Over breakfast, I listened to an interview on Radio 5 with Professor Hugh Montgomery, Prof of Intensive Care Medicine, UCL, telling it like it is. You can listen to the whole interview here, though be warned that he doesn’t hold back and it absolutely is not easy listening:
Shortly after listening to that I phoned the local pharmacy about missing items on my regular prescription, to be told that none of their suppliers have it in stock and don’t know when they will again. There may be a workround.
***
The years are passing too quickly! 2018 has come and gone in a flash. What is there to say? I enjoyed great holidays in the USA and Portugal and wrote a novel that I still need to revise. I listened to a lot of music, read some books, but watched little TV or cinema. I deleted my old Facebook account and haven’t missed it. I stick with Twitter but sometimes wonder why.
Going into 2019 I plan to
- lose some weight
- write more
- be kind
There’s nothing more to say really.
Two years on, I’ve lost a little weight and would like to lose more, I certainly wrote more, and I’d like to think I’ve been kind, but that isn’t really for me to say. I could make exactly the same resolutions for 2021, and do, but I have one more which may well be aspirational given that it is entirely unclear how 2021 is going to unfold in terms of Covid.
Tai Chi in Sha Tin
Some years ago, while I was still at Scottish Government, we had a team away day that included an introductory session to Tai Chi. I was struck also by its ubiquity in China, with lots of fit pensioners practicing in groups in the park in the morning.
Ever since that away day I’ve been thinking that I ought to revisit a class and take it seriously, as I rather liked the idea of controlled slow movement and meditative relaxation. Controlled slow movement is an issue for me because I’m overweight and my ankles and knees still protest at my having run on them for a time, which seems to me to be all the more reason to give it a try.
So, once things open up again, I plan to sign up for a beginner’s Tai Chi class.
***
West Lake, Hangzhou, 2013
Writing the first part of this in the morning, I looked out of the window, through the snow, to see a redwing pausing briefly on the top of the old apple tree, the first I’ve seen this year. Brushing snow off the front driveway, the cold damp air and light snow felt very much like Hangzhou in winter when we were there in 2013, and I went looking for the hard drive with my photos on.
The photos evoked all sorts of memories and feelings (and my diary of the visit is here). It’s a cliché to say that a trip to the east prompts thoughts of the spiritual and, in a strict sense, I wouldn’t say that it did for me. I did think a lot then and since about different cultural expressions and understandings of ‘the spiritual’ distinct from those we have become familiar with in the west, and aspects of that come out in my writing. My characters are not autobiographical, but inevitably aspects of me pervade the stories: my voice if you want to be pretentious about it. If you write first person, as I often do, then you need to find some inner voice or truth about the character to give them life.
One of the outcomes of writing (including this blog every day since March) and of this past ten months has been an increasing focus on the inner me, and I think that’s where 2021 may take me. I don’t mean in any religious or quasi-religious sense; I’m thinking more of ways of finding my voice, which should lead to better writing including, who knows, better blog posts.
This isn’t a new thing for me. In 2015 I sat in the shade of a banyan tree in Sha Tin Park in Hong Kong, not far from the Shing Mun river where White Egrets and Black Kites fished and hunted and a landscaped stream burbled away. A story called Soft Sings The River came out of that. This is the beginning of the story:
It happened like this.
Ba Ren sat down to rest in the shade of a banyan tree. He was tired and overheated. His coarse robes chafed his dry skin and made weeping lesions that stung his dusty flesh. He wondered if the hallucinations would soon come back.
He untied his shabby pack and examined the contents again. However often he looked, it did not get any better; his spare robes were as filthy and infested as those he wore. He fingered the rough-sewn seams and hems, checking the weave, sweeping away the lice and their eggs he found there.
There was movement to his left—a lizard, about a foot and a half long, dusty of skin and black of eyes. The beast stood still, aware of him. It was the first living creature, apart from birds, Ba Ren had seen for days.
‘So, Mr. Lizard, I am in a quandary. What do you think I should do: stay here and die of thirst, or walk to yonder mountains and hope to find water on the way?’
‘Mountains, Mr. Monk? My eyes are too small and close to the ground to see that far.’
Ba Ren looked at the creature.
‘My fever is returning as I thought; I could have sworn you spoke.’
‘Of course I spoke! You asked, I replied. What should I have done?’
‘You might have ignored me. Forgive me, I’ve never heard of a talking lizard before.’
‘Well that’s hardly my fault. And anyway, who would tell their friends they’d met a talking lizard? No one would believe them.’
I’m hoping to self-publish the rest of that later in 2021
***
Music: Alan Stivell released Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique in France in 1971 (Renaissance of the Celtic Harp in the UK). The music draws on his Breton heritage but also music from elsewhere in the P- or Q- Gaelic world. I first heard it some time in the early 70s and have never been without a copy in some form since (I currently own it on cassette, LP, and CD and there’s an MP3 burn somewhere too.)
This is the opening track, Ys, variations on traditional themes inspired by the Breton legend of the city of the same name, lost to flood waters.
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