Holey Vision

Fear and Loathing in London

2011-12-05T04:38:00.000-08:00

Felt like this!

It hadn’t started particularly well. I had put my hair up in a Chinese style chignon but it was TOOO tight and although I looked hugely perky it was because I couldn’t really shut my eyes. Due to that (and also the fact that with visual impairment like mine I can’t always do the blink reflex in time) I then managed to stick the thick wool collar of my coat into my eyeball as I was getting ready to catch the train. This meant that by the time I got to the station I had an almighty headache and a sore eye but it didn’t matter as my hair was too tight to allow me to scowl.

I was in London to attend a series of talks called ‘The Representation of Disabled People in an Age of Austerity’. It was fascinating if devastating stuff. Professor Nick Watson of the Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research and Allen Sutherland of the Edward Lear Foundation fed back from a study commissioned by Inclusive London in which they had analysed all articles mentioning disability in a series of newspapers over two time blocks in 2004/5 and 2010/11. Articles were scanned for emphasis, political angle, language, and so forth.

The study had been followed up by several focus groups to test general public attitudes and those of people living with chronic illness or a disability.
Here is the link to the article : http://www.inclusionlondon.co.uk/ and I am going to just quote a couple of the major findings from the study here but as you can imagine it was pretty grim stuff.

• These articles are impacting on people’s views and perceptions of disability related benefits. The focus groups all claimed that levels of fraud were much higher than they are in reality, with some suggesting that up to 70% of claimants were fraudulent. Participants justified these claims by reference to articles they had read in newspapers.
• This strength of fraud as a tabloid theme conflicts with the reality of levels of incapacity benefit fraud and focuses public perceptions of responsibility for Incapacity Benefit levels on claimants rather than problems in lack of labour market demand, economic policies or discrimination.

Its actually 0.03%!!

• There has been an increase in the number of articles documenting the claimed ‘burden’ that disabled people are alleged to place on the economy – with some articles even blaming the recession itself on incapacity benefit claimants

This talk was then followed by feedback from a study conducted (and ongoing ‘Hidden In Plain Sight’) commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission on disability related harassment. The young woman presenting (I apologise as did not catch her name) said they had been inundated with information, examples, experiences and more. The report shows undeniably that ‘... harassment is a commonplace experience for disabled people, but a culture of disbelief and systemic institutional failures are preventing it from being tackled effectively.’

The speaker asked us to put up our hands if any of us had experienced harassment due to our disability...and almost every person in the room put up their hand. The woman advocated standing up for ourselves, taking a hard line stance but we all know that it is precisely this kind of engagement which in the current climate of aggressive misery can lead to real trouble. We nodded wearily. http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/legal-and-policy/inquiries-and-assessments/inquiry-into-disability-related-harassment/hidden-in-plain-sight-the-inquiry-final-report/

The last speaker Deborah Williams of Reality Productions, reenergized us with a couple of exercises to ‘create’ the ultimate disabled person from attitudes of current media.

What is a good disabled person?

Quiet! Stoic! Sexless! Grateful! Dead or cured! We yelled. ‘Paraolympians! Ex- Army! Tiny Tim! Blunkett!

And a bad one?

Fraudster! Whiner! Political! Angry! Confrontational! Aggressive! Sexual! Mentally unstable! Heather McCartney! Captain Hook! Hoodies with Attention Deficit Disorder! Err Blunkett again!

It's our life!

This was fun but when we all got up to leave I was glad that speaker had written it all down with a pale pink pen and I couldn’t see all the words littering the white board.

This is not just a game after all....

Getting tight.

2011-11-11T02:39:00.000-08:00

The clocks have gone back and BAM just like that I am a hedgehog again and all I want to do is hibernate. This year in particular I have really noticed the brain change. Grace and I usually get up at 6ish (very ‘ish’!) She eats and slopes back to bed and I do my chanting meditation and think about ‘stuff’ and what to write and how plan my day. But since the clocks, I am dopey and dizzy and can’t surface (and my eyes have been a shambles of oedema and ache.) I know it isn’t just psychosomatic, although of course there will be an element of that. When darkness plonks itself down like an unwelcome wedding guest at 4.00pm in the blinking afternoon I turn into a middle-aged, fairy tale princess (possibly more ogre) trapped in my flat trying to spin flax into gold on my computer.

However that is enough whining. I don’t yet have to panhandle for food or sleep in a doorway and I am very grateful for that.... just annoyed by the slight feeling of melancholic claustrophobia that the change in season brings.

That and tights. Freakin’ sodding tights. I hate the things. When I was a kid at boarding school the small girls were not allowed to wear tights until they were seniors. At the time I thought this unfair. There we were, the little ones, with our red wind chapped thighs and frosted knees whilst the older girls had thick brown nylon to protect them from the chill. There was a kind of mystical sophistication that we all thought would come as soon as we donned our first pair of Pretty Polly tan tights. But it was all a terrible con

Spiderman having a backwards gusset moment

First of all you spend several minutes holding the tights up in front of your face desperately trying to work out which is the front and which the back because if you don’t get it right you get twisted up like a fish in a net with your gusset on backwards. A backwards gusset was developed as a form of torture during medieval times when everyone wore heavy woollen tights. A backwards gusset is the equivalent of being in the stocks. A backwards gusset means your tights will be too short and rub in awkward and painful places, you will be forced to walk like a duck...and, in cheap tights, you will also spark like a mini Guy Fawkes. Tights pah! Unventilated and sweaty ...and please don’t tell me you haven’t been in a post shower situation with slightly damp skin trying to drag those suckers up? Hell sir! And now its winter and rather than facing the large moth-eaten bag of old tights with their baggy knees and holes in crucial places, some of them still in the balls I made to throw at the wall, I invest in expensive luxury, thigh slimming, ventilated-gusset, designer beauties only to immediately put my fingernails through them as I pull ‘em up. Two pairs already balled and thrown from wall into wastepaper basket.

wot's a 'tights'?

Tights. Nope. Gonna be wearing pyjama bottoms under my dresses from now on.

Canary in the Coalmine.

2011-10-27T04:13:00.000-07:00

It is a gorgeous day. High blue hanging tapestry of sky with crisp, cold air just enough to make your breath mist as you shout obscenities at the government. Not that we would of course. Most of us haven’t go that much breath to waste, confined as some of us are in wheelchairs or strapped into various bits of engineered exoskeleton, hanging on to guide dog harnesses or canes or friends or a combination thereof. For many of us just moving forward makes us gasp for air.

David C

The police mill around looking sheepish. ‘They are just here in case the rowdy element kick off,’ I say to my friend C as she surveys the frail looking folk in their assistance scooters. ‘That guy in particular,’ I whisper, pointing to a dummy in a wheelchair ( noooo... I am NOT doing a Ricky Gervais. It is an actual dummy) with a David Cameron mask on. Oddly, as people pass it they make little signs with their hands that look suspiciously like ‘warding off devil’ signs...if a ‘warding off devil’ sign involves an extended middle finger.

The lovely folk in the lead make us practice chanting before we set off. For 99% of us, shouting for anything is an entirely new experience. Most people with an impairment or a chronic illness are quietly stoic. The older generation in particular often settle into that ‘Blitz’ mentality of ‘keeping calm and carrying on.’ But now keeping calm and carrying on might kill you. Certainly it will lead to further exclusion and greater poverty. It is with a shocking sadness that we are rallying, accused of ‘scrounging’ of ‘leaching off the state’ and ignored almost entirely by a society warped by the recession.

The Disabled are Revolting!

‘Shout louder!’ we are told and we do, until our timidity disintegrates and we are ready.

The march route is short and takes us from the central park though a corner of the cathedral forum, with the wonderful library to the left and back to the park again. We chant lustily at about a dozen tourists, several irritated shoppers and a murder of crows that are looking rather too intensely at a few of the limping stragglers in our group.

What do we want?

Equal rights!

When do we want them?

Now!

Cath, me and Tim amongst the rabble1

Every time I shout ‘equal rights!’ I feel emotion rise up my sternum and drum on my heart.

Grace!

We try to shout loudly enough to disturb the rest of Norwich city but most of them have disappeared off to the Top Gear Road Show that is blasting pop tunes from behind the shopping centre. Ironically, there is probably more engineering technology in amongst the blinged up wheelchairs and motorised scooters in out raggedy group, but, undefeated we shuffle and skip, roll and scramble back to the park and listen to the speakers tell us not to give up. To fight on for compassion and equality. To fight on for fairness.

‘I am blind, my husband in visually impaired. I have two visually impaired children,’ says B. ‘I work hard and I want my kids to have every opportunity. Last year, we had a special bus service and I paid £250 getting the kids to school. Now the service has been cut and we have to find over £2000 a year. How?’

Her son stands up. ‘I want to go to university. The fees are so high now that most kids are having problems finding the basics. Given I would also need additional equipment, transport and access finance I am immediately excluded.’

Another woman with cerebral palsy, asthma and learning difficulties says her care has been cut from 10 to 3 hours a week. She still needs the care though.’

Other people talk about being excluded, passed over, dismissed, and judged useless. The changes in benefits, cuts to services, rescinding of the basic mobility component of the DLA means that more and more of us are unable to get out of the door, let alone to work. There are no good stories. Only one MEP has sent a message of support. In the distance the duff duff bass sound from the Top Gear Road Show wafts over briefly and disappears like a bad smell.

‘Was it a good march?’ my friend asks when I get back.

‘It was a beautiful day,’ I must admit. ‘But no. No, there was nothing good about such a march.’

My placard with thanks to Munch.

Only a few generations ago, in another recession, in another part of the world, people with disabilities and illness were called parasites too by a government propaganda machine. No one stood up and shouted. The government of the time felt vindicated and their second phase involved wide scale sterilisation. Again, very few people in the society of the time reacted. The government smiled and ticked the next box and we were the first to be exterminated. We, the disabled, were the canary in the coal mine. We still are.

The Hardest Hit!

2011-10-15T09:05:00.000-07:00

Hi there!

Hope you don't mind but I have copied the information from the RNIB website about the planned march next week. I went on the first one in London in April and I think it is very important that everyone is aware that the government 'changes' to disability benefits are going to directly affect the most vulnerable people in society. Its grotesque especially in the way is is all being done 'undar the radar'. You may think it doesn't affect you but it will in the long run.

Please, if you are near any of the places listed below, do turn up and show compassionate support. I'll be at the Norwich do with the groovy hound!

From RNIB:
If you are concerned that you or someone you know may be affected by planned benefits changes contained in the Welfare Reform Bill and by cuts to services locally, there is an action you can take in nine days' time.

Please join us at a Hardest Hit event in your region on 22 October to make your voice heard. You will be supporting other disabled people, people with long term conditions, their friends and family who are speaking out about the impact of planned cuts as the Welfare Reform Bill makes its way through Parliament.

RNIB is working with over 40 organisations to call for significant amendments to the Bill. Key concerns for blind and partially sighted people include:

Changes to contributory Employment and Support Allowance - including proposals for a 12 month time limit on benefits for people who lose their sight (and their job).

Changes to Disability Living Allowance - including proposals to end automatic entitlement to the benefit that replaces DLA, including the higher rate mobility component for people who are deafblind, or severely visually impaired.

We cannot underestimate the impact these proposed changes will have on blind and partially sighted people, and everyone living with a disability. Please join us at one of the 12 events taking place across the UK to send a clear message to Government - you are hitting disabled people and their families the hardest: stop unfair welfare cuts.

•Belfast: Debate at the Radison Blu Hotel in Belfast on the Welfare Reform Bill's impact on disabled people's freedom and independence. Please note the Belfast event is on 20 October and starts at 1.30pm. Visit the Hardest Hit website to sign up to attend.
•Birmingham: Rally in Victoria Square, in the city centre on 22 October. Assemble from noon and the rally will begin at 12.30pm.
•Brighton: Rally at Jubilee Square, Jubilee Street, Brighton on 22 October. Gather from 11am with speeches between 11.30 - 12.30pm.
•Bristol: March on 22 October beginning on College Green, outside the Council House, at the bottom of Park Street, from 12 noon - 1.00pm. Return to College Green for a rally from 1.00pm - 2.00pm.
•Cardiff: March and rally on 22 October. Assemble from 12.30 in the car park outside City Hall, Cathays Park. Speeches from 1.00, followed by a march and returning to City Hall for a rally at 2.00pm.
•Edinburgh: Rally on 22 October. Assemble from 11.00am at the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens in Central Edinburgh. Rally starts at 12 noon.
•Leeds: Assemble on 22 October at Victoria Gardens, outside Leeds Art Gallery on Headrow, from 12.30pm for march through main shopping areas and returning to Headrow. Rally from 2.00 - 2.30pm.
•London: Rally on 22 October outside London's iconic GLA building (City Hall), Queen's Walk. Meeting from 11.00am with speeches from 11.30am.
•Manchester: Rally on 22 October between 2.00pm and 3.00pm at Albert Square, outside Manchester Town Hall.
•Newcastle: March and rally on 22 October. The march will leave Bigg Market at10.30am, walking to the Monument for rally at 11.30am. Ends at 12.30pm.

•Norwich: March and rally on 22 October. Assemble from 11.30am at Chaplefield Gardens in the centre of Norwich. March starts at noon and returns to Chaplefield Gardens for the rally at 1.00pm.

•Nottingham: Rally on 22 October. The rally is taking place in Old Market Square, just outside Nottingham Council House from 12.30pm to 13.30pm.

More information about individual events and contact details can be found on the Hardest Hit website. If you want to support the campaign but you are unable to attend an event, the Hardest Hit website also has a list of suggested actions you can take.http://thehardesthit.wordpress.com/

Night Nighties

2011-10-04T03:52:00.000-07:00

Right, that’s it. I have HAD it with nighties. In fact all bloody silly night dresses of all forms; wispy, silky, clinging, spaghetti-strapped, long cotton with pretty embroidery, delicate, immensely irritating bloody nighties. No more! They are just not safe night wear.
You see a couple of nights ago, Grace and I were woken by suspicious crashing noises coming from the garden. Grace leaps up and dashes for the back door with me on her tail, desperately flicking on all the lights in the flat.

‘Let me at ‘em,’ growls Grace, pretending to be three times her size and when I open the back door a crack she pushes past and hurtles barking into the treacle blackness of the garden. I am left peering blindly into the pitch black, terrified that Grace will get hurt or that I will get rushed by whoever is trying to clamber drunkenly over the back fence. It is then I realise that, back lit by the lights in the living room, I am standing at the French doors in a nightie now utterly transparent.

Must have been one hell of a scary sight because silence now floods the garden. I am still standing clinging to the door, trying in vain to retain some dignity, when Grace trots back in. She pauses momentarily raising eyebrows at me then shakes her head as if to say ‘you just can’t get the staff these days', and lopes off to bed.

Pyjamas are the way forward. In fact, due to having a terrible head cold the other weekend, I was too befuddled to pack a bag correctly and hence arrived to give an after dinner speech without the correct trousers (Gromit!) I ended up standing in front of 140 people to give a talk in my pyjama bottoms. Luckily they weren’t the fluffy ones or the ones with little love hearts on the arse but just saying. I couldn't have done THAT in a nightie!

Self Portrait with du vin.

No one would have noticed either except that, after said talk and to calm myself I downed several glasses of ‘medicinal’ whisky and, all snotty nose and lozenge breath, leaned unsteadily into the handsome man on my right and hissed ‘Guess what...I am so easy to get into bed I am already in my pyjamas!’ before winking one gruesome red rimmed eye and blowing my nose in a come-hither kind of a way.

Oddly enough he wasn’t tempted but my point is that never nighties. Always pyjamas. Especially if one is in a sinking ship. Remember your first life saving instruction? Tie knots in your pj bottoms and blow them into a life vest (or life raft depending on the size of your pj’s of course... )

Whatever your night wear, thank you for patiently waiting for me to get my blog brain back in gear. I aim to keep my posts shorter but more regular from now on. After all we have a hell of a lot to catch up on! How have you all been?

Please Don't Adjust Your Sets....

2011-06-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

My blog brain is on hiatus but ...It Will Be Back! I promise. I apologise for lack of clown in the very bad replica BBC test card but Grace had a hissy fit and legged it into the garden when I said she had to wear a hat. Hope you are all well.
Tanvi x

Fighting Talk

2011-03-30T02:22:00.000-07:00

image from internet

I am gritting my teeth. Sweat is beading under my fringe and my legs are twisted around each other. My friend C, on the opposite chair, is equally scrunched up. We are listening to a CD ....a workshop on Non Violent Communication. It is fascinating and for me it much of it makes very good sense BUT the man’s voice, a painfully slow, American drone of a drawl, is driving us nuts. I am aware of the irony, the fact I am having to hang on to the armrests of my chair so as not to up and head butt the CD player.

‘Does irritation still count as anger?’ asks C, lips near white as her knuckles

‘Can’t talk. Listening,’ I hiss going puce in the face.

The man is talking about how anger is useful as a signal. Why are we reacting in anger to the particular situation? If we unpick our anger we always find an ‘unmet need’. Resolve this with care and compassion and one will find, apparently, the anger obsolete. This ‘signalling’ works with guilt and shame and elements of depression too. Unmet needs. He uses an example of a married couple who come to him saying they are having terrible rows.

‘I just get so angry with him,’ says the woman

‘Why? What behaviour is he exhibiting, exactly, that is making you react this way?’ asks our American droner

‘Because he...errr...he....never..err...he doesn’t...’

‘If you told me what you wanted me to do I would do it!’ interjects the man

Again the woman thinks. ‘It’s hard. I can’t say exactly.’

Then she realises. ‘Ohhh, she says. ‘I actually need him to know what I want before I know and then to just do it. ‘

image from internet

Hence she has revealed an impossible conundrum that she can only solve by understanding her ‘unmet need’ is for something only a telepathic soothsayer could help her with. She doesn’t have one of those. She has a husband. She will need to actually work out what she wants him to do and ask him to do it. It’s a revelation to them both.

I’m not sure if it saved the marriage or if she ran off with a Betazoid (whispers to people without TV, ’that’s a clever Star Trek reference to a telepath soothsayer’ ..cough) Non Violent Communication is a particularly useful way of engaging warring communities to understand that the needs they externalise as violence and fury are actually about unmet needs within; safety, autonomy, sustenance etc. Once an unmet need is exposed and understood it can be negotiated. And it can work equally well for the individual, especially for those people like myself who spend a lot of time enraged at themselves. How many times I day to I want to whack myself upside my own head? ‘You blithering idiot!’ I scream at myself when I do something imperfectly. All rather pointless self abuse which I would be mighty relieved to stop.

I intend to delve into the ideas around NVC in greater detail in the hope that it will help me with all my interactions...(mainly, I would imagine, because by the time I have actually worked out exactly why I am pissed off and what the unmet need IS ..the situation will have resolved itself.) There is need of this I think, of finding something positive to grip on to. Something possible and useful. I don’t know if you are feeling anything like me what with the current icy sluicing of tsunamis and radiation, the fearful boiling over in Libya, Yemen, Cote, D’Ivoire, Syria...? I feel helpless and that all is beyond my understanding and certainly out of my control. I want to fight the injustice, bring help to the displaced, be ‘of use’ and at the same time to run somewhere safe. ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home..’ Its classic ‘flight or fight.’

Maybe the drawling American man will have some answers. Ruby Slippers. (C) T. Bush 2011

A few days ago on yet another very overcrowded commuter train, the woman opposite me insists on squeezing onto the seat even though I have asked her to keep it clear. My guide dog needs a bit of room to breathe,’ I say apologetically.

‘I know dogs,’ the woman says, unpacking her handbag without looking at me. ‘She’ll be fine.’

I am furious. But I remember American Drawl Man. ‘Why?’ I ask myself. ‘What exactly is my unmet need?’

I wait until the train creaks slowly out of Kings Cross and begins to pick up speed. Then I lean across and smile at the woman who has placed her expensive shoes either side of poor Grace’s head.

‘Just so you know, ‘ I say sweetly. ‘My dog has a tendency to vomit when she gets stressed.’

Then, as the woman looks up horrified from behind her newspaper and in vain tries to move her legs, I lean back and feign sleep. Seems my ‘unmet need’ was to ensure we all respected each other’s space. See how easy Non Violent Communication is?

St Iving Off!

2011-02-07T02:35:00.000-08:00

'What’s that?' There is a most remarkable sound coming out of Daisy's rucksack.

‘Flamingos.’ says Daisy unperturbed.

'Oh,' , I say blinking. 'Noisy aren’t they.'

'I had seagulls before', says Daisy 'but that made things a bit difficult at the seaside.'.

I can see her point. We are in St Ives in Cornwall and the sky is tattered with gulls. Having their cry as a ringtone on one’s phone might be more than a bit confusing. A lot of missed calls.

Ahhh St Ives in winter! Just look at the light and the quaintness and most important for Surly curmudgeons and sea dogs like me and Grace, look how empty it all is! Whole beaches to ourselves and harbours to mooch around in.

I cannot recommend it enough- although tis jolly far away. One has to contend with quite a lot of sites, shops, restaurants and bars being shut for winter refurbishment but there is still plenty of great seafood, the Tate shop and enough art and tat shops to please. And even without a car to get across to some of the more wonderful, less accessible beaches, St Ives itself has plentyof sand and surf, all in walking distance and one can always hop on the train. (Right, where is my 10% from the Cornish tourist board?)

My friend, Daisy, and I had organised a couple of rooms in a luxury self catering apartment at a ridiculously low winter rate. As part of the Treganna Castle complex the apartment was at the top of the hill overlooking the town with views out onto a golf course. I had thought it would be a perfect writing retreat but it turns out that staying in too gorgeous a place is dangerous for writers. How could I sit, hunched over the same old computer all day when ten minutes down the hill was roaring surf and wide open beaches full of light and sound?. Plus Grace, having realised on the first day that any movement away from the apartment and ‘down’ meant BEEEAAACCHHH, completely forgot almost every moment of her training and insisted on plunging , with me gripping white knuckled to her harness, over the edges of any steep steps or cliffs she came to no matter where they led. This did cause some conflict, a few angry words but hey..who could resist this expression?

I must thank the guitar wielding, genius cook and inspired driver, Daisy for putting up with my belly aching about work (and literally belly aching, as somehow I had managed to bring a nasty bug along that made me pretty sick for several days...although strangely didn’t stop me getting through the wine box...) And Grace for being the happiest beast in Cornwall. For Rachma and Steven for letting us drink their gin on the way up and back. The sea the sea the wonderful sea!!

Briefly on other news; In Zambia I was sad to hear that Bente Lorenz passed away at the end of last week.

In a career spanning over 50 years, she will be celebrated as a internationally renowned potter, a master of ceramics and glazes, writer, artist and an inspiration to artists across the world as well as a great and kind friend and mentor. My love goes to her children and grandchildren.

All photos copyright (C) T. Bush 2011

She's back!!

2011-01-08T11:57:00.001-08:00

image from internet

I know, I know...once again the blog got filed under ‘bury head in sand’ and the year is suddenly rounding up on the middle-end of January. Gadzooks! Apologies (and I have to give an extra thanks very much to a particular reader who gave me a gentle boot up the backside to get going again. You know who you are!)
Right then. Where are we? Ahh yes...a smashing and relaxing Xmas with my sister and her fiance, a tub-thumping New Year and a crash dive into the bleak mid winter. Such I believe was the pattern for many of us, running hell bent towards the end of the year, eyes shut, fingers in our ears, shouting ‘ Yabadabaddooooo! We made it!’ only to find there was no ‘it’ to make and the morning after was still full of plot holes and winter and ‘what next’s and job hunting and cut backs and the usual hangover of world politics.
I realised that although my 2011 needed to include such things as ‘income’ and ‘love’ and ‘adventure’, I wasn’t going to be able to do any of it or even think straight until I had finished the first draft of my thriller ‘Witchgirl.’ The only problem was that it didn’t seem to want to be written. I tried concentrated blasts. Nope. I snuck up on it, pretending to walk past the computer and then ambushing the keyboard. Nope. I turned off facebook. (This helped but was unsustainable), and I even attempted to remain seated in three hour blocks three times a day. Nada. Not even an eloquently constructed sausage. I whined at everyone (hence facebook on again) and eventually went to far as to moan about the unfairness of it all to my poor cousin in the States- she of the post back surgery-and-by-the-way-I-am-still -in-agony,-still-have-kids-and-a-job- to-deal with-and-am-not-allowed-to-even-swivel-let-alone- pick-up-my-own-martini- glass, cousin. I called to cheer her up with my whining.

'Tanvir,' she said. 'Just write it.'

'Whatdaya mean?' I asked sulkily.' I am a creative. I have to wait... '

'Just get to the end and THEN go back and make it pretty.'

'Really?'

'Really! '

And so and so after much whimpering I finally tucked in my chin and did a slightly off centre judo roll into my final few chapters. And it stinks! Hell yeh! Trust me I am not being modest here. It pongs big time.. but at least I am now in the final few thousand words.
I intend to get to the end by THE END OF THE MONTH! Dad a daaaaa!

And that’s bascically why I have been unblogged folks. At the moment it hasn’t been worth the wait but maybe..just maybe...after a great deal of plot darning, some character renames, an additional sex scene and a spell check this blasted book might be my ticket into 2011 after all.

Apart from the above mentioned, I didn’t really have many resolutions this year but I did decide to continue the one major lesson I learnt last year. I learnt that life can be hard BUT it is you who decides if life is shit. It’s a very simple attitude correction. Feels like having one’s posture adjusted by a physiotherapist. You may feel like a plonker as they twist you into shape; elbows back, neck relaxed, chin in..but then your entire spine suddenly feels gooey with relief, all supple and sexy. Problem is that it takes practice. One is barely out the clinic door before one is slumping and chin poking all over the shop again. You have to keep telling yourself, straighten out, boobs out, elbows and chin IN.
Same with life. I don’t mind hard. Hard is just a challenge and it feels good to get through things that are hard. ‘Shit’ on the other hand is a steady circular downward thing. (I know my metaphors are getting out of hand) I have learnt that approaching things as ‘hard’ as opposed to ‘shit’ makes them possible, sometimes even exciting.
So from now on everytime I hear myself winigng about things being just so shit , inclduing the problems involved with getting my novel fixed, or money, or eyes, I will straighten up and say nope...things are probably going to be hard but that's quite all right. Boobs out, chin in, come on 2011!!

Grace Dec 2010 (c) T. Bush

Mooning over my Dog!

2010-12-21T12:17:00.000-08:00

Dear All, photo: 'Solstice Dog 2010' (c) T Bush 2010

Grace is three today! A winter solstice dog and especially for her an eclipse! a moon eclipse. There was a total eclipse of the sun on my 30th birthday on the summer solstice a few (okay..more than a 'few') years ago....freaky huh? Anyway she doth love the snow and eats as much of it as she can reach but working in it is not possible as there are now no defined kerbs and everything smells different and a dog just can't concentrate dammit!

So we are safely holed up in Radsock for the Xmas week and want to wish you all a warm and loving time of it. Sending love to my cousin who goes into surgery tomorrow, to all my family and friends dotted around the world and to all the wonderful people who check in on me from time to time on this 'ere blog. It has been a pleasure writing for you this year!

Keeping this short as I am sure you are all busy mixing cocktails and trying to work out cooking times per kilo for the turkey you have weighed in pounds. More soon but now there is the season finale of CSI: Miami to watch (research you know....purely research..cough cough..)

Much much love and be careful out there,

Tanvi and Grace.

Tripping

2010-12-05T14:27:00.000-08:00

The woman is blocking my path, thrusting the wheelchair at my legs.
‘I don’t need a wheel chair,’ I tell her for the second time. ‘I am visually impaired but there is nothing wrong with my legs.’
She is having none of it however. Here in Philadelphia airport the disabled Are Assisted In A Wheelchair, dammit!
‘It will be faster,’ she says. . She is pretty solid and behind her is a rattled looking security guard. Behind me the passengers are getting restless I submit..and here’s the rub. It IS a lot faster. Barbi for that is the wheelchair pimping woman’s name, puffs along at the speed of sound whisking me through customs, baggage reclaim and back into the departures. Everyone is terribly nice, talking to Barbi over my head as if I am a well behaved child. I get a ‘well done’ when I hand over my passport. I wonder if I should drool in gratitude. Barbi, in spite of my protestations and constant pointing at my fully functioning legs, transfers me into the back of a peeping electric cart driven by another hugely fat woman who does not look as if she would be capable of walking herself.
I am taken all the way to my gate and off loaded. The seat is uncomfortable and dirty and there is an hour until we board. I ‘undisable’ myself. I will not remain in my prescribed seat. I will not be good. I stalk off back down the shiny corridor passing the fat lady in the electric cart.
‘Are you alright?’ she yells confused as to where I might, cane a-swishing, be heading.
‘I am going to find a bar.’ I yell back over the peeping. ‘I might actually NEED you to pick me up after the amount of Bloody Marys I shall be imbibing.’
‘Oh my Lord!’ wails the woman as I grin wickedly and narrowly avoid walking into someone’ luggage.

I spend two days in New York holed up with my cousin and her two small children in their apartment in Manhattan. My cousin is in agony. Problems in her spine are causing nerve compression and the pain is truly excruciating. Nonetheless she is still having to run a busy nursery and kindergarten, look after her two small kids and generally ‘cope’ with life in the Big Apple until her surgery. She is now on extremely high doses of pain medication and has been advised to keep nipping at the vodka (the last remaining weapon against nerve pain) until her surgery

The vodka-nipping bodes well for me of course but I soon realise that even I, with my Lusaka trained liver, can’t keep up with the constant martinis and still manage to keep fully focused on the small ones. On day two, we head to Philadelphia to my cousin’s folks for help and thanks giving.

These are the smalls.

They look cute don’t they? Adorable in fact. Do NOT be fooled. The little one on the left can go from Zen Master to Monster in under 10 seconds. In Philly they go from riotously sweet to..well .....just plain riotous and at one point the lad, Ben, sets off the burglar alarm which triggers a phone call from the police. In an effort to make them calm their rampaging it is decided to try and string out the police situation.

‘Oh now look what you’ve done.’ shouts his mother. ‘The police are on their way! Now you will have to go to jail.’

‘Its not jail, Mummy, its ‘juvie,’ Ben corrects her.

‘I won’t let them take you!’ Zen Monster shrikes turning into a tiny Bonnie (of Clyde fame). ‘I won’t let them take you alone! Quick lets go and hide!’

This is rapidly getting out of hand and their granddad stomping downstairs, ringing the door and pretending to be a policeman only adds to the hysteria. They hole up upstairs, barricading doors, recruiting mercenary teddies and making catapaults out of pacifiers......

We all reach for the vodka..

Later, amongst other outings, we take the kids to a Chuck E Cheese restaurant for a treat. For those of you who may not heard of a Chuck Eeeeagh Cheese it is a pizza serving amusement arcade. Little children are given tokens and set free within. Our hands are stamped on entry so that we can’t try and sneak off without taking our children (and vice versa). It sounds like it should be sweet but the whole place smells funny; of anxious sweat and old nappies and the kids, loaded up on coke, run from game to game without pausing to put down their pizza.
My poor cuz, recently back from an MRI scan at the hospital, sits opposite me in the far booth, watching her son licking the mirrors on the merry-go-round..

‘You know Chuck E Cheese is a rat?’ she muses.

A rat running a children’s restaurant. Indeed, at one point a thin person in a large rat mask and hairy gloves comes out of a hole in the wall and dances with the exhausted staff before throwing hundreds of prize tickets into the terrifying crowd of seething sugared up children and scampering away.

(c) Ben Edlizt
Luckily it isn't all Chuck E Cheese. We escape in the evenings and there is sushi and cheese fries, delicious Cobb salads and the boil in a bag turkey and pie at Thanksgiving. All in all it is a manic but wonderful week. I love my cousins. They are all so smart and funny and so full of love for each other. They are exceptionally generous and gentle too. And the smalls, when good, are very very good. . The Zen Master is a marvellous cuddler and Ben gives me this work of art before I go. (I suspect it is a portrait of me after spending an hour at Chuck, E. Cheese)

(pic: Suzie and Irv in Philadelphia (c) T. Bush)

I arrive back in England to my icy flat and no dog and for a moment the heavy cold silence weighs me down. I even consider putting on the children’s channel and watching SpongeBob Square Pants all night...but then I remember Chuck E Cheese ....and I breathe a guilty sigh of relief...

Hedging Bets

2010-11-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

‘Well, YOU’RE obviously not blind,’ grins the woman at the end of the bench. We are at the vet and Grace is still in her harness. I am not sure quite how to respond. It always surprises me how the assumption on seeing a person whose eyes are apparently undamaged, who is without a helper and who isn’t actually feeling their way along a wall is that the person albeit with cane or guide dog, is fully sighted

‘Actually I am..well not blind.. but visually impaired.’

I am staring right at her which is always a mistake. I should really roll my eyes wildly in my head; stumble up to her and run my fingers over her face. At least a small eye twitch...but I haven’t the time to ‘do blind’. I have nice make up on. I did my own mascara. If I twitch I’ll smear it.

She looks doubtful ‘Oh, really?,’ (This must be in case I am not sure.) ‘I thought you were training the dog.’

I do my required two minute spiel about tunnel vision and she nods enthusiastically, all green-wellied lady of the manor politeness. Slones are not an endangered species in Cambridge. She has come in to see if the hedgehog she rescued yesterday has recovered. It had seemed a little ‘off’ which is the polite word for ‘run over’. The elderly receptionist assures her it has been doing fine

'I’ll just pop into the back to check...but I sure you can take it home.’ The woman apparently releases homeless hedgehogs in her expansive garden.
‘I have plenty of room,’ she snorts happily.

The receptionist comes back rubbing her hands, embarrassed. ‘ Err...would you believe it..the poor thing has expired.’

Expired? I think, imagining a tiny bar code and sell by date on the little hog’s tummy. At that moment the vet comes through looking his usual dishevelled stern Germanic self.

‘Her hedgehog’s dead,’ says the receptionist a little desperately.

‘Ah.’ The vet blinks Prussian-Blue eyes from behind his glasses. ‘We must do better next time.’

Mum and John arrive from a brief jaunt to New York. John had just run the New York marathon and bested his previous time, which considering he had only just started training when I saw them in France a couple of months ago is remarkable. All hail!

I once made the mistake of asking him about sports shoes. 'I can’t remember if I over-pronate or ..you know the other...but what running shoes on the market would you recommend? Structured insoles? How about resprung layering with sweat resistant technology..?' I had wittered in my best athletic sounding jargon. He had raised a baffled eyebrow. Turns out he wears ‘trainers’, the older, the more used to his feet, the better.

Between them (Mum and John, not the trainers) they still, in spite of marathons jet lag and lugging of baggage, have more energy than Ritalin-deprived, 10 year olds on Tango and spangles. They pile out into my garden chopping, sawing, weeding, mowing and generally saving its life. They rearrange my furniture, put lights up, clean the loo. Although Grace and I can only hunker down under a table and watch all this, I am very, very grateful. The lights in the kitchen make a world of difference. I might actually try reading a recipe book for once I say dancing around. I might even stop eating out of the saucepan and put things on a plate now I can see what they are. Grace inspects the garden and is surprised to see that her dog run is still there, now that the nettles and bind weed have been cleared. She is even more excited to find she can, when no one is watching, now sneak all the way around it and poo secretly in the grass around the back. Image: Grace (c) T. Bush 10

The week ends with my boiler going on the blink but more importantly with the release of the wonderful Aung San Suu Kyi. Nervous joy greets her, everyone glancing over their shoulders for the guns. What has the regime got in store next you can almost hear them thinking. Why now? Is it real? Safe?

We wait and see.

Death in waves.

2010-11-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

Well I finally handed in my MA manuscript last week. It was a huge relief especially as last week had been a terrible mess. The cold I mentioned in my last blog had grown worse and worse until I was finding it hard to stay out of bed for more than an hour at a time....the hour being just enough to get to the shop or to stumble down to the riverside so that at least Grace could bound about in the glorious autumn sunshine. Mostly I shivered and coughed, eyes and nose streaming, trying to proof read and edit...I lie. Mostly I slept and my dreams were crazy and sad.

I dream I am a little girl in a hut near the sea. A man comes in and wakes us all, tells us to come outside quickly. I am small and having to carrying a basket and the sand is hard to walk on. It is very early in the morning but warm although it is oddly still, no wind, grey light reflecting from the white sand. I hold on to the back of my mother who is bent over, gripping, along with the rest of my family, to an outcrop of seaweedy rocks. Behind us a wave is coming, hundreds of feet high and although I can’t hear it , I hold my breath like one does when about to go underwater, waiting for the monstrous silent wave to come smashing down ....but there is no crash. I open my eyes..peek...
..and then I am a teenage boy in a makeshift hospital. I see my brother. Across is my father, an Indian-looking man with bandages on his legs. He is saying, smiling and crying at the same time, ..’It took all the women...but it left me my sons..

(I thought it was just a fever dream. A few days later, in the news, I hear about the tsunami in Sumatra. I wonder about that still... )

Then, on the Wednesday night my sister calls to say that Mark has died. Mark J was my friend, the older brother of a childhood buddy in Zambia. He was a lovely, handsome, gentle farming (he didn't farm 'genltes'..I mean he WAS gentle..and he farmed too..) man who spoke fluent chiNyanja and was a serious fundi of all things ‘Zambian bush.’ He played guitar, drank whiskey, loved to jitterbug (and had once pulled me, back then a rather stodgy teenager, onto the dancefloor and thrown me skywards and spun me around until I was dizzy and besotted.)
A few weeks ago he went to collect wages for his farm workers and a gang held them up and robbed them, shooting, for no apparent reason, Mark directly in the head and chest. And even then..and even then ..he clung on for six weeks undergoing extreme operations in a hospital in SA but his injuries were too much.
Violent death makes bloody rents in the world. People stagger listlessly, confused by the news, unable to know what to say to each other, to the close families left behind, the parents, the children, the partners. Those rents don’t heal like tears from other deaths. They go on bleeding for a long, long time. They make us feel shabby with helplessness, angry and weary.
Edani Bwino mzanga, wrote his frind Miranda. Travel well. She posts a photo of Mark on Facebook. He is smiling hugely, all blond hair and teeth, the afternoon sun golden on his face and the big blue sky fading to evening behind him.

But there is good news too at last. Two friends have bouncing baby boys, an Oscar and a Josef! And also, on Thursday, in a different hospital in SA, my Dad is given the thumbs up and a 99% all clear after a follow up check on his stem cell treatment. He flies back to Lusaka immensely relieved. He’ll have to go back again in three months but for the moment it is all realy pretty damn wonderful. As promised I have a rather dodgy photo of his rather dodgy bonce. His hair truly is growing in a Mohican on top and all curling backwards on the sides... pics don’t quite do it justice! Its hysterical!

I decide to send Dad a photo of Grace and I cheering him on. I go to C, my 90 year old buddy and show her the ‘countdown and click’ technique that can help visually impaired people take pictures of moving objects. She takes several great shots including this one of Grace and I leaping around in her garden in the glorious afternoon sun. Life is so precarious and precious isn't it?

Overcast

2010-10-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

Oh hell! I said I would post at the end of the week...LAST week! I am very sorry. I have STILL been faffing around with my MA manuscript. Had another deadline on Friday and now have another two week extension!!

Don’t get me wrong. I am VERY grateful for the extra few days especially for help with the proofing. It’s just that the pressure has been full on for quite some time now and I am a little grouchy with it all. I try to be working by 7am and then with odd breaks for naps, gym, (note photo of me looking like Eastern European wrestler and the hell hound) feeding, walking dog, am basically just glued to a smoking computer all day every day. Sometimes I will sit for hours with nothing happening. Each sentence feeling like Velcro being ripped out of my hair and although I love writing this book some of it is tough. Bad things happen. Death runs over the pages

Thank god for the internet! I can sneak off to read the papers, check email and rifle through other people’s days on facebook. I love face book. Right now on my home page there are a series of photos from a friend who found a huge snake in his shower. We are all waiting - him rather anxiously I should imagine, for someone to identify it. Looked venomous to me. Another pal is just back from a poetry slam in Midlands. Someone else offering a house sit in a chateau in France. My brother has a cold and is back from Amsterdam. My mum and sister pickling and jam-making. Another friend moans about Zambian women and their addiction to Sugar Daddies. Someone telling the world they love their mother. Music. Ridiculous short videos. Blogs and events and more. When you are stuck in a room for days at a time other peoples' lives are so very fascinating!

I have been warned about privacy. Someone could sneak in and steal my identity. Gawd imagine the poor sod.
‘heh heh heh.. I’m in. I’m her. Quick into the bank account...eh? For heaven’s sake! It’s empty. This is ridicu...ow! F+++! I just walked into a tree! And what the hell just happened to my love life? I have been on less dates then a piece of old chewing gum stuck under a desk circ 1989. And exactly HOW bad am I at maths...? Eeesshhhhh....didn’t see that bike. That really hurt. Well I guess at least I get a gorgeous dog. Hang on...why does everything smell of fox poo...?’
Etc.
So good luck to ‘em. (and yes I DO know that isn't exactly how it happens.)
They would also have to contend with situations like last night. After a long and rather fraught journey from Bath (I had a cold, Grace had wind and the train carriage was over heated and VERY crowded. Not a good mix!) we arrived in a torrential icy downpour. By the time we had got to the barriers at Cambridge stations everyone was soaked. The queue for the taxis was horrific and I know from experience that without a copper around to help me enforce my human rights, not one of the taxis was going to take a wet dog anyway, so Grace and I had no choice but to hoof it. And it rained and it rained. By the time we got home I couldn’t get my keys out of my handbag because my hands were frozen and even Grace’s tail was slightly less waggy.
This was the face I was wearing by the time we got into the warmth.... scary hey?!
Needless to say the cold was worse this morning and both Grace and I have spent the day indoors wrapped in several layers and mostly horizontal. Better now though. Nothing like a duvet day!

On the Dad front: he has been doing really well but his knees are giving him a bit of jip and he has to go back to SA in a few days to double check on everything. The most marvellous thing has happened to his hair though...it was so excited to be growing back it seems to have set out in three different directions. Up on either side and all along the top. It is a mixture of 'Last of the Mohicans' and Elvis. I will try and get a photo. Right. Enough from me. I am not going to have a break and watch bad TV and get an early night. Or watch good TV and have a late night. Or combinations there of. More soon.
T x

Grovelling abject apologies!

2010-10-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

Apologies...I am alive and well but struggling with MA dissertation deadlines. Thank you everyone who read and commented on my last post! Such a pleasure to get such powerful feedback.
Much to tell you...only right now I have to pull a novel out of my .... head and so am being more than a little hopeless. Will post properly later this week.
Tanvir

Holey Vision: The Grumpy Girl's Guide To Surviving Sight Loss

2010-09-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

This speech was given on Saturday 17th September 2010 to the National Talking Newpapers Convention in Peterborough.

Good evening! First a disclaimer: this post supper instructional talk will include flashing images – for me that is not for you...also a little blurring and distortion. There will be strong langugue and it will certainly contain nuts.
Also please note that all opinions expressed are those of the author. Other visually impaired or blind experiences may vary.

To be frank I was initially a little bamboozled about what to speak to you about this evening. After all you ‘read’ the newpapers so you are already going to be pretty au fait with current affairs and am sure will know more than I about any events, remarkable breakthroughs or such in the visual impairment charity sector.
So I thought I would fall back on what I know best. To talk about what it like to find oneself visually impaired; how one is forced to adjust and reinterpret the world. Hence my title:

Holey vision: the grumpy girl’s guide to surviving sight loss.
I have – just in case this gets picked up by Women’s’ Weekly or Cosmopolitan broken it down into five top tips.
The first top tip in surviving sight loss is obviously
1) Don’t bloody lose it in the first place.
It is not just that sight is very useful for getting around the sales in Primark or finding a gap in the crowd at the bar at last orders ( in fact finding the bar) it is that ‘blindness’ is one of the great taboos of disability. ‘Eyes are the windows of the soul’ after all. We are suspicious of people who hide their eyes, shade them in sunglasses or won’t look us in the face. In some cultures eye contact is so powerful it is deemed dangerous and extremely rude to stare at one’s elders or ‘betters’. Most of us feel understandably that eye contact is an essential part of communication. To lose it, or to have one’s eyes disfigured in some way by disease is almost like being ‘branded’ as different....
And then think of all the connotations of blindness in terms of langugue, mostly negative; blind rage, blind fear, blind ignorance, blind faith. In mythology blindness is often associated with in-sight or physic ability, Tireseas, the Fates. More recently with supernatural hearing ability like the comic figure Daredevil, or extra sensory awareness like Geordie le Forge in Star Trek.

But mostly let’s admit it, it is associated with vulnerability, weakness and of course, absolute dependency. To be blinded is to be somehow punished, foreshortened, diminished. You ‘weaken the pack’, become a burden and still in many cultures including this one, are relegated to the bench of life, no longer a player, no longer expected an active part. . When given a diagnosis of a degenerative eye disease, it is not just the fear of losing one’s vision that cripples. It is the fear of losing one’s identity.

I was 21 when I was told I had a disease I still can’t spell, retinitis pigmentosa. After several rather gruelling tests the ophthalmologist patted my knee and said ‘Good luck. You have five to fifteen years of sight left..possibly.’
That was it. He couldn’t tell me how it would happen, how it would feel, he didn’t warn me of all the possible side effects, the other conditions that sneak up when your eyes become weakened. I, like many people in this situation, was left to find things out for myself.

Now the thing about RP, is that it is genetic and if the docs can’t find any family history, you are labelled a ‘mutant’...gosh mutant! See how immediately sexy disability can be? Anyway as a mutant everyone’s prognosis differs. Some people lose sight quickly. Others in short dramatic bursts with long periods in-between. Some people only lose a certain amount and then ‘stick’ like in a poker game. But because you haven’t got a clue as to how your eyes are going to change and all you can hear s that word ‘blindness’ gonging in your ears like the knell of doom you naturally panic. And you insist that everyone around you panics also. The panic may continue for years and it’s at this stage you will lose many friends and even the support and understanding of some family.
I was diagnosed in 1993 and my progression was thankfully very slow. It wasn’t until 2004 that I was actually registered blind. And, in fact, until recently I also worked with a foot in both camps – sighted and non-sighted partly because I can cope, get around, bluff it in good light (although I am totally night-blind). I used to cause great confusion when I was still working as a documentary film maker in Zambia in the early 2000s by driving my crew around through the day and then turning up at restaurants and bars in the evening staggering out of a taxi with a signal cane. I once was accused of witchcraft..but that was after several beers and no one was seeing straight by then anyway.

If you can imagine you have an empty loo roll in your hand. If you squash it a little and then hold it over your eyes it leaves about 10 degrees of sight in the centre which is about my current amount. The eyes are photosensitive (which means I am blinded by sunlight and bright florescent and low-light/night-blind) and I am losing colour vision. My peripheral vision is gone –whited out in places and in other bits – where the incredible brain-eye magic happens – some of the world doesn’t exist at all. My eye insists there is nothing there.
This can lead to remarkable brief splurges of hallucination as my brain tries to make sense of what the eye is saying is empty space. The brain says to the eye ‘yeah..I see what you are saying..but there IS something there because it doesn’t make sense otherwise.’ And the brain fills in the gaps. With anything it can. I have seen polar bears shopping in supermarkets; often see people pressed up against the windows of their cars only to find the car empty when I get close. Cats...for some reason visually impaired people see lots of cats!

This is not unusual and different sight loss conditions can cause different hallucinations. Interestingly there is a condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome which is usually associated with macular degeneration. Studies have shown that sufferers often experience almost identical hallucinations sometimes so brain splittingly realistic that they cannot go on with their daily lives. Often patterns or landscapes and creepily on occasion small children dressed in Victorian clothing. I kid you not! When I asked an ophthalmologist if Victorian children were seen by MD suffers from other cultures i.e. Africa he couldn’t tell me.
There is a great novel in there somewhere!

But as I mentioned it is rare for GPs or ophthalmologists to give you the heads up on this. Potential side effects of distorted vision are almost never discussed with patients and Ii have met several people who thought they were losing their marbles and were too scared to even approach their GP.
Which, talking of ophthalmologists, GPs and the like leads me to my second top tip.
2. Learn a martial art.
– because you are going to need it! It doesn’t matter how elderly or frail you may be– if you are beginning to lose your vision you are going to need to learn kickboxing or at the very least how to handle a taser. Because, as soon as you start needing a cane or a guide to get around, you are going to become a non-person to some people, invisible to some people, pitiful and actually a little frightening to others. Yes I said it. Sighted people are often afraid of blind people. It goes back to what I mentioned at the beginning- how blindness is somehow a thing of nightmares. The Day of the Triffids stuff! Endless darkness.....cue Twilight Zone music.

To counter their fear many sighted people- and I KNOW this because I WAS one- use the ‘does he take sugar ‘ approach when dealing with someone with a cane, guide or guide dog. They feel it’s ok to stare, to discuss the person loudly with colleagues, to talk over their heads. Once, whilst in dark glasses and with long cane, I was waiting to get on a train in London when a complete stranger, without a word, came up behind me, picked me up and dumped me unceremoniously in the carriage. Like a suitcase!
Either way, when this happens a quick upper cut or blast from a taser seems to work wonders. I would advise the same technique when negotiating crowds or trying to get attention in Addenbrookes Eye Hospital
I have actually invented a cane sword stick but I’m not allowed to manufacture it. Sigh.

Top tip 3: Remember that by becoming VI you see better than anyone!
This is perfectly true. It is the strangest thing yet most OBVIOUS thing– a visually impaired person starts developing skills of balance and manoeuvrability immediately. The slower the sight degenerates the more time one has to perfect these skills. All VI people use their remaining sight to the absolute utmost. ALL and I repeat ALL VI people are the MOST visual people you will ever meet. We have to be. Our lives depend on how we use our remaining vision! Think about it. If I just nip out to the shop in the evening I have to negotiate darkness, (remember- night blind), busy roads, aggressive car parking fiends, holes in pavements, black bins on pavements, drunks on pavements, low branches and more. In the shop there is florescent light blinding, crowds, small children on heelies, blurred aisles and then the check out. The sighted person just goes to the shop. Visually Impaired people go on a tour of duty.

Sighted people have forgotten how to see. To really SEE the world around them. You don’t watch anymore and I mean watch using your eyes and your ears and the hairs on the back of your hands, the back of your neck. To sense a vehicle through your trouser cuffs ...! To feel someone coming towards you by the way the air bends around your cheek. .
Over the last few years I have taken up photography and have never had more fun than when teaching blind and VI people how to take photographs. How can we? they ask crossing their arms in an aggressive manner. We can’t bloody see.
But photography is not about a beautiful composition; it is about caught memories and snatched emotions.
A blind woman on a beach holds a new camera she has just been shown how to use. She asks a sighted professional photographer standing next to her what she should take a picture of. The sighted photographer says err..well what do you want to take a photo of..thinking the woman might say ‘the waves’ or ‘the sea’ but the woman says she would like to capture the way the sand grinds when the waves roll over it and the feeling of the seagull she can hear as it calls and its wings flap past and the sensation of the sun she can feel on her face and the energy of the leaping child with the dog she can hear and the sound echoing from the sea to the sand dunes...
And the woman photographer stops her and says you know..I have never really looked before.
That’s a true story folks!
After telling the VI/blind students this stuff and after guiding them around a camera, showing them how to use their bodies as tripods, their ears for focus the VI and blind photographers start experimenting. Taking photos of their families for the first time, of holidays and friends. They post pictures on facebook. They make cards and posters. They start experimenting they make art! It takes only a couple of lessons for someone who has never touched a camera before – who has been excluded from the visual world because of the assumption they won’t understand it - to engage again in ways more highly creative and inspiring and unusual than most sighted people.. It’s exciting stuff.

Ok I see time is ticking on and so I shall squeeze my last two top tips together.

No 4. If you are going to lose your sight...Lose the Guilt!
When I had to stop driving I wept. When it became too dangerous for me to even ride a bike safely in the street (and I live in Cambridge man..that’s a toughie!) I despaired. I felt so ashamed and I felt guilty as hell. Almost all disabled people do but especially visually impaired people who – like me- look sighted. No one believes us. We don’t believe us. We have to explain ourselves every day. No you see I look sighted but I only see in the middle..or yes I know I can see you now but you will be invisible when the light changes –...etc and on. Family members find it hard, friends find it hard and it erodes self confidence. SO many VI and blind people stay at home rather than face the constant challenges of both the environment and the people in it.
When I left work in 2007 I withdrew and began to feel more and more ashamed of myself for ‘failing’. Worse, I began to see myself as Disabled. As invalid. As useless. I began to really believe my life was over. In I was so sick of myself I took all my savings and went on a solo trek up several mountains in Nepal.
This may not work for everyone.. I admit it was a bit drastic...but it worked. I have never been more terrified or more exhilarated, lonelier or more intensely alive then when trying to negotiate a drop toilet in a shed in the dark that is held onto a mountainside by three nails and some barbed wire.
My thinking was that – if you feel dead anyway – what have you to lose? It cleared my head of my depression and I began to believe in myself again as a person who just sees differently not less. I am no less able. Just differently abled.

Of course facing ones fear has to be done everywhere. It can be about getting from Kings Cross to Paddington in rush hour. It can be about getting home from a party late at night. It can be about buying milk from Asda during half term holidays. As I said Visual Impairment can be very exhausting and it’s OK to factor this in, to be kinder to oneself, to say NO to some things and to say yes to others.

Top tip 5: Never Give Up and Never Surrender
Keep a sense of perspective and always a sense of humour. I was thrilled to learn that there was tactile pop-up pornography being developed for the blind for instance. I can’t to see that being read on a train!
I am happily getting used to the constant wolf whistles and shouts of ‘hello beautiful!’ now...the fact they are directed at my guide dog Grace is beside the point...we are a team. Ehem.
There is always another way. It is just that sometimes we are pulling on the door handle when actually it requires a gentle push.

I’d like to end with a quote. In 1957 Josei Toda, a brilliant Buddhist peace strategist said:
Without opposition there is no growth. It is hard to argue with that logic. A state in which we are free from problems or constraints is not happiness. Happiness is transcending all opposition and obstacles and continuing to grow.

So from this grumpy girl looking for happiness I wish you a very good night.

Photo: Lang Tang (c) T. Bush 2007

A French Toast!

2010-09-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

Weather has changed and just like that, like the bran dust, the single, sour little cranberry and the oat debris in the bottom of the luxury box of muesli, summer is nearly over.

'Fleur' (c) T,Bush 10

I escape to France for a few days to see Mum and to raid her library on African flora and fauna as I have decided that the heroine in my Zambian thriller is able to survive on the streets of Lusaka by sourcing edible fruit, mushrooms and insects. As I don’t know my fungi from my fruit fly I thought I best do some serious research.

This is a photo of French Moonflower (Daktura) which also grows in Zambia and is used as a hallocenogenic poison!

Bet you didn't know there was such a thing as a 'snot apple' which grows wild on the edges of fotball pitches..? (Bet you didn't want to either..)

The trip starts at 2am on Tuesday I finally start packing a ruck sack. By 5am I’m at Stansted standing –without Grace who is on dog holiday with her mates- unable to see any information boards clearly or any staff. Everything is a blur of exhausted families and confused students flying home. I stumble into a secure area which is the only way to get any attention and am escorted firmly to the ‘disabled peoples holding pen.’ image from internet

I tell the bored, young woman who is sitting behind the desk calmly ignoring the frantic signals of an expiring Indian grandma on a nearby bench, that I have tunnel vision and she starts laughing so hard she goes purple. When she catches her breath and the tears of mirth stop rolling down her face, she shares the joke. ‘You are like a horse!’ she shrieks and brays with laughter again. I look for a brick to kill her with but short of westling the zimmer frame from the dying Indian lady I am bereft of weapons and anyway am too tired to be trouble. I am led away to the plane still seething that horses don’t HAVE tunnel vision. It’s the blinkers that...etc etc...

However by midday I am on a beach stuffing my face with moules frites and sangria with lovely mum and Silent John..who is much less silent now he has cats, Really! Two small delicate yet ferocious pretty beasties, Topaz and Arthur. Who knew?!

Above: Topaz

Right :Ruth under the fig tree.

9C) T. Bush 10

I solve the problem of having forgotten all my school girl French by keeping my mouth full of food and wine for the full four days and on my return am a little worried to feel the plane lurch to my side when I sit down.

Left Ruth gardening (c) T. Bush 10

But it was all well worth it! I loved seeing Mum and John and the new place. They have already made, what was a run down old cottage and cattle shed, into such a gorgeous home.

Magnifique!

Right:John and Arthur in the garden. (c) T.Bush10

Now back in UK I squint for endless hours at my manuscript - 40,000 words to be in at the end of the month. I have all the words but , to misquote some famous wag, just not yet in the right order. Grace too is back after a fabulous break with her buddies and has had to be cajoled with treats and promises of riverside walks back into harness. Her expression as she drags me along says quite distinctly 'You seem a trifle heavier then last week...?'

Blast..back to the gym again.

Leaf-ing you for a couple of days. Post on return!

2010-08-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

More from the archive!

2010-08-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

Flying High

2010-08-05T03:48:00.000-07:00

Okay it wasn’t ‘crack. It was acid. And the thing is that we had just been talking about Mandrax... I best be a little bit clearer.

Last weekend my friend and I were yakking away. She turns 90 in September and wants to go white water rafting. (She also wouldn’t mind going for a spin in a race car at Silverstone if you’re offering... she was one speedy driver pre the whole bindness/ageness malarkey.) She was annoyed that now there were things her body just couldn’t do anymore...wished she had taken more risks earlier.
So we were discussing thrills we had missed in our youth and I remembered that as a teenager on parole from various ghastly UK boarding schools, I would head back to Zambia where the ultimate 80’s thrill was rumoured to be the ‘Mandrax Run’

Methaqualone is a sedative-hypnotic drug that is similar in effect to barbiturates, a general central nervous system depressant. Its use peaked in the 1960s and 1970s as a hypnotic, for the treatment of insomnia, and as a sedative and muscle relaxant. It has also been used illegally as a recreational drug, commonly known as Quaaludes (pronounced /ˈkweɪluːdz/ KWAY-loodz) or Sopors (particularly in the 1970s in North America) depending on the manufacturer. Since at least 2001, it has been widely used in South Africa,[1] where it is commonly referred to as "smarties" or "geluk-tablette" (meaning happy tablets).

One established contact with a shadowy figure in a bar who would tell you to pick up an old rust-bucket car from a special location and drive it across two boarders and down to Johannesburg. The thrill was in ignoring the fact that the rust-bucket was lined with Mandrax tablets en route to what was then the biggest market – the South African Army. The game was to bluff your way through civil war encrusted Southern Africa, loaded with illicit drugs, and your reward...a wodge of cash and a shiny new cube of a GTI Golf to drive home with. That was if you hadn’t been arrested or shot. It was popular too. There were plenty of teenagers driving spanking new GTI’s in Lusaka. We don’t talk about the ones who didn’t make it back...

My friend found this fascinating. She said as a mother and a teacher, she seemed to have missed the entire 60’s drug revolution and wasn’t sure quite how. ‘How do they make you feel?’ she asked.
‘Well, it’s your birthday,’ I had said. ‘I could score you a tab of acid!’ We laughed uproariously but I had temporarily forgotten who I was dealing with and there was something in her eye that made me a little nervous... Actually I wouldn’t know how to score a Red Bull and vodka in a Red Bull and vodka bar and have always been a hopeless prissy wuss when it comes to anything more mind altering than Bacardi. But it did strike me that if you made it to 90 years old in vaguely one piece, you really should be entitled to any drug you want on the NHS. ( Perhaps not meth amphetamine..I watch a lot of CSI and I wouldn’t want her wandering the streets looking for a good time with a sawn off shotgun under her dressing gown... )

There was good news too this week. Dad few back to Zambia from hospital and by the time I had made contact to see if he had recovered from the flight, he had ALREADY done a sneaky farm clinic and been driving himself around Lusaka. Pretty phenomenal considering the doctors reckoned on 6 months to a year of slow recovery. He is loving being home too after months of anxiety, pain and hospital food. Hooray!!!

Then yesterday, after several weeks facing potential downsizing to Big Issue Seller due to an administrative error by my local Job Centre Plus, I was told with a muttered apology that my benefits had been reinstated. I am not going to be homeless after all!

This made me so happy I decided to teach Grace to fly. I use a ancient martial art technique called simply ‘Inflated Breast ‘which is crude but effective and hugely fun.

Once Grace figures it out we’ll be a lot safer....I do have a tendency to fly into trees.....

New Fridge! Very old Po'tree!

2010-07-31T11:27:00.000-07:00

Out of Sight..again.

2010-07-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

The thing about being visually impaired is that you can’t see very well. I mean not see very well in the ‘usual’ sense. Most visually impaired and blind people I have met are often a lot more insightful, focused and aware then others with their full 180 degrees of vision. They have to be. With a visual impairment it becomes more important to be able to suss voice, intent, energy and potential action of people around you to avoid ..well ...potential death lets say, as i don’t want to be too dramatic. (i.e. if you can hear someone screaming and a noise behind them that sounds like a trumpeting insane runaway elephant it pays to have that heightened awareness and a glimmering idea of where to run for safety. ) image from internet

For me there are two annoying side effects of having no peripheral vision.
1. I have to stare intensely using my 10 degrees of central vision. Staring intently is not most people’s idea of blindness. I also seek and lock eye contact. This can be disturbing to people especially when I stomp over to them at railway stations, peering hard directly at them and then proclaim fearsomely ‘I need help. I can’t see the Signs.’.

Photo (c) T. Bush 2010

2. Things disappear. Usually my bloody magnifiers and magnification specs. Which is ironic. Also cell phones, black marker pens, keys, glasses of gin and tonic, £10 notes and sense of humour. Strangely I can always put my hand on the biros that don’t work that I was sure I flung out last time. Always. I must have a breeding colony of defective biros.

Anyway – I am in Radstock. Here for the week to try and wring out some more words of this bottom heavy thriller. It’s going slowly but at least it’s going. A lovely catch up with a couple of MA friends yesterday assured me that I am not as off kilter as I had thought cartoon from internet

On Skype, Dad now has a fuzz of white hair and is looking a little less translucent. ‘I’m sure it’s grown since yesterday,’ I say reassuringly peering into the screen. His blood counts need to grow faster too though. Those are harder to see from here.

In the evening I wander woozily into my sister’s veggie patches with the watering cans. I stub my toe, drop the can, soak my dress, refill and do it all over again. She has a good load of salad courgettes, tomatoes, herbs and sweet peas, rhubarb, roses, maize and at least one triffid that keeps whacking me from behind the poly tunnel. I am rigorous and steadfast and although have to pluck several bits of twig from my hair and wash off the ants stuck to my cocoa buttered legs I am proud that I have saved the garden from a parched withering.

That night it rains.

image from internet

Unbolted

2010-07-04T06:07:00.000-07:00

I have twice been on a horse bolting from a snake. The horse bolting that is,, not me. This month felt strangely familiar; the puff adder being Dad’s illness and some of the dreadful things arising around it. The horse I suppose being the future, unknown and out of control. My desperate grip and my balance a mixture of experience and optimism and the reins and bridle that will eventually bring the horse into a calm and more controllable state being my Buddhist practice of chanting meditation and the support of friends and family.

Today Dad is allowed to move out of the ICU at the hospital and into the little bed and breakfast adjacent again. His blood and platelet counts still need to increase and of course he is still frail, awfully pale and in need of doubling his body weight. But he is out the far side of the treatment and we can all breathe out a little, release the white knuckle grip on the horse’s flying mane.

Grace too finally had her results and is clear of any heart trouble. To celebrate my beautiful buddy A, who came from Canada for a flying visit, took us for punting and followed up on the Friday with cream teas at the Orchard followed by a glorious, hot stroll along Grantchester meadows and all the way through Cambridge.

Amrita in Granchester.

The weather has been stunning and conducive to mellow mooching, mediation and fruit cocktails. Ok ...so England dribbled out of the World Cup , money is short and my fridge just died and is now defrosting all over the kitchen and beginning to smell like the monkey cage at London Zoo but hey... I have tan marks from my sandals, a small stash of birthday/solstice gin left and a very happy hound.

I think that bolting horse is calming and I am still hanging on.

How are you all doing?

A' Shaving Grace!

2010-06-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

Grace had to go for an overnight to London last week for a hospital check up. Nothing serious we hope – results next week and I’ll let you know. In the meantime she has come back very glossy, fit and happy but with a rather odd shaved bit on her side and tum where she had been strapped to a heart monitor.

'A Close Shave' (c) T.Bush 2010

‘Couldn’t they have shaved in a logo...given her a ‘Nike flash’? My friend asks peering over a deceptively innocent Pimms. ‘You could have got some advertising revenue.’
There is a pause where we all wonder where we can get our hands on a stencil... Grace sighs.

Talking of shaving, Dad, who has already lost most of his hair to the chemo, texts me to say he has run out of eyebrows. I have to email my cousin in New York as I have run out of bad hair puns. (She is more ‘highbrow then I. ‘Nuff of that! Ed.) He goes back in for his treatment tomorrow with less hair but just as much chutzpah. My marvellous father!
Image from internet
Today I nip to the supermarket. I have assiduously prepared an ‘austerity list’ in line with my current finances which basically reads

1. Potatoes

I leave Grace at home knowing I will be faced by crowds of sullen, exhausted England fans mooching half-heartedly along aisles of buy-one-get-one-free BBQ sets, pushing trollies of screaming toddlers and aggressively blocking the frozen pizza aisles.

The World Cup would normally pass me by entirely except that this month I care about South Africa purely because my Dad is in Pretoria and I suspect if they lose a match the crime rate in will escalate exponentially. Very unfair of me I know......

Image from internet

I suppose I also have to care about England only because the madness infects people to the extent that when/if they are rubbish the entire country will feel like Asda did this morning.

Thinking about it makes me add ‘gin’ to my list. Image FIFA Poster

And so and so...I am now prepped and ready for a week of writing. I am trying for 1000 words a day on the novel just to get the blood flowing this week. But that’s tomorrow..today I may just hang out with the semi-shaven hound and watch the Dr. Who episodes I missed on IPlayer. Have a good week folks!

Pooling Resources

2010-05-31T08:38:00.000-07:00

There has been a disruption in my blog flow and I must apologise. I am having a rather hard time with a minor bout of depression due to my continually walking into things I am sure I wasn’t walking into a few months ago. This, exam-material hand-in-time, Tories, Dad’s illness, phone bills, and weariness from the Bath-Cambridge commute have all conspired to dull any creativity or witty banter these last couple of weeks. But fear not! Summer has struck and I am rallying.

Iris In Rain (c) T. Bush 2010

Also I am happy to report that Dad has got through his first stages of treatment and although it was very tough and at times pretty hairy (well no longer ‘hairy’ sadly...but it will grow back..) he did it and the doctors did him proud! He is on a rest now for another couple of weeks to build his strength and weight back for the stem cell infusion. His partner D has been by his side all through this time and doing an excellent job of care, cajoling and encouraging. She is force feeding him steak and chips as I type!

Last weekend was glorious and although I was stuck inside on the computer I thought it only fair to buy Grace a paddling pool as she was struggling a little in the heat. Being a black dog she absorbs heat like an fat eskimo in a burkha.
At first she wasn’t sure.
Suspicous in fact...

But then she figured it out. (check the tail wag!)

Grace and Pool x 2 (c) T. Bush 2010

Dirty Girl

2010-05-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

My flat is a tip. I am wading through teetering piles of paper, mostly study notes, bills and election leaflets. I ran out of hoover bags about..err...1998 actually and the dog has shed me a new carpet. There is stuff congealed on the cooker that seems to be sprouting tentacles and the fridge won’t open in embarrassment.
And it’s a bank holiday which means we woke to lashing rain and howling winds.
By midday the sun has made an effort and although there is no difference to the temperature, outside looks less arctic. Apart from that wind......As I watch a pigeon is blown backwards across the garden with a slightly baffled look on its face. I suit up for a brisk, bracing walk pulling on long johns, a big cardigan, extra socks and a rain coat and square my shoulders bravely harnessing up Grace but outside I am hit across the face by icy sodden blasts and my resolve dissolves. I whimper. Grace looks at me with disgust but I am defeated and retreat back into the warmth of the living room with its towering piles of detritus. Perhaps I could set fire to some for extra warmth?

(image from internet)
Dad skypes from Lusaka and we have the ‘Zambia’ skype conversation
‘....Can you see me?..’
‘Yes..no ..now I can..’
‘..... I’ve lost connection...Can you hear me?’
‘Yes..no ...now and now and...oops lost video..can you see me? ‘
Repeat to fade.

He is heading to Pretoria for his treatment next week which is both exciting and terrifying. Six weeks of tenter-hooks for us and tender bits for him. With the World Cup kicking off flights to visit him are exorbitant and impossible so I am going to check on the costs of sending myself by registered post.

We, Grace and I, are up to Bath again tomorrow and so with rather a lot of reading and marking up to be done I can see that the spring cleaning isn’t going to happen today. Perhaps when the sun comes out for real and the birds (and the pigs) start flying the right way round.

(I have to say so myself but isn't this the greatest photo of the hound to date!! )
'This Dog Has My Heart' (c) T.Bush 2010

H'Ash Browns

2010-04-20T02:34:00.000-07:00

Why do they keep coming to the door when I am mid nap?
Obviously they clutch some kind of Star Trek scanning device to scour flats and houses for people who are in deep slumber (or what I like to term ‘research’.) They ring the bell again and again knowing that the person shambling towards the door is going to be at their most vulnerable, confused and potentially apathetic having been woken up from a deep unconscious and only wanting to return to the warmth of their beds. Like pirates they rely on the element of surprise giving them the edge and pounce with pens poking from their fingertips, clipboards activated, eyes narrowed in case of defensive manoeuvring.

‘Ah. Hello. May I ask if we can count on your vote? ‘

Me, with matted hair, smeared make up and creases from the pillow still on my cheek just dribbling and nodding.

‘Absolutely.’

Each time.

I think I’ve agreed to vote for the main three now and possibly the Greens. I might have signed up for the residents association, a local dairy delivery and Sky TV too...I forget..

Only the Labour canvasser had the audacity to try and get me to actually tick a box and take a poster, gently leaning forward and trying to insert it between my inanimate fingers. She touched me. A crucial mistake. I began to wake up.
‘Eh?’ I burbled. ‘Wha...? ‘
She saw I was rousing from my semi conscious and fled.

But then again there have been more pressing things then listening to insipid white men in ties on TV. My nephew whom we cherish because he is lovely and smart but also, if we are honest, mostly because he is very, very tall (and for us in the family under 5’ 4 ‘’ this is a truly marvellous thing.. we are genetically programmed to worship anyone over 6 ‘ 2’’ as a minor deity); anyway my nephew has been trying to get back from Lusaka for days. He went to visit my Dad for a couple of weeks over Easter and started back on Thursday. He got as far as Nairobi before ‘Iceland’s Revenge’ struck with a sky full of pumice ash and then had to improvise Cairo, Istanbul Rome...where he got stuck looking for space on a train. He has run out of phone battery, is low on dosh and not quite sure what and where to go next. There is a plan afoot for my Mum’s partner Silent John to go and pick him up from the Italian border.... its all sounds very exciting but possibly more than a little harrowing Hopefully he’ll be back afore my next post!

The sun came out at the weekend and immediately everyone got drunk. Kids went berserk on bikes and skateboards, roller-skates, and scooters. Exhausted parents clutching bottles of wine hunkered down on pavements to watch. Pub gardens overflowed with woozy adults, shoulder straps slipping off, t-shirts discarded, sunlight blindingly reflecting off fish-white skin.
Grace and I walked down by the river. Since her illness she has become quite shy and defensive with other dogs. She desperately wants to play and will whine and yelp and start a nervous approach before losing her nerve and jogging back to me looking embarrassed. I had met up for a quick shandy with a pal (I am keeping my toxicity levels as low as possible as the mo) but my friend on her second pint of Leff (an extremely strong wheat beer) got leery. As Grace edged towards a handsome retriever attached to a man and his two young daughters she started howling what she thought would be encouragement.
‘Go get ‘em Grace! Grrr!! Yeah Grace! Take ‘em down!’

This as you may guess is rather against the ‘guide dog code’.

‘Shut Up!’ I hissed furiously noting that the man was standing between Grace and his children with his hands spread out in a protective gesture and Grace was tearing towards him wagging her tail and thinking his outstretched arms were for her. In the end all was fine and Grace and the retriever went for a leisurely lollop and we got home before we were arrested.

I am staying in Cambridge this week ensuring that Grace rests and has fully charged mojo before we begin trekking back and forth to Bath again. I am missing my seminar group but the manuscript is slowing coming along and I have found my Tonga researcher who has accepted payment in Arsenal T-shirts! This is wonderful as my main character is a Tonga child from Monze who has found herself on the streets of Lusaka.
With thanks to her and in light of current events I thought these might tickle you

For the politicians out there: ‘Basokwe bakasekana bukolo’ ( equivalent to the pot called the kettle black but translates literally into 'The monkeys laughed at each other's backsides')

An for the voters: ‘Sibuzya takolwi bowa’ (one who asks never got poisoned by mushrooms - as in, you need to ask questions/directions and you won't ever get lost)

Thank you Beene! And thank you readers. How are you all doing out there under the ash cloud? Do let me know.

I see Spring!

2010-04-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

Hito koishi hitobushi koro wo sakara chiru

'Yearning fills my heart

When the candles are lit:

Cherry blossom fall.'

Shirao Kayo (Edo Period)

A Ward Blog

2010-04-02T04:49:00.000-07:00

Thanks all – my cold is long over and I am healthy as an ox. (And sadly beginning to look rather like one too. Time for spring diet. Sigh.)

OK, so do pray tell what this means -and apologies for those of you who get rigid with boredom when people open with the words ‘I had this really weird dream...’
Only I had this really weird dream. It wasn’t the first bit which began as a marvellous swash buckle of an adventure but which quickly became too surreal and annoying to be much fun.

I woke up.
Or thought I did.

Sleepily I followed Grace into the kitchen to feed her and noticed she had a large notice in pink writing stuck to her back. Realising I was STILL dreaming I looked closely and although blurred saw it was an invoice for my previous swash buckle dream.
My subconscious had just invoiced me for a rubbish dream?! How long has this been going on? Where can I complain?
How weird is that?
*******************
So that appointment for the sleep clinic rattled up to my door pretty quickly. After finding a dear friend to take the hound for the night I arrived somewhat anxious unsure of where they were going to stick what monitor.
Turns out I needn’t have worried. I was not on the ward with the rest of the sleep deprived. I was in the ‘disabled’ ward down by the nurses’ station with en-suite and a dud radiator. It was freezing but worth the privacy.

My Sleep Study (c) T. Bush 2010

A skinny, nervous man came down and stuck electrodes all over my head and legs and strapped some device to my chest. It is a strangely intimate process and the man insisted on rather gushing small talk.

‘I always try to chat with the patients,’ he said reaching under my arms to pass several wires down my t-shirt. ‘It helps put them at their ease.’

‘Really?’ I asked, feeling a little like I was in a play and there was a line I should respond with but hadn’t learnt. What does one say?
‘Well done. Does it ever actually work?’

Eventually I blagged an extra blanket from the nurses and was hooked up to the lap top by the bed and told to get some sleep.
The next day they did additional sleepiness tests which involved being asked to go back to sleep for 20 minutes every two hours but half way through I had a call from my lovely pal who had taken Grace. Grace was sick and I had to end the study and get back home. I did learn I have mild sleep apnea and my circadian sleep pattern is up the yazoo but more on that anon. I had to rush home.

And Grace was very sick. Voiding from both ends and exhausted. If she lay still she was alright but any movement caused her so much discomfort that she became agitated trying to lie, sit, stand, walk and climb up into my lap.

She has now seen the vet and is on the mend but it was a pretty horrible time for her and we are still not sure what caused it or if it is in anyway connected to her previous bouts of sickness.
So she is on a very strict rice and boiled chicken diet and was looking perkier ...until I nipped out to the shops last night and she managed to find and eat almost an entire pat of butter plus foil wrapping that I had left in the kitchen to defrost. Oddly enough she is now looking a bit uncomfortable again.... Ahh the joys of a dog’s digestive system. Dontcha just LURVE my blog?!!

Grumpy, Sleepy, Bashful and Doc.

2010-03-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

Is it me or is it a little creepy that for the last four days here in UK all news has been been head-lining the kidnap and release of the little five year old lad in Pakistan? It is a two day story at most and surely doesn’t lead over the breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian talks, the near extinction of the tuna fish or Beckham’s Achilles heel? I just don’t get it and immediately suspect massive conspiracy and cover up...

Well, I am grumpy.

I have a cold.

Its the kind of cold that blocks one and a half of your ears when you blow your nose making you list to one side usually into other people walking along the pavement. Its the kind of rubbish cold that threatens the imagination with flu and strep throat and bronchitis but only ever really produces phlegm. It hope it will sod off and I will wake up tomorrow fresh and without the puffy and unformed face of semi sucked jelly baby but now I worry that is just the state of my face

Anyway, its one of those things right. Like spending a small fortune on bird food then dropping a 6 litre bag of premium bird seed on the kitchen floor mid sneeze and managing to kick half of it under the fridge whilst skidding around trying to keep upright.
My, how we laughed.

That was until I tipped a plateful of warm melted butter into my lap trying to eat fish one handed whilst playing catch with the dog. I know, I know...I really do need to find a responsible adult to be on call at all times....

And talking of that I did get to spend a few days with my Mum who popped over from France. She flew into Bristol, spent a couple for days with me in the vicarage and trained with me back to Cambridge. It was lovely to see her and not really long enough but she left me with a new cafeteria, a bunch of sweet narcissus and some excellent new cleaning products – which given the buttery fish stains on the carpet, was the perfect present.

Mum and Sister: (c) T. Bush 2010
Today I also had a most interesting trip to another hospital,, where (unlike the last place I wrote about hiss boooo) the staff seem to genuinely be quite interested in the patients. I was so taken aback when the doctor actually introduced himself and offered to shake my hand I nearly fell off my seat.
I was there to have an interview about sleeplessness and sight loss and I have agreed to go back to their sleep laboratory in a few weeks time where they are going to wire me up to a load of machines that go ‘beep’. . I can’t believe they will find anything exciting and I have already apologised for wasting their time but they all seemed terrifically eager. And it might be quite good fun; a night out with someone else cooking and half a dozen people analyzing your snoring.

image from internet
‘I’m afraid you can’t bring your dog though,’ The doc looks apologetically at Grace.

‘ I’ll break it to her gently,’ I say.

Back in the full waiting room the woman behind the reception desk waves wildly in my direction and then in a stage whisper hisses; ‘As you can’t bring you dog, will you require any,,,,’ ( here she makes large circles around her eyes and head for emphasis) ‘,,,,Special Treatment?’

The room goes quiet.

‘Yes’ I say ‘I’d like everyone to be exceptionally nice to me.’

The receptionist nearly falls off her seat with giggles and I get a spattering of applause from the rest of the waiting room.

Sometimes the old lines are the best....

Brief blog from Vicarage

2010-03-07T13:40:00.000-08:00

I am in Radstock at what will be my sister's new vicarage and have been here for a full week rattling around whilst she is away on silent retreat. ...Silent if you allow the odd sneaky text that is. (Do you think Jesus would have been a ‘lol’, smiley face texter? Wonder if there is an emoticon symbol for ‘amen’? :-) or 'I cast you into hell you demon' :-( )

Its not the most handsome frontage but it is nice inside...lots of light and space,

Anyway its been rather interesting and rather odd to be somewhere completely new. I got to pad around Radstock and Bath a little and was introduced to a delightful tiny pub by some lovely fellow students. The pub is called The Green Tree Inn. It is very small and I thought I had stumbled into someone’s living room. There was a fine selection of ale and decided I would drink my way down the list starting with ‘Pitchfork’, then ‘Buttcombe’ – ach how that tickled! However I can’t quite remember the names of the rest..wasn’t there one called 'Just Beyond The Haybales' or 'Now you'll Never get Home'?

The weeks been mostly very bright and very cold and quiet. I had to rest Grace this weekend after she had another bout of food poisoning, quite a bad one. They have very sensitive guts these pooches and I think she was also just a little overwhelmed by all the changes and all the work. She is in fine fettle now however and has been carefully placing her various toys on the stairs to test my eyesight in the morning. Isn’t she thoughtful.

I'm happy to report that Dad is booked in for stem cell therapy in Pretoria in May and although he will have to go through another round of oral chemo before then he was pleased and relieved with the test results. Its a serious marathon; six weeks treatment followed by a minimum of three months recovery. He has been warned it can take over a year to get full strength back but he now has a goal and a strategy and that is important for all our various states of mind.

Back to Cambridge in a couple of days. Will be in touch from there...

Term Begins

2010-02-25T13:17:00.001-08:00

What a difference a seriously blue sky can make even in the fridge like conditions current. All around me a few days ago were the various creaking and cracking sounds of peoples shoulders un-hunching and jaws unclenching as they looked up in in wonder at what is known as sunlight.

It didn’t last of course. On Monday Grace and I woke to several centimetres of icy sludge masquerading as snow and by the time we got to Bath for our creative writing class it was pouring with the kind of rain that always manages sneaking icily down the back of your neck no matter how many scarfs you stuff down your coller. ('Grace in Snow' (c) T. Bush)

It is wonderful to be back in class at last. I get my entire week packed into one very very long day; a three hour seminar in the morning followed by another in the afternoon and usually a two hour lecture event in the evening. By the time I get back to Cambridge on the Wednesday evening I am weaving and woolly eyed with weariness.

('Class' (c) T.Bush)

But mostly happy...so very happy!! Me..the kid who hated classrooms!

Well that is apart from last week and the incident at Edgware Road.. A signal failure at rush hour left Grace and I squeezed onto a train that sat sulking with its doors open, refusing to move.

Eveyone groaned and sunk into their books and newspapers but then, from the other side of the packed carriage, a voice shouts out;

'Look look at the doggie. I wanna hug the doggie!!'

I peer into the blur. This is not the voice of a toddler. This is at first glance an average middle aged woman wearing a duffel coat (couldn't tell you which colour anymore) and huge glasses. I see her eyes. They are gleaming with excitement. She has someone accompanying her - a sofa of an Afro Caribbean minder taking up two of the seats next to her.

'Shhh,' says the minder. 'The dog is working.'

'WHY?' shouts the woman

'The dog is the lady’s eyes.' hisses the fat sofa lady tugging the other one down back into her seat.

'What’s wrong with your eyes?' shouts duffel coat lady at me. 'Are you blind? Can you see anything? Can you? CAN YOU??? I WANNA STROKE THE DOGGIE!!'

Her minder obviously inured to this woman's huge and exhausting presence yawns and starts talking on her cell phone. At no point does she actually make eye contact with me....she just lets the woman rant in the crammed and edgy carriage. I try and make calm, quiet responses but this just seems to excite the woman further.

'Can I STROKE your DOGGIE??'

Gawd! After five minutes of this I am tempted to start shouting across at the duffel coat ‘You have a minder? Can I stoke your minder?? Are you a crazy lady?? Half crazy?? How crazy ARE you? I WANNA HUG YOUR MINDER!!! '

I look around for a hero, some lean jawed type to gently pluck Grace and I up and carry us far, far away ... but there is only the spotty young man next to me who is cringing so much with English embarrassment he nearly cricks his neck.

(Sigh.) (image from internet)

In other news my sister has moved into her new vicarage in Radstock and it is rather lovely. Its where Grace and I will set up base when doing our weekly commute to Bath.

And next week my Dad finishes his first grisly round of chemo and flies to Pretoria for tests. We are all on tenterhooks (what on earth is a tenterhook??) as these test will be the very ones that decide his next round of treatment. Remission? Stem cell therapy? More horrible chemo?

But worrying doesn't help. Just gives me mouth ulcers and a clicking jaw. Sexy eh? Seems the only superhero coming to my rescue is 'Blistex and Rennie' Man.

Will keep calm. Will keep you posted.
(Buddha in the Vicarage' (c) T.Bush)

Bum's Rush

2010-02-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

Grace and I are in the eye clinic waiting room. Here is a picture of my knees.
Its already been an hour which is nothing. Time is not paid enough on the NHS to bother to do its job properly. It crawls and meanders, idles by the water cooler, plays endless games on its mobile.

The bearded man opposite me is trying to distract his hyper-active six year old. She is wriggling on her seat, threatening to escape and run off down the dull grey corridor.
‘Hey Leah,’ her father cajoles. ‘We can do some drawing.’ He is reaching into his briefcase for paper and biros.
But its crap, daddy!’ shrieks the little munchkin pushing her heavy glasses further up her button nose. ‘Crap!
The waiting room falls briefly into a shocked silence. The bearded man doesn’t look up as he pulls a notepad onto his lap. He coughs and then mutters, wincing
‘No..its SCRAP paper darling,’ he says. ‘SCRAP.’

Amazingly I am only in this purgatory for two hours before being shuffled into a small room where I am met by a gruesomely efficient young woman with a bindi on her forehead. My pupils are dilated though, my sight distorted and fuzzy so it might have been one hell of a zit.
She looks like she is sitting A- levels but I presume is in her mid twenties. An ophthalmology student I presume. She doesn’t bother introducing herself but instead steps over Grace politely, checks my eyes and declares me fit to go with a cursory glance at my file. ‘Oh I see you need a field vision test. We’ll book you in for one next year.’

Next year, I am thinking, are you crazy? I need to know what is going on now...why is my colour vision leaching so fast? Can you give me any good news? A more detailed prognosis...? What of current treatments..?

I make some kind of gabbling sound choked with all the questions and anxieties I have been storing up over the last twelve months but its too late and this woman just doesn’t give a ..scrap.
I am given the bum’s rush.

Yes, it was very upsetting but at least I am not in the same boat as my dear friend C who at 89 years old was sat in the adjacent waiting room with a blanket over her knees. She went in with an eye emergency and was told her eye was haemorrhaging at 11am. She was finally seen by the consultant at 18.30 that night having sat in a cold corner of that eye clinic for nearly 8 hours whilst the consultant saw ‘priorities’. She knows she needs an injection of Lucentis for her macular degeneration but it is over £1000. image from internet
‘I get the impression they don’t want to treat me,’ she says today when Grace and I visit. ‘I am too old to be worth the cost of the drugs.’

We sit and watch the birds on her bird table outside the window. There is a robin; brown, blood- red and white and puffed up like a little ophthalmology consultant. I can see him though not clearly and I describe him to C. She sighs and nods wondering about her future.

I try not to think about mine.

image from the internet

Doggedly Trying

2010-01-31T12:13:00.000-08:00

Last week I was utterly useless. Utterly. Useless. I sat in front of the computer and couldn’t even find the impetus to fill in my status bar on Facebook. It was something to do with the cold and sleet and the constant audio backdrop of radio news from Haiti; the sound of so much terror and pain.

After sitting like someone drugged I would get up and make coffee or walk in circles or stare with exasperation at the huge pile of filing growing exponentially next to my desk. Sometimes I even went outsdie and stood around glumly in the garden or cleaned the kitchen but writing wise I remained loggerheaded.

On Thursday, to try a new tactic, I went out with my brilliant buddy L and got totally smashed. I vaguely remember loudly debating positive psychology versus religion, the probabilities of meeting either a soul mate or a lunatic by on-line dating, buying double rounds of Dalwhinny whiskey on my debit card and talking in Zambian pigeon English to the poor taxi driver on the way home.

‘Kukamba Chinyanja my brother? I kept asking.
‘I’m from bloody Bangladesh,’ he kept telling me looking over his shoulder for support from my equally wasted buddy L who was gesticulating wildly in the back seat in a rant about small change.

The hangover on Friday was monstrous but that didn’t help kick start my writing again either. So much for Fitzgerald / Hunter Thompson School of Creative Writing.

Today thank goodness the rusty cogs started creakily turning but it is still like trying to squeeze the last of the hand cream out of a tube when your hands are already slippery.

Grace, having been banned from the park for an entire month due to her five weeks of near continuous free-running whilst on holiday, (guide dog trainers rules..not mine I promise) is not helping. Every few minutes she brings over a stinky soft toy and sticks it on my lap with eyes huge and solemn, in an effort to get me to play with her. A pile of half gnawed rubber rings, fluffy elephants, teddy bears and rope pulls has built up next to the filing. When I don’t respond she stands at the door and whimpers to be let out. Five minutes later she whimpers to be let in. The door to the garden is next to my desk and every time I open the door the temperature drops by several degrees forcing me to get up AGAIN and find extra socks, shawls, jumpers etc which sets off the cycle of coffee, washing up...
I end up barking at her (in a strange role reversal), ‘Not NOW I am TRYING to WORK!’

So today she is lying in her bed with eyes rolling, sighing dramatically and looking forlorn. All together now..’Its a dog’s life..!’

Back In Blighty.

2010-01-23T08:43:00.000-08:00

I know, I know and I do apologise...I have not blogged since before Christmas It seems odd to now ensconced in 2010. 2010. It’s not the sci-fi world I had quite imagined back in the late ‘70’s. Where on earth is my plasma gun?

'Dad' (c) T.Bush Dec 09
And so folks...I best fill you in.
Zambia was both wonderful and at times very difficult. On a positive note Dad’s condition got a little better for a while and by the time my younger sister arrived for Xmas he was up for cooking in the evening and enjoying visitors. My sister arrived anxious about the trip and feeling a little as if she were carrying her past on her back like a rucksack of paper cuts and although we did much together to dull some of those tiny little knives it was still sometimes hard for her to cope with all the changes in both Dad and the Lusaka she had last seen over 6 years previously. But she held her own and her last evening was a revelatory riot of fabulous stories from her time working in the Zambian bush and the local zoo.

Zoe on the hill' (c) T.Bush Dec 09
It was also good to have a sister-in-arms for a while against some of the bullying we had to put up with from my father’s partner. Although my Dad has been with her for nearly 12 years and although I know she can be a kind and thoughtful person, her jealousy and insecurity about his children still exceeds her sense by a very great deal. (Saying she is difficult is like saying Dick Cheney is not really a ‘people’ person, or that Bill Gates has spare change or Tiger Woods has got balls. Sorry.. 'had’ balls. It is a tad of an understatement.)

But I don’t want to dwell on that stuff because I was there for Dad and I got to be with him every day over the five weeks. It was great to see him feeling strong enough to go out for a meal and to cook salt beef again, to sit calmly next to him when he was hyped up on steroids and listen to the opera ‘Leonora’ at full blast (or as I call it ‘steroid-sound’,) to sit chatting with my sister, Dad and great friends and food on a cool porch in the New Year.
'SJ's Porch' (c) T.Bush Jan 10

There was my beautiful friend’s 40th birthday party and more weight training with my dear buddy EM and that wonderful bright gold light that flooded into my bedroom at 6am every morning. (Sometimes not the most soothing thing for a hangover..) 'Tash and Me' (c) T.Bush Jan10

But time ticked on and I had to go.

At the airport in Lusaka at 6.30am on a Thursday morning, Dad and I said goodbye and for a moment I felt just like the 10 year old kid going back to boarding school. I wondered if I would throw up on my shoes.
‘I love you Dad,’ I said and walked into the trolley in front of me. From behind the barrier Dad looked anxious and pale, sweat beading his forehead, leaning on his cane. I tried to pull myself together and gave him a grin. It must have looked ghastly but vaguely convincing. He nodded and turned away and I staggered through customs to the boarding queue.
I finally sucked up the last drops of glittering hot African light from the runway and holding them deep in my lungs ducked into the dark cabin and was immediately waved into what the cabin steward called ‘the naughty corner.’
‘Give us a moment love,’ he said winking ‘You’ve been upgraded.’
Imagine!
That same steward drip fed me Kir Royales and delicious nosh until I could no longer figure out what buttons on the sleeping chairs did what and passed out happily.
There there was several hours on a creaking coach through the night

and there I was..

in Cambridge,

in my flat, iron cold, dark and empty.

‘Shit,’.’ I thought, sat on the edge of the bed, still clutching my wash kit from Buisness Class and feeling my tan ebbing.. Even the duvet felt damp with cold. Sometimes lonliness makes mincemeat of us.

Grace arrived a few days later thank goodness. Due to inclement weather and a few other problems there was no chance for her to do refresher training before she arrived. For five weeks she has been ‘just a dog’ competing for food, toys and love with three or four other dogs, two horses and a bunch of chickens. She charged around my small flat then sat down, head cocked and looked at me with both love and confusion.

‘How do I reboot her?’ I asked the trainer nervously scanning Grace’s tummy for red buttons. As it turns out it was me who needed rebooting. My brain was so full of Zambia, so higgledy piggledy with emotion I had forgotten even the simplest commands. Grace however although slightly shell shocked has seemed more than happy to reassume work. She took me twice to London last week ...but that’s another story and I’m sure you have things to do and other blogs to read so I’ll let you go. More soon I promise! Grace back at work. (c) Tim Jan 10

Crispy Mush.

2009-12-23T03:10:00.001-08:00

My Dad says it’s okay now to tell you that it is he who has the multiple myeloma; the plasma eating cancer that sneaks in to nibble on white blood cells and nerves leaving mouse bite holes in various bones and causing havoc with the rather useful large organs. It is bloody painful and the treatment is extremely unplesant. He has been having a hard time of it and that is why I am here, in Lusaka, Zambia, extending my Xmas vacation by a few weeks to hang out with me Dad as he chews his way through hundreds of ghastly pills and tries each morning to figure out if it is going to be a good day or a bloody bad one. Xmas Dad/Elf: (c) T. Bush 09

However, as he is rather more stubborn then a mule with piles and braver then Attilla the Hun, he insists on going to work even when he is feeling ghastly, propping himself behind his desk so his patients can’t see his cane or the days when his hands tremble terribly (infuriating for a doctor famous for having the steadiest hands in the biz. Makes tying knots in fishing tackle bloody tricky.)

He won't stop. Last weekend he was honored guest at the Mother of Mercy HIV Hospice where he is volunteer medical supervisor. He insisted on leaping up to make a speech but they made him sit to do the presents.

He is rather marvellous.

He won’t want me to bang on about 'IT' though as he hates people worrying. At first he tried telling everyone it was just a ‘squash injury’. He upgraded it to a ‘ski jump accident’ when he started the chemo but now we have both decided ‘kite surfing incident’ has serious kudos and sounds much more glamerous .

Hospice Xmas Party: (c) T. Bush 09

My days so far have been focused on hanging out with Dad breakfast, lunch and supper and just being around when he is resting. I am not greatly useful but he doesn't mind. I've seen old friends too including a lovely Xmas dinner party complete with dramatic sunset and sun-downers overlooking the Southern hills, the dying sun burning my pale skin.

I do miss Grace of course and find myself talking to the space on my left where she should be, which makes people around me a little nervous, but have news that she is thoroughly enjoying her holiday and the snow back in UK which makes me happy.

When Dad is working I should be working on my manuscript for university but instead I have rejoined my old gym. I love my old stinky gym. I used to train here ten years ago and they still have the same towels and equipment, neither of them have been washed particually well since 1999. But I know where everything is and so even though it is boiling and the air conditioner has never worked, only leaked, even though they have fabulously bad Zambian TV on at the SAME time as blasting out Eminem's latest hits, even though the door to the ladies changing rooms is stuck open in such a way as to make getting in for a shower an extra cardio exercise and inside is potentially a bacteria ridden death trap, and even though I suspect one of the receptionists does her own version of ‘personal training..ehem’ in the massage room on occasion, even so I feel very comfortable there.

Anyway it is all essential for getting rid of stress …..or would have been except my old buddy EM was there. He recently won 3^rd place in the Mr. Zambia body building competition and can see from across the blinking gym that I am being half hearted about my crunches and press ups. I am cheerfully adopted and there is no escape. An hour and a half later and my lactic acid build up is through the roof. Me and The Incredible Hulk: (c) T. Bush 09

'Tomorrow,' says EM grinning hugely. He does everything hugely. Note the photo….

And I did this..went with my dear friend and her beautiful children to East of the city into the scrubby bush. Storm clouds towered several thousand feet high on the horizon but the sun blazed heartily determined to melt my 50 factor sun cream. I didn’ t have my jodphurs or boots but there was a jump and it just seemed the right thing to do. The horse was Amarula…a very appropriately named beast for me as the amarula is a little fruit which makes a delicious very potent alcoholic drink…

So for you readers, in various places and my friends and family snowed in and freezing, slipping on the ice and weary of the darkness, I send you some sunburn, the sound of creaking cicadas, the smell of distant rain and the sensation of sun burn.

And love, much, much love. We never know what is around the corner…live every day stuffed full with the stuff!

More soon. Cloud Ships: (c) T. Bush 09

Packing Up (Lusaka tomorrow)

2009-12-08T15:37:00.000-08:00

It is late and I am not packed. I can’t quite seem to get my head straight. I feel fragile, insubstantial..like the spit bubble of a baby, or a moth caught out in rain. I am not anxious or sad just out of time... waiting. image from internet

Earlier today I sat in my novel seminar at Bath Spa Uni peering at my group through vision all smoky. Some days my sight makes me feel as if I am separated from everyone, held behind a screen of smoked grey glass, looking on. It’s lonely when it’s like that. They,-all my group that is, are writing work that leaps and bounces from the page; faster and more eloquent and more lyrical each week.

'Burkha' (c) T. Bush 08

I on the other hand, am having a hard time wringing more then 2000 words a week and it feels lack lustre compared.

‘I have got to up my game!’ I think. But today I couldn’t dwell on it. I had to get to back to Cambridge.
Grace and I leapt up spilling bits of paper, poop bags, biros and small change everywhere. The workshop ground to a halt at which point Grace, somewhat like the Queen, went around to each individual to say good-bye grinning and bestowing blessings. She does celebrity remarkably well.
We bussed and trained and hooched it back home..it only took four hours ..and then the lovely Guide Dog woman came and then it was just me here and the suitcase which looks like a sensible shape until you try to pack it. 'Grace' (c) T. Bush 09
I can’t fit my sandals in. Even if I fold them..which is bloody difficult.

Tomorrow I will NOT ask for assistance at the airport as they have a habit of taking ‘the disabled’ and herding them into ‘Disabled Holding Pens’. A nice quiet area you would think would be a good thing, away from the push and shove of the shopping quadrangle of Heathrow but remember these are for ‘Disabled’ people. Disabled people just sit and drool. We are not supposed to need anything but condescension and prune juice. In this quiet area there are no working areas, no lap top plug ins, no decent coffee machines and worst of all considering if you are a disabled it is the one thing you NEED to do when travelling....nowhere to drink! So no holding pen for me.

Image from internet Nope! Even without Grace I intend to stagger around knocking all the shelves over and wacking into small children and wheelie cases until I can find a decent Bloody Mary. Hopefully I will get to the right gate on time.
Zambia here I come!

image from internet

Just Bobbin' Along.

2009-11-27T13:42:00.000-08:00

My front door has developed a groan from the cold. In one of those marvellous twists of fate the groan is identical in every long note to the opening trombone blast of Bob Dylan’s ‘Everybody Must Get Stoned.’
‘Baohh Baohhhhh!!!'

image from internet
I walk into the house behind Grace and every time add in the descending ‘Baow,
baow,
baow,
Before launching into the verse. ‘They’ll stone you when you’re trying to be so good
They’ll stone you just like they said they would….’

It is hardly possible to feel the fates are against you when your door is a Dylan fan.

However, having said that, we were quite sorely tried this week. My darling Grace got food poisoning on the commute home from Bath and was exhausted and very stressed for several days. I decided not to travel until she got her mojo back.
'Sick as a Dog' (c) T. Bush 09

Then the blokes came on the dot of 8 am (the DOT?! Isn't it normally between 9 and 5pm?) to put a new sink unit into my kitchen......only 'someone' forgot to check the measurements and neither of them could connect up the drain or stuff the washing machine back in. The carpenter scratched his head, then his arse, made a couple of calls, put his tools away..and left.
They’ll send a man round,' he muttered over his shoulder but he didn't sound convinced.
'You’re a man,' I said to his retreating overalls but also without conviction.

That night I cracked my toe into the washing machine sticking half way out into my skinny kitchen and dropped the entire bag of paprika into my supper. I am not Hungarian. the food was wasted.

Tuesday night and Grace and I were floating home after our meditation class and we were nearly run down by a yoof. I shrieked and leapt back dragging poor Grace. He was so close he actually caught my hair as I jumped back. Gasping in shock I glared up at his back. His hood was up, his back relaxed, straight and he didn’t turn around but casually cycled away. A chill went through me as I realised that this boy/man had actually driven at us. Tried to knock us or at very least give us a fright. I didn’t shout at him. I was scared he might come back.

Image from internet

I was anxious that, with my dreadful night vision I had missed something. Perhaps he had tried to warn me? Or perhaps I could have avoided him somehow..read the signs? That is the problem with visual impairment in an emergency. Everything moves to fast for me to scan and especially at night when my vision is almost nil I don’t stand a chance against an idiot like that. I HATE being so vulnerable. I can't fight what I can't see. I am not a ninja. (Not yet Bro...not yet..)

(Creepier..There was someone parked across the road. I know this because he had turned his headlights off when Grace and I came to the kerb..but noone got out of the car to help or offer reassurance. I wonder more about that person. I would have got out of the car…wouldn't you.?)
But
But
Remember my door…I am fine. Grace is now in good form too and in two weeks I shall be with my fabulous Dad in the stonkingly delightful though often remarkably smelly Lusaka.
Grace will be on a farm with a bunch of dogs she knows and loves, horses, chickens, geese and a bantam cockerel called Zeb who is more beautiful then Brad Pitt..(and therein possibly one of the reasons why I remain single…chicken lust. Or is that just a too refined appreciation of cocks…sorry..)
'Photo: Zeb' (C) T.Bush 09
Anyway, back to the homework and back to Bath at the weekend. More soon and much love to all but that sodding little hoodie….
image from the internet

'....Well they'll stone you when you are all alone

They'll stone you when you are waling home

They'll stone you and then say they're all brave

They'll stone you when they send you to your grave

But I would not feel so all alone

Everybody must get stoned!'

Oh The Green Green Grass! or Another Train of Thought

2009-11-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday my journey cost me my entire week’s income support.
All of it.
There is nothing quite like knowing on the Sunday that the rest of the week is all oozing out of the overdraft. The problem was that there were no trains to Kings Cross and we had to reroute and take taxis across London. By the time Grace and I were squeezed onto the Paddington to Bath train we were dishevelled, disgruntled and the stress had caused my eyes to blur. Grace disappeared under the seat in disgust to hoover up old chewing gum and I squinted at my homework through my magnifier.

The train was full to bursting and within a few minutes there was a queue for the seat next to us. I huffed (very quietly in my best British manner) and took my rucksack off the seat to let in a large man with long shaggy grey hair and wire-rimmed specs. He didn’t mind dogs he said and somehow managed to manoeuvre his legs into the spaces left by Grace. His young son had to sit on his lap. There was just no other room.
They were on their way home from a match. I listened for a while as they spoke ‘football’.
‘What was Lampard thinking?’
‘Rooney got one in…..did you see?’
As happens eventually the man and his son asked about the dog and then - because the magnifier was giving me a cracking headache and I was needing to feel empowered again, to feel worth something, I began to whiter on about how I hadn’t always been this way...blind and alone..…oh no.! Once, darling... I had been in the movies, talking pictures..ahh yes..back in the day.....(sighs, turns diva like to camera, lights cheroot, sips dry martini. )
‘I wonder if he is impressed,’ I thought knowing full well that he and his son were probably quite happy to keep discussing goal tactics.
Refusing to release my captured audience on I went.
‘In Zambia,’ I boasted like some hideous ex-colonial ‘I tried, single handed, to jump start a non-existent film industry... ‘
The man laughs kindly and something about the mannerism is somewhat familiar. A little chill runs down my neck. I peer at him closely.
‘Err … are you in media?’ I ask.
‘Well yes I am,’ says the man. His glasses catch the light and I can’t quite tell his expression. ‘I make my own films and stuff.’
There is a pause.
His son is looking at the back of the seat and trying not to grin.
‘Umm.. would I have seen any of your ..'stuff'’? My voice is a little high.
‘Now lets see.’ The man genuinely thinks about this for a second. ‘You may have seen my last release. ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’?’
Turns out I am sitting next to Paul Greengrass .
That’s The Paul Greengrass.
Two Bourne films and 'United 93' among other remarkable and ingenious works.
I notice my mouth is open. I shut it.

After a while I manage to open it again and we end up having much banter for the last remaining minutes before they get out at Reading station.

After they have gone I resist the urge to stand up and shout to the other passengers in the carriage, ‘Oy! Did anyone just see that?!’ I nudge Grace but she just chews her gum and turns over.

So after all the delay, the stress, even so, I still feel exuberant and blessed. Of all the trains in all the world I am the woman who gets to have a personal hero from the movie industry and his son spend 15 minutes making me laugh by telling stories of Matt Damon mistakenly hitting someone in the face on set.

I wonder who Grace and I will bump into this week!

Gangster Rap

2009-10-21T09:12:00.000-07:00

(Forgive me readers it’s been 2 weeks since my last blog session. I have recently found out that one of my favourite people in the world is going to have to battle multiple myeloma and it has shaken me up....shaken all of my family up. It goes without saying this is going to affect my writing but I know that the person involved would rather I didn't go into too much detail right now.)

So I am a packed train from Cambridge to London with the heavy weight of bad news on my back and stiff from several nights without proper sleep when the scary man opposite me starts chatting. He is a pit bull in an expensive leather jacket, a parody of the Mitchell brothers, East End gangster. His voice is low and soft and cockney as Bow Bells. I can faintly make out prison tattoos on every knuckle and a large bird tattoo on the web of skin under his thumb. An military eagle?

He asks me what I do and I say 'I write.'

His name is Mickey G and he says he has just written a book too. He is a good writer he says then stops. Thinks.
‘My handwriting is very neat,’ he confirms.

He went from care to the Norwegian navy to borstal to prison. Been out for fifteen years now. He writes about the underworld. The REAL underworld.

‘Not those muppets like Mad Frankie Fraser. Wouldn’t know a bare knuckle fight if it kicked his bloody head in…’
Mickey himself was one of the Kray’s henchmen. He has a lot of gripping stories. 'Gripping' I look at his huge hands, swallow and nod.

He is searching for a title for his biography. ‘Conviction Without Evidence,’ he growls narrowing his eyes. 'Or, ‘Nothing To Prove’?

‘Goodness, either sounds really...umm...well 'dramtic'', I begin weakly. ' Aren’t you worried about people getting upset about what you write?’ I ask. ‘Could it be a bit..errr..dangerous?’

Mickey looks faintly amused.

He shows me two bullet scars on his face, one zipping his eyebrow to his ear and the other puckering his cheek. He has a cartoon bite mark taken out of his ear.

As I lean in close to Micky's face to have a good look, I notice the rest of the crowded carriage has fallen deathly silent. They are all enthralled and aghast at the man talking about his scars to the blind lady. ‘Can’t she see he is a ‘bad man’? ‘

He has knife scars all over his body he is saying but to my relief doesn’t stand up and strip off to show me.

He has, in true gangster tradition just been to visit his old mum in Kings Lynn. She is elderly, losing her sight. Mickey leans over and pats Grace and she grins nervously at me. I nudge her and she wags her tail politely.

As the train pulls in he gives me his number, says he will need a ghostwriter.

‘Plenty of money in the underworld’ he grins wolfishly.

I gurn and bow and grin like Grace, almost wagging my tail but I manage not to promise anything. There is ghost writing and there is becoming a ghost …writing…if you get my drift…

...............................................................................................

With the bad news from last week now heavier, sitting on my shoulders with its clammy, bony legs wrapped around my throat I still can’t sleep and my breathing is shallow all day but Grace and I are booked to go to a writers' retreat with the MA group in darkest Dorset.

Another train.

It turns out to be a beautiful place in the Toller valley next to an organic farm. I can only get cell phone reception by balancing precariously on a cow bridge and am forced to leave the phone in my room and participate and so I do; writing, eating, drinking and laughing..a lot. I find myself not wanting to go to bed but to stay up yakking and giggling around the fire with new friends. The bad news slips half off my shoulders, its grips loosened by red wine and fresh air.
Grace on West bay: (c) Tanvir Bush 09

On Saturday Grace sees the sea for the first time and is flabbergasted. She is perturbed then delighted and grins manically for the rest of the weekend. Sand and sea water and the smell of wet dog everywhere. Only a few months ago this would have repulsed me but now I breathe in Grace’s honey stinky scent like Chanel No. 5.

Grace and the Sea: (c) Tanvir Bush 09

West Bay (c) Tanvir Bush 09

Turning on the Bath tap....

2009-10-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

This is my poor mutt at home after our first week at BathSpa University for induction and introductory seminars. I think she is a bit…..err…weary. If I had been a nicer person I would have stolen a baby buggy at Kings Cross, softly popped her in it and pushed her home instead of making her guide me..

Induction..what can I say? A marvellous literal (for me) and literary blur with a requisite tally of confident, young men in glasses and small, glowing, pretty young women in short skirts and biker boots. Others older, cautious, smiling from behind wine glasses, shifting from foot to foot as we orbit slowly around the various beaming lecturers as they hold forth on the course.

There are some lovely people in this crew and obviously some brilliant and talented. They may not be the same people. Life’s like that but I can’t wait to read all of their work!

I did make a couple of serious miscalculations that might well have had me in hospital and it is probably about time I sat myself down and gave myself a good talking to. ‘Tanvir, you are MORE then half blind in daylight and you are COMPLETELY night blind….and I don’t mean cutesy ‘things are a bit washed out’ night blind. I mean ‘bugger if that wasn’t a hippo I just prodded with my cane on the way to the bog’ kind of night blind. ‘ (There are witness to this very comment, that very hippo and the self same bog.)

‘You have to be more careful. You have to think ahead and plan torches and sighted help. Damn your ridiculous pride and recklessness!’

Of course one thinks..ahh..but she has a guide dog. But problem is a guide dog cannot guide in a totally new area without help. She is a dog not a sat nav and neither does she have the light-engulfing pupils of the cat. Plus she is also only 18 months old and fresh out of school but she huffed and puffed and pulled my arm off and still managed to guide me to and from the right seminar rooms after only being shown them once!

We are staying in a remarkably beautiful cottage in a village called Newton St Loe, owned by the Duchy of Cornwall.

The view from my boudoir dontchaknow!

We are being hosted by the writer and fellow student JA who has been showing us the maze of campus, taking us out to local pubs and generally spoiling us rotten. She has been essential in our reconnaissance and for that we thank her wholeheartedly!

So now we are home for a couple of days with several tonnes of homework (sodding forgot about the homework...hmm) and a bag and half of washing. Wonder what Grace is dreaming about...? I bet it isn't literary criticism....

Wildlife

2009-09-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

Obfuscate Series: 'Shadow dance' (c)T. Bush 2008

There is a tiny woman with nicotine-blonde, over-curly hair in the side-alley ahead of me. She seems unsure of which pavement to go to and is turning around and around on herself in the middle of the road. She spots me over the roof of the parked cars and immediately her small gnarled face lights up. She leaps forward, forcing me to slow and stop then stoops slightly as if bowing.

‘Isn’t the weather lovely?’ she says in a bright rehearsed voice.

I am about to agree with her. The sun is indeed glorious. We've been walking happily for hours and sweat is trickling down between my shoulder blades but the woman suddenly notices Grace and sways as if struck. She peers up at me with wide, red-rimmed eyes for a moment and then says with a curt nod. ‘Oh but never mind. You’re blind.’

‘I’m not.’ I retort hotly then sigh feeling like a plonker in my huge dark glasses and sporting a very fashionable guide dog.

‘OK just a bit’ I acquiesce about to launch into a lengthy explanation about the difference between visual impairment and blindness and why even disabled people can enjoy the bloody weather and...…. but the strange, sepia lady has spied another couple of pedestrians turning into the alley and immediately, fearless for her life, has leapt back into the road and is stalking them like some bizarre little bouffant mongoose. In the very same bright tone I hear her from behind as she blocks their path

‘Isn’t the weather lovely?’

(image from internet)

‘Ah.’ I say to Grace. ‘She’s bonkers.’
Grace looks at me.
‘Well I’m not totally blind..,’ I mutter narrowly missing the lamppost Grace is trying to pull me around. . ‘Hardy at all in good light actually.’
‘Bonkers is as bonkers does,’ wags Grace’s tail.

(c) Gary Larson

A Few Days Ago.

2009-09-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

It is very still and dark and I am deep beneath my duvet, awake but only just. In the living room I can hear the dog’s medallion tinkle against her collar as she stirs. I hear her clamber out of her bed and shake herself. Next the clicking scratch of her toe nails on the bamboo mat in the little corridor. I can’t see her but I feel her move into the bedroom, sighing in the darkness and after a pause the soggy, well-chewed, soft-toy bunny is shoved lovingly onto the pillow and into my face. Its her way of saying ‘I love ya but I gotta pee’.

Its 5am and I can’t find my clogs.

Its cool outside but without the slightest chill; plumb pigeons stir uneasily in their sleep as they are goosed by wild little eddies of warm wind which whip in and out of the elder trees lining the fence.

Behind me to the East, the dark night has split at the horizon like an overripe fig, purple skin tearing apart to reveal a fragment of soft white, red and pink.
Above my head, hanging over the concrete dog-run, is the moon; brim full of reflected light, glistening and so full and heavy to my eyes it bleeds wet, gold, glitter into the surrounding night.

It is wonderful; I seem to have come outside into the very place where ancient earth magik is brewing. The monstrous moon reaches out and attempts to grab me by the back of my neck. I hold my breath and am aware Grace too has stopped circling to find the best place in the run to relieve herself. Now she stares upwards, alert, her hackles raised. I don’t think either of us would blink if Aslan leapt over the fence from next-door’s garden or an ancient hobgoblin hissed from the flowerbed.

‘A quest!’ I think, my eleven-year-old child leaping from my chest with the strength of hundred thousand wishes. ‘I am to be given a quest.’

Suddenly a police siren goes off in the distance and Grace yawns loudly, squats and pees. I flinch, duck away from the lunatic moon’s blinding shining and following the steady dog back inside, into the half lit house and am back in my warm bed in under 60 seconds…

But I dream.

Sausages

2009-09-06T15:25:00.000-07:00

The dog’s kennel is not the place to keep a sausage.
Danish proverb.

I feel stronger. The sun has made a resurgence this week and even if the light is slowly leaching away from each day, this warmth and high, blue sky has been a brief reprise. Friends have reminded me of how winter can be inspiring and cosy; good for long boots and classic clothing. I am soothed. I have a stock pile of scarfs and socks. (Note potential winter hat!)

And there has been good news.

I am finally nearly possibly definitely maybe positive that I shall get a chance to go and do the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa University. You have NO idea how complicated it has been to even get to the point of ‘fairly’ as opposed to ‘faintly’ possible. It has involved endless phone calls to the Department of Work and Pensions, rather uncomfortable ‘Disabled Student Assessments’ run ins with my bank, tears, tantrums and finally I am green lit. Sort of. Ish. If the local benefits agency decide to refuse me they will let me know about 6 weeks after the term has started. Ho hum. But I am EXCITED and life has purpose once more!

I have to thank my family, especially my Dad and my Mum (and extended family Susan, John, Hattie, Pol, Hannah, blogger pals and those on fb!) for their support and love with all this. I would have given up long ago without you!

So I am preparing! I shall have to commute between Cambridge and Bath going up at the weekend and coming back midweek. (I’m still looking for a cheap room in Bath..anyone got any ideas? If we don't find anything we will sleep rough and Grace will have to get used to pooping down deserted alleys when no one is looking. )

Talking of Grace I took her to my pole dancing class on Friday. I have been going into that gym for months and never a peep from the chaps behind reception as I walked through with dark glasses and cane...but last Friday, as I clumsily clambered through the doors hanging onto Grace, they leapt up horribly perturbed.

‘Can I HELP you?’ Yelled one spotty youth pointing accusingly at the dog and me.
I realised that he did not recognise me at all. He thought a blind woman had wandered into the gym by accident.

I pointed at Grace. ‘It’s her fault.’ I said. ‘She’s taking the pole dance class tonight. Gotta follow the dog...'

The youth swallowed and then gagged a small smile and nodded a curt ‘carry on then’, managing to look outraged, aghast and mollified at the same time.

Grace was a little anxious at first watching us jiggle around and then do funny things on silver poles but after half an hour she fell asleep. It wasn’t very flattering to hear her snore through the routines but she seemed happy.

As we left I glanced right but reception was empty. Then I realised that for the first time this year we were leaving into darkness. The end of summer had caught up with us and I had not even thought ahead. For me the outside of the gym felt like walking into a cafetiere of filter coffee before the plunger plunges; a thick, treacherous, darkness and I was frightened.

‘Hell,’ I thought. ‘I haven’t got my cane with me. I have a ruck sake and now added to this I have a BLOODY DOG to look after.….’ and then it sunk in at last. I have Grace and she is a GUIDE DOG.
DUHHHH!!!

All this time and I have been using my residual daytime vision and now there weren't no daylight! For the first time for real I had to give it up to her.

‘Steady,’ I whispered to her unsteadily as we stepped into the gritty night.

I slackened my grip, relaxed my left hand so I could feel her gentle pull on the harness and follow her as she moved adeptly right, left towards the lights of the underpass.

‘Steady.’

Back at the flat I filled her dog bed with toys and chews as she yawned and rolled her eyes.
She had not a clue as to what the fuss was about.

The Other Dog

2009-09-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

I have two black dogs at the mo. This one is doing great. (I love her. A LOT. She works ..well...like a dog! She is just fab!)

But the other one has me by the throat and is shaking me hard. I have tried to write it away here but I can't. I am overwhelmed, flea ridden with anxiety and already autumn is biting when my entire summer seems to have been spent in a hotel room in March.

I am out of whack, off colour, too blue. It keeps welling up ..salt water through my capillaries. Salination I believe.... If people ask me how I am, even in the queue at post office...tears rise up and make me blink. Most embarrassing. With the constant leaking I am beginning to rust.

Meeeooowww. I miss old friends. I miss my colur vision. I miss my cats Pyewacket, Milligan and Small cat who I had to leave behind in Zambia. I miss romance. I miss my old Daewoo. I miss not missing shit.

But I know this is just 'seasonal adjustment.' I don't do well in the upcoming dark and cold and this is the equivalent of winter PMS. Pre Murky Season Syndrome. Plus it has been hard to stay up beat and perky these last few months. And now a reaction to 'perk' is natural. I will be back to my old self shortly.

In the meantime here are a couple more pictures of the mutt to make you smile whilst I locate mine again.

I WILL be back shortly!!

21 Days

2009-08-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

I am home after 21 days in a hotel room with a large canine.

Pic of me trying out dog-bed in hotel room for potential river escape the night before the beast arrived.

It’s a bit disconcerting being home….I am horrified to find that when I leave my bedroom no one sneaks in and makes my bed. No one has changed the towels I threw into the bath tub. I sit down at my table and there is no waiter service…there is no chef. I have lost the ability to even wash up my own coffee mug.
I am worried I may starve to death in a sea of filthy crockery and dog grooming gear waiting like the Lady Of Shallot for room service. Tirra lirra.

And such a beautiful hotel....such veiws of the carpark..(Actually hotel did brilliantly and everyone was very kind considering we took four dogs into their restauant twice a day...)

Grace however is settling in well. £54 worth of dog toys and we arrived back to find a 9’ by 6’ concrete base had been put down for the dog run in the corner of the garden where the tent had been for me birthday. (This wasn’t a shock. I had asked for it.)
The dogs are taught to pee and poo on command and on concrete in order to ensure that the handler knows at all times when and where the dog has done its ‘do’.
This means that handler and dog can then go out for several hours hopeful that the dog need not do the ‘do’ again out in public or somewhere hard to …errr..find it… (remember the handler is a bit short on sight..)

Plus of course concrete is easier to clean then grass. .

Unfortunately the command to do the ‘do’ or ‘spend’ as they say in the trade is ‘busy, busy’ to be spoken in a bright and upbeat kind of a voice even at 5:30 am (Grace’s preferred time of day)
‘Busy busy’.

Oh yep.

Apparently used because it is nigh near impossible to sound miserable when saying it. The dog’s need to know they are loved during this particular maneuver as they would much prefer to go on grass and are really doing you a massive ..favour….
Hmmm

You will note (some of you) that I removed my last post. It was written when I was tired and scared but that isn’t an excuse to have been mean to my fellow students. We were all tired and scared. None of us were getting more then two hours consecutive sleep a night with the dogs in the rooms. We were having to cope with isolation,fear, loneliness, confusion, bone-grinding boredom in between moments of nerve-wracking dog in traffic and group (dis)obedience training, a set hotel menu that didn’t change for 21 days and really hard water. And I mean hard. March is also Very Highly Chlorinated. My skin was a rash of nasty and my hair stared falling out. (The old guys didn’t have much hair to begin with so even worse for them…)

I wrote every minute I could and will post a couple of bits and pieces over the next week but for the moment just nice to be home and finally almost on top of the landslide of bills and worse I found waiting for me on my dining room table.

And now I am a dog handler.
A visually impaired dog handler who at some point is going to probably forget the dog tho’remember to hang onto the shopping or grab the dog and forget her house keys…

I still don’t know about this. Do I still have too much sight to really need all this? Could I actually cope with all this with LESS sight? Cripes Scooby! What kind of a fix have I got us into now?

But I know about Grace. She is smart as a chimp and funny and daft and knows her left from her right. She memorises a route after one single walk. At night when I am almost totally blind she makes me feel like I am flying.

So ..we’ll see. Or not (arf arf…did you see what I did there?)

Also folks I do apologise for getting out of touch with all blogs. The sodding hotel had no internet access?! March is just like being in 1985. they even played early Michael Jackson at breakfast and 10cc every evening....anyway..promise to read up on you all pronto!

Dog's Life apparently...

(All photos (C) Tanvir Bush 2009)

Rabid

2009-07-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

What is it with people? The next person who puts on a baby voice and asks me if I am ‘excited about getting my doggie-woggie’ I shall bite on the nose. Savagely.

I presume you don’t get this kind of patronisation when you first get a wheel chair ‘Ohhh you must be sooo excited about getting your wheelie-beelie.’

In case you may still be confused about why taking on a guide dog is emotionally more complex then just ‘getting a doggie- woggie’ please imagine being suddenly handed a toddler to care for over several years. Then cover your eyes with several layers of cling film, Vaseline and glitter and try changing a nappy. In fact the next person who even thinks ‘doggie woggie’ near me I shall wrap in cling film and dirty nappies… breathing out…feeling better….

Of course there have been many more of you, thank god, who have been incredibly astute and useful with your insights – and with your silent support ....and I certainly don’t mind the barrage of canine related and ap-paw-ing puns flooding my phone (a horrendous amount may I say from my dad) and I can only say thank you. Your support is essential and I am so grateful.

On an entirely different note, …well its not at all entirely. Only if I am grumpy this woman is f++=ing furious. This is a fascinating opening gambit in the equality debate from Disability Bitch’s Blog. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/opinion/b1tch/db_vs_negative_politicians.shtml

Disability Bitch logo (BBC)

It’s about Obama’s recent speech on equality and disability. She ain't impressed....

Remember that chances are we will all be disabled in our lives at one point or another..even if that is just a leg in a cast for several weeks, temporary deafness from an ear infection, chronic back pain from a slipped disc, old age...or various forms of blindness to the rest of humanity.

It comes to all of us.

'Twist' Self Portrait: (c) T. Bush 2008

Hardly Sex for the Superconcious.

2009-07-24T04:53:00.000-07:00

My good buddy sends me a link to an article by the BBC entitled ‘Dirty Talk for Blind People’. In the hope this may be a new government benefit cobbled onto my income support, I read it eagerly. It is however a discussion about what kinds of erotica and pornography are available for people with disabilities….. ’discerning’ people with disabilities that is (this being a BBC article) …and it turns out not a lot.

‘Society’s reluctance to accept disabled peoples sexuality is perhaps based on a deep-rooted but unspoken belief that they should not reproduce.’

Yeah well and ho hum…

Having already posted here of my murky albeit brief slide into selling phone sex http://www.holeyvision.blogspot.com/2009/01/phoney-sex.html I am not surprised by the lack of imagination when it comes to erotica for women let alone disabled people. (oh hell..just realised you probably don't know about this Dad...errr.. opps. It just paid better then the bingo calling...Goodness, I must make you so proud!)

I worked once with a brilliant young and very sexy TV presenter who, due to his being stuck in a wheelchair, was not able to find any kind of serious presenting work outside of ‘Disability Rights shows in UK. He was in constant pain but said he had discovered a remarkable way of controlling and converting the pain through a form of Japanese bondage. I believe he eventually made it to the States and is fronting a show on cable about such things. Now THAT would be a more watchable form of ‘The X Factor’ surely!

Personally I think there would be a fantastic market for erotic tactile pop-up books. They could have plug in audio although might be tricky reading them subtly on the train......

(images from the internet.)

Attaining Grace

2009-07-16T12:41:00.000-07:00

‘How many times have you been shat on by a bird?’ My friend M is gingerly swiping the top of his head with his hand. Its only water dripping from the overhead pub awning but still he looks across at me, his eyes darkening.

‘Well, how many?’ He is insistent and I note his fist is clenched.

Startled I shake my head. ‘Errr …nefariously onceI think. Splashed in passing. ‘

‘Yes yes,’ M leans forward. ‘That’s the usual response.’
His breath comes out in a hiss. ‘And how many times do you think I have been shat on..? ‘

‘Err …’

‘Eighteen!’ He blurts out wildly.

‘What!!’

‘Eighteen times! ‘

‘But… surely that’s not possible…. ?’
Image from internet

He slumps back on the bench, his handsome face pale, his terrible secret out. ‘Once it even happened twice…. in the same day.’

I gasp. That’s less the odds on a lightning strike!

We sit silently for a moment sucking on warm beer. I glance, with a phoney casual pretend flicking of my hair, at the sky over his head. Its empty but I still feel we are being watched.

Could it be the same bird every time? I am imagining some serious starling vendetta or a love-sick tern but he tells me that it started way back when he was a child and a bird managed to spatter him through the open roof of a car. (That takes some serious co-ordination and aim.) Ever since then he has been regularly ‘blessed’. Its even been caught on camera, on film.

Birds poo on this man.

‘Its lucky.’ I am trying to be up beat. He sighs. I think he has heard that one before.
‘Good thing pigs can’t fly..’ I think.

M has taken me out to this London pub after a long day’s photographic workshop and he is actually doing a very fine job of distracting me from my current state of emotional stir-fry as I have just made a decision that might completely change my already rather baffling life. I am going with the Guide Dog.

I met her on Tuesday. I went out to the car to greet her expecting the usual gorgeous, dewy-eyed beast and out lolloped a stocky, black and brown grinning mutt acutely resembling a small rottweiller.
I sat on the pavement and we bashed heads in greeting. The trainer, a stern woman with a skin tanned to leather, was all action and within seconds I took up the handle on the dog’s harness. The dog confused, looked around a couple of times for the trainer who insisted, in that ghastly British way, on calling herself the dog’s ‘mum’ as in; ‘ she’ll keep looking for her ‘mum’ so you will have to use your voice to push her forward.’ I do and the dog shrugs and we are off.

We walk the block passing interested neighbours and disinterested cats and the dog happily snuffles and galumphs and tail wags her way ahead of me. Later back at the flat she is splayed out on the floor and my feet. Her ears are soft and cool, dark brown. She snores.

Taking on a working dog is incredibly tough. There will be three weeks immersion training in a crumbling hotel in darkest fenland with visitors restricted and no access to a decent pub to start with. If I survive the training, then there will be six months adjusting to my local routes..except there isn’t time because I start my MA course in October. She will have to commute back and forth to Bath with me and sit under formica tables on nylon carpets bored out of her mind whilst I attend lectures and indulge in endless conversations about composition and structure.

She will need feeding, cleaning, pooper scooping, walking every day.

And she’s not a pet. She’s a working dog. I won’t be able to nip off for a few days. I won’t be able to stay in bed all Sundays. And I will have to think twice about all my plans for the rest of my life.

And my blindness will be ‘official’.
Bollocks.

Interestingly several people including M, are confused. ‘Do you really need a guide dog?’ they ask. ‘You seem to get around fine with chutzpah and cane. ‘

Then, ‘ Won’t you stop using your useful vision as you start relying on the dog?’

And I can’t answer either of those questions and I suppose all these things will become apparent during the training.

But I do know I need help and could certainly do with some animal magic and am immensely lucky to have been even given the chance to learn a new skill and find a new route through the world.

So I just say ‘lets do it.’

You will not find your mission by standing still. The way to find it is by challenging yourself in something – I would almost say it does not matter what. Then by making consistent effort, the direction you should take will open up before you quite naturally, just as wide new horizons before someone walking up a hill. Little by little you will come to understand your mission. That is why it is so important to have the courage to ask yourself what it is you should really be doing now, at this very moment.
Daisaku Ikeda; President of the Sokka Gakkai International
'Prayer Flags' (c) T. Bush
And by the way, the brown dog with the small, smiling, gold eyes, dodgy eyebrows and velvet ears is called Grace and I know I could always do with more of that!

'Saving Grace' (c) T. Bush '09

Out of Stock.

2009-07-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

I started off today with a skip to my step Tonight I cook paella for some friends. I love the stuff and as I I was given a paella pan for my birthday am keen to experiment

The shopping list is long and I have already failed with the prawns and am having to improvise with frozen seafood cocktail. I came early to this huge supermarket to avoid the crowds but my sight is blurry and I am can’t find anything and consequently I run over time. The supermarket fills with fretting families and fast-walking weekly-shop wannabies. I have my cane out but no one understands its significance and it just gets in the way of pushing a trolley. I am beginning to bash people.

Sorry sorry

Opps

Oh you go..no me. Oh ok..oh shit …

Sorry..

I need to get out now and am scanning frantically trying to find someone who can help. Unfortunately this bloody supermarket has kindly chosen to dress their stuff in understated grey and blue fleeces with the tiny logos embroidered discreetly on their chests. I can’t tell who is staff and who is shopper.

I hit the bread aisle at about 20mph and knock several stacks of prebake bagels to the floor. A woman tutts so loudly more bagels slide to the floor.
By the cheese aisle I am flagging, consider abandoning it all and cancelling supper but finally there is someone who looks morose enough to be staff and is wearing a set of key cards around their neck. I ask for chicken stock.

‘Aisle 4,’ she says and then asks if I need any more help.

‘No, no absolutely fine thanks.’ My upper lip quivers then stiffens.

I turn away with purpose but am immediately confused. I scan and scan for aisle numbers and then start running, shoving and dodging past people thinking ‘I know- I’ll just count from Aisle 1.’

Not in this shop sister.

I try being logical twice and only succeed in finding deodorant and bath gel.

And then I see the chicken aisle.
I rush forward thinking that I can grab the stock and be out of here in five blurred minutes.

I peer up at the top shelf and can see the large plastic containers and exuberantly grab the first. What I do not see is that the first is attached to the second and the second to the third and so on.

I bring down an entire shelf of chicken stock.

Three of the plastic containers burst open splashing their yellow brown contents all over the floor, the shelves, my legs and the trainers of the man standing ..now leaping backwards..next to me.

I look at him aghast and only then discover that he is absolutely gorgeous. Tall, dark intelligent eyes, shoulders to lean on and damn him, damn him..a dimple. He has said something like ‘oh dear’ quietly and kindly and looks to see if I am all right. There is my opportunity to make contact, to start something beautiful and what do I do..
I look down at our legs dripping chicken broth and say with a ghastly giggle (it’s the one I do when I meet someone I am attracted to. It is unfailingly unnerving)
‘We’re going to smell really ‘fowl’.
And then I do a kind of eye brow ‘taa daa!’.

The man’s face freezes slightly and I turn pink with embarrassment spinning around to try and wave down a helpful staff member ..when I turn back I see he has escaped. I catch a fleeting glance of his back disappearing into the veggie aisle.

I stick by the mess I have made, feeling anxious as hordes of people keep pushing their trollies through it. I don’t know why I don’t walk away ..but I don’t and moronically stand for over ten minutes directing people around the pooling mess suddenly realising that the chicken stock looks suspiciously pee like and with guilt written all over my sweaty face people are drawing their own conclusions. Eventually a man with a blue fleece, a sour expression and a yellow ‘spillage’ notice comes into my vision and I nod politely and flee.

‘Can you go slowly? I’m visually impaired’, I ask at the check out. My hands are shaking.

‘Do you want help packing then?’ Whinges the man. ‘See there is a queue and we can’t have you holding other people up....’

I wish.

Blackbird in Blue

2009-07-03T15:01:00.002-07:00

I am watching a juvenile blackbird. She is incredibly excited having recently discovered the concept of flying and launches herself at everything with huge enthusiasm but seems to have still a bit of a problem with depth perception. She doesn’t care though. She’s just kind of..well …‘plummeted’ from the roof, smacking into the top of the fence and whammed down onto the grass popping back up, yellow beak high, with a Russian gymnast’s flourish Ta daaa! . It’s bloody glorious!

It makes me feel better which is good as I am sore. At 8:30 this morning, I, a woman with a truly pathological fear of needles, find myself desperately trying to console a near hysterical Irish nurse called Maureen.

‘Its okay.’ I say soothingly. ‘ Really. I had a riding accident when I was nine. My veins are tricky on that arm… ‘Here you go..’.
I slowly and without making direct eye, in case she bolts like a lunatic horse, lower my right arm to within range of her glinting needles, twitching in her shaking hands. .

‘Here you are Maureen..how about this arm. There you go…’ I proffer my remaining arm hoping my relaxed and expansive attitude will stop her hyperventilating.

20 minutes later I am forced to suggest I lie down to stop myself from passing out. Strangely I am still relatively calm.

‘OK..got all you need now?’ I ask kindly not looking at the bruising spreading up to my armpits. ‘Please stop apologising..please. Your weeping is shaking the examination table. ‘

Seriously the worst blood lett..I mean ‘taking’ I have had in many years. She even managed to put the sticky plaster on the wrong parts of both elbows.. I didn’t even get a sodding lollipop. At home I had to lie down for 45 mins until I could raise my arms above my head again. Thank goodness I don’t earn a wage as a shot putter.

It’s nothing serious. I am still trying to figure out why I am always so knackered and am sure it is not just that my eyesight makes things ‘soooo’ much harder. I mean for Gawds sake! Other people cope with much more then this…and only a few years ago I was bloody running my own charity in Zambia..so come on! I am hopeful for a strange and exotic Zambian parasite feeding on my guts… or a strange brain fever. How about consumption? That’s relatively romantic. But NOT bloody ‘ tired eye syndrome’.. Hell!

Anyway..on the very up side , I have had a call about a potential guide dog. It is all very coy. I get to meet her (she’s a black and tan Retriever/Labrador bitch) in a couple of weeks with a chaperon on hand (for the dog…not me) and then make a decision if I want to carry on to the three week immersion training in August.
She will have to like me too- after all she is worth a hell of a lot more then I. Guide dogs are specially bred for smarts and wit and start training at 6 weeks old. They start professional guiding at 2 years old and have to have the best food and vet treatment until and during their retirement five years later. I on the other hand was a rubbish toddler,..well lets not even mention potty training..bad student, fail every mathematical test I’ve taken and spell sideways..plus I have dodgy medical treatment and self medicate with gin and tonic. I don’t have a pension.

The dog is younger then me better looking and probably has more friends on her Facebook page. Bitch. Yes. Quite.

My first thought was, would you believe… ‘Is it going to impact on my love life?’

Oh stop bloody laughing. I did ONCE have one..a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. It is still possible, I’ve seen ‘How Stella Got he Groove Back.’ I’ve seen ‘Amalie’..more appropriately I’ve seen all the ‘Shrek’s’ and all the ‘Aliens’. However pitching up led by a Guide Dog..?
Relatives – especially those still gunning for grandchildren - say ‘Oh Tanvi, the right man will look PAST the dog.’
Yeah right.
Us ‘disableds’ (to coin a Zambian expression of note) know that that right man doesn’t exist. Many blokes (sorry..he/she or transgendered) are going to be put off by
1. a fear that others will see them as ‘lesser’ for going out with a ‘lesser’ person or even see it as a way of getting other women (men/ transgendered) by being seen as ‘compassionate’. (I’m not being daft here.. Sadly I talk from direct experience) ,
2. a fear that they might have to keep plucking the ‘disabled person’ from burning buildings, traffic accidents, exploding toilets blah blah.
3. or worse want to rescue us from our own cynical angst. Me? Cynical angst? C’est moi mojo n’est pas?
4. or ..and unfortunately (and yes I know I haven’t had much luck with blokes –) be rather too interested in the dog.

'Noir' (c) T. Bush (all other images from internet)

But strangely and out of the blue I still want to be open for the possibility. It’s partly the weather: concrete-cracking heat, humidity at 60% and storms like tiny, black smoke signals gathering on the horizon. Its also in part the fact that I have absolutely no idea what might happen next in my life. I am totally free falling. And i love the feeling and I bloody love storms! And that’s the problem. Stormy heat and a completely unreadable future does up my level of erotic greediness and that addictive and bizarre compulsion for romance. Call it the 'Year of Living Dangerously' syndrome.

Oh - the lovely 'Lemonade Award' from marvellous Val from Monkeys On the Roof.. I need to nominate ten blogs with attitude and gratitude.

Therefore the following blogs are officially nominated:

Tinku Tales

Velo Gubbed Legs

Siren Voices

Epicblogue

Fleeing Muses

Fush and Chips

123 I Love You

Up The Hill Backwards

The Gold Puppy

The Times Of Miranda

I want to wish my blogger friend The Gold Puppy much much love and strength. And she of Times Of Miranda much joy with the new baby.

When the party's over...

2009-06-27T12:22:00.000-07:00

My birthday weekend was lovely, remarkably sweet and chock full of splendid people, venison burgers, vegan salads and Cava by the bucket. Massive thanks to the inebriated vicar who provided all the scrumptious food and the calm and careful Mum and John who helped me set up the garden and did the never-ending Sunday brunch.

'Sally on Sunday' (c) T. Bush

On Monday, the remnants of the guests staggered blearily off to catch trains and buses and I took out the last bag of rubbish and by Tuesday I wanted everyone to come back again.
Post party depression they call it.

On the train home from London yesterday the evening sky was moody blue and punch drunk with early summer storms. I was feeling sad and shy, evading the commuter’s incurious cow like gaze behind my dark glasses and wondering, as always when I feel so scared by my overindulgent English spinsterhood, if there was anywhere in the world I might actually be of use.

What if I used my birthday money (supposedly set aside for my dental surgery) and jumped ship to join forces with some romantic cause like the dark Lord Byron, Che, Lorca, Sampson or Sacajawarea …you won’t have heard of the last two..they’re a chicks and we know most history was written by men; some with remarkably small penii and huge imaginations..(The Trojan army was HOW big?)

Then again you might only have heard of Sacajawea because of the film ‘Night at the Museum’. If this is true I cannot judge…I am also this culturally inadequate but I am losing my drift net-all rubbish line of thought.

What can I really offer with no technical skills and no languages? Would I be useful getting a flight to Tehran and offering hugging ‘aww let it all out’ services to the Guardians in the hope that they suddenly feel less uptight and nuclear and more prepared to chat about it all. Or a quick dash across the border to North Korea to see if there is anyone in the militia who want to try permaculture, sustainable living and local trading systems. It's really very good for drought proof vegetables. .

Anyway – just so you know I got for my birthday - amongst other marvellous things from jewellery to paella pans, sunflowers, martini glasses and Buddhist prayer bead - a subscription to a ‘blog redecoration service’. They are going to help make my blog site funky and more enticing which is a good thing because you may have noticed I have been slacking off badly and indeed was thinking of pulling the plug – this will be the much needed ‘re-boot in the behind’ to get me writing consistently again! It may take a few weeks but please do let me know what you think!

Also before I go to closing party photos – do check out ‘Siren Voices’. http://sirenvoices.blogspot.com He is a paramedic who writes up his strange encounters with such tender, mesmerising prose his blog quickly becomes addictive. Real modest, melancholy genius.

And thank you VAL from 'Monkeys on the Roof' for passing to me the Lemonade blog award! Whoo hoo! More on that next time.

And lastly farewell to the deeply troubled, brilliant and tragic Mr. Jackson. My childhood would have been strangely empty without some of your music.

Summer of '69.

2009-06-19T03:05:00.000-07:00

I was born on Midsummer’s Day in 1969, which makes this Sunday a rather large birthday. I think I am finally on top of the dizzying G-force effect of hurtling through time towards an age which tops Zambia’s life expectancy....which occurs the first time you actually realise that no one will ever call you ‘young woman’ again ....and which gets you ‘that look’ when people ask you if you have children and you reply ‘not yet.’

I did initially decide to hide under my bed weeping for the year but luckily have been convinced a celebration of survival, friendship and family might be appropriate and would certainly involve more sparkling wine.

I had wonderful birthdays as a pre boarding school child. My mum and dad would organise amazing fancy dress parties with themed food and remarkable cakes. Once – when I was obsessed with The Arabian Nights – we had a party with Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Sheherezade (my own personal spelling) , Turkish delight, storytellers and pink and blue rice. My pal Sasha, dressed as Sinbad had a long wooden recorder attached to a huge stuffed snake in a man sized reed basket. He would play the recorder and gradually pull the string and therefore pull up the snake and we would all fall about with hysterics.

Sadly I don't have those photos but as a teenager in the late Madonna infested '80's there was the infamous 'Poseur and Tart Party' we threw one holiday....'High School Musical' it was most DEFINITELY not..but the less said about that the better...

ehmm...moving swiftly on...

Later my birthday was always mid exams…until my third year and my 21st birthday when my beautiful friend (she of the barge) bought tickets for Glastonbury. My parents sent a side of smoked salmon and two bottle of champagne and we guzzled them in most unhippy fashion in the Fiat Panda stuck in the three hour-long queue to the entrance. We arrived in the dark and I, desperate for a pee, leapt out and ran to a corner of the field and squatted down just as the battalion of parking attendants directed the next slew of cars to my very spot. In a thousand headlights my bare bottom was lit up like the full moon. My friend nearly stopped breathing she was laughing so hard….

When I turned 30 there was a total eclipse of the sun. In Zambia, in the bush on dad’s hill, with a motley collective of marvellous friends and several tourists weighted down with binoculars, cameras and special glasses, we waited and sure enough at 3pm in the afternoon a huge eagle and flocks of birds suddenly flew towards us to roost and the sun was eaten. It was a mind blowing, terrifying, humbling three full minutes of unearthly shadows and the strangest silence and even the dogs stopped howling. As we gazed at the blackened sun with its flaming, exploding aura there was a slight coughing sound and then a man behind us started singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Dad had chosen that very moment to light the candles of my melting birthday cake.

The sun came back (phew) and the euphoria carried us for weeks.

Tomorrow my big sister is preparing lovely food, my Mum and John will be over from France and the garden will be full of friends and family. In the evening those still standing will go to the pub.

I will, at some point, toast Teelo and other absent friends and have a bit of a wail but someone will pick me up, brush me down and hand me a shot of tequila and onwards and upwards to more adventures, more love and maybe many more birthdays! A toast to all my readers and if any of you are near Cambridge this weekend do come along!
All images (c) T. Bush and family

Polls and Poles.

2009-06-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

Wonder what’s going to happen in Iran. It would seem the encrusted sandal of the religious right is about to crush any spark of reform. Do we hope for revolution or do we wish for people to stay safe and hide inside? Image from internet

From the Sunday sunshine of a Cambridge morning with doves cooing and church bells in the distance, a country fair on the green with the sweet smell of fried onions and burnt sugar on the breeze, riots, rage, death and demonic demagogues seem far, far away....

Image from internet

Having wafted off into an advert for the English tourism board I do have to pull back and have a rather serious perturbed winge about the state of play here in UK. After all how can we stand up against the sleaze and toothless, pink faced sweaty stupidity of the British National Party, shake fists at the greed of the banks, demand equality for all when at the same time condoning the vast gluttonous indulgence of the football industry. Ronaldo is transferred for 80 million and on a salary of £500,000 a week. This vain, young man may well be a great athlete, he may well have come from a tin hut in some mosquito ridden favela but please don’t fall for the line that this gross amount of money is a ‘symbol’ of hope for the oppressed masses hoping that they too one day will rise from their hovels to kick a ball in Manchester, marry some botoxed apparition, get embroiled in some ugly rape scandal, and disappear off at the age of 35 into broadcasting obscurity and alcoholism. That gross amount of money is purely that. Gross.
Image from internet

Anyway I withdraw growling and fully aware that greed is what makes the West go around and around and my firm belief that no one in the world should be able to earn more then £100,000 a year is never going to be popular..

And it’s sunny…
So quit thy harridan’s witter woman.

Actually there were a couple of endings this week. On Tuesday the photographic workshops came to the close of the first phase. The participants had selected a photo and we had made them each posters and the ensuing exhibition was joyful in the extreme. Their friends, family and colleagues wandered around the room continuously saying how astounded they were. how they had never imagined that blind and visually impaired people could take such remarkable shots (sorry i can't show you yet but I hope soon some will be on an on -line exhibition!)
‘This is my photo of a thrown away piece of wood,’ said Mr. O. ‘When I saw the photo I realised it had bought out something beautiful in the wood and it made me think that all thrown away things have something beautiful still to be found. I have called this photo ‘Hope’. ‘

'Nuff said.

My beginner’s pole dancing class also came to an end and there will sadly be no whipping around shouting ‘wheeee’ on poles until the intermediate class starts up next month. Just so you know this class wasn’t about sex..nope..this class was not even about grace and style..oh no oh no! This class, being beginners, was just lunatic gymnastics mixed in with the child-like memories of climbing trees..OK that was me. I shall have to take it more seriously for the intermediate class....point toes and stuff. .....but for now…‘WHEEEEEE!’
' pole' (c) T. Bush

Prattle

2009-06-06T03:58:00.000-07:00

There is no getting away from the endless prattle and waspish cynicism seeping septic from the news. Government implodes and flights disappear and French students are tortured to death.

Thank goodness for the historic and remarkable speech by Obama in Saudi Arabia. At that point all across UK there was a rush on green cards. He is like an outstanding professor, Armani model and Gandalf combined. I wish he would invade England.

I can’t concentrate and time is ticking but instead I sit empty and stupid watching the yobbish starlings decimate the suet balls on the bird feeder. They shriek and peck at each other; like the Labour party really. It would be a better metaphor if they were a ‘parliament’ of owls… wonder what is collective noun for starlings..hang about. .Ahhh Google! A ‘scourge’ of starlings..a 'murmuration' of starlings. Personally I would go for a ‘UKIP’ of starlings…but that’s just me…
Starlings (c) Machrihaniol birds
I am fascinated by their rough pecking. I am riveted by everyone eating actually. I become still and attentive when I see people chewing gum as they walk past. I drift off and drool horribly when food adverts come on to the TV; the reason being that I am only a couple of days into a ten-day detox. The first three fast days are worst and I’m already dreaming of melting cheese, chips and dirty martinis. The detox is just to reboot my liver before my birthday in couple of weeks and I know once I am on the raw food bit I shall feel marvellous but right now I ache for Bounty ice cream.

So this post is short and full of prattle and no substance because neither am I (full of substance that is.) I leave you with a photo I took in Trafalgar Square the other day, which I feel expresses my current mood exactly.
T x

'Girl on a Pole.' (c) Tanvir Bush '09

Doctor's Visit

2009-05-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

Hotel and conference centre: Banbury: Sat 16th
My dad, known to this blog’s readers as The Doctor, arrived from Lusaka ten days ago and I am afraid, as per usual things, got a little nutso. Immediately there was the 50 year reunion of his old dental school The Royal. (yep, The Doctor did dentistry before he did medicine.)
As the only offspring available I am allowed to attend although I am bit edgy as I will be the youngest at the do by about 30 years and certainly the only child in tow.

In the car my dad has managed to finagle from my distracted aunt, we discuss tactics. Iam anxious. They will ask me what I do. ‘Is ‘dole scum’ too aggressive?’ I ask.
Dad, who nearly fell off his seat with laughter when I told him I was half way through an 8-week pole-dancing course, suggests exotic dancer. I decide to go with ‘burlesque’ as that sounds faintly circus and a bit edgy.

As it turns out there is enough wine consumed for none of the small talk to matter and everyone seems to be having a riotous time. Dad is in charge of the speech ‘The Next 50 Years.’ As usual he does no preparation, has no notes and, as he is the last speaker has consumed a fair amount of plonk so when he leaps to his feet I find I am biting my nails but his lunatic shaggy dog story about aliens digging up perfectly crowned molars in 500 years time hits all the right notes with this particular crowd of ex tooth-drillers and the crowd cheer. He even gets a guffaw from a passing waiter.
Speech! (c) Tanvir Bush

Thrupp: Sunday 17th
My beautiful old friend from university has a barge. She and her husband are living in it. With two cats and a roof garden. I am still feeling slightly bilious from the previous night and, captivated with the sunshine glinting on the water and the smell of patchouli incense in the living room, secretly try to negotiate a flat-to-barge swap with one of the cats but the cat is having none of it.

My place: Cambridge 19th
'What’s a gimp?' Asks Dad. My friend is passing on her esteemed husband’s suggestion of a more practical equivalent to a guide dog.
‘A gimp is a fetish slave.’ I say gravely. I am thinking the idea through and it sounds rather promising. ‘I could keep one instead of a dog- they will also walk to heel on a lead but the added benefit would be that I would get foot massages, gin and tonics made and wouldn’t need a pooper scooper. …or will I....?’ I look across at my friend for more information but she is in convulsions of giggles having noticed that Dad is wearing socks with days of the week printed boldly along each one. Today is Tuesday but he is sporting one Wednesday and a Friday.
‘Well.. you never know.’.he says mysteriously.

Casa Mio:Italian restaurant: Leeds 21st
My dad’s famous cousin is sitting opposite us, still erudite and a commanding presence in his mid 80’s. He is talking about his active service in Bomber Command during World War 2. They were losing planes and people on every mission every week, every day. It was one of the most terrifying and deadly jobs of the entire war. Famous cousin’s father was a stern, emotionless man. When cousin arrived home on his occasional allowed visits, his Dad would quietly ask him
‘How many missions son?’ and then just nod at the answer be it 10, 25, 40 and that would be that.

One day cousin came home pale, exhausted.
‘How many son?’ Asked his father as always.
‘Sixty-two’ said cousin. ‘But that’s it Dad. Its over.’

And his father leant his head against the wall and wept. Then he took his son to the pub for the first time in his life.

We are quiet at the table. ‘I think it was the parents that suffered more then we ever did’ says this remarkable man.

Famous cousin’s daughter is an artist and she gives me a beautiful small piece called ‘a glimpse of the lake’. There is something jewel like and calming about it non?

'A Glimpse of the Lake' Hilary Brosch

Agra Restaurant: London: last night.
My brother prods me in the ribs.
‘Well when is the next bit then?’
‘Eh?’ I say trying not to choke on my king prawn curry (I haven’t stopped eating since Dad arrived. I am beginning to look like the cook from ‘Mary Poppins’.)
‘Your blog thing. I want to know if I’m in it.’
My brother grins, evil glinting from his choppers.
I gaze with horror at him and then across the table strewn with bits of popadoms and rice, where The Doctor sits embroiled in a deep conversation with my sister who is sipping a large pint with her vicar’s dog collar slightly slipping. (Try saying that fast..)
It has slowly dawned on me that they all now read my blog..quite regularly and I shall have to be tactical. Hell..I shall have to be nice about them or risk not getting birthday presents….
Bunch of Bushes (c) Tanvir Bush
My family are bloody marvellous! Would I lie to you?

Tuesdays and a Bit of Blind Panic (Long Post Warning)

2009-05-14T03:16:00.000-07:00

Following my last blog, I have been asking myself, ‘well why DO you write you loon? Explain yourself. After all you do tend to spend a hellish amount of time with what I call ‘writer’s block’ and other people might call ‘the television on’.’

Then it hit me. I write because of days like Tuesday.
Let me explain. (It’s a bit of a long read this one. You can skip to the ‘conclusion’ if you are in a rush.)

Tuesday could have gone either way. I had had a bad night and woken up grouchy but then wrote poetry on the train in to London. Not saying if it was any good (actually it was so horrible it made the pen leak) but this invariably means something interesting is going to happen. I rarely get that compulsive need to write verse. It needs a change in the weather, a metaphysical prod, an uncanny ‘click’.

So I was thoughtful when I arrived at Kennington and slid into my role as a volunteer facilitator. We (from the charity Photovoice) are running a series of photographic workshops for blind and VI people. We are in the 4th week of a new course but on this Tuesday three new people stood patiently waiting to join in. A tall Jamaican lad, blind from birth, a short, streetwise North African with his guide dog Frankie and a gentle Haitian-English man with his dog Bill. As everyone else was hyped up to go on a field trip I stayed in to work with the three new men.

The older man asks what is often the first question. ‘Why should blind people take photographs’?’ I roll up my sleeves and begin.
Over the two hours we explore the possibilities of communication between sighted and non-sighted communities, discuss language and how emotion can be conveyed through image and combinations of image, touch, scent and sound.
We discuss sight; our sight, how we lost or are losing it, what limits us. Then we explore the camera basics through touch and take the first series of photographs using touch and sound to establish the composition and I show them how to place the camera on heart, chin or nose (using the head as a tripod pivot) to take steady and simple pictures.

One of the young men remembers that when he had sight as a child in Africa he loved to watch the birds flying in the dawn skies before he went to school. The sound of them….
‘I want to take photos of birds,’ he says
We discuss British bird song. We discuss what it might be like to layer bird song with images.

The tall Jamaican lad, blind from birth says he would rather photograph lions. ‘But I also love the countryside,’ he says. ‘I want to photograph Kent.’

But then the day swivels on its heel. When the rest of the group arrive back glowing from an outing to the Imperial War museum, it is apparent that the three new men are too many for the course and will have to leave. There will be another opportunity in a couple of months but they have been so open with me, so enthusiastic and hopeful that it is a blow to us all. I am too angry and I wonder if my own struggle with my diminishing sight is causing me to become too emotionally bound up with the participants.

I glance at one of the group photographs the young African man took in the park. There I stand next to the others, a small odd-looking woman in my over sized glasses and daft cap, looking cowed and uncomfortable in the sunlight, handling my cane like a dead snake. A blind person in a group of blind people. For an inexplicable reason I am horribly shocked by the photograph, my perspective skews wildly and I realise that I am gearing up for a panic attack. I haven’t had one for over three years..not since trying to commute from Cambridge to Reading for work (nearly 4 hours each way) and eventually losing it at Paddington station.

My heart beats up high in my throat and I feel nauseous. Bollocks…if I am going to have to breathe into a paper bag I am NOT going to do it here. I don’t ask for help, can’t really. The rest of the facilitators are sighted, experienced Londoners and I don’t feel I have time to go into the explanations. I make my excuses (I wonder afterwards if I actually pointed at my own head and made twirling motions….wouldn’t put it past myself!) and run.

Just as I am becoming doubtful that I will make it to the tube I run, smack bang (literally) into the tall Jamaican and the little savvy North African with his guide dog Frankie.
Bizarrely they are going my way and gabbling happily, drag me with them into the depths of the tube station where a woman smelling deliciously of cocoa butter escorts us all into a carriage.
The two leap out a couple of stops before me, Frankie’s toenails skittering on the floor in his desperation to get out of the train and the anonymous crowds swell.

I sigh and prepare to be swept up in the mayhem of Kings Cross underground and then…

‘Can I help you ma am,’ comes a voice from far above my head. A huge man in a yellow jacket and collar radio offers me an elbow. It take me three confused seconds to realise the coco butter lady has called ahead for a ‘meet and greet’ and this monster is my escort. I can’t see the man’s face clearly in the low light behind my glasses but I note the tattoos that spiral up his wrist and disappear into his shirtsleeves. He is so big that the crowd don’t even try to squeeze around him but instead wait patiently behind for him, tanker like, to move off. I take his arm..well half of it. My hand isn’t big enough to get a full grip of his elbow. I feel like I am in a Shrek cartoon. We seem to float up to the exit

‘I’ll be fine now, ta’, I say and he kind of heaves me gently over the barricades and I am off up the steps to face the masses in the mainline station and I wince and..

‘Excuse me… may I help you? I actually work for RNIB and I couldn’t help notice you had a cane….’

A middle-aged man with a manner so neutral and insipid that he almost lacks an aura is at my shoulder. Again the crowd part around him as if he has a small force field. My mouth drops open as I thank him and take his arm. We are perfectly in time for the train and he plants me on the furthest carriage and almost bowing, scuttles away so as not to invade my space.

‘This is getting ridiculous,’ I think to myself and the various gods that seem to be carrying me home. ‘I was booked in for a panic attack 45 minutes ago…’

‘T is that you?’
A woman squeezes in next to me. An acquaintance from Citizens Advice Bureau. ‘What a bit of luck,’ she says not knowing the half of it. ‘How’s your MA application going? Anything I can help with?’

And so on Tuesday it seems, after a wonderful and terrible day I was actually escorted home by some marvellous series of (coincidence/ angels/ aliens/ Jesus/ Monkey god/ quantum event/ luck).

And to CONCLUDE, if I didn’t write this stuff down I would forget it. (well...what did you expect?) By the way if you just skipped to the conclusion you missed the bit about the naked couple at Elephant and Castle tube station…

Now about that award; As I mentioned it was Val from http://monkeysontheroof.blogspot.com/
Who awarded me the Noblesse Oblige. She writes from the Botswanan bush and her blog is so vivid and beautiful you might never need to go on safari yourself but just check with her every few days! Her work is a commentary on the harshness of beauty of the natural world around her. Fantastic stuff!
So here is the award speel!

This award is one of the more thoughtful ones that I've seen or been given. It's got a purpose behind it that really makes you think about why you're blogging and who has influenced you. And of course it comes from a blogger whose insights and work are creative and humbling.
The recipient of this award is recognized for the following: 1) The Blogger manifests exemplary attitude, respecting the nuances that pervades amongst different cultures and beliefs. 2) The Blog contents inspire; strives to encourage, and offers solutions. 3) There is a clear purpose at the Blog; one that fosters a better understanding on Social, Political, Economic, the Arts, Culture, Sciences, and Beliefs. 4) The Blog is refreshing and creative. 5) The Blogger promotes friendship and positive thinking. The Blogger who receives this award will need to perform the following steps: 1) Create a Post with a mention and link to the person who presented the Noblesse Oblige Award. 2) The Award Conditions must be displayed at the Post. 3) Write a short article about what the Blog has thus far achieved – preferably citing one or more older posts to support. 4) The Blogger must present the Noblesse Oblige Award in concurrence with the Award conditions. 5) Blogger must display the Award at any location at the Blog.

Phew! Right all done apart from my nominations. And they are (and in 3D –just like in Cannes!)

Tinku of Tinku Tales: http://tinkutales.blogspot.com/ for her exceptional dialogue on all things contemporary art and culture in Canada.

The Tea Time Traveller Nao http://teatimetraveller.blogspot.com/ for the beauty and the bees!

Susan from Stony River Farm http://stonyriverfarm.blogspot,com/ I am sure she has already been weighted down with awards but this is the blog to tap into if you are a would be writer. Warm and brilliantly informative and often exceedingly funny!

Ruh and John of Epicblogue http://epicblogue.blogspot.com/ A bit of nepotism here but this is my Mum and her partner's remarkable ongoing blog about their adventures in Europe and recent relocation to France. Funny, insightful and sometimes so dry it makes one reach immediately for the wine.

And that's all folks!