Dues

(Superstition factor: 11)

You see, most people only go up to 10, but me, I can go up to 11.


I bought a new fork, an all-steel one, because I have so far cracked three wooden handles whilst levering out brambles at the roots. I've developed a knack of plunging the fork in two or three times, testing to see which way the root branches off beneath the surface, (because they never go straight down, you know), and then giving a mighty plunge on the fork handle. This loosens the root enough for me to then get both hands around the stems and pull it out of the ground. Bramble nil, Me 1.

I sometimes feel guilty about murdering life-forms in this way: what I'm doing is against nature, after all. Left to themselves all plant life manages to achieve some sort of equilibrium. Some plants might achieve dominance in one patch of ground, but not everywhere. I come along and quite callously rip up this and that in order to allow the other to thrive where it previously had to share. And what's ripped out of the ground isn't even allowed a replant, it goes up in smoke or into the compost heap. I am final for lots of green life-forms. Am I too soft? Possibly. But I do it for money. A bit like the SonderKommando; it was their job. If they didn't, someone else would.

At the end of a busy afternoon I christened the new fork. We went to the bottom of the garden to plant a plum tree for the lady. I cut a nice hexagonal patch of turf out with a spade, then dug down with the fork to excavate a hole deep enough for the mass of compost around the roots. I reached for the plum tree to pick it up and shake off the pot, and one of the small branches raked my cheek viciously. As I shook off the pot I felt something trickling down my chin. Blood. It had slashed an inch-long scar on my face.

Little Petal, when I got home, asked what on earth I had been up to. "Dueling with a Plum-tree," I said with some bitterness.
"And it won?"
"So it would seem. I wasn't free to slash back at it."

Maybe the Plum-tree knew it could strike me with impunity, because I was just the hired help doing my job. Perhaps the uprooted brambles had clubbed together and slipped it a bribe to get me back for their untimely deaths. Or perhaps my customer is an ancient Wiccan who knows that trees need a blood-sacrifice if they are to grow into proper trees. Or perhaps a steel fork demands a christening in blood, since it is a weapon all the way through.

The next day, I was preparing to cremate several weeks worth of bramble-slaughter at another customers. I popped round to the yard to get an old oil drum with which to make an incinerator. I was told which drum to choose: not the one that had held anti-freeze, or the one which had held clean engine-oil, but the one which had held dirty oil. I recognised it easily enough, it was the dirty oily one, and carried it back to the workshop where the man was going to wizz round the top with a plasma-cutter so that I would end up with the basis for a very effective incinerator. I stood watching him prepare to start, chatting with another onlooker whom I hadn't seen for a while.

The explosion was memorable not for the noise, which was just a short violent bang, but for the absolute silence which followed it. It had been so unexpected that I had only the briefest memory of seeing the drum leap up three feet, the lid fly off out of sight, and the man with the plasma cutter jumping backwards for twice his length, and then that memory seemed to be blotted out by the silence. As I got used to the hush I realised my ears were ringing.

"Are you alright?" I called to him.
"I haven't got a clue," he answered, staggering out into the daylight and blinking.
He rubbed his hands through his hair and they came away black from the droplets of old engine oil which had been blasted out across the floor and up the walls.

Apart from a tiny drop of blood on the bridge of his nose and some singed hair, he was fine. I trod carefully through the patches of old oil and switched off the machine, then found the tools which had been flung from his jacket and the portable phone, scattered around the workshop floor. The drum lid, which other onlookers had said cleared the top of a nearby tree, was nowhere to be found.

I hadn't got the nerve to ask him to cut half-a-dozen air holes around the bottom of the drum a few inches up from the base. I paid him the money, and then put all my remaining change in the lifeboat box they keep on the shelf, as a way of saying thanks for being spared, yet again.

I used a club-hammer and chisel to punch holes in the drum and got the incinerator going, spending a couple of happy hours cremating the brambles and ivy I'd murdered the previous weeks. My trousers and fleece stank of burnt engine oil all the way home, and went straight into the washing machine.

That night, I dreamed, as I usually do, but this time it was, for me anyway, a very unusual type of dream. It began ordinarily enough: I was walking along a road that was covered in mud and debris, and the banks were littered with abandoned cars which seemed to have been washed along in a torrent of water. I had no clear idea what I was doing there, or how I had got there in the first place. A white camper-van pulled up and a man got out. He said he was the county sheriff, and told me to get inside.

There were two other men inside the back of the camper, his deputies. The sheriff asked me if I had a motor bike. I said that I didn't. He looked sad at that, but then said it didn't make any difference, I would still be just another victim of the bike-killer. I asked him what he meant, and he said "Ignorance is no excuse in this matter."

He went to the other end of the van and un-holstered his pistol. One of his deputies was sitting at a fold-down desk, filling out paperwork. The other deputy came down to where I was and offered me his gun. I shook my head.

"Take it," he said, thrusting it towards me, "We're making it fair."
I refused it again. I didn't want it.

I said I hadn't done anything. The sheriff laughed at that and said "You know? That's what all of them say."

The deputy offered the gun one more time and I said "No" in an insistent tone.

"Have it your way, then," the sheriff snapped in annoyance, and shot me. I saw the bullet moving towards me in slow motion, leaving behind it a trail of little bullet-outlines, just as in Matrix, and I tried to twist away and duck my head forwards, but I felt it rip into the back of my neck.

And then I died.

And then I woke up.

I have very rarely experienced death in my dreams, it is totally unlike what I normally see. So now I'm wondering if, because I cheated death in the daytime, I had to experience it in the nighttime, just to pay my dues.

My life is anything but mundane, I'll have you know.

Ahem

ahem, ahem. Ahroogharghchoogargh cack-cack-cack.

The Nightingales are coughing near
the convent of the Sacred Heart

Sorry.

My first blog post, two years ago now, was about early-morning coughing. I wrote it in a whimsical mood, sparing the messy details of hawking and retching because I had some sympathy for my reader (all one of her), and instead imagined the rattle and bark of the engine of a First World War fighter aircraft springing into life as the dawn sun peeped through the trees and hedges somewhere in Flanders.

My early morning coughing fits do prey on my imagination sometimes, for all the wrong reasons. I gave up smoking a few months before I moved into the station, sixteen years ago. I stopped because I had done some sums and realised that to get out of the horribly featureless box of a modern maisonette and into somewhere I had dreamt of for nearly all my life was going to take more funds than I could count on getting my hands on. It was the middle of a housing slump; my five-room ground floor maisonette was now worth £5000 less than it had been when I had bought it three years earlier. And in addition, I was giving up my secure job I had held for three years and going back into the uncertainties of freelancing.

At the time of which I write, cigarettes still hadn't reached the incredible prices that they command today, but I worked out that if I stopped my forty-a-day Red More habit immediately, the savings would pay most of my living costs over the next three months until the start of a possible contract in Southampton where they were making some new underwater fibre-optic cables to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans as part of the FLAG project. That contract, assuming I got it, would allow me to sell up, at a loss, and move Westward, away from the clamour and crush of the booming Thames Valley, to start a new life in the peace of the countryside.

So, having double-checked the figures, I threw away the last six cigarettes in the packet, and stopped drinking coffee for three months until the need to smoke felt less intense. It was as easy as that; no patches, no chewing gum, no mints, no support groups where you have to listen to the ravings of a wretch who imagines that he's worse than anyone else in the room and wants them to reassure him that, yes, he really is a special case and deserves everyone's attention. No need for group hugs and chest-baring confessions; I preferred to suffer in silence.

A few years later, when someone was trying to sell me life insurance, I asked the question about having previously smoked, and was told in reply that the insurance companies considered that after ten years of abstinence, you were equal to someone who had never smoked at all. Equal, or equivalent, I can't remember the precise weasel-words, but the gist of them remains.

I still find that hard to believe. Can a lifetime habit that had at one point reached sixty-a-day be undone after ten years? Especially when for some of that time I had smoked cigars instead of cigarettes, believing that they were less harmful, but I knew that I was inhaling the smoke, which cigar smokers were not supposed to do, and was up to twenty-a-day; partly because there were cards inside the packets to collect, and I wanted the last couple of famous aircraft, a few of the hedgerow wildlife, and one or two railway trains to make up complete sets. You'll gather from that confession that I am of the compulsive type. It worked for me; where I had previously been a compulsive smoker, so I switched to becoming a compulsive stopper.

If it were true that ten years or more of abstinence could make you born-again, lung-wise; how come, I was wondering a few years ago, did I have such a hacking early-morning cough at certain points in the year? Did life sometimes withdraw the recuperation bonus for those whom it considered had tried to cheat their way out of paying for the pleasure they had enjoyed for so long? And yes, let me remind you all, smoking is a pleasure. I know that smokers smell terribly to non-smokers, and I know that they sometimes seem to be part of a closed society that has the right to hold secret meetings in private rooms, or recognise each other in railway carriages and airport lounges and pick each other up in clubs and bars by asking for and accepting lights from strangers, but the real reason for smoking is that it is enjoyable. It is, believe me.

Non-smokers will never know this pleasure, of course, and probably will never understand it either. One of the things I missed most when I stopped smoking was the company of smokers. I always found them easy to talk with, more tolerant of personal differences than the fervent non-smokers I also knew, and, in some way, more tolerant of other people's habits, such as drinking, or of quietly farting and not apologising for the offence. Of course, smokers have one of the best defences against the wind-breakers, except in crowded tube trains where they are banned from taking pre-emptive measures.

It was the tubes that first made me worried about whether I had possibly left it a little late to give up. Not the tubes inside of me, but those underneath the ground. A couple of years after I moved into the station, I took work in London that meant I had to stay in lodgings through the week and only see my Wiltshire home for a few brief hours each weekend, rather like my recent sojourn in Lincolnshire. I noticed quite quickly that, whereas a few years before I had been able to run up the escalators to reach the top and light up, I now struggled up at the same rate as those around me. I put this down to the extra weight I had put on when I stopped smoking, and started going out to Finsbury Park in the evenings to try and jog it off, but the increased bulk of my mid-section meant that I could no longer sustain the fluid motion I had been previously proud of, and after a few yards the wobble would get out of control and I was forced to slow to a shuffling walk to try and stop the tank-slapper that my bulging belly was threatening to throw on me.

I didn't keep a diary during that period of my life, so I can't look back and try to see where I first began to cough as soon as I got out of bed some mornings. I do now have a few years of notes that I can look back through and realise that it is the crisp cold mornings that affect me most, not the damp foggy ones. And since I am still getting these hack-attacks even after losing some weight and regaining fitness, I am worried that it might be caused by something other than my previous smoking excesses. Could it, for instance, be a result of my country life-style? Must I consider giving up something else I enjoy?

The station has no mains gas, nobody in the area does, nor are we likely to, and I don't have oil-fired central heating. I burn coal in an old Rayburn room-heater with a back-boiler to supply hot water to the bath and warm water to the cast-iron radiators I scrounged from the factory in Southampton where the cables were being made. I burn coal in the sitting-room fireplace and wood on an open fire in the large room I call the office, which was really the booking hall in the days when the station was active. Visitors, when the fire is cheerfully crackling away, always remark how wonderful it must be to have real wood fires. Yes, there is a definite cheerfulness and a radiant heat they you won't get from the smug smoothness of pressed-steel panel radiators, but I wonder how long the visitor's envy would last if they saw the work that goes into running solid fuel fires for warmth? The labour of carrying in the wood and coal, the need to keep kindling dry, and, of course, the need to sweep the hearths clean and carry out the ashes each day.

That's where I am worried that my coughing might be coming from, the contaminating dust that wanders invisibly throughout each room as the fires burn and produce their heat and ash. I am worried that on cold dry mornings, the sudden change of air temperature in my lungs as I breathe in disturbs the fine particles that have built up inside me, and the cough is an instinctive reaction to get rid of these invaders. If so, what is happening to me on the mornings when I don't cough? Is there no dust to be expelled, or is there no helpful burst of cold air to trick me into getting rid of the particles?

These thoughts were stirred by a program I watched recently, which described how some of the rescue workers who rushed into the choking dust clouds as the Twin Towers collapsed were starting to experience respiratory problems a few years afterwards, and, typically, the administration that at the time was so proud to be videoed standing alongside them was now distancing themselves from the sad wheezing workers who were finding it hard to climb stairs or carry equipment around. The dust, which a government body had insisted at the time presented no threat to humans, was reportedly building up in the lungs and causing scar tissue to grow over the particles, and consequently giving the sufferer a significant loss of lung capacity.

The 911 workers will, I hope, be able to claim compensation from the US Government; if they cannot, it will be one of the most disgraceful disregarding of human sacrifice that one could think of in the past few years. Smokers, almost paradoxically, it seems, are also able to sue the tobacco companies for profiting from their ailments. But I, living in my railway station, with my wood and coal fires, cannot sue anybody if I find I am going to cough my way to an early grave. I have enjoyed their warmth and comfort for the past sixteen years, but there may have been a hidden price that I am only just coming to realise.

Or, of course, it's me indulging in a little hypochondria. I rode the bike up the steep hills to Shaftesbury for two consecutive days last week, as part of the cure for a depressing cold I had been experiencing that was leaving me breathless after working for a couple of hours. I can't be all that ill if I can pedal up a 400-foot climb at my age.

Go on, feel sorry for me, you know you want to.

Yet another wake-up call

{it's your turn soon)

I have a new customer for my gardening: an elderly couple who live in a converted barn on a hillside overlooking the river Nadder and the railway line. They are both too old to manage the heavier garden work, and the man who mows the lawn and cuts the hedges likes to do a quick and easy hour's work with motorised tools and not get involved with any really physical work. So I have been pulling out the Russian Vine that has grown unchecked to the very top of the conifer cluster and high stone wall. It was killing the trees, and had begun to send tendrils up under the eaves into the roof space.

I began by clearing away the long grass and weeds which had grown up in the flower beds and borders, because the bulbs are already growing up, and she would like to be able to see them. Her sight is deteriorating due to macular disorder, and she cannot see clearly much further than her feet, let alone through a mass of weeds. I uncovered some early crocuses, and a beautiful deep purple flower that I still can't put a name to. Neither could she, because it was too far from the pathway for her to walk to.

Every few minutes, the man wanders out to where I'm working. He says one of two things: "I was going to ask you something, but I've forgotten it", or "Do you know a local mechanic who'll come out and see to my car?"

He has Alzheimer's disease. It came on him sometime in the last 12 months. He still has his long-term memory; he can remember where things are kept around the garden, and where his friend lives on the coast. And he can obviously remember something in the short term, because when he comes out to ask me the question, he knows that he decided to come and visit me for some purpose. But he doesn't realise that he is repeating the same behavior regularly. How can he, when he doesn't have the recall necessary to make comparisons? He doesn't even know that he has Alzheimer's, because what the doctor told him was probably lost five minutes later.

Some time ago, I wrote a story in response to a challenge; to write a short story in which all the action took place in a span of 5 minutes. There could be no reference to events outside of that window. I settled on imagining a pair of people living together in a home who had lost their short-term memories. At the time, I didn't go and look up anything about Alzheimer's or Dementia or other known conditions, I just wondered what it would be like if all you could do was live for the moment.

The story is here (Stalemate) if you want to read it. Just out of interest, when it was reviewed, the reviewer imagined two old men together. I knew better, but didn't contradict him; sometimes it's instructive to see how other people think.

What has focussed my attention now is that I seem to have imagined quite accurately what it is like to not remember, and I am worried. Is it going to happen to me? Or to someone close to me? Because at the moment, there is very little that can be done about it. The attitude in the health service is very much one of not wasting resources to deal with a problem where the sufferer is going to die within a short timescale anyway. There might also be a hint of not rushing to cure someone of a condition that they do not know they suffer from, and which doesn't actually cause pain or physical discomfort anyway. But does the sufferer feel mental anguish?

I am now becoming fascinated with what I might try to do if I myself began to lose my short-term memory. The first and probably most important question is, how would I know?