Be in my broadcast when this is over
Summer's over, her lucky escape, dose three, time travel backwards
Saturday afternoon, summer in the city and a solo afternoon idly spent on the laptop in a local pub garden. There are three local festivals on this weekend which seem to have removed the casual crowds from The Lazy Dog. Flickering gleams of the season’s brightest sunlight are pushing all the way through, helping to give today a little edge of magic.
Computer open, lots of words written about clouds. The phrase ‘a cloud, a blossom’ has hung over these posts since the first proper piece went online (hence this Substack page’s slightly oblique URL). It was how I viewed the tumour in my head from first seeing it on a contrast-fed MRI scan back in April 2024 - a glowing white shape hovering inside all the known space of the brain. That cloud became the focal point of so much of last year, the question at the heart of it all. How the hell can we get rid of the damn thing?
In metaphor and in life, clouds represent change and - when gathering en masse - that’s rarely good change. The writing is about random changes that happen without warning and - with one mighty leap sideways thanks to some blue sky thinking - a lot about how a cloud’s morphing form somehow represents us moving through our community while we unknowingly become ill.
It’s utter gibberish, obviously.
Paragraphs and paragraphs of text that don’t really make any sense - the usual mush of dreamy, drifty, pretentious cobblers that just seems to fall so easily off my fingers when I don’t have any clear direction in my head. The sun’s shining and I’m typing, hoping all the time that I can try to pull all of this into some kind of shape before I nervously press send on Tuesday morning. Maybe a glut of last minute edits and slashes will help form this dross into a workable narrative. Think, think, think. There’s got to be something there.
And then, an ambulance arrives.
Two medics walk into the pub garden with a stack of handheld machinery. Those magical bits of gear are here specifically for an old lady who is sat at the back of the garden. The medics’ specific purpose on this sunny Saturday is to keep her in the land of the living for another day.
The lady and her extended family had walked in less than ten minutes before and taken seats in the far end of the garden. Someone had then been sent off to the bar to really smooth things out with alcohol. Before that person had even made it through the pub, the lady slowed down and her communications shut off. Non-verbal and non-reactive, to her family it looked exactly like she was having a stroke. The person who had gone to the bar for drinks asks the pub if they can ring for help as things suddenly weren’t looking positive out the back.
I sit, a little dumbstruck contemplating the clouds, the progression of illness, the lady at the back of the pub and the how the hell do any of us ever really know what’s going on when I get a text from a friend telling me a medical situation they are in suddenly looks uglier, heavier than it previously had. It’s anti-weather, all colour fading from a positive forecast.
Bass drums heavy at nearby festivals. Acid loops tweaking, intensity levels rising. Thump thump thump.
Clouds are reshaping everything around us, just like clouds always do, oblivious to their own place in the scheme of things. Sat here on a summer’s afternoon, two clouds above me have just gotten shades darker. Pitched down, pitch black, filled with rain and readying to burst over everything on a late summer’s day. One cloud is a friend and the other is someone who I’ve only crossed paths with in a pub garden, someone who came in hoping for a beer that might make the day float by a little easier. This feels like that common weirdness that envelopes the best Flaming Lips songs. Gleeful melodies sound like giddy bliss before lyrics arrive, chewing bad acid. Bleakness creeps in around the edges that forces the musical centre to warp itself right out of shape. Everyone you know, someday, will die.
Sometime later, the lady in the pub garden walked out. Close call, warning sign, whatever - her cloud lightened, the black dissipated into greys and then nothing. She left the pub on her own two feet and the ambulance left without offering a red-light breaking speed trip to the local hospital. Their response time between call and arrival was miraculous - easily inside of five minutes. If needed, consider that one more unarguable advert from me for the NHS and a very large glass raised to the staff at the pub who reacted calmly, quickly and with love and care (just to be clear - I talked to pub staff about this at length later the same day so wrote this piece knowing the lady in the garden had pulled through).
I’m writing this knowing less about my friend since last week’s message. That’s something I’ll try to change this week. I’m hoping that the immense rain storm cycling around their head can be softened, that there’s hope or luck or some kind of positive energy that can help lift a mate who needs decent cloud cover a lot more than I do right now.
Summer really comes to an end for me this week as I go back onto the poison for ten days. My iPhone is telling me it’s going to rain for most of that time, which feels about right. The first dose of chemotherapy treatment was hard work, the second much, much harder. There’s a plan for iron rich foods at every mealtime but it ends up as a diet of white toast and butter and nothing else. I’ve been told previously by the hospital that chemotherapy drugs can produce different reactions in one’s body. A common internal reaction is something along the lines of first dose - ‘woah, not sure what’s going on here, lad’; second dose - ‘what the fuck are you doing to me man, this shit is poison, this is an actual horrorshow.’ Details of the third dose were not accurately mapped out by nursing staff in these scenarios.
Summer having been the season where watching and listening becomes a bit skewed based on what the weather is doing outside, there’s not a lot getting dug into at the moment. That said, and with the sofa in mind when it’s been too hot to sit outside, I’ve been loving Alien Earth. Apologies to anyone who read a piece by me in the Heavenly zine where I rattled on about watching trailers for these shows and not the actual programmes, this has been brilliant so far. Synthetic humans, crazed eyeball beasts from the outer edges of space, miserable AI running trillionaire sods… this is very much pushing my buttons right now, regardless of what I wrote previously - never listen to me, part 23853290.
Music wise, poison due and it’s been loudness and bleakness all the way. I’ve been pushing my deafness limits with Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf (pure coincidence, unless the band knew my condition when they ramped up the heaviness over two decades ago). Watching footage of them back in that era, playing mid-afternoon at a Belgian festival, it’s incredible that they kept it together in the years since - there’s exiles and there’s deaths waiting to happen. And there’s somehow still a band at the heart of it that sound like they’ve stepped out of Fallout, playing the soundtrack to the armageddon with an unrepentant groove.
I’ve been playing Thomas Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless, specifically the tracks Windpower and Airwaves. Somehow they each manage to exist outside of the time they were made in - a brittle and miserable early 1980s. They’re odd and progressive and modern sounding. I’ve read about Dolby’s vision for the record which he saw as “moving into a sort of post-apocalyptic reverie, a parallel universe… (that imagined) how London might have turned out if one of the many threatened invasions of our island had been successful.” Listening now, it’s strange to hear a renowned producer’s debut album - one made on massively expensive yet now hugely primitive sampling machines - sound like a crossing point between the ’80s and now. It sits between the Britain of the Thatcher-era and the Britain of grim street corner racism. This last weekend has been a total mess here - the worst of the worst getting blanket media coverage across all papers with gatherings of thirty or forty flag carrying subnormals stood protesting around a hotel. These are the people invading our culture, and they were here moaning away all along, gaining automatic cover pieces for their minuscule gatherings while peaceful protests and carnivals and Pride marches each effortlessly gather tens of thousands of people and don’t warrant mentions. It’s upside down, all the time and our media seems to revel in all the awfulness these people promote. So, I’m not sure why these tracks have resonated more now than when my brother bought them when they came out over forty years ago. Glowing nostalgia for then meets modern day miserable realism maybe. Or perhaps it’s just the rapid approach of dose three driving me slowly crazy. Who knows.