Playing with fire.

 

Giver of life,  

You chuckle, crackle, inspire 

Your energy moves me,

You give me light and warmth

You are my sun,

My reason, my creation.

 

Never the same,  

You sway, dance, hypnotise

Seduce with your desire,

Your play of colour,

Makes me steam, melt,

Burn with temptation.

 

A greedy mistress,

You roar, consume, require  

Nought but disintegration,

Your hot breath, your hiss,

Reduces me to elemental fury

And black resignation.

 

The dark side of the moon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You rise alone at dusk, 

sick with longing;

a melancholy romantic,   

pale reflection of desire,

intent on seduction.

 

Your glance, inscrutable,

beguiles with suggestion,

creates shades of possibility,

among fragrant borders,

transplanted with lust.

 

You suck tsunamis from the deep

That sweep me from the beach     

to drown in your mystery,

that cold, silent accomplice

that fate cannot  deny.  

 

40 years ago this week, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin landed and walked on the moon.  ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’    

 

It only hurts when I laugh; living with an injured back.

When I was a physiologist,  I used to ponder the cause of the sensations I felt in my body, the reactions of my gut, what is was about feeling sick that made me yawn or sweat, why a headache made he muscles on the back of my neck sore.  I even thought of writing a book of such observations, but like so many of my grand ideas, it ran into the sand trap of time and was forgotten. 

Now the pain protecting the healing bones in my back offers a whole new insight on life.  What I originally took for granted, didn’t think about, is suddenly, painfully brought to mind.  I have to be careful how I walk.  Keep the back straight, let the feet do the work, keep the head up, swing the arms for momentum but not too vigorously.  It’s amazing how much we use the trunk, the back, to add fluidity to our walking; the constant balances and adjustments that occur at every step.  All of these are now forbidden.  The back has to be locked rigid, the damage protected in a rigid case.

Lead off up the stairs with the left food not the right.  Any sudden movement with the right foot, brings on a spasm of pain that makes me cry out.  Use both arms to support when sitting up.  Don’t bend the back; reach down for things by using the knees.  Keep the back straight at all times. 

 Breathe deeply and evenly and try not to cough. Coughing is so painful. The sharp contraction of diaphragm and intercostals jerks the wound, dislodging the broken ends of bone and creates an anguish of spasm.  A chest infection is the most dreaded complication of broken ribs.  Secretions collect in bruised tissues and can easily become infected.  The cells lining the bronchioles and bronchi have a carpet of cilia, tiny hairs that beat in waves wafting the secretions upwards.  But this ciliary escalator can only get secretions as far as the trachea, if that.  There they collect, tickle and have to be coughed up.  Try to suppress the cough reflex, grunt to move the collection and move the phlegm into the pharynx, from where it can be swallowed. 

 Just as you use the knees to reach down, let your colon do most of the work in defaecation.  Learn to relax and take your time.  Think, evacuation – a bit of self hypnosis.  Imagine your gut like the M1 with the traffic flowing evenly smoothly.  Breathe deeply, allow your colon to ease, squeeze the plug of waste down until it is in the firing position.  Allow the sensation to build until, almost like orgasm, it demands release.  And then just a small graded increase in abdominal pressure will hopefully expel it all in one shot. 

Sorry to go on about it so much, but if you’ve hurt your back, constipation can become a real torture.  Take plenty of fibre, fruit, drink syrup of figs or prune juice, take a dose of lactulose every night, add a senna – do what it necessary to keep the contents of your colon soft, but not too much that they are liquid and urgent – you don’t want to be caught short.  Remember you can’t hurry, even if your bowel wants to.  Adjust the dose so your faeces are soft and pliable, then you can relax and let peristalsis do most of the work.  So, take your time. Remember, laxative and relaxation have the same derivation.  The ancients knew it.  So should we! 

But there is one thing you cannot always prevent.  It sneaks up on you when you are relaxed, catching you off guard, tearing into your back and causing the most intense spasms of pain.  That is emotion!  Not any emotion, but the sudden surges of anger and laughter. 

Emotion takes over the control we exert on our lives.  It demands expression, satisfaction.  Grievance, loss, depression can make it impossible to think of anything else.  The chemicals inundate the brain, controlling our thoughts and movements, distracting, preoccupying,  obsessing with the same insistent thoughts. There can be no escape.  

The same happens with acute spasms of emotion, though such flash floods of chemicals can catch you unawares.  An attack of frustration while climbing the stairs can cause you to forget, lead off on the wrong foot, unlock your back and leave you hanging on, wracked  with the most intense pain.

And laughter, the repetitive contractions of intercostals and the inescapable build up of tension as you try to stop laughing, is murder. You can die laughing or it seems so.  The ridiculous can stab you in the back.  Avoid it at all cost.  Turn your face and your back to stone – for the time being anyway.

 

Not for you.

 

Not for you, the intimacies of the night;  

you like the light;

the freedom of dawn, when

scampering winds shepherd clouds

over the hills of your dreams.

 

Not for you, the beguiling song of the blackbird;

the one you cannot trust.  

You prefer the high rise worry of larks,

the pied piping of oystercatchers,

the querulous slide of the curlew.

  

Not for you, the hooting melancholy wood,

but the thrill of the moor;

the paraglide of pipits,  the thrum

and squeak of roller coaster snipe,       

the tumble and whoop of plovers.  

 

Not for you the furtive stoat in its crevice,

in the windy wall.

You favour the clear lines of the wheatear,

his bright soliloquy in pastel, his promise in slate, 

his innocent gift of primrose.

 

Romance is not for you; too intense.

You’ve no time

to waste on pain and sighs.

You want no make believe, no lies, 

just constancy ….. and life.

 

Spoilt!

When I was growing up, the worst thing you could be was ‘spoilt’.  My parents would point at other children and say, wrinkling their upper lips with disgust.  ‘And he’s another spoilt brat.’  Being spoilt was a dreadful sin and not one of your own causing but one visited upon you.  You got spoilt by your parents and you couldn’t do a thing about it.  If you were spoilt, you could hardly get unspoilt.    

 

So what does being spoilt actually mean?  According to Webster’s dictionary, the term spoil originally meant to pillage or plunder, as in despoiling another man’s goods,  but later it also acquired the meaning ‘to corrupt or render worthless’.  So spoiling a child is to damage or corrupt their character, nature or attitude by overindulgence or excessive praise. 

 

The notion of spoiling a child comes from the ancient saying, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’.  In Piers Plowman (1377), William Langland warned, ‘Who-so spareth the sprynge (switch), spilleth his children.’  The same thought occurs in Proverbs and is first listed in John Coverdale’s 1535 translation: ‘He that spareth the rodde, hateth his sonne’, and in an even earlier text, Aelfric’s Homilies, circa 1000: “Se ye sparas his gyred (belt), he hatas his cild.”  The notion of rod, here doesn’t just mean physical chastisement, it means laws, rules, boundaries.  And hatas in old Norse has connotations of lack of care, causing trouble, insult or suffering.

 

So if parents love their children too much, try to please them with treats and presents, regard them as if they were special, over-excite them and worst of all, give in to their tantrums, then they are spoiling them from becoming useful members of society.  And in rearing a monster who will continue to make excessive demands on them, they are using the rod, they have spared, on their own backs. 

 

 

It’s all about boundaries.  Childhood is a long process of socialisation, acquired through an appropriate combination of encouragement, stimulation and prohibition.  Children have to learn the painful lesson that they can’t always get what they want immediately.  Anything of any value has to be worked for and there are always others to consider.  Growing up with siblings and friends helps children understand essential social concepts of empathy, sharing and collaboration.

 

‘No’ is the most important word a child can hear.  It sets the limits.  This is acceptable, that isn’t.  It’s only later with maturity that they come to understand the ambivalence of context and acquire the skills to re-negotiate boundaries.  But in the beginning they have to know what’s right and what’s wrong.  Society cannot function unless people have respect for ethics and laws.   

 

As a child, I avoided children who would sulk or get cross if they didn’t get their own way, the ones who grabbed the best, those who told tales, never owned up and consistently blamed somebody else. Such kids were a bit of a pain. Our little gang learned early on not to trust them. They created tension and spoiled our curiosity.  It is sad that many of them were only children and several from single parent families.  They were special kids, little princes or princesses, but they were starved of friendship and our wariness, I’m sure, just helped to consolidate their isolation.  I never questioned then whether I might have been a bit spoilt too.  Children learn projection very early on.     

 

It may be tolerable to be spoilt as long as you have doting parents.  There are compensations for friendship, material possessions, travel, opportunities to learn and develop skills and talent. The trouble can really set in when such children grow up.  Poorly equipped to manage in society, they remain self-centred, impulsive, competitive, demanding, uncompromising, but behind that, fragile, lonely and lacking meaning in life. They constantly seek out thrills and excitement and they find it impossible to delay gratification.  They want it all and they want it now, and if they don’t get it, there is always the risk they will fly into a destructive rage. 

 

Spoilt, narcissistic people find it difficult to have trusting relationships with other people.  Their relationship with their parents was based on manipulation and exploitation and that pattern is continued into adulthood.  People have to be there to satisfy their demands.  Empathy is difficult; they are too preoccupied with their own needs to understand anybody else.  They cannot love or be loved.  They may be lucky enough to be admired or even adored.  They may even indulge their romantic fantasies, but they are rarely loved.  Their relationships tend to be based on mutual exploitation for narcissistic gain.  

 

Anxious to please their indulgent parents in order to gain rewards and with opportunities lacking for others, some spoilt children are fortunate enough to grow up with all the outward talent and confidence to be successful.  Many footballers, musicians, actors, celebrities are the product of overindulgent and admiring parents.  The acclaim they achieve from their talents feeds their narcissistic entitlement.  Nevertheless, despite being surrounded by all the material and social benefits of success, life can still seem empty of meaning.  They have to keep performing in order to gain the ephemeral accolades to maintain  emotional buoyancy.  Remove those and they may sink into an alcoholic and drug-fueled oblivion .     

 

It all sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it?  Stereotypes always do, but personalities are multifaceted and their outward expressions evanescent. ‘Spoilt’ carries features of  narcissism, hysteria and borderline personality, but such labels are there to illuminate, never to define.  ‘Spoilt’ is a continuum.  There are indeed some people who were spoilt rotten as kids and live with the struggle of existential loneliness for the rest of their lives. But there are many more, whose parents loved them a bit too much and were not quite as consistent with the boundaries as they might have been, but nevertheless did a good enough job.  As adults, these may struggle to give in to their impulses and, when stressed, can regress to childhood and behave petulantly with little consideration for others, but for the most part they survive well enough in society.  And there are others, who grew up in poverty and deprivation, but who achieve positions of great power and celebrity that are ultimately corrupting.  We only have to think of Robert Mugabe or Josef Stalin, although both were the sole surviving members of single parent families and were brought up under the strong influence of the church.  Perhaps it was their early deprivation that induced a steely determination to have it all. 

 

 

We were all little tyrants before we encountered the terrible twos and the hard lessons of prohibition and we all of us carry a yearning to return to that fantasy of perfect freedom and acceptance. Why else would people fall in love? .      

 

Although ‘spoilt’ can now seem somewhat outmoded, it is probably more common than it has ever been.  The number of single parent families has risen consistently since the nineteen sixties.  Children are over indulged more than ever before.  Parents exhausted by the divided loyalties of a job, a home and their own social life, tend to give in to their children’s demands as the line of least resistance.  Child truancy, antisocial behaviour among teenagers, knife crime, divorce have all gone up.  The current epidemic of obesity and the rise in drug addiction, binge drinking and antisocial behaviour are all indicators of a society without brakes on its behaviour.   Anybody, even those with a minimum of talent can become an instant celebrity.  You’re worth it!  Just do it!  The worrying thing is that it’s not just ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’.  If, as seems likely, a majority of our children are overindulged and poorly corrected, it’s our society that will be spoiled.   

 

 

 

In the eye of our mind

Human existence is nothing is not meaningful.  The brain works in metaphor and meaning.  We surround ourselves with symbols that represent aspects of our identity.   We use mental imagery to make sense of our experience through the creation of internal objects, psychological representations that flesh out our thoughts.

 

And we project those thoughts, those representations, onto other people, experiences, and objects that inhabit our subjective world, influencing what we see in them, how we interpret what happens.  The person we fall in love with embodies the qualities of an idealised parent.  They have to. We all need our delusions and imaginings. They comfort us. When we discover the reality, that they are themselves after all and some of their personal habits are - well, not as we would like, it can be quite devastating.        

 

Inhabiting a world of meanings is like carrying our own personal television in our heads, a theatre of the mind seen through the camera of our mind and created in our own image from everything that has ever happened to us.    

 

The arts give voice and form to our representations.  Music can be heroic, stirring, happy, loving, sad.  It encourages personal association and can amplify it and come to represent it.  It is such a powerful emotional amplifier. 

 

And look at the painting and sculpture; the comforting interiors of Wilhelm Hammershoi,  the womb like reds of Mark Rothko, the painful ruminations of Louis Bourgeois.  These are all representations of the issues that preoccupied the artists.    

 

Language is an abstraction, a way of conveying meaning through an understood code, a metaphorical communication.  This reaches its most sophisticated and eloquent in poetry.     

 

But if this is all part of the theatre of our mind,  it is an interactive theatre.  If we are to remain healthy, our interpretations have to change, to adapt, when events shatter the image. If they don’t, then we cannot live with ourselves.  Instead we exist in a state of dissonance and may only find meaning in illness.  The story has to change and adapt if we are to remain healthy in mind, body and spirit.  This is what is meant by Narrative Therapy (see my blog on Narrative based therapy; changing morbid life scripts, 19^th September 2008).  

 

But what are these representations there for?  Why do we need them?  TS Eliot once remarked that ‘mankind cannot tolerate too much reality.’   So do we use symbols to distance ourselves from intolerable realities, that we really are all alone in the world and there are forces out there that want to destroy us? 

 

Dr Kenneth Wright, psychoanalyst and author, who spoke at The Eye and Mind Society last week, thought so. ‘Our symbols exist to help us cope with separation and live an independant life. We cannot do that unless we can build a representation of what it is we separate from’.  This allows us to remain connected to the objects that give us security even if they are in mental cyberspace. As I explained in last week’s blog, Lean on Me (18^th February), the ability to be independent and go it alone depends on the presence of a supportive partner. It is really a state of mature interdependence. This can still be the case even though they are thousands of miles away, if we have not seen them for years and even if they are dead.  As long as we know that somebody loves us, then we can do anything.  But how do we learn to be without the one we need but still have them? 

 

Infants use substitutes, bits of blanket, smiling teddy bears, their thumbs – transitional objects that represent a continued connection with their mother’s face and body and are used as comforters.  Transitional objects are a step on the way to internal or mental objects. 

 

Toddlers learn to play quite happily as long as they know their mother is there or will return very soon.  They carry the image of the consistent mother who will always be there if they need her and that gives them the confidence to play, to explore their environment.  As they grow and the distance and time of separation increase, they carry a mental resonance of the soothing sound of her voice, an image of her smiling face in our mind’s eye.  The face is particularly important.  Humans have the most expressive face of any animal.  It conveys feeling through a visual connection.  A smile makes all of us feel good .  It is immensely reassuring.  A frown is frightening.  

The older child learns to work in metaphor.  They move from a world of real things to abstract images, soothing music, soft contours, comforting colours and images, that may still represent aspects of their mother. These are all ways of creating a reassuring world.  And when adolescents leave home, they may carry an impression of home and mother which they then project into their chosen partner with whom they re-establish a much earlier intimacy.   

 

But symbols do not just represent home and security, they represent other aspects of our lives as well; the things we are afraid of, that make us angry.   They recreate our good objects, bad objects, guilty objects and objects we feel ambivalent about.  Good representations reassure us that we are loved.  They are a way of possessing but not possessing.  Bad representations provides the means of taming the dangers of life.  They separate us from a reality we can’t control and give us a virtual mastery, which can take away the fear. ‘You’re never alone with a bad object.’   

 

Symbols are rather like spirits.  We see them in our minds eye and they bother us.  

 

‘As I was going up the stairs,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

I wish that man would go away.’ 

 

Tribes in some regions of central Africa live in the world of spirits all the time, so when somebody returns to the tribe after many years absence, they throw sand at him just to check he is real.  Some of us do something similar for the people we don’t quite trust. We test them out.  Is this person for real?  Will they be there for us?

 

Young children and many older ones inhabit a split world of all or nothing, good or bad, which they try to control through magic and superstition.  It takes time, training and experience before they acquire a more balanced approach and develop more ambivalent but realistic representations.   

 

Some people find it difficult to make mental representations.  They do not trust their mental images.  They cannot think about the meaning of things.  They have to know the facts. Perhaps for them, separation has been too sudden and they need to hold on to reality. 

 

But for the majority, it’s our accumulation of our memories and meanings that build up our identity.  How we cope depends on the nature of our objects. If they are good, we can go out into the world with confidence. If, however we surround ourselves with negative representations, then life is a torment, for which the only relief is the support of our friends.

 

Bringing out the best in her.

Mum could moan for England.  If it’s not the whistling in her ears, it’s the lack of feeling in her hands, then she’s too cold and if she puts a coat on she’s too hot.  But she’s 92 and her life is constricting towards the vanishing point. 

 

If I tackle all the complaints head on, she gets too immersed in the negative aspects of her life.  If I get her to try to remember what has happened today, then her frustration transmits itself to me. So I try to deal with the one area where she can function, the past.

 

Coming down from Ringinglow towards the lights of Sheffield far below us, she thinks she is on Bedminster Down looking over Bristol as the German bombs rain down.  The Centre, Broadmead and Old Market were devastated in one night.  Although I was born at the end of the war, I can still remember the bomb sites like broken teeth in the Georgian terrace on Park Street.  

 

‘They used to run special trams onto Bedminster Down to watch the blitz.’

 

‘Like bonfire night.’

 

‘Yes, Bristol was badly hit.’

 

‘You used to work on the station during the war, didn’t you?’

  

‘Yes, I was in the YWCA at Temple Meads.  I directed the soldiers as they got off the train.’

 

‘Oh like General Eisenhower.’

 

‘Oh no!  He was a Yank.’

 

‘Corrupting our girls with lipstick and nylon stockings.’

 

‘Yeah’ 

 

 

Connecting some of these memories to the present – like Carwardine’s tea dances and Strictly Come Dancing – brings her back from morbid preoccupation with death to the time of her life.  This makes her eyes bright and brings a smile to her lips and that makes me feel good too. 

 

Focussing on a person’s areas of competence and being interested in makes them lively and confident. It is the sort of unselfish communication we use for our children, our students or our employees, but we don’t always use it for siblings, friends, peers or partners.  Too many people are preoccupied by their own feelings, thoughts and activities.  This can bore and silence their audience.  Some boast about their achievements making their listeners feel inadequate. Others like to air their grievances, inciting a sense of obligation and inviting  rescue or perhaps irritation.  People don’t feel good about themselves make others feel bad too.  Married couples often project their grievances on to each other, passing  the parcel of pain back and forth.    

 

Social discourse is like mutual grooming in chimpanzees.  You rub my back and I’ll rub yours.  You eat my fleas and I’ll have some of yours.  A good host and  hostess just know how to divert the party bore and bring out their more reticent guests.  A good chair will  stimulate the energy of the meeting,  find areas of collaboration and utilise the diversity of skills and perspectives to come to constructive solutions.   A good theatre director will harness the intuition of the actors to bring out the play’s nuances; lively interpretations of the authors ideas that will resonate with the audience.   

 

 

Yesterday mum and I talked about music.

 

‘I used to play the piano’, she said.

 

‘I didn’t know that.’  

 

‘Oh yes.  I used to wait until mum and auntie Lil had gone out.  Then I’d go into the front room and play as loud as I could.’

 

‘What did you play?’

 

‘Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor.’ 

 

‘Oh I know that’

 

So we sang it together, crossing over our hands in a frenetic duet.

 

‘Bongg, bongg, bongg, bong-dum, bong-dum, Bonggggg!’   

 

 

It was a moment of real creative connection that I will cherish long after she’s gone.

 

 

Shame in the Belly

There can be nothing as embarrassing as gas. It gurgles and squelches through the intestines during pauses in conversations, sometimes squeaking like a rusty door and sometimes roaring like an express train in a tunnel. It gets trapped by spasms causing pain and such gross bloating and distension that you can look as if you’ve acquired a five month pregnancy within the space of half an hour. It can rise up in the mouth and be expelled with a cavernous belch but worst of all, it can escape downwards, silent and deadly at five paces or with a flutter or toot that instantly advertises your shame.

 

Gassy and other gastrointestinal symptoms are a taboo subject. A survey conducted in 2007 by Tickbox for Yakult revealed that 48% of women (compared to 32% of men) felt too embarrassed to talk to their GP about them. But what is so embarrassing about our guts?  Are they the vulnerable underbelly that we cannot control?  Do our bowels represent the dark, dirty aspects of ourselves that we can’t talk about.  Our guts have a hot line to the emotions.  They are supplied by sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves that translate what happens to us into bodily feelings.  Gut reactions are part of our emotional language.  ‘I can’t stomach this.  He doesn’t have the guts for it.  It gives me the shits.’ 

 

They can also reveal how people feel about their life situations.  Jane developed faecal incontinence when her teenage daughter became pregnant, repeating the shame of her own narrative, Chris’s rumbling tummy betrayed the guilt of his secret love affair.  And Stephanie was only able to go after she had left her husband.             

 

But such shameful symptoms might also suggest something wrong with the gut. All intestinal diseases can be associated with alterations in bowel habit and many with increased flatulence. As Dr Paul Cann, consultant gastroenterologist at the James Cook Hospital in Middlesborough said, ‘Bloating or farting can be caused by conditions that impair intestinal absorption, such as coeliac or pancreatic disease.  The pseudonymous, Mr Sutalf, claimed to be the world’s most flatulent patient by expert flatologist, Dr Michael D. Levitt, was scientifically recorded to fart 144 times in a single hour, generating enough gas to launch a weather balloon.  He had lactase deficiency and was easily treated by reducing his milk intake.    

 

Diet could well be the problem. Many fruits and vegetables contain sugars or starches that defy digestion in the small intestine but are fermented in the colon releasing gas.  The flatulent properties of beans were immortalized in the Hollywood movie, Blazing Saddles, but bananas, apples, pears, reheated potatoes, cereal fibre and Jerusalem artichokes are also very gassy. Unfortunately they are all components of a ‘healthy’ high-fibre diet. The art of medicine is balance. If it’s the offensive odour rather than the volume of gas that is the problem, cutting down the amount of meat in the diet can help.  

 

There is no simple solution to embarrassment.  All too often, shameful symptoms indicate a bowel that has been wrenched out of kilter by circumstance.  Relaxation, hypnotherapy and other complementary therapies can help restore emotional balance.  Psychotherapy might address the meaning of the symptom – guilt, shame, disapproval, anger or attention seeking, for example.  But the indiscretion might lie with the diet or the symptom might just indicate an undiscovered gut disease.  Gas leaks can be dangerous whatever the cause, so ‘swallow’ your pride and talk to your doctor about them! 

This article was published in The Times this morning. ,

 

A Message of Hope

The temperature in Derbyshire has been around minus two degrees centigrade all week.  It’s been the same on the Ross Ice Shelf.  ‘Who would have thought that the one thing we have run short of is suncream?’,  exclaimed Will Gow in his daily audio report, ‘It’s just too hot!  We’ve stripped down to vests and tights and are still sweating buckets.’ 

 

Gow with his two companions, Henry Adams and Henry Worsley are descendants of the members of the Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole, led by Ernest Shackleton exactly a hundred years ago.  They are following Shackleton’s route – across the ice shelf, up the Beardmore Glacier and a final trek across the polar plateau.  Here the comparisons differ.  Shackleton took 4 men and four ponies for his push to the pole, but the ponies exhausted themselves; their hooves broke the ice crust at every step and sank a foot into the snow.  One by one, they failed and three had to be shot.  Socks fell into a glacier and nearly dragged their stores with him.  This meant that Shackleton and his men needed to drag their sledges up the Beardmore in relays, a climb of 8,000 feet.  Shackleton didn’t know the route.  Nobody had been there before.  He nevertheless found the only feasible access to the polar plateau by following a light in the sky – the reflection of The Beardmore on the clouds.  They were within 100  miles of the pole when they turned back. 

 

It is day thirty-one of The 2008/9 Shackleton Centenary Expedition. Gow, Adams and Worsley know the way and they been sending back reports and images daily.  I have been monitoring their progress. On skis, dragging 600lb sledges yet matching the pace of their ancestors, they have now reached the foot of The Beardmore.  Tomorrow they will climb Mount Hope, from which they should see their route to the pole. 

 

Conditions have been so much better than Shackleton’s expedition. Most days have been warm and sunny with excellent visibility and although the snow is ridged into sastrugi, these have been relatively shallow and the sledges have glided well. The men are fit and cheerful.  Their days fit into a pattern; heating snow for water,  packing up the sledges,  pulling for 8 hours taking it in turn to lead and then camping and cooking their fat laden supper.  They are each eating about 6000 calories a day to offset the energy they are burning off pulling their heavy sledges.  For the last week they have averaged 15 miles a day over safe ground, but ahead is a long climb over dangerous transected by bottomless crevasses concealed by the flimsiest of ice bridges. 

 

How I would love to be there!  In August, I responded to an advertisement for a volunteer to join the expedition.  Of course I am too old, but the idea captured my imagination, and now I am on their mailing list as a supporter.  It’s so symbolic; the idea of three ‘wise’ men travelling across a frozen desert following the stars to the South Pole for Christmas at a time when the collapse of credit is threatening the lives of millions and people are dying of cholera in Zimbabwe.  Their’s is a message of hope, an inspiration in the face of  disaster.

 

Today I shall run up the hill out of Edensor and over to Monsal Head.  Hardly The Beardmore, but as  inspirational as it gets in these parts.  Have a lovely Christmas and may you reach your south pole next year or at least catch sight of it!        

 

Senator McGoo; Palin’ into insignificance.

 

 

There’s just a day to go in the American elections and the result seems clear.  Barack Obama is six points ahead in the polls and is leading in all the key states.  He looks and sounds like the President already.  His mixed race and global understanding will give him real stature in the world.  His appointment will send out a strong signal of a wise and resurgent America.      

 

His opponent, by contrast, is looking increasingly like Mr McGoo – bumbling, out of touch and outshone by a much more charismatic, if somewhat flaky running mate, with whom he has ‘differences’.  ‘We’re both mavericks and mavericks don’t always agree.’  Well, that’s as may be, but it helps if the candidate and his running mate were singing from the same hymn sheet.  If ever there was a symbol of America in decline, McGoo is it. 

 

The republican candidates are being undermined by two unlikely figures.  Tina Fey gives such an amusing and convincing impression of Sarah Palin that it is difficult to one ends and the other begins.  Sarah is palin’ into Tina and they both have expensive wardrobes. 

 

And McGoo is too preoccupied by the privations of Joe the Plumber to sound very effective, especially when it turns out that  Joe is really Samuel J. Wurzelbacher and stands to gain by President Obama’s proposed tax cuts.  Joe the Plumber has spawned a host of republican friends,  Tito the Builder, Jack the Hunter, Ed the Dairyman, Christine the Florist, Bill the Bricklayer and Clare the Cook.  It just needs Noddy, Big Ears and Mr Plod the Policeman to turn up and we will have a full house but no president.

 

McGoo’s campaign has always been about make believe. Let’s stop the charades, get the election over and focus on the real threats.