Graham Higgins Illustration

The surprise postponement of the operation has sent ripples through the news channels. It took a couple of weeks to notify everyone that This Thing had happened so I wouldn’t be answering calls and mail from given date.

Some will have seen the revised date on an F-book post-it note, others I’ve spoken to or mailed;  now i get those who would’ve understood me prioritising in the first couple of days and whom I now assume I must have told.

Rather than re-type an update, here is a mail from a friend. It’s a quince – Bill Bailey’s definition: ‘almost a coincidence’ – that Schrödinger’s Cat crept in a couple of days ago. My friends are surfing the ripples of quantum decohesion. How many event-variants can you get from heart-surgery + date x possible outcomes? Enquiries in the aftermath are a test of tact. The style can be big and sweary or painfully polite; here’s another variant…

From yesterday’s mail:-

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[S]“I’ve been thinking about you. One week in, you’re probably still aching everywhere that can ache, and are so knocked out on medication that you hardly know which way is up — or care. Which is fine. If your body’s got any sense, it will have switched off your intelligence to concentrate on more important jobs.”

[G] Boo, again, in both intonations. Yes that’s where I should have been.

I went in last Tuesday with hospital luggage-lite, the pared-down version of your Stuff they prefer you to arrive with so they can lock it away while you’re in coma.

Activated my TV card; started on a guitar-learner’s memoir (not writing my own… ‘Guitar Man’, Will Hodgkinson); in the evening a nurse arrived with tiny dry electric shears and disposable razors and her merry depillator’s song and shaved my legs and chest. Me big hairy man, hm?, so she actually wiped her brow as she broke out a second razor to make a third sweep; noted my ensuing body-dysmorphia – hadn’t really noticed before that in my older age over the years I’ve watched the slow encroachments of moorland and thickets of body hair over my highland regions – looking down at the new smooth featureless contour came as a peculiar slightly queasy surprise.

Attended to soul. Imagine packing all the interesting stuff in your room into boxes and moving them out so you’re left with a table and chair and pen and paper and time to think – that really was the task, putting stuff away in boxes. I fell asleep before I had time for greater verities.

Woke in the morning and was sent to shower this oven-ready body with red astringent soap; given meds to ‘make me drowsy’.

Awoke in the same bed five hours later, to be told that there wasn’t a space in Intensive Care for me post-op, so they’d postponed surgery and would give me their next suitable date. I called Martin, the friend who agreed and then volunteered to act as hospital taxi, who picked me up Wednesday evening.

I go in again on Dec. 1.

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S replied today and in another passing quince mentioned writing her blog which no-one seems to read. This is hugely encouraging because I’m still trying to figure out a function for it.

The rate at which the ‘cutting edge’ recedes to quaint horse-drawn plough – I suspect ‘cutting edge’ is getting a bit old hat now – does mean that recording the day-to-day will very quickly provide unwitting evidence to the social historian of the near future… er, I tell myself.

It might be somehow useful.

Cue The Police, Message In A Bottle: Kafka with a dub-reggae beat.

In praise of play, also from yesterday’s mail….:-

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[S]“They are going to show some of my Darwin pictures from the summer on the side of the new theatre between Christmas and new year, as a finale to the Darwin year (not just mine, but mine were asked for specifically). A moment of minor fame at last!”

[G] …more important, recognition. You get a lot of that in Flickr!* so you must have absorbed a general sense that whatever it is, you’re doing the right things somehow. Isn’t it so much more satisfying that your work is noted than that your professional self-promotion strategy has paid off?

It’s the amateurs, in the very best sense, who make Flickr fascinating. Very often the pro photographers’ sites are clearly qualitatively distinctive but cold. Models are lit to be shot like the shells of sports cars.

You’re one of the reasons I don’t take more photographs – if I did of course I might get better – because there are people who ‘see’ camera and capture something more than an inventory of objects within range. My brother too has talents such as the ability to catch crowd scenes where everyone is visible, natural and part of a composition. I try similar shots and it looks like the camera went off by accident in the street.

It’s true that I’m a great amateur guitar enthusiast even though YouTube’s a constant reminder of the many amateurs who’ve developed their enthusiasm to breathtaking levels or who have *that* musical sense. Look at any of the uke pieces by ws64 on YouTube. He does so many that it would take me a week to begin to learn. He seems to be able to voice any tune that happens to run through his head, humming using a ukulele. That’s a musician.

It will be a unique experience to see your own images cast large on a building, irrespective of quality, just big, and *up there*. Hoorah!

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*Flickr.com has so completely become a feature of my life that I neither obssess (I did, a bit, for a while) nor really notice that it’s a habit.  Flickr is a gigantic public snapshot album designed for photographers but used by artists and makers and pop-history archivists. I use it as the fridge door on which I tape my paintings from school.

My username ‘rackratchet’ is a term for the ideolect of pidgin I speak when tackling time-consuming practical tasks – flat-pack furniture;   attempting to get my bank to recognise my card on-line; filling out administrative paperwork.

Rackratchet is spoken from the corner of the mouth with a rhythm reminiscent of a choking outboard motor or a simmering pressure-cooker.