Ramblings From a Misspent Week.

I am starting to swear less and last week's trauma is beginning to fade away. So I decided to record my thoughts, not necessarily in chronological order regarding a somewhat unusual experience, at least for me. (See previous post.)

Aren't ambulances a surprisingly bumpy ride. I swear my old Mosvich had better springing. And aren't A and E (Accident and Emergency) places high tech. I couldn't believe all those individuals sitting in front of computer screens. What a contrast from the old style places you went into to be put back together when you (me) were unceremoniously dumped off your motor bike all those years ago. I was slow on the uptake regarding what was going off in general; nothing new there then. The hospital is massive (five floors) and I had become part of the system. I progressed from A and E to was it Triage and thence M and something or other. I had no idea as to what floor I was occupying at any one time. Being seemingly labelled 'Nil by Mouth' for ever more was not amusing; neither was being hooked up to machines that were repetitiously noisier than the Indesit washing machine my wife was given as a wedding present in 1970. Plus it bleeped incessantly, presumably no one else could hear it. (I gave it a good push once to distance it from myself. I forgot I was attached to it!)

Make no mistake, the NHS could not operate without its workers from overseas, Queens English or no Queen's English. But should I really have smiled when an enquiry as to whether a patient had slippers was misinterpreted as to whether a patient has syphilis. But the thing that struck me most was the sheer surreal nature of the whole experience.

You are no longer in control of yourself. You are seemingly in control of nothing. Everything is done for you, by others. I couldn't get over the feeling of lack of personal control. ( At one stage I was within minutes of being 'released' until a doctor decided otherwise.) The programme 'The Prisoner' constantly visited my consciousness yet I am not really conversant with the programme at all. I was never in any physical pain, just a constant overwhelming feeling of no longer being here, being 'me'. Talk about 'a journey round one's head'. I have never 'thought thoughts' so much for many a year. For the first time since leaving college in 1974 I recalled Descartes 'I think, therefore I am.' How bizarre is that. I didn't 'get religion' during my brief stay. but I did get a much better idea of my sheer unimportance in the big wide world. Long overdue some may say.

Met some remarkable people; took away some interesting memories. Where else but a NHS hospital would you meet a Buddist, (named Bewan if I remember right) who visits patients in A and E every Tuesday and Thursday. What a lovely, lovely smile you had. And where else would you be led via the hand by security when you were hopelessly lost having wandered from the ward in a moment of supreme boredom on night three or was it four. (I'm not senile chaps, just a silly old septuagenarian with no sense of direction.) And not learning too fast either. Did exactly the same in the local Westfields Shopping Centre. Come to think of it, perhaps senility beckons after all.

A strange week, and do you know something, I wouldn't have missed it for the world. We must do it again. How about in another thirty years time.

Ouch

How many of you can say with certainty what you were doing on a given day ten years ago? Twenty years? Thirty or forty years, or even fifty?

On Tuesday the 10th March, 1959 the Tibetan people rose up against the Chinese invasion of their country in what was to become known as the Lhasa Uprising. On this same day I had an altercation with a builder's lorry whilst hurrying to work on my 197cc Francis Barnett motorbike. The lorry won comfortably.

The young lady on the back of my bike was mercifully thrown clear. Myself and the bike finished up underneath the lorry. After the impact, as the steam settled I vividly remember looking up at the lorry underside, too close to the hot exhaust for comfort. Actually comfort is completely the wrong word. I was pinned under the bike and I distinctly remember holding my breath in the mistaken belief that if I breathed it would be my last. I had passed so far under the lorry (from sideways on) that the wheels passed over the edge of my helmet. Was it luck, providence that I survived, you tell me. A posse of men were summoned, they lifted the lorry (who needs Superman, the British public are wonderful when they need to be) and I was pulled clear.

My passenger received a serious laceration but fortunately nothing more. There seemed no lack of volunteers to examine her legs. I had a badly broken leg and ankle and less serious, as far as I knew, head injuries. (Who knows for certain whether they were accountable for some of my 'actions' over the past fifty years.) I remember some fool of a woman's audible comment 'Ooh, look at his face.' Consequently I refused to remove my arm from covering my face until I arrived at a hospital. Silly woman! The main feeling I remember is of acute embarrassment at the whole affair. I would have left the scene had I been remotely able. All in all not a day easily forgotten. The ride to hospital was uncomfortable in the extreme, a trip in the back of the lorry would have been less bumpy. But my surgery and treatment in three hospitals, brilliant. Hurray for the NHS.
Prior to this accident I fell off the bike or had near misses on several occasions. I was also in the habit of taking with me to work on occasion a young lad from Borrowash who, slightly younger than myself was also besotted with motorcycles. Being underage to own a motorbike, he could not wait to own a bike of his own, which he duly purchased on achieving the statuatory age for owning a motorcycle, that age being sixteen. Within weeks he was dead, killed instantly on colliding with a stationary lorry less than three miles from where I met my Waterloo. My interlectual capacity was even less then that it is now, but I could not help but wonder, why him and not me. Six months later, patched up, I returned to work. Not the job I had been employed in previously. March 10th, 1959 was one of the life defining days of my life.

As I sit at my computer all these years on my rebuilt appendage twinges in sympathy. I still have the helmet plus the marks made by the lorry tyres. Alas, I no longer have my youth. Stupid, wanton, foolish youth. so enjoyable, so unpredictable. But at least I'm still here, just! Have you swanned smoothly through the ages. Or have you had a life defining moment in your life that decided for you the path your life would take. Think about it and, whatever your beliefs, say a silent prayer.

LBB

I feel exhausted, there again I didn't have a very good night's sleep. I usually blog around twice a week and I knew I was about due today. So I tossed and turned all night wondering what on earth to write. I could look in the papers and be topical but it's not my style. Of any case millions out there do that already. and who wants to know the opinions of a retired, sixty nine year old, at the moment exhausted ex-schoolmaster. Which begs the question, if I'm struggling to fill two blogs a week, how do you six or seven times a week bloggers do it. Some of you seldom go to bed, that's for sure!

And what did you do in your LBB?

Life Before Blogging, do you remember those far off days. And if you do, what on earth did you do with your time! I've asked this question of several bloggers and amazingly often bloggers are unwilling to divulge such highly secret information. Perhaps life as we know it before LBB never really existed. Similarly the question, 'Why blog' receives equally evasive replies.

There's no doubt the blogging world is a godsend for many. The lonely, the exiled, the newly liberated, all welcome the opportunities offered. It is for some a club, a collection of like minded people who offer support and solice to each other, often in times of need. The benefits that blogging offers many cannot be overestimated. For others it is a chance to pontificate, without interruption on every conceivable subject. What was it Nicholas Murray Butler said. 'An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.' Which again puzzles this comparative newcomer to the world of blogging, why spend so much time for no financial reward whatsoever. (Please spare me the' There's more to life than money' spiel. There isn't if you haven't got any.)

Professional bloggers get paid, the sole reason for their often dubious efforts. Most areas have local newspaper hacks who churn out banal, often peurile blogs on a weekly basis. Not for them the luxury of choosing when to blog. It's the 'You're paid to blog, so blog' school of thought. We amateurs are more in control of our blogs, and are unpaid, so it is our choice. So why the compulsion to show others our knowledge, skill, wit. And why so public a face. I've often wondered how many bloggers kept extensive diaries prior to their rebirth as bloggers. And how many would have subjected those diaries to full public scrutiny.

I have a public speaking engagement tonight, at the St Augustines Wives Group in Upperdale Road, Derby (see blog dated Fri 6th June Talk Talk). And I get paid to do so. I get paid £164,000 for a ninety minute speech. Mr Blair also gives speeches, he gets £20 for approximately fifty minutes but has to pay his own travelling expenses. Or is it the other way round; I forget! (Bill Clinton earned $475,000 in a single day from two speeches.)I would be the first to admit there is an element of an ego tripping in public speaking closely related to blogging. Plus after a serious illness it is my way of keeping the old brain cells or what is left active. (see blog dated 18th May Hooray For The NHS). I suspect the problem comes when hobby becomes obsession. When compulsion drives ever deeper and the hobby or interest takes over. The main reason I doubt I could cope with blogging daily.

I was in hospital many years ago. The old chap in the next bed would relate hourly how many rolls of wire he would have made on any particular day. An admirable, dedicated workman who had made this wire for forty years. Admirable except that he was dying. I find that sad, surely there are more important things in life; maybe I'm wrong.

Funny thing, obsession. I know a man whose whole life revolves around twitching. (Bird watching to you and me) His wife has to dress up in a penguin suit and sit on the end of the bed squawking if she wishes to arouse him. All right, not true but you know what I mean when we talk about compulsions and obsessions.

Gordon Brown and Nigel Clough both made publicised visits to Derby last Wednesday. It is less well known that The Queen also visited. As Michael Caine would have said, 'Not a lot of people know that.'

She visited our local asylum on an informal visit. She does this sometimes you know. It tends to deflect the bad publicity the minor royals attract every time they open their mouths.

She took great interest in the gardens and was particularly taken by one old chap who was tending the flowerbeds.

'Good morning, my man,' she said to him graciously, (The Queen always does graciously) 'and what's the matter with you. Why are you in here?'

The old man sighed a great sigh. 'There's nothing the matter with me. I'm just a harmless old blogger who suffered writers blog. Broke down, cracked up and I'm now kept in here completely against my will.'

The Queen is a little deaf (not a lot of people know that either) and wasn't sure sure she'd heard exactly what he had said, but no matter.

'I'll see about that,' said The Queen indignantly (she can also do surprise, consternation, etc. She can do them all, for she is The Queen when alls said and done.) 'I'll not have my subjects locked up for nothing; even buggers. I'll sort it out when I get back to the palace.'

The old man was ecstatic. 'Thank you ma'am, thank you oh thank you.' And he bowed as bloggers do. (psst, how do bloggers bow?) And The Queen waved her hand dismissively, as queens do and moved on.

The Queen had travelled a mere ten steps when she received a large blow to the back of the head which brought her to her knees. She staggered to her feet, turned and through glazed eyes saw the old man gesticulating wildly.

'Don't forget,' he shouted, clutching another house brick in his other hand.

Enjoy your blogging, but don't take it too seriously, for you never know.

One final thought for today. Anyone any bright ideas for an epitaph on a bloggers tombstone?

Anyone seen my leg?

I regularly talk to groups, Women's Institutes, Senior Citizen groups and the like. It's a challenge in a way and keeps my brain in reasonable shape. My bread and butter talk, so to speak is entitled 'There's Nowt so Strange as Folk', based loosely around a book of short stories I wrote a year or two ago. It can't be all bad because on occasion I have been asked back. no mean feat. The last time I spoke I was greeted with the words, 'Pleased to meet you, I hope you are better than the one we had last week, she were terrible.' Not exactly designed to inspire confidence but not as bad as another speaker I know of. Five minutes into his spiel on the workings of computers some old lady stood up and spoke immortal words. 'We don't want this rubbish.' (Evidently the group had been expecting to be taught the basics of how to use a computer, not how the computer's innards function.) They don't mess about, pensioners groups, straight to the point and if they don't like you be prepared to run.

Because of return visits I've been working on a second talk entitled 'Is the whole world going mad or is it me.' Interesting to put together and based on every crackpot, unusual, sometimes simply bizarre individuals and situations in the word today. For instance, pensioners on ASBO's for thoroughly juvenile behaviour; how odd. Sat Nav ambulance crews who took a patient on a 400 mile ride from London to Manchester and back on what should have been a twenty minute transfer between Ilford, London and Brentford in Essex. Universities awarding a PhD. in darts and a dentist who used his surgical instruments to clean his finger nails. (and that was one of his better habits!)

The reason for this particular blog being the news that Alton Towers is dismantling a twenty eight year old, seventy five feet high rollercoaster. Interesting but made even more so when one considers what the dismantlers have found to date.

Now the eight hundred pieces of jewellery found is sad but understandable; anyone who has ever experienced the fast, furious terrifying ride on the Corkscrew as it was called will empathise immediately. Plus three hundred mobile phones. What sort of clown would try and use a mobile phone in such circumstances. (On second thoughts, the whole world seems incapable of walking down the street without phoning so perhaps it's not all that surprising.)

Fifty three odd shoes, an irritating loss but not unexpected, but then it really gets interesting.Ten pairs of underwear. I must be careful what I say here but the mind boggles. I daren't even guess but perhaps its best to leave it to the readers own imaginations!

The last two items found give real food for thought. Item one, a prosthetic ear. Which of course would surely stand little chance of staying put on such a high speed, wind buffeted manic ride as the Corkscrew. Embarrassing to say the least, a difficult ride home especially if you were a driver for how on earth do you keep your glasses on in such circumstances. (Sorry, not meant to offend but you have to smile.)

One final discovery, surely the strangest of them all being one prosthetic leg. I hope it was not the same man who lost the ear, For there would be an unfortunate double whammy. (Why am I assuming it was a man?) Imagine the problems this mishap would cause you, stuck at Alton Towers minus a leg. Its not funny really but if you didn't laugh you would probably cry. All the old jokes immediately spring to mind. You'd really need a leg up and then what do you do, hop down to the information desk? Do they have a set, practiced procedure for lost legs? Surely they don't have spares for such an emergency? 'No problem, sir, left or right?' You could sue them but you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. It would not exactly enhance your day and I've no doubt you wouldn't get a replacement on the NHS the next day. All in all a right bloody nuisance but what a story to tell at your next cocktail party when the conversation flags, the day you were legless at Alton Towers.