Encouraging words

"Dear Shaz,

Thank you for the manuscript. I finished it yesterday and have been digesting my reactions.

I would definitely encourage your friend to keep submitting it and keep writing. It has a strong and distinct voice that I found generally enjoyable, entertaining and easy to keep with.

I found many of the observations funny and the events sad/thought provoking/informative.

I can offer other comments but don't want to overstep the bounds as I think you said you were just looking for a broad reaction.

How would you like me to arrange to return it to you, and also, when is our next book group?

Regards,
Heather"

Happy birthday mum

The Barons Of Tang

According to the web site we checked-out, BOT would be playing at The Famous Spiegeltent in Hyde Park at eight o'clock. There was only one small error in that information ... the band came on stage at Midnight. Still, it was a blast. The band is a lot of fun, the music is good and Spike got to dance to her heart's delight for an hour and a half. It was three o'clock by the time our heads hit the pillow ... maybe closer to four.

Barons Of Tang at MySpace.




All clouds have a silver lining, though. To fill in some of the four hours we found ourselves suddenly confronted with, we bought tickets to a dance show by Wendy Houston - Desert Island Dances. Quirky is the word, I suppose, which springs too easily to mind. But I enjoyed the show.

My swollen leg ...

... keeps me in bed all day. It's a real pain in the arse to be required to stay in bed against one's wishes but because you have to. There's not much a quad like me can do so I read a few pages of Trader, read some pages of Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness, didn't read any pages of Coraline; ate two plums, a few grapes and a white peach; slept more than I ought to have slept; spilled tea on the books after Spike got home. Missed my poetry group. Damn swollen leg.

But there was one "wow!" So it was not an entirely wasted day.
.

Petals Of Blood

I tried to get into this book, chosen as the subject of the monthly reading group at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I have tried and I'll try again but its didactic, heavy-handedness really gets in the way of telling a story.

That seems rather churlish as a judgement on the writing of a man (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o) who spent time in an Kenyan jail for what he wrote.



Lady with Ocelots by Yinka Shonibare MBE

Trust me, I'm a doctor

So ... you visit your GP because you have what looks like a mild infection in an old would on your right leg and you're given Cephalexin. That seems fair enough, although I don't really like taking drugs. But Dr Mann tells me the antibiotic will assist not only the old wound but clear up my urinary tract, which I think has something to do with my sweating.

Then you start up a conversation about parenting (maybe) at some unspecified point in the medium term future, which means some time before I'm dead - an event that could occur almost any day ... meteor strike on Ashfield, run over by the proverbial bus (although I don't see how any bus would fit in the lift to reach the fourth floor) or, if I'm truly unlucky, I could simply spontaneously combust ... you know ... explode, right here; right now!

.... fortunately that didn't happen just then but, it turns out, an exploding Dougie is not quite as fanciful as it seems.

Conception requires sperm and an egg. Sperm, as we know, comes from where it comes from (for which all boys are eternally grateful to the Cosmic Biologist for the way He's organised things ... whoever conceived - pardon the pun - of ejaculation, by the way, HAD to be male). Anyway ... in high-level quads there is a risk of an autonomic dysreflexic response to ejaculation. The details don't matter but a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I had such a moment of crisis. Did the Earth move for you Dougie? Move? It nearly crushed me to death ... as the hospital staff will testify.

So, given that I'm a quad and given that one has broached the subject of conception with one's not-girlfriend and given that the whole idea has not been immediately laughed out of court as evidence of an old man's barking madness, one naturally raises the topic of sperm, ejaculation, autonomic dysreflexia and possible death with one's GP. Her advice is to experiment cautiously. (And if that's not a something of a dampner on one's ego driven proclivity to procreate wildly I don't know what is). To be on the safe side, however, I'm prescribed with a Nitrolingual Pumpspray. Two skooshes under the tongue in any moment of autonomic dysreflexic crisis swiftly lowers the blood pressure but don't ask me how ... speaks sternly to it maybe.

So that's comforting ...

... until you open up Google.

It turns out that my Nitrolingual Pump SL-Spray 400 mcg/dose goes by the name (in brackets in smaller type) of Glyceryl Trinitrate Pump ... better known to you and me as nitroglycerene, which (according to Wiki) "in its undiluted form ... is one of the more powerful explosives ... [which] makes it highly dangerous to transport or use."


Nitroglycerene doctor? Ah well, the things we do for love.

Kaboom!!!!

Happy birthday Martin