Go Congo!

There aren't many things I believe in but I do believe in democracy. It's hard work, it's flawed to hell and back, but there's no better way to run a country. You need universal suffrage, you need separation of powers, you need some sort of national pride, you need some level of gender equality, you need well paid and well educated public servants, and you've got yourself a country, that can talk to other countries and, you know, begin to sort stuff out.

The DRC hasn't got many of those things, but hey, elections are a start.

In other news, I still can't even begin to think about the Middle East... but I have downloaded Lebanon by the Human League to help me get it out of my head. Postmodern life is screwed, frankly.

joella

Avant-garde wheelchair-accessible curry-fuelled summer city nights

About a year ago, I went to a party in Old Botley where a young man in a wheelchair spent the earlier part of the night careering about madly. A bit later, the wheelchair stood empty in the middle of the garden, at which point it became clear that his occupancy of it had been both optional and confronting.

I spent the next couple of hours in the wheelchair myself, and it was both interesting and a lot of fun, though I woke up the next morning wondering if it's ok to do that sort of thing. My favourite bit was when C ran round the garden with me at great speed and then bumped me down some steps into the living room where several people expressed shock at his reckless handling of me, even though they knew me and knew that my legs work perfectly well.

I have thought about that night many times since. Which is one of the reasons tonight was so weird - M was playing his first gig with his new band in the Old Dairy in Headington Hill Park. I rang C, who is recovering well from his car crash but still very poorly, to see if he wanted to come. He said he wasn't really up for it as he can't walk very far. I said 'well, what if we find you a wheelchair?'

And it turned out that the performance art wheelchair was still in the garage in Old Botley, and I ended up wheeling C up the hill in it, in all its flat-tyred, spider-ridden glory. It was the wheelchair equivalent of the avocado bathroom suite, and all the worse, somehow, when he was having a little walk and I was wheeling it empty. I felt like something out of a David Lynch film.

Nonetheless, it was well worth it to see him out and about, and it was amazing to see the Old Dairy, which still has its stalls and its original milk-draining floor, and which all reverberated well to screeching and screaming and violins and bass and drums. The first song was called Silence in the Slaughterhouse. It was 7pm on a warm summer's evening and I was still scared.

Later K&A bought curry from Aziz and we all sat in the garden eating and drinking and (in everyone else's case) listening to me rant about the Great War of Africa (known to wikipedia as the Second Congo War) which no-one in Europe's ever heard of BUT WHY NOT. This was a response to A's comment about the UK's domestic and US news focus - I agree we're rubbish at covering Europe, but we're rubbish at covering everywhere else as well.

This developed into a monologue about the whole 'heaven in a wild flower why leave your house to discover all the beauty the world has to offer' vs the 'how can you be a global citizen without some understanding of the reality of life in developing countries even if you have to fly long haul to get there' dilemma. And when I say monologue, I mean monologue. My companions flaked away one by one, while being careful to say to me that it was nothing personal.

So let's say that I loved Malawi (photos here), but it's also good to be home.

joella

If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will

I am back in OX4, processing my thoughts from the last 10 days and rejoicing at the ferocity of tonight's thunderstorm... I'm sitting in our little conservatory with all the lights off, feeling battered by the sound of the rain on the plastic roof yet also knowing I have shelter from the storm.

It's a fucking enormous storm though, so this feeling might not last. The roof could cave in at any moment, is what it feels like. I am working off the battery in case of a power surge. It's wild and elemental and feels nothing like benign northern Europe should.

I am also thinking about A, who has to decide whether or not to subject herself to chemotherapy. These decisions seem never to be clear cut. It's not quite the Russian roulette that is unprotected sex in Southern Africa, but it's still a game of chance.

Humans have a particular relationship with risk. I think it's one of the things that makes us human. When I was younger and a bit fucked up, I used to walk down the middle of the road late on a Friday night, when I was wasted and nihilistic and wanted to taste exhaust fumes and feel engine heat. I surely risked my life, or risked my health at the very least, yet... at the time, if you'd asked me, I'd have said what is life for if you can't bet against the odds every now and again.

These days I stay on the pavement, but I take my risks in other ways. I still like to taste electricity in my mouth during a big storm. And I feel for A, who has to decide how much sickness to risk for how much health.

joella

The Test

One of my colleagues writes short stories, and yesterday he gave me one to read: it's called The Test. It's beautifully written, so I do him a disservice by summarising it so bluntly, but I've been thinking about it ever since.

The story runs as follows: young-ish man (aged 32) who has never had a sexual relationship is in church one Sunday listening to the preacher talk about love and wondering if he will ever know what it means. The reading is that one from St Paul about love being always this and never that. I read it at a wedding once so I do know it quite well, and I do think it's rather beautiful.

A young woman comes in late and sits beside him, and he realises that maybe he will know what love means. She is new to the area and they start seeing each other. His best friend is a doctor who has slept around a lot, and he advises that the young-ish man should make sure he knows what he might be getting, but the young-ish man is not that sort of young-ish man, and his sweetheart is not that kind of girl.

They go out for two years, then he proposes and she accepts. Everyone is very happy. Then without her consent the doctor (who is taking her blood for another reason) tests her for HIV, discovers she is positive and tells the young-ish man. The young-ish man is distraught and does not know what to do. How can he marry a woman who has kept her sexual past from him in this way? The doctor advises him to leave her.

He thinks a lot about the reading in the church the day they met, and decides he will go ahead anyway as he does love her. The day before they get married the young woman's brother, who is the doctor's assistant, comes over and also tells the young-ish man about his sister's HIV status, as he was the one who actually did the test. He is not sure the young-ish man should marry his sister.

But the young-ish man believes in love, so he marries her. On their wedding night he tells her it's his first time, and she says it's hers too. He doesn't believe her, and asks her if she has ever exposed herself to HIV. She says only once, with a young boy. He is horrified.

But it turns out that the young boy had been hit by a car and the young woman gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation, and he had blood in his mouth. She doesn't know what happened to him. It then turned out that the young boy was actually the youngest brother of the young-ish man, who had, it turned out, contracted HIV from unsterilised medical equipment used during an emergency operation a few years before the car accident. So the young woman discovered on her wedding night that she had contracted HIV from the brother of her husband. But love won out.

Or something. My colleague asked me what I thought of his story. I said it was difficult for me to say, as I wasn't really its target audience. I asked him why he had written it. He said he wanted to show that you can get HIV without being a prostitute.

Which is true. But it's also true that most HIV+ women in Africa caught it from their husbands. Young women can be as pure as they bloody well like, they're still at risk. It's the young-ish man who's unusual in this story. And the idea that three men can know your HIV status before you even know you've been tested is pretty unpalatable, even if, as I suspect, it's only being used as a narrative ploy.

What HIV does, in an unbelievably brutal way, is make patterns of human sexual behaviour evident. Old people catch it, because old people have sex. Children catch it because adults have sex with children. Faithful wives catch it because their husbands are not faithful, and, to a lesser extent, faithful husbands catch it because their wives are not faithful. Deeply Christian countries like this one are incredibly uncomfortable about this, but the evidence that it happens is now incontrovertible. They have to enable people, especially women and girls, to protect themselves. Moralising might help a bit, but acknowledgement, feminism and condoms help a lot more. In my opinion.

OK, rant over.
joella

Night on the town, Malawi-style

We finished our work for the week last night. We did some evaluation of the process and everybody had enjoyed it, and the project is now handed over to the researcher and project assistant we have hired. I wrote the project proposal, and designed the process we used to start it all off, so although it would be nowhere without the skill and commitment of the Malawi team (and they have plenty of both) I feel pretty proud of myself.

 

So much so that I chanced the red wine – ropey and Zimbabwean, but great for celebrating nonetheless. We drank on the hotel terrace as the sun went down, bid farewell to N, who is off to another workshop, and then L and I asked the porter to get us a cab to go into Blantyre proper (we are actually staying in Limbe, which is to Blantyre as Botley is to Oxford, only further away).

 

Okay, he said, and disappeared into the bar – not somewhere I would normally look for a taxi driver myself, but there you go. He emerged a little while later with a guy in tow: he will take you, he said. Okay, we said, how much? It was 800 kwacha, we said fine and he led us to the car park, which was full of big white shiny 4WDs and a battered ancient red Datsun coupe. Which was his. And had no seatbelts.

 

Earlier we had been refused use of a work car because neither of us had had our driving assessed on Malawian roads and the guy who does the assessing is away. So for safety reasons we couldn't drive ourselves, yet it's perfectly fine to get into an unlicensed cab held together with spit and string.

 

Luckily we'd had a few drinks, so we thought this was hilarious, and the radio mostly drowned out the noise of the engine screaming up the hills.

 

We arrived in the big smoke and joined some of our colleagues for an Indian meal (fish! hooray!) which was like manna from heaven after a week of pasta with carrots and green beans, and then they suggested going to the Sportsman Bar. This, we had been told, is as down and dirty as southern Malawi gets, so we had no hesitation.

 

And it was great – the band were cool, beautiful boys who played some reggae, some traditional songs and the odd cover, including Graceland, which was strangely moving to hear in such a place, and I drank Malawi gin on ice, which was rough as you like but seemed to fit the mood. It was mostly men, and most of the women were of the ladies of the night persuasion (and, disconcertingly, didn't bother to close the cubicle doors when they went to piss), but nobody gave us any hassle beyond a bit of dirty dancing in our general direction, and my guess is that wasn't personal.

 

We left as the place was beginning to slide into messiness, and our colleague P, who is a Seventh Day Adventist and therefore teetotal (and not supposed to go to bars at all, but likes the music) offered us a lift back in his big shiny safe car. So we had a proper Friday night out, curry and all, and I was still in bed by midnight. Splendid.

 

joella

Sunrise on the tobacco auction floor

There's a tobacco auctioneers over the road from our office. How many people can say that? I've been watching it on and off all week, wondering what goes on in there. Last night we wandered over after work, and the whole place practically ground to a halt as lots of men in bright green overalls stopped to wave and say hello. We wandered around a bit, feeling that strange feeling of being white and female in a very black and male place. It's like coming from a different planet, but in a very benign way. I guess we were taking our gilded status a little too much for granted though, as after a while we were picked up by security and taken to the manager's office.

 

He was very polite, but basically said 'we can't have people just wandering around all over the place'. Fair enough, we said. If you want to know what's going on, he said, come back tomorrow morning and I'll get someone to show you around and explain what's happening. Okay, we said. Thanks very much, and, er, sorry.

 

And so it was that we turned up there this morning at 7.30 am and the auction floor foreman gave us a tour. I have never seen anything like it in my life. The tobacco comes in in bales of different grades and qualities, from flue-dried yellow stuff which is top quality to much lower grade dark brown stuff from small farms. It's weighed (the top quality bales can weigh over 100 kilos, the lower quality ones are more like 40 kilos) and then sold -- the auctioneers and buyers walk down rows of bales at top speed bidding and counting and gesticulating. There are tobacco checkers who check the bales and reject them if they have faults, ringing abbreviations on forms like 'TFA' for 'too far apart', which means the different bunches in the bale are of different quality and can't be processed together. The low quality stuff goes for about 40 cents (US) per kilo, and the Virginia stuff for maybe $2.50 per kilo.

 

It was fascinating -- the auction house sells over 5000 bales a day between 7.30 am and noon, and they are all loaded onto lorries and out by 4pm. That's what all the men in the green overalls do. Some South African buyers explained to us how it's then processed and sold on to cigarette manufacturers.

 

I know tobacco is Very Bad, and I know commodity producers get a really raw deal, and I know the whole thing is cut throat and exploitative. But it was fascinating to see, and I have been thinking about smoking all day...

 

joella

Strangeness and warmth

Today I presented the results of the last two days' work to a room full of staff and partner organisations – it fell to me because I designed the process that we have been using, and hey, who wants to present fifteen flip chart pages full of potentially controversial material to fifteen people if they can avoid it?

 

The flip charts had been typed up but we had already had too much Powerpoint (= some Powerpoint) so I went for sticking the originals up on the wall and moving between them. I started off on Malawi's national response to HIV/AIDS, trying to ignore the loud rustling noise my Malawian colleague J was making under the table, and the fact that my South African colleague L, sitting next to him, seemed to be trying very hard not to laugh.

 

Five minutes later he was still rustling and I was onto rights-based approaches, gender and empowerment. Then he waved something at me: he had made me a two foot long pointer out of a piece of flip chart paper and some Blu Tack. It looked like the world's biggest spliff. I think I lost some gravitas, but it did do the job.

 

I'm running short of clothes, so first thing this morning I tried ringing the number given for 'Laundry' on the sheet of internal extensions provided in my room. Nobody answered, just as nobody has answered for the last two days. So I wandered out into the corridor with my laundry bag, and handed it over to a smiling man who spoke no English but seemed to get what I was on about. When I ducked out of lunch four hours later in favour of a little time out and some Tesco Value peanuts in my room, I was amazed to find everything lying on my bed, neatly pressed and wrapped in plastic.

 

They've never washed and dried it in that time, I thought. And they hadn't. They had dry-cleaned it. All of it. Including my pants. So I now smell like a branch of Johnson's the Cleaners, and god only knows how much it will cost.

 

But I'm loving the place really. After the workshop my South African colleague, my Dutch colleague and I jumped in the pool – it's barely 20 degrees here and the water was freezing, but the sun was setting, the light was beautiful and we had had a long and tiring day. As we swam up and down with our teeth chattering one of the waiters came over from the bar and said 'can I get you a hot drink?'. There's a huge amount of good nature around the place, and I feel very lucky to be experiencing some of it.

 

joella

                       

The fish knife of optimism

Every day since I got here I have been hoping for fish. Every evening they set the tables in the restaurants with the full range of cutlery, including fish knives and forks, and every evening I say ‘do you have any fish?’

There is never any fish, and after I have ordered my vegetable pasta they come and take away the fish-specific cutlery. It’s like Groundhog Day, but I worry that if I don’t ask I might miss it.

I also ask every day about the wireless network cards. They say ‘they will be here any time’. But which time, I don’t know.

This could all be intensely frustrating (Why have wireless hotspot posters up all over the lobby? Why not remove the fish dishes from the menu? Why not say stop bloody asking white girl, we’ll tell you when your strange requests can be accommodated) but actually it’s not. It’s just the way things are. There will be fish when there is fish.

There is also wonderful use of euphemism. We started work today looking at the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Malawi. There is still a huge amount of stigma surrounding HIV status, and some discrimination towards those who are dying of AIDS, but free (if not perfectly distributed) ARVs have given people hope, and there’s a noticeable move towards open acknowledgement of positive status.

Someone who is HIV+ and not receiving treatment is described as ‘not enjoying stable health’. When the same person begins ARV treatment they (quite literally) get a new lease of life. Everyone knows why, and they can be congratulated on enjoying stable health again. This is progress on many fronts.

joella

Better security, worse plumbing

I have moved rooms, with the (superfluous) help of the hotel porter, a tall skinny man who patrols the corridors constantly, looking like a baddie in a James Bond film: dark blue knee length narrow coat, skinny dark blue trousers, white gloves and black trilby. I know I ought to tip him, but a) I haven’t quite got my head round the money yet and b) he doesn’t actually do anything except look remarkable. Maybe that’s enough.

Anyway, my new room has a walled in veranda, so it’s like having a little sitting room, only darker. I am blogging by candlelight, listening to the sounds of a Malawian Saturday night – bars, traffic, insects, and calls to prayer.

There’s a little sign on the dressing table saying ‘your room was prepared by…’ and a space for the maid’s name, which is White. White is black, unsurprisingly, and also male, rather more surprisingly. He brought me new towels to replace the soggy ones room 214’s previous occupants left behind, so I shall be tipping him also.

But I shan’t be tipping the water company, whose supply is erratic at best. There’s a sign on the door of the toilet in the office, which says ‘Polite Notice: Remember this is Blantyre. Check there is water before committing yourself to the task ahead’.

I keep forgetting.

joella

Pyjamas, Glenfiddich and wi-fi hotspots

I am feeling a lot better. I managed to order Greek salad and chips for my dinner, although it was a struggle, as the waitress kept explaining that the salad came without chips. Yes, I see, but could I have extra chips? Salad and chips? Yes please!

They were both fine (Malawian chips are home made, they look pallid but taste very good) but everyone at the next table was most intrigued and the waitress pointed at me and said ‘chips and Greek salad!’ Green salad? Greek salad! Maybe I’ll start a trend. Or maybe I should just quit trying to be vegetarian in Africa.
I am getting a new room tomorrow (probably) as this one has a veranda door with no key, but for tonight it’s mine, so I had a long, slightly orange bath, got into my pyjamas and cracked the tiny bottle of 12 year old Glenfiddich I allowed myself at Heathrow.

I had my Malarone, read through my notes for tomorrow, and thought I could usefully do a little bit of work… and then when I turned on my laptop it found me a wireless network! Not a free one, sadly, in fact one which costs 3000 Kwacha (about £12) for a five hour card, but you know what, I might just buy one. And then I can blog from my bed in Blantyre. How the world changes.

I’m doing this on the free five minutes, to see what the speed’s like. And then I plan to watch some depressing Middle East meltdown on BBC World (the news is always scarier from a hotel room) and sleep the sleep of the recently long hauled.

joella

Revisiting the other side of the digital divide

I am liking Malawi so far. Blantyre airport was a dream... walk down the steps onto the tarmac (I love doing that) and wander towards the tiny International Arrivals terminal, as tall young men smile at you and hand out immigration cards like they were nightclub flyers.

 

Immigration took seconds, no questions asked (there are times when white skin and a British passport are great assets, and they didn't say anything about the pink hair) and then I had a great exchange with the customs officer, who said 'are you here to do anything in particular?'

 

I have a satisfying brick of strange banknotes, a room which sports a verandah, a bewildering array of bolsters, and a candle for power cuts (frequent), and I'm expecting to eat spaghetti with carrots and green beans twice a day for the next week.

 

My colleague J is fantastic, and it will be great working with him, so all in all I'm doing fine, except for the shockingly slow internet connection. It really is like going back 10 years, but we all need reminding that substantial chunks of the planet's population just don't get online, and if they do it's a fairly miserable experience. 

 

And there are the empty roads, and the barefoot boys pushing man-sized bicycles loaded up with sacks of charcoal. And lots and lots of patience.

 

Oh, and 5.30 sunsets. I need to go -- need to be back at the hotel by dark.

 

joella

That pink hair in full

That pink hair in full
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

I think it's worse when people *don't* mention it, as I think they must be silently aghast. I have also had my left hand henna-ed, which is rather lovelier, but I am flying to Malawi tomorrow as I'm leading a workshop there next week and am slightly apprehensive about going through immigration in a conservative Christian country looking like a relic from Greenham Common.

But hey. The driver who is coming to meet me is called Blessings. What can possibly go wrong?

joella

You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world...

... I'll give you anything, everything if you want thing. {BASH BASH}

Bike by Pink Floyd was one of the songs that changed my relationship with music (infinitely for the better, if the track listing of my early compilation tapes is anything to go by...). So I am very sad to learn that Syd Barrett has died... he taught me that mad can be wonderful.

joella

Sunny spells, occasional squalls

On the sunny side, surely nobody could be recovering from a near fatal road accident faster than C. The second time I went to see him he was sitting next to his bed in an NHS armchair with an NHS Zimmerframe wearing orange NHS pyjamas. It was the loveliest possible sight. He is still bruised and swollen and fractured and a bit deaf, but you wouldn't believe the difference.

When we went in today bearing food and DVDs he wasn't even by his bed - he had taken himself off to the toilet. It's amazing. He's amazing, the hospital is amazing, the human body is amazing. I know it's going to be a long road, but he's already wearing dark blue instead of orange (C is a monochrome kind of guy) and wondering how long it will be before he can play the sax again. For a man with a ruptured diaphragm, this is fantastic progress.

On the subconscious self-destruction side, I have accidentally dyed my hair pink. I clash with my own eyes, not to mention half my wardrobe. It came about as I have decided that imminent unemployment is preferable to fear, loathing and Temazepam (prescribed last week by my GP and quite interesting but not a great long term option), so I figured I should start economising. I could clearly spend less on my hair, but there must be a way of doing it myself which doesn't involve looking like a 1980s goth-hippie freak.

'Own that hair!' said M. I will try. And like a scar, it will fade.

joella

7/7 rehabilitation

It's an important anniversary today. And I can think of no better way to have marked it than with my own Friday evening, though to be honest I mostly appreciated it for selfish reasons.

I was invited to a leaving do - I don't often go to the pub after work these days, but Fridays are different, and leaving dos are double different. So I went, and found myself drinking with, among others, a Rwandan, a Burundian, a Malawian, a Chinese, several Brits and a not sure from whereian. Let's just say it was a group of people with interesting and challenging views on just about everything.

I so love that. Belly laughing with big African men who then drive you to the next pub in their big old padded Mercs because they 'don't walk anywhere' then sharing Bombay Mix with skinny and unskinny English boys and girls who care about disempowered people from here to Asia and back.

I feel that to relate to people you have to either share their values or share their background. You mostly get the latter, but I prefer the former, and I had a lot of fun.

I left before I got messy, bumping into G at the bar on the way out. He was buying cider on ice and I took the piss out of him gently, or so I thought, before he said 'bye then, scary lady' and I spilled out onto the pavement laughing at myself.

I danced down Cowley Road in iPod assisted fashion (I think I have finally got the point) before ordering Chinese food, stopping in at the vomit-and-bleach offy for a dodgy bottle of Chilean red, stepping round the mop bucket on the way out, and heading home.

The lady bus driver who stopped at the lights for me grinned widely, and I grinned widely back. I was listening to PJ Harvey and shuffling mock-aggressively up the hill when past me wandered easy-tanned 30-something beautiful people wearing gladiator sandals and smelling of patchouli.

My world was complete. I felt better about my job, and I felt better about my country. In fact, dammit, I felt better about my life.

Go Britain!

joella

The joy of grumpiness

Just heard from the hospital - C is out of the critical care ward and is reading things and eating things and being grumpy with nicotine withdrawal. This is fantastic news. I am looking forward to being snapped at no end.

joella

Rain in my bed

I have spent the day in bed today, nursing my sore throat and regaining perspective. I have also been dozing, reviewing Malawian synopses of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, reading a murder mystery set on a Soviet fish processing ship, and, best of all, listening to the rain. There is a skylight next to my bed, which I opened to let in the blessed cool breeze and, with it, the occasional heavy raindrop. I can't have rain in my bed without listening to New River Head, so I've been doing some of that as well. If you haven't, you really should.

joella


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The kindness of women

This is the name of the novel I am reading at the moment, and I highly recommend it (as a novel - I *hate* the protagonist though), though you need to read Empire of the Sun first.

But it's more than just that. I wrote recently that I am glad that some of my best friends are men, and I am. I like men a lot. Wouldn't like to be one, but I wouldn't be without them. You know where you are with men, on the whole. You may not like where you are, but at least you know.

Having said that (and notwithstanding the support of my boyfriend) -- like JG Ballard, I would be nowhere these last few weeks without the kindness of women. They have listened, they have reflected, they have told me things I haven't always wanted to hear but which I needed to hear.

They have reassured me that the bad stuff is not about me, and given me examples from their own lives to help me believe this. They have brought me tea, chocolate and wine. They have said they will help me deal with it. I believe them.

And while it was a male surgeon who saved C's life, putting his bowel back in its bowel place and his heart back in its heart place, it is the female nurses who are keeping him alive now. They are decanting his bile, his blood and his piss, monitoring his heartbeat, and moving him in a straight line so his fractured ribs, spine and pelvis stay aligned.

We went to see him today, and tried to make conversation through our own shock and the fug of his morphine. There are no visitors' chairs in the cardio-thoracic critical care ward (and no flowers, and no cards), and you have to sanitise your hands before you go in two by two (M and I went with ex-housemate S and got a special dispensation from C himself).

We didn't stay long -- too may tubes to stand on, too much obvious effort on C's part to make conversation from a place where he can't really see, he can't really hear and he can't really talk. I was silently marvelling at the level of technology around him, when that was blown out of the water by the level of care: the nurse who had buzzed us in came to ask him when he usually has his first cigarette of the day so they can gauge when to apply a nicotine patch to his tiny broken body.

"Don't tell my mum I smoke," he said through the sanitised humidified stuff they are pumping into his mask. It was ex-housemate S who made sure the nurse understood him.

He is 45. His mum is 90. The nurse assured us that his nicotine patch would be placed somewhere his mum wouldn't see it. She didn't even laugh.

Later I thought about James Brown and his man's world. I think he's wrong about that.

joella

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

The photo I never took

I'm not going to make a secret of the fact that I was on Portugal's side this evening, though my overwhelming feeling was (as usual) indifference. I am up in Lancashire and I slept through most of the match... we went out for Chinese food during extra time and worked out the result from the deathly hush which descended over the town about halfway through our starters.

 

I have hated the flags on cars and the preponderance of red, white and blue nylon shirts which are made in Chinese sweatshops and will be landfill tomorrow. But I know a lot of people are really sad, and I like some of them, so I am sad for them. I can do empathy. Sometimes.

 

I went on a wander through deserted pubs looking for Mick the builder, who has changed his mobile number without telling people in that way that builders do. I gave up after guess number three: it was all a bit edgy ghost town, with a heavy (for this part of the world) police presence.

 

Walking back, I saw the perfect photo opportunity. Four teenage boys - two in red, one in white, one in blue - were sitting in a row in the bus shelter outside Spar. Their heads were bowed in dejection and the evening sun shone on the St George's crosses dyed into their number threes.

 

My hand reached for my camera, but it wasn't the sort of photo you should take without asking, and they weren't looking like it was a moment they wanted recording for posterity. So I just watched them for a while, till people started staring (they don't get many hippie types round here), and I walked home to drink posh red wine with my dad.

 

joella