metastases

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.