This and that

*****************************************

I am lying on a trolley thing. All I can see is the ceiling. I am in a corridor; there are lights in the roof. What a way to be spending Pancake Tuesday.
I am not afraid. I just feel a sort of detached curiosity. Of course they’ve given me some medicine to make me feel like this. But that’s fine by me.

Voices above my head. Female voices. Nurses.

“Do you think we should take him into theatre?”
“Oh, it’s cold in there.”
“Yes, but Mr Bennett-Jones doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Crunch of tyres on gravel.
“He’s here.”

A face appears. Large and round. A man’s voice. Accusingly.
“Why didn’t your mother call the doctor earlier?”
“I don’t know.” I whisper, guiltily.

I am pushed through rubber flapping doors and lifted onto a table.
“We’ll just fasten these straps around you, so you won’t fall off.”
Fine by me. I am still in some happy drug-land. Until. A man – I see his face looming over me – places a large tea-strainer with a folded white handkerchief in the bottom over my nose and mouth.

Suddenly I’m choking. It’s like cotton wool is being stuffed up my nostrils and down my throat. I panic. I thresh about – or try to: the thoughtfully placed straps hold me firmly to the table.

A man’s voice commands. “Blow it out. Blow it out.”

Desperately I try to blow this awful stuff out of my moth. I hear my own breathing, louder and louder. Blowing, blowing. Everything is going dark. Then nothing.


But all this happened a long, long time ago? (The reason Mr Bennett-Jones was annoyed was that he had been dragged away from Florence Nightingale’s leaving “do”.)

Well, I’m really telling my therapist. She asked me to write down any event I could recall that I felt had a high level of stress or trauma – especially during childhood (I was ten years old at this time).

Anyway, I just thought I would ‘share it with you’ - as they say in the best therapy circles because I was thinking that I know so little about your childhood; in fact so little of your background at all. You just ‘appeared’ out of the blue, in response to my advert for an au pair. You said your surname was ‘Paulsen’; I never really believed you. But so what? You filled the bill in all respects. Still, I’ve often thought that although we have been intimate, we have never really been close. I mean at that deeper level. And it is to that level I would like to go.

I is our childhood that shapes us (you did mention that Sven had not had an easy life), and although we can change, I believe it is only when we understand and accept our past history. Only when we can say: “Yes, this did happen”, without seeking to apportion blame – on others or on ourselves – can we move on.

Now, about ‘Winnie’: yes it would have been nice if you had told me from the start that you had been communicating with him. I really would not have been angry; I am not angry now. I think the arrangements are most admirable: it will certainly save on hotel bills whilst in Purley.

And, as I told you, I have arranged accommodation for the two of us – when you eventually reach Swindon - but for now, I want to keep it a secret so that I can surprise my Anna.


Yesterday I was feeding the swans, and assorted fowl of air and water, and I could see that there were bullies, even in the avian world. This confirms my theory that there are only two classes of people: the good guys and the bad guys, (okay, call them ‘psychological types). And you find them in all groups, classes, cultures, from the tennis club to Al-Qaeda
It is a pity the good guys don’t wear white hats and the bad guys black, like in the old ‘B’ movies of my youth.

It makes things so complicated.
Of course, governments try to simplify it for us, and group them together conveniently so we know who we are supposed to fight (depending upon the political (economic) demands of the moment): Nation; Culture; Religion; Political Creed; Moral Principles; slice whichever way to achieve the desired end.

Oh, and about the ‘bunny burning’: I personally think it is a great idea – as you say ‘ecologically sound’. Did you know that in the late nineteenth century millions of human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in Egypt? Wood and coal were scarce, but mummies were plentiful.

I say, I say, I say. Was Tutankhamen a mummy’s boy?
No. His mummy was too wrapped up in herself.
I don’t wish to know that – kindly leave the pyramid.I hope that isn’t racist.

I do believed there are national characteristics. But, are the British hypocrites?

Look how we “took up the white man’s burden’ in the nineteenth century (yes the same century the Egyptians were firing their locomotives with dead people).
Now, some may say that we became the ‘black man’s burden’, but that is a slur, based only on the benefit of hindsight. We exported our religion and civilization and all we asked in return was a bit of gold here, some iron ore there, a few diamonds – that sort of thing….

But I am not a political animal. Although I am an animal; let us not forget that. A member of a species of particularly clever monkeys: Homo sapiens. But, surely I am more than that… aren’t I? There is no evidence to suggest that I am.

Sometimes I get this weird feeling that my life is a novel. And I am reading through it, and I am up to this particular point in the story – but the end is already written. BUT THAT’S DAFT.

I do think Jung was right about the ‘collective conscious’, though. I dream a lot and sometimes (only sometimes) I feel I am tapping in to some larger ‘mind’, of which I am part. Perhaps dreams are a ‘portal’ to this larger mind. Like the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s story.

But what ever else it is, I think that Life is an enterprise in itself: a grand adventure, as Ronnie Laing said. And that it needs not other justification.

Sometimes I am acutely aware of my nose. I don’t mean that it’s big or anything (well, it might be a bit big – doesn’t spoil my looks though, eh, Anna). It’s just that it feels in need of wiping – when it doesn’t. I wonder why that is.

I was in Sticky last night. Borrowed the salt off a charming young lady. I had just one pint of bitter. I was depressed.

I think I need the company of a nubile
young woman – possibly of Swedish extraction.