Them bones are me
TV eye, nothing at all, France birthday, have I locked the cat in
Saturday evening. Today I’ve just turned 55.
Sat in a rented apartment in Lille while the family all slept or scrolled, I’m absent-mindedly flicking through the channels to find something to watch. Birthday TV this year is a dizzying blur of beefy buttocks on the Winter Olympics — imagine a determined army of Flanderses bumping their ‘nothing at all’ chobbles right the way across northern Italy — or the dregs of a Wales game that showed a large flash of hope, the kind of bright spark moment destined to properly let you down just three minutes before the end.
The sweet sound of my wife lightly breathing, half an hour into an early evening battery recharge. The kids in their room, swapping YouTube clips with each other and endlessly giggling. The calmness all around me is making me dream that there’s an empty seat in a pub somewhere that’s been left free for me, somewhere that would allow me to ignore this terrible telly and get on with the raucous, fun stuff, like drinking and talking absolute cobblers.
A decade, or maybe two decades ago, birthdays were easy excuses to do anything. Meals, parties, pubs and clubs, all followed by a hole-up in some dive where the lights stayed on and the records spun until the last living soul dropped.
Now, they’re a long breath exhaled.
Your story has been extended and you’ve managed one more year. Thank God. Well done, you.
It’s a sign that life still passes and an indication that I’m still doing OK.
I’m not saying it’s easy to manage vertigo attacks that you can’t predict — tripwires pulled taut to stagger you when least expected — but you carry on, because what else are you going to do? Two mornings this week I’ve woken up in a spin, with an inability to walk in a straight line. If I could drive, I’d be no use in a roadside breath test — a five-foot stumble becomes some kind of wild mountain climb. It is an astonishingly annoying thing, this total lack of knowledge and control. There is no one to discuss this obnoxious situation with beyond my wife and kids, and I think they’ve heard enough from me. Sleep, sleep, scroll, scroll.
What causes these bloody blights? Tiredness, deafness, stress, boredom, the wind blowing the wrong way down the road we live on… any old bollocks seems to set one off. Today it came on after a bad night’s sleep. A meal, a couple of drinks, in bed by 11. Nothing terrible. Just a brain that decides it wants to cause you some pointless havoc, as if back in that after-hours dive in the old days.
Every year, birthdays come around, even if outside circumstances mean you’re not really ready for them.
Last year’s 54th was my introduction to radiotherapy. I begged for a different appointment, but medicine does what medicine needs to do, when it needs to do it. I lay on a flat bed in a hospital surgery and a man with a microwave moulded a piece of plastic to my face. This would be the only permanence of the project, other than — hopefully — enough radioactive beams fired into my head to destroy what was left of the tumour. Hard to quantify that without going into an MRI machine, though.
The mask had a sinister look, but only really as much threat as a two-bit villain from a cheap ’80s Spider-Man cartoon, always just one slung web away from a date with the NYPD. A trip to see Captain America: Brave New World afterwards felt like ascension after fasting all night and then being prodded for blood at 8am.
On my fiftieth, my wife gave me a very much-loved, indispensable Apple Watch. On my birthday this year, it packed up. The screen is now just a spinning white wheel — a symbol of a hunt for some kind of life, probably an afterlife rather than anything more impressive. The wheel spins, like the head of a screw furiously digging its way into the watch, an impression of helping out that ultimately means nothing. It’s just a bloody wheel spinning, isn’t it.
The watch’s demise means I can’t screw the system any more and create a reflection of what never actually happened. Push the fishing exercise button to pretend I’ve stood up ten more times than I have. Fluke the ‘move’ points with whatever programme decides to go easiest, when really I’ve just been sat on BlueSky for ten hours contemplating the whys and wherefores of a humdrum day working in my usual seat at the kitchen table at home.
Maybe the breakdown is some crazy god’s offer of freedom. Forget closing the three rings and actually get on with living your life, you idiot.
These routines are there to control everything — three rings to rule us. They create a terrible bind for a fragile mind, and I’ve been told many times in therapy that not only do behaviour patterns become addictive, whatever your worst nervous thought is, it will become a curse.
Did I shut the front door? Go back and check the front door. Take a photo of it shut to prove to yourself a few hours later that you did, in fact, shut it. Is the cat locked in? Poor cat — lock him in earlier tomorrow. Never let him out, much easier. Did you get back from the pub without stepping on the cracks between the paving stones? What’s the weather doing later? On and on, every day.
There are myriad cases of cognitive distortions arriving under the shadow of a brain tumour. One might face eye problems, headaches, nausea, addictions to gambling, or end up drinking too much. There might be swings of anger or apathy or even — God help me — major losses of inhibition (this is a side note saying a quiet prayer that changes to my mental health don’t end up making me become John Davidson on a night out at the BAFTAs).
My reality right now is that I have just turned 55. I’m pretty much all there in the head, but I go day to day with zero energy. Less than after the operation, less than during radiotherapy, less than the first few months on the chemo drugs. The brain is trying to keep up with the real world, but there’s a grim determination to show me who is boss. I might as well have a giant red flag waving over my head, just in case things go south on any given day. If I’m lucky, that might mean flattening things completely, mushing up all my thoughts in an angry spin cycle and sending me back to bed.
You know, back to bed doesn’t actually sound too bad from where I’m sat.
My wife has found a blissful serenity in the room next door, snoozing through this parade of bum cheeks on French TV and the grim reality of Wales snatching defeat from the jaws of victory at the 75-minute mark. The kids have found it too, via TikTok, Instagram stories, and a perma-scroll of the endless nameless.
Soon we’ll go out and see what Lille has to offer us on a Saturday night. The northern French have a large capacity for formidable beers. If I’m feeling daredevil, I might give one or two a go.
For now though, maybe I’ll put my head down on the sofa for a minute or two and let the day carry on without me.
That after-hours dive probably won’t even open for another few hours.
Underworld one week, Deftones in Birmingham the next, a half-term break in Lille… that glut of fun almost sounds like a complete recovery?
Well, not quite. Both of the gigs have been truly special occasions, and they’ve also been tests. Can this kind of thing be done when you’re low on power and your hearing is out of whack? Can you travel out of town, or out of the country, without causing yourself massive amounts of stress?
The answer to both questions is: sort of. At amazing live shows in distant venues, there were points where I became convinced the bands were playing out of tune. Then I remembered my hearing was so bust that I was the one with the frequency problem, not them. Travelling abroad was partly a dream (the Eurostar and the RER remain pretty much flawless) and partly incredibly hard (taking the kids to Disneyland Paris was phenomenal fun but a total blitz on the energy reserves).
That said, I’d do it all again next week.
Staying at home forever will send me mad eventually, and the hope and gonzo excitement of seeing a band hit the stage at full pelt is the kind of thing that makes days sunnier, happier. Travelling to a corner of France I’ve never been to before with family and friends is unbeatable — just best to avoid anything brewed locally, as it’s at monk-stunning levels, alcohol-wise. Those French brewers definitely know exactly how to get you properly pissed.
Birthday week feels like as good point as any to say thanks so much for reading these Scatterbrained pieces. Writing through illness and recovery has ended up as something of a lifeline — looking back at a mirror of the soul can be bracing but also helpful. These pieces have helped me answer questions about where I am and what’s going on in my head in real time. I’m not saying it’s a kind of therapy… but… all of it helps the head in the long run. They are also part of the routine I wrote about above — self-editing for the soul, a running commentary on the every day. A fourth ring needing to be closed. Without doing that on a regular basis, well… who knows where I’d be.
So this is me, raising a glass to you, and saying a massive thanks for reading and subscribing. One day we’ll have that pint together — all of us.
Mmm… properly pissed. Belated hoppy birthday to ya xx