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I’ve been watching the first couple of episodes of Into the West, and enjoying it in a guarded way. I find the bits with the settlers deeply dull, but I’m very interested in the parts of the story concerning the Lakota. I don’t know how historically accurate any of it is, but Steven Spielberg seems to have managed a fairly balanced view of both sides so far. I’m pleased that they chose to have the Native American tribes speaking their own languages (though I’m in no position to say how authentic either the language or pronunciation is), but I do wish that they wouldn’t make the translations for the sub-titles so stilted. They sound like my bad Latin translations, and I keep wincing in case ‘White Man speak with forked tongue’ pops up. I can imagine that Lakota language used in ceremonies or rituals might be quite formal, but surely family members didn’t speak to one another in such a telegraphic way?

Anyway, it has reminded me of how obsessed I was with Native American tribes when I was little. I think it was in primary school that I first learned about the Plains tribes, and I thought they were wonderful. I was such a tomboy that I couldn’t imagine a better life than galloping over the wide prairie in buckskin and feathers and living in a tipi, never thinking in my innocence that my life might not have been quite like that as a female Lakota or Cheyenne. For that matter, I didn’t think much about the hardship involved at all, but I suppose I can be excused because I was only six or seven at the time. I want you to take my tender age into consideration when I tell you the rest of the story.

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Wound healing is a pretty amazing thing. I’m a biologist, so I know how it works¹, but I still find it fascinating. Four weeks ago, I had a relatively large (but very neat) cut through my body wall, something that ought to be fairly catastrophic — there’s a reason we have all those layers of skin, after all. But now I just have a red scar, and the skin has knitted itself together nicely. That part of the procedure was more or less the handiwork of my body’s own processes, without much modern medical intervention. All that is needed is some way of temporarily keeping the edges of the wound together (modern surgical clips, stitches, thorns, soldier ant mandibles, or whatever), and your body does the rest.

I was thinking about this yesterday while watching a couple of plumbers trying to fix my leaking radiator pipe. Why can’t we design domestic pipework to heal itself of leaks, like a scab forming over a wound? We could provide the equivalent of a temporary plaster over the hole to slow the flow, then the pipe could gradually seal itself. In this case, the plumbers who originally installed the pipes couldn’t even get basic plumbing right, let alone advanced self-healing. The guys yesterday had to open up the wall a bit to find a sound bit of pipe to form the new joint with, and discovered that a) the plastic piping that’s supposed to protect the copper pipes from corrosion caused by the plaster stopped half way down the wall, and b) they hadn’t actually bothered to solder the upper joint — it was just slotted together, which goes some way to explaining why it was leaking.

¹ …she writes, desperately trying to recall the details of that lecture many years ago in which the process was explained. It would be more accurate to say that I know roughly how it works. ↑

I’m beginning to think that wild bird food is one of the best value entertainment purchases around. In our old house, we had a bird feeder, but got a pitiful number and variety of birds visiting it, for reasons that still aren’t particularly clear. In our new house, the situation is completely different, and we find it hard to keep up with the ravenous demands of the avian residents of our garden. Yesterday I was just gazing out of the window (something I’ve had the luxury of doing while on sick leave), delighting in the acrobatic show that the blue tits, great tits, coal tits, long tailed tits, house sparrows, blackbirds, robins and dunnocks were putting on. All of the trees and shrubs around our garden were alive with birds, and occasionally a blue tit would fly up to the guttering just above the window I was looking out of, flip upside down in midair, and cling on with its feet while pecking at insects, giving me a sidelong glance at the same time.

It’s fantastic entertainment, and about a million times better than daytime TV.

Last Tuesday morning, I was waiting in a wheelchair for a scan. I’d had a lot of pain in the night, and had been given a strong painkiller, so I felt fogged and dizzy, and worried about what the scan was going to show. I’d been admitted to hospital at the last minute, so I wasn’t really fully prepared and had to borrow one of those awful, open-backed hospital gowns, and had no slippers or bathrobe. In a very unusual lapse of consideration, the porter had brought me down to the radiology waiting room as I was, and had parked me by the reception desk, where I sat trying to pull the skimpy gown over my knees and hide the catheter bag behind my calves. I felt like a battered and unloved Ford Fiesta waiting on a garage forecourt for a service.

I started to feel rather sorry for myself.

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Well, last week was—-how can I put it?—-interesting. I apologise for the tumbleweed blowing around this blog for a week or more, but last Sunday, my aforementioned medical problem went from painful and annoying to emergency status. In enormous pain, I did something that I’ve never done before; I called the out-of-hours GP service. The on-call GP I saw was very sympathetic, and could see that I was in enormous pain, but said that there wasn’t much he could do for me, and I had to try to get an appointment with a consultant as soon as possible via my GP. Anyway, after much ringing around on the part of my GP, and a lot of anxious waiting on my part, I was fitted in at a clinic. When they realised what was happening, I was admitted to hospital right away. I’ve never been in hospital before (I’ve been very lucky), but I just felt incredibly relieved that at last something was going to get done.

So, I was hooked up to a series of tubes (no, not the Internets, unfortunately) for a day, then fitted in for surgery the following day. I was discharged yesterday with a souvenir 15 cm incision, decorated with alarmingly gothic-looking surgical clips (Hellraiser goes to Office World) that I’m hoping to pass off as a duelling scar¹. I’m incredibly sore (I never appreciated how much you use your abdominal region to do everything), weak and very tired, but relieved as anything that the worst is over, and that I still have all my internal organs in their rightful places.

I’ll probably write more about the experience later when I’ve got some energy back, but here are a few thoughts:

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This may look like a perfectly ordinary coaxial socket, but it represents an enormous amount of pride and achievement on my part. When we moved into our house, there was an existing TV aerial in the loft, but it wasn’t particularly good for Freeview reception. So, sweating copiously in the sauna-like atmosphere of the loft, I wired in a new aerial that was more suitable for digital reception. I was quite proud of that, but I wasn’t going to stop there. In the office, we have our eyeTV hooked up to the iMac, and it was still using the rather pathetic indoor aerial which wasn’t really up to the job of getting a reliable signal, so I wanted to split the signal from the new loft aerial and run a cable down to the office.

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It should be fairly clear from the image at the top of this page that I’m very fond of bats, both megachiroptera (fruit bats) and microchiroptera (insectivorous bats). Not only are they flying mammals, which is a great start, but the micro bats also eat biting insects which would otherwise eat me, which endears them to me hugely. If all that wasn’t enough, they are also furry, squeaky and cute. I’m labouring these points, because you’d probably otherwise get the impression from the following paragraphs that I hate bats.

During our stay in the Pantanal, we had to move rooms because of a booking confusion. The hotel rooms were wooden, two-story cabins, and we moved from a ground floor¹ room to a top floor one, which had an open space above it and to each side, under the eaves. It only took a few minutes of listening to a lot of squeaking, scrabbling and batty scrambling around². And then there was the smell. No mammalian urine (as far as I know—-I haven’t done a thorough survey) smells exactly fragrant, but bat pee is particularly musky and lingering, and there was a very distinct whiff of it, both inside and outside our room. When you’re getting up at 5am in the dark, an all-pervading atmosphere of bat pee doesn’t improve the experience.

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In the centre of Birmingham, I overheard this exchange between a mother and her 5 or six year old daughter:

Mum: …and then we’ll go to the Library. Daughter (bouncing up and down with excitement): Yay! I love going to the library! Yippee!

Talk about the perfect kid.

On the subject of libraries, we now have a library literally four doors down from our house. It’s pretty tiny, and has somewhat eccentric opening hours, but… a library! Practically on our doorstep! Better still, you can reserve any book in the entire Birmingham library system online, and have it delivered to your local library.

Mmmm. Books.

Well, we’re installed in our new house, and just beginning to emerge from the piles of boxes. We’ve put together more Ikea furniture than I care to think about, some of which went together nicely, and some which we had to battle with. Just don’t mention wardrobes to me for a while…

It’s been completely exhausting, stressful, and it seems to have gone on for quite a while. None of it was made any easier by my discovery (a few days before we were due to move) that I have a medical problem I didn’t know about. It’s fairly serious (though not life-threatening, as long as I do something about it promptly), but it might require surgery, and therefore has the potential to scupper various short and long-term plans. So, it’s been a fairly weird couple of weeks.

On the bright side, we have a lovely new house. It will take a little while before we get it exactly the way we like it, but it feels great to actually be able to make changes: something very new for us, because we’ve only rented before. In our old rented place, I had a tiny room for an office, which was very cramped with two computers in, faced a busy road and was rather gloomy. I now have a lovely large room (which doubles as a guest room with a sofa bed in it), and I’m looking out of the window now, while typing this, at little flocks of blue tits and sparrows foraging around in the trees that surround our garden. Better still, there’s enough room for two proper desks and chairs, so Mr. Bsag and I don’t have to fight for ownership of the only chair any more. We’ve also got a lovely little garden and conservatory, both of which are lovely to sit in in the evening and watch the sun go down with a cold beer or glass of wine. In fact, I might just have to go and do just that right now.

If any of you are waiting for an email reply, I’m gradually working through the backlog and will try to reply as soon as I can.

OK—-that’s it. I’m officially fed up of the hot weather. It would be fine if I could just laze around with a cool drink in my hand, but working, commuting and clearing out dusty shelves and cupboards is decidedly not fun in these kinds of temperatures.

All this week, my commute has been disrupted by bending or broken rails. Leaving aside the question of why Network Rail seems to use a metal with a melting point of 30 deg Celsius (perhaps Cadbury makes the rails for them at Bournville?), cramming a lot of hot, sticky and—-above all—-late commuters on to trains and platforms does not make for happy customers.

On Thursday, I abandoned the train at New Street Station because it was clear I wasn’t going to get much further very quickly, and tried to head out of the station to catch a bus. I left the platform by the escalators, and there were so many people on the concourse at the top, that there was a cartoon pile-up. People stepping off the escalator had nowhere to go but to crash into the backs of those in front of them. Ah, what fun!

Generally speaking, I’m a Reality TV hater. If I happen to pass through a channel showing Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrity Tank Driving, Life Laundry, How To Be Thin/Pretty/Young or any of their ilk, I hit the ‘next channel’ button with a little cry of distress. I’d rather watch paint dry.

But somehow I’ve got sucked into watching The Convent, and I’m finding it fascinating. I nearly got put off by the trailers in which the four women who were going to spend 40 days in the Convent of the Poor Clares in Arundel were portrayed as petulant, rebellious drama queens. I’m not sure that my opinion of them has changed greatly over the course of the series (though several of them seem to have quite serious psychological problems), but it’s well worth watching for nuns alone.

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I was going to write a post whingeing about various things (the ridiculously cold weather for the time of year, still having a cold—-basically, all cold related), but then I heard the blackbird, and now I don’t feel like complaining.

He was sitting at the very top of the fir tree in our garden, facing West. The sky was dramatically dark, and against the lowering clouds and his own black feathers, his beak was set ablaze by the setting sun. And he was singing. Gorgeous, bubbling, liquid gold notes dripping and splashing from his beak, cascading into the garden. Lazy, sweeping bass notes, trills and rolls and achingly sweet crescendos.

We were half way through our dinner, but I had to open the patio doors (despite the cold) and just sit and listen to him, watching his burning beak open wide to pour out light against the coming dark.

Now I know what so inspired Kate Bush.

I’ve had a really tough couple of weeks for one reason or another. It’s nothing major—-just the accumulation of a lot of marginally stressful things. So on Wednesday, I decided that instead of reading or listening to music on the train home, I would just quietly observe the world outside. It helped that it was a lovely day and even the air was shining. So what follows is a series of little snapshots of what I observed from the train.

A demolition grabber is in repose, resting its rusty steel forehead on the ground, neck curled after a giant’s meal of twisted metal girders and dusty concrete. It sleeps.

At Duddeston, the plants are waking after the winter, roiling over the platforms and tracks in great, green clouds. On the abandoned platform, an open book lies on its spine, pages riffling gently in the warm breeze.

The embankments are decorated with an indigo froth of bluebells, seeming to float slightly above the grass in the late afternoon light.

When I get off the train, the air is glittering with insects. Midges, lacewings and thunder flies make the air soupy and thick. If I were a filter feeder, I could strain the air, like a terrestrial whale eating plankton. My skin is constantly tickled by the legs and wings of lacewings, and warmed by the sun.

Over the course of the time that we’ve been looking after M, my parents’ cat, one thing I’ve noticed is how whole-heartedly cats do physical things. They might spend 90% of their day sleeping, but when they stretch, they really go for it. They arch their backs (the inspiration for the cat pose in yoga, of course) and seem to stretch out every single muscle fibre in a shuddering, eye and ear scrunching movement. And that’s it, back to sleep—-job done. Likewise, cats don’t have any truck with the politely-smothered yawn. They crack their jaws open, bare their teeth, stick out their tongue and really yawn.

It does you good just watching it, but it also reminds me that doing anything with conviction and commitment is a good thing. Yoga practice teaches the same thing, and the idea that you should always be conscious of your breath and every part of your body encourages you to experience the moment fully, rather than being half there and half not. Of course, it applies equally to any endeavour. When we are children, we tend to be very focussed on and absorbed by whatever we’re doing at the time, even if that focus doesn’t linger very long on any one thing, but as adults, our minds seem to be perpetually somewhere else, skipping ahead to the next thing.

So my Spring Resolution (I dislike making resolutions at the New Year because it’s so hard to keep them then) is to be more child/cat-like in my attention. If I’m doing something, I should be doing it, not half doing it.

I’ve been trying to find a really comfortable office chair for ages. I used to use one of those kneeling chairs, but found that the pressure on my knees was too much after a short period, even though the chair kept my back in a comfortable and natural position. Since we moved, I’ve been using our landlord’s standard office chair, but I don’t find it comfortable and my shoulders and back are beginning to suffer.

I came across the Bambach Saddle Seat, and really liked the idea. I used to ride when I was younger (with an enjoyable return to the saddle in Brazil), and I always found sitting in a saddle very comfortable and natural. I seem to automatically sit up straight in a saddle, with my shoulders relaxed and pushed back rather than rounded forwards. Of course, it could just be a conditioned response to all those years of my slightly frightening riding teacher barking “Sit up straight! Shoulders back! Chest out!” at me like a Drill Sergeant. So the Saddle Seat looked ideal, but I really didn’t have £400-plus that it costs.

Then I saw the T2000 Saddle Stool at Natural Living: it seemed to be a very similar design, lacking some of the adjustability of the Bambach Seat, and perhaps slightly less high quality in finish, but only £99 including delivery and VAT. I got some money for my birthday, so I ordered one; we’ll need a new office seat when/if we move house anyway. I’ve been really pleased with it. I felt immediately at home on it, and I find working on the computer so much more comfortable and natural. My shoulders and lower back in particular don’t complain now, and because of the way that you sit astride the stool, it doesn’t restrict the circulation at the back of your knees the way that standard office chairs do. Because there’s no back on the chair, your upper body is much more mobile, and I find myself twisting around to reach things behind me, which must be a good thing for the mobility of my back. It even seems to have improved my typing accuracy!

Above all, it’s just fun to mount your saddle when you get down to work. When I’m reading from the screen without typing, I’ve taken to resting my hands on the ‘pommel’ of the saddle, as if I’m surveying the herd out on the plains. If no-one’s around, I might even ‘gallop’ my saddle stool across the laminate yelling “Giddyup!”. I just wish I could get one for work too.