mature

From a very young age, I was strangely mature. I don’t mean physically, although I had a growth spurt at the age of twelve that saw me move quickly from distinctly average to unusually tall within the space of a few months. 

At the age of eight, I jumped a year into the school’s scholarship stream. Not surprisingly, given that I was now surrounded by kids at least a year older than me, my lack of physical and emotional maturity was probably painfully apparent to everyone. As a result, I think I kept myself to myself and tried not to stand out too much. 

This jump in academic year meant that I was going to spend two years in the sixth form, as my former peers caught up with me. I was being prepared for a scholarship exam that I sat when I was just turned thirteen. By now, I was Head of School. Until now, I haven’t really given this much thought; this was just a sequence of events that happened to me, and I dealt with them as they came along, not giving them much thought. Looking back though, I was by now noticeably more emotionally mature (in some respects) than my contemporaries. Maybe this was because I’d been forced to grow up faster when I jumped a year, although I don’t think this explains my over-developed sense of responsibility. I was the very model of an upstanding schoolboy, and I did everything by the book. I imagine I must have been insufferable, but my teachers recognised strong sense of duty in me and were happy to put me in a position where I was their representative amongst the pupils. Head of School. I had a little yellow badge announcing my status, and I wore it proudly. I used to get invited to spend my breaks in the staff room, having tea and biscuits with my teachers. Jesus, can you imagine? 

 I’m not sure what happened to that kid, to be honest. I think that was my absolute peak of maturity and responsibility and it’s largely been all downhill since then. Imagine realising that you peaked when you were thirteen years old. 

Of course, at thirteen, I wasn’t really mature at all. Apart from anything else, it’s hard to think of a more unnatural environment for a child than to strip them away from their parents and to throw them into a largely single sex environment at a boarding school. It’s a wonder that anyone who experienced this sort of culture grew up to be even remotely well-adjusted. Assuming that anyone did, of course. 

I changed schools, and by the time I was eighteen, I was a very different kind of a person. I was angry at the world – I suppose a lot of teenagers are – but I was becoming aware of the shortcomings of my environment. I’d grown up in a mostly single-sex environment, but I was now interested in girls but with absolutely no idea of how to go about talking to one, never mind anything else. I was angry and frustrated about that but also began to kick out against authority figures. Unlike most of my contemporaries, I was also smart enough not to show this rebellion obviously. I never got caught drinking or smoking or anything like that, and I never got summoned to the headmaster’s office. No, but I did spend my time challenging what I saw as stupid and arbitrary rules and enjoyed asking difficult and awkward questions at every opportunity. I used to edit a weekly school newsletter that was pinned up in every common room across the school. The teacher who supervised us as we pulled this together every Thursday afternoon used to tell me that there was always a queue of other teachers wanting to talk to him about the latest edition every Friday breaktime in the staff room. To his eternal credit, he never once tried to stop me publishing what I fancied. Perhaps I had a well-developed understanding of where the line was and never quite stepped over it. I used to write editorials satirising the sermons we had in chapel, for goodness’ sake. Jesus, what a precocious little shit I was. 

And yet..and yet… That sense of responsibility and that firm grip on right and wrong never disappeared. I used to find it fascinating and frustrating that my school seemed to think that authority was derived from success in sport, particularly in rugby. Almost without exception, the prefects were picked from amongst the first XV. To my mind, although I quite liked a lot of these guys, I was often acutely aware of how nonsensical it was to pick your leaders from people who happened to be good at sport. Frankly, a lot of them weren’t really very bright. There was a part of me that still thought that I was going to be picked by my housemaster to be head of house. Although I was never really actively in trouble, I did spend quite a lot of my time being an awkward, contrary little shit. Not surprisingly, when the time came, my housemaster picked someone else. I was annoyed, and also stupid enough to be quite vocal about what I thought about his choice. He picked someone who cut quite an intimidating figure and was likely to be able to scare people into behaving themselves. That was never going to be me, but I spent a couple of days moping about, carping about the decision and quoting Martin Luther to anyone who would listen: 

Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise 

What eighteen-year-old walks around quoting Martin Luther? Apparently, me. 

Looking back now, I can still see that thirteen-year-old with an over-developed sense of responsibility. I do a lot of volunteering: I coach athletics; I guide blind runners and have worked with Guide Dogs for the Blind as a sighted volunteer; I’m a trustee, director and company secretary of a domestic violence charity; I’m on a parkrun core team; I am always amongst the first to volunteer at my rowing club and spent my whole weekend last week on a BBQ to help raise money for the club. That kid is still in there somewhere. So, it must be said, is the angry, Martin Luther quoting eighteen-year-old. The little company where I work has just been taken over by an international corporation. We had an away day with them all last week in the Cotswolds. The dress code for dinner was “dress to impress”. Ugh. I wore a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. 

Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.

Ian.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ian, these last few weeks. It’s been more than 30 years since I last saw him, and we weren’t really friends, but he still keeps popping unbidden into my thoughts. 

I studied history for my undergraduate degree. Warwick University has quite a reputation in the subject, so it was (and I assume still is) a popular course with maybe a hundred students in total. My own particular specialism in Modern European and Renaissance History was a little more niche than the main course, but we all came together for lectures in the core subjects, and it was here that I met Ian. 

Ian was studying Modern History, I think, but he cut such a distinctive figure that he was hard to miss: he was tall and ungainly, wore aviator style glasses (before they came back into fashion) and a railwayman style cap. He wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, cool and would stride about the campus purposefully in practical looking shoes and an anorak. He also had funny little bald patches in his hair. At the time, it just helped underline how weird a kid he was, but thinking of it now, it looks like the kind of baldness you get when you constantly pull at your own hair until you start to pull it out. But yeah, he was the weird kid. 

At the age of eighteen, I was painfully aware of my own awkwardness, but you know what people are like, I found my own gang and Ian was firmly outside the boundaries of that gang and so we never really paid him any mind and certainly didn’t spend more time than absolutely necessary making small talk with him. In fact, now I think of it, he didn’t seem to have many friends on the course at all. This isolation was probably compounded by the fact that his hall of residence was International House, where all the students from overseas were housed. I have no idea how Ian ended up there, but compared to some of the other, big undergraduate Halls of Residence, he might as well have been on the moon. If there was a bright centre to the undergraduate universe, it definitely wasn’t to be found anywhere near International House. 

One night in my first year, I was knocking about around my own Halls of Residence when I became aware of a group of people sniggering about something. I wandered over to see what was up, and they were laughing at some poor guy who was hanging around the place, mooning after a girl called Sonia. 

It was Ian. 

I remember feeling slightly responsible for him, not because he was my friend, but because he was on my course and because I instinctively didn’t like this group of guys laughing at the poor sod in his anorak, sensible shoes and railwayman’s cap. Before I did anything else, I checked that Sonia was okay. She was not surprisingly uncomfortable that Ian was hanging around, following her about. I don’t think he meant any harm, but he clearly liked Sonia but didn’t really have the emotional toolkit to know what to do with those feelings other than to follow her around. At this point in my life, I don’t think I was anybody’s idea of a knight in shining armour, but I went up to Ian and suggested that I walked him back to International House. He recognised me, of course, and without too much persuasion, I took him out of my Halls and on the short walk across campus. On the way, we chatted. I explained to him that he was upsetting Sonia and he couldn’t just hang around her like that. He seemed to understand that, and we parted on good terms. 

I don’t like bullies, and I suppose I was just awkward enough around women that I recognised some of myself in Ian and wanted to do something other than just point and laugh at him. I didn’t really think anything more of it. 

A little while later, before the end of my first year, it was announced in one of our lectures that Ian was dead. He’d been cycling through Coventry when he had been hit by a bus and killed. A tragedy. His parents had arranged a memorial service for him in the campus chapel, and we were all invited to pay our respects. 

I walked past that chapel every single day on my way to the History Department or to the library. Did I go to the service? No, I did not. I can’t remember why I didn’t go, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t because I had anything better to do. I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I probably just wanted to be in the bar with my mates rather than attend a sad and awkward service with Ian’s bereaved parents. He was a bit of a strange kid, and he wasn’t my friend. Besides, other people would go, right? 

Wrong. 

Not a single student attended that memorial service. Not a single one of us had the decency to take 30 minutes out of our days to pay our respects. I remember feeling a bit bad when I heard that, but the feeling didn’t last and I got on with the serious business of completely taking for granted the privilege of a university education. 

Now, more than thirty years later, I find myself thinking about Ian quite often. What must his parents have felt when no one turned up? I think about that time when I walked him back to International House; did he have any friends, or did everyone just think he was weird and give him a wide berth? Was he lonely? God knows it’s hard enough just being a teenager. 

I know I can’t change the past, but I do wish that I could speak to my younger self and encourage him to be better; to do better. Of all the things that University did teach me, it seems that it took the passage of time to teach me empathy. 

RIP Ian. I can only remember the names of a handful of people on my course now, but I remember you and I’m sorry.

travelling without moving...

 I feel like life with Multiple Sclerosis - at least for me - is to permanently exist in a liminal space. 

I experienced my 1st symptoms 20 years ago this summer, but was running marathons until lockdown. 

I still run, swim and row, but I also occasionally walk with a stick. 

I can ski black runs, but I'm often too weak to stand up unassisted if I fall.

I’m not on any disease modifying drugs, but I take shit loads of meds to help control my symptoms. 

I self-catheterise, but present (mostly) as a normal, healthy guy.

I’m in transit, but never arrive.

you tell me it's the making of me...

 

As I was driving to an appointment this morning, I was listening to the band James. I’ve been a fan of the band for a long time now, but it’s fair to say that I’m more familiar with some of their back catalogue than others. A song called “Ten Below” began to play. This is on the album “The Night Before”, which was released in 2010 and which I bought when it first came out. I’ve listened to the song before and I’m familiar with how it goes, but this morning, perhaps for the first time, I found myself really focusing on the lyrics.

 

It’s about being sent to a boarding school.

 

-

 

So I'm on my own
Far from my broken home
And it costs
Feels like 10 below
Pack me off to school
Innocence and trust
Are all lost
Where did my childhood go?

Calling from the payphone
Trying not to cry
Feeling I am dying
Telling you I'm fine
You tell me it's the making of me
That's a fucking lie
When's the holidays?
Holidays
Holidays

I'm at the bottom of my bed
Headphones on my head
John Peel's show
Feels like 10 below
The sky's a dull gun metal
Where did the sun
And it rains and rains
Feels like 10 below

Turning on the weaker ones
When we were bored
I used to have feelings
But all I feel’s a hole
Is where the heart is
And the organ praise the lord

When's the holidays
Holidays
Holidays

He's at war
He's at war
With himself at the world
He's at war
He will strike first to anticipate
He's at war
Don't know how to relate
Feel like a cold war spy
If I'm caught
Take the easy way out

 

-

 

I’m fifty years old now, and my school days are a long way behind me now…. And yet, it seems that the damage it caused is still very much with me. The song finished, and I found myself reaching to play it again, taking the time this time around to really let the lyrics sink in.

 

Calling from the payphone
Trying not to cry
Feeling I am dying
Telling you I'm fine
You tell me it's the making of me
That's a fucking lie

 

I was seven when I was first sent to board. I didn’t know any better and just trusted that my parents knew what they were doing. What seven-year-old would be any different?

 

Looking back at photos now, I look impossibly small and vulnerable and I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for my parents to pack up my new school uniform into a trunk and to drop me off at this strange new school about an hour away from the only home I’d ever known. But drop me off they did, and I can still remember that first night in the dormitory, surrounded by the beds of around fourteen other small children, some sobbing quietly in the dark. I didn’t cry, and I don’t remember ever feeling particularly homesick. I just adjusted to this new life.

 

Looking back on it now, I can see how I learned to survive by bottling things up inside. You quickly learn that emotions are a weakness that someone else can use against you, so you smother them. It’s a defence mechanism; you are surrounded by bigger, older kids and it’s so much easier to conform than to stand out. It’s something that I didn’t notice was happening at the time, and it wasn’t really until much, much later that I began to wonder what long-lasting damage this might have done. Did my parents see this happening to me when I came home for the holidays?

 

Many years later, I saw an animation created by an artist to a narration by her father explaining how he walled his emotions up inside so that he could survive at his school. The animation is of a small, scared boy peering out of a window in the chest of a robot. The robot is marching, and we soon see that he’s part of a robot army, each robot with a small window in its chest containing a small, frightened child. This was very close to home, and I found myself moved by the thought of myself as a small child with mousey brown hair, glasses and wonky teeth learning to survive by supressing and hiding my emotions.

Turning on the weaker ones
When we were bored
I used to have feelings
But all I feel’s a hole
Is where the heart is

 

It's taken me a long time to start to be comfortable showing and expressing my emotions. Thirty-five years later and I’m still a work-in-progress, as my wife will happily tell you (largely single-sex schooling probably didn’t help). I look at some of my schoolmates – still my closest friends - and realise that I’m one of the luckier ones and for some, the damage is still very clearly visible. I think I’m always going to be guarded about sharing my feelings and I’m told that I am very difficult to read, but I think I’m far more emotionally articulate than I used to be, and definitely more so than some of my other friends.

 

My mum died last year, and I’ve found myself thinking about how especially hard it must have been for her to send her child away like this. As we contributed to the eulogy for her funeral, my elder brother suggested including a memory of having burgers for tea on a Saturday evening in front of the A-Team. It’s a vivid memory, but for me, it’s tainted by the fact that we had only arrived back from school that evening and would be dropped back at school first thing on Monday morning; we were visitors in our family home and just passing through. Not just that, but we actually ate those burgers in a room in front of the tv and away from our parents, who ate somewhere else, so it’s not even a memory that we share with them. In any case, by the time I was thirteen and moved to another school, even those weekend visits stopped as we became full-time boarders.

 

When's the holidays?
Holidays
Holidays

 

My father has been coming to terms with the death of my mum for the last 18 months, and I’ve found myself thinking more of him and the damage I think our schooling did to him. He was a busy doctor, and my childhood memories are that he was always on call or out helping patients and didn’t particularly seem to have all that much time for his own family. At Christmas, we would not open our presents until he was back from his rounds. He always volunteered to be the doctor on call because, so he said, the other doctors all had young families. What on earth were we? Even now, when I think that I haven’t spoken to my dad for several weeks and I should perhaps give him a call to see how he is, I sometimes stop myself and think that telephones work both ways and that he can always pick up the phone to me if he wants to chat… but somehow he never does. When I ask him, it’s because he doesn’t want to bother me. How damaged has he been by the fact that I stopped being a part of his daily life when I was 7 years old and I’ve never lived at home with him properly since?

 

He's at war
He's at war
With himself at the world
He's at war
He will strike first to anticipate
He's at war
Don't know how to relate

I count my blessings, really. I survived my schooling and I don’t think I’m an unexploded bomb, liable to blow at any moment. I did go through an angry phase in my early twenties, happily sabotaging my own relationships and career prospects. I think I was trying to adjust to life outside of the bubble afforded by school and by university. My schooling was so immersive that I don’t think I ever really experienced university in the way that many people do: it wasn’t my first time away from home and, in large part, it was more of the same. I’m so grateful now that I didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge. The universities I did attend were large and filled with people from all sorts of different backgrounds. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been good for me to be in an Oxbridge College, surrounded by people of similar backgrounds and experiences. It certainly wasn’t good for those of my schoolfriends who went, anyway. University wasn’t a big deal for me, but I think I made the first few tentative steps of my journey back towards emotional balance there, even if there was a long way still to travel. I just had no real preparation for life in the real world, interacting with real people.

 

I don’t have any kids, but my mum once asked me if I would consider sending any offspring to a boarding school. When I said “under no circumstances”, I can remember my mum bursting into tears. My parents made huge personal and financial sacrifices to send their three sons to boarding school. I’m sure it wasn’t a decision that they made lightly, and they did so with the very best of intentions to give us the best possible start in life. Both had come from relatively humble backgrounds and had worked hard to be in a position where this was even a possibility. How can I hold it against them?

 

They did the best they could.

 

It's just that the emotional scarring runs deep.

Thumbs (a glimmer)

As the ancient Chinese curse apparently has it, “may you live in interesting times”. While sounding superficially like a blessing, of course it’s nothing of the sort. When it really comes down to it, although we all talk a good game about wanting to lead exciting lives, don’t most of us just want to live out our time quietly in uninteresting times of peace and tranquillity? I suppose it all depends upon your definition of “interesting”. Some people like to do sudokus and to watch reality TV. Chacun à son gout, I suppose. Each to their own taste. 

Besides, the last five years or so have demonstrated quite nicely that we live in anything but tranquil times. Brexit. Trump. Johnson. Ukraine. Rampant inflation. Fuel poverty. Climate change. Mass migration. Wildfires. Mass extinctions. Police brutality. Race riots. Islamic State. Do I need to go on? Our certainty in the inexorable advance of liberal ideas has been suddenly badly shaken and right to abortion, the right to be gay or non-binary, the right to freedom of expression and even the right to freedom of speech all seem much less certain than they were not so very long ago. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the very foundations of British life were shaken to their core last week by the death of the Queen. Even mourning, it seems, is now a source of controversy. 

It’s a lot. 

Perhaps then it is entirely in keeping with these turbulent times that the expression “may you live in interesting times” has no equivalent in Chinese, no Chinese source has ever been produced for its origins and it is mostly likely to have sprung up sometime around the late nineteenth century. Still, a superficially authentic sounding aphorism that is widely known but turns out to be entirely apocryphal seems somehow appropriate, doesn’t it? Still, who fact checks anything these days? It's easy to be angry with the world at the moment, and much harder to take a breath and to see the beauty that is still around us. Amidst all the noise, it’s easy to forget that the majority of people are just like you and me. Decent. Kind. 

I was reminded of this at a music festival a couple of weeks ago. Festivals like this are bubbles at the best of times, but End of the Road is perhaps more cosy than most. It takes place in Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset and is small enough to feel intimate, with stages surrounded by trees and with peacock walking around amongst the crowds. Glastonbury it is not. It’s a comforting thing to be surrounded by people who are a lot like you and probably share a lot of the same opinions, even if only for a long weekend. Just to forget about the troubles of the world for a few days to drink cider in the sunshine and watch some live music. 

On the Sunday evening, we made our way to the Garden Stage. As the name suggests, this is a natural amphitheatre surrounded by trees and gardens. It has a relatively small capacity of perhaps two or three thousand people, and when we arrived at about 7pm, it was nowhere near full and the grass around the stage was covered with people just sitting with their friends, quietly drinking wine and waiting for the next act. We sat down on the grass towards the back. After a few minutes, a man perhaps a little older than me made his way into the space just behind us and set up three little chairs, before sitting down in his own chair and settling in for the evening. The next act was a singer called Lucy Dacus, I wasn’t familiar with her music, but she’s an American singer/songwriter and basically performed on her own with an acoustic guitar. It quickly became clear as she drew me in that she was really good, my musical highlight of the festival. At some point, the man sitting behind us was joined by two girls, each maybe about twenty years old, who sat down with him in the other chairs. I didn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it, and I certainly wasn’t about to turn around and start staring, but I thought that one of the girls was this chap’s daughter, and the other was maybe her girlfriend. As Lucy Dacus played on and I became more absorbed in her music, I realised that her lyrical content was quite intimate and confessional. At one point, she warmly addressed the crowd and asked if any of the audience were gay and here with their partners. From the crowd reaction, it seemed that a lot of people there were (I subsequently learned that Lucy Dacus herself identifies as “queer”). Now, I’m a 48-year-old man and I was at the festival with my wife, but I’d also been wearing rainbow shoelaces on my shoes and rainbow wristbands on my wrists all weekend. I think inclusion is so important and it costs me very little to signal that I’m an ally. I know that I was in a bubble at this festival and maybe even as part of this crowd, but it’s a bubble that made me feel warm and happy in an angry, uncertain world. 

As the music continued, the two girls got up from their seats and came to stand just in front of me so that they could get a better view. It was now getting dark, and at one point, they were beautifully framed by the stage lights, gently holding hands and leaning into each other. It was a beautiful sight. I glanced behind me and saw that the man in his seat had seen what I had seen and was taking the opportunity to take a photo of the two girls as they were silhouetted in the stage light, lost in the music and in each other. He caught my eye and we exchanged a smile. What a beautiful thing that this guy was at the festival with his daughter and her girlfriend and that he was gently bursting with pride about this. It was a lovely moment. 

The moment stuck in my mind too because of the song that Lucy Dacus was playing. It’s called “Thumbs” and it’s about two people (lovers?) talking about the return of an abusive father. The final verse goes like this: 

I wanna take your face between my hands and say 

“You two are connected by a pure coincidence 

 Bound to him by blood, but baby it’s all relative 

You’ve been in his fist ever since you were a kid 

But you don’t owe him shit even if he said you did 

You don’t owe him shit even if he said you did”  

It’s a powerful lyric, but at the same time, it’s almost impossibly tender. Watching the two girls in front of me together sharing that moment together, and me sharing that moment with the watching father behind me, was wonderful and filled me with renewed hope. When there’s love in the world like that, how can you not feel optimistic? However dark it seems, there’s always a glimmer of light. That was my glimmer.

think of all the things we could discuss...

I make no claim to any superpowers. 

None of the really good ones, anyway. I can’t fly; I’m not the world’s greatest detective; I can’t climb walls and I certainly don’t have super-strength. I do seem to have an unusual empathy though; an ability to really connect with another creature. I don’t mean humans. God! Not humans! Humans are illogical and unpredictable. Who would want to have any special insight into that? 

My wife tells me that my special power is to make people want to feed me; she tells me that I have a “please love me” smile that it entirely irresistible to ladies of a certain age. Well, perhaps that’s true. And if it is, surely there are worse talents to have. But I’m not sure that I agree. People I can pretty much take or leave. I’m here for the animals. 

I’m not sure when this first started, but I’ve always seemed to have the ability to connect with animals. They seem drawn to me, and I’m certainly drawn to them. It probably started out the usual way, with cats and dogs. My grandmother used to have a particularly spiteful cat called Twiggy. Twiggy was a farm cat who had lost her tail at some point in the course of her long life. I don’t know if this misfortune was the cause of Twiggy’s bad temper, but she was famously vicious; the kind of cat who would scratch your hand as you put her dinner plate down. As a result, every gave her a wide berth, which probably suited Twiggy just fine. I liked Twiggy. I wouldn’t say that we were best friends, but 5-year-old me and 15-year-old Twiggy rubbed along alright, much to everyone else’s amazement. Mind you, I liked all animals, Twiggy was just one of the first in a long and growing list. There’s a picture of me from about this time, sitting outdoors with my feet up, reading with one hand reaching behind me to tickle a dog. I think that’s still me in a single picture. 

Growing up, I was a member of the Young Ornithologists Club, the Tufty Club and pretty much anything else that involved animals. Well, okay, the Tufty Club was about crossing roads safely, but who wouldn’t want to be in a gang with Tufty Fluffytail, Minnie Mole, Willie Weasel, Harry Hare and Policeman Badger? I still have the badge… 

Did you know that every spider is Scottish and speaks with a broad Scots accent? Wherever they might be found in the world, they originally came from Scotland and migrated. None of them have lost their native accents. They’re all exactly as Scottish as Groundskeeper Willie in the Simpsons. We have a really big one that lives in our house. She’s so large that you can hear her footsteps when she walks on bare floorboards. She only has seven legs too, having lost one somewhere along the way in her adventures. Perhaps wisely, the cat gives her a wide berth. She’s called Aragog, and whenever I see her, muttering in her distinctive accent as she goes about her business, I’m certain that she’s the wisest creature in the house. 

Most animals have names. 

How I know this, I couldn’t say, but these names are definitely not my invention because that would be ridiculous. Every wood pigeon calls themselves Joe Cool and the only words they say, Groot-like, are Joe Cool. “Joe Cool? Joe Cool” 

A blackbird is called “Un oiseau noir avec un bec jaune”. A female blackbird is called “madame oiseau noir avec un bec jaune” (the French for Blackbird is actually “Merle”, but what do they know?). 

Robins are all called Winter George. 

Gray Squirrels are all known as “Fatty Lumpkins”. This one is based on how they can be seen every autumn gorging themselves on hedgerow fruits, but it suits them all year round. I do know a squirrel called “Lazarus”, but that’s because he rose from the dead and chose a more appropriate name for himself. Dogs have a variety of names, depending on personality rather than on breed: scuttlebutt, waggles, side-eye, soft-as-shite… that kind of thing. There are also a few dogs that can clearly talk, and probably have a library filled with leather-bound books and a smell of rich mahogany. One or two smoke a pipe. 

I think you probably get the picture. 

It is, of course, extremely rude to walk past an animal of any kind without saying hello in an appropriate tone of voice. If accompanied by a human, it is always the animal that should be addressed first. 

Please don’t think that I’m alone in my madness: my wife was brought up in France as a child and was taught to hiss at cats. These days, she has learned to approach them respectfully, address them by name and offer the appropriate courtesy to see if they deign to acknowledge her presence. And you can’t blame my good influences for the change, either. Her mother tells me that, when she was a child, my wife couldn’t walk past a herd of cows without giving them a cheery “Bonjour madames les vaches!”. Obviously, we both do this to this day. After all, we’re not savages. Did you know that rabbits are actually “lapin d’affaires” and often run successful businesses from their warrens? No? Well, not a lot of people do, because they’ve never taken the time to ask. 

Perhaps I’ve said too much. I don’t want to betray any confidences. 

I’m told that I have a particular soft spot for the animals that no one else loves: vultures, rats, hyena… In the Serengeti a few years ago, we came across a pack of hyena sitting rather sadly underneath the carcass of a gazelle that a leopard had stashed in the fork of a tree that they couldn’t quite reach. One was sitting very sadly with is head resting on his paws, and, as we passed by in our jeep, he turned to look at us and he was missing an eye, presenting us with a rather grizzly, empty socket. Of course, I thought this was marvellous and just loved him all the more. 

Lots of people love animals, I know. But how many talk to them? Really talk to them, I mean. And how many of them listen to the answers? You should take a tip from me and try it sometime. It’s surprising what you can learn, and your lunchtime walk will never be the same again.

blood on the tracks...

TRIGGER WARNING: if you’re squeamish, you might want to sit this one out.

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I’ve been intermittently self-catheterising for a few years now. For those not in the know, this is where you take a lubricated, 40cm long plastic tube and insert it into your urethra until it reaches your bladder, at which point your bladder drains. Why do I do this? Well, one of my least favourite things about multiple sclerosis is that the nerve damage it causes has affected the wiring between my brain and my bladder. What this means for me is that my brain tells me that I need to pee much more often than I actually do need to pee, but also means that my bladder doesn’t completely empty when I do pee. This is a pretty toxic combination, because retained urine can cause infection and also because it means that you can’t trust the signals from your brain telling you that you need to pee. Annoyingly, on top of this, I also get sudden bladder urgency, where I will go from not needing to pee at all, to desperately needing to go in the space of about 60 seconds. 

Annoying, right? 

Well, one solution to this is self-catheterisation. If you catheterise, you are absolutely guaranteeing that you have completely emptied your bladder. This means both that there is no unpleasant retained urine, but also you can know for a fact that any signal from your brain that you need to pee is a false flag. 

It might not sound ideal to be shoving a really-quite-long tube down what was previously a strictly one-way deal, but it’s amazing what you can get used to if you have to. 

Now, sticking that tube down isn’t actually that big a deal: it’s lubricated and there aren’t too many nerves down there to mean that you feel anything. You feel a little bit of resistance as you push through the prostate, but if you persevere then you’re pretty much there. You do need to be slightly careful to make sure that your hands are clean and that you keep the risk of infection as low as possible, but that’s not too much bother. I initially only did this once a day, just before bed. Just recently, I’ve started doing it a little more often than that, but it’s not really a big deal and it’s worth it just to be comfortable. The catheters are supplied to me free of charge, to my door by the NHS and it’s all good. 

Well. Until it’s not. 

On Wednesday this week, I decided I would cath before heading out to a choir practice. I felt a little bit of resistance a little higher than usual, but I was in a bit of a rush, so I just pressed on, pushing until I had reached and drained my bladder. As I pulled the catheter out, I caught sight of a tiny drop of blood flicking into the toilet, but I didn’t really think much more of it. By the time I got home a few hours later, there was blood inside my pants. 

Yes, it is a little alarming to be bleeding from the tip of your penis. The next morning, when I peed, my stream was a deep, bloody colour with a few clots before running clear. Nice, huh? I was pretty sure that all I’d done was to scrape my urethra and that it likely wasn’t all that serious… but even so, right? I rang the continence clinic before guiding my friend Alan on a 4.5 mile run, and they told me to head to the hospital. I completed my run, did a couple of hours of work and then headed into City Hospital, where they were expecting me on one of the wards. 

As has almost entirely been my experience of the NHS, all the staff were fantastic. I had to wait around for a bit, watching with a terrible interest as the doctor explained to the nice old gentleman at the bed opposite that the bladder normally has a capacity of about 1.5l before it starts to be in danger of bursting, and that they had just drained over 2l from his… 

It turned out that the doctors were more concerned about the dangers of me possibly retaining urine than they were about the bleeding. Had I catheterised since I’d started bleeding? Well, no. I was peeing normally. Bloody, but otherwise normal. I wasn’t in a hurry to shove another catheter down there until I knew that I wouldn’t be causing any further damage. After a consultation with the registrar, I was offered a catheter – something that I would have to wear, full-time, for the next two weeks. Not my 40cm tubes, but the whole nine yards with bags and everything. This would give my urethra a chance to heal whilst making sure that I wasn’t retaining any urine that might cause infection. 

Look, if I felt it was necessary, I would have worn the catheter. Hell, the day may come when I can’t avoid one… but I didn’t feel that this was the time. I catheterise mostly because I don’t want to be going to the toilet every half hour, not because I am in serious medical danger of an infection. Not yet, anyway. I have the luxury of being able to choose whether I catheterise or not; I find it helpful, but I don’t think it’s a medical necessity for me. I gently pushed the doctor back, and after consulting with his registrar, he agreed to let me go if I self-catheterised successfully before leaving the ward. Reassured that it was likely to be okay to do so and that I wasn’t about to reopen my wound and start bleeding profusely again, I happily did that and then we all agreed I could go home. On the way out, I poked my head around the door of the staff room to thank my doctor, who had been lovely throughout. It was a pretty small room, and it was filled by about six junior doctors (including mine) with their heads buried in textbooks, cramming for their exams. Sheesh. Who’d want to be a doctor? 

Thirty-six hours after the initial incident, I’d stopped bleeding and everything seemed to be back to normal, which I will admit is something of a relief. However, I have learned (or been reminded) of few important things:

 - The NHS is an amazing and precious thing. It was there when I needed it and helped me without question or charge. The staff are hard-pressed, under-rewarded and yet somehow (on the whole) manage to retain their grace

 - It’s amazing what you can get used to. A younger me would find the idea of self-catheterising awful, never mind the idea that I might one day find myself to be oddly calm and rational about finding blood in my pants (or that I might also have a wife who was equally calm and reassuring at the sight of the same. Although, to be honest, younger me might just be astonished that I have a wife at all. Does that mean I’m maybe having me some sex too?)

- If you find yourself self-catheterising and you encounter some resistance (above and beyond what you’d expect from your prostate), don’t push! 

The tl/dr version of this is that self-catheterising can be scary but it's really good.

I wasn't going to blog about this, but Steve had someone comment on an old post of his about self-catheterisation just the other day, and it occurred to me that this sort of information might be useful to someone in the future. There's a lot of unhelpful and often just plain negative stuff about MS online, which is one of the reasons why I've been determined to be honest but up-beat in the first place. If you have stumbled across this, I hope you found it useful and not frightening. MS can be a lot to take in, but I'm pretty sure you've got this. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to discuss anything I've talked about here. 

I mean, clearly, I have no boundaries.

can't trace time...

Over the last couple of years, my MS has been steadily getting worse.

Every time I sit down to write about this, I always seems to fall into a kind of relentless optimism. Perhaps this is a defence mechanism, but I think it's actually how I feel most of the time. As I've said many times before, I honestly don't see the point in wasting my time and my emotional energy railing against something that I'm not going to be able to change. It is what it is. No one knows where this is going, and sitting down and crying about it simply isn't going to achieve anything.

Of course, that's not to say that I sometimes don't feel like crying about it...

On my last visit to the neurologist, I was told that I was a shining example of acceptance of my diagnosis. I think this is because I acknowledge that I have multiple sclerosis and that my disease is progressing, but I try not to let this get in the way of going about my business the best I can.

I suppose this is best illustrated in my running. I ran a bit before my diagnosis, but for whatever reason, started taking it a lot more seriously afterwards. I've run six marathons and countless other events since. My MS has weakened my left side and my left ankle is slowly losing its flexibility. This makes running harder, but thanks to the support of my MS team, I have been able to keep running using a series of different strategies, insoles and orthotic devices. The most recent of these is a pretty snazzy piece of kit that adds some spring-back into my ankle and seems to have stopped me from falling over.

Before this, I was falling over so often whilst running that I was beginning to cause myself some real damage. This brace works well enough that I've been able to go out running without wearing the wrist guards and kneepads.

 Even so, I'm basically fighting a losing battle. 

A consulant surgeon who specialises in sport (and who is a runner himself) told me about ten years ago that it probably wouldn't be my MS that ultimately stopped me from running; it was likely to be as a result of some of the compromises my body was being forced to make to compensate for weakness elsewhere. It seems that is likely to be the case for me. As well as the creeping stiffness in my ankle and the muscles of my leg, I'm told that the weakness in my left hip now means that my running gait has changed. Apparently, instead of driving my left leg through my running stride normally, I now "throw" it in front of myself because I lack the fine muscle control required. 

Running is hard and has got a lot harder over the last couple of years. My last marathon was in April 2019, and it now feels unrealistic to think that I could put my body through that kind of a distance, never mind the hundreds of miles of training. Perhaps more importantly, I'm not sure I have the kind of determination you need. Instead, I've found a joy in just being out and running at all. I can't run as far or as fast as I did before. Usually, at this time of the year, I'd be out with my club taking part in a local series of cross country runs. I've never been very quick, but they're very inclusive events and they are a lot of fun to run. There's a certain joy, I've discovered, in the mud and the hills. This year, I've sat them out. I just don't think it's realistic to put my body through that kind of stress and I'm just not confident that I'm strong enough to pick up my left leg over that kind of terrain for a 10km race.

All these things make me feel a bit sad, but I'm also determined to continue to focus on what I can do, rather than to dwell too much on the things I might have lost. 

I suppose this is what my neurologist means by acceptance.

He also told me that my MS progression was quite unusual: it is not at all normal for patients this far after their diagnosis to be as fit and healthy as I am (my first symptoms were in 2005 and my diagnosis was in 2009). This is obviously good, but it's also a bit depressing. Yes, I've been lucky, but I suddenly have a real sense that the sand is running out of my timer.

Over the last two years, my condition has progressed. I haven't really developed any new symptoms, but the symptoms I do have are getting worse and are affecting me much more in my daily life. I take drugs to help manage my bladder urges and I self-catheterise every night. I also take muscle relaxants to try and control the muscle spasms in my legs that have woken me up at night for a little while, but are now starting to affect the way that I walk and even make it hard for me to sit still in the evening. I walk stiffly and can feel that I swing my legs from the hip as I walk because I tire easily and don't have the strength to drive them through normally. I wouldn't be all that surprised if I needed to walk with a stick at some point in the relatively near future (I actually find walking a lot harder than running).

I am relentlessly positive about these changes, but that doesn't mean that they aren't on my mind. I am really disciplined about not allowing myself to wallow in where this journey might end. No one knows the answer to that one, whether they have MS or not. But.... it does make me a little bit sad.

I reckon I'm pretty strong and resilient, on the whole and maybe I am a shining example of disease acceptance...but these changes are still a lot to take in. 

Well, I'm doing my best.

the law won

I wrote to my MP again.

Ruth Edwards replaced Kenneth Clarke in this constituency in 2019 and has been notably compliant with the Government whip on every vote. She's ambitious and doesn't want to do anything to rock the boat that might jeopordise her career in Parliament. I can actually understand that. I don't agree with her on almost anything and some of her voting has been ridiculous: she talks of her love and concern for the environment and then votes to allow the dumping of raw sewage into our waterways.... but still, this is how our democracy works. She can vote as she sees fit, and my recourse is at the ballot box.

I am genuinely interested to see how she lines up to defend this latest affront to common decency.

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Dear Ruth Edwards,

I wrote to you in May 2020 about Dominic Cummings' trip to Barnard Castle with his family. You replied on 27/05/20, telling me how you were angry when you heard about it, but that

"As I listened to his media conference on Monday afternoon, I was struck by the level of detail and explanation offered by Mr Cummings, as well as the time he took to answer questions from the media.  His performance was not polished or flowing, they were the words of a husband and father who had tried to do the best for his family in very stressful circumstances. Mr Cummings made clear that he had taken steps to remain isolated throughout his journey and once he arrived at his parent’s farm.  I can understand why he thought it best to isolate himself, his wife and child where help was available to him should he need it and where accessing that help posed the least danger to other people".

You concluded that you felt that Cummings had acted reasonably, but added:

"Like any other individual, Mr Cummings is entitled to this due process and also to equality before the law.  If he has stepped outside of those lockdown rules (which should be equally applied to everyone), then the process for investigating breaches of those rules must also be applied with the same equality."

I wrote to you again in December 2021 to express my anger at news of the Downing Street Christmas parties in 2020. Again, you expressed your shock and anger at what seemed like a flagrant disregard of the rules that we had all been following. I told you I hadn't been able to see my elderly mother with Parkinsons and you told me about the sacrifices you had made:

"We did it because we were following the rules we had asked everyone else to follow and because we believed it was the right thing to do. I know many other people also faced significant challenges of adjusting their business model to allow people to work remotely and of trying to cover both work and childcare when schools were closed.  We all missed the camaraderie and friendship from working together in person with our colleagues".

Now, on the back of the news from a couple of weeks ago about a gathering in the garden in Downing Street (a 'work meeting', we were told), it seems that there was another drinks party in the garden on 25 May 2020. The invitation to this event, sent to 100 people, makes it clear that it was a social event with alcohol. It may have been socially distanced, but it was also clearly in contravention to the guidelines that were in place at the time. Matt Hancock made a point in one of that week's press conferences that we should resist the tempation to enjoy the good weather with our friends because we all had to do the right thing. Except it's clear that not everyone seemed to be clear what that meant. Whilst thousands of people were seeing their families through the windows of care homes, or attending strictly limited funerals, or washing their shopping and worrying about whether they were allowed out for a walk with their family if they had already taken some exercise that day, it seems that other people thought it was acceptable to have a garden party with alcohol.

I wonder what the Prime Minister's excuse will be this time; I wonder how he will try to duck responsibility or shift the blame onto someone else. What seems clear to me is that you and I are both being treated as fools. We followed the rules, and even as we were being urged to follow them, they were being egregiously broken by the very people giving us the instructions. What particularly galls me is that this particular party (and who knows, there may have been others we don't yet know about) is that it took place in the days immediately before that pious defence of Dominic Cummings by the government and many Conservative MPs, including yourself. That Rose Garden press conference took place within hours of this most recently revealed party, that defence of Cummings was masterminded by people who knew the party had taken place, and still they lectured us about rules.

How do you feel now about you defence of Cummings? Do you feel you have been taken for as much of a fool by these people as I do? When did you find out about these parties? At what point will you stop trying to defend them and start to represent the outrage of your constituents? We simply cannot tolerate a government or a society where there seems to be one rule for them and another rule for everyone else. I agree entirely with what you said in May 2020, "If he has stepped outside of those lockdown rules (which should be equally applied to everyone), then the process for investigating breaches of those rules must also be applied with the same equality."

The rules should be equally applied to everybody. 

Everybody.

I look forward to hearing your views on this,


Yours sincerely,

swisslet.

somebody I used to know...

For most of the time I've been in my monthly writing group, I've been doing a lot of "magical realism" style of fiction. I seem drawn to things like talking animals and a world that's like ours, only slightly different. In an attempt to try and get away from this, and in a style that's probably familiar to long-time readers of this blog, I've been delving deeper into my memories and dredging out things that I've never articulated before. It's been a rewarding and also occasionally alarming process. Cathartic, I think.

Anyway, here's something I wrote over the summer. It's all true, albeit obviously only viewed from my perspective. It's the story of somebody I used to know: Hugo.

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To most people, Boris Johnson must seem like a character out of a book: he’s Billy Bunter made flesh; he’s Just William, he’s Flashman. It’s present in the ruffled hair, the snatches of Latin and in the classical references that pepper every speech. You can even see it in the way that, although he is clearly dressed expensively, he still somehow looks as though he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. It takes a lot of money to look that scruffy. Yes. Johnson – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – is every bit the caricature of the English public schoolboy of popular imagination. 

We should probably be used to this by now: since Robert Walpole became the first, Britain has been served by fifty-five prime ministers. Nearly all of those enjoyed a private education, and fully twenty of them (starting with Walpole himself and finishing with the present incumbent) were educated at Eton. Is it really any wonder that people with this sort of educational background often seem entitled, or that most of us think it’s normal to be governed by people like this? The history of our democracy tells us that both these things are true. 

Johnson likes to present himself as a man of the people. He loves to visit factories and warehouses and to dress up in the clothes of the normal working people of this country, to pretend that he’s just like us, when clearly, he is nothing like us. Can you actually imagine going out to a pub for a drink with Boris Johnson and trying to have a normal conversation with him? He doesn’t seem like a real person at all, does he? 

He might seem like an alien to many people, but he’s all too familiar to me, because I went to school with people like Johnson and I’ve seen this kind of easy, unearned self-confidence before. 

I first met Hugo when we were both thirteen and were being shown around our boarding house on the first day of term at our new school. It’s quite an overwhelming experience. Both of us had been to boarding schools before but being dropped off by your parents and being left alone with the eighteen-year-old prefects is legitimately terrifying. I’d been a pretty big fish in the small pond of my prep school: literally. As well as being head boy, a growth spurt also meant that I was also comfortably the tallest pupil in the school. That first afternoon being shown around my new school by two members of the school first XV rugby team (flanker and second row forward) was a pretty clear demonstration that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. 

There were fourteen of us in my year and Hugo didn’t make an immediate impression on me. I’m sure he didn’t make much of me, either. Probably we were both just overwhelmed by the whole experience. A handful of the other boys had been at my prep school, so I likely gravitated towards the people I knew. Likewise, one of the other new boys had been at Hugo’s old school, and I’m sure the two of them were drawn to each other as we tried to take it all in without drawing anybody’s attention. Now was a time for blending in, not sticking out. No one is that confident. 

It didn’t take too long after that for Hugo to make his mark. He was one of those boys who seemed to be full of boisterous energy and enthusiasm. He wasn’t as tall as me, but he was still a pretty big lad. At the age of thirteen, like a puppy, Hugo seemed to have huge paws, a massive head and a general lack of coordination, but he was also very physical and liked a bit of rough-and-tumble. He was pretty thoughtless and never really seemed to give any thought to any possible consequences, but he seemed to lack malice. He would act on impulse, get into trouble, but then be so charming that he always seemed to get away with it. 

It was hard to dislike Hugo. 

I liked him.
Everyone liked him. 

The environment at a school like this means that you spend an awful lot of time with the people in your house, and none more so than the people in your year. From that very first day onward, we would spend almost every waking hour of every day together, including weekends. We weren’t necessarily in the same classes, but we would eat together, play sport together, muck about together and sleep in the same dormitories. Over the course of five years living in each other’s pockets like this, you really get to know someone, for better and for worse. To make things even more interesting and to spice up the mix, most people also go through a lot of physical and emotional changes between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. There was very little privacy here and nowhere to hide. You learn to bury your emotions deep in an environment like this lest you show anything that makes you seem weak or makes you vulnerable. 

Hugo and I knocked along pretty well. We were very different people: neither of us were particularly good at sport, but I was pretty academic, and we tended to hang out with very different groups of friends. I spent a lot of time listening to music, reading and making a few, really good friends (many of whom are still my very closest friends today). Now I think if it, I can’t actually remember Hugo having any particularly good friends, but he was popular enough, and was certainly better-known around the wider school. As I said, there were fourteen people in my year in my House, around 100 people in total in my House and something like 900 people in the school as a whole. It was quite self-contained little galaxy of overlapping orbits. If Hugo hadn’t been in my year in my House, I’m not sure I would have had any reason to know him, and might actually have actively avoided him, but as things were, we spent a lot of time together and got on without ever really being bosom-buddies. At one point, we actually shared a two-bed dormitory. 

I think it was the arrival of the girls that changed everything. At our school, the first three years were entirely single sex, but as you entered the sixth form, girls were allowed to join the school (lucky them!). They had their own boarding houses, of course, but they joined our classes and they were assigned a boys’ boarding house for their meals. To the fourteen of us in my year in my house, now aged around seventeen, we now suddenly had four girls join us at mealtimes. It’s a bit of a shock for all concerned. It’s overly simplistic to say that it was the very presence of the girls that brought about the change in our relationships, but I think it’s fair to say that they were a prism that revealed a side of our characters that we’d never really been forced to look at too closely before. 

Like most teenage boys, we talked about girls all the time. Most of us had been at almost entirely single-sex boarding schools since the age of seven or eight, so we had no practical experience to speak of. The arrival of girls into our everyday lives was like the arrival of a foreign species. I can only imagine how bizarre an experience this must have been for the girls. For us boys, we suddenly saw these people with whom we had shared nearly every waking moment of the last three years, and thought that we knew pretty well, suddenly start to behave quite differently. 

For myself, I had very little idea how to begin to talk to these strange creatures, but I did have a fairly strong sense of how I did not want to behave. Hugo, who had often regaled us in the dormitory after lights out with tales of his supposed success with women, had a very different sense of how he wanted to behave. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a predator; women were not people in their own right but they were something to be pursued, consumed and then dropped. He was pretty cold-blooded about it too. I remember one poor girl, Alice, who soaked up the full focus of his charm. She was a year younger than us, seventeen, when he wooed her. She thought she loved him. Eventually, he got what he wanted and he more-or-less came charging out of his study to tell us all about it. He left her in tears and never spoke to her again. It felt wrong then and it feels even worse now I type those words. That is literally what he did, and I found it impossible to consider him charming when I knew that he was capable of this sort of behaviour. 

I haven’t spoken to Hugo since the day we finished our A-levels and left the school to head off to University. We have friends in common, of course, and he has sporadically tried to make contact with me over social media, but I’ve always declined. I think he has kids now, but after leaving school, he seems to have drifted through life on a sea of privilege and lack of consequence. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t had to work too hard for anything that has come his way in life. Perhaps he’s changed. Perhaps he hasn’t. 

There were a lot of people like Hugo at my school. 

Barack Obama observed of David Cameron in his autobiography that he had “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life.” That phrase really resonated with me. I know far too many people from my school days to whom that phrase could be equally applied, not least Hugo. Many ended up working in banking in places like Hong Kong and Sydney. None, as far as I’m aware, have gone into politics, but whenever I see Boris Johnson, I can’t help but think of Hugo and how much collateral damage someone like that is capable of causing to the people around them.