Icy water......

It's only when I get to work that I notice my 75 cl bottle of Volvic has an iceberg-like lump bobbing around in it. No wonder my hand was so bloody cold. Ernest Hemingway compared his writing to an iceberg - 5 % visible, 95% of it under the surface. He used very thick paper, you see....This explains the incantatory style he developed. "In the fall, my mate Paul, who's very tall, would run a stall. It was late in the the sprawl of fall in the stall with Paul and a tall Gaul that we'd meet in the hall with a tight pair of smalls and brawl. In the pall of the late fall in the hall we'd call on Paul and haul our shawls to the mall with a drawl till Paul got run in by a Pamplona bull and I topped myself with a shotgun, still owing Gertrude Stein 150 francs for a bar bill I ran up in 1922...." See, Incantatory, isn't it? But is there a new Hemingway out there (Wayne excepted, obviously)? William Leith? The hungry years: confessions of a food addict. Confessions of a cunt, more like. I walked in today, you see. 1 hour 10 minutes from Teddington to Osterley. Not bad at all for a physical wreck. Quicker than usual. Ticker worries prompted it. There's been a residual pain there for some time but that sensation is now sporadically bubbling up into what my hypocondriac psyche has already diagnosed as "a heart murmur". The pain could be many things - lingering, residual grief, general unhappiness brought about by recent commencement of my 42nd orbit of the sun, imminent cardiac arrest, indigestion.... It's become such a fixture that it is more noteworthy when - briefly and occasionally - it's discovered not to be there at all, as sometimes happens for a few minutes when "God in the i-pod" conjures up a particularly exhilarating three in a row (as happened this morning: Pulp - Something Changed & The Jam - Start & (and this was a stunning bit of sequencing from on high) straight into The Beatles - She Said, She Said). I'm no doctor but I do have enough of an acquaintance with the rules of general healthy living to know that the occasional walk into work alone will not transform me into "a fit person". It does, though, ease the feelings of guilt which will inevitably accompany that evening's 5-6 cans of el cheapo Primus premium Belgian lager. I should lay off the booze, I know, but the habit seems so ingrained that neither S. nor I can muster much resistance when, in total contradiction of that morning's 'no more booze' edict, one of us pipes up with the 'fancy a beer, darling?' mantra and watches the other fold like a wetwipe into the ensuing evening of brief jollity followed by sniping rows, bottom-lining into alcoholic torpor and early night. So, the heart remains heavy and the head is engulfed in a clammy fug for most of the day, a fug that only lifts - curiously enough - when the prospect of the next can of el cheapo Primus premium Belgian lager becomes an inevitability rather than a possibility. It's a hard life, but someone's got to live it. After Mum died, I used to think, 'oh well, at least I might have inherited more of Dad's iron constitution'. He was my genetic role model, I guess, and so the fact that he had turned 70 and he appeared to be in rude health most of the time and was still capable of ambling down to 'The Gun' and having a few pints became my justification for throwing the beers back and not doing what all my more sensible friends were doing - speed walking, cycling, running marathons (or, as the kids of today no doubt refer to it, running snickers) But then, five short months after his 70th, as we watched Man Utd surprisingly grind out a 1-0 win against hitherto unstoppable Chelsea and he complained of an indigestion-like sensation and pains under his arms, I pretty much knew things had changed for good. I was going to have to look after him from now on. Stubborn and doctor wary as he was, how was I going to even get him down to the surgery.....? No need. Two days later he was lying there, cold and peaceful, like a little boy curled up in his wintery bed. Progressive coronary disease. Perhaps the clear Cornish air will help...

© 2006 Swipe Enterprises