Thursday and both my partner and I are awake early as she has a date with an endoscope at 9:45 at our local general hospital. I eat eat breakfast and drink coffee out of sight as my partner cannot have anything before the procedure. We both prepare our “waiting at hospital” bags and I then drive us to the hospital. Surprisingly there are plentiful parking spaces and being practiced at this we have pockets full of coins to pay for our pay and display. No fancy card stuff at this hospital. Parking payment here is still in the leech ages. We find the Vanguard unit, a pristine portacabin like structure growing mushroom like on the outside of the hospital and enter. My partner is whisked away and I settle down and read my latest book, Birdy by William Wharton. So time passes. Relatively quickly my partner reappears and is looking for me. She is still mildly woozy from the atheistic, so I guide her back to the car as I would a tipsy chum. On the way we meet a bloke who asks if the pay and display is coin only, he has the desperate look of a novice who is all at sea without plastic. We take pity on him and take him to our car where I hand him our ticket that has hours to run on it. He is much relieved and goes back to car to extract what I take to be his aged mother from his car.
Rather than going home I drive us to a garden centre where my partner can at last get a drink and nibble a scone to break her pre op fast. We sit and chat while she recovers fully. We do not linger too long before getting home and settle down to resting. I have poems 361 and 362 to type up and file away. I have to make a decision about whether I am going to take a poem to this Saturdays face to face poetry stanza meeting. I’ve already shared my inoffensive ditty about my waist size here a couple of days ago this is the darker one I said I would share later.
Forged in Worker Association concerts, random tickets for loggia, box or stall, or museum trips, I learnt culture. Aspiring working class exposing children to better things. There were rules; No debt, work hard, achieve at education, be socialist, liberal and tolerant. Go on marches, ban the bomb, and avoid South African goods. Segregation is bad, fairness and equality are the way. Be a good co-op member, look after family and neighbours, we are in this shit together. My mother a life- long Labour member died a racist, swamped by all the fruits of her efforts. A community she no longer recognised, surrounded by tongues she did not speak, beholden to people she had fought for. She did not understand how being white put her out of being right. Told to feel the guilt of privilege, told her life of struggle or family and friends was all wrong. Of how she was ignorant, uninformed and disposable. Even before we got woke she craved release, it had all become too much, her world had turned. Now dying her son feels the underachieving white teenager rage again. The drudgery today boys and the still told, “your not good enough” youth. Everything here is not for you, Ignorance is yours, Fault is yours, and the community wonders why there is resentment when the message is, The future is not for you, There’s no place for you. So suck it up worker boy We don’t give a fuck That’s the way it is Init. So it circles Generation on generation Without concerts or conscience, Art or consideration. There will be a backlash, blacklash and barbarity and a new era darker than before. This sceptred isle, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, This England Hath made a shameful Conquest of itself. Fucked init.
As I said a darker poem, which is really about the loss of kindness, something my friends and I had talked about at a recent lunch together. I am not sure if kindness has declined or if it is the effect of age and changing social structure. It does feel as if the the working class boy I was, and perhaps still am, is still out there in the youth of today, just a bit more obviously black and white. Having typed this up I know its not anywhere near my favourite Shakespeare Sonnet, 116 but it at least I’m having a go at trying to make sense of my universe. I slip into a nap and when I rouse myself I find that my partner has also napped. Now recovered from the hospital trip neither of us fancy food so we snack. Our garden guy turns up and is chipper having moved on from his girlfriend and tells us about the holiday he has booked for next summer in the sun. He sets about cutting the grass while we slide into an evening of Outer Range, a sort of Stranger Things meets Wyoming cowboys. Its an early night for me I am suddenly crashed and spoonless, I think this is the result of my chemo drugs. Something is going on, I will just have to wait it out.
Friday, well this is finding out in style as I wake up at almost half past ten. Clearly my chemo drugs are having an effect in terms of sleep. I remember they did this before, I also think it is more marked as I come closer to my 28 injection, which is due this coming Monday. It feels as if there is an interaction going on but probably not something I could conclusively demonstrate. So I get up and mechanically make the bed, head down stairs and make myself a late breakfast. I’m in a strange mood, vaguely irritated and dark, a good indicator that I need to train today or otherwise I will not be good company this evening when my partner and I meet friends for dinner. I draft the blog to keep me busy and grounded. My morning meds taken I move on.
What I move onto is reading. My partner makes me a bacon sandwich after which my plan was to read briefly and then train. The reality was that I read solidly all afternoon until I finished Birdy. I got to a point where I simply could could not put the book down and had to know what the outcome for the to main characters was to be. It was a rollercoaster between philosophy of reality and the reality and brutality of war.
I am long past when it is practical to train before dining with friends but I am stimulated and will have stuff to talk about. So I slide into the evening with a shower, food with friends and then hopefully a night of sleep in what ever form my medication dictates. Poetry stanza preparation must wait. Tomorrow will bring gardening, football and poetry face to face.
