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’
Methaqualo 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 borders and down to Johannesburg. The thrill was in ignoring the fact that the rustbucket 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 flew 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 of 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 an 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…..
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. )
Photo (c) T. Bush 2010
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.’.
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.
cartoon from internet
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.
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.
image from internet
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.
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.
Amrita in Granchester
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
Image from internet
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!
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.
Image from internet
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 FIFA Poster
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.
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!
There has been a disruption in my blog flow and I must apologise. I am having a rather hard time with a minor bout of depression due to my continually walking into things I am sure I wasn’t walking into a few months ago. This, exam-material hand-in-time, Tories, Dad’s illness, phone bills, and weariness from the Bath-Cambridge commute have all conspired to dull any creativity or witty banter these last couple of weeks. But fear not! Summer has struck and I am rallying.
Also I am happy to report that Dad has got through his first stages of treatment and although it was very tough and at times pretty hairy (well no longer ‘hairy’ sadly…but it will grow back..) he did it and the doctors did him proud! He is on a rest now for another couple of weeks to build his strength and weight back for the stem cell infusion. His partner D has been by his side all through this time and doing an excellent job of care, cajoling and encouraging. She is force feeding him steak and chips as I type!
At first she wasn’t sure. Suspicous in fact…
But then she figured it out. (check the tail wag!)
Last weekend was glorious and although I was stuck inside on the computer I thought it only fair to buy Grace a paddling pool as she was struggling a little in the heat. Being a black dog she absorbs heat like an fat eskimo in a burkha. Grace and Pool x 2 (c) T. Bush 2010
My flat is a tip. I am wading through teetering piles of paper, mostly study notes, bills and election leaflets. I ran out of hoover bags about..err…1998 actually and the dog has shed me a new carpet. There is stuff congealed on the cooker that seems to be sprouting tentacles and the fridge won’t open in embarrassment.
And it’s a bank holiday which means we woke to lashing rain and howling winds.
By midday the sun has made an effort and although there is no difference to the temperature, outside looks less arctic. Apart from that wind……As I watch a pigeon is blown backwards across the garden with a slightly baffled look on its face. I suit up for a brisk, bracing walk pulling on long johns, a big cardigan, extra socks and a rain coat and square my shoulders bravely harnessing up Grace but outside I am hit across the face by icy sodden blasts and my resolve dissolves. I whimper. Grace looks at me with disgust but I am defeated and retreat back into the warmth of the living room with its towering piles of detritus. Perhaps I could set fire to some for extra warmth?
Dad skypes from Lusaka and we have the ‘Zambia’ skype conversation
‘….Can you see me?..’
‘Yes..no ..now I can..’
‘….. I’ve lost connection…Can you hear me?’
‘Yes..no …now and now and…oops lost video..can you see me? ‘
Repeat to fade.
He is heading to Pretoria for his treatment next week which is both exciting and terrifying. Six weeks of tenter-hooks for us and tender bits for him. With the World Cup kicking off flights to visit him are exorbitant and impossible so I am going to check on the costs of sending myself by registered post.
We, Grace and I, are up to Bath again tomorrow and so with rather a lot of reading and marking up to be done I can see that the spring cleaning isn’t going to happen today. Perhaps when the sun comes out for real and the birds (and the pigs) start flying the right way round.
(I have to say so myself but isn’t this the greatest photo of the hound to date!! )
Why do they keep coming to the door when I am mid nap? Obviously they clutch some kind of Star Trek scanning device to scour flats and houses for people who are in deep slumber (or what I like to term ‘research’.) They ring the bell again and again knowing that the person shambling towards the door is going to be at their most vulnerable, confused and potentially apathetic having been woken up from a deep unconscious and only wanting to return to the warmth of their beds. Like pirates they rely on the element of surprise giving them the edge and pounce with pens poking from their fingertips, clipboards activated, eyes narrowed in case of defensive manoeuvring.
‘Ah. Hello. May I ask if we can count on your vote? ‘
Me, with matted hair, smeared make up and creases from the pillow still on my cheek just dribbling and nodding.
‘Absolutely.’
Each time.
I think I’ve agreed to vote for the main three now and possibly the Greens. I might have signed up for the residents association, a local dairy delivery and Sky TV too…I forget..
Only the Labour canvasser had the audacity to try and get me to actually tick a box and take a poster, gently leaning forward and trying to insert it between my inanimate fingers. She touched me. A crucial mistake. I began to wake up. ‘Eh?’ I burbled. ‘Wha…? ‘ She saw I was rousing from my semi conscious and fled.
But then again there have been more pressing things then listening to insipid white men in ties on TV. My nephew whom we cherish because he is lovely and smart but also, if we are honest, mostly because he is very, very tall (and for us in the family under 5’ 4 ‘’ this is a truly marvellous thing.. we are genetically programmed to worship anyone over 6 ‘ 2’’ as a minor deity); anyway my nephew has been trying to get back from Lusaka for days. He went to visit my Dad for a couple of weeks over Easter and started back on Thursday. He got as far as Nairobi before ‘Iceland’s Revenge’ struck with a sky full of pumice ash and then had to improvise Cairo, Istanbul Rome…where he got stuck looking for space on a train. He has run out of phone battery, is low on dosh and not quite sure what and where to go next. There is a plan afoot for my Mum’s partner Silent John to go and pick him up from the Italian border…. its all sounds very exciting but possibly more than a little harrowing Hopefully he’ll be back afore my next post!
The sun came out at the weekend and immediately everyone got drunk. Kids went berserk on bikes and skateboards, roller-skates, and scooters. Exhausted parents clutching bottles of wine hunkered down on pavements to watch. Pub gardens overflowed with woozy adults, shoulder straps slipping off, t-shirts discarded, sunlight blindingly reflecting off fish-white skin. Grace and I walked down by the river. Since her illness she has become quite shy and defensive with other dogs. She desperately wants to play and will whine and yelp and start a nervous approach before losing her nerve and jogging back to me looking embarrassed. I had met up for a quick shandy with a pal (I am keeping my toxicity levels as low as possible as the mo) but my friend on her second pint of Leff (an extremely strong wheat beer) got leery. As Grace edged towards a handsome retriever attached to a man and his two young daughters she started howling what she thought would be encouragement. ‘Go get ‘em Grace! Grrr!! Yeah Grace! Take ‘em down!’
This as you may guess is rather against the ‘guide dog code’.
‘Shut Up!’ I hissed furiously noting that the man was standing between Grace and his children with his hands spread out in a protective gesture and Grace was tearing towards him wagging her tail and thinking his outstretched arms were for her. In the end all was fine and Grace and the retriever went for a leisurely lollop and we got home before we were arrested.
I am staying in Cambridge this week ensuring that Grace rests and has fully charged mojo before we begin trekking back and forth to Bath again. I am missing my seminar group but the manuscript is slowing coming along and I have found my Tonga researcher who has accepted payment in Arsenal T-shirts! This is wonderful as my main character is a Tonga child from Monze who has found herself on the streets of Lusaka. With thanks to her and in light of current events I thought these might tickle you
For the politicians out there: ‘Basokwe bakasekana bukolo’ ( equivalent to the pot called the kettle black but translates literally into ‘The monkeys laughed at each other’s backsides’)
An for the voters: ‘Sibuzya takolwi bowa’ (one who asks never got poisoned by mushrooms – as in, you need to ask questions/directions and you won’t ever get lost)
Thank you Beene! And thank you readers. How are you all doing out there under the ash cloud? Do let me know.
