It has been an eventful week, during which my mind has turned to the
Scottish play. After a campaign of smears and mud-slinging by the right-wing
press, I’m delighted the national electorate swung towards a message of hope. Discredited
Theresa May is now said to be on ‘death row’ and there have been street
protests in Britain about her new friends, the DUP. Locally, I’m sad that our
hard-working constituency MP, Margaret Ritchie, has been beaten by an
abstensionist. This effectively silences us on any issue, as our new MP will not
turn up to do anything on our behalf at Westminster.
I have my hospital bag packed. But I’ve not had a call from Admissions.
So I wait anxiously, try to stay well and don’t make plans. It’s not exactly
‘death row’ but each day I wonder if this will be the last time I am able to go
for a bike ride, or mow the lawn, or go out for a meal, before I have the
surgery and become incapacitated for a long while. I’m living normal life with
a heightened intensity as there is an underlying sense of grief at the losses I
will suffer for many months to come after going under the knife again. Allied
to this is also the fear that something might go wrong and I could be
incapacitated forever.
Being experienced at major surgery (having come through two episodes of
it in the last 18 months) means that I also know how tough an ordeal it is. I
know my body can recover but I have no illusions about the severity of the pain
that has to be endured and the long, hard struggle of recovery.
Our dear ginger cat, Cyril, has been missing for several weeks now. We’ve
looked everywhere for him, and have put posters up offering a reward. Next door
were feeding him each day in the porch of our house whilst we were away in
England for a long weekend. But he has been missing since then, whilst his
nemesis the big grey feral cat has been very evident in the garden. We think
Cyril was beaten up and chased away so that the big grey cat could take all the
food. One day last week the big grey feral cat sat in our back yard all afternoon
in heavy rain. He just shook his wet pointy-eared head and glowered at us,
green eyes glinting. We have renamed him Grey Malkin after the witches’ cat in the
Scottish play.
Perhaps I now need to boil a brew of toad, newt, snake, bat, frog, lizard
and owl to help foretell my future. But even then I probably wouldn’t be much
better off, as the witches’ spells for Macbeth were highly equivocal. The only
way to reliably get to the future is to dig deep and live through whatever
ordeal you are presently confronted with. This is as true for me as it is for
the UK.
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