Deep in the NightNurse slumber the wind blows. It’s a wind full of ghosts, fleeting memories
that skit across the mind’s surface and
then fade into the borders like the wraiths they are. When I surface, with a start, the real world
appears as full of apparition as the one I’ve just left. Motes,
glimmers, rattles, thumps, distortions that shift and blur. I tread water for a disorientating moment and
then it all clears like bubbles surfacing in a glass.
The noise outside is the men relaying the pipeline that
supplies gas to the street. I can see
it, a giant yellow coil like a children’s treat being unwound into a hole right
dead centre across a neighbour’s drive. It
sounds Industrial, just like Cardiff once would have. Everyone waking to the hammer and thump of
the steelworks, the rattle of the coal staithes, the trains steaming and
clanging, and the ships hooting as they reached the docks.
From up here on the hill I can see where it all would have
been, the whole post-industrial landscape laid out before me, now gentrified
with apartments and neat cul de sacs.
Places to house our rocketing population. How does that figure? When there was work aplenty Cardiff was half
the size it now is.
The thing with colds is that no matter what you actually do
they carry on just the same. Their durations are fixed. Work through them or give in and lie
down. Makes little difference. Pretty
much the only thing that works that I’ve found is drugging yourself up with
Lemsips and hoping for the best. I’ve
prepared a vacuum flask of these before now and carried it around with me all
day. Down the road they are advertising
Hopi Indian Underwater Nipple Massage (£35 a go) as sure insurance against
catching winter colds. Good luck, I say.
I reach for the Prednisolone, the morning routine of tablets
to keep the polymyalgia pains away. And
then I remember. I’m on zero now, been
here for a few weeks. The problem has
been dealt with, diagnosed, treated, lived with at its maximum intensity and then
lived with as it slowly oh ever so bloody slowly faded down the scale for 10 to none. Polymyalgia, the malfunctioning of the
proximate muscles, common among older women, apparently, and those who live like sloths. A disease of the body that rattles and
frightens you so much that you wonder if actually the whole thing is in the
mind. But it’s not. It’s as real as bone snapping or bladder
infection or thumps on the nose. You
take tablets to ward it off and it goes away. If you are lucky then it does that permanently.
Am I cured? Could be.
In a drawer I have a large supply of the drugs. NHS overprescription to ensure that I always
had enough on hand to save me. There is
nothing wrong with the drugs in these boxes but they won’t be recycled. They’ll be thrown
away. I’ll take them back to the
pharmacist from where they’ll be sent for some sort of secure disposal. I could try reselling them on the street, I
suppose. But then who would want a fat
moon face and night fears followed by nose bleeds and an inability to go out? I guess I’ll hang on a while, just in case
the leg pains shimmer again. Best be sure.
And this blog. What
do I do with it? I’ve still got the
spinal cyst and my dealings with the NHS
might have slowed just a bit but they’re still there. Maybe I’ll change the name and carry on. I’ll let you know. Watch this space.
