metastases

Christian died on the morning of March 10th 2008.

At the beginning of January I was frail, shaky and ready to move house. So we moved house.

Now I am looking out of the window at a beautiful, little, vaguely Japanese, garden belonging to the hospice with squirrels and gulls. It has been snowing. Some day.

Somewhere along the way I acquired a morphine driver pump (*), a handfull of pills a day and fulltime oxygen mask. I haven’t an idea how I got here, really.

I’m not sure who I am, but I think, someone different.

This has been the most difficult few paragraphs I have ever written bar none ever, despite not having any emotional content.

[Christian really wanted to add another paragraph explaining what it is like to be somebody on continuous morphine and either slightly, or acutely, short of oxygen, but couldn't find the words. She is very aware of her loss of cognitive ability, whilst at the same time not aware of whether she is making sense at any given moment. The title of the post is not only a reference to Douglas Adams, but also to the seagulls that float past her window now. The feeling she wants to describe seems to something to do with floating like a gull - out there.]

* morphine can be delivered subcutaneously. The syringe driver pump is a device for continually pumping a measured dose into the body without the inconvenience of pills or the complications of injections.

Christian (aka Potentilla) isn’t dead, but her life as an independent person has come to an end. As independence was one of the defining features of her life, then this is an obituary, of sorts.

When, in 2002, we agreed to go an live in a remote place in the Scottish Highlands, the idea was to give work a miss for a while and spend the remainder of our youth climbing the mountains we were always too busy to climb before. Christian was diagnosed as metastatic in December 2002, in between us buying our house and moving in. She never really fully recovered from the treatments in early 2003 and although we managed to do some good stuff, the mountains were beyond her.

The emotional rollercoaster has followed the medical one since then. In April 2003 she was told to expect to live for weeks rather than months. Her doctor at the time was a Professor at the Royal Marsden hospital and he become the first of many doctors to be surprised by Christian’s resilience. There was a look of pure astonishment on his face when we attended one of his clinic appointments later that year. Christian walked into his office carrying her flight bag (we’d flown from Scotland) looking, if not fit and healthy, then at least mistakable for same. His patients simply didn’t do that, so the diagnosis was shifted slightly and other doctors became involved – some of whom became similarly astonished over the years.

Medical crises came and went. We learned to take opportunities that arose and not be disappointed by plans that had to be cancelled. If you’ve been reading this blog over time you’ll know that she hated to see belligerent language used. This was not a fight against cancer, this was life with cancer. Something to get on with as best as possible. Rage and anger were just a waste of time.

Throughout these last weeks she has focussed on getting well enough to come home again – telling, for example, the night sister on her ward that I was about to arrive to collect her (when, in fact, I was about to arrive to make sure she was comfortable for the night). This had been the pattern over the years – a medical crisis would happen and would be dealt with and then I would come and take her home where we would work on her diet and getting her strength back to the point we could resume some life resembling ‘normal’. Only this time it is different. This time she can literally not even sit up in bed without assistance. She can’t move without being attached to an oxygen supply and even at full rest, without oxygen she noticeably loses her logical rational abilities after a few minutes. We are currently waiting for a bed to become free (yes, that is as macabre as it sounds) at the local hospice in the hope that she might be a bit more comfortable there than on the ward in the busy hospital.

If you haven’t worked this out, this is Colin writing. It’s my first post on this part of the site. ‘Metastases’ was Christian’s way of communicating with friends and getting things straight in her own mind. She is particularly proud of the post titles…

Talking of friends, I am indebted to friends old and new. Old friends who have stuck with us and new friends who have come along despite the obvious potential for an emotional overhead. In a twist to the old saying that you don’t know who your friends are until you need them, I’ve found that the world quickly shakes down into two sorts of people. There are those who, when presented with the news of somebody else’s distress immediately ask what they can do to help, and there are those who explain at length how the news impacts upon them. The latter group is surprisingly large. Anyway, no names here, but friends, my thanks.

I’ve no idea whether Christian will now live for hours, days, weeks, or months. All I know is that I plan to make her her morning coffee (latte now, not cappuccino, because the froth doesn’t survive the drive to the hospital) just like I have daily for twenty six years. I hope that she does indeed go gently (look at September 2006 in the sidebar).

We never did climb those mountains. I hope you climb yours before it is too late.

Yonder Peasant has just come in with another armful of pine-logs (hither) and says it’s -7°C out there. There are stars, and not that much moon; I would like to go and look at the former with the scope, but it’s too cold (though I do feel a bit more human today). This is a good place for star-watching because any light pollution that there is, is entirely under our control; but not perfect because the high ground to south and north reduces the field of view. I saw the moons of Jupiter quite clearly once, with binoculars. Summer is not so good because the nights are very short, and my amateur enthusiasm doesn’t extend to three in the morning.

It’s now about the fourth day below freezing, and everything is very pretty with the hoar-frost. We like to sleep with the window open, and I have been experimenting with various combinations of bedding and clothing to deal with the fact that I sleep hot but that it’s been down to 14 point something °C in the bedroom a couple of mornings before the heating comes on at 6am. Colin, of course, continues to sleep naked under a 3-tog duvet (albeit a posh goose-feather one), as is his habit.

Talking of YP, it struck me the other day how irritating it must have been if you had just got a bit of a fire going with your winter fu-oo-el and suddenly a great big snowy king comes bursting in, feeling very benevolent and pleased with himself and with a half-frozen page in tow. You can tell Wenceslas was not the brightest of sparks on the hearth, because otherwise why would he have bothered taking the page at all when he couldn’t carry much and was obviously going to get into trouble in the deep and crisp and even. Pine-logs are quite heavy and they burn fast, so W couldn’t really have brought more than an hour or two’s worth of fire, especially with the flesh and wine to carry too. YP would have felt he had to say “sit down by the fire, your Maj, and, er, have some of your own flesh and wine, whilst we thaw out this page” and how much do you suppose was left after all that?

I know the official story is that the page was warmed by the heat in the very sod that the saint (or king) had printed, but as miracles go, it’s a very implausible one, since we know from the fact that fire-walking is possible that heating yourself up through the soles of your feet is scientifically dodgy (even if we allow W efficiently to transmit his own super-heat to the sod without it turning into a mud-bath). Or perhaps it did, and they didn’t just shake snow over YP’s hovel, but tracked in lots of gooey sod too.

Perhaps W had to take the page because he wasn’ really sure where St Agnes’ Fountain was (not that this really affects my hypothesis about sparks). That’s nearly 3.5 miles (I just typed “1 league in miles” into Google, isn’t the modern world wonderful) and even if it wasn’t blizzing (owing to brightly shone the moon that night) there was probably a lot of snow blowing about owing to the rude wind’s wild lament, and the frost being cruel suggests powdery snow. It would count as child abuse these days. I hope W at least carried him home.

If this is all too culturally Christian for my non-British readers, try Wikipedia.

Yonder Peasant has just nipped down from the dim-room and thrown the last of the pine-logs into the wood-burning stove. Uh-oh. How long before a king hammers at the door.

Not too hard at the moment, since I am feeling a lot more lively after a week of mostly sitting around like a ham sandwich* staring vacantly into space, occasionally dozing off, and pretending to read RF Delderfield. And coughing. I am now off chemo and on another sort of hormone treatment (Faslodex) and probably running out of road. I twisted a doctor’s arm up her back (not my usual one, doctor not back I mean, whatever) and asked her to make an estimate and she, reluctantly (it was a very unfair question) said, perhaps 6 months. So obviously it crossed my mind that the total and utter fatigue unrelieved by sleep, was the Next Stage; but it doesn’t seem to be, or at any rate it’s not a ratchet. (I should probably point out that last time a doctor gave me any sort of prognosis, it turned out to be radically wrong).

The flat purchase has gone through, and Colin has been twice to Aberdeen for furniture deliveries and cleaning (and I may decide I’m well enough to go with him next week). We have bought me a great big electric recliner chair. It is in fact a La-Z-Boy, which for some reason makes me happy. I think it’s because I associate La-Z-Boys with a certain sort of American novel. Anne Tyler. I’m sure La-Z-Boys come into Anne Tyler. That makes them sort of quintessentially American things, which we don’t understand in the UK, like Oreos and Neiman Marcus. In fact, La-Z-Boys are romantic to me the way Aberdeen is mythic to Ophelia (in the comments to the previous post).

I suppose that’s because, although I have one way or another imbibed a lot of American culture, I have only been there three times. Places what I have been in America:-

Chicago, twice. Once for a boring business course at Northwestern (but there was a total eclipse of the sun, and we went on the El), and once much more recently to our office, to discuss the legal and technical issues surrounding the launch of a daily-priced open-ended US-domiciled collective investment fund invested in property securities with the lead fund manager in London (looking after various European markets) and others in the US and Sydney (and Singapore? I forget), to be marketed to Japanese retail investors. So there. I can probably still bore for Britain on this sort of subject.
Denver (airport) and Phoenix (airport) and a whole lot of very sexy national parks in between, like Bryce Canyon and Canyonlands, in a crimson Chevy (another American Brand) which beeped at you whatever you did and handed you your seatbelt.
Hartford, on business, in January, with flu. I can still remember gazing out of the window of a limo on the Mass Pike at the snow, as it got dark, having been cowed by an immigration official at O’Hare (and this was before 9/11). Luckily I was travelling with several of my staff, who piloted me to the hotel, where I slept for 14 hours and was fine next day. Which was just as well, because it was the middle of a business trip in which I flew right around the world east to west in a week.
LAX, in the middle of the night, see above (actually, now I think of it, on the way to Chicago as well; the immigration officials were much more friendly and that was in 2002).

Lots of play-power left in America, then, even just in the United States of, before getting on to South and Central and the Canadian bit of North. Possibly if I was well, we would be buying round-the-world tickets. On the other hand, we might have decided that we have done enough of being like a tea-tray in the sky.

* I dunno, it just came into my head. After all, ham sandwiches, of their own volition, do just sit around, don’t they.

I find that making one post a month is becoming customary. In this case, there is one negative reason for me not posting more, and one positive one. The negative one is same old same old; I haven’t been well enough to bother. Not only is the chemo tiring (and I realise, now I think of it, that I have now been on chemo for some 15 months with only a couple of short breaks) but also I have had what various doctors have characterised as Probably a Seasonal Virus and The Really Nasty Virus That’s Going Round At The Moment. That means lots of symptoms which could potentially have been indicative of the next step of my decline, but probably aren’t – dry cough, occasional retching fits probably due to cough, disinclination to eat much, tiredness, odd aches and pains, intermittent insomnia, treacle-brain. Today is the first time in several weeks that I have felt well enough to think and take minor decisions; I am now feeling just ordinarily crap (for someone in mid-chemo) rather than definitely ill. (Of course I have just ensured that this improved state of affairs won’t last until tomorrow by taking vinorelbine). I was going to call the post Just Ordinarily Crap, but it seemed too gloomy. I am actually feeling quite cheerful, if tired.

The positive reason is more exciting – we are in the process of buying a flat in the Granite City, aka the Oil Capital of Europe, aka the Energy Capital of Europe, aka the Silver City with the Golden Sands, aka Aberdeen. (“Energy” is an attempted rebranding in anticipation of the eventual exhaustion of North Sea oil. “Silver” is because it is mostly built of granite, which looks quite silvery when wet, and presumably “Grey City” sounded too gloomy). Why? To see if we like it.

Also because if I continue to be hospitalised regularly, it would be better to be a bit closer to a hospital than a four-hour round trip. (“You don’t need to visit me every day, honest”. “But I want to”.) The flat in question is very near not only the main hospital, but also the hospice.

Also because this year I have been able to contribute very little to the running of our domestic economy, which meant that Colin has not only had to do all the housework, and the repairs and maintenance (a non-trivial task given the climate) but also all the gardening, which was my thing originally. What he calls a concrete box (ie a modern apartment) seems attractive (we’ve lived in several previously).

Also because…..a change is as good as a feast. We’ve had nearly 5 years enjoying living in the countryside. But we like city things too, which we’ve missed, on and off. Aberdeen, being oil-rich, in possession of two universities, one ancient, and being 120 miles from the next city (OK, I mean Edinburgh – can’t be bothered to go and think about Dundee or Perth) boxes above its weight in the article of facilities. The best things to do round here – gardening, geological investigation, walking on the hills, kayaking – all require a level of physical ability which it seems relatively likely that I shall never again achieve – not just cardiovascular fitness, which is not strictly speaking necessary, but a certain amount of stamina (like, say 30 minutes) and some leg muscles, which are. The countryside is just too strong. Whereas in the city I may be able to add to intellectual pursuits little tripettes to the (nearby) park and to the beach and to the Winter Gardens and even the shops. And the Highlands are still within half a day’s drive, and the Grampians much closer. In case anyone wonders, why not back to England, the answer is two-fold; the mountains, and house prices.

Anyway, we most likely won’t sell this house for months, so we can always expensively change our minds. It’s not even going on the market for some time, as we plan to move piecemeal, disposing of STUFF as we go. I think my target is not to take more than about half of the books. And anyone want a mattock?

Something I found out after we had made our offer was that one can fly directly from Aberdeen to Paris. The Hokusai exhibition at the Guimet in the spring suddenly becomes much more feasible. I love Paris in the springtime, and even Aberdeen in the winter, when it drizzles (but less than here).

Now up to a round dozen mice. Colin bought a couple of extra traps, and the pattern recently has been no mice for a few days and then two at once. The level of scuttling in the ceiling is reducing, so we live in hope that they aren’t just walking in from the garden as fast as we get rid of them.

We had an exciting second half of September owing to going to Edinburgh (a bit over 4 hours door-to-door, by car) one weekend and London (8 hours door-to-door, by car, plane, train and black cab) the next. I had to manage my energy levels quite carefully (for instance by having a nap in the hotel every afternoon) but managed not to exhaust myself too much. In Edinburgh we stayed (in a very pleasant hotel) on the Royal Mile, which was surprisingly tatty; lots of very beautiful old buildings with Scottish tourist rubbish shops and down-market LOUD live music pubs and charity shops at the bottom of them. I suppose it’s because the area is full of students and tourists (a combination the effects of which I remember well from Oxford) and most of the city’s business goes on in the New Town. Still, it was very convenient for the Royal Museum, with which I fell in love; who could not like a museum which has rocks and Asian art right next to each other? and a replica moa. I also dropped in on the National Gallery and found that Raeburn’s “Rev Robert Walker Skating on the Duddingston Loch” may well not be by Raeburn, and is possibly not Rev Robert Walker, and probably not Duddingston Loch since the skyline is all wrong. A metaphor for something-or-other.

The London trip was caused by a reunion of people with whom I worked about 10 years ago; I wasn’t sure right up until the last minute whether I would really have the energy, but I did, and made it to 10.30pm without mishap and had a good time. (Colin would have rescued me if summoned by mobile phone, but as he was just going down with a vile whole-nine-yards cold which he still has, it’s good that it wasn’t necessary. I, amazingly, haven’t caught the cold. I’m wondering whether vinorelbine might be a useful, if rather overkill, remedy against a bacterial infection?) I picked a hotel because it was close to the reunion venue and also to the British Museum (for the Terracotta Warriors exhibition, which was brilliant); it turned out also to be quiet and close to a sushi-train place, a Starbucks and a great second-hand bookshop. What more could one need? (And the room service food was really quite pleasant).

The Royal and British Museums have in common that they have beautiful central light-filled spaces (the BM’s Great Court is worth going to for its own sake even if you never got as far as the galleries), and that they have a traditional approach to display; beautiful and interesting stuff in glass cases, mostly. In contrast, the RM has a next-door bit called the Museum of Scotland (together the National Museum of Scotland; you can see a committee got involved in the naming decision), which reminded me of several of the things I don’t like about modern museums. Too many screens playing not-very-spectacular footage – when people have wide-screen at home, IMAX round the corner, the internet and modern game software, why would they want to look at a smallish monitor hung from the ceiling playing generic “here is water running over stones” pictures whilst someone goes on about sedimentary rocks? Too many computers in general – a stuffed polar bear may seem old-fashioned, but a child can understand just how big a polar bear is by standing beside one (there were lots of cheerful children looking at the stuffed animals in the RM). Too many buttons to press that don’t do anything very interesting when you press them – being able to get more info about the exhibits is good, but it can’t be that expensive to make it informative info rather than a single paragraph. Too much of a designed path to follow – I much prefer to see a whole space in one glance and be able to wander about and look at what takes my fancy and backtrack and revisit and gradually piece it together, rather than being directed along a specific path with no visual line to the beginning or end from the middle (”discover” is a word much used in museum brochures, but the approach is often not “discover” at all, but “be instructed”). Too much space taken up by words written on the walls in big font sizes, rather than objects. Not enough big. A USP of museums is big, normally; high ceilings, long vistas. So why not make use of it to have big things and layouts of information that don’t work well on a page, rather than clutter up the big with room dividers. A good thing in the RM (Ivy Wu Gallery) was a historical timeline of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean history, with the West as a comparator. It was wall-sized and had lots of info (though it could have done with more). You had to stand there and look at it for some time. It was great.

Now back at home, plus a few more books and postcards. For some reason last night as I was not dropping off to sleep (the most irritating side-effect of the vinorelbine), I started listing all the medical procedures I’ve had, so I’m posting it here to get it out of my head. Until I was 33, I had only had the normal childhood diseases (lightly), the occasional cold, a couple of fillings, and a fractured shoulder. After that, it all gets more complicated:-

1 lumpectomy (and sampling of axillary lymph nodes)
1 course of radiotherapy (about 30 doses?)
1 PET scan
1 MRI scan
1 bone densitometry test
1 barium swallow
1 nephrostomy
1 cytoscopy
1 endoscopic biopsy (and cauterisation of bleeding point)
2 laparoscopies (1 for biopsies, 1 for removal of fibroid)
2 (at least) ultrasounds
2 (at least) chest X-rays
2 radiofrequency ablations of liver tumours
3 endoscopic ultrasounds (I think)
3 endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatographies (if that’s the right plural)
3 electrocardiograms (that I can remember)
4 courses of chemotherapy involving 8 cytotoxics (OK, not procedures, but lots of needles involved – I reckon I’ve been cannulated at least 25 times just in the last year)
5 general anaesthetics
quite a few mammograms
an unfeasible number of CT scans (?15-20)
gallons of blood samples taken

And probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten.

Battalions!

Actually, four, so far, but three is funnier. Colin has stripped some ivy and bunged up some indoor holes and we hoping that we have got the better of this particular incursion. They are wood mice, Apodemus sylvaticus, not house mice. They are actually beautiful and interesting, just not indoors. They found some small nuts in an incautiously insecure container, and carried them carefully upstairs, presumably one at a time, and stored them neatly in my winter clothes.

I have just taken my poison pills and am sitting waiting for them to kick in. I did vaguely mean finally to finish off my post about philosophical thought experiments, but instead I made some orange and fennel salad and some Slothful Portions and a bean stew. This involved stickily cutting up seven oranges and a mango, and now I am too tired for philosophy. Tomorrow I shall be weirded out, which is the best way I can explain the effect of chemo which doesn’t make you feel sick. It isn’t the same as any of the normal ways of feeling tired.

I shall probably spend a lot of the day reading. I now have my unread books classified roughly into (a) non-fiction ones relating to an area in which I am especially interested (evolution, various bits of philosophy, various bits of psychology and economics) (b) “hard” non-fiction ones relating to an area in which I have a passing interest but certainly no special knowledge (immunology and the US electricity grid being two current examples) and (c) novels and travel and possibly a few “easy” b-type ones. I have a new policy of only reading (b) or (c) for the hour before I go to bed, because (a) always leaves my brain churning with thoughts and connections, not conducive to sleep. And chemo means (c) only for a couple of days.

We had a minor drama with this lot of chemo; the pharmacy at the hospital couldn’t fill my prescription, so they had to send this week’s dose by the van (which goes every day) to the GP practice in the town over the hill (the van doesn’t come to “our” GP practice because of the hill, or more accurately the bealach), and the district nurse collected it and delivered it to our surgery, and Colin collected it from there. All slightly complicated by the fact that it has to be kept refrigerated. At one point the pharmacy (which I think was feeling rather on the back foot) was proposing to send it to us in a taxi, despite us assuring everyone we could think of that we could perfectly well collect it from wherever.

It is one of the un-looked-for benefits of living somewhere remote, that things operate on this sort of human scale. It’s akin to the difference between working in a small company and a large one. In a small company, you know everyone personally, at least vaguely, and can rely on your knowledge of their abilities and personalities to get things done. If you are the boss, you can improvise easily. In a large company, this is not possible. So instead of relying on your improvisational ability (and that of others, because you know which ones have it and which ones don’t), you have to have procedures for everything. Not just because you are a control freak, but because it is your responsibility to make sure that certain things happen reliably (consistently, safely) and, because you can’t have a personal estimate of the all the members of staff involved, the ONLY way you can fulfil the responsibility is to have rules.

I used to work in a large(ish) and multinational organisation, with a small bit in New Zealand. The guys in New Zealand did really good stuff in their market, and were always convinced that they should be considered as a sort of test bed for things which could be re-used in the wider organisation. I would say to them “but it just doesn’t scale” and they wouldn’t get it. Sometimes one of them would move and work in London or even Sydney and then, after a while, they would.

As I recall, there is some research indicating that people work best in groups of around 150-200 (but I can’t be bothered to look it up properly right now). This is possibly because that’s round about the number of people it would have been necessary/possible/useful for us to know in the ancestral environment, the size of a hunter-gatherer band. My recommendation for anyone choosing between jobs would be to look for a company of about that size, owned by a parent on the other side of the world, with deep pockets but some degree of commonsense (or perhaps naivety) about “your” market and the need to be hands-off and listen to the experts (you). This is not a suggestion about how not to have to do anything, although I suppose it could work that way; it’s a suggestion about how to be able to get on and do lots of stuff at breakneck speed and have fun at the same time.

Fun is important. I could write a whole post about fun. But not right now.

We’ve had two warm sunny days here, but today was back to cloudy and cool and occasional faint drizzle. So that was summer then. Back indoors (well, mostly). How shall I entertain myself in my week off chemo?

With various put-off bits of admin, partly. High on the list is doing something about the fact that darling Microsoft have just upgraded me (overnight, with no warning) from Hotmail to New Improved Windows Live Hotmail which unfortunately doesn’t work with the browser I use, Safari. (Not even what they irritatingly call the classic version, which is feature-lite compared with the version that works with the latest Explorer, which is in any case cut down compared with the paid-for version).

Oh well, using Hotmail was originally a quick fix on our unplanned return from Oz (goodness, not far short of 5 years ago, doesn’t time fly when you’re apparently not dying of cancer just yet). The trouble is, a lot of people have that address now. So either I start using it through Firefox, which in turn either means either doing something about an enormous number of bookmarks in Safari, or using two browsers all the time; or I try and get lots of people to update to a new address for me. And which provider to use? Gmail? (don’t much like the way it works). Yahoo? (but how long will they be around?) Dotmac? (good because I can use it to synch my two Apple laptops, but pay for email??). Aaaaargh.

Having stated the problem, I shall yet again put off making a decision (which would have taken me about 10 minutes max when I was working), and go and do a meme instead, as I was tagged a few days ago by Ophelia. Eight random facts about myself. I shall cheat and crib from Ophelia and Jean, but maybe put a few more words in as compensation (and anyhow, I can never resist a few more words, except when I’m being paid to do so).

(1) I was born in North Yorkshire, at the edge of the moors, in a mouse-infested cottage with no indoor lavatory, in the Hard Winter of 1963. My father had to dig down through 3 feet of snow in order to bury the placenta in the garden (unless this is a rural myth – Mary can you confirm?). The cottage was beside a main road which has since been widened, so my birthplace is now a sign in the road saying Go Slow (this I have verified myself, more or less). A mouse virus is one proposed aetiology for breast cancer so maybe my end was in my beginning (although I have lived in other mouse-infested cottages since).

(2) I like cold places too, that’s partly why I live in one. Not that it’s COLD cold here. The best trip we ever went on was to the Ross Ice Shelf. Iceland was pretty good, too. I have a large collection of books about being in mountains and at the poles. Hot is OK in moderation, and only if you don’t have to do anything and have aircon to retreat to if necessary. We might have stayed in Sydney if it wasn’t so hot and humid in summer.

(3) I’m wearing a T-shirt (with king penguins on), trousers that were probably imagined by their manufacturer up some mountain somewhere, and a polar fleece jacket. This would be a true statement on about 99% of days (except for the penguins, and with more fleece involved in colder weather). Most of my clothes are blue, very old, and polyester, polycotton or nylon. I hate clothes-shopping and absolutely never iron anything. Even when I was working I mostly managed non-iron.

(4) I get easily bored by small-talk and management bullshit, and tend to avoid occasions when the former is necessary for politeness, and drift off into thinking about something more interesting during the latter (not necessary any longer). I get to avoid quite a lot of the boring daily routine stuff like housework either by being genuinely ill or by being lazy and having a dedicated carer. I am interested in a wide range of things and am hardly ever, perhaps never, bored when left to my own devices. How does any of this relate to having a low boredom threshold, which is what Ophelia claimed for herself?

(5) I never used to wear hats either, but Sydney cured me of that; they are a necessity in Oz, especially if you (like me) can’t wear dark glasses owing to being too short-sighted. I have a couple of Tilley hats of which I am quite fond, but only when my hair is really short. I like it number 4 clippers all over, but I hate having it cut, especially professionally (see 4 above). So Colin does it and/or I hack bits off myself, when it starts getting too curly and wild and I can’t stand it any more. I actually didn’t mind too much being completely bald from chemo, except it was rather cold.

(6) I like elephants. Well, I like the idea of elephants, but I’ve never met any personally (except at a distance in zoos and briefly close-up at the Amber Fort). And I won a book about them as a prize for being Best Child Handler at a Guide Dogs for the Blind event when I was about 10. This being so, does “I like elephants” actually mean anything at all?

(7) My automatic reaction is to question everything, especially if it appears to come from Authority. AFAIK I was born this way; when I was young the questioning bit was often in the form of dumb insolence, although I like to think I have progressed to reasoned and polite debate (and I am certainly bored by the usual internet jalpa). It sometimes makes ordinary life a bit difficult; for instance, it makes the newspapers almost unreadable. And it didn’t always make me very popular at work. In this case it means that I shall ignore the tagging bit of this meme (especially since I can’t remember who has already done it and am not about to attempt a reconciliation); but do borrow it if you feel like it.

(8) I don’t mind talking about myself but I don’t expect anyone else to be interested (that’s the beauty of blogging, as no-one is paying for this, if they aren’t interested they can just do the other thing). Two memes in a row is a bit much though, and I get bored with the sound of my own voice, so perhaps I will revert to vague philosophising next post; I have an increasingly large number of scribbly notes, including one which says rather mysteriously “religion is like chocolate”. (It’s just occurred to me that meme is the same as me-me, which is very apt, even if the original derivation was different).

Back to disentangling crocosmias.

Just got back from three weeks of family mayhem in wet green Wales; there were 19 of us in total, 14 maximum at one time, 8 aged under 9 years. The sheer volume was mind-boggling. To think that in many parts of the world, living in the extended family is the norm. Anyway, it was an achievement actually to go on a trip as planned without medical complications, and lovely to see everyone. Back here, the new growth had nearly closed the path to the door, but there were no sleeping princesses inside, nor bats, a minor worry when we left as our summer pipistrelle roost was getting out of hand. I had 64 emails, mostly very boring (eg DFDS Seaways telling me that I could take my motorbike to Norway for free!). An interesting one which I’d forgotten to expect was my interview questions from Aphra, which I volunteered for when she was doing the interview meme. So here are the answers:-

1) You respond to the natural world on many levels; which came first, your intellectual response or your aesthetic / physical response and which gives you the most pleasure now?

As a child I was interested in animals; both ones I met in person (various pets) and reading about more exotic species. My ambition was to go and work at Gerald Durrell’s zoo. I scuppered my chances of becoming a scientist by choosing to do Greek O-level, but in another life I might have become a zoologist. I did do some real science, more or less accidentally, due to my choice of undergraduate degree, which started me on my lifelong interest in genetics, evolution and cognitive psychology. Again, if I hadn’t spent so much time at university on socialising, music and acquiring a life partner, I might have become an evolutionary biologist…..as it was, the unfortunate necessity of earning a living intervened. The natural world re-entered my life as an antidote to living and working in London, first in the form of doing a lot of hill-walking (in the Lakes and elsewhere) and later when I acquired my first garden, or rather the triangular plot of builders’ rubble which later become a garden. Learning about plants was also a great book-buying opportunity, always a plus for me, and it occurred to me for the first time that botany and horticulture were more suitable interests than zoology for someone who is -13 diopters in both eyes and very astigmatic. Plants don’t run away so fast. I have recently also got into geology, because of seeing lots of interesting rocks round here.

I think all this means that, for any specific area, “isn’t that beautiful and interesting” comes first, but is closely followed by “I wonder how it works/why it’s that way and not some other way/whether it’s like this other one over here/what its name is”. The second response follows the first to the extent that I have enough mental energy (which in turn is mostly to do with how ill I am), so I guess the aesthetic response gives me the most pleasure overall.

2) Have you ever written fiction, poetry or music?

Not since I was in my mid-teens somewhere. I am either too perfectionist, or too lazy, depending how you think of it. There are so many people out there, saying things, and so much of it is rubbish. I once thought I might try writing popular fiction for a living, but I enjoyed what I did instead and the returns were more dependable. I have thought about going back to poetry, but somehow there are always other things I want to do more.

3) What difference has the Internet made to your decision-making about where and how you live?

We live somewhere very remote and socialise very little. This suits us because we are both introverts and have minority interests. However, the internet lets us “talk” to people (apart from each other) who share our interests. Also, we do a lot of internet shopping. If I didn’t have the internet, I would need even more books than I do anyhow, and how would I get them if Amazon didn’t exist? Panic! (I have hypobibliophobia). And we do a lot of emailing and (latterly) video-Skype.

Would we have chosen to live here if the internet didn’t exist? Probably, but maybe the experiment wouldn’t have worked out.

4) You are widely travelled – is there anywhere that you have not been already that you’d like to visit?

Given my poor health, not really. Travelling is very tiring and there is always the possibility of having some health crisis in medias res, which would be expensive and tedious (we have had to throw away quite a lot of air-tickets in the last year). If I was still in good health – I’m not sure. Certainly, the excitement of going somewhere new just because it is new has worn off with age, because the new place invariably turns out to be quite a lot like one or more of the old places, really, and also I can more easily imagine the downsides (bad coffee, assorted physical discomforts). In fact, when I imagine places I might choose to go, many of them are places I have already been. Antarctica. The sub-Antarctic islands. Sydney. Lord Howe Island. Hong Kong. Paris. Delhi/Agra/Jaipur. Iceland. The Alhambra. The rest of New Zealand. Venice. Sutherland. La Gomera.

I always intended to go trekking in some serious mountains (probably the Himalaya) and I would still do that, given the physical capacity. Also I might make easy side-trips from Hong Kong; maybe Beijing or Shanghai or a bit of Japan outside Tokyo or tourist Borneo (we nearly got to KK last year). And more Europe – Turkey, perhaps. And do the tour of New Zealand we never quite got around to. Perhaps the Arctic? A real sand-dune (as opposed to rocky or salt-pan) desert?

Anyhow, only places that either have a lot of nature or have a lot of people doing things. Places with lots of human history or architecture, not so much.

5) What gives you delight and makes you laugh?

Ideas. Very large bookshops. The first coffee of the day. Bach’s B Minor Mass, especially whilst flying above the clouds. Rutilated quartz. My 8-year-old nephew’s response to spoonerisms and puns. Meerkats. Cosi Fan Tutte. Dry one-liners (Colin’s speciality). The Swingle Singers (sometimes) and the Mills Brothers (other times). Fledgling siskins. Almost any food involving limes or garlic or ginger. Oystercatchers, especially the ones that go kleep-kleep-kleep around the hospital I spend too much time in. Saturated colours, especially blues and greens. Hokusai’s woodblocks. Potentillas. Wood-mice perching on the peanut-feeder. Rainbow lorikeets. The conversation of (some) small children, as long as I can hand them back to their mummies and daddies at the time of my choosing. Incongruity.

OK, as it’s a meme, I will do it properly. I don’t think most people who read this have their own blogs, though.
******************

DIRECTIONS FOR THE INTERVIEW MEME
Leave a comment saying, “Interview me.”
I will respond by emailing you five questions. Please make sure I have your email address.
You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
When others comment, asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.