Israel; revisionist writing

Friday, August 10th; 
If you should ever travel to Jerusalem, it's probably best that you avoid telling the Arab traders who throng the narrow, fabled and historic streets of the old city that you know me. You may not yet be aware of the fact but I have acquired a fearsome reputation in those parts as a very tough haggler and several traders there are still recovering from the skills, strength of purpose and sheer audacity I displayed in our one-sided negotiations. Despite this however, I remain on good terms with them and several have told me, warmly and repeatedly, how much they like me and for this reason would make me offers that would not be made available to others. There are at least two young men who, as a result of my hard-won purchases, I am now helping to put through college.

Nevertheless - as I wrote earlier, it is probably a good idea to avoid making mention of me - just in case.

Btw - if anyone wants to buy some olive wood madonnas and authentic hand-forged mamluk swords - I still have a few (dozen) more than I need.

But Jerusalem - what a place! There is so much to say - and others are no doubt better placed to describe its incredible mix of culture, religion, ethnicity together with its multi-layered history of empire, politics, warfare and trade.

All I can say is that I have had few experiences such as that afforded by the view of the roofscape, flat and pitched, minareted, towered and domed (including the golden, sun-half-risen, dome of the rock) from the terrace of our convent hotel on the Via Dolorosa.

Or perhaps that should be the, alleged, Via Dolorosa.

Archaeology and historical research are continuously revising, qualifying and questioning the certainties that are the well-spring of tourism and commerce. But, in the end, perhaps it doesn't matter all that much - this is a city where people want and need to believe. People of faith are borrowing something from each other and in alliance against those who harbour religious doubt -  but they are also engaged in an ancient struggle to hold what they have; Jew, Moslem, Christian, (Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic) etc etc and perhaps make gains at the expense of others.

It was hard to walk the city streets with their polished stone flags and steps in the severe midday heat. I discovered what may be a new side effect of my cocktail of medication - swollen feet. As I type I am suffering in a manner that causes me to kick off my lightly-tied shoes.




Thursday, August 23rd;
And there the contemporaneous despatch from Israel ended........

Events overtook us; a non-stop carousel of travel, food, visits, excursions and times for recovery. What a successful trip! Now we are returned to the UK for more than a week and Israel, the true experience of Israel, fresh and unalloyed - is disappearing through the rear-view mirror of memory. Friends and family have pounced - demanding tales and recounting of moments - and we have been ready to satisfy them. Inevitably, these memories are repeated, supplemented, polished, abbreviated until they are ready for slotting into the filing cabinet of recall, labelled; 'interesting lifetime events; 2012'.

So, you'll have to phone and spend half an hour coaxing one of us in to repeating the stories - or, visit and watch the photos each with its own accompanying oral text.

Only fragments of  the unvarnished truth remain - such as that entitled; 'the street traders of Jerusalem meet their match'................

Shalom

It's Sunday, 5th August, 9.45 pm local time in Tel Aviv. The intense light of the day has given way to the unremitting night. This is a live streaming blog. I'm on the roof of a nine-storey apartment block looking out to the west/West across the city skyline with its array of skyscraper-high, brightly-coloured neon and towered slabs of  domestic lights piled one upon the other. The incessant drone of traffic is occasionally sliced by the blare of car horns or the wail of a siren. Tonight, the air temperature is a comfortable t-shirt warm and continuously  refreshed by a fair and welcome breeze.

The sudden thrum and whup-whup-whup of a helicopter reminds me that there's a demo taking place in downtown Tel Aviv this evening; a protest against Israel's new austerity measures. I was going to go but fatigue following an afternoon at the beach with Oren and Ella, coupled with inertia, got the better of me.

This has been one helluva holiday to date - and we are only a few days into it. We've had some mini-adventures; such as that at Ben Gurion International Airport when we finally emerged, wearily, with our reclaimed baggage into the glazed and marbled arrivals hall to discover that, although we had fulfilled our part of the bargain in getting to this point - there was no-one there to meet us.

Admittedly it was 1.30 a.m. and we were an hour late but it took a tentative phone call to remedy the situation. We left the sanctuary of the air-conditioned building to enter the open oven-door heat of the night when Claire and Amichai had been dragged mortified and half awake in turn, from their beds.

This mishap aside (Claire and myself are still in a struggle to seize the moral low ground of denial) we have been made so welcome by this outpost of family. And this is a sizeable outpost. Yael has allowed us the exclusive use of her 'penthouse flat'. Anat, the youngest at 21 years, first encountered in her  brown Israeli Defence Force uniform, is solicitous of our every need. No'omi with her 18 month old baby, Ephrat, has given us a glimpse of life within the community. It was Amichai, he of interrupted sleep and Claire's husband, who first issued the invite to visit Israel. He has two brothers, Shaul and Nadav. It is only the latter we are yet to meet. Their parents, Effi (Efraim) and Rachel are well versed in the fusion and frisson of  the nuclear family.

Two days have passed - yesterday we went by train to Akko (Acre) and were made more aware of the multi-layered heritage of the old, largely Arab, city and thereby, the wider Israel.

Today we have been to Yad Vashem or Holocaust Memorial Museum. The location, on one of the hills above Jerusalem, is stunning as is the architecture of these very modern buildings. I loved the attention to detail; the use of trees and shrubs to enhance the open spaces.

That which is inside is shocking and at times, with its multi-media displays, quite overpowering  - and ultimately, very moving. Here was a time when life, Jewish life, was cheap but as the text made clear every individual was far from anonymous; each was a world unto him/herself.

From my vantage point this made sense - this blog, small and insignificant as it may be, is one part of 'my world'. Each of us carries a world inside us and I know, as I struggle with my own physical 'debility' to make my way through the hours of exhibits and video and audio, something of this vulnerability, something of this personal crisis, this threat - even as, in all humility, I experience, not humiliation and violence but the warmth, generosity and support of my own, newly-met, Jewish family.

Another holiday

The die/Di is cast.

We are going on holiday to Israel. We will stay with my son-in-law, Amichai's, family in Tel Aviv. Amichai, my daughter and their two children, Oren and Ella, will also be there. The invitation has been extended to us for some time now but was re-stated with renewed enthusiasm and generosity not long after my diagnosis last May.

So, it's been an expensive hassle getting medical travel insurance and it's a crazy time to go because it promises to be very hot but this is the right moment. I'm not sure how many other opportunities there will be and it feels important to make this connection with an outpost of the extended family. (Of course, for Amichai's parents, Rachel and Efraim, it is we in England who are the outpost - but you know what I mean.)

If I'm honest, I'm apprehensive, particularly about the travel but this has been a decision a long time in the making and having been made, will stand.

I had some indirect feedback from an ex-allotment holder the other day that suggested she saw me as somebody who was very cautious and unwilling to take risks. It's amazing isn't it from whence people get these strange notions?

Perhaps I will get the opportunity to blog on location, in Israel? Graphic, heat-stained images, tastes and aromas from the Holy Land - I need the boost in my stats. Oh! Did I mention that I can now get stats on how many people are reading my blog? and from which country? and the time of reading? and what the reader had for breakfast?

For some reason these figures have become important to me - tell your friends. I need more hits.

Living in the present - again.

I can only start from where I am. You see, I have been thinking about and half-starting this post for at least a week but for various reasons I have been unable to get onto a computer and so ideas have fizzled and spluttered and come to naught. But I will not return to where I was - I will begin afresh and in the present.

In the present. That is how I am advised to live, the way I have advised myself to live and in many respects it isn't an approach for which, in so far as I'm successful, I can take any credit, for, inescapably, it comes with the condition. And there are advantages in being 'in the moment' .... the heightened perception, the 'letting go' of old concerns, old worries ............ but there is also a high price to be paid...... the 'loss of a future'. We all do it don't we? Imagine ourselves within a future of indefinite length; one that enables us to think idly about moving house, making journeys, visiting family and friends, acquiring new skills, new hobbies. Something of that is lost when you live in the present - the loss of pleasure in an imagined life full of self-sustaining fantasy.

Enough of this whimsical musing! (Give them facts, Mr M'Choakumchild.......give them facts.)

OK. Here are some facts. We have just returned from a few days in Cornwall visiting the Eden Project and the Lost (now Found) Gardens of Heligan. We also managed to pack in a lot of other Cornish treats; visiting Pete and Kate in Launceston, Truro cathedral, the fishing villages of Gorran Haven and Megavissey, the Tate Gallery in St Ives, Lands End (should that be World's End given it's tacky, you-must-be-entertained-fed-and-watered-theme-park-with-souvenirs nature) and then on our return journey, Exeter and its extraodinary cathedral. All this, a birthday present from Diana.

As stated before - you know when you're ill - you get to go on more holidays. Live in the present.

I could write 'loads of stuff' about these five days - and I can't promise that I won't - but I must begin with a revivifying experience on the long journey to our holiday B&B just outside St Austell. Diana was driving and I had fallen asleep. This is not an unusual state of affairs. Diana is now used to me slumbering in her company; on the sofa watching tv, in the comfortable chair in the kitchen while she is cooking, in a noisy bar chatting with friends or family....... so it is understandable that she would simply let me drift off, head lolling forward like a discarded marionette as we motored down the M5 into what we already knew was likely to be a few days of very dodgy weather.

I began to stir when the pattern of the engine noise changed as we pulled off the road into the motorway services. Diana negotiated an unending series of turns and manoeuvres as I returned to consciousness. This was one of those areas that has to be approached by a roundabout above the motorway. The sign read, Bridgwater Services. 

We avoided the hazard of confused people crossing the road in front of us and entered a concrete hangover from the late 60s or early 70s. It was a mini multi-storey car park with just two floors. It was dark, oppressive, low-ceilinged with parking bays just wide enough to accommodate Saxon chariots. It looked as though the builders had become so depressed by their efforts that they had walked away before completing the usual number of storeys. We found a space on the first, and top, floor and descended a dark, smelly stairwell to find ourselves having to cross the very hazards on which we had previously threatened to mow down other, now fellow, pedestrians.

My mood had been as grey and bleak as the experience but then something began to change. This was so awful, it was good! I was in a time warp and there is something wonderful about a discovery left over from a previous age, however naff, however ancient. By the time we had negotiated our exit I was cheerful and energised. Try this pick-me-up yourself, the next time you are down that way.

Children of course are good at living in the present and I'll admit to having already identified some early indications of the, illness-accelerated, onset of my 'second childhood'. Some might (if, of an uncharitable disposition) say my dependence on Diana for the completion of simple tasks, like tying my shoelaces, has been in evidence for a while but you should know that, for the second time in two years, I have been invited by a respected national institution to indulge in the practice of smearing my own faeces.

Now, I'm not saying that I can recall enjoying this activity as an infant but Freud and co. would have us believe that it's not unusual and part of an early stage of psychosexual development. So, when you reach the age of 60 years and enter the NHS bowel cancer screening programme, be aware that you are being indirectly invited to get in touch with your inner child.

I'll spare you the details of the procedure but I look forward to logging other instances of my innocence revisited.

Btw - I got an 'all-clear' from the screening programme. Live in the present.

A new perspective.

Some 10 days ago, Di and I visited her sister Liz at her home in Northamptonshire. On this occasion we took the opportunity while in a county renowned for its attractive villages to explore the church at Brixworth. My 'Betjeman's Best British Churches' had already informed me that Brixworth is 'one of the most important buildings in England', so I was looking forward to seeing it. 

The experience was one of great interest but also more than a little disconcerting because the church was so different to anything I had seen before. I like churches. I often take the trouble to enter them when travelling and have done so ever since my first forays as a child, on bike and in car, into the Norfolk countryside; a county that boasts its own share of impressive, ecclesiastical architecture.

I thought I had a reasonable grasp of  church architectural styles and the way they help you decode the narrative of a building's history and heritage. But Brixworth's Saxon origins, its use of Roman materials and liturgical traditions, overturned a lot of these notions and left me struggling to understand how my story now needed amending.

I walked through and around the building and picked up a leaflet full of information that required more time than I had at my disposal for we were hungry, the day was cold and the siren song of the village pub meal, increasingly attractive. I bought a couple of booklets in the church and wrenched my velcro-desire to understand away from the place.

A few days later we were back at the Cancer Centre at QEH to get feedback on my latest (end of the second three cycles) CT scan. We had a story in our heads before we met the oncologist as to what course this meeting would take. The first scan had shown shrinkage of the tumours and in some cases rendered them too small to be detectable. With the continuing commitment to monitoring the nutritional quality of my diet, our 'silver bullet', this second-period scan would show further shrinkage. We had begun to allow ourselves to think about asking whether it would be possible to come off the drugs for a period of time or at least reduce the dosage and thereby the tiresome and sometimes painful side effects.

It didn't work out like that.

The radiologist's report indicated general stability with some minor growth in a couple of nodules. Our oncologist insisted that, I needn't worry, that there was no question at this stage of my being taken off the current drug because of a decline in its efficacy. We were reassured that this was the usual pattern, that the first scan would show shrinkage and the second stability, that the growth may be explained by the scan taking a section through a wider part of the nodules, that most patients only remain on my drug for a year, that there were other drugs available, that there was nothing that need cause undue concern.

This was like the Chairman of the Football Club Board giving reassurances that the manager's job was safe. We had no idea that the team's results could be viewed as poor.

After leaving the consulting room we struggled to make sense of what had been said. To put it simply; we were in shock. The narrative we had in mind had been overturned and we probed at our recall of the consultant's words again and again in an attempt to decode them.

I have read and re-read the booklets on Brixworth church; its story and the way it exemplifies the Saxon style of Romanitas, replicating the Christian architecture of the mother church in Rome. I have inched towards a new understanding of a long history.

Something of the same process has happened in coming to terms with the news about the CT scan. It just takes time to get things into perspective, a new perspective.

Life, the universe and everything.

Time to take stock.

It is now almost exactly a year to the day since I received the news of my diagnosis from the urology surgeon at QEH. I was told in a direct manner that I not only had kidney cancer but that it had spread to the lungs. The prognosis, based on statistics that take the mean survival rates as 'the measure of central tendency', gave me just over two years of life expectancy.

Such a moment changes you - 'but how, exactly?' - I hear you ask.

I'm not ducking the question but first I have to make mention of the fact that it soon became clear I was faced with a 'double whammy'. As it transpired, I not only had advanced kidney cancer, I also had degeneration of vertebrae of the lower spinal column caused by scoliotic curvature which in turn was resulting in serious 'mechanical' and 'neurological' pain - perhaps a 'triple whammy' would be more accurate.

I think that it has taken a year for me to make sense of this, to disentangle these conditions, understand and begin to accept how such an avalanche of misfortune could occur.

The first thing I must now acknowledge is this - if  I hadn't had the back/leg issue I might well be dead by now.

Without a reason to give me an MRI scan, it is almost certain that the kidney tumour would have continued to grow and the cancer to spread. By the time other symptoms had raised the alarm, I might well have been beyond the reach of the drugs that I now take and which have already had some success in shrinking the metastatic nodules in the lungs. (Btw, I have my second end-of-three-cycles scan next week - I hope for a continuation of the same progress).

So, I have two very separate conditions, with separate symptoms requiring separate (but interrelated?) treatments. I may have done some disentangling but I am still unsure as to what condition I should ascribe some of my difficulties.

Take walking for example. I need to, have to, walk for the exercise but it causes me problems with my back after a couple of miles and if I am walking uphill I experience almost immediate difficulty with breathing and exertion of my leg muscles. Is this down to my back and the drugs I take to alleviate the condition or the toxicity of the cancer drugs or some combination thereof? Who knows? Not me and from my conversations with medics (including a recent appointment with a doctor at the QEH's pain management clinic) not them either.

I sense that your eyelids are growing heavy - keep going.

So, how has the knowledge of my illnesses changed me? I hear you ask - a second time - but now with less enthusiasm.........

In many and varied ways, I am sure (I never promised original insight!) and perhaps some have become apparent to you if you have read my posts over the last eleven months (and not twelve, because it took me a while to absorb the initial impact before I could start to write this blog). However, it seems to me that the most profound area of change relates to my adjustment to the nature of what life is.

For virtually all of my time on the planet, B.C., there was something that I can only describe, and did so even back then, as 'unreal' about 'existence'. There was some self-consciousness (or was it the lack of it?) that insulated me from the fragility and time-limited, accidental, nature of life. I always knew that I could die but I knew it 'intellectually'. The only moments of 'reality' were  those when I had a visceral fear of death, such as standing on a cliff edge and looking down or when I lost someone who was close to me, such as my father or my mother. The break-up of my first marriage too, that was real. But the 'insulation' soon regrew over the wound, like a cicatrix, to 'protect' me. I stepped back from the brink, back behind the safety railing.

But when you are told you have advanced kidney cancer and there is no cure but only palliative care - there is no longer a safety barrier. 'Life is unfair', I whined. Yes, I now understand with clarity, that life is unfair - get over it. As Christopher Hitchens said (and I paraphrase) - the universe is profoundly uninterested in fairness, in whether I live or die.

Is this a penetrating or prosaic discovery - you decide - but, if interested, I'm sure that there is more from whence this came............

Things to do before you die.

Drive to the Torridon mountains in Wester Ross (as we have done - this is a live, streaming, blog) and arrive, preferably on a sunny day (as we did) in the ribbon settlement of Torridon village at the eastern end of Upper Loch Torridon. Perhaps you might pause here to enjoy some refreshment in the solitary cafe and chat (as we did) to the English emigree who moved to the village a couple of years ago. Then drive on down the road alongside the loch.  You will see that it is signposted 'no through road' but put aside your reservations about 'dead ends' and drive the big dipper of a road for another few miles. You can admire the panoramic vista across the loch of dramatic snow-capped mountains. You could drop down (as we did) to Inveralligin and explore the enviable beauty of the village there but you should also drive on the extra miles, over another hill, raggedly clothed in peatbog, that will take you down, eventually, into Lower Diabaig.

Here you can park and walk out onto the harbour wall and look up and around - the full 360 degrees. It is as though you are in an amphitheatre, or possibly the centre of the bowl or cone of some extinct, now flooded, volcano.

Try to organise it so that you all travel on different (sunny?) days otherwise you will miss out on the eerie sense of isolation, the feeling that you are alone in a beautiful universe and in all truth; very, very small.

No refunds given.

If my recall is accurate, Margaret Mead, the renowned American anthropologist, who studied and wrote books about communities in the South Pacific, was once asked when she thought men were happiest. She considered this profoundly important question for a time, then answered, 'when they are preparing for the hunt'.

This may explain why, my brother and I, newly inducted into the arts of fishing from the beach, sought to replenish (in my case 'plenish') our freezers with mackerel, bass, codling, ray and any other pescatorial booty that might come our way. Thanks to Kate granting us access to her wonderfully-secluded family 'retreat', we were able to sally forth for a few days into beautiful Dorset in pursuit of our prey.

Two days later we had spent something like twelve hours on the steep shingle beaches of the Jurassic coast. (Please put aside now any temptation to make mention of  how appropriate this might be for a couple of dinosaurs......) By the time we packed away our thoroughly-drenched gear on Tuesday evening, the English Channel had yielded one small, strange fish called a 'father lasher' (Myoxocephalus scorpius) and a writhing, slimy elver.

The only mackerel we saw was the one we bought for bait to supplement the ragworm in which we had invested so heavily. Even that fish disappeared when a patrolling herring gull swooped and carried it away while I was distracted by the waves momentarily threatening to o'ertop my wellingtons.

There is no question; the setting was magnificent, when you could see the biscuit-coloured cliff for the rain; the sea was majestic, though it consumed considerable amounts of equipment that we insisted on throwing into it in the forlorn hope that the sea might let us have it back again; the beach was impressive in its dramatic, pebbly banking though it made climbing and descent an exhausting effort  - and the weather was - just awful.

And yet............... we can't wait for the next expedition. We had a great time. We eagerly anticipate fresh sight of the sea, the promise of (fishy) food, the prospect of exploring, encountering that primitive, DNA-embedded, residual instinct established in the Era of Evolutionary Adaptation - the thrill of the hunt.

................ and this trip with my brother was further evidence of my 'rehabilitation', my ability to survive without the ministrations of Diana . At this rate those of you who are still reading this will be 'wanting your money back'.

Not much chance of that, I'm afraid.