If I could afford it, which of course I can’t, I’d have a thorough massage once a week. Particularly the back, and especially the lower (cervical?) area, and the neck and shoulders. Classic stress loci.
But whilst I can occasionally persuade Teresa to give me a few minutes of back massage, in the main I’m reliant on other stuff for relaxation. Self-medicating with booze works, for sure. But isn’t the healthiest way.
The results are immediately tangible.
Chester, our delightful and, of late, not so wee moggie, can be a real blessing. Today, like yesterday, I plan to spend as much time as poss’ resting in bed. And about 20 minutes ago he popped in, from one of his regular jaunts outside. The little darling came straight up to me and went straight into face rubbing. Which I adore.
Trump watching Higgins at work.
Another almost cast iron sure fire way I’ve found to relax is watching (good) snooker. For some reason it has to be players I find engaging, playing very well. Anything less, and it doesn’t work. Todays snooker menu consists of the gargantuan feast that is Trump vs. Higgins, 2019 World Championship.
Over eight hours of two of the greatest playing superbly. Although John Higgins is undoubtedly brilliant, he’s not one of the players I’m drawn to. For some reason (my artistic aesthetic side?) I like guys like Trump, O’Sullivan, Selby, etc. They play superbly, and look great doing it. Higgins looks like an accountant or a bank clerk!
Trump in killer shark mode, nailed eight frames in a row!
Trump played so phenomenally well in this match, particularly one session – which Steve Davis aptly described as ‘brutal’, and ‘controlled annihilation’! – that it really was one of the best snooker finals one could hope to watch.
And, as Stephen Hendry commented, these longer matches bring something the shorter formats just can’t deliver. Epic! And yet also soothing…
It has to be confessed that I’m not having the best time of my life right now. I woke up, after some very interesting dreams, felt mighty sick. And pretty shortly thereafter, barfed.
I’m not sure the fish and chips dad and Claire kindly bought us last night totally agreed with me. But the neither am I sure that this was plain ol’ food poisoning.
I’ve been suffering from hyper anxiety and agitation just recently. And a disturbed mind can manifest in many ways physically (please note, this is not an endorsement of Louise Hay’s insane ideas)
Simon, Teresa, and Claire, Sunday evening.
I spent almost the entire day today in bed. Feeling thoroughly wretched. I had ‘cotton mouth’ the entire day, despite eating next to nothing and drinking lots of water.
There’s some shit going down in my life at present that I’m keeping to myself. Maybe just for the time being, maybe forever. But it ain’t pretty.
And today it culminated in a mammoth visit to the A&E at Peterborough Hospital. Mammoth in the sense we were there from 3.50-10.20pm… six and a half hours!
And, glory be to our ultra-capitalist society, not only am I there as an ill person, I also have the joy of paying £9 parking for the privilege of this exhaustingly long visit.
Our Tory Overlords sure know how to milk us Serfs.
But back to the Joys of Spring: acid-reflux, bloated stomach, wind. Eyes red and puffy from a mixture of disturbed sleep and all sorts of other shit. This weird upper respiratory bullshit that’s been bugging me now for three or four years straight!?
Let’s do the show right here!
It’s enough to make one sooo miserable one feels compelled to write a musical, and make everyone else’s lives a misery as well.
It seems my cup o’erflo’eth with naught so much as bile. Will I even make it through this week? Past evidence suggests I will. But that doth not fill me with The Joys of Spring.
A friend on Facebook just shared this. How great are squirrels? Just watch to learn. A fun and uplifting video.
We have squirrels. We also have a walnut tree, actually in a neighbour’s garden. But overhanging ours. When we moved in here, I wondered, for a while, how and why we were continually being carpet-bombed with empty walnut shells.
Reflecting rather poorly on my Sherlockian powers of deduction, it wasn’t until I was literally sat ‘neath the trees at the back end of the garden, that I twigged. I could hear debris falling around me and I could hear an odd ‘scrit-scrit-scrit-scrit’ sound.
I looked up, and cool as a cucumber, there was a rather ballsy (very literally) squirrel, leisurely enjoying chomping away on his walnuts. I don’t know how many squirrels we have living nearby. The most I see is a couple chasing each other.
As this video demonstrates, it can be quite rewarding to pay more attention to these fabulous little furry critters.
This is both a book review (my first zero stars one!) and a polemic, I guess. It also touches upon troubled familial relations.
Many years ago my mother gifted me a copy of Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. I read the first half, and found it asinine. But, in essence, I agreed with Hay, that thinking positively is healthier than thinking negatively.
But the second half of the book? That was another matter entirely. And it is in that part of her ‘work’ that Hay’s true colours are shown to be, not to put too fine a point on it, a motley flag of insanity. Insane, and very dangerous for anyone taking her advice to heart.
I have, I suppose, some unresolved issues with my mother, around both the break up of our original ‘nuclear’ family. And, subsequently, being treated less equitably than other siblings. When my sister lived abroad, my mum visited Spain far more frequently than travelling the few miles to us, for example (I’ll leave it at that, for now).
Anyway, back to the main topic of this post. Her having bought me this book, whilst in part motivated by good intentions, perhaps, revealed a deeper – I might say unstated, except it wasn’t/isn’t – view of her apparent opinion of my life circumstances.
What it boils down to is what is nowadays referred to as ‘victim blaming’. In this case it’s the ancient pre-scientific idea that illness is a form of punishment for ‘sin’, wrongdoing, evil, or just a bad attitude. Call it what you will.
When I first read You Can Heal Your Life I put it down in absolute shock, horror and disgust when I read Hay’s moronic assertion that the disease Polio is caused by ‘Paralysing jealousy. A desire to stop someone.’ She has an A-Z, or, more accurately, an A-W, of similarly ridiculous ‘explanations’, for everything from Abdominal Cramps to Warts! [1]
The impact of polio on my family’s lives is huge. Polio killed my grandmother on my father‘s side, contributing to the consequent disruption of his life (he and his brothers were brought up in foster care, as orphans). Polio also disabled my maternal grandmother, meaning she lived her adult life on crutches, and eventually in a wheelchair. My mother had issues with family, quite possibly related again, in part, to the knock-on effects of this disease, running away from home very young (so I’ve been told), and ultimately into the arms of my father.
Does she really and truly believe that these two ladies got polio as a kind of cosmic or psychic punishment for ‘Paralysing jealousy. A desire to stop someone?’ Such views are horrific; they are obscenely offensive, and totally unfounded. The actual cause of polio is, as should be universally known now, a virus, identified in 1909, transmitted for the most part via water contaminated by human faeces. [2]
Something that struck me very forcibly when I decided to research this post is the total mismatch between endorsements and critiques in relation to Hay. Everybody , from Wikipedia’s entry on her, to the Guardian’s obituary, simply parrot Hay’s own completely unsubstantiated ‘personal history’. There’s no mention at all of any sceptical views of her anti-scientific ideas and claims.
I find this deeply shocking. Does her financial success make her immune to proper evaluation? Apparently so. The only objective or balanced critiques I could find were those of individuals, pointing out what crackpot nonsense she grew rich peddling.
It’s a great shame, I feel, that so many people – millions, perhaps, if sales of her stuff is any indication – are suckered into uncritically adopting her bullshit. Even if only thanks to the positivity aspect of her ideas. It smacks of a blinkered desperation. I can understand that. Having chronic ailments myself, I recognise that deep longing for some kind of simple solution to what might otherwise appear to be intractable problems.
It has been demonstrated – the placebo effect, for example – that the mind can be very powerful in relation physical health. But to adopt Hay’s alleged position (her own life needs to be thoroughly investigated, as to the truth of her own claims/actions [3]) is to fly in the face of the findings of all modern medical science.
It has been medical science, not New-Age quackery, that has dealt with my psoriasis and related arthritis, and manages both my physical pain and mental ill health. We can thank (or curse?) developments in public hygiene, in light of this hard won knowledge, for creating the conditions that have allowed for humanity’s demographic explosion.
I thought about giving this book half, or maybe even just one star, for the first part, about the benefits of positive thinking. But the issue is that these come attached to the second part, which, in my view, is poisonously bad. Evil, in fact. The rose here is attached to an enormous stinking turd that really cannot be ignored.
It has oft been said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’d be damning enough if one were to know how many desperately ill people have died as a result of taking Hay’s unfounded nonsense as truth [4]. That people will have died following her advice is sadly inevitable.
But, just as bad in my view, is the pernicious and completely bogus idea that illness is the fault of and consequence of the sufferer’s thoughts and/or actions. This adds self-righteous condemnation to the arsenal of the healthy, and unnecessary guilt and self-condemnation (how ironic, given the alleged healing of loving oneself Hay professes to peddle!) to the afflicted.
My mum needs both her hips replacing. According to Hay’s worldview this is somehow my mother’s own fault, on some negative psychological level: ‘Fear of going forward in major decisions. Nothing to move forward to.’*
This would be laughably preposterous applied to a car; do my tires regularly need replacing because, A) they have a ‘Fear of going forward in major decisions. Nothing to move forward to.’ Or B) due to physical wear and tear?
If your local garage mechanic said ‘You don’t need new tires, your tires just need to truly love and value themselves. Here are some affirmations for them to repeat.’ Would you pay them, or go back there in future?
Not the cartoon I wanted. But the same idea.
In her lifetime Hay profited monumentally from peddling her dangerous brand of nonsense. Her personal claims are all totally unsubstantiated. And her broader claims fly in the face of medical science. Why – other than the toxic marriage of hopelessness to comforting BS – has she not been taken off her pedestal? It has to be the present day sanctification of success. She’s made lots of money, so she must be right.
Louise Hay (source: wiki)
* These quotes are lifted from the appalling second part of You Can Heal Your Life. It ought to have a Government health warning: New Age BS is no substitute for scientifically grounded medicine.
NOTES:
[1] Her ‘explanation’ as to the cause of warts would be hilarious, if it weren’t so frighteningly vacuous: ‘Little expressions of hate. Belief in ugliness.’ Her list reads like a dotty New Age analogue of horoscopes; arbitrary, open to wide interpretations, and based not on real knowledge of understanding underlying facts, but a vague even whimsical form of associative imagining. Warts are in fact caused by a virus. Not by the mind of a person who may have them.
[2] Tragically, under our current Tory rulers the potential return and rise of such diseases is being increased by the total disrespect shown to both the environment and the humanity it sustains, by their rampantly capitalist ideology. Brexit is part of this downward scramble towards private profit-motivated deregulation.
[3] As far as I’m aware none of Hay’s autobiographical claims, from the alleged facts of her childhood, to her ‘miraculous’ curing of her self from cancer are in any way reliably documented.
[4] I need to re-find the quote, but one of the few critical things I found about Hay included a comment from a bereaved man whose wife died whilst following Hay’s imbecilic ideas.
Well… ‘least said soonest mended’! As several of the ‘downstairs’ characters in You Rang, M’Lord were always saying.
Without giving too much away, I hit some sort of crunch or crisis point this evening. Not a pretty sight.
Thankfully some things were in place to minister to a mind in turmoil. And I appear – for the moment at least – to have weathered this latest storm.
It’s been brewing a while. I kind of knew it was coming. I’m hoping it was like a pressure valve releasing. Fervently and devoutly wishing for better days ahead!
The two R. Crumb pics illustrating this post are chosen purely for their ‘poetic truth’; they aptly get across where my head was at today. Melt-downs and explosions!
I’d kind of like to get into some of the nitty-gritty. But I’m too close to it right now!
Some while ago I posted excitedly about ordering a bunch of groovy green tops. Well, turns out the company in question are Chinese bandits. They pinch pics of expensive fashion-wear from genuine makers/sellers, and pretend they’ll sell you it for peanuts. Should’ve known it was too good to be true.
The only upside is that I filed a complaint and a request for a refund. And, somewhat to my surprise, they did refund me. Now I’m worried they might be flogging my card/account details! This and another recent and similar farce have taught me to NEVER EVER buy clothes off FB marketing links!
I recently got back in touch with a friend, Melanie de Smith, who I hadn’t seen for several decades. We found each other via another mutual friend, on Facebook, How they know each other I’m yet to find out.
Mel and I have now met a few times. The first time was at Amy Ellis’ last birthday party. And it there that we discovered we both have MX5s, of similar style and vintage. Hers is 19 years old, and has done about 110k, mine is 20, and has clocked up over 190k!
They’re neither of them in tip-top shape. Mine has the ubiquitous rust issues. Hers has those as well, although (poss’?) to a lesser degree, and, she tells me, needs a new clutch soon. Judging from how it drives, she probably needs rear brake callipers as well.
And, rather tragically, both our cars have had the CATs stolen in the last 6-12 months! I only just had mine (and most of the exhaust) replaced! The idea is, with the two MX5s, I might just get one that’s a runner. And keep the other for spares. Or poss even a project re-build?
Southbound platform at March Station.
I took the train from March to Cambridge, and then a bus, from the rail station to Cavendish Avenue, where Mel and her car are/were. I always feel a bit like tourist when I’m on public transport!
View from March rail station foot-bridge.Nice shadows!
That was all yesterday. Today I fitted a new number plate holder. Mel had broken the old one, in a bump. I also gave the car a light partial wash, in the muckiest areas. Just to spruce her up a bit! Need to get her declared SORN now.
It’s Sunday, and I got up very late. Midday! I sold a couple of 200W LED lights to a guy calling himself ‘Danny Fury’. I didn’t get anything like their real full value. But we need to thin down our clutter. I got £60 for the pair.
I’ve also been moving stuff from the grey shed (shed #3!) into the big green shed (#4!). And then I finally got around to what is, I think, my third (or poss even fourth?) attempt at hanging a door on shed #3. I’ve come to realise that this entire shed must be a leaning-to-the-right parallelogram!
Head foreman Chester checks my work!
The door itself is cut pretty durn square. And the horizontal cladding is pretty durn horizontal. And yet the door seems to lean right, which is most evident at the top and bottom. What this should teach me is to take more care when erecting such structures, to keep all the main members running as straight, true and square as I possibly can.
Anyway, with a much more satisfactory door in place than heretofore (the previous door just kept failing to pieces!), next I’ll be adding a door-handle and locks.
A lovely blaze!
Today was nice enough to eat our lunch outside. Which we did. Plus we had our first fire of the year. Something about fire is so primal! As Tom Waits once sang, ‘all Hallowe’en orange and chim-e-ny red’!
Well, several days ago now – ‘twas ‘pon the Sunday last, I do believe? – I finally finished the loft flooring work.
I first put a middle section of board up there three, four, or poss’ more years ago. That was a chequerboard affair of small tile like boards.
Pic
And then, ages later, I did what I’ll call the right or back side, roughly doubling the available floor space. This latest bout has seen me do the left or front side, tripling the original floor area.
There’s still loads to be done up there: partitioning us off from the neighbours (at present) contiguous loft space; fitting electrics, so there’s proper lighting up there; poss’ even turning the resultant space into a proper walled (& insulated room)?
Pic
And quite apart from any of those further shenanigans, there’s the by no means small matter of tidying up all the crap that we have up there, so as we know what we have, and, if need be, can get at it. At present, like everywhere else in our home, it’s a godawful mess!
Burt Bacharach passed away at the ripe old age of 94 today. What a legend!
Here’s one of my own personal favourites from his extensive and illustrious catalogue:
From Alfie to What The World Needs Now, his body of work is incredible. I adore the string of albums under his own name, from the later ‘60s and the 1970s, with his own orchestra, and Burt at the piano, singing his own tunes (lyrics by Hal David, of course!).