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In addition, he somehow arranged his life to accommodate our needs and this involved his discovery of a new ability to give and receive great affection. I look back on all this and feel huge admiration for him.
There is a small black-and-white picture of my father with a large, leggy child, who must be me, enveloped in his lap. Both of us are asleep. This picture is most unusual for its time. Post-war men, on the whole, had been brought up by Victorian fathers and simply did not know how to show their sons such a degree of
love and ki...
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even without the twenty or more cigarettes I smoked each day. I wasn’t the only smoker, of course. My colleagues smoked, and we worked in a perpetual blue haze. At home, Jen smoked. On the Isle of Man, her parents smoked. Everywhere, our friends smoked. In 1992 we all smoked, we smoked in pubs and restaurants, we smoked on trains, at our desks and on the bus. We knew it was bad for us, we knew that cigarettes contained over 4,000 constituents, many of which are toxic, from hydrogen cyanide to cadmium to benzopyrene, but we put up with all that for just one ingredient: nicotine. So far, we’d
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Pumping blood through damaged lungs is hard work for the heart, and I hoped that the right side of my heart was not already enlarged by struggling with this extra burden. As for its left side, I knew that, if I couldn’t learn to control my reaction to stress, then
my blood pressure would rise and my left ventricle would thicken trying to cope. The heart is an organ one can hold neatly in the palm of one’s hand. So small but so steady, a little fist, clenching and unclenching seventy times a minute, day and night, year after year, 30 billion times over a lifespan. A faithful friend. Until it stops. It was down to me to repay its fidelity by managing my diet, exercise, smoking and stress levels. Just as I knew I should give my liver a rest sometimes from alcohol if I wanted it to carry out its magical repair work on itself.
