Warm as forecast here but not exactly tanning weather - no sun. I'm inhibited from writing anything by the super-creative activites of friends and the total lack of creativity in my life. I made some nice sausage rolls yesterday though, and a successful semolina cake soaked in orange syrup at the weekend. Shame I can't hang them on the wall.

I've been reading a lot and sleeping ditto in an attempt to throw off a chesty cold. A customer lent me 'Beware of Pity' by Stephan Zweig and it has me gripped. The style, IMO is that of the great Russians, perhaps partly because of the era in which it is set, but also the style of writing which is more careful, rounded - mannered would be the word - longer and more flowing sentences than most modern writers risk anyway! The tale is that of a young man, a cavalryman, used to the muscular, often coarse masculine world of the military, who is suddenly faced with responsibiliy for the delicate feelings and passions of a crippled girl. Not at all my usual taste these days. Before that I read 'The Fifth Witness' by Michael Connolly which I found equally gripping, and before that 'Seizure' the sequel to 'Virals' by Kathy Reich in her new role as teen-book author.

I've also discovered the joys of iPlayer so I've been fulfilling my vital social role as media audience in that way. Then on Sunday we watched "Midnight in Paris" with our wine. I found it totally entrancing, one of old Woody's best. The storyboard may have been slight and the moral a bit obvious but the scenes of Paris were so beautifully shot... It's such a lovely city and he did it proud. A visual treat, funny, witty...

A friend also lent me Dennis Potter's 'Karaoke' and 'Cold Lazarus' which I've been looking for for ages. Karaoke could still hold it's own today but CL, which hit me hard at the time, has aged badly - because it is set 400 years in the future from the 80s when he wrote it and the producer's ideas of future technology mostly look laughably old fashioned! Still the idea of tapping into the memories existing in the cryogenically frozen head of a man (the writer who died at the end of Karaoke) and bringing them out onto a screen to be watched by a team of researchers, possibly to be sold as universal entertainment, is as horrendous as it ever was.

Well that's more like it!

I can't get enthusiastic about the amaryllis at this stage, which seems to last forever. Probably D.H.Lawrence could have composed something suitably obvious about its lusty thrusting upward toward fruition.


I was given it as a present and could hardly get out of letting it thrust.


The last couple of weeks have been full of Life in a deathly sort of way. My friend's wife still lies unconscious in a London hospital whilst he calls me up to be taken out to lunch, which is a bit how I feel about it all: Out to lunch. K defies medical science by being, according to scans, brain dead, yet responding, with hand-squeezing and the occasional hint of a smile, to the voice of the young German woman who has been reading to her and reminiscing about their times in India. It's at once touching and horrifying to think about. 


Then a friend of my daughter's topped himself, unable to cope with his life, which was difficult 'tis true, but he leaves a 14 year old daughter and a sick wife to cope with the loss of him so, although we feel sympathy with him we also feel anger at his apparent selfishness. We don't want to feel this anger because he was such a nice, kind, chap. It's very upsetting.


Sandy's arm seems better, despite medical attention, and Iain's ribs are slowly mending.


I've been reading P.D.James, first her new book then a couple of earlier ones I missed at the time. She is solemn, ponderous, good at describing architectural settings, good at the English language, but entirely without humour, unless I'm being insensitive to her style. She has a liking for the word 'minatory' which I note every time it crops up because I had to consult a dictionary to find out what it meant. She also has a habit of starting sentences with 'But'. I thought that was disapproved of. It irritates me mostly because she often does it when the sentence before has a 'but' in it, and that sounds like too many buts. Her editors should have been more aware.


Still, it gives me something to grumble about. I also have an aching tooth and a trip to the dentist this afternoon. 


The cats are Bengals, by the way. Silly brain. The same brain has been leaving the gas on recently. That's going to cost me! I decided it was time to buy one of those boxes with seven little compartment to put pills into before I start either forgetting them or taking them twice. 


As long as I remember to fill it!
  

A pleasant, if sneezy, couple of hours was spent in the company of these elegant creatures. The silver coated Abyssinian has the most alarmingly loud and strident miaow, which is just as well as he got stuck up a tree  a mile from home recently. His people live in a deserted part of the countryside so they heard his cries and effected a rescue.

I spent the afternoon in A&E with Number One Grandson who fell down a flight of stone stairs yesterday and hit his funny-bone (it gives me a pain just thinking about it!) By today the elbow was nicely swollen, hence the trip in to the NHS House of Horrors, (minus, unfortunately, House). The waiting room was empty but we still sat for long enough to get cricks in our necks watching afternoon TV. I suppose they put the screen that high to be out of the way of drunks and injured giraffes. Iain joined us, dragging his chest drain bottle, to help pass the time both for him and for us.

He is, by now, the hospital's most senior patient having just passed his 8 day training period. A few days more and he will be appointed Matron. He knows all the doctors and consultants by their first names, is especially matey with those who go up to the roof to smoke, and has managed to organise himself a steady supply of vodka and orange disguised as Innocent Smoothie.

 The results of the x-rays of Sandy's elbow were inconclusive because the radiologist has gone AWOL until after the weekend. The nice triage nurse told us she thought he had a fracture but we shall have to wait until Monday to find out. After a while she came back and retracted the bit about a fracture because she isn't an expert. Sandy was given a natty little sling and we were sent home, leaving poor Iain mooching morosely around the car park in his slippers, smoking an evil looking rolly in black liquorice paper.

 We are buying a copy of 'Plumbing for Idiots' for him to leave behind when he finally escapes. We will helpfully highlight the passage on one-way valves. The junior doctors don't seem to have fully grasped the principles. Iain's lung was deflating at night to the point where he swore he could feel it flapping around inside his chest. It re-inflated in the day time when he was conscious and could seal the tube - rather like that Dutch boy who stood with his finger in the dyke. The hissing sound coming from the misaligned valve should have given the highly trained medical staff a clue to what was going wrong but possibly no-one wanted to blame their colleagues for cocking up.

It was a relief to get out today to listen to a talk on mining art by a native of the Great Northern Coalfield in which terrain the speaker was born and bred. (Bishop Aukland was mentioned Jillian.)

I had feared Constructivism, square jowls, bulging muscles, raw sweaty working men hefting manly tools and looking Cubist without really trying. Unlovely, and quickly wearying, Communist art. There was a bit of that, but there was much more; touching, beautiful, humorous, and breathtaking. I wish I had copies of all the slides but I only have this book of Tom McGuinness’ art put together by the speaker who has collected mining art since his earliest years.

The first art-work from the pits to come to public view was that used in the mid nineteenth century to make the case for legislation that banned women and boys under 7 (!) going down to drag coal sledges or, if they were very small, swing the air conditioning doors for ten hours a shift.

Here again was a pocket I thought we might get trapped in - the mistreated children, ponies, maimed young men, the disasters. I grew up with stories of Welsh pit disasters because my grandfather and three of his sons worked in the mines in the Taff Valley. Not my father, his heart was left damaged by rheumatic fever, and that, I think, is the reason part of his family moved south-east to find work he could do in the effete Home Counties. I had childhood nightmares from these stories, the cages rose to view full of dead men caught by gas; men suffocated slowly underground after a cave-in, men lost their limbs, then, just as I grew out of those nightmares, there was Aberfan.

Inevitably there were records of the agonies of loss, but there were also animated scenes in the bars, of young men and old walking the miles to start their shifts, backs bent, legs bowed or bold and straight and brash. The welcome bath at home with the mother or wife pouring buckets of water over the grimy figure bending into a bowl. No showers, or even baths.

Such is the magnitude of the human spirit it can find form, passion, mythology, inspiration, beauty, wherever it lives. They can even relish the suphurous places. There were men who had to leave the collieries to go to war and afterwards could have stayed away for ever but chose to return because, for reasons almost inexplicable to anyone but themselves, loved the life.

Tom McGuiness was encouraged to attend Darlington School of art, but many of the artists were self-taught. Again, I wish I had the slides because theirs were probably the most striking works of all.

                                                  ******

Note: This word processing system calls me on cliche - it wants me to find a substitute of ‘born and bred’. It didn’t like ‘manly’ because it is ‘gender-specific’ and suggests I replace it with ‘courageous’ ‘strong’ or ‘honorable’.It has no sense of irony.

2012 is getting off to a slightly shaky start in our family. One of us was hospitalised a week or so back with chest pains, as yet undiagnosed ( my ex who is a very good friend) and now my eldest daughter's partner has been in an accident leaving him with fractured ribs and a punctured lung. The same hospital as that briefly visited by my ex, to no satisfactory effect, has not performed well this time either. Not reassuring! A junior doctor would have let Iain out with an unnoticed pneumothorax had not Iain's brother, a consultant at that hospital, come in to check on Iain. Chloe was all set to complain, suspecting that more was wrong than the Junior Doc. had seen. She probably knows more about the human body than the Him, or at least as much with more experience behind her, but they may well not have listened to her.

I remember the first time I was in hospital after a miscarriage, I had complete faith in everyone. The second time, with appendicitis, I felt the same. It was a lot easier on the nerves! Little by little my confidence has been eroded, especially in the nurses. Our other nearest hospital has recently had cases of C. Difficile.

Apart from that gloom, the sun is shining brightly and there is still no snow - although I'm almost afraid to write that for fear of nemesis.

Later:

Oh good grief! Now I've heard that a friend who holidays in India has had a stroke on the homeward journey. Same age as me. Very strong person. She's in a coma in a London hospital.

Sorry folks. No more gloom. I think Karin's stroke is a lesson to make the most of life whilst we have it.

Each year they seem like a small miracle. They have been popping up for a fortnight already, which IS a bit of a miracle. This winter has been so much easier than the last two - although I'm told we shouldn't count chickens yet. Yesterday, as I left the house at 8am, the sky was beginning to lighten and it was the first time for a while that I haven't had to scrape ice off the car windows or defrost the lock. Street lamps went off as I reached them so I felt like Dumbledore with his deluminator.