, trying to predict the artistic weather. And carrying on the impure belief that the neologisms "spoke" to you. YOU! 

While burying themselves in the belief that your belated transcriptions were actually accurate. (You're not religious, are you?)

But do you have a song like that?

Do you?

Take all the time you need. 

Because I know you do.

Because.........because..

I have two.

This is one.

And there isn't another person on the planet that is mad enough to guess the second.

(Well not correctly, at least).

Lock & Key

When you have the heart and output of a frustrated poet and life kicks you in the testes, the dispenser should eat a dose of his own medicine.

Cut a fat slice of his own rhetoric.

Eat it - swallow it, try it on for size. Pretend it tastes good.

Use the keys for the internal locks that he knows and try them on the locks he doesn't.

Maybe one lever will give. 

Maybe two. 

Maybe that's enough to force the door.

Or maybe not. 

He could lubricate the mechanism with a healthy dose of self pity.

Or get on with picking the rest with the arsenal of a locksmith.

Whatever it takes to find a way to recover and regrow, to recognise, reorder and repair.

And to see what tumbles.

Call The Doctor

Television history is upon us.

It is 60 minutes and 6 miles away

And I'm going to go to the cinema to watch it, even putting aside my intolerance of 3-D.

I'm actually a little bit nervous. The 50th has been so built up, but one man has always delivered.

One man never lets you down.

If I were in the hands of anybody other than Steven Moffat, I might not be so optimistic.

But bathe his writing in the skills of David Tennant, John Hurt and the fabulous Matt Smith.

This is television - the defining art form of our lifetimes and I know I'm about to witness history with a capital T.

Thin Ice

Would you like to go ice skating?

What a lovely idea! 

Only, don't do it with me.

Because I've started going ice skating.

You need more explanation?

Well, as delighted as I am with my new boots, my phase may not last long, and it's easy to give people the impression that you're doing it for fun. 

I'm not.

I have an exit strategy locked in.

The "sell" point is when I've achieved a level just below average competence.

See! 

I shoot for the moon.

Because ice skating is an intolerable, unnatural, bonkers activity.

Anybody with a normal level of under-competence, such as I, will be counting the minutes until they can get off the ice to click their rediscovered heels in the air (should they still have the capacity after removing the skates).

The trouble is that I have no doubt that it's good for you physically, if not mentally.

And I confess to holding out a hope that a certain level of competence might make it enjoyable, perhaps enough to see myself in scene from a Fred Astaire movie, in which case I could add the 'mentally' onto the list.

But of course, I won't know until I've committed a little.

Fitness wise, it ties in well with balance and core, and those other sort of yoga/Pilates things, that I might have scoffed that a few years ago but seem to make a little more sense to me nowadays as an alternative to pumping iron. 

If iron was meant to be pumped,cornflakes would give you wind.

Learning wise, it's even more appealing, forcing your joint position sensitive to compute a new set of variables, educating yourself nerve ending by nerve ending.

True, your life still seems to rely a little too heavily on the quality of the work of the fellow who sweeps the ice. And I'm pretty sure his minimum wage is not the safety net my ankles require. And if I was any good at it I would probably give up, my mission complete, for those of you with an passing interest in paradox. (How else can a renaissance continue?)

But you have to try to take part. 

Otherwise you just sitting watching. 

You've got to be more Torvill & Dean than Pearl & Dean.

Or at least more Torvill. 

Than Orville.

Quotable Me 11

I'm not into popularity contests. 

I would be, but I'm not popular enough.

Rules of Engagement

Yesterday I was talking to a heroin addict, who had been made into a methadone addict, courtesy of the medical profession. Well done, girls!!
He was not very keen to take more methadone as all his teeth had dropped out, but despite his low dose he topped up with extra purchases to keep his withdrawal symptoms at bay.

But at the time I saw him he was lucid, attentive and articulate. And it's always hard to resist spending a bit of time with people who are keen to listen.
He articulated a point I'd heard several times before by identifying the biggest distributor of drugs in my part of the country.
The name that came up once again was the female consultant for the local drug and alcohol programme, widely considered to be a soft touch for extra drugs, and always looking to increase the doses drug addicts
are prescribed.

This is a popular approach with supposedly therapeutic benefits, but can be articulated easily by people who prescribed before they talk to individuals. It is a level of disengagement dished out by linear thinking clinicians who rarely get to grips with what the patient's needs, wants and strengths are.

It's a failure of one of the first principles medicine. Which is this.
Listen to the patient. He's telling you what's wrong with him.

It's more than that of course he's even telling you what he needs.
Just listen.
Please... for a second put down your pen resting, itching and aching
over your prescription pad, and engage your ears and brain.
Listen.

And then he asked me a question.
He even prefixed it with the phrase. Can I ask you a question? (which is always slightly charming, if a little too deferential).
So I was kind of expecting a tricky one.
But it was the easiest question in the world.

"Do you believe in once a smack addict always a smack addict ?"

Surprisingly simple. Highly articulate. A simple straightforward question.
With that rarity of rarities...a simple straightforward answer.

"No, of course not". The words were out almost as a reflex.

How could anybody in medicine ever continue if they didn't believe in the incredible, (possibly best thought of infinite), potential of the human... well, the human being.

And yet...I can imagine the drugs workers saying or implying this to him.
Who hasn't heard of the same idea of the alcoholic.... once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.
It's not much to look forward to, is it?
It is spectacularly undignified and ignorant clinical approach, an excuse for not engaging with the next set of motivations, (after hopefully controlling the primary problem).

I can imagine the defence of an articulate professor unable to see my view as anything other than that of a clueless dreamer.
But frankly I prefer clueless dreamer (me?) to just clueless (them!).

And I know the patient and I shared a clue. Because I listened and I looked and I saw and I heard it. And I felt it make a difference. And then I checked it had, checked that I wasn't kidding myself.

That he'd engaged with drug services to such a degree and not even have a clear answer in his head (or been given the wrong answer by rote) to that simplest most primal, most important of all questions, is not a sad indictment of him.
It's a sad indictment of the rest of us.

And when I say I us.

I really mean you.

Joining the Dots.

How much effort do you go to to join the dots?

To catch up on lost threads and trains of conversation that occur to
you, parked ideas, forgotten dreams and ambitions, friendships and
relationships that stalled or decayed?

Do you bother to build bridges to the things that the ebb of time and
flow separated?

Maybe not and maybe you shouldn't.

Plenty of people feel as though they move on.

And of course they do in some ways.

And of course they don't in some ways.


I'm not talking about something as crass as closure. I'm not Freud.
And frankly I am not sure I fully believe or have any interest in the
concept.

I suspect many people seek closure on things that are already closed.
That's more like a disease process than what I think I'm talking
about.

I am just talking about linking things up, little fragments of life
scattered through time.

Like a join the dots book.

Like a mind map. God knows it's been a popular enough concept in
recent years, because this is how our brain actually works, ideas
linked in multi-colours from felt tip pens.


We do this all the time. The Internet allows us to track down any song
lyric. It ruins every radio competition for us unless we are listening
in the car. Any little funny fact can be nowadays be drawn, clarified
or refuted by QI or Wikipedia.

Pub quizzes lost their innocence years ago. There's bound to be
somebody clicking away on his mobile phone whether or not he makes the
effort to disguise his action with a visit to the lavatory. Apologies
for the gratuitous use of the word lavatory. But I'm just try to make
a point. (And while I'm at it…..lavatory, lavatory, lavatory. That's
closure for you).


How much should you try to complete your pictures? Well, you can
sometimes tie an invisible loop with a letter to the past, or the
present. There are even modern applications that will send an e-mail
to yourself or somebody else in the future. The alarm clock has
finally woken up. When we finally sleep there will be a digital legacy
that in some way represents us. This will be mine.

But when you sketch your way through life, it is sometimes nice to
take a moment to go back and fill in the colour.

I'm not talking about reminiscence.

Okay well maybe I am. But not in the 'let's all gather round the photo
album' kind of way. I am talking about the version that is a bit more…
a bit more.. a bit more…. well….. me.


How much effort should you go to?

I'll tell you.


Some.

Fall and Rise

It's a beautiful autumn day, you know one of those days.

And a little walk in the local churchyard the leaves falling from the trees, sun peering between the branches. Warm in the face, but appreciating the sweater in the wind.

Rustling leaves, falling sycamores. You know the stuff. The stuff of children's poems from an illustrated book.

But here's the thing.

I didn't know what the leaves were.

I didn't know what the trees were.

I didn't know the name of the plants around the church.

And I didn't know anything to call the fly that landed on me anything other than "fly".

It's not very good is it?

We learn to rub stencils of leaves in our school exercise books.

But somehow, some of us get to the stage or the age where we don't know our oak from our maple.

It's pretty poor.

Psychologists harp on about mindfulness quite a bit nowadays.

Well how about being mindful of an environment?

Once you become a little aware of it, why not then become a little inquisitive and then perhaps a little informed?

Just one interesting fact about the tree you looking at should do it. It's history, journey, geography, biology, anything...

It's like flossing. It's a nuisance but all you have to do is floss one tooth. Floss one, and you're away.

Start.

Improvised theatre speaks a lot to environment.

Once you're aware of it, you can engage with it.

So become aware.

Wonder.

And find a way to engage.

This is your world, just as much as the one you've been living in.

But this isn't a general lesson, this is a lesson for me. I know plenty of people are brilliant at knowing plants, people who know can tell their larch from their ash, their beech from their maple.

It's me that is behind the pace.

So I'm finding ways to pick their brains. In fact I started last night. I happened across a twitterer who identified plants.

I tweeted him a leaf from the churchyard. And he gave me back its name and a bit of history within a few seconds.

Finally...social media is good for something other than selling.