To blog or not to blog

I am ashamed that it is so long since I last sat down to update the dusty pages of my little blog so forgive the cobwebs and the feint smell of mildew (that’s me, not the blog) for I feel appropriately chastised by those who have been generous enough to miss it and kind enough to encourage me to scribble a little more.

I have my reasons for this absence, some better than others. When I last wrote I was standing on the brink of a new treatment regime intended to scrub out my ailing liver and lend me a new lease of life. Any lease though has an associated cost and for me that was some very bad reactions to the drugs. In simple terms my body stopped producing enough white blood cells (which fight infection) and red cells (which carry oxygen to the muscles, organs and brain). This left me as pale as a ghost and about as weak. I am told that the effect was the same as if someone had drained a third of the blood from my body and then asked me to run a marathon. I ended up having to visit the hospital every day, ironically so they could take more of my blood to test. I’m sure I was left with little more than ectoplasm and will power flowing through my veins.

Think of that shot they always show on wildlife programmes of a new-born quadrupeds (horse, camel, cow, deer – whichever you pick). The scene where the said baby tries to pull itself tottering, wobbling and frail, exhausted from its recent trauma, to its unsteady feet for the very first. That’s pretty much how I felt, although thankfully with only two legs to coordinate and no hump (if you were thinking camel). The solution, in both senses of the word, came in the form of booster injections; two for the haemoglobin, one for the white cells. Along with the original treatment, which was also injected, I was jabbing my stomach every day for 14 weeks with anything up to 4 different syringes. I don’t know about you but I don’t really enjoy sticking needles in my already sore and punctured tummy. I’d rather have a cup of tea. just for future reference.

I endured all of this with as much strength of spirit as I was able and the unending endurance of David who must fear my hospital visits even more than I do because of the hell I then put him through. Now, I am a very firm believer in “Murphy’s Law” as it never seems to fail me. It played out in its usual style in this case too and after 14 weeks I was not showing a significant response to the medication and the treatment was stopped. The trials and tribulations of the last few years meant that I was simply not strong enough to cope with a dose sufficiently high to make a difference and so that 100 days of hell was for nothing. To be honest it was a relief, just to give my bruised and perforated stomach some respite. I know I will have to go through it all again one day, maybe with new and better drugs and that is a Damoclesian sword of some weight. Part of me feels like I failed, like somehow if I had tried harder or squeezed one more drop out of each syringe, the outcome would have been different, but clearly at the time the drugs were poisoning me and not having the beneficial effect I needed.

Through all of this I have kept myself sane with the garden, pottering around, doing little bits of jobs at a time, but grateful for something to distract my mangled mind from the medical mayhem that left me feeling like I was living in an episode of Casualty – and not even a very good one. The new greenhouse became a bubble of ‘other space’, somewhere unimpinged by needles and tablets, blood tests and scans. An escape. I could do as much or as little as any day’s symptoms allowed, with no pressure beyond the challenges of a late Spring and frosts that ate into the season like locusts leaving the land barren. To close the door to the greenhouse was to shut out the telephone, the calendar of hospital appointments, the drawer of tablets, the sharps bin for discarded needles and that whole part of my life and I honestly think that break, even for a few minutes, helped me stay marginally on the right side of survival.

I could sit on my little plastic stool in true gnomic fashion, dibbing away at pots of seeds, watering seedlings with the sprinkler on the hose and generally doing Percy Thrower proud (substitute Chris Beardshaw or Alys Fowler if you must and if you are too young to remember the days when it was perfectly normal to see a Percy out in the garden on BBC One). The heavy work has been down to David, the Dimmock to my Tischmarsh if you like, and I have to say I am proud of what we have achieved. In no particular order, we managed potatoes, runner beans, French beans, peas, lettuce, carrots, spring onions, full-sized onions, garlic, beetroot, sweetcorn, strawberries, cape gooseberries, sweet peppers, jalapeños, apache chillies and hundreds of tomatoes. I also have rhubarb (or bubub as my Grandfather always used to call it) and two grape vines which won’t crop for a year or two. For fun I grew some sunflowers and they added no end of colour, as did the French marigolds and nasturtiums, which are both supposed to act as natural pest control methods. Adding to the fun crops, we still have a good-sized tub of purple potatoes – yes, they really ARE purple all the way through.

On the same theme we have some heritage purple carrots too. I need not discuss the fact that carrots were originally purple as that is quite well known these days but to actually see one and eat it is quite odd – they taste exactly like any other carrot, no hint of purple at all.

Two small plots and a 6′ greenhouse have meant that we didn’t buy any veg or salad for the duration of the Summer, so I wonder how many food miles that has saved. I would quite like one day to check the countries of origin of a weekly veg shop and tally up just how far things have travelled. There is, of course, no taste comparison to even the best food you buy in a super marker – no matter how super it claims to be. There is something quite special about podding and eating some peas straight from the plant you grew yourself and knowing that no nasty chemicals were used, they have not been refrigerated, packed, shipped, stored or stacked. We don’t claim to be living The Good Life just yet, we would argue far too much about who is Tom and who is Barbara if we tried, but the garden has given me a the escape I needed from the more clinical part of my existence.

With the seasons as they were there was a quiet time with the veg, when seeds were sown, bulbs planted, spuds chitted and nothing I could do would speed up nature’s clock while they grew. With a decent period of dry weather and still the need to be outside we plotted a plan to build a pond. I had two in my last house and have always wanted one here too, but time and lack of inspiration had contrived to drop that down the list of priorities. But I needed something else to do, a project to occupy my mind and so the pond idea was resurrected. Even when I was fit and well, the prospect of digging something on the scale we wanted would have been beyond my reach and David, whilst willing and able to help in the garden is not fool enough to get roped into a task of that magnitude. He did offer, bless him, but with the same tone a death-row inmate might offer to paint his cell – I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. But thanks to my mother’s kindness we found ourselves with the funds to ‘get a man in’ and said man was got. The excavation took him an afternoon, it would have taken me a month – I make no exaggeration; I was not strong enough to wield a spade so would have had to manage with a trowel!

I have to say that the guy who did the work probably hadn’t dug many ponds before. The plot of land is on a slight slope, it rises by about six inches towards the patio. Despite a detailed diagram, example photos and all the measurements written down for him he never quite managed to grasp the concept that water tends to have an affinity for the level and if you make a pond with one side higher than the other it will only ever fill to the height of the lowest part. You all know that. I know that. David knows that but Doug (I shall call him that as it seems appropriate – what do you call a man with a spade in his head etc) didn’t know that and couldn’t grasp that the high point needed lowering. OK, I can forgive him for maybe not quite having the same vision for this aquatic fantasy that I held in my head but some basic common sense would help the guy no end. I thought as he was digging that maybe he had not quite understood the plans so again I explained that the level needed to be dropped at one end to compensate for the slope. He nodded with the understanding that a slug might have when presented with a quadratic equation and then proceeded to dig in the shelves around the edges. He knew I wanted a shelf of about 6 inches around part of the pond and another one at twice that depth to allow for planting marginals and lilies. But the numpty only went and dug these in parallel to the existing sloping ground, NOT on a level so, when the water was put in, one end of the shelf would be under the perfect 6 inch depth but the other would practically be dry. I gave up the fight and thank god I was having one of my better days or else either him or me would have ended up at the bottom of the hole waiting to star in a future episode of Brookside.

David cantered home in his shining armour and put things right, even managing to use the huge spirit level that I had been waving at Doug all day. The pond was lined and filled, and over the next few weeks I taught myself how to lay the edging bricks. Of course, these things I have to do slowly and on a minuscule scale so I was mixing mortar with a trowel and only enough for a few bricks at a time as my energy was unpredictable and I could end up flagging (no, not laying flagstones) at any time. So, bit by bit the edging was laid, everything was tidied and it was ready for draining. My inept attempts with the mortar were not always successful and loads ended up in the water. Lime mortar is bad for fish. It makes them dead. So it had to be removed by draining the pond. One learns from ones mistakes. I never said I was any good at it! That’s why I’m not a builder called Bob – although I’m sure a Digger called Doug could have found new skills at which to not excel.

No story is complete without a countdown to add to the drama and this is no exception. Ours was not so much your usual ticking clock or digital countdown but more a very traditional version. Think by way of example of a bucket of sand with a hole in it – when the sand trickles out the bucket is lighter and tips a fulcrum to set fire to a rope attached to the swinging axe… Our example was bigger – it was water in a lake that was slowly running out and as a result a hosepipe ban was due to be triggered any day. So amid imagined tension-building orchestration and quick cut-away shots to water guages in Crummock Water we had to get the pond emptied, cleaned and refilled before aqua became a black-market commodity and possession carried a higher penalty than cocaine.

We did it, with one day to spare. “The Ministry of Water today announced a hosepipe ban in areas including Manchester, Salford…” I think at one point we had more water stock-piled in our pond that United Utilities had in its entire reserve. But we were prepared, we had a butt, we could catch rainwater in hollowed-out oranges and bathe in the dishwasher. Stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. If things got bad I had ice cubes in the freezer we could melt down for soup. Of course, the day of the ban was wet, I mean piss-wet-through wet. And it kept being wet. Wet with a capital WET. The wettest wet since sliced wet. God, or Nature or the Baby-Jebus-in-the-sky has one bitch of a sense of humour and we had a month of wet Sundays and enough wet Wednesdays in a week to get anyone called Noah reaching for the power tools and books on animal husbandry. On the plus side I didn’t need to water the gardens and the butt was always full for greenhouse irrigation.

Political equality forbids me to draw any connection between the dark and ominous storm clouds and the General Election and of course this year we had all the razzmatazz of an American-style fight for the top job – except the Yanks fight over the White House and our guys bicker over a terraced council house. How frightfully droll that the outcome was the one thing that absolutely nobody in the country voted for and hardly anyone wanted. So Morecambe and Wise moved in to Number 10, no doubt sharing a bed and re-enacting the ‘breakfast’ sketch every morning. If I’m honest, I have pretty much now forgotten which one is which. Its like Ant and Dec. Does anyone really know? The Labour party were left to lick their wounds as Gordon was given an enormous political wedgie and frog marched out of the limelight. At least when Mr Brown said he’d keep an eye on things’ you knew it got his full attention. Still, maybe time will show that four eyes are better than one. This of course left the Labour party with a dilemma – who’s name to put on the letter-heads at Party HQ? They would have to elect a new leader but the ProntaPrint order has to go off, well, pronto. Solution: put the Miliband brothers up for the post – that way the business cards could just say Mr Miliband whoever gets the job. Now THAT is the sort of money saving scheme they should have adopted before the country fell into the economic abyss. Oh well, ‘all change’ at Downing Street and that is Tweedle Dum, Tweedle  Dee and Milib-Andy-Pandy safely ensconced in their new positions and the country thrown back to Thatcherite strikes, unemployment and cuts. As ‘about the size of Wales’ is now a recognised  unit of measure, and allegedly  we need to cut back as much as it costs to run ‘a country about the size of Wales’ for a year I think I have seen a solution here…

I shall leave you for a short while contemplating the absurdities of the British political system, our declining manufacturing industries, growing unemployment and cutbacks to the NHS which quite honestly make me fear for my own survival, while I slip off and write Part II.