Irreversible ablation treatments

Ann's pulse has ricocheted from heights of 186 bpm (beats per minute) to depths of 46 bmp, sometimes over periods as short as an hour, since she went into atrial fibrillation (AF) twelve months ago, leaving her exhausted and she often needs extra sleep through the morning or afternoon. Electro cardioversion is a crude method of attempting reversal of AF, basically by sending a massive electric shock through her chest under sedation to stop the heart, and hope it restarts in a more natural rhythm. A previous attempt to reverse it failed, so Ann was started on even stronger drugs which didn't help much but brought their own unpleasant side-effects. Yesterday she had another blast of high voltage therapy, but this time it seems to have succeeded; the heart is mostly in sinus rhythm (SR), though still with bouts of AF. Because of the junior doctors' strike, Ann was the only patient brought onto the ward that morning, so she was attended by the great man himself (no, not God this time). The receptionist looked up from her empty desk to greet Ann, "back again?" and three different nurses kept coming in to see if she was comfortable or wanted another cup of tea. It is too early to tell if she will be less exhausted, but this morning she is back in bed with the heart moving between SR and bouts of AF, which confuses her Apple watch monitor that reports it as "inconclusive".  The next step will be ablation therapy, which means the deliberate obliteration of the natural pacemaker in the heart wall. 

Hundon football team play on a steeply sloping field opposite our house, which means that for half of the match, each team has to run uphill towards the opponents' goal. A few years ago, they moved up a peg from the lowest village league to enter the Cambridgeshire village league. I watched as they swung the ground round by ninety degrees to play across the slope rather than up and down it. They also had to install fancy new goal posts with proper nets. I watched as the groundsman explained they had to break up their old goal posts (a simple cross piece on two uprights) to comply with FA regulations requiring their complete destruction. This change means that hard hit balls go into the hedging at either end, and Byron can be relied on to fish one out on his regular walks round the field to run off with great glee holding the invariably punctured trophy high before him. He then gets his exercise by dropping the soggy bag at my feet to be kicked a few yards away for him to chase.

Ablation therapy for Hundon football club

Alas, Covid seems to have destroyed the team, which never reformed as players moved on and were unable to bring younger people on board. The clubhouse became dilapidated, and now is being smashed down. Walking past the destruction I am reminded of how we, full of hope, play across the field of life only to end in lethargy, despair, and final destruction. There is an air of terminal sadness as I walk on. They talk of building houses on the field; this would double our limited village housing stock but its future seems uncertain.  The town of Haverhill continues to expand and has crept up the hill to flood the fields beyond on its way to coalesce with Keddington, an expanding village between us and Haverhill. They have laid in massive water and sewage works outside Keddington ready to service its gross enlargement with nothing to stem this expanding concrete wall and the constant ablation of our life-sustaining arable and green country.

For a moment as we stepped from the car into the underground carpark in Bury for my eye test, I thought my eyes had gone completely. It was total darkness - all the lighting had failed and not a carlight or even emergency light was switched on. The automatic car headlights had guided us in, but now we had to switch on our phone torches and grope our way to the exit door. The ticket machine was still working though, and took our money willingly while lit by the torches. Then Edwin phoned to say that one third of the whole of Brazil was under a major power cut - it was just a strange coincidence for the rest of Bury was OK though, Brazil was set off by outage of one power station in an overloaded system; the car park was just one switch had been triggered. Strange, though, that there is no emergency lighting.

Nature's destruction

 My office is upstairs, facing east. It is where I continue a low level of work for the company I have supported for twenty years; it is where I have written all the cosmology papers I have had published, and where I write my short stories or poetry. In winter, the sun rises far to the south, before slinking off close to the horizon. Gradually sunrise moves round until it hides for a while behind our neighbour's house before peering over the roof, then continues its move northwards to rise behind a mature lime tree, flecking my room with its leafy shadows imprint of shadows before finally reaching the wide horizon of the distant hill. 

Lime trees can reach a height of 150 feet, the tallest broadleaf British tree, and live for 500 years; this tree was old, and well over 100 feet in height, and Ann and I loved looking out on it. It was the last of a row of trees dividing our properties, shelters for a variety of birds, and home to bat colonies which teamed out at dusk to brighten the fading sky. All these trees were butchered one year when we were on holiday, leaving a blank view of the house next door; only the lime tree remained. Coming back this morning, we were met by our neighbour, Lynda, who boasted that the tree was coming down. The sin the tree had committed to invite this destruction? It shed some of its leaves in Lynda's garden and she couldn't be bothered to sweep them up! Ann was too tearful to stay and ran inside, and I turned without comment to follow her. Lynda's feeble cry as we walked in, "Oh, I've upset Ann." The woman has no idea how valuable that tree was; the last of a great number of limes, from which one of the houses down the hill was named. To look at the constant activity of the birds it supported was a mark of continuing life; its form broke up the distant skyline; and the passage of the sun past and through it marked the seasons. Ann and I both love trees; I used to lean my cheek against some huge, rough oak and stroke the contours of its rough bark, watching the acorns form, ripen and fall. My father admired the different woods, working their grain with affection and understanding. He would not allow us to put shoes on a wooden table, and believed in touching wood for luck, sensing the spirit of life they represent. Even the bat colonies had returned finally to this remaining tree.

Destruction

We have a large sycamore to the side of our house. It needs regular pruning, and its leaves fall on the side garden, the drive and over the fence into the back. Each year I sweep them up, and find it therapeutic to be able to do some light gardening and see a direct benefit by way of a clear drive and lawn, unlike most gardening which is backbreaking and often seems to give little reward. In addition, birds mess the cars from its boughs, but we would not dream of cutting it down to save a little work.

Somehow, the loss of this last tree, over one hundred feet high and probably two hundred years old, home to bats and squadrons of  insects and birds, represents something deeper: the loss of life and continuity, the end of an era. So many people round Hundon have destroyed their trees; it is a sad village for encouraging such destruction when the whole world is crying out for reconstitution of the natural order.

POSTSCRIPT: Edwin and Andre left for a three-week holiday in Brazil to stay with Andre's family, leaving their empty house for us to spend the day away from the sight and noise of the broken landscape. We returned in the evening and another neighbour tapped on the door. She came specifically to see Ann as Lynda had met her and said how upset Ann seemed and  she was upset too as the tree blocked her view of the row of houses beyond it. The upshot of the disagreement was that Lynda was named a bovine beast, so they comforted each other in the grief Lynda had caused, inspired by the cherry tree which, in Japan, symbolizes new beginnings and good fortune; life-affirming ideas that embody a positive and resilient nature.

Psychotherapy

 Hundon has a village shop selling basic essentials, and a pub that's open four-and-a-half days a week, but all other amenities are a drive to Clare, Haverehill, Bury or Sudbury. Kelly, our hairdresser, works in Clare and Ann has relied on her for many years. There are several hair stylists in Clare, and Kelly had worked in one of the bigger salons before setting up on her own. She has an air of calming reassurance that makes the visit a pleasure as well as a necessity, and I now always try to go to her too, having abandoned my regular cutter in her old salon. I have started a portrait of Kelly hovering over Ann's scalp, but it doesn't seem to come right; I made the figures too small and they seem buried in the dull background wall, but I also took inspiration from Kelly for my new poem, Psychotherapy.  

Psychotherapy

The dark grey chair hears her troubles:

Lost dreams, threads of fraying hope, thin wishes,

Voiced despair, absorbed like fallen hair 

hitting the ground unheard; 

swept away to indifferent oblivion.

On the wall a giant clock, 

black against the white cell wall, 

sweeps away each second, 

timing the closed session to its allotted ending.

Her hands, professional, calm, relaxed, reassuring, 

massage as the hair is washed, worked, cut, curled, set and sprayed,

Absorbing sound like a velvet curtain while problems slide past.

John H

Yesterday I was able to cut the grass, which had grown hugely with all the recent rain but finally the sun has returned. Too long for the mower, I could strim it down to a manageable level. The battery-powered strimmer gives me a hint of old rural life, when most of Hundon laboured on the surrounding farms, scything the crop. It is a satisfying motion that induces relaxation and contentment like a physical psychotherapy, and I only needed to sit once for the whole lawn, unlike when I mow it and need to sit several times with a drink of Crabbies to revive me. 

Near the pond, a frog jumped out before my approach but hopped away to scramble on the patio, risking the sun before my blade. He won't be able to hide in the grass now but will shelter under one of the rocks skirting the pond's brim. I love frogs, their lythe shape, their amphibious lifestyle, and their wonderfully exposed lives: from bursting out as a clump of swelling spawn, to displaying openly their quiet development of head and wriggling tail, and the sudden growth of legs and loss of tail and gills as they continue to evolve, unlike the hidden changes of mammals. The tadpoles do not fare well in our pond, for the fish see them as fresh ready meals and few survive. We stocked the pond many years ago when I first dug it with a pair of goldfish brought proudly home in plastic bags from the fair at Long Melford, supplemented with a few others from the garden centre. Two or three have grown large, and there seem to be new fry every spring, somehow keeping the numbers steady.

The lone frog reminds me of the cruelty of some boys who boasted of 'blowing' frogs. This led to an edict from the headmaster that any boy caught doing this would be caned, but I always wonder if such behaviour is a pre-requisite for men who go on in other regimes to become torturers or vicious jailers or perform other acts of cruelty, now relieving their inner torment by destroying trees or shooting wildlife, or persecuting weaker people.

Alba Donati's New Book

The boys are off to Brazil for three weeks soon, so invited us round for a farewell meal. Andre prepared a Nut Roast Wellington in a perfect puff-pastry envelope even decorated with pastry flowers, all worthy of a top prize. We didn't get back till midnight. Ann continues to have debilitating bouts of tachycardia but insists on continuing her housework between sessions of lying down. Hopefully the repeat cardioversion booked for next week will be successful.

I've just finished Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati. This too, like all books that grip the imagination, is psychotherapy. The beautiful descriptions of landscape, events and people carry me to those mountainous regions of Italy and illuminate them and the characters as though I am among them. Donati, too, shares her love of books and scatters recomendations like dandilion seeds, feeding new ideas for reading. If I were younger, I would have gone on a pilgrimage to Donati's little village in the hills just to sit among her books and draw in the air. But when I was younger, I was materialistic, full of other ambitions and pilgrimages, so it is only now in the serenity of years that I can discover the calm of words beyond medical notes and scientific texts. Such is the way of our unbalanced lives.

Andre becomes eligible to be a Brit

The weather continues its atrocious way through August as it began in July, with the wind switching from the N.W. to the N.E., bringing heavy rain lashing my windows at the back instead of those at the front. It is cold and miserable, and I must seize any brief moment I can grab to walk the dogs. The pigeons sit huddled on the roof tops looking miserable, yet in the distant sky a lone swallow swirls about, no doubt trying to dodge the rain as he hunts for his feed.

The Sainsbury's delivery man has just arrived, bringing the first batch of drinks for our Heave Awa' celebration. He is wet and cold, but says it's not too bad when he dries out in his van between deliveries; the worse time is when he gets totally drenched and doesn't dry out all day. The celebration is only six weeks away, but Ann is reluctant to order too many drinks yet in case either of us is ill or doesn't make it. We take a break for toast and tea, now the bread has arrived.

 Andre has been in the UK long enough to qualify for citizenship, and this week took his "Life in Britain" test in London to complete the process. Sample questions were: Which two houses fought in the Wars of the Roses? Who was given the title of Lord Protector? What king was defeated by Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War and hid in an oak tree before escaping to Europe? We all tried the practice tests, and while Ann and Edwin passed, I confess I failed. I also failed my mock driving theory test when Andre was practicing for that, but I suppose I could swat up a bit if I really had to take it again. Thankfully we don't yet have to retake the driving test every couple of years; we really need our cars, living here in the sticks with no shops and not even a bus for transport. I suppose we'd have to rely even more heavily on Amazon orders  and take a taxi for vital appointments.

Lucy said Andre needn't have taken the test to become a British Citizen, as she would marry him. She would then be called Lucy Suzzy, which amused us all, but made me think of an alternative twist: gay man comes out of the closet and confesses to being secretly hetro, leaves his partner, and runs off to marry partner's sister. It would certainly be unusual. Edwin may be able to quote such a story already being extant, otherwise I offer it to any budding authors.

I had an online meeting yesterday with someone in Indiana who'd read one of my papers and wanted to talk about its relevance to his own work. Chris is a young man with wild hair and a straggly beard, fresh from his PhD so he knows much more physics than I do and is far more up to date, leaving me reluctant to return his call, but he was easy going and the chat was general. He's left academia to work for a start-up of his friend's father; it's one of those enterprises that will either crash and burn rapidly or else go on to make the founders rich, but he finds it too demanding and time-consuming so is already looking for another job. I wished him well and hope he keeps in touch about his future paper. 

Heave Awa' Celebration

Barbie Ann with Pink Flamingo

Having seen Oppenheimer, this week was the turn for Barbie, with Edwin's insistence. He treated us to the tickets then led us in, to a sea of women in pink with fancy cowboy hats. It was surprisingly good, and certainly thought-provoking. I can well see why it gets so many rave reviews. It remains an interesting conjecture, why they are so often bracketed and seen together as BarbyHeim. One is so thought-triggering as we recall mayhem unleased, the other a light, frivolous bit of nonsense; but Barbie too contains some surprising depth, with a serious approach to women's lack of full equality in the US, and a nod towards death and imperminance. 

The accepted wisdom states that "There is nothing so certain as death and taxes." But last week, we received a miracle: a hefty tax rebate! Such things never happen to us, and it was totally unexpected, but it brought into focus the corollary that perhaps I will get an extension before my death sentence. It will be recalled that, on 16th of September of last year, the oncologists told me the cancer had spread widely, and they could do nothing further for me. Consequently, they didn't want to see me again and signed me off their books, with the cheerful parting aside, "you only have twelve months." It is not yet twelve months, but we hope to celebrate the occasion with a "Heave Awa' Party", to which all are invited. This is named after the occasion when an ancient tenement building collapsed in 1856, killing 35 people. As workmen were clearing the rubble, a voice called out to them, "Heave awa' lads, I'm no deid yet!" and they successfully pulled a young lad clear, the only survivor. We hope we are not tempting fate or retribution too much by planning this celebration too soon, but I've told Ann that if either of us don't make it, the survivor should turn it into a wake, as everyone will already have made preparations to come.

I have managed to cook another dish. This time, I prepared a tomato and cheese bake with fusilli pasta, and it wasn't bad. I had originally planned it for Ann's birthday six weeks ago, but on the day she said she'd rather go out so we ended up at the Swan as usual. I still had the ingredients though, so didn't have to buy anything new. The mozzarella cheese was well past its sell-by date but still looked pure white and didn't smell bad, so we risked it with no obvious ill-effect.

You are still here...

Just for a moment
you are still here.
Maybe next month
maybe next year
we will mourn
a salt-flavoured tear
for one who gave more
than most people dare.

Annie Elliott

A rediscovery of driving pleasure

Ann's new car is a dream; it rolls along silently in battery mode, while cutting in seamlessly to recharge as needed. Although no larger than the Polo, it is roomy with plenty of head height, and more features than anyone has a right to. I am wading through the manual, but probably will not fully master it before it finally gets sold on again. I particularly love the regenerative breaking; the realisation that slowing down recharges the battery rather than heating the atmosphere is very satisfying. Also, we are getting nearly 60 m.p.g. even with just local stop-start driving, so we are looking forward to taking it on longer journeys, perhaps north to visit the family once Ann has had her next cardioversion.

For her birthday last month, the boys had given Ann a Lego set to build her own orchid. We are pleased to tell them it has finally been completed, and has a place of honour on the piano.

In the north, news that Rosie was admitted to hospital with acute appendicitis. By the time they took it out, the tip was gangrenous and she was lucky it hadn't ruptured with a full peritonitis. Happily, she is back home and recovering.

Alan, Ann and J in the Swan

Ann's cousin, Alan, came to visit this week on his break from his Portugal house move. He regaled us with tales of the many fraught problems entailed by property law in Portugal. Neither Ann nor I relish interminable legal tangles these days, so we agree that a move abroad is not on the cards, even given the tax advantages and better climate - but even that is debatable with the brutal heat wave inflicting southern Europe this summer. Here in Britain it remains cold and wet, but at least we can simply don an extra jersey, and there is less chance of wild fires spreading across the fields to engulf the house! 

Congratulations to Edwin who continues with his Taekwondo, and got his first belt last night. We remember how good he was at Karati when he was younger, so I'm pleased he has found this sport to excel in. 

Car-hunt capers

 We always called the county, "Bent Kent" because of the many strange, inexplicable happenings we witnessed, such as vans parking on the far edge of Tesco's carpark and a dozen disorientated people emerging, or the vans parked on a layby back to back with their backs open for the transfer of strange objects, or the house opposite ours being raided by the police at 3:00 a.m. on several occasions for drug running, or the helicopter that landed on the lawn of Miriam Margolyes' holiday home after we'd rented it for a week as part of a drug-running scam. On Sunday we motored down for a short break there, and sure enough it lived up to its name. We stayed in the Churchill Hotel on the seafront, with a balcony view across the harbour. Ann sat at the window watching the world go by, and suddenly she was spell-bound by a strange tableau being enacted on the beach. A group of Pakistani or Indian people were gathered behind some rocks, mostly out of sight, but including some women in saris. All carried bags or cases, and they waited there for some while as it grew dark. A car then came crawling along, passed the group, and then reversed to line up with a gap in the wall. One man got out and came back carrying a large box, then went back to the group and took individual flash photographs of them all before they followed him to the car and were driven away. We still wonder what they were doing there.

Morelli's Ice-cream - a sharing dish

Our stay in Kent was enjoyed in some of our favourite spots, including Morelli's Ice-cream parlour in Broadstairs, Margate pier head pub, and Herne Bay front. 

Apart from this diversion, our time was well used as Ann continued her car hunt in Canterbury. We came round to considering the possiblity of a Renault and saw two possible ones. It seems a good car, ticking many of our boxes, so Ann continued the search yesterday when we got back. Today we went to another garage at Sawston and saw the ideal compromise car - a Renault Clio - put down a deposit, and suddenly Ann has a car again! Vindis Motors were very fair, even agreeing to replace a scatched rear windscreen, and the car - a hybrid - drives like an ideal motor. Vindis himself was an interesting Chech guy who came over in the war, flew Spitfires with the RAF at Duxford, and ended up as a flight leutenant before using his discharge money to open his first second hand car dealership. They still have his gold-plated Rolls Royce in the showroom. Definitely worth our trip, and earning a toast to happy motoring at the Globe on our way home.

Ann has a new car!