running the gauntlet

A normal morning on Cotham Hill. The usual vans parked on the double yellows. In the background, a lorry is lurching forwards and backwards, manoeuvring into the narrow entrance of the builders' yard. Pedestrians seize their moment and dash through the gap when it offers itself. Nobody is helping the driver out by waving him back, watching his blind spots. It's about 10:30; the chaps at the yard are probably having a cup of tea.

Forty eight hours earlier, just about to the minute, a cyclist and her bike were crushed under a lorry at this exact spot. It was a bigger lorry, an articulated one; it was swinging into this same entrance when it caught her. Of the comments on the Bristol Evening Post website, a lot of them seem almost to gloat that a cyclist has been badly injured, assuming that she was doing something that she shouldn't have been doing, and reckoning that she'd got what was coming to her. The general attitude is: lorries are dangerous, and the drivers can't see very much from their cabs, so keep well clear or you've got no-one to blame except yourself.

As I commented on the website,

....it's the 'elephant in the room' thing. And it's not just an elephant, it's a visually-impaired elephant. And it's not in the room, it's on the streets.

When I worked on a ro-ro ferry, lorries were not allowed to move around unless under the supervision of crew members with hi-vis gear and radios. And yet it is apparently thought perfectly acceptable that an articulated lorry should be allowed to manoeuvre through one of the busiest parts of town without any sort of control or assistance.

rad graf

At Katie's school, Ther Kidz thought that it would be nice to have a graffiti wall. And, after due representation and consideration, the school agreed that a graffiti wall they should have.

So they employed a graffiti painter to come to the school and paint the graffiti wall with graffiti.

And here it is.

Katie did run past some of her fellow pupils the idea that maybe a graffiti wall should be a place for free expression. By... Ther Kidz.

"Oh, we'd only make a mess of it," one of them said.

finding a rhyme for 'antlers'

Quiet times here, as I recover from last week's surgery. I went to Kings Weston House yesterday. It's a fairly modest stately home, as stately homes go, and it looks out across council estates to the chemical plants of Avonmouth. I was gawping through the window and the woman at the desk inside beckoned me in, so I mustered John Terry, who had come along for the adventure, and we admired the staircase, and then saw this, which I, as a keen amateur ornithologist, recognised instantly as a Giant Irish Deer.

As he's been extinct for about 8000 years, I think it's a bit showy having hunting horns mounted next to him. Apparently he was a Souvenir Of Ireland.

a ward

Sometimes life throws something unexpected at you.

And sometimes life kind of swoops down out of the blue, plucks you up and whirls you away to an entirely unexpected place.

I woke up at 0100 on Tuesday with pain in my stomach. It got worse, and I started vomiting, which didn't ease the pain. And it got worse. And worse. So I checked the NHS Direct website for symptoms, and the closest match to what I was experiencing seemed to be in heart attack country and I though, "No, that's not a heart attack."

So I phoned up the number and described what was happening and the helpline person said "Go to hospital", and I thought how embarrassing it would be to turn up and find out it wasn't anything important.

And I also thought of my father sitting up all night suffering the symptoms of a stroke and not doing anything about it and how that contributed to shortening his life.

So we drove through the rain to the hospital (I didn't know how long this was going to take, and I didn't want to leave Katie on her own) and got there at about 0400. The A&E department had people hunched around outside smoking or sitting in the waiting area enveloped in their own personal miseries. We waited. I was writhing by now. We went through to an examination room and I was checked over, then given a hospital gown to put on and a tube in my arm, into which someone pumped morphine. It was by now fairly apparent that I wouldn't be going home soon.

I phoned Brendagh, and she came and rescued Katie.

As the day went on, I got x-rayed and ultrasounded. The ultrasound images showed that I had gallstones, and the gall bladder was apparently inflamed. It was explained that the usual procedure in cases like this is to remove the gall bladder. So I was put in the queue for emergency ops, and went onto NBM (nil by mouth), which is very thirsty work, especially after two days, let me tell you.

I settled into life on the ward, zonked on Tramodol. There were some nice folk there. People are often at their best when their worlds are being turned upside down, or they are working in that sort of place.

Meanwhile, out in the world, people were sorting things out, and after what must have been a miserable and worrying time for Katie, she was being looked after; and the car was collected, along with the parking ticket it had picked up; and a phone charger arrived and I was finally able to talk to people again, including Richard, who had been expecting me in Birmingham that evening for a reading event at the library theatre...

I was in a different theatre the next day...

And now I've got four little sticking plasters on my abdomen, where they put the various things into me. The nice surgeons explained that my aching shoulders were a result of them inflating my abdomen with CO2, to make it easier to tinker around in there, and I decided that, while I was very grateful to them for doing it, I wasn't sure I liked to hear about the precise ins and outs of it. Must have looked v funny, all inflated, though.

"So, how are you feeling?" they asked
"Pretty good, thank you. Ready to go home... no offence..."
"None taken," they said. Beds are at a premium in the hospital.

I said some fond farewells. And set off home. And collapsed into the Guild cafe when I realised I wasn't really up to walking.

And got rescued by Brendagh.

ghost

At the last tally, I know of three cyclists killed in Bristol this year. And ghost bikes have appeared in the city. If you haven't heard of them, ghost bikes are painted white overall and installed at the scene of a cycling death, as a memorial and a reminder that cyclists are vulnerable.

So I was a bit alarmed to spot this bike on Cotham Hill last night, as I hadn't heard of any new fatalities. But it turns out that it was put there by some students, to advertise their "Social Enterprise Project".

False alarm, then. Apparently, the bike is not white but sky blue, and symbolises 'aspiration and ethicality'. Still looks like a ghost bike to me. And, knowing the facts behind the appearance of the bike and nine others (thanks, Niall!), the thinking behind their installation seems at least muddled, and plain wrong. Fail!

in the bag

Lucy was asking "What's in your handbag?" so I've dug out this pic from a few years ago.

Contents:

PDA
Car keys for my old Ford Sierra
Keys for everything else
Moleskine sketchbook
Fineliner pens
Fruit drops
Hair gunk
Specs
Nurofen/Rennies/Rescue Remedy
Make-up stuff
Credit cards
Kipling bag
Mobile phone
Conkers
Gerber Multiplier
Tissues
Richard Beard's "Manly Pursuits"
Purse

Must get an up-to-date pic sometime...

our lady's well, Hempsted

I went to the Midlands by the old road on Sunday, along the A38 from Bristol to Gloucester and then to Tewkesbury. (After Tewkesbury I cheated and took the motorway, because it gets complicated after that). I wanted to look at Llanthony Secunda, the daughter establishment of Llanthony Priory, established on the outskirts of Gloucester when the monks evacuated from the Black Mountains during one of those periodical times of troubles-with-the-natives. But first I stopped at Hempsted, a village on a sort of extended island between the Severn and the Sharpness Canal, to look at a holy well. It's marked as Lady's Well on the OS map.


View Larger Map

It was a surprisingly peaceful spot; from the map, I'd been vaguely expecting something quite suburban. But the door on the west wall of the wellhouse was gated and locked, and the floor inside it was dry. Apparently the water had recently been channeled into a cattle trough in front of the structure, but there was no sign of it today. Though there is a cattle trough at the bottom of the hill, as you can see from the aerial photo.

There was much commotion from a large flock of jackdaws in a nearby row of trees; and to the north-east, great clouds of gulls and crows wheeling over a landfill site. But to the west the sun was declining over the Vale of Severn, a kestrel flew by, and a buzzard mewed.

I never did find Llanthony Secunda, because I got lost in some dispiriting industrial estate instead.