Monday, July 03, 2006

Blue, blue windows behind the stars...

...Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the sky
Throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless...


My friend N had her wisdom teeth out in Blackpool Victoria Hospital many years ago. It was summer, she was on a mixed ward, and the night before her op the man in the bed next to her tempted her to sneak outside with him and share cans of smuggled in Stella. He rolled cigarettes in the warm night and told her she should get hold of Neil Young's Harvest. I believe she later did. It also transpired that he was an inmate of Kirkham Open Prison, but I am not sure whether that's relevant, except it possibly explains why he was so keen to enjoy the moonlight and the company of women.

It's a story that's stayed with me, mainly because I (wrongly) thought Harvest contained the track Helpless, and Helpless is, I believe, one of the greatest songs of all time. Whenever I play it, I get a flickery mental snapshot of N and her man in arrow-printed pyjamas, sitting outside a hospital, drinking warm beer and waiting for anaesthetics and knives.

I should have saved that image for my novel. But it came to mind recently when I heard that A (who is going to marry my cousin) had been diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 32... a random brutality which has slammed into her life and reverberated outwards into the lives of everyone around her.

And last night my lovely friend C was the passenger in a car which was side swiped at 60mph on a country road somewhere near Banbury. He has a fractured skull, a ruptured diaphragm and a torn heart membrane (whatever that's called), and is currently on a ventilator in the John Radcliffe hospital after four hours' emergency surgery.

When these things happen, we have ambulances. We have surgeons. We have nurses. We have the NHS. I am sure both A and C have the best possible chance of recovering from their respective body blows, but, like terrorist attacks, they shock us out of complacency without giving us any alternatives. We are lucky to live where we do, where roads are safe and cancer is detectable, but when it comes to it, in the face of fate, we're all helpless.

What can you do but play it loud?

joella

3 comments:

tatton said...

Best wishes to C. As for me I'm aboslutely fine. Sore tit, not much else wrong. The problem with being fatalistic, is that you give away control to something else which isn't you. Yes, you never know what's round the corner, but that's what makes Life so amazing and beautiful.

Having a bird theme to the wedding, perhaps if we know the song we can have it as our first song...

Phil said...

Helpless is a Crosby Stills Nash AND Young song second to last track on Deja Vu. It is lovely but perhaps a little melancholy for a first dance at a wedding.

Jo said...

Indeed. But what about I Like Birds by the Eels? That would be hilarious!