Andrew MacLaren-Scott's Blog, page 24

My father, his mother, his father

Another old WW2 photo unearthed. My father who grew up fast between Normandy 1944 and Germany 1945, my grandfather, as a retired professional soldier, having served much of his time in Africa, spent WW2 in the Home Guard, aka "Dad's Army". Grandfather died before I was born. Grandmother made it to age 101, father to 78, and I am still going, meantime. I have not had to fight in a war, which is progress, I suppose; but ever since I was a child I have had to fight a perpetually ebbing and flowing battle against a deep sense of pointlessness and depression. Perhaps we need tangible physical fights to keep our minds from contemplating other things. My father and a pretty young girl he found in Edinburgh made me a few years after this photo was taken. Is it ungrateful to say that I have many times thought it would have been better had they not bothered? Grandmother seems to be managing a faint smile here, in the midst of patching up the mess made by fighting men. Her favourite saying was, "Every blade o' grass holds its own drop o' dew."

A slice of light between the clouds and the sea

Reminds me why I like this planet, despite many of the people, and the nasty microbes, and wild animals, and some more of the people, and some other people too...

No way in

I need to get in. I was supposed to get in. I could not get in. There is, apparently, possibly, a clue to the solution to a mystery in there, perhaps. It looks the part, on a dark cold night near the winter solstice, for the location of mysterious things. I will assume a misunderstanding, and try again. And if I do get in, I hope I get out.

Dreichinburgh

Into Edinburgh again for a conversational lunch on a wet and bleak day for which we Scots invented the word "dreich"; but it is still a good place to look at even with the sun in hiding and the cold rain dripping down your neck.

A nice view for a breakdown

I took this photo just after my left leg gave way, leaving me supporting myself with an arm on a fence while I hoped to recover and thinking - oh, still, what a lovely view to look at while I wait... I wonder if I will eventually make it back to the car; which I did, eventually. And apparently the reason for the mixture of numbness and pain, wrapping strangely in a wide band right around my knee, may actually be a nervously communicated combination of a tethered spinal cord associated with my congenital spina bifida occulta - I have known about that since an x-ray aged 30 and it is nowhere near as alarming as it sounds - and a possible minor herniated disc, all aggravated, but not caused by, my recent fall. Those are the possibilities and maybes that would be the good news. Other alternatives would not be so good. The treatment, for now, was described as "rest, watch and wait." There is no point in scans if I am not recommended for, or accepting of, surgery; and the advice is that surgery would not be a good plan, as it doesn't always go to plan, and can probably be avoided, unless things deteriorate rather than improve. Nobody is putting a scalpel near to my spinal cord unless things deteriorate significantly, be assured. And anyway, I have had such a crisis before, or at least a somewhat similar one, without the detailed speculative diagnosis offered this time, and was walking freely and golfing again not long after. Anyway, my arm is much better, and to earn a living as a writer and lecturer all I need be able to do is write, and talk. And I am writing this now while trying to stop repeatedly bending my neck downwards to initiate the weird sensation that is apparently, probably, caused by the fact that somewhere near the end of my spinal cord it is tethered to its casing rather than being able to slide up and down freely as it should. But when you try to stop doing something you tend to keep doing it, yes? The good news, if the offered diagnosis is really anywhere close to what the problem is, is that I will have had it for years; but age has a way of allowing such things to catch up with you, eventually. The crisis will subside, or may subside, apparently, before I do. Irritation, inflammation, swelling - just as they can come, so they can go. Apparently it was "a bloody stupid idea to walk all those miles yesterday, in the state you were in even before you started," according to the opinionated lady lying next to me, unimpressed by my view that I may have been able to "walk things off." But what does she know? I have a golf game on Craigie Hill booked for late next week, and have not entirely abandoned the hope that it may proceed. I have not told the lady that yet though. Meanwhile my leg is currently rather unwilling to bend at the knee, so I will let it sleep. Goodnight.

Chilly childish cheek

A 55 minute cold walk to collect the re-clutched car from the crazily inaccessible location of the repairer my insurer sent to rescue me, and still limping, and increasingly as the long march proceeded, from the effect on my left knee of the fall that broke my right arm three weeks ago; and as I held that fence to negotiate carefully a patch of ice, terrified of a further fall, a young girl following on from that group of schoolchildren seen here descending the stairs from the railway bridge ahead, said to me, "Oh bless your little cotton socks old fella, now watch you don't fall," but more in cheek rather than genuine concern, I felt. Thus I have become the butt of "old geezer" type remarks, of the sort, I admit, I have delivered myself, probably in the early seventies, perhaps not directly to the geezers concerned but certainly with a laugh amongst my young friends. Then I thought of what these children have ahead of them, probably, perhaps... the struggles, the challenges, the first times for so many new things, and I sighed, and felt glad that was all behind me, although two miles of icy roadway still lay ahead. I made it, little cotton socks and all, although darkness had descended by then.

Cold calling

Car clutch croaked, hence standing freezing in minus 10 degrees Celsius at a bus stop at 06.50, then bouncing in a bus for half an hour, then walking ten minutes, bouncing in another bus for fifteen minutes, cupping coffee to reheat bones, only to enter a room full of students, explain my plight, and hear them tell me that I shouldn't have bothered for they would not have minded at all if I had just cancelled the lecture on reduction-oxidation reactions and quantitative analysis. And I was so diligently trying not to disappoint them.

My father, the boy soldier

My daughter wanted to see her now long-dead grandfather as a soldier, so my brother scoured the old photographs. There are only two. The first taken in his mother's house aged 18, I presume. The other looks like a professional image probably taken a few years later. He arrived in Normandy in June 1944 and ended up in Germany, via Amsterdam. I know that he killed, and I know that he saw friends killed; yet when I asked him as an elderly man what his time in the war was like he said, "They were the best years of my life." I found this a very strange reply. I am not very fond of looking through old photos, whether of relatives or of myself. Too many unwelcome thoughts arise.

Cold water under the bridge

Another day dawns

Another early walk to make some young students' lives miserable for a few hours. Two mornings a week I do that. These mornings cheer me up. Was there not some old phrase along the lines of, "If you can bring misery into someone else's day then your own miserable day will not have been entirely wasted"? Maybe I just made that up.