Kiss of Life…what I need right now…
Category: Diary
Diamond Hoo Ha Man, indeed…
Oh dear reader, have I been sick lately? Yes, very, very, very ill. The worse flu bug I’ve had since the one that pole-axed me on the way back from Los Angeles after my 30th birthday back in 2001. I spent a whole flight dying in my seat, sweating the sweat of the damned, only to have my bowels open as we made our descent into Heathrow. I remember begging the flight attendant not to kick me out of the cubicle as they forcibly opened the locked door as I was in mid-explosive movement. Shaking and distressed, I returned to my seat, literally empty and waited for the landing. When we left the plane, I asked The Missus to feel the fabric of the seat I’d been occupying. It was sodden as if I’d pee’d all over it, such was the forcefulness of my sweats.
Well a similar bug got me recently and I’d been struggling to fight it off ever since my mother had been in hospital. So for about a fortnight, I’d been struggling on and then whammo – it got me last Friday afternoon. Weekends are busy here, lots of newspaper bundles to lug and a multitude of inserts and unfeasibly dense sections to stuff. I felt like the proverbial “Death warmed up”, but I struggled through like a trouper. The 4.45am starts were a killer, but I kept returning to my sickbed after all the heavy lifting was done -to lie in bed, sweating and gasping and sweating and having numerous fever dreams.
In one such dream, I was still in the shop but the lights were out and I had to open up the shop again (for what seemed like the seventh time). Outside it was pitch black, but mothers were taking their children to school and they looked at me dead-eyed, zombie-fied. It freaked me out and in the dream, I left the shop in a hurry.
Anyway, after a couple of days sweating and suffering and dealing with the most terrible diarrhea, I am almost making a recovery and almost enjoying serving the great unwashed, one of whom I obviously caught this evil bug. Luckily, Baby Verity and The Missus have remained unscathed from such germ warfare.
With my mother out of action and this awful illness knocking me down, I feel like this is all become a test. The sick part of it is that I am enjoying rising to the challenge. And even though it is hard work, low paid and tough, I like to think it is bringing back the better qualities of my character and I’ve managed to drop some of my other, more destructive traits.
In between running a busy shop, raising a baby and still writing my little bit of freelance work, I am still managing to record some tunes. When I’ve knocked them into a suitable shape, I’ll post some clips here soon.
Daniel Hoffmeister-Thrill asked:
I take it no more Debden based madness for you now?
What is this Debden of which you speak. It seems like a lifetime ago, a world away. My ex-corner of the Universe is now a barren worksite – all mud and bricks. The tree marking Chez Lock, cut down and removed. They call it progress, I call it man’s folly.
But where am I now? I am living on a main road in a village about one hour forty-five minutes from that there London. There is an airport approximate one minute’s drive away that claims to be an international airport, but I can’t see it myself. The nearest city is a mere three miles away and is one of England’s historical centres. I kind of regret leaving Loughton because the majority of people around here are a bit, ahem, simple. But that’s what happens when you move to a small village – we’ve swapped one lot of inbreds in Debden for another lot.
The best bit is getting up at five in the morning and lugging bales of newspapers into the shop in all weathers. If this doesn’t make me a man, I don’t know what will. I’m still poor and we are still struggling, but at least my working-class heart beats out a proper day’s work and so I sleep with contentment, too tired to worry about how we are going to pay the bills. Bliss…
So let’s not beat about the bush. Christmas is a miserable time. So much pressure to have a good time, to buy the right presents, to spend lots of money, to make sure that everyone is well fed, etc. There’s so much emphasis on Christmas that I believe that this somehow increases the statistical chances of something going wrong. In our case, not only are we running a busy shop, but my mother got taken ill on Christmas Eve. Thinking it was just a cold, she got an emergency appointment at the village health centre and go prescribed steroids and antibiotics. The pills failed to work and she took to her bed, missing out on the Christmas dinner I had cooked for her on the big day.
There was no improvement Boxing Day and so on 27th we called for the doctor again, who visited the house and said: “You are going to hospital”. And so an ambulance arrived a couple of hours later and mother was taken away, delirious and gasping for oxygen. A couple of hours later I received a call from the hospital asking for the next of kin. I’d been this place before and so I naturally thought that her time had come and emotionally prepared myself for the worst.
Thankfully, she wasn’t dead but hooked up to a ventilator and heavily sedated. The nurses couldn’t (or wouldn’t) comment on her condition and so it was a stressful 24 hours. Days later, she has pulled through and is well enough to come out of the Critical Care Unit and be put on a regular ward. Meanwhile, we were a worker down in the shop and so myself and The Missus had to make up for my missing mother, who is frankly the key to the operation, as she gives us breathing space to do things like look after baby Verity, go to the bank and other business related stuff.
So we opened Boxing Day and New Year’s Day and we did it. Myself and The Missus pulled it off on our own (with some help, of course, from our regular morning worker). So I sit here slightly frazzled thinking that a whole new year extends before me and that this time next year I will be even more exhausted. So be it. That’s the forfeit of an honest day’s work.
I’ve not posted any music videos on here for a while, so here’s Tony “King of the Bottom End” Levin with this quirky little number.
Good job George Michael didn’t wander into that particular restroom, eh?