Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

At the British Museum recently we saw a strikingly original exhibit cum artwork that has stuck in my mind. In the past I've worked on the collection of oral history, in all I've taped and transcribed over forty interviews. What comes from such a range of individual testimonies is a broader social history of great immediacy & authenticity. I am endlessly fascinated by personal histories and first-hand accounts.



So "Cradle to Grave", which investigates the approach to healthcare in Britain by presenting the lifetime medical experience of one married couple, was really my thing. Enclosed in each of two huge lengths of fabric, in tiny pockets of filament, lie 14,000 drugs - the estimated average prescribed to every person in Britain in their lifetime.

Starting at one end, one walks along the unfolding history of the man and woman - immunisation, antibiotics and painkillers, contraceptives and childbirth medication, onward to HRT and to the eventual significant treatments for each of them in old age. The appropriate drugs are placed alongside each documented joy and trauma of their lives. The woman lives on well past her husband. The element that anchors the display to real life, its hook, is a series of carefully placed photographs of the two lives with family stories, funny moments, event and incident remembered by their children. The whole is a wonderful composite picture of an eighty year journey through healthcare in the welfare state.

Created by Pharmacopoeia - a GP, a textile artist & a video artist working together - it's a piece that's well worth seeing.

Paul-Albert Bartholomé, Artist/sculptor (1848-1928): Artist's Wife Reading.
There is a pleasing window painting of her too

I'm in the land of the living but not quite out of the woods, to mix a metaphor. Not to go into too much unwelcome detail, all symptoms point to a kidney stone at some point that either eluded the sieve or self-destructed. The Doc is not satisfied in view of some other problems, so I'm on my way to an ultrasound scan - possibly sometime before 2009? Always slightly worrying these waiting games; I feel much better but - as mum used to say -"I couldn't push a bus over". I did a couple of hours of gardening and that was more than enough, not like me at all. I have also been good about getting to bed early, not like me at all; as night is my usual time for blogging not much of that has been going on.

I have been re-reading my collection of Elizabeth Bowen, four novels and the short stories; when there's time, wallowing in an author for a couple of days is a memorable way of reading.

I'd found a lovely 1930's illustrated edition of "A Shropshire Lad" for my Ludlow friend's birthday, so on a spring afternoon I sped right through, moved by its simplicity. Oh, and I'd bought Gordon Ramsay's autobiog' at the charity shop for a pound and was quite compelled by his difficult journey. Watched The English Patient for the umpteenth time, Greta in Queen Christina and two of the Poliakoffs to round out a week of relative idleness. Mixed bag.

I bought the Evening Standard in London a couple of weeks ago, half of it was devoted to covering all the angles of the GLC election. It seems inconceivable that Boris could win in a sane world - well that's the answer. I fondly remember how, in the distant past, he handled a full frontal from Ian Hislop. As WS suggests - "Let me put in your mind what you have been ere this and what you are..." Indeed, but even so, one feels an annoying mixture of delight and disapproval, charm is a deadly weapon.

Because I looked a bit wan, I lathered myself all over with that Johnson's Holiday Sun stuff, whose effect was one of being tie-dyed with gravy browning and smelt repulsive - wan was better.

Had callers yesterday, bee-keepers bearing gift jars of marmalade, which I thought slightly funny. They arrived in full protective clothing having made a dash from a storm that caught them at their hives over the road. During coffee J asked me to look out some info' on two aircraft relevant to a memoir she is writing. I found the Tom Tit but have drawn a blank on the Side Serrand. While searching, I found this wonderful old film of the 1934 Mildenhall-Melbourne Air Race - such excruciating poshness of accent.

I'm getting used to Uggy the new cockerel, he's so utterly up himself that he's becoming a star turn - so I've forgiven the donor (secretly, as she has been plying me with placatory marzipan bars). Anyway, I won't strain your patience further, thanks for your messages, it's wonderful to know you come here still and take the time to comment, it really makes it worthwhile to apply fingers to keyboard.

I thought I knew what severe pain was until last Saturday when it became clear that there were whole new levels beyond. I'd been having a bit of a grumbling left side for a couple of days when suddenly a ball of sharp pointy knives started spinning in my lower abdomen. The spasm lasted for about 3 minutes then faded. "What on earth was that?" I, more or less, said, mopping my brow, relieved it was over - then it hit me again and continued to do so every 15 minutes for the next 20 hours.

I took paracetamol and spent a wakeful night. A couple of doctors looked me over on Sunday and Monday, sent off pee for test & forms for x-ray. Later, the pain became so acute that it was making me sick - ergo, no tablets would stay down. I finished up at the hospital where I sat for six hours without analgesia, occasionally creeping to the loo for yelling sessions; the agony went on until a kind soul in A & E jumped me past the (9 hour plus) queue to an emergency doctor elsewhere in the hospital. This divine creature whose feet I would willingly have kissed, gave me a prescription - suppositories that would stun a camel - and with them the pain subsided. He and my GP came up with same diagnosis - probably a kidney stone stuck in my pipework.

I am still on hold until my film comes back to prove that a stone it really is; the radiographer warned it might take up to ten days to get the results. Great. But now I am quite comfortable and have a very exciting new game to play - peeing through a sieve - every visit to the loo has become a treasure hunt.