The First Car in Shipley.

What can I say?
Mr Brooks was obviously the coolest guy around.

Loopy as a loopy thing, but cool with it.

One very small horsepower.

No shit.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins

Pestilential Pigeon

Where Have I Been Recently?

Well, it's a long story.

This lady's been taking up a lot of my time. Just a short while after this picture was taken, she got married, and her second child just happened to be me.  As a child, I suffered a lot from severe asthma and eczema, and she had more than her share of sleepless nights, hospital visits, nursing, and worry. Now it's my turn to repay some of that debt.
This year has been difficult. Bit by bit, time is stealing her memory. Clarity comes and goes, some days she's sharp as a tack, doing the crossword, telling me stories of people long gone, and it's all there and fluent, other days, she'll repeat several times what she's just told me.

This year, this year might be the year in which I say, "I lost my mother". The memory thing seems to have started over the last winter. Then there was/is the lump.  The lump. In her neck. Scans, mri, ct, x-rays, biopsies... I've been taking time out of work to take her on hospital visits, luckily, my employers are very understanding.
This week, we finally got the diagnosis, Hodgkins Lymphoma (it's causing trouble in her spleen too). On friday, she started chemotherapy.

Then there are balance problems. A couple or three weeks ago, I got a call at work, from my sister, who lives about three hours away, that my mother'd called her to say she'd had a fall, had been helped by a passer-by, taken home, but was in pain and seemed confused.  I left work early, got the doctor to see her. No bones broken, just lots of bruises.

This week she started the chemo, took a double dose of some of her drugs because she couldn't remember .... So now we've had to get a visiting nurse to come, every morning, to be sure she takes the right ones in the right amounts. I go there every day, make her a meal, make sure she's eating and drinking regularly. 

Some days she's up, positive, full of ideas and plans, other days, she's had enough. Wants not to be here any more.

It's not easy, I'm not any sort of expert at being a nurse. But then nor was she, in those years when she would sit by my bed through the night.

It's my turn now.

Comment Spam.

I've been getting some odd comments, on older posts, they're like comment-spam, but seem not to contain links of any sort. The poster is anonymous, obviously english is not anon's first language, and usually the comment seems to have little relevance to the post.
Consequently, I've enabled moderation for older posts, and I'm reporting as spam, then erasing anything that doesn't look like a bona-fide comment.
I like people to identify themselves in some way, comments made as "Anonymous" are likely to be summarily executed.

One for the Pencil-Loving Mule!

Imagine how many of those Derwent Watercolour pencils are inside this trailer!

We'll Just Have to go a Little Faster,or We'll Never Get the Jump Right.

I Was Disconnected.

I lost my internet connection.
I tried all the usual stuff, you know, disconnect the cable modem, allow it to reboot, ditto the wireless router and the computer, nothing worked.


Eventually I dialled the number on my internet provider's bill, to hear the automated voice tell me there were no known service outages in my area. Then I dialled another number, hit the right buttons, listened to the recorded messages for a while, until i got a human. The human listened to my woes, advised me to power down the cable modem......
Eventually the human decided to transfer me to the tech helpline... So I got the lady in India whose speech was very difficult to understand. "I vant you to take off the power supply to the cable modem please...." Can I just bang my head against the wall instead?
She told me they could not get any fault to show on my line but said "theres something very strange". She would not expand upon that statement, just that an engineer would come out on Saturday morning between 08:00 and 12:00.
In the meantime I could clean my house, read "War and Peace", and learn esperanto, perhaps.
I'd have preferred immediately, because having no internet is like having no phone. Disconcerting.
I can remember the days when our phones were wired to the wall, in the hallway.
I'm addicted, I realise.
So the day after, I went out to have a look at the internet connection box on the front of the house.
The cover was off. the connection splitter block was disconnected, and the incoming cable from the street, from the interwebs.... was connected, directly... to a black cable headed upwards to my neighbour's flat.
I reconnected them all to the splitter block. My upstairs neighbour is an idiot, a fuckwit too. I rarely see him. I took my doorbell out because I was sick of his idiot friends and ex-girlfriends pushing on it, when ringing his, banging on the door, and throwing stuff at his windows didn't work.
Today the repairman came. I didn't tell him what I'd found, just that it had been bust open and disconnected. He looked at me, smiled and said... I hear what you're saying. We'll have a record of any connection other than your modem. Here's my number. Just call me if it happens again.

So I'm back again.

For a while.