Zappity-Doo-Dah
These are the voyages …
As of today I have had 6 sessions (‘fractions’) of radiotherapy with 14 more to go. The procedure involves removing my shoes and trousers and lying on the machine that you see in the photograph for a few minutes while it rotates around me. So far so good.
I have not yet experienced any direct side effects but I am aware that, even though it is only a couple of hours a day including commuting to the hospital and back, it nevertheless consumes a lot of my emotional energy and I get quite tired (though not yet the fatigue that the radiotherapy can induce.)
I have a list of things I want to do and get on with but it is hard to sustain my focus on, for example, writing. A lot of the time I don’t have my computer turned on at all. I have been fine with reading for the most part although I am not reading anything intellectually taxing over long stretches. I have been enjoying reading poetry before going to sleep (currently Simon Armitage, Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems.)
I am acutely conscious of things I haven’t done.
My only problem with the radiotherapy is the TV in the waiting room. I don’t mind if it’s tuned to bland radio but more often than not it is showing morning programmes on STV and they are dreadful. I have a book with me usually (I’ve just finished The Man in the High Castle and am moving on to Neuromancer) but it is hard to concentrate and there is no quiet area. According to the radiologist this morning, the TV was introduced because people complained about the atmosphere in the waiting room without it. Bluetooth headphones and ambient electronica tomorrow. I think.
***
Non-identical twins
The one thing I have managed is to make a couple more notebooks. I like both of those photographed even though their cosmetic attractiveness masks ‘beginner’s’ issues in their construction, although they are functional. The one on the right in the photo is the better realised of the two.
There’s a ‘Zen’ quality to the repetitiveness of the steps taken to come up with something tangible and useful – stitching the signatures together and measuring and making the case and gluing it on. It is a very different kind of focus to that needed to come up with a thousand words of fiction. It is also, by definition, an analogue task done with hands without the use of modern technologies.
A bigger project, completed before the radiotherapy began, was to rebind of my teenage copy of The Lord of the Rings. I have the 8th impression of the Unwin paperback which was the first of the impressions published in 1971 and so was probably a birthday present. In the intervening 55 years it was read and reread and was the one I read to my daughters as a bedtime story before the Peter Jackson films. The cover was sellotaped on and the text block was split and also held together with sellotape.
One does not simply let one’s LotR disintegrate
In good condition those editions have some value, largely because most of them are not in good condition and had a name for falling apart. However it does have a lot of sentimental value to me, so I decide to repair it. I carefully removed all the old sellotape, repaired the text block and reinforced the spine, then cased it as a hardback, retaining the covers with the Pauline Baynes illustrations. It should be good now for another 55 years even if I am not.
I note that the Unwin editions were published in a clear font on Indian paper while modern paperbacks bought since the films have cheaper acidic paper that is already browning.
There may be other survivors of childhood worthy of the same treatment, but they can wait until the radiotherapy is over and I’m more inclined to take on projects for myself.
***
Allan Massie, RIP. I enjoyed several of his novels over the years, particularly Augustus.
Recent Comments