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

More from the archive!

Flying High

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!

Out of Sight..again.

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

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!

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!