Another photo from our day out in Walcott with Oliver: here Dot and grandson face the awesome prospect of excavating some water from the sea without getting wet. As I remember, discretion triumphed.
This has been a very odd week, especially since receiving the news about my prostate. It’s as if reality has slipped off to the side somewhere and I’m only remotely attached to it. However, my energy is returning, and I am sleeping well. Got lots of support from everyone who knows and am feeling very positive. Most of the time. Yesterday I went up to the city to meet Dot after she went to the dentist’s, and we had lunch in John Lewis’ cafe, which is nicer than the full-blown restaurant and rarely very full. Afterwards she tried on a dress while I chatted to someone whose daughter was trying to find a dress for a wedding, then I left her to go to Marks and Spencer while I wondered home via Ottaker’s / Waterstone’s, where I bought an Explorer map of Norwich which I discovered later I already owned. So that’s one for each reality, then.
Dot arrived later with several items of clothing that she had bought at Marks, and we watched a couple of episodes of Battlestar Galactica, making a total of six this week. No wonder reality is seeming strange. Is Dot a Cylon? Am I? The Greens, who are almost certainly Cylons, got in at Thorpe Hamlet in yesterday’s elections and won two or three other seats, so reality is certainly not going to get any less strange.
I have a couple of poems in the latest Norwich Writers’ Circle anthology: about 840 were entered and fewer than 70 chosen, so I guess that has to be good. But I didn’t win anything with my Fish entries this year, although I got on the long list with my pre-biopsy short short story, Three-Minute Child:
The old Norfolk boy looked at the paperback in my hand as if it were an alien artefact. He had come in from Dereham by bus, and clearly spent all his spare time ploughing, digging out ditches or dealing with cows.
“What else is there to do in bed?” I riposted.
“Aren’t you married?” he chortled – a Norfolk joke. His wife, a substantial pensioner spread out next to him, laughed sportingly.
Every three minutes (yes, I was counting) a man propelled a screaming child in a pushchair the length of the hospital waiting room. I guess he was trying to keep her quiet. It didn’t help.
Personally, I was feeling great. I had just lost a stone and felt full of life. The blood test, however, said I was full of death. My blood and the rest of my body disagreed at a pretty basic level. Reality was falling apart, and the child on wheels kept screaming.
I do read books. The doctor was running way behind, the nurses would not look at me, and time was distorted, spiralling down. Reading kept my mind off the black hole that was surely waiting. But there was another reason. Someone said the difference between fiction and real life was that fiction had to make sense. It was good that something made sense; so I carried a book everywhere.
The nurse looked at me hard and called my name. I felt good. The blood must be lying. But the three-minute child was still screaming, refusing to be soothed.
