A Minor Triumph

Another post from yours truly… It may not seem like much to the passing traveller but the fact that even  remembered this blog existed, let alone that I came back and posted, is indeed a minor triumph.

Visiting and posting is a habit I need to form, and once formed I will of course be completely unable to break it. For that is the way of habits.

Although that said I did manage to quit smoking…one of the hardest habits of all to break…and I did it successfully, at the first attempt and I have not smoked a single cigarette since that day over ten years ago now.

Dammit! I just disproved my original point.

 Ah well…I still celebrate that I am here today…in this blog I mean. And I celebrate also that I do not smoke – even though I have of course become that most  despised of creature…the dreaded ex-smoker.

I am also celebrating that I  finally finished reading a book. Okay so it is a very short book and it took me about six weeks to read it…but we shall overlook those little things and I celebrate that I finished it. It was in fact The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , a book that was dictated one eye blink at a time by a man who found himself victim of locked-in syndrome following a massive stroke at a young age. It is a slightly uncomfortable read but a testament to the human spirit. I may have struggled due to my own cognitive limitations, but I am glad I took the time to read it.

So it seems I have much to celebrate really. I am here in this blog, I do not smoke and I read a book that a man dictated one eye blink at a time. I am alive, I cooked dinner – it wasn’t great actually but we have colds, and so we ate it and blamed the mucus …even though we know the food wasn’t great even without the mucus…I ordered some travel money for our trip next month, I made a list for a friend, I had a phone conversation with a relative ot two (well four actually if you count the heavy breathing and gurgling of a toddler) and I wrote a short piece on swearing… so all in all not a bad eff-ing day really eh?

OOps…I ‘did a Humpty’

A little background… In August 2006 I did a Humpty Dumpty and took a great fall.  Luckily for me the patch up job was pretty neat and you can’t see the joins where they put me back together again.

The only visible sign of my concrete kissing adventure is a teeny  little Harry Potterish scar . Mine is neatly tucked away in the unfortunate folds of my chinny chin chin, and unlike that of Mr HP mine did not come about from any heroic tussle with evil forces. It does glow red sometimes though…magical eh?

 So… moving swiftly along from nursery rhyme eggs, through wizards and on to goldfish. Some years back I read an article about goldfish which explained that in order to prevent them from going quite mad swiming round and round in circles all day, every day, Goldfish were blessed with a five second memory span. At the time I thought this was vaguely interesting and slightly amusing… and rather inspirational since it became the prompt for a rare attempt at poemetry(sic)

 Cold Gold…

Through watery windows

blurred and smeary

yesterdays forgotten

in an instant, instant.

No company; alone,

a lone swimmer,

in circles of frustration

If only I remembered

long enough  to care…

I’m Gold,

don’t think me cold.

Through watery windows

blurred and smeary

Yesterdays forgotten…

Of course had I known at the time just how prophetic this would prove to be I may have thought twice about the flippant tone….but then again, I doubt it.

One thing that my injury has taught me is that if my memory loss means I am to be stuck in the moment, I may as well really make the most of it and enjoy every single one of them.

Just another blog?

The whole world and his wife and their dog is blogging these days, on topics ranging from the sublime to the bloody ridiculous… so does the world need yet another blog?

The answer is clearly probably not …but then again since when did we get what we need, let alone what we really really want.