Choose Rest

Choose rest. Choose getting sick. Choose a lifetime’s illness. Choose having to ask your family for help to survive. Choose a fucking big chasm between your life and the abled world. Choose walking sticks, wheelchairs, shower stools and heart rate monitors. Choose bad health, a shite immune system and minimal sickness benefits. Choose ever increasing […]

Too far, too tired

Last year a friend who lives close by messaged me, after four years during which we weren’t in touch. Four years during which I got significantly sicker, crashed out of work again – permanently this time, ended my career and became medically retired, had other severe, acute health issues, had major surgery, became almost entirely […]

Slow is not normal

So I can not only get outside sometimes now, I can walk further, too. A few hundred metres, before I have to sit and rest; and then a few hundred metres more. But I can only go so far by walking very, very slowly – to keep my heart rate as low as possible, to […]

Anti-heroes / heroes

Last week an online Open Book group was reading from Nick Makoha’s new poem collection, The New Carthaginians – which according to one review, has: ‘a trio of characters – the Poet, a Black Icarus, a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat – embarking on a hero’s odyssey… gathering the symbols of a new mythos’.  It made me think […]

‘I couldn’t live like that’

A feeling of depression on reading an account of a writer I admire – a previously wholly well, fit and active professional middle aged woman (sound familiar??) – receive a cancer diagnosis and go through debilitating chemotherapy.  She said, ‘just walking around the block felt like swimming against a riptide, and I understood what the […]

To Tollcross for the first time in 2 years

Drove the car to the garage in Tollcross today for its MOT and service, and walked home. It’s about 1.4 km away: I walked very slowly, stopping twice to sit and rest for 10 minutes or so. Last year I was too sick to do this myself; I had to ask K to take it for […]