There are currently five sites accessible from here:
…so if you are interested in (possibly) one of the smallest theatres in the world, in computer generated voices, in old telephone technology or finding out more about some old guy trying to figure out who he is – then go here https://k6.gravityisahat.com/wp
and forget this site. If you are a member of my family, want to read about them or about yourself, my cancer, my politics or my cats – stick around on this site.
So brace yourselves.
I vow not to:
Maria’s face fell and she started making up the spare bed when I announced it. Yep a new chemotherapy chapter is about to open.
I had got used to the self administered variety but this is a return to the hospital drip feed version. Once a week initially and then once every two weeks. How will I fit it into my hectic schedule full of daytime TV and sleeping? So glad I have retired. This is a treatment regime that hitherto York did not have a license for so I am very fortunate to get it. I am slightly jumping the gun because as yet my new consultant has to have a multidisciplinary team meeting, coo! And a discussion with the National Amyloidosis Centre. Aren’t I important. I have to say I am glad to be led again. My treatment was in danger of drifting a bit while York Hospital struggled to recruit haematology specialists but it seems things are getting sorted which is very reassuring.
Yesterday I knew something was afoot when during my consultation a specialist nurse came to join us. This usually means the session is gonna involve a procedure (painful or embarrassing) or she’s gonna have to dispense tissues and comfort. Neither were necessary, just the usual leaflet describing the abominations your body will produce when subjected to the vellum. Actually touch wood my body has yet to react adversely to any of the chemo recipes so far.
This has been two years in coming and lucky me that there continues to be new treatments available – god know what they cost – I assume it might be on an ascending scale, try the cheap stuff first (Lidl chemo) if that doesn’t work try Tesco chemo then Waitrose chemo and finally Fortnums chemo that comes in a gift basket delivered by private jet.
As ever I continue to be profoundly impressed by the care I get at York yesterday I bought a caffeinated macchiato from Costa by mistake, gave it to the nurses who made me a decaffeinated instant in exchange and brought it to me in the waiting area – I have not had instant for thirty years and I was immediately transported back to working at Bonaparte Records in Bromley drinking gallons of instant coffee so that by the end of the day I would feel so bloated that I needed milking.
Coincidentally my next door neighbour is about to embark on a change of chemo so we were hoping we might get appointments together. The procedure takes a few hours so having a mate alongside might make the time pass more quickly – mind you that is a perfect opportunity for German study to take place on which subject – I had my German lesson online with Sophia yesterday. Yet another disaster. As bad as I have had so far. I panic and get brain freeze. She has to wait while I painfully fail to dredge up any German sentence with a passing resemblance to the one I intend to say. Often falling upon an English one of such inordinate complexity that it sounds like I am trying to fox her translation skills or demonstrate that I can at least speak my mother tongue. Maria has the same problem – Say it as simply as you can – “I went to town” – not “ Yesterday we decided, after much consideration to take a much needed trip to town.” Basically I would get as far as “yesterday” and the rest would be a string of incomprehensible German sounds punctuated by ‘becketian’ pauses and Anglo Saxon curses.
It seems I am drawn to the blog when my health concerns move to the foreground. I know why and I have repeated it many times: It makes me feel better. So no doubt you will hear from me again at least until I get used to the new chemo regime or bored with it.
I suddenly feel the urge to blog. In the past the shorter darker days have sent me into a tailspin of gloom but since retirement I have so much more freedom to avoid gloom, I would feel guilty if I let myself go. What are you all doing about the news from the US? As soon as I realised what was happening, I deleted all my online news feeds and stopped listening to Radio 4 or watching TV news. If it comes on while I am changing channels I sing loudly shout nonsense and frantically find a channel with dull people up-cycling bedside tables. (Much repeated moan – Up cycling in my view should be called ruining – beautiful old telephones turned into horrible lamps …ughhhh) anyway back to the news from America – I just can’t face it anymore. I followed the election build up enthusiastically, hoping (expecting) that ‘Sane’ Kamala would win and ‘Mad’ Donald would lose, then disappear. Now I give up. The American people have made their decision, and I have made mine – to ignore them, him, it, the whole terrible thing the whole terrible lot of them. I am too weak and lazy to do anything positive to improve the world so I have decided to stop looking, listening, reading, to hibernate and just wait until someone tells me it’s worth waking up because all the greedy old men with humongous egos have been eaten up by a monster.
While we wait, we in York and have been ill. Not seriously but persistently and when I say my family I include one cat. Between us we have taken four lots of antibios and a ‘Boots’ load of paracetamol and ibuprofen. Fortunately Maria and I didn’t need clamping by the front paws onto the kitchen table while utilising long leather rose pruning gloves to have our medicine administered but Vince did. Awful, awful, awful – we needed Lisa badly. Poor Vince acquired over a week or so a lion face with a big swollen jaw and a lot of dribble and pus, squeeling with pain at one stage. We took him to the vet three times or was it four, and each time he pooed in his box and was very distressed. The vet said it could be something sinister (a popular euphemism for cancer) but could equally be a vermin bite or an abscess under a tooth. I started preparing his eulogy on the basis that cancer is very much in fashion in our house so I saw no reason why Vince wouldn’t want to be part of the trend. Hopefully he doesn’t as his face is no longer ‘lenny’ like (Tv lion from the 60’s) and his appetite is back and his temperament is jolly as ever. Bobby the only non ill member of the family has a smug look on his face that warrants a punch.
The last five weeks have probably been my least productive period for years. I have done next to nothing except feel poorly and slightly obsessively keep on learning German. My excuse is that we are in Bonn for Arthur’s birthday next year but I think I am competing secretly with Maria and George who are both making excellent progress with their Italian and I just don’t want to be left out. I have a super smart, too smart teacher, Sophia who massively overestimates my intelligence and retention power, bubbles with enthusiasm but cannot refrain from speaking so fast my brain starts to boil trying to keep up. I come away exhausted unable to remember the German for ‘Christopher Newell’ – it is Christopher Newell btw.
I continue to enter various writing competitions never to hear a thing back except variations on a theme of “nah.” Before getting ill I completed a short video made with my next door neighbour Geoff and his grand daughter. I will release it once they have seen it and approved. It hasn’t been possible to show them so far because we have been so infectious they don’t want to come in the house for a screening
On Thursday I will find out what the plan is for my treatment, as the current chemo has stopped working. Worked for three years which is excellent. Hoping it’s nothing too vicious but I will take whatever is thrown at me of course. I am on stronger beta blockers as well for my heart which are making me super lazy but then again I can’t unravel the effect of the cold on my particularly sedentary habits so we will see. I expect to be a lot bouncier soon and I must say I am looking forward to feeling like getting on with things again.
Hey one more thing. Once you chuck away BBC news and the Guardian and TikTok you discover loads of worthy, arty videos on You Tube you have been promising to watch but just accruing in ‘watch later’ at the expense of a quick news fix. Bernstein’s series on music is brilliant. I have never realised before, that the reason I love Berg so much and don’t love Schoenberg at all is the incredibly emotional way he hints but doesn’t indulge in tonality. If you think of his music as tonal layered with atonality then it seems more accessible. Then again you need Bernsteins ear to hear it. Even the more accessible Berg is still quite often a right load of wrong notes for rather a long time but I think I understand it better now.
Here is ‘The Messenger’ (by Arthur Newell) the last piece from the concert in All Saints Church in Appleton Roebuck on Friday. Played by Arthur Newell and Benedict Wood. It was an amazing evening with nearly 100 people attending. Very, very proud!!
Full EP (5 Tracks) available on Spotify – or let me know if you want a CD copy for £10.00 plus postage).
I have been trying to create a video essay that would sum up my work on The Red Telephone Box That Talks a Bit Like Me. For some reason I need to do this. I think it’s about completion/closure/to have some tangible artifact to show off. My original intention was to accompany it with an academic journal article. I have also started that several times but I knew I had lost the plot when my last attempt began with me recalling the death of the family dog and my career in HMV records and how I was inspired by a scratched copy of a Karlheinz Stockhausen disc to embrace serendipity as part of my creative process – dear oh dear… pretentious or what! It’s been a right struggle and on and off has taken a year. I haven’t counted the number of failed attempts I have made but my poor family and friends have had to endure showings of all of them. The last one was 30 minutes long and very dull. This one is 13 minutes long and much better. It is to be my last attempt. It’s finally done (emboldened to remind self). I will do something else for a while and then try to write the article before the anniversary of my retirement from Hull in October. Then I feel it’s time to enjoy my phone box as was originally intended as a tiny private theatre instead of a obsessive, creative and academic mission.
The footage was all shot on an oldish mobile phone which I must say I am rather proud of as I was always trying to persuade my students (unsuccessfully) not bother with the fancy gear they could borrow from the uni which would inevitably go wrong or be so complicated they couldn’t figure it. Let me know what if anything emerges from the video that’s actually clear or better still, interesting. Although I have not the slightest intention of changing a thing even if nobody gets it. More than anything I need to stop trying to make this video now and forever.
Here are the dates for 2024 and 2025
Ignore the LA ones (sadly) they will be Arthurless (their loss)
It’s a really entertaining evening – we went and we are old and uncool and we loved it.
http://www.jazzsabbath.net/live.php
Should anyone be in Appleton on the evening of Friday June 7th it would be lovely to see you.
Follow the link above ^ for tickets.
I made this little trifle according to the ten tenets of ‘Chindogu.’ The Japanese art of the unuseless.
You can find out what I am on about here. – https://chindogu.com/ics/?page_id=336
I suppose it’s a veiled criticism of some of the disappointing apps that I have downloaded over the years. I have been wanting to make it for over ten years since being introduced to the theory at a design conference. I just needed to get it done and tick it off the list on my ‘new whiteboard.’ I have no expectation of interest from anyone except me but should you perchance operate an android phone would you be so kind as to download and test it. It does nothing except display the word TIE but it would be a bugger if it crashed. I don’t use an android phone so I have to rely on those that do. It’s not going on the Mac App store cos (a) it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to do it for Google Play and (b) they charge too much. There are two more in the pipeline so you can look forward.
Here is the link to Google Play where you download the app (Android phones only) –
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.uk.gravityisahat.unuselesstie
if you don’t have an Android phone you can see the YouTube Short here.
Here it is on TikTok https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGe99Qyfd/
You won’t be expecting this.
Please be reminded that this blog is an ego trip. It is about me me me. There was a time when I felt enthused to include news of other loved ones but they didn’t like it much, so I stopped with just the occasional lapse when I couldn’t resist showing off about a book a gig an album or a trip. Trust me when I say there could have been a good many lapses over the years but I have held back – besides which, who in what universe wants to read about other people’s children’s successes.
10 years have passed since I was diagnosed with cancer. For a time I thought my time was up and the idea of ten years hence seemed ambitious, optimistic, unlikely. But here I am, ten years older, STILL ALIVE, a milestone worthy of a blog post at least.
Talking of the blog. I gave it up a while ago. A good move I think. Best not to say things if you have nothing of interest to say. If only I could apply that to life in general. I have never been able to modify my enthusiasm for sharing my thoughts, whatever the quality, and to whomever happens to be in range at the time. How often have I come away from a conversation or a meeting wondering why I felt the need to ‘contribute.’ So much better to have been the mute, thoughtful one and leave my audience guessing what profundity might be silently stirring, but no, off I go with a stream of ill considered deliberately contentious twaddle. Maybe it’s part of my charm or more likely it’s just a childish desire to be the centre of attention. How pathetic! I hate the notion of anything being too late to fix. Sub par physical fitness, excessive greed, old man views on modern matters but in this case my mouthiness is incurable – which brings be back to cancer.
It all began in 2013 with kicking a bonfire, falling flat on my back and triggering a Temple-of-Doom-like runaway rollercoaster of ambulance, pain, chiropractor (useless exploitative crap), physiotherapy (useless but not exploitative) tubes down throat (terrifying), biopsies and finally, sometime in the spring of 2014 the diagnosis that changed everything and realised in vivid Technicolor with full 12.1 Dolby surround sound most people’s worst nightmare. “You have incurable cancer.” The effect of which cannot be captured in words but would not make for a catchy song either, so best left as empty parenthesises ( ) or the words that my late mother-in-law called forth on so many occasions from too much salt in the tomato sauce or a suddenly deceased family member ‘whata canna you dooa?’
Well it turns out you can do a lot but you need
and it seems I have all five, at least for now.
I would like nothing more than to continue to be so blessed. I despise that last word but just at the moment can’t come up with another. The rhythm of the sentence is pleasing so a monosyllabic final beat is required. Any ideas?
Since 2014 there have been some significant personal milestones mostly medical or related to medical – shame that – would have been nice to have milestones met as the result of great personal endeavour.
Yes it’s not the most important but it is the most present, most recent, most tangible change in the last ten years for while surviving is certainly pleasing for me and my loved ones retiring is something less existential and easier to write about.
It means I have more times to do other things that aren’t immediately productive (not that I did that many productive things before but I always felt as though I should be doing them) – I had to do a lot of preparation for lectures and here is a confession dear reader – I knew bugger all about the stuff I lectured on, so the best I could do was hope the students hadn’t read more than me – they hadn’t so I scraped through. There is nothing I know a lot about and this is the essence of being an academic – drill deep – so I could never pass muster -I am a shallow water paddler dabbler consequently it was a slog and I have to say not that rewarding but it did give the impression to others of productivity. PowerPoints and videos got made, work got graded, students got degrees blah blah blah. Anyway, that’s all over and I can’t say I miss much. Had we had a water cooler I might miss standing round it chewing the cud but most of the time we worked quite independently and didn’t see that much of each other. That said I had some really nice colleagues. For the most part we were an uncomplicated bunch in digital media, we didn’t fall-out or row or sulk or really gossip and perhaps I miss slightly the reassuring niceness of a bunch of blokes who like me, admired websites, monitors, computer games, animation, video codecs, youtube, and ip addresses so so so much more than personal relations or the news or world peace or books.
The future beckons and its not so scary as it was, not least because Maria and I have bulldozed aside some of our nervousness about travelling or any changes to routine like parking in a different car park in York. We are far from intrepid compared to just about everybody, but we can get in cars, taxis, on planes and trains and complete the journey without needing sedation and a month to wind down. We have had some nice holidays or as they are described these days ‘we have made memories’ – blaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh – what a horrible Instagram-tainted idea – as if you can make memories by going somewhere. – memories are made whether you like it of not by anything at all, at any time, in any circumstances, they can’t be contrived – a memory is no better if it is framed by the Acropolis than it would be framed by Watford Gap services. Who doesn’t have memories of their crinkle cut fries and urinals.
So what are my plans.
Let’s face I am quite consistent I have been wanting to master walking bass for twenty years now and I still plan to do so. The only thing that prevents me is not practising walking bass on my bass. I frequently imagine addressing this.
I want to make my ring ring cycle yes two rings – get the pun – phone box – trouble is I keep making stuff and not liking it enough to leave it alone. I dismantle it thus destroying what little good stuff may have inadvertently populated the largely empty shell. Anyway I have yet another scheme to nail this one.
I enter poetry and short story competitions from time to time with no success. This is because what I submit is not that good but then what wins is not that good either so I am clearly in with a chance.
Like every retired middle class saddo I am doing duolingo. Italian would be sensible as I have a grounding, but Maria is getting really good and G is off the scale so I am doing German. Nah nah na na.
I did loads of carboot sales selling last year. I had aspirations to do it semi pro but I have completely gone off that. I can’t be arsed with trying to make money I just like sitting around for five hours meeting odd bods. I am prevented from buying anything because we have no room.
I planned to sell semi-pro on eBay. I have completely gone off that. I can’t be bothered to make money it’s time consuming and boring. I like buying but see above.
Thus ends my celebration of ten years of extra existence. I really am lucky.
Love
Chris
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
Samuel Beckett is my hero. This is based on seeing only one play (Godo) and being pretty bored, trying and failing to read some others, getting no further than the first page or so of one of the novels (cant remember which one), listening to, but not ‘getting’ several of the radio plays, and persuading Maria to perform NOT I in Scarborough – so I love what fragments of his work evoke in me but I have no time for the rambley long stuff. The line above is perfected by the unexpected ‘the’ before nothing new.