Tag: Covid

Is Spring actually springing?

Snowdrops in Sidney Gardens

I checked on the Potwell Inn stats a couple of days ago and I found that my writing output took a real dive after August last year and has only just begun to pick up again in the last couple of weeks. I know exactly how this happened and a quick look at the diary confirmed it, because that was when I had all my heart medications changed after an echo scan, which kicked off a load of side effects that made me feel really – and I mean really under the weather, much more than the original reason for seeing the GP. I’d had what’s called Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation for years – it’s pretty common and as long as it’s managed properly it’s not especially dangerous. The Paroxysmal bit means that it doesn’t happen all the time and the GP had warned me that the usual course of the complaint means that the frequency slowly increases until the episodes pretty well join together and your heart is beating irregularly all the time – which can make you feel a bit odd; light headed and wobbly.

I’d always kidded myself that a heart rate of 190 while I was climbing, or in the gym, was a rather positive sign that I could really put my foot hard on the floor and get away with it. That’s until we watched a 24 hours in A&E episode in which a woman was taken off to hospital in an ambulance for having a heart rate of – I think -154. Cue, or should that be queue for an appointment with the GP.

Anyway, to cut a long story down a bit , it was all taken rather seriously and after some scans I was given some medication and told – for the very first time – not to overdo it. The penalty, I was told, was the high risk of a stroke or a heart attack. But hours on Google and in conversations at the gym and with a GP neighbour on the allotment who, when I asked him if I’d ever be able to stop the medication replied “only if you want to die!” ; no-one was prepared to specify what exactly overdoing it means. It all reminded me of a verse from a poem by ee cummings –

(let’s go said he
not too far said she
what’s too far said he
where you are said she)

ee cummings – May I feel said he

I largely managed to put the whole boring diagnosis out of my mind; but to be honest, working flat out on the rowing machine – my favourite activity in the gym – now always led to one anxious eye on the heart rate monitor which often obliged me with some randomly threatening results. Then came the COVID lockdown and the gym was closed for months so I took to weights and floor exercises at home.

The GP was right of course and I finished up with constant AF and some noisy heart valves. Hence the new medication that didn’t stop the AF but slowed my pulse quite a bit, dropped my blood pressure and made me feel ill. That all started in August when the Potwell Inn work-rate fell. Our GP pharmacist was brilliant and we agreed that I’d put up with feeling absolutely rubbish and give the new medication time to bed in – which slowly made things better until we got COVID for the second time and then I really did take a dive. This new variant left me completely exhausted, often breathless, dizzy and with no appetite. “There goes Christmas”, I thought.

And then I slowly felt better. During our week in Cornwall I discovered that I could still walk up some pretty steep coastal paths without having to stop and catch my breath every 20 yards. It was all a matter of overcoming the anxiety and pacing myself. This week we reinstated the 10,000 step walk that we invented during the lockdown and it was OK. I could hardly believe, it but apart from a bit of understandable stiffness I felt back to normal. I even – and I haven’t even confessed this to Madame yet – I even thought about a gentle rowing session at the gym. After all, apart from killing myself what could go wrong? More seriously, after decades of refusing to act my age, I think I’ve cracked it. I should act my age, control the anxiety and not overdo it, after all death is God’s way of telling you to slow down, so I need to keep my feet off the throttle and not worry too much about being the oldest person in the place.

Being fit; being able to do things is a truly precious feeling and it makes me feel confident and happy. The hospital consultant cheerfully told me on my last visit that he could pass a minute soldering iron down one of my arteries and burn out some of the extra nerve endings whose random firings are the ultimate cause of all the bother; or they could still fit a pacemaker; so I’m not nearly done yet.

And has Spring sprung? and is the grass riz? As the ninth named storm crashes over us in the season since September, the plants seem determined not to let the wet winter, the frozen spring and now more torrential rain and wind get them down’ and neither shall I.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

Friedrich Nietzsche 1888.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost ..

The beginnings of the container garden

Today we started to make a container garden outside our block of flats. We’ve been talking about doing it for months and then our neighbour, Wes, plonked a couple of containers down and the blank wall just came to life. After that it was a no-brainer and we bought and borrowed some pots and brought things down from the allotment to make a start. This is a community project that just seems to have spread right down the street. The majority of front entrances now have displays outside – some of them really beautiful. I put this photo up on the residents’ app a few minutes ago and got 5 likes within minutes so maybe others will want to join in.

We’re massively lucky to live right in the centre of Bath, but this is also an area of great deprivation with a lot of social housing and – as I’ve written before – big problems caused by drugs and alcohol, with ambulances being called almost daily. On the plus side we have a big patch of green outside which, in hot weather, becomes a favourite venue for parties and barbecues. I have an entirely personal theory that the nicer we make the area look, the better people will behave, so this is our street campaign to make this area family friendly and welcoming. There are no rules, no committee, no chief executive and no competitions. Occasionally we organize, but more often than not some kind of street party just happens spontaneously. One of our neighbours will sit out on the broad Georgian pavement with a bottle of wine and before you know it there are half a dozen of us. Most of us live in some kind of social housing and we have a tremendous mix of musicians, teachers, nurses and even a couple of retired professors along with the retired and unemployed all with different and interesting backstories.

I titled this piece “For want of a nail … ” because this traditional rhyme brings home one of the most critical issues in our society. The neglect of tiny things can often have catastrophic consequences. Loneliness and isolation are endemic, especially among older and poorer people and the cost of neglecting it is prodigious. In the current environmental crisis we are losing species every day and we have absolutely no idea which of those losses will prove critical, so every little wildlife garden we create, every journey we make using public transport, every action we take to build stronger communities, every small act of kindness could just make the difference.

Covid had a terrible effect on community life and just about every voluntary organisation has suffered. Many people are still scared of crowded places and it will take a long time to mend the damage. These small instances of community action are also acts of resistance against the ideology that preaches that there’s no alternative to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy that loads the burden on to the poorest and most vulnerable families. The mere existence of functioning neighbourhoods and communities that are maintained by the people who live in them and share their experience and good fortune freely are anathema to our Gradgrind government.

In many ways living here feels like a return to the sixties and seventies. There are very few advantages in being old, but one of them is the experience of communal living at its best and worst, and understanding that if something needs doing you can just do it. It’s amazing what can be achieved without grant support and official recognition. But if we wait for the politicians to change things it’s all over for human life on earth.

Taking a flail mower to the inner landscape.

Winter scene – taken just outside Priddy today

There’s a long walk around the village of Capel y Ffin in the Black Mountains that takes you up Hatterall Hill at just over 530 metres above sea level and joins the Offa’s Dyke path. Walking west along the ridge you come to a track that’s a lot easier to find with GPS, down past Vision farm. You drop steeply down into the valley, cross the Honddu river by a bridge and then climb up the other side through Capel, passing the ruins of the monastery there, and uphill until you reach a second ridge that offers the most spectacularly airy views of Hay Bluff and across into Wales. Turning left you follow the ridge, keeping an eye open for a single wind blasted thorn, several miles further on and which is the only clue to the whereabouts of a path leading back down the valley to Llanthony Abbey and the starting point. It’s about ten, maybe twelve miles, I suppose – a fine walk in any weather although there’s no shelter from sun, wind or rain and it can get a bit gloopy in winter. That thorn tree is an essential part of the navigation. If you miss it you let yourself in for a long and difficult thrash.

The image came to mind today as I was struggling to make sense of the confusion I am feeling at the prospect of yet more restrictions and growing numbers of deaths from the Omicron Covid variant. Hefting – to use the phrase that describes that way sheep “belong” to particular parts of their fells is a powerful description of an attachment that goes far beyond owning an internal sheepy satnav. Hefting includes within its meanings the knowledge of particular plants for food; of water; of shelter from storms; of tracks of use only to sheep who have different purposes than careless walkers. Hefting embeds ancient inherited knowledge within a whole landscape – an almost sacramental image combining outward form with inner grace; shared – and here’s the point – between sheep and shepherds. I remember once talking with a farmworker in his seventies who could point out, and actually name a field on an east-facing slope of the Forest of Dean, a mile away across the River Severn.

It’s an important clue to the way it feels to be human, here in this place and at this moment in time. Covid, brexit, the collapse of social care, appalling and uncaring politics and the impossibility even of seeing a doctor when their answering machine says – “If it’s an emergency dial 999 and if it’s not – talk to your pharmacist”; all add up to the feeling of walking on a rainy and windblown ridge and discovering that every single waypoint has been taken down. The thorn bush that’s always been there as a pointer to the way home, is gone. You feel lost.

And so, today – much to Madame’s bewildered amusement – I just had to drive up to High Mendip to make sure it was still there, even if it was too wet to get out of the car and too misty to see beyond a hundred yards. “God it’s bleak up here”, she said, and I thought to myself that its bleakness may have been its saviour.

When someone’s taken a flail mower to your inner landscape you have this primal urge to find a place that you know, and that – in some strange way – knows you. I’ve explored Priddy’s underground streamways and passages with more moments of sheer terror than bliss; seen the power of the water reshape an entire cave system in a single night, and then retraced my steps sixty years later walking the map above ground. It’s a three dimensional landscape for me ….. or could it be four? My son gave me Robin Wall Kimmerer’s latest book – a collection of essays – for my birthday this weekend. Here’s something truly significant that she writes towards the end of the preface:

In indigenous ways of knowing, we say that thing cannot be understood until it is known by all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, spirit. The scientific way of knowing relies only on empirical information from the world, gathered by body and interpreted by mind. In order to tell the mosses’ story I need both approaches, objective and subjective.

“Gathering Moss” – Robin Wall Kimmerer – published 2021 in the UK by Penguin Books.

You need to know that Kimmerer is both a scientist, professor of environmental biology and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. But you don’t have to be a First Nation American to embrace the earth in its totality. There was never a more important moment in human history to turn away from the narrow vision of the reductionist arrow slit to embrace the intensity and difficulty of the whole. For me, the emotional and spiritual connection to landscape -and not just wild places and countryside, but the towns and cities in which we are also hefted – these connections are being tested like never before. We are being shriven by the weather of events, huddling beneath the walls, waiting for a spring that’s failed us now, for two years, and fearing that there is no shepherd to lead us down to food and shelter.

For each of us the equivalent of my blasted thorn will be different. The signs that guide us to safety are rarely the ones erected at great public expense – like the statue of Edward Colston, in Bristol – in order to keep the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. The Post Office and corner shop, the local pub, the tatty GP surgery, the school where the teachers remember your name thirty years later, the alleyways and steps, the bus stop that’s always hosted the number four bus, the sweet shop of your childhood that suddenly and overnight turned into a bookies on the day you finally understood why your grandfather would send you up to give a note to the shopkeeper and occasionally bring an envelope back – evidently not a rebate on sweets. When the flail mower visits your own blasted thorn you feel lost and sad; and if there’s a calculus for feeling lost then I have lots of data.