It was a most unexpected ending to the day. Rather than feeling joyful, that afternoon was filled with sadness. We had been building a wall on and off for twelve months; it was the year’s big project. Then the work was done, the site was cleared, and it was time for saying goodbye. I didn’t actually cry but it was a close-run thing.

Jean-Claude, my mason friend, came out of retirement for the job. In all there was to be around five weeks work on site – an initial three-week session last October, then a further two weeks this March. But for me the project started much earlier. I am not a muscly man and was frightened that carrying stones and pushing wheelbarrows would damage my back. So, for six months before the initial session I did ‘back’ and ‘shoulder’ exercises in the gym. They worked – during the building there was never even a twinge.

It was my second wall in our cottage in France [A labour of love, 9th Aug, 2010] and this one was altogether more ambitious. Set out in an irregular U-shape, the new wall is some 20 metres long, around 45 cm thick, in places nearly 2 metres high, and is built mainly of local stone although for its hidden parts we used breeze blocks.

It was a pleasure working with, and watching, Jean-Claude. He could go on for hours – lifting, levelling, chipping, cajoling, and almost caressing the stones into place. With his help, the stones, which were of all shapes and sizes and some weighing up to 40kg, would somehow fit as though they had come out of the ground for us.

Apart from moving the stones around so that Jean-Claude could easily see them, as the apprentice my jobs were to deliver the cement to him when and where needed; fill in the gap between the wall’s front and back faces; tidy up the joints; and set the site up in the morning and clear it up each night. The trowels and spades, and the ‘surfaces’ of the mixer and the wheelbarrow all needed to be spotless. Often he would shout advice across the site telling me how, for instance, masons load their wheelbarrows facing in the direction in which they need to go when they are full, or how masons always keep the paths on site clear to ensure a steady footing etc. If, as we were building, I found a stone I thought would be a good match for a particular niche, I would ‘present’ it to Jean-Claude for approval. Watching my offerings being added to the wall gave a sense of boyish pleasure. It is an odd life being an apprentice!

All the time we chatted and joked. One recurrent subject was a tiny, skinny, ginger, feral kitten who appeared to be living in the neighbour’s garden shed. Ginger, as we named her, would come up and inspect the wall, frolic round the stones, and creep up on imaginary mice, but ran off rather than be stroked. Other themes we discussed were families, sport and politics, and towards the end of the day it was Jean-Claude’s sore right shoulder and my exhausted body. And then there were our mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks. In deference to the nationality of his apprentice, each morning at around 10.30 we would stop for coffee and each afternoon at 4.45 for tea. He knew me well and these breaks, especially the one in the afternoon, always amused him; the use of a teapot and a strainer and the addition of milk, rarely escaped comment.

Jean-Claude and I have been friends for several years and these few weeks together chatting and tiring, and working on a shared goal, had brought us closer. The goodbye that last afternoon marked the end of an era. But there was more. Were I younger, the lifting and carrying would have been a doddle but now it was too much. Somehow I knew that I would never be able to do such strenuous work again. The beginning of my decline had been made painfully clear, and that was sad. But being tearful has not stopped me enjoying the memory of the project, nor from getting pleasure from the wall itself. When I see it, I glow inside.

But, back to the kitten. We had been fooled, there was not one but two, and the second we named Spice. When we came back in March we soon discovered that they had been adopted by a neighbour and had survived the winter. Both were now much larger and Spice the more sociable. And it is Spice who is sitting by the wall in the photo. I had wondered how I could indicate the wall’s dimensions and she conveniently came forward and offered herself. An ingenious solution!

It was part of my job to set exams. One year I decided on a new approach – I would write questions that came at the curriculum from new angles. Within an hour of the exam finishing, angry students had arrived at my door. I had tricked them. Generations of students before them had analysed past papers, calculated the odds of certain questions arising and targeted their revision accordingly. By setting novel questions, I had undermined years of tradition. What I saw as original and challenging, they saw as unfair. I argued that in this particular situation, their knowing possible questions beforehand seemed to defeat the issue. I got no sympathy, as far as they were concerned I had overstepped the mark.

It may be argued that playing tricks is underhand and unacceptable but in reality it is legitimate, common and a recognised part of everyday life. Working within recognised rules of engagement, outwitting the opposition forms the basis of all competitive games. It is essential in commerce and politics and in many aspects of policing. And for me they were essential when dealing with difficult bureaucrats or colleagues. Moreover, human beings are not unique in having this capacity, if Alley and Willow are anything to go by.

I met Alley in Kenya where she was reclining in the bushes. She was not like the other chimpanzees in the colony. While they would amble over when the keeper called, Alley would simply nod her head; here was an independent being.

Unlike the others, who had been brought from Rwanda when civil unrest threatened their survival, Alley had come from a ‘good home’.

Their compound was surrounded by a three-metre high, electric fence – quite a challenge for Alley who was bent on escaping. Outmanoeuvring was her forte and when the mood took her she would press adjacent live wires together with two sticks,  shorting the circuit and blowing the mains fuse, allowing her to slip through the fence with impunity. Sometimes she was seen holding the wires apart to let others through.

She and her co-escapees were always re-captured but her desire for the challenge did not waiver. When the keepers discovered her trick, they separated adjacent live wires, interspersing them with dummies to make short-circuiting more difficult. Alley learned to bridge the wider gap by using branches rather than her original sticks and escaping resumed. Her ingenuity was respected by her keepers. But, of course, for her such respect was probably unimportant. Apart from escaping, a beneficial effect of her activity would have been the respect gained from her peers and the possibliity of climbing the colony’s highly competitive matriarchy.

Willow, in his youth a sprightly tabby, had a similar thirst for outmanoeuvring. Presumably to amuse himself,  he would deliver live mice to our bedroom in the dead of night and then chase them around the bedroom floor. Usually I got involved, rushing around trying to swat the mouse with a shoe so that I could get back to sleep. According to my wife, the sight of man in pursuit of cat and mouse was the stuff of cartoons.

In readiness for the performance, Willow would carry the evening’s plaything up to the first floor via the wisteria. He and his ill-fated stooge would then enter the room through the half-open window. We eventually tired of his nocturnal antics and left the window closed, leaving only an inch or so for ventilation. A few nights later we were woken by a thud as a new would-be plaything hit the floor. Willow, who was sitting outside on the window sill, had posted the ‘toy’ through the slot, presumably so that I could play with it by myself. Over the next weeks he delivered several moribund mice, a bird and a frog, just to be sure.

Obviously there is a risk that I am anthropomorphising. But why shouldn’t these two animals want to outmanoeuvre like we do? The behaviour of both of them seems so very reasonable to me. Moreover, if this is not the explanation, how else can one explain what went on? After all, it was from animals that we evolved, and from whom a desire to outmanoeuvre would have been inherited.

It took some time to realise what was happening and it was wonderful. On the Wednesday of my week in Paris I had been to a film and had understood most of what was said. By the Friday, understanding spoken French was almost second nature. After six years, something had clicked. In aeroplane terms, I had got up enough speed to take off. For the French it would be ‘je m’envole‘, and the nice thing about the French wording is that it indicates that I did it myself. The feeling was exhilarating and although reality has since reminded me that there is still a long way to go, a barrier has been broken. Whatever else happens, the week in March will be remembered as something special.

In some ways it should have come as no surprise. I had felt for some time that a breakthrough was due. I was in Paris for my fifth, or was it sixth, immersion. This time, however, it was different. I was staying in the house of my teacher so each day there were over 6 hours of French guaranteed. On day one I made my goal clear – ‘to understand spoken French’; to be ‘fluent’ in comprehension. My writing, reading and speaking were not too bad, but when matched against my own expectations and when compared with my peers, my understanding of conversation was poor. I would often have to ask French speakers to repeat what they had said, which was embarrassing; even then I did not always get the drift, which was worse.

When I declared my goal, Karin said nothing, I even wondered if she had heard me. Then the week began. We worked hard on translation, pronunciation, presentation, grammar etc. and all this was interspersed with more general discussion – about her, about me, about her house, about politics (difficult!) and about France. Gradually, over the five days, I went from hesitant to passably fluent. More importantly, my understanding improved so that conversation became a two-way affair, and rather than feeling that French radio and TV programmes were an unpleasant threat, they became a welcome challenge.

It was quite a transformation and all rather mysterious. Then it clicked – could it be because Karin hardly ever corrected me? Occasionally, yes, but in the main she allowed my mind to flow and through this for me to gain confidence as practice lubricated the French talk centre in my brain. I was suspicious and asked Karin several times why she rarely interrupted and she said that there was no need as I made so few mistakes. And her lie worked. It allowed me to discover myself.

Over the last few years I have been taught by at least a dozen French teachers, with lessons lasting up to three hours and in various venues – cafes, pubs, front rooms but mostly classrooms. Most of my teachers have been superb, and the present ‘team’ (Christiane and Thierry in London, Marie in Brittany) are that and much more. They encourage, drive, and support wonderfully. And when I am being prickly, or press them with questions, they respond with patience and respect. But, as with all teachers, they do what teachers are supposed to do, indeed are paid to do – they correct. And in lessons this is inevitable. Of course they carefully chose what to correct and when to interrupt. During a week long ‘immersion’, the atmosphere can be the same, and in the past this has been the case, but having this ‘correction-free week’ was what I seemed to need. Who would have thought it?

Interestingly, when it came to vocabulary and grammar, Karin was no match for my home team, but that did not seem to matter. What I needed was to be let free for a few days. And, in some ways, the outcome could be predicted, at least at one level. They say that the quickest way to pick up a language is by speaking/hearing it in the playground (or the street). And in such a location, of course, corrections would be unusual. There is, it seems, something to be learned from the ‘playground’ school of teaching. Obviously the ‘silent teacher’ approach can offer nothing erudite and so is far from ideal, but it clearly held advantages for this oldie at this particular stage in his development.

Now, back in London and once again party to the conventional teaching approach, my Paris week seems almost like a dream. But it has left me with added insight and confidence and in French terms, more savoir faire. Such weeks are a wonderful luxury, and are, of course, what ‘summer’ schools are all about. But as is so often the case, having the right teacher at the right time is the essential component, and I was lucky.

Granny C was angry. She wanted to see more of us. She had come to stay and we weren’t paying her enough attention. She knew we had planned to clear the thistles from the meadow to allow the poppies to re-grow like last year [Field of Glory, 15th August, 2011] but spending hours digging each thistle up individually was time-consuming madness. Why not use a weed killer and be done with it?

We made it clear that we were keen to avoid environmentally unfriendly sprays but we got nowhere. These herbicides are dangerous and difficult to handle. No reply. More resistant than usual she took herself off to the garden centre and with dogged determination and more than passable French (how could she have known that a spray pump was a pulvérisateur?), she came home with the very device. The box said the spray had a metre-long spout with a cone-shaped hood at its tip to restrict each herbicide spurt to the target thistle. Fortunately, or so the packaging declared, the apparatus was ‘easy to assemble’ (a claim made next to a tiny Union Jack)

Granny C took the box into the entrance hall, and for fifteen minutes nothing was heard. Then, the sound of the most un-granny-like language broke the silence. “Oh fuck. These instructions are useless… They are impossible to follow… I hate instructions anyway… They say it might explode if the pump part is wrongly assembled… The spout doesn’t fit.. I have had enough… I am going to use the little hand spray I saw in your garden shed…”  “Fuck!”

The back door slammed and she stormed off down the garden path, muttering expletives to herself.

“Granny, please calm down,” I said, “I am sure it can be assembled.” Slowly I pieced it together. I did not read the instructions because I never do. I am instruction illiterate, instruction averse. But working slowly using a mixture of savoir-faire and some luck, construction is almost always achieved, as it was here.

Granny C steadied herself and, after practicing the spraying arrangements with water, went on the rampage for real. For a day and a half she tirelessly criss-crossed the meadow doing what would have taken us weeks.

We live in a culture where instructions are everywhere and following them is what intelligent people do. Conversely, to ignore instruction is frowned upon. Being of the ignoring type, like Granny C, when it came to assembling a piece of IKEA furniture some years ago, my wife read out the instructions while I did the business. Presumably to help people with my sort of problem, the IKEA instructions are not written in words, but in pictograms.

The bits of our new glass-fronted cupboard were laid out on the sitting room floor. Rohan interpreted the pictures and gave instructions telling me which widget went where and what order, and things went well. At least until the last step. The latch on one of the doors just would not work – turning the key clockwise locked the door when it should have opened it. We must have taken the wrong turn around pictogram 50. We reassembled the lock three times, paying increasing attention to detail. Then it clicked – we had been sold a pack that had a lock for a left hand door and on this particular kit the cut of the wood demanded that it be fitted to the door on the right. By fitting the lock upside down the problem was quickly solved. What had been needed was a bit of lateral thinking, The solution was to ignore what we were being told.

Maybe we could have assembled the whole thing blind, as IKEA addicts do, boasting, as one did recently on the internet,  “I only look at the instructions when the job is done to see where the left-over bits might have gone.” And whatever the rights and wrongs, my position on instructions remains unchanged – keep clear of them if at all possible. In this spirit I have ignored the pages of instructions that came with my birthday iPad and we are getting on handsomely. And how I use it is special to me. [Though, strictly speaking, it is not dishwasher proof. Ed]

A couple of ‘newsy’ things have escaped comment in this blog over the past few months. Since both news items are reasons to be cheerful they must not go unremarked.

The first (though not necessarily in the order it happened) was the promotion of Joe Collier from BMJ journeyman blogger to Guest Blogger of the Year. The award was granted by the BMJ for Joe’s contribution to its Doc2Doc blog in 2011. Joe cut his teeth as a paid blogger (if  you could call 100 quid a time ‘paid’) producing pithy, serious and relevant essays for the venerable pages of the BMJ blogs. Joe gave up the paid work in favour of the unlimited licence that Greyhares allowed him but continued to submit his pieces to Doc2Doc.  In the Doc2Doc Awards, Joe was up against serious competition from some of the most notable bloggers of the medical world and triumphed – well done Joe, and belated congratulations!!

The second thing to be cheerful about, earlier this year, was Joe’s 70th birthday which was celebrated with friends and family in the elegant surroundings of Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park.  It was a happy occasion with fine tributes paid to the OB from lifelong friend Neil Taylor and Joe’s wife, Rohan who managed the task twice, first in English and then in French. Greyhares’ Ed managed to get himself invited in his capacity as Joe’s technology therapist in the event, for example, of visual aids suddenly being required. The pleasure of the occasion for Ed  was dimmed  slightly when he heard that, amongst the birthday gifts, Rohan had given Joe an Apple iPad. Now, we must explain that Ed has spent the best part of three years attempting to counsel/coach/coax his ‘patient’ (a contradiction in terms, if ever there were one) in the practical application of WordPress, DropBox and several other overly-complex products with missing spaces in their names. Thus, the introduction of an iPad into the mix was a matter of some concern.

After that, several months of silence followed.  No WordPress, no DropBox, nothing. And for all we knew, no iPad.

Last week, the Greyhares editorial office received a video from a German friend, which might have been purpose made to express Ed’s anxiety. The scene: Daughter and father, Ragnilde and Jürgen, are in the kitchen:

[Google Chrome user? To view video click here]

I speak no German but here is my rough translation -

R:  “Papa, how are you getting on with the iPad I gave you? Did you read the manual?”
J:  “RTFM? Me? I’ve never read a ******* manual in my life, there’s no need to start now..”

We were just trying to think whether this reminded us of anyone we knew, when to our utter astonishment, like a sudden crystal clear voice on a ship’s radio after months of nothingness, up pops in the Greyhares DropBox a document named “Granny C and the thistle” in which Joe Collier partly explains his aversion to reading literature of any sort, together with a report on his progress with the iPad.

Now read on…

Until recently our feelings about views have usually differed. While my wife loves ‘untouched’ expanses of nature, the Cairngorms for example with not a house in sight, or miles of Atlantic rollers, my breath is taken away by man-made structures. The Roman aqueduct at Nimes blew my mind when I was a teenager, and for me there is nothing more exciting than looking at the eighteenth century crescents in Bath or Edinburgh.

Recently, however, there has been some meeting of minds. Although it is certainly not of the same order, both of us love the view from the back of our cottage in France and could happily stare at it for hours. The house sits with its back nestling under the summit of a small hill. From it we look south across a valley. Opposite is a simple rural landscape. There is nothing special on offer – no lakes, no cliffs, no forest in sight, just a few houses, fields and trees. But somehow it mesmerises.

The key is the lane that goes up the facing hillside and which threads its way between the trees, sometimes almost out of sight. When we moved in, all we saw at the end of our garden was a line of tall elms. These offered us a thick screen, which at the time we welcomed. Over the next year or two, and with much sadness, the trees died but their clearance revealed this hitherto unconsidered delight.

The pleasure from the sight is not unique to us. A fortnight ago we were sitting on our patio and, as often happens, the view entered the conversation. There was a consensus that the view simply draws one in – it is so easy on the eye and, with the occasional person, car or tractor moving up and down the lane, always absorbing. Then our sculptor friend Elona, who had been absorbed for some time, suddenly announced the reason for its beauty. It was the positioning of the lane. From where were sitting, the road opposite divides up the landscape perfectly. So if the view were a picture, the line of the road falls according to the ‘golden ratio’ of 1:1.6180339887…., such that if there is 1 unit of the scene to the right there is 1.61 of it to the left. Put another way, our lane divides up the canvas according to the golden ratio. Apparently we are privy to a ‘divine proportion’ that has an innate appeal.

The idea is both fascinating and unnerving.

It is fascinating because it suggests that there is some universal truth about beauty that can be described mathematically. Apparently the Swiss architect Le Corbusier believed in it and calculations have suggested that de Vinci felt likewise when he painted the Mona Lisa, as did Ictinus when he designed the Parthenon. I admire Elona’s work greatly, so to hear that the notion also contributes to her sculptures adds to its credibility. The idea is unnerving because it suggests that artists could be replaced by computers, and more importantly that if everything in art were predictable then there would be no such thing as originality.

Just a week later, at the same table and at much the same time of day, I asked another successful artist, this time a local potter, his views on the matter. In his opinion, the ratio was interesting but a distraction. There were two many exceptions to make it valid, beauty he said, ‘is a matter for the heart’. Certainly the figure never entered his mind when he was potting.

Whatever the explanation for the quality of our view, a few days ago the importance played by the position of our lane was given a boost. I found our next door neighbour busily planting trees expressly to hide the very lane opposite, which she repeatedly described as moche (ugly). Taken aback, I asked if I might see her view and found that from her terrace the lane ran plumb up the centre of the canvas, and moche was a very apt description. Although we were standing only ten metres to the right, the aspect had changed.

Whatever the role of 1.6180339887 in determining beauty, our neighbour quite literally couldn’t see it.

Illustration:  “The Golden Ratio”, with thanks to Sarah Campbell – www.sarahcampbelldesigns.com

In Fulham Palace Road, the darkest hour is just before dawn, says Philip McGough.

I had bragged that I would be fitted with a titanium alloy hip of space satellite quality to return me to Fred Astaire class mobility. On returning from hospital I announced that I now had a ceramic hip joint. My children, sensitive, supportive, suggested that the NHS had used one of their old tea mugs. When I objected, they said, “Oh, so you think you got Ming porcelain, do you?”

Being re-hipped was an informative experience. The technology is superb. It began with the epidural anaesthetic from the ultra-competent consultant anaesthetist, a woman in love with her work who seemed chuffed to find someone interested in what she was doing. (I suggested a simple mechanism to help patients keep themselves steady during the introduction of a needle into the spine.) The lower half of the body is knocked out, but one avoids the total unconsciousness of a general anaesthetic with its resulting nausea.

Over the next hour and a half, they cut off the top of my right femur and drilled a hole down into the length of it. The hole becomes the anchorage for a ceramic ball which is received by a ceramic cup fitted to the pelvis, thus creating a new ceramic, hip ball joint. Brilliant! 24 hours later I stood up and walked tentatively. 48 hours later I was walking up and down the corridor. 72 hours later I was causing disruption and discharged. So, in its delivery of acute, intervention medicine our health system shows itself to be marvellous.

On the other hand, concerning the chronic, or follow-up, or however we call the longer term side of things, the picture is not so good. My time in a three-bed room was miserable.

During the first night I found myself staring at a greyish-blue scene. It was both strikingly clear yet indecipherable. It did not move. I thought it must be a computer screen. But I could find no means to make it change, no mouse, no keys. Then I realized that I was awake and staring at the room lit by that awful hospital glow. It was terrifying. In this half-light, half-life, of a night of half-sleep that seems endless, voices echo, half-recognized people lift my arm and inject me or take blood pressure as I lie sweating, longing for dawn. Of my companions, one was quite fun and the other was a Catholic priest. Day and night he howled, farted, belched and vomited. Day and night, alarm bells rang from his bed and nurses rushed in and out with buckets and bedpans. Two women, one vastly fat on crutches, the other mouse-like, visited him constantly – visiting hours were ignored for him. They held his hands and said they loved him and muttered the rosary with him. Two other priests came – in civvies, but I could spot them. They said: “Mrs Henderson was at mass this morning,” and “Mrs Ferguson sends her love,” and “Mrs Anderson is using her influence with Mrs Donaldson to get you a room for two weeks in a lovely nursing home where you’ll be properly looked after and fed.” Apart from “Oh Dear, oh dear!”, the remark that his cornflakes could do with more sugar, and the shout of “Viva Franco!” to a Spanish nurse, he said almost nothing. (When my wife visited, he heard us talking French and yelled “Vive la République!”). Claiming agoraphobia, I kept drawn the curtain that separated us. I never let slip that I was once a Catholic monk. The third night was too long to bear. I sneaked off on my zimmer frame to the Day Room. I opened the window, breathed the cool air, rejoiced in the sound of traffic building up on Fulham Palace Road and waited for dawn to save me.

The food was so bad it was puzzling. One thought, it would actually be easier for it to be better.

I was discharged having experienced fantastic surgery and three days of awfulness – although, as you can tell, the latter is already becoming merely the excuse for a bit of a yarn. I will return to see the osteopathic surgery team and associated physiotherapists in six weeks time. Meanwhile I am on my own. “Any problem – see your GP”. And of course, seeing one’s GP entails waiting for, at best, a day or two. So, once again, it is the non-acute, the chronic and long-term that is weak.

I also understand that hospitals suffer problems of infection. All in all then, they thus seem places to be avoided. Yet they are the cornerstone of our health service. News of a hospital closure incites public outrage. I am a supporter of the NHS and believe that health should be delivered publicly. But should it be totally free at the point of delivery and delivered mostly by large hospitals? I now have doubts. However any major change in our health service will be bedevilled by party politics. The Tory party cannot be trusted with health reforms as they would not be driven by the ideal of public good. While Labour are unclear as to whether the public services exist to provide service or to create jobs. I presume we have big hospitals because this is the most cost efficient way to provide a range of treatments. Or are they simply an expression of conservative thinking? (cf the Admiralty rejects a design for new destroyers that is not the traditional, romantic, long, lean, “sea-wolf” in conception, etc.)

It is going to be difficult to argue for fundamental reform without being accused of being anti-NHS or anti-public health. However, I know that in the bar, or at the dinner table, I will to want to get the argument going. It can join, “Was I justified in voting for Tony Blair in the Labour Party leadership election of July 1994?” and “Wales hammered England at Twickenham in 1936, a triumph only marred by the one-eyed and biased ref who awarded England more points,” as a possible medium sized ding-dong between the salad and the cheese.

Philip McGough is recovering and is as comfortable as can be expected for a man of his years. Philip is an actor, now retired, and former Catholic monk. He is currently working on his memoir, “The Pope and Al Capone”.

Our recent holiday in Kenya was special. And we, to be more precise I, went with serious concerns. The UK had declared that civil unrest made the country unsafe for holidaymakers. Friends warned us about the dual dangers of altitude and buffalo – unlike lions and elephants, buffalo are plain spiteful. And research on the web told me that medical provision could be hard to come by, a deficiency abroad that always makes me anxious. Our age generally, and my prostate in particular, were the worries.

As with many holidays, it is moments that are un-photographable that stay in the mind longest. We went with Lucy who knows and loves Kenya and who had organised the trip, and the particular ‘moments’ started in the departure lounge at Heathrow. While waiting for the plane she suggested that when we were in the log cabin on Mount Kenya’s foothills, I might like to give talks on mountain sickness and on any other medical issues that might arise. She would certainly love to know more about the condition, and felt that our mountain guide (John), his assistant (James) and our cook (another John) would be fascinated. Rohan added that she too would be interested. From that moment my evenings were bespoke.

Yes, I was a doctor and was used to giving talks, but my knowledge of mountain sickness has never been more than patchy. More worrying, when I later searched the internet, which I did at a two-day acclimatisation stop at 2000 metres, I soon realised that nobody else knew much about it either. I was essentially on my own. Moreover, I discovered that the cabin on the mountain had no electricity, and so no lighting and certainly no audio-visual aids. By the time we left on our drive up the next 1000 metres I had bought an A3 pad of paper and two thick ‘magic markers’ – one red, one black.

Word had gone on ahead, and as soon as we arrived I learned that John and his team were excited about the talks. I also realised that all three had left school at around 16, knew very little about ‘science’ or ‘biology’, and that their vocabulary in English was good but limited. I also discovered that all three were thoughtful, inquisitive and had an infectious thirst for information and understanding.

As dusk fell on the day of our arrival –a Sunday – Lucy arranged some chairs around a table and sat us all down. The first talk began with the word ‘OXYGEN’ written large on the centre of sheet one. With their perseverance, with regular breaks to answer their questions, with the liberal use of analogies (‘think of red blood cells as trolleys on rails carrying oxygen around the body’), and with use of the make shift flip-chart, key ideas were formed. Somehow, by the end of our allotted 30 minutes, we had covered the fact that Oxygen is an essential energy giver and that without it we die; oxygen is found in the air; that oxygen gets into the body through the lungs and then goes on to the muscles, or brain etc having been carried there in the blood which is pumped round the body by the heart. Importantly, at 3000 metres the pressure of the air is low so pushing oxygen through the lungs to the blood is more difficult, resulting in less oxygen in the blood and a feeling shortness of breath. Accordingly if a person had a particularly large number of red blood cells, and a strong heart with which to pump, as happens in those who are acclimatised, shortness of breath would be most unlikely.

Now shortness of breath is only one problem for those who suffer altitude sickness. There is sleepiness, headache, nausea and vomiting, coma and worse, but the cause of these has little to do with the lack of oxygen itself. To learn about this they would have to wait till the next day.

On the Monday we climbed to 3400 metres. To everybody’s surprise, particularly mine, Rohan got very short of breath and I managed without breathing trouble. However my legs did feel a little wobbly on the way down while hers remained steadfast. All this needed some explanation, and that evening the difference between heart fitness (I cycle hard each day in the gym) and leg fitness (Rohan walks 14km once or twice a week) was explained. Then it was on to talking about how those other features of altitude sickness (sleepiness, sickness etc) might arise, and how acclimatisation worked. And the questions and asides suggested that the ideas were being understood.

On Tuesday we pottered around at base for fear of repeating Rohan’s horrible feeling of breathlessness, and that evening the talk became more a question-and-answer session. We covered inflammation of the pancreas, heart attacks, cancer, stress, depression, and ‘healthy’ lifestyles. Then, on Wednesday it was off back down the mountain.

The talks were a real joy for me, not just because of the intellectual challenge they presented but because of the pleasure that sharing gave. Clearly something special also occurred for John and his team. It was not just the new knowledge and understanding that they gained, but, as John explained, it was the idea that they had the right to question and to know, that he found so exciting. He pressed me to stay on for another year or so, but I had to decline. Whatever else I remember about Kenya, those surreal moments together in the semidarkness half way up the mountainside will persist. Thank you Lucy for the challenge.

‘Quick’. ‘Look’. ‘Top of the trellising’. And there they were, just two metres away, a pair of goldfinches. I knew that they were around, we had talked about them often, but this was the first time I had actually seen them, and in our own garden too. They were small (shorter than a robin), and exquisitely coloured with vivid red and yellow dashes. Unlike the neat, not to say dandy, elegance of the blue tit, the colours of the goldfinch are brazen, almost theatrical, like hurriedly thrown-on make up. But it works.

Then 30 seconds later the pair were off, but of course, the image stayed on in my mind’s eye. The fleeting episode was captured to be relived again and again. What a genius of an apparatus are our brains, and this capacity is not limited to sight, it is the same for any sensation. One of my sons wrote a piece of music for my birthday and played it twice after the party. The opening bars have stuck, and I can hear them in my head and enjoy them whenever it suits.

How very different is this skill for those who can no longer remember things that have just happened. For the few years before her death, my mother-in-law, who had Alzheimer’s disease [see Last Words, 10th September, 2011], could rarely retain any such images. Had she been with us that morning she would have seen, and been excited by, the goldfinches but minutes later the image would have gone. It was so sad that with her incapacity to store, there was no opportunity for her to gain pleasure from simply ‘replaying the tape’ – the recording machine was broken.

In so many ways such a loss is debilitating. But there are possible advantages. At an almost trivial level, reading a good section in a book gave her endless pleasure. When she was in a mood to read, she could reread a choice page over and over again and each time she found it as new and as amusing as ever, and it would bring her a smile. Then there was the episode of her broken hip. The physiotherapist told us that it would mend quickly. She was, he said, so forgetful that she would not remember that walking hurt. Accordingly, and in keeping with his predictions, she would attempt exercise with impunity, and more importantly without anxiety. Yes, it did hurt at first when she moved, but every day she gave it another try and the speed of her recovery was seen by many as remarkable.

Interestingly, in some circumstances the abolition of short-term memory, particularly of painful events, is natural. What happened during the few seconds before I had a serious bicycle accident and was knocked unconscious, has been deleted. And after many minor operations, doctors routinely prescribe drugs that dim memory for the episode. But in these instances the memory loss is for the one event only and selective, for my mother-in-law the loss was for everything and there all the time. However, with memory loss she was spared thinking about the horrors of the last years of dementia. How awful that would be.

Photo credit: Sergey Yeliseev (under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It was a lovely spring afternoon and I sat sipping tea in the conservatory, calculating the amount of my time I spend procrastinating. The task was prompted by the sight of shirts, towels and smalls fluttering prettily on a washing line that I had just put up; a job that took 3 years.

In the calculation I limited myself to the last ten years, and then considered only major DIY work. Delay was to be based on the time spent from when I agreed to do the work to when it was completed. I chose not to consider small household jobs, such as mending a cupboard door or replacing the toilet seat. I reckoned that in total these would have taken less than a year or so. Nor did I include delays relating to personal commitments, such as writing or editing, and where procrastination is not normally an issue, although my writing-a-book project is now in its 5th year and there is not yet a word on the page!

After much puzzling, my procrastination tally came to 27 years. To the washing line figure I added the time to fit a shower curtain (6 years), tidy the cellar (9 years), convert the spare room from being fit for family to being fit for guests (9 years). Interestingly, all of these major tasks were requested by my wife, so from time to time I would get tactful reminders. Perhaps because I had done nothing her words had a way of touching my guilt centre, which for these issues is very sensitive.

I do have excuses for delaying, and all of them seem eminently sensible. The fact is that the idea of the task immediately engenders a set of worries – the job will take days to complete, will need complicated planning, will require me to buy tools and/or materials, will demand physical exertion (sometimes contortional), will mean working in dirty or possibly unsavoury conditions and most importantly will take me away from doing things I actually prefer.

Setting aside these concerns, the overall process is simple. It just takes time. In brief – the challenge is accepted, the issues are mulled over and a bevy of practical, theoretical and emotional problems are resolved. Then, when a propitious moment arises, i.e. something tips the balance like Rohan asking me for a washing line for Christmas, I begin the task.

Let me illustrate. With the washing line I was keen first that it would not be an eyesore and second that it would be robust. In this instance, it took years to find the right type of line – a strong retractable outside sort. Then it was a matter of tracking it down, ordering it on the web and then collecting it from the post office sub-station as there was no way it would go through the letter box. To mark the end of this first stage, the device was delivered to Rohan in her Christmas stocking. Some time later, having inspecting the fixings, it was off to the ironmonger for some metal plates, the timber yard for a pole to hold up the line, to one DIY store for attachments to provide the pole with a forked top and a rubber bottom and to another for a new electric drill, an extra large masonry bit and some matching screws and rawlplugs. The actual fixing took around three hours, which involved balancing precariously atop a long ladder whose feet were trespassing in the neighbouring private car park. All done, we then waited for the sun on a washday. The consummation took place over tea last week.

My next three jobs are replacing a light switch (already 4 months; completion predicted in December 2012), clearing out the attic (9 years; predicted May) and gluing the head back on a stone statue (3 years, predicted June). The odd thing is that the completed jobs give such pleasure. Putting on a shirt dried in the sun and wind rather than in our tumble dryer is such a pleasure. The trouble is that whatever is the cause of these delays, it is likely that finding a solution will be subject to more procrastination.