Toxicity

Autumn can be a dangerous time. It seems that most bad things in my life have happened at this time of year, and as I guess that i am in the autumn of my life, the situation can only get worse.

Recently, two local women collected wild fungi from the botanical gardens here. This is a common passtime as the woodlands and fields are full of mushrooms and toadstools of all descriptions. Most of them are safe to eat and some of them are delicious and highly prized. There are so many species out there, and luring among them are a handful that are highly toxic. Most of the nasty ones are fairly easy to identify, but the worst of them all is not. It has a significant name - The Death cap, and in its immature state, at first glance it looks much like a button mushroom. They are easily harvested by mistake and they even taste good.

The unfortunate women ate some of these, and one has since died, the other as far as i know remains very ill. The toxins in the Death cap have no antidote and a 90% mortality rate as the toxins destroy both liver and kidney function. These innocuous looking things are clearly best avoided.

There are a few bits of advice that can be offered to those who delve into the woods for free and delicious food.

1. If you are not 100% sure about identifying the really nasty ones, then stick to the supermarkets.

2. Never eat anything with white gills. Field mushrooms have gills that range from pink to dark brown.

3, Avoid anything with a ragged skirt as shown in the photo.


I had a friend for whom Autumn is a favourite time. At this time of year I remember so many good things and yet I always feel a sense of apprehension and foreboding. Personally I always heave a long sigh of relief when springtime returns. Right now, springtime seems a long way away.

Quandary

I have a friend, ( ok don't look surprised, some people do you know! ) that i have known for many years. We have never been close, but he always had a sense of humour and was fun to be with. We share a taste in music, a certain amount of history and a few mutual friends.

In recent years his eyesight has diminished, due to a genetic disorder and now he sees very little, or so he would have us believe. He lives alone and seems to manage to get around in daylight, but is very hampered by darkness. Consequently he is becoming increasingly reliant on the goodwill and help of others. I am perfectly happy to do odd jobs for him, and even run him to the doctor or the dentist from time to time, but he is becoming more and more demanding.

Several years ago, he signed up with an agency that puts him in touch with young and available eat european women. Each week he would receive the CVs (resumées) of a number of nubile and gorgeous women, all of whom seem to be willing to do anything to get their hands on an English man. Now I find this very odd in the first place, but he insists that this company will find him the woman of his dreams and that she will marry him and look after him. It all seems to go in cycles, he chooses a short list and sends it in. They invite these women to come to see him. One will agree and arrange to visit on a specified date. He gets excited and when the day comes - she has not been able to make it. Reasons include surprising lack of Visa, inability to afford ticket, lost in Vienna, etc etc. THis has been going on now for three years and all he has to show for his money is a few well thumbed photos, and a diminished bank account. All of us have pointed out the pit that he is digging but he insists that he wants a Russian, Ukranian, Georgian, whatever, woman to cater for his needs. He has failed to tell them about his disability altogether! I worry that one day one might turn up, take one look and vanish immediately.

That is not my problem however and if he chooses to dream and have those dreams shatterered on a regular basis then so be it.

My quandary lies elsewhere. He is becoming a nuisance. To begin with, he is letting himself go in terms of hygeine and appearance. He is dirty, his clothes are rarely washed and he smells. His fingernails are long and ragged and utterly filthy, and the source of that filth appears to be something unspeakable within the confines of this blog. He drinks heavily and is clearly suffering with chronic depression. He refuses to do anything about it except that he calls people on the phone once he is in his cups. This can be very late at night. He started with me, and I am afraid that I give him very little time on the phone, and eventually i gave up answering him during the night.

He has now turned his attention to someone else. And phones her several times a day. She is softer than i and will listen to him, or should I say would listen to him. She has now taken to ignoring the calls to, but he persists and leaves long and rambling messages on her phone. Whenever we meet he grabs her and slobbers all over her and franky she is not happy. So much so that she is now avoiding coming over here in case he is there.

He has a very short fuse and does not take criticism well. I don't know what to do. He is already depressed and I do not want to push him over the edge of that dark pit. I know it all too well. I feel that I should confront him with what is making him into someone that everyone avoids, but I don't. That in turn makes me feel that I am taking a cowardly stance. I do not want to take on all his issues and problems and yet I feel so sorry for him. What can I do?

Knowledge

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!
I have a little knowledge about all sorts of things and quite often that has got me into trouble, none more so than in the wonderful world of DIY. All too often i will take on a job that seems ok at the outset and then, because i know less than I ought to have done, a small job grows into a bigger one or even sets off a chain reaction of DIY. Recently, someone that I know well, installed a new light fitting in their front room. It is an attractive, but very heavy unit that had to be firmly screwed to the ceiling.
Now ceilings are varied in their construction, but all have certain features in common. One of them is the supporting beams that we call joists. It is essential that anything heavy should be attached to one or more of these.

To cut a long story short, last time i went there, there were deep cracks in the ceiling around the fitting, and only a week later, the ceiling came down along with the heavy and expensive fitting. Fortunately there was no-one underneath it. The fitting had been screwed into the plaster only and it is a wonder that it had stayed up that long.

Basically what i am saying is that you can never have enough knowledge. Knowledge is empowering and gived us increased autonomy and freedom. Without it we are no different to other animals that inhabit the earth.

Yesterday I was reading about the Pope's latest announcement, made at a Mass in Paris. Allegedly, he condemned "pagan Ideals of materialism, money, power and knowledge." Now i find this a bit hard to take as the Vatican is a hugely wealthy organisation, with vast powers and probably one of the most extensive libraries in the world. What is he condemning? Is it everyone outside of the church?

I suppose as far as religious leaders of all persuasions are concerned, a little knowledge is ok, what they cannot handle is people who know too much , as people in those positions have minds of their own and are less easily manipulated.

As time goes by, the knowledge base increases exponentially. If only more people would make more use of it!

smells

Of all of our senses, i think that the sense of smell is grossly underrated. To have an olfactory capability of a dog must be wonderful indeed.
This morning I was walking through fields, in an attempt to take some pictures of National Trust properties, and though hampered somewhat by low flying clouds zipping in from the south west, I did manage to make it to St Catherine's Oratory, or what remains of it. This place was built on a very high spot as a penance for being found in posession of wine belonging to the totally incorrupt church. Anyhow, that is not really relevant and if I were to go on I'd have to look up dates and i am frankly not that interested. What I wanted to talk about was the ability of smells too evoke strong memories, and the abundant cowpats that littered the fields, did just that. I was transported back to my childhood and to the enormous freedom that I had in my life between leaving the house and going back to it.

I was a country boy at heart and I guess that in many ways I still am. You can take the boy from the countryside......blah blah you know the rest.

In those days there were two things that one always carried in ones pocket. We had no money, but everyone that I knew had a knife, and some string! How sad it is these days that carrying a knife has different connotations, and kids that carry them may be doing so for totally different reasons. I still carry one more or less wherever i go, but am aware that there are some places that it is best not to.

With a knife you could do so much, we were rarely bored. A Knife can be put to all sorts of good use, and we made all sorts of things. Bows and arrows were a staple, and a good bow became a prized posession. Alas most of them were not good and would break at the first use, and arrows would split or get lost as soon as used. Willows grew in abundance along the river banks and they provided most of the materials that we needed. String was essential of course for the bowstring but also for tying branches together to make camps. We could spend a whole day building a camp by the river bank only to find next day that someone else had wrecked it. It didn't matter, if we found another one that someone else had made, we'd wreck that and use the raw materials. We made spears too and pretended to hunt wild animals. WE never came close enough to any self respecting beast, but we liked to imagine that we might.

Later we'd make fishing rods, Tom Sawyer style, tying a length of string or line to the end, and with worms or bits of bread, we'd catch minnows and other more stupid fish all day long.

I can still smell the willow bark as it was stripped away, revealing the cold damp creamy white heartwood, I can smell the river and the nettlebeds that we seemed impervious to, though no doubt we were stung so often that we didn't notice, and i can smell the cowpats that we'd occasionally drop someone in.

It is an amazing sense, and it also works in reverse. If i think hard and focus on an event in my life, quite often it is a smell that comes to me before anything else. I wonder when this sense fades away like the others tend to, if memories of smells will still persist. I do hope so.

Spring to autumn

As always, friends and the family that I choose to share things with, have been very supportive, and I know that some people really do care about me and that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I don't think that I have ever been one to court attention, and it is really only through my blog that I tend to really dislose what is in my mind. I do not indulge in self pity, and I can honestly say that when things go wrong with my body, I do not think "Why me?". That always seems a strange thing to contemplate. I mean why NOT me? LIfe is to a great extent random. WE like to think that we have control, and yes we do have the facility to make decisions, but it is not a game, there is no referee, and there is no game plan. If there were then any real choice that we make would have no meaning at all.

To me, when things go wrong, I usually think something like "Oh shit - not again!" and I put myself in the hands of those who i assume know what they are doing, and then hope for the best. So far i have been fortunate in that those responsible for cutting me up and putting me back together seem to have been pretty good at their jobs and each operation has given me back a quality of life that I really do appreciate every day of my life. I do not consider myself to be unlucky. Quite the reverse in fact, I feel that I am enormously fortunate to be here at all, and then to be in a position where I have no real worries any more and I seem to have developed a mental state where I am always OK. I do not seek extremes any more, as in the pursuit of those extremes, lie so many pitfalls and the potential for much suffering, and we all know that physical pain is no match for the other kind.

I am lucky that I know so many wonderful people, a few of whom I would call my friends. I hope they know who they are, as they do bring much into my life and although i am not very demonstrative, i treasure them more than any material things (except maybe my computer :-) ) Those people enrich my days and I am well aware that it is much easier to lose them than to gain new ones. I have reached a state in my life when I try hard to be nice to everyone. There seems no point in being otherwise. I smile at strangers, and quite often they smile back, and doesn't that make a difference to the way that you feel?

I do not fear death. I fear the process I think, and maybe the thought that I may be missing something. My own belief is that this is it! There is nothing afterwards, why should there be? Religions have grown through a fear of nothingness and an inability to comprehend the futility of an individual life. I know that most of my life has been futile, and the only things that matter are the positive things that one leaves behind, whether they be children, or the effect that one has on those around you.

Through children, our genes are perpetuated and through our actions, our thoughts and feelings can be passed on. Some are able to pass on words, art or music and a tiny group, through this will become immortal. I cannot imagine a time when people are not aware of Mozart or Shakespeare, but most of us will quickly fade into oblivion, remembered only at a molecular level.

In my own genes are echoes of my own ancestors, most of whom I never knew. They too had lives that were meaningless and as far as i know, they left little behind but their DNA. Sometimes i think that it would be interesting to trace a family tree, but then, when i look at the challenge that it poses, I don't get around to it. Maybe, unless my own genome meets a dead end street, my ancestors will take the trouble to look backwards, and my name may crop up as some anonymous figure from the 20th and 21st centuries. All it will say is Paul Cotton - Teacher. It would be nice to imagine that I'd be remembered for more than that, but it is unlikely!

Wednesday

Well the day is here and so far so good. The world has not come to an end for all of us though undoubtedly it has for some. Each of us thinks of ourselves as central to the universe, and that is quite natural i guess. Everything goes on around us and so we have to be the pinpoint singularity of our own existence. One of the hard things about dying must be, leaving things undone. Perhaps it is like leaving a party early, against ones will. You know that behind you, people will go on having fun and that your departure is largely unnoticed.

Perhaps the world did come to an end and that we just haven't noticed yet! Maybe there are parallel worlds out there and we just slip from on to the other and that everything is infinite.

Anyway enough of that rubbish! I have the news that you have been waiting for! :-) Yesterday I saw the consultant. A lovely softly spoken gentleman who showed me the scan of my head. I was expecting to see my brain, but there was no evidence of it at all. What did show up though were the cavities in my skull that contain my ears. It was odd, knowing what i was looking at - i could see all of the tiny ear bones in the left ear and the air space that makes up the middle ear. Even parts of the inner ear could be identified. The right ear however looked very different and the space that should be filled with air is filled with a growth of some sort. Probably not vegetable, it has basically taken over like some alien invader and it has to be removed before it seeks out and finds my brain. Having said that, I couldn't find it, though i know that it is hiding in there somewhere.

So anyway, i have an october appointment with a knife, or a drill and hammer and chisel. I suspect the latter as they have to get inside the skull and attack the damn thing from the inside. It sounds quite gruesome and so pardon me if i don't talk too much about it now. Maybe if i am able, i will do so post the event. The doc was very keen to tell me that there are risks of nasty infections, nerve damage, loss of balance and not much hope of getting the hearing back, so all in all I am less than ecstatic. However, plenty of people go through far worse than I do and so i will not complain.

In a way i was hoping that a black hole would engulf us all today. I know it sounds selfish, but I'd hate to think that if i went alone, that people would not be talking about me after I'd left! I hate being ignored. :-)

May you all have a perfect day and be grateful that the loonies are probably wrong every time.

waiting

I am not very good at waiting, though I seem to spend a lot of my time doing just that. At the moment I am waiting to meet an appointment at the hospital to discover the outcome of my CT scan. I know that being nervous is pointless but I do admit to having the faintest flutterings of butterflies in my stomach, and am making more trips to the little room next door than normal.

It is the whole hospital thing again. I really get very worked up at the prospect of going back in there every time, and even though I know that it is only a consultation, it makes no difference.

I hate impunctuality, so of course I will be there early. i will find a seat in the waiting room as far from anyone as possible and I will sit nonchalantly reading a woman's magazine, (there are never any others!) and pretend to be comfortable and relaxed. All the time though my insides will be in turmoil.

I will listen and nod as the results are explained to me and when i come out I will think of countless questions that I should have asked, and by then of course it will be too late.

In a couple of hours that part will all be done and dusted and I thin have to wait for the day of the surgery. That however isn't for a few weeks and so for now i will bury it and bring it out again nearer the time.

For some strange reason i am reminded of an experience i had when waiting for a bus. Two women were talking about the death of a neighbour, the bus was late and the conversation was more interesting than the rain - One woman asked the other what he had died of. The other's reply was astonishing - Nothing serious, just his heart!! I still cannot be sure what was going on in her head, but that has stayed with me all those years.

Anyway This has passed some time and in a few minutes i can set off. Wish me luck!

The end is nigh

One of my favourite songs is Collide - by Howie Day. It has a lingering connotation that is hard to shake off.

I mention that, in advance of tomorrow, when, if we are to believe the loony fringe, the world will come to an end.

Tomorrow the CERN particle collider goes on line, and experiments begin that involve causing collisions between sub atomic particles. Protons will be accelerated around a huge tunnel and crashed into each other at speeds approaching the speed of light, and as a result, they will be shattered releasing all sorts of bits an pieces for vast numbers of scientists to observe and measure.

One possible outcome, and this is a very slim possibility, is that mini black holes will be formed, as conditions are likely to be similar to the big bang, albeit on a small scale. Steven Hawking hopes so, as any radiation detected from them would almost certainly result in a Nobel prize for him.

Now a black hole is a scary thing. It is effectively a tiny lump of matter that is so dense, it has a gravitational pull that nothing can escape from. They draw in matter around them and become more dense and this becomes a vicious circle. There are some that believe that on wednesday, we will all vanish into a man made black hole, and the world will cease to exist.

One of the scientists working on the project is reported as saying that anyone who believes that is a "complete twat!", I do love the use of scientific terminology.

I am wondering how, if the world is going to end, I would spend my last 24 hours. Maybe if anyone is reading this they might like to share their own thoughts on that one.

Roger McGough gave this some consideration in the 1960s






At Lunchtime - A story of Love

by Roger McGough

When the bus stopped suddenly to avoid
damaging a mother and child in the road,
the young lady in the greenhat sitting opposite
was thrown across me, and not being one to
miss an opportunity i started to makelove
with all my body.

At first she resisted saying that it was too early in the morning and too soon
after breakfast and that anyway she found
me repulsive. But when i explained that
this being a nuclearage, the world was going
to end at lunchtime, she took off her greenhat,
put her busticket in her pocket
and joined in the exercise.

The buspeople, and there were many of them,
were shockedandsurprised and amused and annoyed, but when the
word got around that the world was coming to an end at
lunchtime, they put their pride in their pockets with their bustickets and
madelove one with the other. And even the busconductor,
being over, climbed into the cab and struck up some sort of
relationship with the driver.

Thatnight, on the bus coming home,
wewere all alittle embarrassed, especially me and the younglady
in the greenhat, and we all started to say in different ways howhasty
and foolish we had been. Butthen, always having been a bitofalad, i stood up and said it was a pity that the world didn;t nearly end every lunchtime and
that we could always pretend. And then it happened.......

Quick asa crash we all changed partners
and soon the bus was acquiver with white
mothballbodies doing naughty things.

And the next day
And everyday
In everybus
In everystreet
In everytown
In everycountry

people pretended that the world was coming
to an end at lunchtime. It still hasn't
Although in a way it has.

Sarah Palin

So Sarah Palin could become the Vice President of the USA. Now to some, that may seem like a pleasant prospect. She is after all an attractive and vivacious young woman who at least looks good in front of a camera, and along with John McCain promises big changes in American society (don't they all!).

I can handle the idea of Republicans being re-elected, after all the USA is fundamentally a conservative country and is driven along on its path to world domination by the interests of big business, and not much can change that. I have no problem with them electing a woman to a powerful position, let them have a taste of it! What concerns me is that she (allegedly) is a creationist!

Vice presidents, can do and have become presidents. America likes to shoot its presidents from time to time, and there is a possibility that should the Republicans come to power, that she could become president.

Creationists are blind followers of religious doctrine, they abandon all attempts at original thought, accepting the words of middle eastern philosophy that was written down almost two thousand years ago. This is the equivalent of reading Grimm, and accepting as absolute truth that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden!

Ok much of the central American Bible belt will back her up, but I find it really scary that people with such limited ability to grasp facts can find themselves in positions of power. I am sure that she sees America as the promised land and that Americans are the true soldiers of her god, and who knows where that might lead?

They say that we elect the government that we deserve. Electing creationists to powerful positions is a step backwards to wards the dark ages of ignorance and bigotry, and of course that is what Conservatism is about.

September

It seems like september in all senses. The weather, well, what can you say that hasn't already been said? Summer has gone un-noticed and now we slip downwards to the dreaded winter, and there is no going back.

I thought I had an appointment to see the surgeon today but it seems i got it wrong again. My appointment is next week so I will put that away again, and think about the present. I feel listless today, and am distinctly lacking in direction. I have no projects on the go and as term hasn't started, no students either. I find myself inventing tasks and even doing things that don't need doing just to fill my days.

I have found an Open University course on Writing Fiction and attempted to register online this morning. It wouldn't let me on the grounds that my details are a close match to other details on their database. Well it is hardly surprising as i am a returning student! Dammit, that means i have to print out and fill in an application form and put it in the post! Writing by hand is almost a forgotten skill - like so many things that I used to be able to do, it is vanishing into the fog of the autumnal years.

I have found a pen however and must do something about this today! If I leave it any longer i know what will happen, i will forget it and that would be a shame. Who knows, I may find it in me to write something worthwhile one day.

My friend Holly has been very productive recently and has added two more songs to her ever growing catalogue. She never ceases to amaze me in terms of her abilities and I just hope that she gets the breaks that she deserves. This is a link to her latest offering!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrCcqI12Qhs&feature=email