A Flooded Meerkat

Before I get into the main business of today’s entry I will tell you that I managed five press-ups yesterday and a briskish walk around the block in the warm autumn breeze today. As my brother gently reminded me yesterday, a month ago I was receiving potentially lethal doses of chemo and two weeks ago I was discharged from hospital. These are still early days.

Today I received a visit from a valued friend and among other things we brainstormed an interesting aspect of a novel he is writing. He also lent me a really tremendous vampire movie to watch, called Let Me In, which is based on a Swedish novel and is an American remake of a Swedish movie of the same. While the film’s horror was graphic enough, much of the story-telling was suggestive, based on out-of-focus images, distant camera-work and mass media of the early 1980s playing in the background. As well as being an interesting variation on well-worn vampire themes, the story was also a powerful allegory of the difficulties of adolescence. Catch it if you can, even though Mark Kermode didn’t like it, regarding it as a pointless remake. My friend in turn left weighed down with borrowed Tintin books, one of which, Tintin in Tibet, is one of my oldest possessions, dating back to the early 1960s.

Well, what of the main business? A bit of fun really, prompted by a text message from my friend before he came round, in which he said that he had been unable to find the word “gnosistic”, used in yesterday’s entry, in Chambers’ Dictionary. Therefore, as he put it, the word could not exist, adding “simples!”, the catchphrase used, with a Russian accent, by the supposedly loveable meerkats—or, rather, “meerkats”—featured in the long-running advertising campaign by the insurance comparison site comparethemarket.com. Animated “meerkats” are used to advertise the site, the premise being that they inhabit a land called Meerkovo, somewhere presumably once within the Evil Soviet Empire, where their formerly peaceful lives have been disrupted by numerous enquiries from people looking for cheap insurance and confusing the insurance site with their own web presence, maintained at comparethemeerkat.com (and further developed with games and animations at meerkovo.com). Thus are writ large two great English vices: anthropomorphism and over-reliance in the mass media on bad puns. The cuddly denizens of Meerkovo use the broken English of “simples” to point up how elementary is the difference between the two words “market” and “meerkat”, hoping thereby to educate the Great British Public into accurate surfing so that they can get back to peaceful life.

Having time on my hands and a web-enabled computer on my lap I wondered how meerkats had come to be in such a position in popular consciousness. The following seemed to be the significant steps along the way…

Meerkats (Afrikaans for "marsh cat") in their natural habitat, southern Africa (i.e. not within the former Evil Empire).
Related to the mongoose, they first came to popular notice in UK wildlife documentaries about thirty years ago and immediately appealed because of their habit of striking this alert pose in groups (they are sociable animals).
Hey, they are almost human!

Transitional phase, aka "the rot setting in".
Meerkats can use human technology!

As often Disney is implicated.
Timon the meerkat and his friend Pumbaa the warthog from The Lion King (1994).

All is now lost, broken English and all.
I wonder how real meerkats are faring…

I am not a Gnostic

Today a kind friend in the States emailed me an unusual document, a set of Christian liturgical texts dating from between 100 and 200 AD. Actually we would increasingly say “100 and 200 CE”, “CE” being an abbreviation going back several centuries and meaning either “Common Era” or “Christian Era” but now, as Wikipedia puts it “Since the later 20th century…popularised in academic and scientific publications, and more generally by publishers emphasising secularism or sensitivity to non-Christians”.

These psalm-like pieces (42 in number, although the second has never been found) were discovered by a scholar in an old manuscript he had lying around in the early 20^th century and are known as “The Odes of Solomon”, although they have nothing to do with that ancient king. Some have seen in them traces of the several heresies, known collectively as Gnosticism, that were such a plague to Saint Paul in the early days of the Christian Church. In fact there is little trace of gnostic belief in the texts, which generally seem quite orthodox and in line with the teachings of St John set out in the New Testament. Why am I telling you this? Well, one comment I read suggested that the Odes are not gnostic but could be considered gnosistic, a word whose meaning I have tried in vain to find. The definition search however brought up a link to this blog, written by an Anglican priest who—as it happens—has just left the parish in which we live and who is a scholar of Syriac. I found the article featured very interesting in view of our frequent, post-9/11, perception of Islam as the religion of gun-toting fundamentalist fanatics. In short, I felt rebuked for those times when I have been blinkered in my perceptions.

I then turned my mind to the hydra that is Gnosticism and did a bit more reading, trying to find out why the Church has taken such a hostile view of it over the centuries. I think the essence of difference lies in two main beliefs of Gnosticism: that salvation is a form of esoteric enlightenment attainable through a range of practices and that the physical world is the creation of a lesser deity and to be viewed with suspicion, if not with contempt. The first does not seem to me to fit with the Jesus I find in the New Testament, whose teaching was for all, the learned and the simple alike, and whose ministry was hostile to esoteric forms of spirituality reserved to a privileged few. The second is an example of dualism, which I believe to be alien to an integrated understanding of ourselves as psycho-physical beings and to be the fruit of the mind dissociating itself from the body.

Gnostics still exist, although they dropped off the map for a few centuries. I am not tempted to join them. A wise friend, concerned for my welfare, once cautioned me at a particularly unhappy time of my life against returning to Christian faith, saying that religion was “wrapping paper” imposed on reality; “nasty wrapping paper” to be specific. I respect this view more than I can easily express and still use the “wrapping paper test” when it seems that a concocted scheme might be obscuring reality. The notion of wrapping paper however presupposes a gift and I have to say that Christianity still appears to me to give the best chance to us of meeting the Giver. Religion is dead; faith is a different matter.

Why?

What is up with Nationwide Building Society? As mentioned in the last entry, I had to go into the local branch today to make a payment to my French bank account (a “SWIFT payment”), whereas I used to be able to do this online.

Today I filled out the details of the payment and the receiving bank, which are quite lengthy, on a form to print off from my own computer. I then took said form to the branch, where the cashier duplicated my work by filling out a fresh form for his supervisor to sign, while all the time a queue of dissatisfied fellow customers built up behind me as far as the entrance. Progress? I suggest not.

The round trip did at least give me some exercise, but left me exhausted for much of the rest of the day. I am sure I had more energy last week. Why?

Why too am I still itching all over? When is this blasted chemo going to worm its measly way out of my system? I know I should be grateful and in my more objective moments I am. I just wish treatment did not have to be so poisonous. One day it won’t be and that will be progress.

Thanks to all who have so far supported my friend John Penny in raising funds for WM research. There is £465 on the tab to date. www.justgiving.com/John-Penny

Ten Years On

I was not going to mention Nine Eleven, the airwaves having been so full of comment, reminiscence, commemoration, images. I can see a place for commemoration: the act, its scale, the suffering, the aftermath all demand it of our human nature. What come as relatively new, of course, to the human condition are media overkill and the economic imperative of selling newspapers.

It was interesting listening to Tony Blair being grilled by John Humphrys for half an hour yesterday morning. Normally I find Humphrys an ordeal to listen to but, given an important subject, he often rises to the occasion. Our tangerine-hued former PM still asserts that Iraq was an appropriate target after the destruction of The Twin Towers. Having been persuaded by the WMD argument at the time, I initially supported the invasion of Iraq but it is far from clear now that Iraq was relevant to the conflict provoked by the events of 9/11. Afghanistan? More pertinent it still seems to me as a crucible of fundamentalist terrorism, in spite of the errors and omissions of our campaigns there and the attempts to build and support civil government. 

How wonderful it would be if guns were not used, as violence and trauma feeds violence and further trauma. I have to admit however that I believe we are in a war. This was my gut reaction on learning of the Twin Towers ten years ago: that the flying of hijacked planes into key targets was a declaration of war. A new form of hostilities certainly, but war nonetheless. To call such acts of terrorism criminal both trivialises them and imposes on us means of dealing with them and protecting ourselves that are insufficient to the task, whatever the failings of military approaches on their own. Criminality is indeed involved, but surely we are entitled to call the actions of our own 7/7 bombers treasonable also?

I have spent much of today resting, either in bed or on the sofa. I have just had no get-up-and-go, although I have managed to feed the right mix of ingredients into the breadmaker to produce a loaf and to install anti-virus software on our daughter’s new computer. Every day brings some modest achievement. Tomorrow I will have to drag myself to the building society to send some dough (the financial kind) to France, since Nationwide no longer seems to allow one to deal with such direct payments online.

A friend sent me a kind email today and attached a couple of photos from his recent family holiday on the island of Iona. Here’s one.

Iona Abbey.
Tony Blair's predecessor as Leader of the Labour Party, is buried on Iona, which he loved. His epitaph is a  quotation from Alexander Pope: "An honest man's the noblest work of God".
How different history might have been if his heart had not given out. Would we have invaded Iraq?

Fringe Benefits

I suppose that one benefit of having to make two trips to the computer repairers today is that I am getting a reasonable quantity of exercise for the present stage of my recovery.

My computer is now back on my lap and order is restored.

Less successful was my attempt to reach a builder in Brittany that we have used before. It seems that the good man has moved house, as the message on the answerphone was not in his name at all. We may have to try and find someone else to fix a trying problem at our house. At least I now have a bit of extra time in which to perfect the following in French: “I need work on my chimney to prevent starlings getting trapped in the wood-burning stove”. I kid you not: when we took the house out of mothballs at the start of this summer, there were nine stiff avian corpses awaiting removal. Not a nice way to go.

Bad Apple

As regular readers here will know, I am a fan of things Apple. I remain so, but like many loves, this one is under severe trial just at the moment.

I thought everything was fine with my laptop after I collected it from repair yesterday, but today it has thrown several wobblies and I am currently resisting the urge to throw it on the floor and stamp on it. At this point we start applying the pathetic fallacy and attributing blame to an inanimate machine. The thing about computers is that they promise gold and often deliver mud, a bit like people, so perhaps we are not altogether wide of the mark in attributing some, at least rudimentary, personality to them.

The rot started with downloading a new version of iTunes, which then consistently crashed on launch. I was going down the road anyway to pick up my daughter's bike from servicing and the fitting of new mudguards and so the laptop came on the journey as the computer repairers are just a stone's throw (or the irate hurling of a laptop) away from the bike shop. The repairers suggested a fresh install of iTunes. Once home I tried this and all was well until I plugged in my phone to sync its data. iTunes now will not load at all and has since been followed by my email programme and two other applications, one of which stores a copy of this blog.

Feels like the whole thing is folding on me again and so we will be back to the geeks tomorrow. Until then, the machine is on the naughty step.

Shame they can't fix my rash as well, which has not yet completely gone and which itches like mad on occasions, particularly when I am stressed, like, er, now...

First Anniversary

Today marks one year from my initial diagnosis with Waldenström’s macroglobulinaemia, a name that took me a week to learn without my tongue dropping off. It is interesting to look back over the modest passage of time and realise just how much I have been through since the initial shock and disbelief that I had a form of cancer, albeit a relatively manageable one. It would have been doubly, triply unbearable had I been able to see all at once what the disease would lead me to experience over this time, underlining the importance of the wise injunction to live each day at a time: “give us this day our daily bread” as the Lord’s Prayer has it.

Our daily bread (yum!)
The Greek of the Sermon on the Mount is subtle: "epiousios", normally translated "daily", more accurately means "sufficient for the coming day", suggesting that God gives us each day what He knows we will need for that day.

I was up reasonably early ready to welcome Father Milligan, the vicar and old friend with whom I work, who was going to make a pastoral (and friendly) visit. It was so good to see him and we shared coffee and news of recent weeks with each other, including talk of what was being found under the floor of one of our churches. Watch this space…

It was then time to do some food shopping with my daughter, deliver her bike for servicing and collect my computer from repair. The cost of repair was less than originally estimated and I have been reunited with my faithful laptop. After reflecting that we would like to buy up the whole of Waitrose and its foody delights, we contented ourselves with a fairly modest selection from its shelves and made our way slowly home, my pace more closely matched to my daughter’s these days, not racing ahead as I normally do.

In the afternoon my brother came over and we spent quite a bit of time planning the installation of a window to let more light into the main room of our little house in Brittany. All in all my most active day yet. Will I pay for it tomorrow?

Our little haven...

...but the ground floor could use more light.