Monthly Archives: August 2015

Moan, moan, moan, ow

Leave a reply

I am blogamoaning – big time. Much flatulent communicating cos flat on back or on knees most of time. Hope you are not all fed up with me.

But first a friend passed on a funny thought that has made me laugh greatly. I feel bound to explain it given that some of you are less than sharp on contemporary pop culture and groovy comedic turns and also just a tad prudish. This will kill the joke dead – sorry Barbara – As you know this site is called gravityisahat, after the incident with the ladder in which it may be said, gravity caused me a bit of grievous, she suggested it be renamed gravityisatwat. I just know some of you won’t get this or indeed like it, but I thought it was hilarious. Yes it does mean vagina, a stupid person and a forest clearing. Check out the Wikipedia entry on its misuse by Robert Browning in a poem in which he thought it was part of a nuns vestments. Silly twat.

Last night was not fun. I managed a few seconds of sleep every few minutes while sat on the side of the bed elbows on my knees head in my hands. I would drop off and then lurch forward and wake up, climb into the bed lie down for 30 secs or so, sit up and start the routine again. For the causal observer this would have looked like choreography by Piña Bausch or a film by Zbig whateverrhisname is, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sci9scFN_TU

for me, in my irrational state it was pain management. As the pain was less than previous nights I did this with reasonably good humour only occasionally letting out a sigh of despair at the ridiculousness of my routine. It was pretty awful though. The pain, like a malicious gang of wasps had alighted on various sores all at the same time and set out to niggle me crazy. The gang consisted of – My usual back pain – a bit ow, usually Ok but since the ladder incident greatly reinvigorated – belly pain from the hospital flush out it had received, bit like a toilet bowl must feel after being brushed with bleach, clean but sore – a new belly pain from too many preventative laxatives, 4 in one day is not an overdose but if you are not used to it they have an inflationary effect that’s almost as bad as the constipation – general sickiness from the potency of the Class A’s – scratchy sore skin from excessive lying down on hospital beds. The whole night was hateful and I am fed up, fed up fed up with it. It was not funny or surreal. Tonight better be better or else I shall cry and I mean it.

I was able to look over the phone box again. My, it looks smart in its new red shiny coat. It has an internal light working which creates a fantastic vibe at night. I love it despite its blatant disloyalty to me. It is so frustrating not to be able to finish it. I am probably just a solid day away from the end but the jobs are all fiddly and cannot be delegated as they require a Heath Robinson approach to wiring various bits that range from very high-tech wirelessly networked devices, to tech no higher than a steam engine, and about as heavy. It has some new decorative features to be added at the last stage which I cannot wait to see in situ. Once that is complete then I have the winter season for programming and content development, probably opening the doors in the New Year, but we’ll see. My friend Paul helped make sense of the whole thing in one sentence “ it says what you can’t.” He’s dead right

What I have learnt this week.

Gravity is a twat
Corbyn continues to give focus to my optimism. I will rejoin the party if he wins.
Dawkins is right but I don’t much like his Twitter persona
I must start tweeting again. I cannot bear the thought of having to start again, yet again
I delight in my new found egotism. The phone box is my big mouth and my folly.
I would like to have been one of those marines who bashed up the terrorist in France.
Most people do not understand Kitsch at all. It really frustrates me.
Most people in the world don’t understand art or design either. Luckily I do.
I should have been an engineer as I so enjoy making machines, if only I had been clever enough
All people really are equal it’s not just a slogan
Our pussy cats are worth much more than £30 each
I am a privileged fella born with a silver spoon, I am lucky
I can get on with racist bigots if they are ill.
Especially when I am ill, let’s face it, quite a bit this week, Maria really is ‘the Angel of the North.’

Continue reading →

Out of the ward.

Leave a reply

Oh dear, sorry about the mess that was my last posting.

Well I suppose it had immediacy and liveness but in every other respect was a scraped D+ at GCSE. I am going to leave it there despite the damage it is doing to my literary and academic reputation because I could not give a toss and anyone who could, is a tosseur.

Last night I thought I was a Victorian bed part made of cast iron and thus unable to be bent and fitted in place, and I saw all flat surfaces of a pale colour as furry. Toilets, baths and magnolia walls were particularly hursuit. This was actually occurring while I was writing and continued at home in bed when I had to ask Maria not only where I was but what I was – so it just goes to show that you can still manage certain complex technical tasks such as uploading to a blog on an IPad using an iPhone as a network hotspot, while being completely, and I mean completely out of your head. I was sweating so much that the sweat ran in streams off my ear lobes onto the floor producing splashes that with close attention you could hear, however my temperature was normal. The nurse described me as ‘cold and clammy.’ I asked “why?” she said ‘you must be ill.”Not the most startling intuition given where we were.

Me and my ‘rough’ friends continued to share our gallows humour until 10.30 pm when I was sent home with a secure bag of class A drugs, I could tell one of the gang was envious. My best friend was told he needed a liver biopsy and my extremely rough friend, yes he had been ‘inside’ and whose son had recently beaten to a bloody pulp a bunch of lads who were out to steal pensioners prescriptions as they came out of the surgery – this fearless incident was apparently greeted by applause from the doctors who had been unable to rid the environs of these nerdowells , he produced a gallon of phlegm such that the nurse privately commented she could do all excreta bar phlegm with indifference but phlegm ****– poor lovely thing..

How we laughed at all the bits that had fallen off our bodies not as much as we had laughed at Johns testicles, (hopefully in the singular by now) but a stroke, 3 heart attacks (shared between two friends) an ulcer, a gangrenous leg (now gone as in missing), a lost thumb, lung something or other, heart something or other, my cancer, amyloidosis etc were great material to riff on the meaning of health, death, Jeremy Corbyn, Manchester United (whoever they are), our pets, twoking, expectorants, how all immigrants except the nice polish couple next door should be sent home and bourbons or digestives. We ended up as firm friends and I agree with Arthur I found the whole experience really life enhancing. People have so much more niceness amidst so much stupidity.

I am home now. Still pretty Ill but so much better. I can sit, stand, almost lie, sleep (sadly only within furry walls and in a Victorian furniture factory) piss, pooh, eat and drink. I have my glorious and complete immediate family with me today. I cannot ask for anything more.

Btw. I was so, so so touched by the phone calls, texts, e-mails, blog comments and everything my dear friends do to keep my pecker up. Many made me laugh a lot. Don’t forget presents though. I like them best and don’t feel you have to be modest. I could start a John Lewis ‘Chris’s post constipation list.’ I wonder if you can get Enemas on EBay – save a lot of trouble for next time. Perhaps Maria could pop it in.

In the ward

2 Replies

I have been spending quite a bit of time in hospital. Unplanned mainly and my first time on a ward. Not a glorious experience but really not so bad. The problem has been my wimpish approach to pain. I don’t like it one bit and as a consequence seek out strong chemicals to counteract it. Trouble with these chemicals, morphine and such like is that, for all the good they do, more or less all of them bung your bowels up like an escaping mole entombed up a drainpipe – Maria and can vouch for the immovability of a stuck mole after Paddy our cruelest cat led one to such a fate.. Well anyway along with the back pain a new and stronger pain began to grow along with extreme distension of my stomach. I am talking, a perfectly round, balloontaught, Alien’s womb affair. Anyway I found that, plus a few other ridiculous symptoms like hiccups that reverberate in your back, too much to bare and after two visits to A&E I was finally admitted to ward 14 with non acute something or other.

Ward 14 feels quite doomed. It is a kind of reception area of a run down comp with beds in. In other words everyone is a generalist, no one knows much about anything and the staff here are significantly ‘less’ in every respect than either the staff in A&E or certainly Oncology, including of course numbers. The result was a seven hour wait to see a doctor preceded by a less than encouraging conversation from a nurse, which consisted of “oh no you are in bed 17 I suppose” I was not sure where the disappointment lay, was it me or the dreaded bed 17? – anyway she has continued to this hour to be useless and pretty incompetent. After seven hours of this level of joviality, many accompanied, thank God, by my wonderful wife and son, I saw a doctor who pretty much instantly did the right thing and had me ‘enemaded’ commenting that my constipation was off the scale. I love that brave man! Thus I have been blessedly liberated from that pain but held up in hospital while they do it all again, just to make sure it wasn’t a one off and now at 19:00 we await Dr Bradfords last word and the endless filling in a forms. Could be a long night!! Hopefully though they will kick me out and not find a pretext to keep me here another night

Staying overnight was not as awful as I expected. My friends (I am still here so I can observe them as I type) are heavily tattooed, significantly butcher than me, possess strong Yorkshire accents and are very nice. I feel a bit like Hugh Grant amongst them. I just wish I had some working class credentials to flash about. There is a builder a plumber an ex miner. It is incredibly hot and humid and I stink. One is about to loose a testical and can endure pain like a Buddhist monk. His stoicism and good humour completely puts me to shame. Some people really are amazingly strong- how he has put up with the delays and I do not know. I would be in floods of tears and clawing the walls. Another friend has had troublesome blood results (been there got The T Shirt) he has been sat in the ward, perfectly fit, but exceeding anxious about what might lie ahead. I don’t envy him. The youngest guy in here has some sort of problem emanating from eating too much fatty food. It may be an ulcer or something. The eldest has a version of the miners disease is is currently sat sucking on a five foot gas tank. There is definitely a Yorkshire humour that I cannot quite tune into and equally my Sevenoaks humour seems not to travel. Thus I am condemned to being a tolerated outsider. Not alien enough to get a UKipping although for all I know I could get a scargilling politics stays off the agenda in hospitals which is a shame given the inordinate amount of time one has to contemplate it – yes I am still here 7: 7:15 pm.

Whoops silly me!

3 Replies

We have been communicatively cut off from last week until last night in case you were wondering why so silent. Over enthusiastic hole diggers cleaved through the BT cable and castrated electronic communication for the whole of our street. Unknowingly and ironically I had rewarded said diggers with bacon sandwiches in an effort to bribe them into giving me the porcelain insulators from the old pole. The result of a misdirected spade was no phone, no internet, no mobile signal (we rely on a connection to the internet to get a mobile signal), no blogs, no Apple TV and no eBay for several days. It was horrible. I love my connectivity and get withdrawal symptoms when I am not able to check etsy on a daily basis. Btw. Apologies to some – I have lots of e-mails to catch up with so please bear with me.

Rather unfortunately (as it turns out) given our stranded status I decided to fall off a ladder while applying the finishing touch to my telephone box. And I do mean the finishing touch. The very last bit of scraping off of clumsily applied red paint to one window and the job was to be complete. Having been neurotically cautious regarding my safety up until this last task I rashly attacked it with a Bambi like spring only to come crashing down like a lead hippo onto my back. As you may know my back is where the damage to my bones is at its worst so this was a really dangerous fall. I was very winded and yelled unheroically for Maria. Unfortunately she was in the midst of learning Dildo and Anus and could not hear. So in true dying-of-thirst-desert-oasis fashion I crawled to the door and stuck my head through the cat flap to get her attention. From then on all hell broke out with neighbours, passers by, nonnas, farmers et al, a veritable sunami of the panicked tried to resolve the fact that we needed an ambulance but had no landline or mobile signal to call for one. Eventually this was resolved by a local farmers daughter who managed to get a weak signal and there followed the customary checklist of questions about my age, gender and whether I was dead or not. This had to be delivered as if trying to order a drink at the noisiest bar in the world. I had time to pick up the fact that she guessed my age as fifty which was nice if unlikely given I had turned a Shrek shade of green. To add to the drama I had been using red paint to I looked spectacularly injured and a touch Christmasy.

I was not in much pain and was pretty confident I had not done anything too serious. Maria had thoughtfully sieved the soil I landed on so to a certain extent it had been a soft landing. I should also point out it was only a step ladder and the fall was no more than 4 foot so any normally fit person would easily have brushed such a titchy fall off. Anyway because of my fragile skeleton it was resolved I should be taken to hospital and checked over. All was discovered to be well although they did discover two fractures in my back that belonged to my original injury and had never been identified. So no wonder the chiropractor I stupidly indulged in bloody well hurt. What a load of crap and money that was.

So after a not unpleasant 5 hour sojourn in A&E I was dispatched home none the worst. That said during the night I experienced something like child birth of the spine – strewth ow ow ow! Despite having a selection of class A pain killers I was not a happy bunny at all. Happily now that all the class a’s have kicked in I am contentedly writing this blog, buying fake grass on eBay and coming out with the odd bizarre interjection such as confusing the word ‘toast’ as in “yes I would love some toast” with the word “guinea-pig” – so easily confused when under the influence.

I managed my monthly consultation today. I had to sit two or three times for bit of a rest during the 100 metre trek from the carpark and the consultant looked horrified when I explained what had happened , in fact in his own measured and reassuring way he more of less told me not to be such a silly arse. Anyway my bloods are in good shape so I don’t need to see him for two months. I gather I have been very lucky not to have done some serious damage so no more ladders for me – Doctors orders. I am signed off work for two weeks and have had to cancel our visit to Julia and Richard’s and a short holiday we had planned. I feel desperately sorry for Maria who between me and her mum will be at the hospital four days in a row while having to endure her own slip disk which is giving her a lot of grief. Basically what a bummer all round and all because I was being an over confident nit.

Important poultry breakthough

1 Reply

Big news with the hens, I managed to get one to eat out of my hand! The red ones are definitely pluckier than the grey ones and one red one in particular is the Ellen McArthur of the flock. True I had to put my head through the fence and kneel in order to get down to her level before she would approach, but once prostrate, and after some significant hesitation she snatched a large crumb from my open palm. I was so excited I feel bound to share my expertise. The secret is to be very smooth in your movements the slightest jerk and they all rush off in a frightful tizz assuming one to be a fox in fancy dress, but as I used to say to the chorus of Traviata who were upstaging the lead singers by ‘jerking’ at the back, note this should be said with a particularly camp inflection, “imagine you are swimming through olive oil.” It seems that this style of movement works both for subduing over acting choruses and for luring hens. After this successful incursion the plucky one pecked a competitor about to capitalise on her mine clearance and took several more crumbs until stale-loafless but content I went back indoors to break the news to my readers. Xx

Ps important observation. I had assumed that the reason the cockerel never took any of the crumbs was that he was being magnanimous with his harem today I realised it was actually because being about twice the height of the hens it takes him twice as long to bend down and grab one – he seems to know it’s hopeless so he doesn’t bother. A moral tale perhaps.