Looking Up

'Plumping' as applied to the skin of the face. Apparently, this is the new way of getting rid of wrinkles. Some bright spark obviously spoke up in cosmetics focus group, observing that fat people have fewer wrinkles.

Mind you, it still requires some expert euphemising. Can you imagine a product called 'Face Fat' flying off the shelves? Clearly plumping is a more desirable effect.

And while we're on the subject of adverts, am I alone in being deeply disturbed by the latest ad for a certain well known orange flavoured drink? The ad features bears and deer getting it on, while flamingos pole dance in the foreground. Perhaps it's something about the hand gesture required to shake the drink up that inspired such an ad...

...that's the ideal time for a good kicking, and so it proves.

R brought Daddy a present home. She's very generous, you know. Especially as her runny nose had all sorts of hidden bonus symptoms by the time it got to me. I started to slip into serious Man-Flu last night, then woke up this morning feeling like s**t, which is a bit like shit, only more dramatic.

To give her credit, R has been attentive with the Doctor's bag, sticking various plastic toys into ears and up nostrils, etc. She told me that I had "Mushrooms in your ears," and on the plus side my mouth was full of "Lots of teeth."
The best bit comes when she pulls out the plastic hammer for testing my reflexes. I really don't know where to begin with that one...

I'm seriously annoyed that I seem to have caught a cold for the second time in two months of this miserable summer, but my anger turns to darker mood, as it seems that the cold has inspired a new piece of experimental music, where the invisible man picks out a tune on my legs with a pitch-fork, and I howl and whine and swear accordingly. I'm thinking about making it a free download. Less a breathy Je t'aime,  more a discordant "Je suis dans la douleur" spat through gritted teeth (and, hey, if the translation sucks, remember the circumstances).

And so, while I remain confident that I shall fly again, the runway has been dug up (like the rest of Hackney-don't get me started...), so instead I must offer passengers a complimentary drink of whine and a bag of going quietly nuts...

No pleasure involved this time. This week I found myself thinking back to the last time my old nemesis Spike dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.

"Did I hear you call?" Sure enough, no sooner had I taken encouragement at the extended break... Last night a stubborn electical jolt/itch gradually ramped up over a two hour period, until the disguise was thrown off, and,
"Surprise! Didja miss me? Didja? Didja? You didn't? Awww yer just saying that." etc.

I know he hasn't spoken before. It's not that I'm suffering aural hallucinations, it's just a literary device, OK?

Anyways, a sleeper and a large brandy hardly seemed to make a dent on my consciousness, and after alternating between rolling around and shooting things (computer games) for a couple  of hours, I ended up taking another half sleeper and squirming in bed until well past one thirty.

Looking back, it's all a bit hazy (hardly surprising). But it also makes me ponder a little on how deliberate amnesia seems to be a part of my toolbox.

When I'm on the up, I often give the  "just got to get on with it" speech, the defiant voice, the half-full version. I sometimes find myself alone after, wondering if I've managed to fully convince myself yet.

Then I have a night like last night, and the full weight of my disability and all the pain and frustrations and feelings of helplessness crash over me. Thinking back on what was going through my head last night, it's all a bit sketchy. Maybe just as well.

The effect of such a visit is that Spike seems somehow to leave nothing in his wake, and I know  that I now have a few low-pain days ahead of me.

The downside is that I also have to rebuild the platform of positive approaches on which I perch in order to keep myself somewhere nearing happy.

So, perhaps what's going on for the rest of the time is a healthy slice of denial? Hey, whatever gets you through the day...

Yep. It chucked it down, but intermittently, and the kids all guzzled cake regardless. We had toy aeroplane races and pin the tail on the donkey, and they all made party hats, and we adults all looked a bit lost, really. It's great when it works.

The place we went to is a bit of a secret location. It's one of our favourites and is usually empty. It's called The Waterworks, and it's an old water treatment works that has been turned into a nature reserve. Also, it's far enough to the north of Hackney marshes that it will hopefully be spared the ravages of the Olympic site which seems to be swallowing up many of the secret places in East London.

It's a shame, but the 'regeneration' will result in us losing many Victorian buildings, and much of London's industrial heritage. If it were Islington, the buildings would be listed, and probably turned into 'Loft style apartments'.

Still, it's progress, isn't it? Not really regeneration, though. More a bunch of sporting venues landing, as if from outer space, in the middle of nowhere. I think of regeneration as a more gradual, dare I say it, 'organic' (there. I dared) process that helps an area to develop, rather than the leftovers from the largest travelling circus the world has ever seen.

Enough. I must go and lie down, whimpering softly as I recover from the excesses of too much tennis followed by too much fine Turkish food.

On a lighter note...

I like this one.

"Differently abled".

Huh?

It rather suggests some kind of special powers. When I sit in my wheelchair at the bottom of a flight of stairs, I don't feel 'differently abled'. Similarly, were I to fall into a tempestuous sea, as I went down for the third time and my life flashed before my eyes, I wouldn't be thinking, "Hmmm. I appear to be differently swimming."

So, the hot weather has been with us for a week or so now, and my tactics for getting through the day have become almost routine. Some days I hide in the supermarket for an hour or two, lurking among the chiller cabinets getting frostbite from the push rims on my chair (they conduct temperature very quickly).

The only trouble with this plan is that in a short time I am pinned down under an enormous pile of top-shelf food items that over-enthusiastic shoppers have assumed I needed help with.

Other days are spent in the house, staring out of the window and wishing I was wielding a shovel in a garden somewhere. I really miss working outdoors, but doing anything outside in the midday sun is difficult now, as half of me no longer sweats properly anymore and if I get too hot I get a really uncomfortable prickly heat rash that makes me squirm.

A tough push uphill is enough to trigger this response, but it doesn't seem to happen when I am playing tennis or basketball for some reason. Go figure.

Of course, no sooner have I complained about the hot weather when the heavens open, and tomorrow's toddler birthday party in the park begins to look like a foolish idea.

We are frantically putting together the various bits and pieces to entertain eight under fives whacked out on icing and no doubt trying to find wildlife/people to pull the legs off. I'm hoping we can harness the destructive energy with some non-violent games. Either that or construct a giant hamster wheel and hook them up to the national grid. I wonder what the carbon footprint is for icing-based energy production. Is it a bio-fuel? And does one have to factor in the child's methane production, because if it's anything like her dad's we'll be planting trees for years to come.

We are planning to have pin the tail on the donkey,but as we will be in the middle of the park it's going to be tough finding something to attach the donkey to. I can see a game of 'pin the tails on the wheelchair tyres'  followed by a game of 'drag the grumpy cripple back to the car park.'

Reading this back, I feel like I should be the Wikipedia entry for curmudgeonly. I'm sure our beloved three-year-old will be smiling all day tomorrow. I know I will. Probably choking back a few tears,too. They grow up so fast, don't they?

For anyone who didn't see it, there was a fascinating article in Sunday's Observer about developing technologies of a 'bionic' nature...

Looks like my dream of getting into a pair of 'The Wrong Trousers' might not be so far away after all.

At first I saw this and felt sad. I can't dance anymore. And I could dance a hell of a lot better than Matt Harding. But once I started to watch, I realised that he is doing exactly what I would love to do. And probably would do constantly were my legs to suddenly start working again (unlikely). He should also be listed in the dictionary under the word exuberance.

It's also nice to see t'internet still has the potential to create an innocent viral phenomenom (altogether, now "Dup der, pherderba!").



Good on yer, Matt. Hate to think what your carbon footprint must look like, though...

C'est Finis! And there ends my French. Yes, we are back from our camping adventure, having covered over 1600 miles, camped in four different campsites, eaten 35 baguettes, fourteen kilos of cheese, drunk eight gallons of wine, and never once complained about the heat.

We have left the beautiful, rugged and sun soaked scenery of Provence behind us and returned to the 'atmospheric', grubby and rain-soaked scenery of Hackney. Of course we managed to return relatively empty handed because of the charming French refusal to adopt anything other than pedantic opening hours. Even the hypermarches of Calais were closed when as we headed for the Europipe on Sunday night.

But what a holiday we had... As my resignation to being unable to speak the language grows, so I become ever more comfortable with the Gallic shrug, and somehow we muddle cheerfully through.

The thing that I find most impressive is the French sense of terroir and regional identity. As you drive across France, you pass through region after region, each with it's own speciality food. Even motorway service stations have 'Degustation' stalls erected out front selling local peaches or melons or asparagus or whatever. I struggle to imagine a stall outside 'Welcome Break' at Watford Gap selling watercress.

Camping was, well, camping. The usual challenges were augmented by some new ones provided by wheelchair use and toddler wrangling. The tent is big enough to wheel straight into, so the main issue was making sure that we were close enough to the toilet block but not so close that we felt like we were sleeping IN the toilet block.

The nipper offered an altogether more complex issue to solve. In order to make camping in campsites work as adults, we all buy in to the same lie. We pretend that a wafer thin wall of nylon fabric is actually the same as bricks and mortar. We are not actually sleeping twenty feet away from a bunch of complete strangers who insist on continuing inane conversations or strumming Kum By Ah on an out of tune guitar into the wee hours.

Unfortunately, toddlers do not subscribe to this mass delusion, and so having been put to bed in the tent, R could hear her parents whispering behind a piece of fabric not a meter a way, and crept out of the tent to join in the fun. The end result was that we all ended up going to bed at the same time.

I will spare you my observations and generalisations about driving in France, except to say that there must be more Dutch folk travelling Europe in caravans than there are Dutch folk living in Hollland. And the Belgians? Adam, I now understand your comments about driving in Brussels...

So, as the memories and the tan fades, I am already back in the yoke with my latest column on OUCH. Hopefully it will provoke a bit of thought. On professional matters, a good friend of ours spotted my book in a bookshop in Heathrow airport. Next to a biography of Tupac, naturally.

The weekend Open Studio event drew to a close yesterday with a set by Cambridge-based band Delphi playing in the yard. The great and the good of Stoke Newington society turned out in numbers, and it was nice to catch up with a few people we haven't seen in a while. But what's the work that you've been showing? I hear me ask. Well, there's a website for the studio that gives you an idea of what we're about, but I have taken the liberty of shoe-horning in a few out of focus snaps taken in haste.