Clearing The Blockages Against Positive Understanding....

  I can remember be 18, and up to that age going to the doctors most reluctantly. Mother would insist that if I had to go, then she had to take me, and be with me during the consultation. I should not be allowed to see the doctor on my own. When she did not want to go, then neither of us went. She was born in the era before the NHS was founded. She only sought the doctor long after she needed to see him - locally every doctor was male, even in the 1970s. By the time she went her reason for going had become close to accute, making the visit, desperate. An emergency. 

   Apparently my hearing was normal, that is nobody asked me about it. But for years the working class way of anyone getting wax out of their ears was to prod the ear with the non phosphotrus end of a matchstick*, unable to see the effect that such prodding had, and only stopping at any sign of blood on the matchstick, which rarely happened, thankfully. 

  Aged 18 I made my first apointment to have my ears checked by Dr Ward, a doctor I had little cause to have faith in. But then I had only ever seen him with Mother. I knew Dad was technically registered with the doctor, but we never knew for sure because he never made any appointment to see the doctor. He must have been registered since once the doctor saw him at home. When I was 16 and Dad was 43 Mother called the doctor out to see Dad. He had been laid up in bed for a few days, his meals brought up to him and the dishes taken away. He was too ill to go to work, much less to maintain the vice of his choice, the pub. The message that was distantly relayed to his family was that, for him having only one lung, he had better give up smoking the roll up cigarettes he had been smoking for thirty years. Passive smoking via being in smoke-laden room had not yet been discovered, or described. He took up passive smoking, whilst actively drinking, in the pub with renewed relish when he finally felt fit enough get out of bed. Only he knew what the doctor said, and what his medicine was...  

  But to get back to my own business, I got to the appointment with Doctor Ward and he examined my ears and found plenty of wax worth removing there, and prescribed the ear wax softening treatment for me to apply twice a day, and gave me the date of the appointment with the nurse. Maybe a fortnight later I returned. She filled the metal cylinder of the syringe with warm water placed the kidney shaped bowl under the ear, and took her time. For a procedure that was beng done for the first time I was astonshed at the volume of wax that fell into the metal kidney shaped bowl. And I was pleased that I now knew the difference between hearing and not hearing: people did not have to raise their voices as much. I was also pleased because I had been able to ask for the examination on my own.

  There were many other matters where my understanding was blocked by the language my family used to explain things, and where my experience of social class, contributed to my part in the collective misundersanding of life, where the right question to ask was the hardest to phrase, and then deliver and get an anwer for. But hearing and looking after my hearing better was a good start.

  My mother is still alive, now aged 91, and for all I know still has her allotment for growing vegetables. I am better off not asking what goes on there. My father lost his job when the factory that he worked in - the biggest employer in the town by quite a large number - closed, soon after he retuerned to work. He was never offered another job, and made propping up the pub with the best of his health his life's work for nearly thirty years more, before his declining health made him give that up when he was 74. He died soon after, which meant I lost my chance to ask whether he liked being in the pub as much, more, or less, when the pubs severly reduced the amount of passive smoking inside, by making drinkers smoke outside, under improvised shelters.  

  I now live far from my birth family. on my own. I have a good relatiosnhip with the modern health service, with all the data it collects, and preventative medicine ethos it applies to my life. I have that because I can, and because I live more healthily than my parents ever prepared me for - I even enjoy hearing my own tinnitus - something they would never have thought to prepared me for enjoying.

*Bryant and May were the brand of matches of choice in the parental house, because they were the only brand to put on the back of them what are now called 'dad jokes'. Sample: Son, doing his home work, 'Dad where are the Himilayas?' Dad in reply 'I don't know. Ask your mother, she is the one who puts everything away.'.     

Bird Life: The Rainbow Bee Eater

Rainbow bee-Eater.

Fogg Dam, Australia.

Photographer: Matt Campbell.

 

Sex And Violence Ancient And Modern

This image was published in the Sunday Express 8th October 1972
shows Mary Whitehouse as God, and Lord Hill, then Chairman
of the BBC Govenors as Moses, prostrate before her,
makes play of the idea of  her making her way
through the tide of depravitry that the BBC broadcast,
the thilthy waters of which she parted - for her  to tread a clean path
through the filth would cleave and retreat
as she stepped forward, afraid of her.

 The image is from a 1973 book of the scripts for 'Til Death Us Do Part',
 one of the BBC programmes she liked the least. In my twentnies I read
The Old Testament, and I used to joke to my disbelieving parents,
who were small c conserative, 'It is full of sex and violence'
which it is - the violence more than the sex, I had to look harder
to find the latter. I still read the book today, but less for the shock value,
or the renewing some feint old hope of being freshly scandalised.    

 

In This Age Of Unoriginality

Through the reinvention of corporate theft
I wonder how long it will take, before
the corporate recycling will meet itself,
coming back from it's previous thievery?

When it does, what will it recognise,
given how vanity does not recognise itself? 

Nobody's History

As the world draws closer to a stage
where the ill will that leads towards war
proves irretrievable I notice a new tactic
from thos who seek to dircct thoughts
that will lead to adversarial behaviour,
a new varition on 'throw the stone
bu hide the hand [that thre it] after'
at first allow their enemies to quote 
what they say, accurately direct from the sourcs,
then change the way of engaging with the public
to allow words to be recorded but without attributation.

So the words exist and leave their mark
on human behaviour but who said them
and when they were said freshly anonymises
the new chapter in the history of human conflict
as if some lived and many died, but nobody
alive now knows why, or who it all starterd with.   

The Partial Attention Span Economy

Not only do I start to read fewer books
than I once did, but I often don't finish
what I read either. It could be, to quote
the writing on the work house clock,
that 'The Time is Short', where the urge
to work, whether my work is at words
or at the physical labour of the sort
the clock once encouraged, is no longer
as urgent in seeking achievement as it once was.

In my new self I lapse from the standards
my older selves once set. I like who I am now,
much more than who has led me towards  being that person

I am less drawn in by past and present day versions
of the partial-attention-span-economy
that misses the point it once attempted to make.

Open Thought

To underthink something
is less about approaching the subject, or idea,
with so weak a formal agnda that it is formless, bare,
much more that the idea is strong but spare, and open....

To underthink something is to let the idea breathe,
and allow the idea to follow the tide of the air
through it's natiral course, nearer it's concluson,
like a river undiverted where the only dams
are the barriers that get set up by Mother Nature.....