Today is Black Wednesday

Well today is the day, when we make a leap into the unknown. It is a day I never wanted to happen, but that dreaded letter is making its way to Donald Tusk in Brussels, triggering Article 50 and our departure from the EU.

Let this be clear: the right wing bigots in the Conservative Party are in control here. There is no coming together. I for one remain adamantly opposed to what this Government is about to do to this great country. I am not unpatriotic. I am not against the will of the people. I am democratically expressing my extreme displeasure at the direction Theresa May is taking us. This is a great country. There is no plan. My only hope is that this will conclude with us remaining in the Single Market and enjoying the freedoms that come with that.

This morning on Radio4 somebody said "it's about taking back control of our borders". I will never stop believing that this movement to Brexit has been about for the vastly main part about xenophobia. Nothing more nothing less. That we would walk away from the Single Market to feed this bigoted view is madness. Immigration is good. It feeds our cultures, it brings down barriers, it feeds into the economy, it funds our pensions. If schools and hospitals are full then this is about Government policy and lack in investment, not about immigrants.

This is Black Wednesday. I've cried already this morning. My resolve will never falter in opposing this lunacy.

 

Anywheres and Somewheres

I'm working from home today as I await my passport delivery. Quite the irony given that once I am on the transplant list I shouldn't really travel away from home too far. Still it doesn't feel right not to have the means the travel. I've been listening to Andrew Marr on Radio 4 this morning, with a discussion on Anywheres and Somewheres. I am most definitely an Anywhere, probably to the extreme, in that I am an ultra liberal who believes that immigration is a good thing for culture, economy and social progression.


Still, I stand increasingly isolated in the Theresa May view of the world; she who despises citizens of nowhere. I've lived in London for about twenty years now. I thrive on the multiculturalism here. It's what makes the city work. Believe it or not there is a small community here, be it friends from my building, friendly faces from Guys Hospital or others in local politics. The latter I am increasingly interested in becoming more involved in. I want to make a difference in my local community. Is it possible to be both an Anywhere and a Somewhere?

Not a good kidney week

This week was not a good kidney week. After seeing my consultant and the surgeon, we calculated a rate of 24 months before I might require dialysis. I think the NHS are manipulating me into finding a living donor, as by me going on the transplant list I will also need to wait a minimum of 24 months to find a deceased donor. Go do the sums. I understand why they are doing this, why they didn't put me on the transplant list last year where I would in most probability have avoided dialysis. It just isn't fair. Well life is not fair. Suck it up.


Then later in the week I received a call from Guys to tell me that my eGFR had declined from 15 to 13. This is important as it puts me much nearer to the 10 mark, when I might need to go on dialysis. In theory it could  get to 8 but I am not taking any chances. So now I have to come in for an additional appointment to go through the motions for that.


So now I am really looking at living donors. It's what the NHS wants and it is what I want. It just freaks me out to have to discuss this with friends and family.  If I find one, this nightmare could all be over in a month or so.


Yesterday I started feeling quite dizzy and came home early from work. I think it might be the increased medication to try to reduce my blood pressure. That really rounded off the week for me.

Storm Doris

Doris Kenyon, 2010

Today’s storm brought obvious memories back to me of my late grandma – Doris. It felt good, if a little irrational, to idly muse that she was blowing the air about me. It made me think about my own mortality and who might even bother to look me up or muse about me in a hundred years. I thought of my grandma’s parents – long dead but well documented in my Ancestry family tree.

 

Doris Kenyon, circa 1932

I suppose unless you breakthrough into celebrity status there is nothing other than official documents or perhaps social media that will persist. It would be fascinating to go through the tweets or Facebook posts of future ancestors, although the mountain of data will be considerable. So how do you ensure that the important bits are captured? I suppose in me writing this blog I am attempting that in some way, but will it persist, and if it does will it be buried beneath all my employment and tax records?

 

I’d like to hope that there is something personal about me that is left behind. Something for future generations to grasp as to my character. When I was researching my family tree a couple of years ago I was delighted to discover that an ancestor on my paternal grandmother’s side had been arrested for stealing some corn. When all you have is Census, birth, marriage and death records being able to fill in the gaps with some extra colour makes it all worthwhile.

 

Not that I have been arrested – yet at least, although I did have a storm bearing my name earlier this year!

Ethiopian memories

I was feeling a little down after last week's hospital visit, so I thought I'd focus on something more positive. There is so much wrong in the world right now, so much incomprehension that I need to hold onto something that makes me feel good. So I thought about listing out all the things that I have done in my life so far that I am proud of. Here's one from the list. I might add to it over time.


Trip to Ethiopia, 1994
Following my graduation I was a little lost in direction. My partner at the time contacted the Missionaries of Charity in London to ask about voluntary work. At the time a lot of young people were heading over to Calcutta, with Mother Theresa still actively working there. However the Sisters suggested Ethiopia as an option, which received little attention. So off to Addis Ababa we went!


In the time I worked there I experienced so much. From helping wash laundry, to feeding the patients, to cleaning, to washing. The children were wonderful. It was a real community and I am very proud to have worked there. These people had nothing yet the Sisters ensured that they kept their dignity.


We worked in the Addis Ababa compound first, right in the midst of the city. Outside the compound life was so very basic. Kids on street corners begging, simple stacks of tomatoes for sale on the filthy ground upon shreds of cloth.

And the rain, which came at 2pm every day, lasting until 4. But Addis is such a sprawling city, whether it be lunch at the Blue Tops restaurant (a haven of Western food for when we were fed up of eating injera) near to where the fabled Lucy's remains were kept, or else the enormous Mercato market city, which went on for miles and miles.


Then, following an overnight train journey to the east of the City, we arrived in Dire Dawa - an Orientalist's dream: sandy, roaming camels, abundance of khat. There the compound was much larger. One morning we were awoken by lots of people outside our room, which was a small brick-built hut, equipped with a simple fan (assuming electricity) to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Sleepily I opened the front door to be startled by a mass of hundreds of people, all queuing for cooking oil, right outside our hut! The Sisters were giving it away in gallons - the only caveat being that recepticles must be provided. Most were holding rusty tin cans with them and were able to scoop out a litre or two from the enormous vats. We started helping, and with the sun beating down it wasn't long before my arm was soaked in oil and burning quite nicely. One or two only possessed plastic bags and had to be turned away. The event took all day. I was covered in oil from head to toe by the end of it.


Another time in the compound, the Sisters decided that they wanted to go to market for the purchase of a cow. We accompanied them in one of the ubiquitous blue mini buses into the local countryside where they were set to barter for the said purchase. We were told to be discreet so as not to permit the inflation of the price. However unbeknown to me, a crowd had started gathering and an agitated man carrying a very large machete approached us aggressively. There then followed an argument in Amharic whereby one of the Sisters - Sister Michael - shouted at him and he, thankfully, skulked off, thankfully leaving us intact. We bought the cow, naming him Geoffrey and took him back down the hill and into the compound. Over the next few days we visited Geoffrey until the time of his slaughter, at dawn. There followed a feast, with all the children singing and dancing as the meat was roasted and we partook of the flesh, which I have to say was tough and flavourless.


I take my hat off to the Sisters in both compounds for their dedication and hard work in looking after the ill and the orphans. It's over twenty years now since they were there but I still have great memories of those wonderful ladies, in particular Sister Michael, who took us under her wing. I'm proud of them all for what they did for the local community and feel inspired that I can perhaps be a better person for my experiences there.

Hospital appointment!

Today I had an appointment at Guys Hospital to scan my kidneys. I've not seen such close up images like that before and it's fair to say that I was pretty shocked by how advanced the disease is, with the largest cyst or crater being 5cm long. Thankfully there was no carcinoma detected.


I guess it puts it all into context for me and aligns me to the thinking that dialysis is not far away. My appointment next month will most likely lead to me being placed on the transplant list.


I've been feeling pretty tired of late. Getting up for work is difficult. But the world carries on, fake news continues, assassins wear tops emblazoned with "LOL".

Bank of geeks

I was googling some of my old school colleagues the other day. I was at work, a little bored I suppose as I revisited my A Level years in Harrogate. I remember those years as rather lacking direction. I was in the top set at English, but competing against a bank of geeks to the desks on my right who all looked down on me.

I was in love with one, Thomas. He was slightly more introverted than the rest; somewhat posh, goth with beautiful, thick nut-brown hair. We sometimes walked home over the Stray together after school. He was also rumoured to be out.

Hockney's swimming pool,
Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood

Part of the problem, as I see it now, looking back on my isolation as a more confident fortysomething, was a lack of many role models in my life. There was David Hockney, I suppose, who I discovered one day in a spread in the Sunday Times magazine, discussing his forthcoming Retrospective at the Tate (and whose current exhibition at the Tate I am very keen to view). I actually bunked off from Lower Sixth for a day to see that exhibition in London. And it blew my mind away. His use of perspective and colour is incredible. Just look at that photo I have taken of the swimming pool he painted at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.

I was probably obsessed by Thomas. He was very bright and went up to Oxford. I wrote him a letter from my digs in Reading later that year in 1989, declaring all. He never replied. I have googled him too recently and I have an idea of what he is doing. And he is doing rather well.

That bank of geeks tormented me. And in the normal rules of the universe, fate would have caught up with them. Yet I see that one is on the Legal 500 list, another is a professor in California; another is a City success case with a huge house in Fulham. It's hard not to compare and contrast.

Back in 1987 I so wanted to return to that school for my A Levels. My earlier years had been disrupted by my parent's divorce and my mother's remarriage to the aforementioned stepfather, who took me out of Harrogate and moved us to the other side of Leeds, much rougher and far less refined. Two years of hell followed, where I was considered the "posh kid" and ostracised whilst I channelled my loneliness into my O Level studies. With glowing grades I was able to return to Harrogate, and into the top sets, when we all moved back to that area in the summer of 1987.

Yet after two years of longing to return I was bitterly disappointed to learn that the world had shifted somewhat. My younger school friends had moreorless vanished and a new, more Sloaney set taken their place for A Levels. Again I was the loner, mocked for being "not posh enough" and feeling culturally inferior when incidents such as a mispronunciation of "Achilles heel" in English class left me the butt of jokes and torment.

I was never going to be a high flyer. I was told that at Harrogate several times. Thomas told it me, as we walked across the Stray after school one day when I disclosed to him my interest in attending the Oxbridge introductory sessions. "You're not good enough for that," he said.

On the one hand I look back at that bank of geeks with awe. They mocked me, humiliated me, tormented me and I took it with homoerotic enthusiasm. It made me introverted. It took me on my journey with David Hockney, my love of his double portraits, the theatre of his art, embossed with colour and tone. I was never going to be much of a success, partially because they forced me into a mould of self-imposed isolation and partly because of my lack of role models. My father was absent. My stepfather unapproachable. My elder brother also quiet and self absorbed. 

What a lament I have going on here! On the other hand I look at those geeks with disdain. They were part of the clique I envied but also shunned as I tried to make sense of my own life. They were better than me academically but they were no Ed Sheeran. I was reading his article in this month's GQ. What a guy. Pure drive, talent and focus. I had none of that. I wonder how many fortysomethings took a career they were only mildly interested in and have done okay in, but who have never really been high flyers. They just turn up every day to work and keep going, without ever finding their niche.

That bank of geeks is now an irrelevance to me. I'm much happier in my skin than I used to be. I haven't yet found my niche and I'm not channeling my energy like Ed or David Hockney, but I'm sliding along, content with life.