January disease

When you fall ill, you expect the symptoms to cluster sensibly in the direction of a diagnosis, something known, something other people have had, something with a name. So what happens when you experience symptoms that don’t cluster sensibly? Could there be diseases unique to individuals, or ones so peculiar that nobody has considered them as groups of symptoms which are causally related? We all like to think we’re unique, that we’re individuals, but we wouldn’t want to think we were peculiar… Sometimes we like safety in numbers. We like to be told, yes, you’ve got X, it’s as common as muck, take these three times a day. Off you go. Sorted.

Over the last decade or so I’ve had episodes of what I’ve come to call January disease, since typically it strikes in the first few days of the New Year, and is generally gone by the end of the month. Sometimes it lingers a bit into February and mild versions of it can occur transiently at any time of year, but mostly it’s January-specific.

I’ve no idea what it is except that it’s sleep related and also involves my left leg. It can occur when I’m falling asleep, it can wake me up, or I have an episode of it as I wake up. This can happen with normal night time sleep, or if I have a snooze during the day. Always it involves an ache in my left lower leg, ankle or foot, combined with a feeling of nausea or feeling sick, twitching (usually the left leg, but occasionally other limbs), and visual imagery experienced as unpleasant or even painful (although the content is not usually conventionally so), which keeps me awake. 

At its worst, several years ago, the condition involved multiple myoclonic spasms, even whole body spasms while I was asleep and unaware of what was happening, and strange mental phenomena – a variety of noises in my head, bangs, and a sound like a snowball gently hitting a wall, plus visual imagery which often resembled a TV screen featuring what looked like rapidly fast-forwarding video. These were not like normal dream images, nor hypnagogic ones, which from time to time I enjoy. I began to dread bedtime. At one point the twitching caused me to involuntarily bite my tongue. As I say, this was years ago, and by January this year – though the condition arrived right on cue - it was much more mild. Now, almost out of February, it’s more or less gone. However, one night recently I awoke - with all the other symptoms as described above - to an image of a pile of fragments of leopard skin fabric piled up in a city park. An image that hurt. How bonkers is that?

Naturally, when this condition first appeared, I was alarmed, and consulted my GP. Too scared to reveal all the symptomatology I talked her into a diagnosis of restless legs syndrome and she prescribed quinine, whose advertised potential side effects encouraged me not to take it. Meanwhile I was on the internet researching sleep disorders, epilepsy, migraine, brain tumours, parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, the myoclonus and its disorders. Nothing quite fitted the symptomatology. I wondered if it could be a trapped nerve somewhere that gets pressed upon when I lose muscle tone. I do not have any diagnosed underlying medical conditions, nor do I take ‘substances’. What could it be?

The fact that I’ve had this thing for about ten years, that I’m still here and that I’m fine for the rest of the year suggests that it can’t be anything all that serious, and I’m no longer unduly worried about it. Just mystified. I discovered quite early on that I could temporarily cure it by waking up properly and walking around for a bit, and even more strangely that, if I mentally told it to “go away”, it would oblige. It’s difficult to describe, but at its worst there was a sensation that I was accessing what felt like a mirror of my normal consciousness, something like a double; I was disappearing into my own brain. It could be that for some unknown reason I sometimes land in an unusual level of consciousness somewhere between waking and sleep, somewhere that I shouldn’t be. Why the left limb involvement, though, I have no idea. An odd interaction of mind and matter. Curiously, I no longer seem to get the normal sort of myoclonic spasms on falling asleep, like I used to occasionally.

And why January? Is it an after-effect of Christmas overindulgence, something dietary, something related to shortage of daylight, to ambient temperature, to the handling of a new calendar, to some underlying disease which has periods of activity and remission, or is it the consequence of some mysterious annual biorhythm or a coincidental pile-up of other factors? I don’t know.

Whatever the cause, for now, I’m grateful that it’s a long while until January, and the blossom is starting to form on the trees.

The collective finger – Part Two

Shutting out the conventional world and ignoring expectations is a luxury enjoyed by the elderly, as well as being a mark of the reactionary, the misfit, the crank and the eccentric. It can also be true of the original thinker, the deeply creative artist, or any other brand of focused, determined and memorable individual. Those lists of “greatest ever Britons”, which generally include the likes of Brunel, Newton, Turner, Churchill, Lennon and Hockney (and occasionally Jeremy Clarkson, although I don’t insist), would probably coincide closely with lists – should they ever be compiled - of “greatest ever exercisers of two fingers”.

These are people not acclaimed for their docility, people not famous for accepting the status quo, for being told “you aren’t allowed to think like that” and keeping stumm. Not necessarily easy people to get on with, not necessarily nice or very moral people, but effective at what they did, baiting the establishment, beating it at its own game without becoming fully part of it. The trick, of course, is not to sell out once you’ve done your bit, but to retire or die with said digits still fully outstretched - until rigor mortis completes the job for you. Incidentally, I’m pleased to see that David Hockney is still going strong, doing exactly what he wants to do in amused and growly contempt of those who think he should do differently. I’m greatly looking forward to visiting his retrospective at Tate Britain

In the future, historians may look back at 2016 as a year, along with 1789, 1848 and 1968, when many people started getting stroppy, started giving the finger to those who for many years had told them what to think, what was good for them, what they were and were not allowed to say. They voted for Brexit and for Trump, voted to jump out of a less than perfect frying pan and into a fire, whose temperature and extent neither they nor anyone else could judge or predict. At present, we’re witnessing the irrationality that sets in when rationality doesn’t give you what you want; the irrationality that becomes the new norm, the new rationality.

 
“Two fingers to the lot of you” could be hugely entertaining if the potential implications weren’t so serious. Fine if you’re a genius level artist, engineer or scientist. If you’re the leader of the free world or just an average member of society who wants a more congenial life it may be less reliably productive. A facile and ugly gesture it certainly is, more diagnostic of a despairing state of mind than anything else. A bit like an angry suicide note written intentionally to hurt. Naturally, from time to time everyone needs a safety valve, and giving vent to a vigorous V-sign or its verbal equivalent is probably healthier than taking antidepressants, kicking the cat or invading somewhere that doesn’t deserve it. By itself the gesture does little more than cause offence and make the finger-owner or the obscenity-utterer feel better. Very occasionally, however, it may herald  the start of something, a tipping point, a decision reached, a new start. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis - the eternal Hegelian triad. I’m not holding my breath.

Nothing is real

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ double A-side single, “Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever”. Oddly enough, after the Beatles had started their run of No. 1 hits in 1963 with the “Please Please Me” single, this - arguably their best - was the first of their singles not to top the charts, reaching only second place. 

John Lennon reckoned that “Strawberry Fields” was possibly his greatest achievement, and I agree, although there are plenty of others that come close. It’s magnificent, hauntingly strange, out there on its own. Lennon at his most fundamental, aided by the recording magic of George Martin at Abbey Road studios, where famously two seemingly incompatible versions of the song were spliced together. “Strawberry Fields”, backed (or fronted, according to one’s taste) by McCartney’s “Penny Lane”, constituted a pair of startlingly new songs at the time, songs of a type we had never heard before. Two very different yet complementary evocations of a world now scarcely recognisable, a world that, for their composers, wasn’t the trippy late 1960s but the late Forties going on into the early Fifties. Autobiographical songs. Childhood in the Liverpool suburbs.

A child’s world, where the most ordinary things were extraordinary, puzzling, magical. The mysteries of adult society, the very sense of being alive, wonder.  Banalities, commonplaces, treasures. A pretty nurse selling poppies, a banker waiting to have his hair trimmed, a fireman rushing in, the overgrown garden of a former Salvation Army home, blue suburban skies. Both of those songs speak to me of a kind of silence that characterised those times, the silence of cold, bright, breath-visible early mornings, when life and all its possibilities stretched ahead. A future that everyone assumed would just go on getting better and better, as would the music. Peace and love, man. A cliché that’s easy to poke fun at. What happened?

Part of what happened was what the world woke up to on the morning of 9th December 1980. Wicked and senseless beyond belief. And today? Fracture, hatred, alienation, craziness, mediocrity. Liverpool has changed too. The city eventually got round to celebrating its musical heroes, marketing them, exploiting their legend. But go to those song locations now – along Smithdown Road and Beaconsfield Road - and there’s not much left, a few graffiti, a space where a road sign has been nicked, a laconically named café, a coachload of Magical Mystery Tourists. 

So long ago; was it just a dream? What have we lost? What have we gone and done?

Take a listen, and marvel. Strawberry Fields forever.

Slob ruined my handwriting

The title of this piece, if it means anything at all, will be meaningful only to those who were mid 20th century pupils at Nottingham High School. I was one such; another was Kenneth Clarke. In the Winter 2016 issue of the “Old Nottinghamian” magazine, a short item about the Rushcliffe MP’s autobiography appears, as follows:

Perhaps he should have spent less time revising for his EU-levels. 

As for Slob, the teacher known to generations of boys by that focused, descriptively perfect name, his History ‘O’-level lessons were so boring that I wrote down everything he said, verbatim, without engaging conscious brain activity, scribbling away at speed, filling five fat exercise books during the year. At the end of it, what I had was illegible, and my ability to write neatly was ruined irreversibly. Fortunately, that was all that Slob ruined for me, and these days I can happily enjoy a good history book.

The collective finger – Part One

A room full of her own paintings; a lively gig in a pub in the Archway Road; a stroll in a cemetery in post-industrial Ohio. Glimpses of the life of Chrissie Hynde in a BBC4 “Arena” programme last week. I’d never known much about her, which was why I watched. I warmed to her when she declared how much she loathed words like “empowerment”. I held my breath as she went on to say how much she “hated everything” – by implication many irritations of today’s world – and then spluttered “I wish everyone would just fuck off”.

I breathed again. Relief. So it isn’t just me, then. I have those moments constantly. There is so much about today that – for someone who grew up during the fifties and sixties – is not only completely repellent and annoying in itself, and not only because it is so obviously vastly inferior to what we once had, but more significantly because I feel that I’m expected to be impressed, to like it, to want more of it.

Most of all I resent the erosion of peace and quiet, all the intrusions, the nosey-parkering, the false intimacies, the snooping electronics, the incessant announcements and halfwits jabbering special offers, all the unwanted junk and spam, the accelerating rate of change but not for the better, the obsession with collecting feedback, the denial of privacy and anonymity, the systems mentality, the resort to apps and algorithms – or to the law - instead of to knowledge or common sense or decency, to intelligence or creativity. The endemic stupidity, the ambient intolerance and prickliness of modern public life. Progress - a word I fear, though I didn’t used to. Technology, information technology especially, is a mixed blessing. The internet isn’t half as pleasant to use as it was a decade ago, and it’s deteriorating rapidly. Soon we won’t be able to fart without logging on, and if we don’t produce an acceptable chromatographic spectrum our collective fridge will mysteriously stop working. I am of course referring to a metaphorical fart, an incorrect or deviant fart, and to a metaphorical fridge as an instrument of punishment and control. Why do we do it to ourselves? Because we can.

Increasingly I can appreciate how one has to retreat inside oneself or out into the wilds to escape from it all, in order to stay sane. Luckily I can paint and write and make music, not that anyone’s interested. Of course I’m getting old, and I fart more than I used to though with increased likelihood that my deviances from the norm will be not so much metaphorical as metabolical. Or even diabolical. Perhaps getting old is synonymous with a pushing away of an unwanted world, tired of London, tired of life and all that. Except that I’m not, I’m merely tired of increasingly prominent and intrusive aspects of daily life.

So yes, I agree absolutely with Chrissie Hynde, who is a year younger than me. So often I would like – ever so politely - for it all to go away. That’s a core thought I’ve been fumbling towards for a long while. “Angry of Mayfair” was Kenny Everett’s version; “Modern Life Is Rubbish” was Damon Albarn’s. Chrissie nailed it in two words.

 
I believe that the technical term for all this is “having a rant”. Good !