Fast cars and lovers

 After a morning of doing university work, filing my last terms documents neatly in folders as I feel sure that somehow this lot is going to be needed for referencing my dissertation in two years time, I read some of Wuthering Heights again.   I had already decided to go to the cinema this afternoon and with a limited choice I picked Ferrari with Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz.  

The day was colder than it has been, had been very wet overnight so I am still avoiding flooded areas although from my house to the station it is impossible to avoid all flooding.  (I found driving back in the dark tonight was unpleasant).

Ferrari was less racing and cars than I was expecting and more about the troubled life of Enzo Ferrari, his unhappy marriage and the failing Ferrari business in post war Italy.    Both Driver and Cruz gave first class performances in a somewhat disjointed story which one was left to piece together, especially with regard to Ferrari and his lover and secret child, as one went along. Cruz is a pretty tough cookie and she played the part well of the aggrieved Ferrari wife and business partner and was given a rather sparce narrative within which to exercise her anger. 

I would like to have more cars on the track of a story, more racing and less of the domestic drama and I am sure there will be many disappointed racing fans after seeing the trailers.  Moss was taken out fairly soon, I won't say killed off because he wasn't, but he was in a race and had to retire and Maserati was given a tantalising part but never emerged in the film more than an also ran. 

On Netflix tonight I watched Good Grief which I recommend.  I won't give any of the story away because I am finding it hard to explain without a major spoiler.  It is advertised as a comedy/drama.  I really didn't find anything funny but it is a good drama, and mostly gay men as it centres around a gay couple.   It is an interesting story.  Celia Imrie is in it.

Glory be

 It irritates me that it takes a tv dramatisation of the Uk Post Office scandal to raise awareness of this terrible, shameful happening.   I wrote about it years ago.    What a state this country is in.   Wake up people to the real world and turn your bloody televisions off.  Others will of course say "but it raised awareness".  Ok but it highlights the people who are around me who know sweet bugger all about anything. 

I used to write about things in the news and politics but rarely do so now.  Killed off all interest by trolls and  emails received declaring me the wicked evil woman who regularly points out the truth and deserves nothing more than a kick in the teeth for it and so let's destroy who she is at her very core.  Kill her off. 

Now you get massage, hairdos lunches and poetry assignments.   It is better for my personal well-being not to get the trolls and the accusations that I am lying and all things returning to one way that I might just be not voting how you are but that is just based on your own summation.  Centre was always accepted as the norm however you voted and leaned,  now one has either to be left or right.  I don't buy into that.   

I still get the readers, visits to see how the comments lay,   to see if there is a show going on.  

I have reduced my reading list for the good of my psyche, mental well-being, whatever you want to call it.     It will reduce further today.   

Help with chrome and caches and third party cookies and Google and gadgets largely to blame is no longer offered.   I am sick of saying the same things over and over and reading the same problems over and over.  Get it that Google and Apple don't like one another or anyone other than themselves.   Buy a Google Pixel 8 and get your photos just how you want them to be and then complain because it doesn't work.  It does.   Except if its Fujitsu you're talking to and about and Vennells who should be behind bars for stupidity which manifested as wickedness beyond belief and a reflection of life in Britain of how stupid people are that we are breeding with no ounce of common sense, no questioning brain cells,  this country is the pits.    And she was once a priest.

Anonymous goodbye

Here is how to turn off Anonymous comments for those who need this information and keep asking me for it.

Go to settings on your design/dashboard.  Settings is in the list on the left and near the bottom, above Reading List.   Click on Settings and scrowl down to Comments and then open Who Can Comment and then check/tick the box Those Users with Google Accounts.   And then click Save. 

Today the rain has stopped and the wind has dropped.   I have put the washing out. 

The storm last night had 60 mph gusts which was why I sat here ready to run in case my roof took off.  I have been outside this morning to inspect and all appears well.  At least the roof is still there.   As for the floods, I am not sure whether I will get out because the big flood is away down the road out of sight.  If Colin the postman comes I will know it is ok to go and I will ask him which is the best route to take.   My hair appointment isn't until mid afternoon. 

One Life

Today has been a day of floods and I drove through a very flooded junction with water washing over the bonnet of the car and just hoped that I would get through and out the other side.  A small crowd stood watching with nobody giving me any indication of how deep it was or any practical help in any visual sense at all.  I didn't want to stop in the middle of it and wind the window down so slowly crept on.  If they had been farmers they would have been signalling to me with hands and arms and had a tractor and chain ready to pull me out.  But they weren't;  they were just arms folded people out of some isolated houses by the roadside gawping at me.  It is a quiet road and there was no car in front of me for me to gauge what I was going into.   However, I got through and out the other side and the engine was still running.   I think many others won't.  My little Citroen is a good car in floods. 

I went to see the film One Life.  Whilst not wishing to take anything away from the story of the saving of 699 Jewish refugee children from Czechoslovakia which goes without saying as a wonder and a true triumph over the Nazis in  occupied Czechoslovakia and the bureaucrats in Britain at the time, the film did not make a great cinematic spectacle.  And yet it could not have left anyone with a dry eye in the house.     Great credit for the success of the film goes for me to  Anthony Hopkins as the old Nick Winton,  played down and a bit like a bumbling old fool, but a clever one, and made the film into the splendour that I said was missing just two sentences ago.   And also Helena Bonham-Carter who plays Winton's mother who was back in London when Winton was in Prague without whom he would not have achieved what he did because she was tough and able to take on the London bureaucracy and not take no for an answer.    

And now refugees are a constant problem and thorn in the side of politicians and news and opinions overflow everywhere and lots of talk goes on but not a lot of action just camps, lawyers, waiting,  unanswered letters and no entry signs.   

Auden's poem Refugee Blues, which I imagine he wrote at the time Nick Winton was arranging for the Jewish children to come to London, and Nick Winton and his mother  are still very relevant today.   It's a pretty good film which no doubt will be on streaming platforms very soon, it doesn't  seem to take long these days. 

Intolerance to certain foods

 As I am still not up to speed healthwise (separate to colon business) I have decided to ask the doctors for one more blood test - a hormone test.  As all sinister things were ruled out in the blood tests last summer and autumn but my health is still under par it appears that the hormone theory as suggested by Hannah the hairdresser is worth pursuing.  I will request the test and see what happens. This will include Vitamin D test which I asked about in October and was told that they do not routinely test for Vitamin D.   (I did have a thyroid test in the summer and it was fine).   Considering the importance of Vitamin D to the immune system and a lot being said about it during Covid and  not everybody spends hours out of doors, such as me, I would have thought more importance would be placed on it.   So that is current plan. 

Today I will go to the cinema to see One Life, the Anthony Hopkins, kindertransport film.

It is a very grey day and lots of rain has fallen yet again.  I got up and looked out of the window at the flood in the road and thought "don't ever be a farmer".

Yesterday I did reading of Nabokov set book Pale Fire, finished assignment for last module (at last) although still have to complete the index but have numbered the pages, did an hour in the garden debris clearing, and watched Husbands and Wives (Woody Allen) on Prime in the evening and then went to bed and carried on reading.    I have left the book upstairs by the bed as I do not intend to do anything academic today.  

Eating is to stay alive and fancy foods are not necessary is my thought for the day.  (Since the prep business for the colon thing when I poured acid down my throat to get ready I have viewed eating totally differently and have no interest in anything fancy and see it as barbaric and unnecessary).    We should think about eating simply prepared foods more than global warming because if we don't address eating it won't be worth saving the planet anyway.  The planet will go on its own sweet way.   Overweight and unhealthy people put the planet population in danger.     80% of Asian people are lactose intolerant and milk does not feature in Asian diets nor in Japanese diets.     One of the things I can no longer eat is icecream, not a big deal, cows milk and anything like that will set me off on the journey of not to be thought about.  I gave up dairy milk over 10 years ago and never started it again and I have never bothered with cheese much anyway, sacrilege, can take it or leave it,  but I had never thought of the fact about milk and Asian/Japanese diets before.   We think milk and dairy is so important when really it isn't.  

1st January 2024

 It seems important for some reason to post this morning as it is the first day of the year.  After yesterday's review which was a bit gloomy I want to go back to normal.  You know a little about me and my responses may help you to understand.  

I have a fairly normal week.  Hair appointment with Hannah, lunch with friends and a massage with Wandee fixed up with her yesterday and my first for two months.    

Yesterday I also arranged a lunch with friends from scattered places and we will be meeting up next week, a mini reunion of school friends and London Underground industrial action will hopefully not cause them to miss the train to Norwich, that is those travelling - it is a Tube industrial action week next week. 

Whats App made all the arrangements yesterday very easy.     

Today the sun is shining and the sky is blue which is always a good start to the day.  My day has started very late.

Objectivity is important to thought process and analysis and I learned this in stockbroking and looking at company annual reports and also much of this from a colleague who was without outside influences in his life and had few possessions, no  television and no books and nothing on the walls of his house  and although I didn't know it at the time I learned much from him about thinking for myself.  We worked together for 20 years.    

Last week I gave away my collection of maps.  I have always loved maps and collected them for years and although my books (apart from my art books) went long ago I hung on to the maps. They had their own shelf here.  Now they have gone and the shelf is bare.   The shelf will be taken over by poetry books instead of maps which I am using for my course.  I took the view that I never actually look at a map anymore and if I want to see a map I look on the internet and the paper maps  just sit there and they are of no use to me and I don't need them and like they are nothing more than  a comfort blanket  so they could go.  It felt good and sensible.   I have retained my atlases though because I do use them still.   

Review

 I don't normally do reviews of the year.  I am not sure what bloggers do who do it.  Does one scroll through 12 months of posts?  Pull out photos?  List things?   I will just do it off the cuff as it is quite easy. 

In January I got into the clutches of the doctor.   I picked up a blood pressure tester that they gave me that didn't work.  Then I bought myself one.  Then I got flustered with cats at my feet yelling at me "what the hell are you doing, it's breakfast time?" and a cold house and having to take blood pressure before I did anything else and that sent it sky high and me into a cold, dark frenzy of cats and screaming "I can't do this".   I then had the ECG test on my body and went without a bra to save the trouble of bra on or off discussion.  Prior to that I had refused to pick up statins or blood pressure pills and was reminded of the script waiting for me again at that session when the nurse and I were in fits of laughter during a conversation  with me on the floor because the bed was causing static and she couldn't get the ECG machine to work.  I eventually  picked up the prescriptions  to shut the doctors up and threw them in the garage.  (The bag still lays there). 

In February I caught a virus and again ended up at the doctors.  It was the worst virus I have ever had and could have been Covid but the test I took came out negative.    It was something to do with strep I am sure although the doctor never had me tested and insisted that I could beat it and it was a respiratory virus and "there are always loads of them around".Well I did,  February and March were wiped out though along with a trouble next six months or more.   I couldn't breathe properly so took up You Tube breathing exercises.  Then I bought a Chinese plastic blow thing to help with the breathing because breathing is invisible and you can't see what you are doing and it is nigh on  impossible to convince yourself you are doing any good.  The coloured Chinese balls going up and down convinced me I was doing something.  This was all helped by a blog reader in the States who told me about oxygen and a book The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown which might help, and it did,  and then I started watching more videos. Eventually my breathing improved and I could get across the line again at the station over the steps when the train got in without panting and stopping.  I took up meditation via a Tibetan monk on You Tube and then as a dare from Hannah (hairdresser) went to the Buddhist centre opposite her salon and did some meditation with them and got to like it.

Then it would have been holiday time but because I was still not very healthy I never went.  I couldn't face Stansted Airport. 

Next I applied on a whim one afternoon in July to do a Masters in Creative Writing (Poetry)  at University of East Anglia and sent off reams of poems (12 pages actually)  from an old blog where I had kept the poems bits from 2008 and 9 and 10  which Gwil and Weaver used to read and added a few new ones and winged it off with copies of previous university certificates as proof of being able to satisfy university learning in the past and lo and behold I received a letter offering me a place.    You could say the rest is history but it isn't.

In October I started 12 weeks of poetry workshops where I was exposed and laid bare and as naked as the no  bra at the ECG and later even more naked and read and had my poems analysed and pulled about as a precursor of things to come.  One night on the way back from a workshop in November I had a dramatic episode in four lanes of traffic stuck at Thickthorn Roundabout and had to just go with the flow literally  and in the dark I undressed in the garage and left the clothes there some of which still remain in a black bag and next in the night I bled to bits and ended up at the doctors again.   This time the receptionist reduced me to tears when she, the dragon of all receptionists,   refused the emergency blood test the doctor said I had to have and over-ruled him because she said there were no appointments for a month,  until a new member of staff starting that morning came to the rescue and took over and did it herself and mopped up my tears. 

The rest is again history as I then had a colon camera 8 feet into me between poetry workshops,  and I never missed one,  in the sci fi building biggest gastro unit in Europe and wrote a poem Fuck My Colon which was on 24th November and I still await results, have been spoken to by nobody and have researched it all myself and worked out something about what I think happened but owing to unpleasant people who visit this blog I won't tell you my friends. Sorry.    It is now 5 weeks and they said 6 to 8 weeks so I will watch the NHS app as I do not expect a human voice to contact me.   And then it will be no visits to doctors. I hope.

Last night on a whim I thought I would like to take a holiday in 2024 and the place I would like to go is Baghdad which is not such a good idea but not out of the question.  I watched Remember Baghdad again and the memories of then would not be the same as now but I would still like to go.

I am currently writing parodies of Wuthering Heights, have finished  reading the real Wuthering Heights, and am now reading the second core book for Ludic Literature which is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov which is madly enjoyable about a weirdo who may be a  pedant and maybe I am a pedant after all and it scares me to say that I am actually enjoying it. 

Oh nearly forgot, one cat died and now I only have three.

Addendum:  I missed out that after I was accepted for the Masters course I had much cause to return to the doctors yet again because I felt so unwell still and had a series of ever more serious blood tests.   There was a confusion about all sorts of things like I was told I had a high iron which turned out not to be true.    To cut a long story short, I passed the blood tests and was told (actually I read in on my NHS app "result satisfactory", nobody actually spoke to me) I had nothing wrong with me.  It    At one point I asked the doctor if I should start the Masters at all because I was about to hand over a vast sum of fees and was I going to see it through until Christmas even.    He told me to go ahead and not to give not going ahead another thought.   I was then verbally told I had passed all those blood tests.     (Hannah asked me if I  was going through the menopause - she has never got her head around my actual age - and I believe that perhaps I did have some hormone imbalance and she was in a way correct).   We can now move on to October when health issues turned out not to be all over. 

I am for once looking forward to a new year starting.