Grimm is full of random acts of brutality and bad luck- yep I can identify with that.

Grim describes a place that is dark and forbidding – yep I am in one of those.

Happily before getting into that I had a pleasant lucid hour writing to a neighbours granddaughter about Wittgenstein. She is super smart, only 13 and super interested in literary and philosophical theory and sent me a substantial paper on Wittgensteins theories in relation to a poem she was working on at Tad Grammar. Bizarrely I am in conversation with another bright family member female 19 who is similarly keen on Wittgenstein. Must be getting well taught in schools because it seems to capture the teenage imagination..

I had sent some well deserved praise to Grandma for her gradaughters whole approach which frankly was well above Ug general standard but when she asked for more I gave her some more personalised feedback, which I feel turned out quite well if tough because it made me try to explain my very naïve understanding of Wittgenstein being merely a fan not a reader or expert. To that end I got why it has become so central to my other work namely it reveals the mechanisms of absurdism which is currently my creed.

 I will leave it in italics so you can easily skip it and move onto to the next cancer treatment episode ie my daily frustrated vent.

[15:48, 24/05/2025] Chris Newell: L’s work is remarkable !! There are things in there I need to study – she is truly insightful as well as intuitive – I will read it properly and do my homework but I think she’s covered every point I would have tried to make – what did R make of it?

[19:49, 24/05/2025] +44 7367 061711: This is L. Thank you Chris I’m pleased you liked it. I would like to know if you agree with what I thought about Wittgensteins theory.

[04:12, 25/05/2025] Chris Newell: Ok L.

It 3:00 o’clock in the morning. I don’t have your paper with me in bed to respond to all your points but I will do my best to remember some of them

I agree that in order for our society to function we need common languages. That’s a very practical point and even Wittgenstein would have agreed after all how could he have done his job as a school teacher. Although I think he once refused to agree, there wasn’t a rino in the room (something like that). That would fit in with his Language Game idea.

I don’t agree with the way you draw Wittgensteins ideas into an analysis of the poem. It’s a completely valid point and very eloquently made but I think your point is really a poetic one and aside from Wittgenstein I have very strong ideas about the purpose of poetry so of course I am not going to agree with you.

Let’s suppose that rather than thinking practically he was thinking philosophically ie. not what was useful or sensible or practical, but what was true. Now you can probably already see a problem in my definition of the problem, namely the word “true” may not defineable and therefore cannot be true in any meaningful way –  but let’s leave that for now.  By the way if you want to make grandpa mad, this way of talking is post modernist thought and grandpa does not like it.

A word that can name something by showing it, like a table or a shoe is useful but I think you go on to suggest that the use of words in the poem to make emotions, feelings, memories, connections are as useful or important. At least without your paper in front of me I think you did.

He said: would suggest that Wittgenstein would not accept that and nor would I.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” L. Wittgenstein

Grandma and I often talk about religion and we have very strong opposing views that we enjoy discussing. I would not wish to set out her ideas but I am not a believer in any god or follower of any religion.

I think we both get frustrated when discussing the topic by falling into the language game way of trying to find agreement. We will both present words or phrases to each other in an effort to win the argument. The sort of words that might appear would be  –

God, faith, hope, love, belief but also words like pragmatic, verifiable, mathematical, statistically significant and of course the word true. These sort of words are miles away from words that simply show what something is.

These words are loaded with our own experiences, even the word ‘chain’ as in your poem can mean multiple contradictory things to different people of even the same person in a different situation. You might use the same word to mean completely things in different situations or to make a different point. So if we were to use as an example of a expression from Christian philosophy, say, “god is love” then you can see that expression is meaningless, just as the expression “then you can see that expression is meaningless,” is also meaningless the argument turns upon itself and can reach no conclusion. It’s a word game.

Wittgenstein believed at the end of his life that philophical debate was a word game. He probably believed a lot of other contradictory things as well but I haven’t studied them.

Here are a few popular quotes you can find on wikis – I find them fun and helpful

                  •               “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” 

                  •               “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” 

                  •               “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” 

I will study you paper again to see if I have misunderstood anything – ok?

It’s now 3.57 night night.

So back to my venting literally and metaphorically.

The one thing you don’t expect, is the number of different chemotherapy drugs that can be applied to your condition. I spoke to nurse Ebi last night in the middle of the night when I became a bit desperate with the nausea and she ran through a list of different chemotherapy approaches that I could be undergoing. It seems the systematic chemotherapy I’m going through at the moment has a tendency to make you sick and my body has decided, while not making me very sick to make me continuously nauious. The nausea has a partner in crime namely, diarrhoea which is now  occurring about every 30 minutes. My body is doing its best I believe, to throw out all the nonsense that its keeps having thrown into it. Trouble is it has no discretion as to how to do it or when to do it,  so I’m like a lemon chocolate water fountain constantly on tap. Not the most sociably  desirable asset in the household particularly as I haven’t eaten for about 3 days so I’m very weak and Maria has to deal with me. Somehow I can’t think of any witty things to lighten this  script that doesn’t insult Maria’s incredible   grit.

Instead I will tap into my other obsession with grimm and imagine this benign creature with the sweetist face bearing benign tools that just hint at a grim purpose bearing incomprehensible labels. She is visiting me at night knocking politely on my tree bark door.  She is calling “Nurse” I am looking completely knackered a little scared but grateful.

Daily update

The massiveness today is its Maria’s last day at work – she has retired or is retiring when you read this. I think it best to ask her how she feels about this because I feel it’s probably my fault. I am very happy about it but perhaps I shouldn’t be. Somehow we must party tonight!!!

Thank you all so much for enduring these lurid excerpts from my cancer diaries. According to Sis A the titles could make for a collaborative surrealist poem. I love that idea.  Particularly as someone else does the editing. I sense that some of you are worried that your news of all the exciting things you are doing that I can’t do, might piss me off – they don’t at all – please keep them coming. Your random news headlines are like gifts to me.

Since yesterday my appetite has tailed away to zero despite the regular anti sickness treatment. I really don’t like this as it’s hard to do anything with an imminent puke on the platform waiting to pull away but I am getting used to it and hope it will diminish in time. The last cycle was terrible probably cos of the Covid vac so I am hoping for a more mainstream journey this time.

Maria is at work today but the lovely J next door (now on this mailing list) keeps checking on me via what’s app so I feel very comfy.

Maria went through hell trying to juggle her responsibilities on the last day playing for exams etc and being here for me. I was absolutely insistent she went. I relish the care she gives me but I do take advantage – I can get my own water refreshed – I can open the door for the cat I am just idle and needy. I am really happy she’s there to close the circle properly they have speeches prepared and whatnot. She can’t miss that although she would like too.

The district nurse Julie just dropped by to adjust my catheter. It had dropped off last night and was tied on by a brilliant silk tie from 1980 I had attached this morning. It’s loads more comfortable. No more rasping and tugging no more pink wee, Happiness!!!

I have been buying opera DVDs from Ebay – so cheap – I would describe them as the sort of German challenging classics I have always vowed I enjoyed but really I endured. Berg – lulu and Wagner – the ring complete. I have an ancient Mac laptop that has a DVD drive so I can watch them in my bed conveniently placed to capture me as I pass out after 15 minutes.

Sometime ago I bought Samual Becketts film collection -blooming not cheap – same category of pleasure anticipated. They are quite short of course, great cultural capital.

Sickness is waning so time to top it up with a blockbuster chemo tab – dreading it.

Seriously, don’t read this. This is not a marketing trick.

Yes the bed was the recipient of a pint of old man pink urine.

Poor poor Maria.!!!!!

Anyway we had enough protectors to not get to the mattress itself but it’s 30 years old so it’s going anyway. And it missed the duvet miraculously.

G,A,L,A this all relates to our bed not either of yours.

The levels of indignities really stack up with this kind of illness and subject to the durability of your loving carers the only thing to do in my view is not to despair and if you can, laugh. In this case it’s just not funny. Flashing your bits to your daughter-in-law (L was the recipient of that last visit) is just about funny. Or I hope it is?

Maria’s morning of tomato plant transfers evaporated in laundry liquid and bleach. I watched Bourne 3. We had a routine treatment appointment at 1:00 which progressed quite well. I am no longer allowed to self administer because they want to close monitor me after my platelets plummeted. So we have to go in twice a week, bloody awful for Maria, I don’t mind at all and she says being the saint she is that she doesn’t mind either. She does get her Italian homework done to a level her teacher must be super impressed, if somewhat overwhelmed, by, given the amount of marking required by her most diligent student. (Sorry G)

Anyway the only surprise at the hospital was the wonderful dr alia had managed to pursuade nurse happy (that’s her name) to fit me in for a last minute (un heard of at York MRI. They need to know what’s going on in my bladder so I am very grateful she has pushed it forward – she spent literally the whole of yesterday afternoon on the phone. I love her.

I admit my weaker self emerges nearly tearful, and scared with MRI – not the results, they will be what they will be, the actual procedure. And the degree of ‘I want my mummy, can I go home’ is inflected by the amount of time I have to stay totally still with bad back ache which in this case was to be 90 minutes. I have never had one this long. I don’t think it’s unusual, but for me it was unpresidented and I was momentarily ready to do a Bourne, knock the staff unconscious with my ju-jitsu and escape to Tangier.

Then miraculously I was delivered a restorative gift in two forms. I had a big bottle of opiate liquid with me and some paracetamols. Slugged em down like a heroine addict in the changing room.    2nd. I had forgotten the liberating effect of the catheter together with its accompanying nappy to catch the pink leaks. I was free to piss, leak and even poo anytime. It took them 20 minutes to find Radio 4 but by them it was chilling to the accompaniment of “reversing lorry in my bedroom” and “council workers like to drill.” The standard MRI hits.

Back to haematology to get my next dose in the belly and collect my quota of drugs. All good, got a cup of tea shortbread biscuits and some crisps.

Back home to Bourne. “She’s standing right next to you.”

discovered that it was my nappy that was causing the catheter chaffing rasping. Did some reconfiguation much better.

Ate some sea trout.

12 hrs later woke up – bed and self completely soaked in sweat. Vinnie not happy so he has decided to sleep more or less on my head. Like he is on desert island, you know the one with the single palm tree.

vinnie left early slightly damp.

18 hrs later – sickness kicking in – no prob I am ready this time.

Don’t read this if you are sensitive to the language of toiletting or squeamish about medical procedures.

I thought it might be fun to relay the progress of this cycle of chemotherapy in a certain amount of detail because according to the nurses it has been quite unusually full of incident. Oh how we laugh!

It all starts way back just after Christmas with an MRI in Tescos car park. The assumption was that something was growing that was causing me back pain. That was followed by one dose of radiotherapy which as far as I am concerned didn’t really do much but of course I may be wrong. As part of that process I was prescribed stronger and stronger painkillers till I ended up with quite a pharmacy full of different varieties and a brain full of mush. They were worried about addiction I was worried about constipation and then sickness and just a tadet about Alzheimer’s as Maria witnessed me incapable of remembering anything of consequence but bizzarely able with the German conditional tense…mmm.    all in all someone was worried about something. Since then I have been able to reduce the dose and I am now on just one remedy at a low dose.

In the gaps between hospital visits have been getting stuck into Wittgenstein. Should you be wondering if you have Alzheimer’s or are just a drug addict this is not to be advised.

Just had a very satisfying poo which is one of the great rewards of my current life. Particularly given that the catheter feels like it could interfere with that process, happily it seems it doesn’t!!

 As the opioids can make you sick, reducing the dose is a good thing because as the first proper cycle got established nausea became quite a big issue and I started to assemble a good number of anti sickness remedies to counter the fact that I stopped eating pretty much completely. This escalated toward constipation which I countered with mega laxative doses. The most  effective was 6 sachets in a litre of water over 90 minutes however that was dependent on me not being sick. Quite a predicament.

 You can see where I am going with this. It became an act of juggling variables, a bit more of this a bit less of that. Maria did a lot of the decision making, as I struggled to keep up with it. During this time I resorted to a wheelchair mainly because with no food at all I felt like I might feint.

There was a strange pause that occurred when A&L came up and for 3 days my apetite began to return only to stop again once they left. Eventually it has returned to 50% but more permanently which is fine and normal with this chemo.

Alas the next strike was not peeing and this was the worst. 4 nights ago, it stopped. We went to A&E and almost as soon as we went through the hospital doors it started again and I was allowed to go home. Next night it stopped again and this time it really hurt. Went to A&E again and they measured nearly a litre being retained. Apparently that’s a lot and I was relieved that I was actually ill not anxious although I am always both. They were amazing and within 30 minutes I had a catheter fitted. The relief was unbelievably intense. The experience of such incredible intimacy administered by the nurse should have been weird but to be honest it wasn’t really. I know I shouldn’t mention this but the nurses were young and female. Had I viewed this from a theoretical perspective before it occurred then I think I might have preferred a male, but as it happened I did not care a jot.  It was very professional but yow it hurt. It bled a bit so I had Barbie pink wee for a day. It’s all strapped to my leg like I am the terminator with cables and tubes powering me. It has a tap to empty it down the toilet and although I can’t recommend it for comfort and style it is very practical and has meant I have had two nights of more of less uninterrupted sleep which both vinnie and I appreciate enormously. You can bathe with it on and obviously hygiene is a high priority.

Anyway this development triggered a bit of an alarm with the haematology team who of course want to know what the hells going on and why. I am just content to have a solution to the pain but the result was that yesterday, the third consecutive day we spent at the hospital .

Oh no. I am in bed. The valve has got knocked open. FLOOD.!,!

DISASTER.

So sorry Maria.

Yes,  not the best design, somehow it’s emptied into the bed.

Fuck.

Will update after the 4th day at the hospital and day 1 of treatment cycle 2 – 16 more cycles to go.

Chris

I am experimenting with writing as if i were Mahler writing the 10th symphony while suffering from throat cancer or Mozart dictating the Requiem to Salieri on his death bed and discovering i am not up to it. Not a hero just a big baby. So here goes with a blubbly moan

I was fine yesterday first thing. We had agreed with the cancer team that I would have a Covid jab in the morning as they have never troubled me greatly. This was followed by an afternoon with the obsessively punctilious Rob showing me how to inject myself in the belly for the second time with a (new to me) chemo treatment. I have one more exam before hopefully being able to do it myself avoiding two extra trips to the hospital per week. Things have tightened up loads since I first did the injecting 10 years ago, it was all much more slapdash. I remember feeling very unprepared, this time i am too prepared and it makes me nervous and less efficient. Eg. Now if I spill any of the drug I have to put on full protective gear and a mask and use a special kit to clean it up. Its like a nuclear incident. I had never really taken on board that all the drugs can induce cancer as well as cure or in my case slow it down. Anyway Rob went through it, I did all right according to Rob, probably about a B- and I was sent home feeling fine. By the evening one or other of the drugs started to get grumpy and I started to get proper poorly. Sweating like I have never ever sweated or not since hooping cough in 1960, hot and cold, shakes, diarreoa, zero apetite, muscle ache (all pretty standard stuff for the covid Jab) but with the other stuff it’s been like a bulldozer bucket load of symptoms all vying for presidence. I also managed to forget my opiate which started to give me withdrawal (probably imagined) and I wanted my mummy and felt teary. St Maria is an absolute absolute complete total Saint and my gentle but unstoppable collapse over the  12 hours was scrupiolulsly monitored by her until about 10 minutes ago when I started this and I think I am getting better. So lets do a fact check – actually it hasn’t been as bad as many people experience even with just the covid jab – I am not in screaming in pain at all – I just feel ill – like pretty bad flu. I have medication to do everything but while they don’t actually conflict to take an anti diarreoa with anti constipation cant be easy for your system to deal with. So I think it throws up its hands from time to time and just panics and so do i. I feel like my body is running like an overwound clock and any minute a load of parts will go flying round the room embedding themselves in all the soft surfaces.

Its getting more and more likely that I will cancel the NAC trip. It would be absolute torture in this state and of little value but I won’t decide till Monday.

Last week I did nothing much creative (no 10th symphony for me)  just keeping up my German practice in tiny doses. I bought a beautiful second hand scholarly edition of Grimm fully annotated but I still think G’s distillation of Grimm is perfect. Better than the Harvard professor that wrote the book and a load better than ASByatt who provided a much too clever dick forward.  G is referring to ‘Hans my Hedgehog’ one of the wierder ones.

‘I really like the specificity of the unlikely details and the matter-of-factness with which they are presented. The morality of the story seems to me secondary to the more fundamental Grimm worldview, which is that people are arbitrary in their wants and actions, that injustice and danger are waiting everywhere to punish you for daring to be alive, and that to succeed or even survive you need to be both pretty wily and, even better, lucky.’

 Coincidentally H has been corresponding with me about my current state, always a delight and always helpful and I was looking for a response to her complaint about injustice – ‘its not fair’ which she freely admitted was unhelpful. Setting aside helpful or not it caused me to think about fairness and I realised that admidst so many other complaints about my circumstances this is one I don’t have in my grump arsenal. Unfairness can only occur against a moral backdrop that is shared by a community. My community, ie the one I subscribe to in my head has no moral backdrop and is pretty much perfectly summed up by Grimm according to Georges analysis. So no wonder I am so attrated to those stories not just stylistically but also philosophically. Mind you big bad mark for some gross antisemitism and christian cobblers in some of the stories. Oh btw – I have abandoned reading them in German and gone back to ‘crimis’ – it was too exhausting figuring a translation for hedgehog dung.

So i sent down an order for boiled egg and soldiers via alexa so things are definitely on the up. Unfortunately I have still to take a bunch of nasty stuff now to accompany my boiled egg so I am not looking forward to the outcome. Nourishment I am told is important along with hydration. The advice is to drink loads and eat whatever you fancy whenever you fancy.

I must admit this seems to have been a very worthwhile experiment. I feel physically and mentally a lot better. No requiem dictating yet and roll on another 11 years if I can just learn to endure feeling a bit ill most of the time.

Thanks for reading xx

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