Amour

I went to the cinema last night and saw this film. Its a very powerful and affecting study of ageing and care, of love and of death. In short its the best film I've seen all year.

Anne and Georges are retired music teachers in their eighties. The film is largely set in their apartment. We see the elderly couple going about their daily life, caring for each other in many small ways. They have a rather self-obsessed daughter who lives abroad. Then Anne suffers a minor stroke and has to go for treatment in hospital. When she returns in a wheelchair she makes Georges promise that he will never put her back in hospital or in a nursing home. Georges agrees and the core of the film is the day to day love and care of that relationship. There are many challenges of course. Georges is elderly and a little infirm. Anne is frustrated by her incapacity. But they surmount these with humour and respect.

Anne suffers another stroke and becomes paralysed down one side, then begins to show signs of dementia. It is a struggle for Georges but he continues to be her carer. Despite Anne's infirmities they sing and play little games together. One day their daughter arrives, insisting that her mother be put in a home. Georges refuses and the daughter departs. But even with the assistance of a nurse and neighbours, the task of caring for the severely incapacitated Anne slowly becomes too much for Georges. Over the course of the film he deteriorates perceptibly. In the end there is a dramatic twist (the film opens with the police breaking down the apartment door to find Anne's body and concludes with the daughter walking around the now empty rooms).

Having sketched the plot, I imagine anyone who has not yet seen the film is thinking: this is such a painful story, how could it be a great film? Well it is great because it focusses on the little and large acts of kindness, love and selflessness that make human relationships work. It is great because it shows that this care, humanity and respect can surmount even the most demanding circumstances. It is great because it unflinchingly shows us our futures (ageing and death) and reminds us that we can't change this outcome, but then says - how you get there as a human being is what really matters.

Above all, it is honest and heartfelt. It comes as no surprise to find that the film was based on real events in the family of writer/director Michael Haneke. Amour won the main prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year. In its scope and tone there are echoes of Tokyo Story (one of the greatest films of the last century).

I immediately thought of my father, who was paralysed down one side after a major stroke. Especially, the many hours I spent trying to communicate with him (he had lost the power of speech) and the long debates inside the family about a suitable care home. But all to no avail, as he died from pneumonia after three months in hospital.

Then I thought about myself. In particular, my own incapacity after the big operation last year and the care I'd been given in the early days by Joanne (which I never fully thanked her for). As Georges struggled with Anne, I relived the many problems that everyday things (that we normally think nothing of) bring for someone who is incapacitated: getting in and out of bed, washing, the toilet, walking, etc. I knew I'd come a very long way since those dark days. I'm hoping I still have a good distance to go.

 

Marks and Spencer

It was Saturday morning and I was in my local Tesco, wire basket in hand. I'd collected some bananas and was heading to the vegetables when I bumped into a friend from the town. We smiled, stood and chatted, wire baskets dangling beside our knees.

The first topic was the local Pantomime, we were both going to help out there in the evening. Then we got on to what we were going to do that afternoon. I said I would be watching the rugby international on TV - Ireland v Argentina. 'Should be a good match', I added. He grinned and nodded.

'How about you?' I said, expecting him to be doing the same as I knew he was a keen follower of the sport.

He shook his head, 'I'm going to Marks and Spencer', he said ruefully.

'OK', I said, a little quizzically.

'I've been told I've got to get a new jacket', he said with resignation, glancing down at the carrots in his basket.

I nodded sympathetically.

'They've got a sale on', he shrugged, '25% off', and studied the carrots again. 'My wife keeps her eye on these things', he added quietly and then looked up.

I nodded again. Our eyes met. We said nothing.

'Oh well', I said, 'you can always record it'.

He nodded brightly. Then he paused. 'But I don't know when I'd get to watch it', he said, scanning the row of shiny vegetables beside us.

'OK', I said, glancing down at my basket.

'Better get on', he said and lifted his basket to check the contents.

'Fine', I said, raising my hand in a wave, 'see you later'.

'Sure', he smiled and turned towards the cheese aisle.

As I wandered away I thought about the very hard year I'd had since Joanne left. How at times it had got so painful and tough that, despite all the problems we had, I would have welcomed her back. Then I thought again about how far I'd come over that year. A journey of real growth in so many ways. A journey that I'd needed to take alone.

Joanne had been regularly critical of a whole series of things: most often it was my home and then it was my clothes. I smiled and strode up to the checkout. I was glad I wasn't being compelled to spend my Saturday afternoons in Marks and Spencer.

Remembrance

My father ran away from home and joined the Army. He was just 14. The third eldest of nine, he was tall for his age and passed for 16. After basic training he joined The King's Own Hussars and was posted to Egypt. Each week he sent money home.

The regiment did a lot of reconnaissance, long expeditions into the desert in Riley armoured cars to explore the terrain and make maps. He enjoyed this work and was good at it: he got promoted to corporal and sergeant, climbed the pyramids, learned how to deal with scorpions, drank mint tea. Then the war began. He became a 'Desert Rat', fighting a series of losing battles against Rommel as the 8th Army retreated across North Africa towards Cairo. My father distinguished himself under fire and rose rapidly through the ranks to Major, with command of a squadron of tanks.

The decisive battle of the campaign took place at El Alamein in 1942. At the opening of the battle my father was ordered to undertake a night attack on the German lines. His squadron of tanks were caught in an artillery crossfire and most were destroyed. A shell exploded into my father's tank: the gunner and driver were killed, he was blown clear. Half of his unit were killed in the attack, the rest were captured. He later learned that this attack was diversionary and all of his unit were deemed expendable. He never forgave Montgomery.

Wounded, my father was captured and sent to a transit camp near Bari in Italy. After months of only pumpkin soup, the prisoners were loaded into railway cattle-trucks and taken to Germany. At first he was held in a large camp Stalag VIIIB (in Silesia) then he was transferred to a smaller camp Oflag VA (in the Black Forest). Here he spent three years as a POW until the camp was liberated by Patton: he recalled him standing on the bonnet of a jeep with two ivory-handled revolvers. The American soldiers gave the prisoners bars of chocolate, which they wolfed down and then were violently sick. After years of starvation their stomachs just couldn’t cope with the rich food.

After the war he was slowly squeezed out of the Army. The British class system reasserted itself: the son of a village milkman couldn't really be a senior member of the officer class. He tried a range of jobs but didn't find anything that suited him. He ended up working in a nylon factory, got married and had three sons.

'What did you do in the war, Dad?' As a kid, I asked him again and again. Often as we sat together in the front room watching war films on TV: John Wayne, John Mills, et al, being heroic. But he would always leave me unsatisfied, only saying that he had fought in the desert and had been a POW. He never disclosed any other details. When pressed he would shake his head and say 'it's nothing like in the films - a lot of good men never came back', then he would leave the room. And when at mealtimes, I or one of my brothers would say, 'I'm starving!' He would snap, 'you don’t know what starving is'. Cowed, we would stare at our plates as mother dished out the spuds.

I left home, became a student, took drugs and grew my hair long, identifying with anti-establishment figures such as John Lennon. My father's Army career was an embarrassment. We became estranged.

Much later I read Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi, books that brought home to me the horrors of incarceration in camps and the desperate everyday struggle for survival. I bought copies of them for my father. He thanked me for the books. Next time I asked him what he thought. He said he didn’t get on with reading them.

I tried another tack. Buying him a lined journal and pens, I suggested he could write down some memories. Secretly I hoped he would use his neat, precise handwriting to describe the story of his life. Again he thanked me for the present, but on my next visit I noticed the pages of the journal were still blank.

My father's place was outside, especially the garage. This was his workshop: stuffed with timber and carpentry tools, sweet with wood-shavings and sawdust. Here he smoked his 'forbidden' cigarettes, cupped furtively in his hand, and designed the pieces of furniture he would make.

Deeply troubled by my own past, I sought him out. Gill, the woman I was going to marry, had been killed in an accident. After burying the pain for a decade, I was going through therapy. Slowly I unfolded the story of my loss to him. He listened raptly, nodding and pursing his lips. When I stopped, he reached into his pocket and offered me a cigarette. I smiled and shook my head.

Then he started towards me and began to speak. How he ran away from home because he had been made to go to work as an assistant in a draper's. How he joined the cavalry because he loved horses, but they changed them for armoured cars and tanks. How the desert became so cold at night and the sky would be sparking with stars.

His stories spilled out across the workshop. Mine did too. Belated confidences offered like treasure. We spent hours talking and then went indoors. My mother knew something was happening, but couldn't work out what it was. We kept our exchanges to ourselves. The next morning he went out to the workshop, I joined him and we did it all over again.

I came home regularly that Autumn and sojourned with him in the workshop. On New Year's Day I got a call from my brother, my father was in hospital after a massive stroke. I rushed to his bedside. He was paralysed down one side and had lost the power of speech. He remained in hospital, but never spoke again. My father died three months later.

 

Belfast Festival

The Festival is in its fiftieth year and still going strong. For a couple of weeks in the Autumn the city is packed with arts events. A veritable portmanteau that I always look forward to sampling.

In case of sell-outs, I booked all my tickets before I went off to England. Then, over the Festival, I went down with a bad cold and bronchitus: but wrapped up well, I still managed to attend most of the events I'd booked. The highlights for me were:

Junk Ensemble (The Falling Song). Very inventive contemporary dance: quirky and full of ideas. They employed live percussion, piles of mattresses, a children's choir and ten kilos of apples in the show.

Gregory Porter. Soulful New York Jazz. Gregory, a big black guy, does ballads with power and feeling. His sidemen play fast and super-cool.

Buena Vista Orchestra. The Cuban oldies are still going strong (without Ry Cooder). They might have to sit down to last out the set, but boy can they play. The Ulster Hall was swinging with son.

Polyphony. Pitch and tone-perfect choral ensemble performing works from Britten and Whitacre in Clonard on Halloween, fireworks exploding all around.

WillFred Theatre (Follow). A marvellous one man show around the theme of deafness. Shane O'Reilly does inspired physical theatre.

The main disappointment was the Michael Clark Company. A big reputation but a timid and tedious show.

Finally a mention for The Moving Word, a live poetry, music and image extravaganza from the Heaney Centre. 25 poets and musicians filling an afternoon in the Queen's Film Theatre. I was one of these poets. A well attended show with a good mix of performances.

I'm sad to say that it's all over for another year. But pleased to report that the cold and cough is on the way out.

 

Scars

I've started treatment with a new physiotherapist for a long-standing injury. The problem began a couple of years ago with a muscle tear in my right groin (acquired pushing a heavy mower out of a ditch). At first I was impatient with my slow recovery and eager to prepare for two overseas trips I'd booked (to Chile and Bhutan) so I began my activities again (walking and cycling) and built up the intensity. But soon my groin became sensitive, then painful and then intensely painful and I was forced to stop. So I rested for a while (days perhaps weeks), then began again: but each time I built up my activity, the pain would return and the unhappy cycle would repeat. I became stuck in a series of peaks (rising activity) and troughs (pain and depression) – the pattern of a chronic injury.

I ended up having to cancel my overseas trips and claim the money back from insurance. Then I became seriously ill and all thoughts of such activities evaporated. This year, as I recovered, I began to walk further and more often. Stupidly, I managed to pull the muscle in my groin again working in the garden. I rested for a while, then returned to easy walking and started to do more. But the old problems quickly recurred and again I found myself stuck with a chronic injury. I began to fear that I would be unable to do hillwalking and cycling ever again. These were activities I had enjoyed for many years; I valued them and I wanted to be able to have them in my life. So I resolved to try all available treatment options before I abandoned hope: I went to a physio, then an osteopath, an acupuncturist and most recently to a new physio.

The new physio started out my treatment in a different way, by explaining what was happening to me in the chronic injury cycle. I thought that each time I got to the point of intense pain I was re-injuring myself – and this had happened again and again. She said no: the level of pain in my groin was a warning sign (the level of tissue damage was a good way beyond). And each time I exceeded the level of pain (before backing off), I was actually lowering the level at which my groin would become painful the next time. In effect I was teaching my brain to become more and more hypersensitive about my right groin.

In her opinion the injured tissues in my groin should have healed up some while ago. Her treatment strategy was twofold:

Firstly, to get me to do gentle and regular stretching to correctly align the underlying postural muscles around my pelvis.

Secondly, to get me to do my activities at much lower levels of intensity and in a much more controlled way. I should build up carefully and slowly to the point of sensitivity and then scale back. Importantly, I should not stop at this point, but do my activity again the next day (or the day after) and carefully build up to the level of sensitivity again and scale back again. In this way I would progressively be raising my body's threshold of sensitivity and expanding my level of pain-free activity.

I've been following this new approach for just a couple of weeks – so far so good.

 

 

Moving On

I've recently returned from two and a half weeks in England visiting friends and family.

This was my first overseas trip for over 18 months (since my illness). I chose the long ferry from Belfast to Liverpool, an 8 hour crossing, because I wanted to be travelling over there in my own car.

When it came to packing for the trip I found it really hard to decide what to take. I was full of anxieties. I'd arranged to stay in peoples' houses: seven in total, right across the country, moving from one to another. Would I feel OK staying in other peoples houses for such a time? Would I be faced with food that upset my sensitive stomach? And each family I was staying with was different, so I should take particular clothes and things for this activity with these people but then I'd need some different stuff when I was at the next place with the next people? And so on.

I ended up with two holdalls full of stuff. Then I filled two carrier bags with my breakfast food and other snacks. I stared at the pile. My first reaction was pretty self-critical. The old me went on long bike trips abroad with everything I needed in just two pannier bags. Get a grip I grimaced, shaking my head.

Then I sat back and laughed. It really doesn't matter, I thought, there's no weight limit. If the pile of stuff would fit in the boot of the car, it could go. I hauled the bags outside and the boot of my old Focus swallowed them easily.

The first thing I noticed in England was all the traffic. Apparently there are 30 million vehicles on the roads there. This makes normal driving extremely stressful; during peak times it becomes overwhelming and brutal. When I lived there I never thought about all the stress I was absorbing every day (such is the power of normalisation). Irish roads are so relaxed in comparison.

England has many attractive and intriguing places to visit of course (travelling between them is the tough bit). I was using a guidebook to historical sites written by Eric Newby in 1968 and particularly enjoyed Stonehenge (after bouncing on Jeremy Deller's version, I just had to go again), The Square and Compass in Worth Matravers (a Dorset cider-house with its own archaeological museum), Stourhead (the landscape gardens, lake and exotic follies), Clifton Suspension Bridge (aesthetic engineering), The Backstage Tour of the new RSC theatre (almost in the round), Ilam and Thor's Cave in the White Peak (most atmospheric, despite the heavy rain), My Bespoke Tour of Radical Nottingham (that started and finished beside the statue of Brian Clough) and the splendid Babington Chantry in Kingston upon Soar.

It was great to catch up with lots of people who hadn't seen me since I was ill. I offered my thanks for all the support they'd given me (last year in particular) and I gave each of them an Ash seedling from my garden. Everyone said that I looked very well. I responded that I felt very well - physically recovered, fairly fit (20 pounds lighter) and mentally pretty good. Several later admitted they feared they would find me somewhat incapacitated, and were very pleased to encounter the opposite. I was given great hospitality wherever I went.

Some of the friends I caught up with I hadn't seen for many years. There was lots of reminiscing and taking stock. Their children had grown up and were now away at college. I had undergone immense change over the past decade. We were reconnecting through and beyond who we used to be.

And my anxieties? Well, they evaporated. I felt pretty relaxed wherever I was and I never needed my comfort food (despite losing a filling en route). I also managed some very tough days of travelling (longest 13 hours) and drove 1200 miles in total.

My envelope was extended and I realised that I was much more robust than I thought I was. Thanks again to my friends and family for all your help.

 

Nephew Andy and his son Will.

 

 

Lance Armstrong

Today's revelations are truly shocking. The case against Lance Armstrong as a serial doper seems to be overwhelming. And he has chosen not to contest the allegations.

Lance's story of his recovery from cancer (with a bad prognosis) to become a professional cyclist again and then to achieve success in the Tour de France meant a great deal to me. I read 'It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life' as I was recovering from cancer. And Lance's story became a talisman to me. I empathised with his ordeal of treatment and I was enthused by his story of recovery and success.

In 'It's Not About the Bike' Lance describes his path from cancer patient to winner of the Tour as not just a victory of determination and courage, but as a triumph of self-knowledge and reconstruction. At the core of his journey is an intense personal transition (wrought by the ordeal of cancer) and through this renewed understanding of himself (strengths and limitations) he became a better person and a better cyclist: better able to focus, do the hard work, make the right strategic choices and ultimately to succeed.

All cancer patients know that story. How you are suddenly removed from the life you lived before. How all the things that used to make sense to you are changed. And how all you can do is to feel your way forward, rebuilding yourself and your life with whatever resources you can find.

Lance's story offered me hope at a very dark time.

Since I read his book I've made huge strides on my own journey. I know myself better than I ever did before. I've become more fully myself, more complete, more self-assured and more capable.

I will never ride the Tour de France. But I think I'm ready for whatever may come.

After the severity of his illness, it was a magnificent achievement for Lance to finish the Tour - let alone to win it seven times. I also recognise that Lance appears to have done what most other professional cyclists were then doing (taking banned substances to improve their performance), as many have since confessed.

But I still feel hurt and betrayed because my talisman turns out to be tarnished.