Graham Higgins Illustration

I’m going to quote from an email again, mainly to record impatience with post-op recovery. I imagine this is a commonplace irritation so I’m putting this up as commiseration for anyone else caught between medical malaise and an interior monologue about what one ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to be able to do.

I sleep on the sofa these days so as not to disturb Sharyn’s sleep. At first this was because I had to make a staged rise from the recumbent if I wanted to get up in the night, calculating leverages and bracing myself for bruised-muscle spasm’n'grunt. I tried a return to the upstairs bedroom last weekend but apparently Sharyn ‘couldn’t get any sleep’ that night, what with my restlessness and *breathing* – a frequent feature, this, the morning report on my sleep-pattern as it affects Sharyn’s. I never know quite what to do with this; being told after waking that I’ve had a restless night doesn’t help me and only leaves me with lame apologies for my inadvertant inconvenience.

At least I get to have the radio on by the sofa to go to sleep to, instead of the in-ear phones. For years in solitude the bedside radio was like a stream of white noise that preserved me from my own circular thoughts, and TalkSport proved the best low-content babble – very little to cling to consciousness for there. I doubt if I manage more than 15 minutes on average before anaesthesis sets in. Some part of my brain registers the 6 o’clock switch from overnight phone-in to morning sport updates, when I turn and retune at a click to 5 Live. Thereafter a return to slumber until the nagging alarm of the bladder wakes me to consider movement.

I notice progress in my recovery in the reduced time it takes me to swing upright in the sofa and prepare to lever myself to a stand so I can mount the stairs. In the morning my torso feels like a hand clenched into a fist overnight and requires flattening-out and stretching. The sensation of wall-to-wall bruised muscle  twisting and protesting at every movement has settled into a brief pause sitting to assemble my wits and breath like a wrestler in the corner recovering from a mistimed leap from the ropes.  Once on my feet I launch myself into a forward totter that takes me up the stairs in the kind of sustained tick-tock rhythm that used to get me up the upper scree-slopes of Snowdon with full rucksack (to the mantra: each new step is one less to take).

Morning is also prime-time for unusual heart-rhythms, as if the pump’s also been roused from a night’s sleep and has to remember where it is and what it’s supposed to do. The interior thump of the pump is like something out of Poe – such an insistent thud in the ribs that it’s hard to credit that it can’t be heard like a miniature bongo in the room. First thing in the morning I sit and listen in as it experiments with rhythms until it settles on the familiar reassuring 65-ish bpm.

All these years in my reading I’ve circulated around the psycho-philosophical enigma of the mind-body conundrum – v. briefly: how does an insubstantial thought-impulse fire the necessary tiny electrical charges to direct the meat-body into action? …and following from this, how much behaviour is truly self-initiated and how much is ‘mere complex behaviour’? (birds build nests better than you could without so much an an Ikea diagram; you play guitar better once you’ve got over thinking about where your fingers go next – your intelligence can get in the way of complex behaviour)

Now it becomes a pressing real-life consideration, since recently I’ve been through periods of ‘deciding’ to breathe (my sleeping body obviously accomplished this; my conscious mind was really concerned that nothing catastrophic happened on my watch) and for weeks now, just shifting my sleeping and sitting position has required a brief pause to brace myself for audible and muscular groans and gasps in the necessary interval between wherever I happen to be and where I’d like to be.

Since the sofa has become my Home-square I’ve taken my tab-files downstairs so I can flick through and distract myself revising chords to songs I once knew. The chords aren’t so difficult to revive as the lyrics; that was the thought that prompted the title on this mail [originally Time After Time] (titles are helpful in recalling old mail topics, but I do occasionally wonder at those years when one sent a letter and very rarely ever saw it again. You didn’t title letters; if you were a little formal you might date them).

Time After Time is one of those songs I overlooked when it was chart-pop because it was smothered in kooky Cindy Lauper-ness. Miles Davis made the melody cool and Eva Cassidy redeemed the words. Years on, I haven’t reliably learned the lyric and I have to read off the page. This is no reflection on the writing; I don’t know why this hasn’t bedded in because there’s no shortage of emotion I can bring to that song.

Likewise the very slight ‘Golden Slumbers’ which I can very readily imagine singing as a real lullaby to as yet imaginary grandchildren. I’m very prone to sudden attacks of hyper-sentimentality at the moment.”

Time After Time is another of those lyrics like It Must Be Love that takes on an entirely different life as a Dad-song.