Monster

 A rainy day and a cold one.
I walked the dogs and left them cuddled up asleep and went to the Chester Storyhouse. I was too early so had pad Thai in the Market and ate it with chopsticks on one of the communal tables in the vast dining room


Monster is a carefully crafted study of the pain of feeling what you feel when you are a pre teen, and everything is not quite what you think it is. Seen in a long series of flashbacks taken from differing points of view from a succession of characters we watch single mother (Sakura Ando) trying to understand why her young son Minato ( Soya Kurosawa) is acting so strangely. She hears through the grapevine that his outwardly diffident teacher Mr Hori ( Eita Nagayami) is bullying him and as she battles with the grief stricken and obsequious headmistress ( Yuko Tanaka) it is suggested that Minato is in fact bullying  another boy, the gentle and slightly effeminate Eri ( Hinata Hiiragi) 

Like the skin on an onion, director Hirokazu Kor-eda, slowly peels away the reality of the story with some care and with a Japanese eye, examines  homophobia, physical and sexual abuse, and maintaining honour and saving face within the story of two boys growing up.

Yuko Tanaka

It’s an incredibly fascinating and rather sad story all told , acted beautifully by all involved. Ando and Nagayami are especially strong as the lioness mother and bemused teacher and veteran actress Yuko Tanaka is compelling in her emotionless turn as the damaged headmistress.  

Kor-eda finally brings all the threads together by the final reel , but he gives the audience two endings, one hopeful, one tragic .

I’d like to think everyone picked the hopeful one

I’m off to Chester again tomorrow , but this time to the theatre to see The Kite Runner. How lucky am  I Japan one day Kabul the next .


'What Me Mam Taught Me'


Sometimes your evening doesn’t quite work out the way you expect it would . 
John Copper Clarke

I went to see the poet and raconteur John Copper Clarke last night. 
And I kind of fell in love with fellow poet Mike Garry who was supporting him. 
They sound the same.
A thick, proud Mancunian accent. 
Nasal and rhythmical, his poems of childhood and a rough working class life in a Northern City had an obvious energy and life to them, and he lived each one with the power of an evangelist preacher.
I was captivated from start to finish, so much so that I was slightly disappointed when Cooper Clarke came on stage, late and ever so slightly drunk. 
At seventy five John Cooper Clarke is still the old king of his craft, and he performed a good selection of his poems with a wry wit which is both appealing and affectionate. But he is much more an all rounder now, more a stand up comic who hurtles one liners out like machine gun bullets rather than just a performing poet. 
I felt as though Mike Garry was his younger version 
Having said that, I remember one short poem which had the audience screaming in laughter when Cooper Clarke lugubriously threw away his short poem called Necrophilia 
“ Are you fed up with foreplay and all that palaver? 
‘Ave a cadaver” 
Cooper Clarke and Mike Garry

A Little Piece Of Home


In the wee small hours this is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 fM
I tune in perhaps three or four times a year
And there it is 
Like poetry, or a prayer
More about that tomorrow….it’s been a poetry led evening and I’m feeling suddenly melancholy 

Sweet dreams ( thank you Philip xx)



Bluebell



When you’re single you have no back up! 
Bluebell was taxed last year but the MOT just passed me by and so I was lucky my nephew could fit her into his garage today at very short notice.
By the end of the day , she was serviced and MOTeed and was sitting proudly in the drive at the end of the garden , a constant friend in my 61st year. 
On reflection I have underestimated just how much she has been a good mate to me these past five years, and only very occasionally has she let me down.
This week is a case in point, not only do I have to nights to commute to, I’ve got John Cooper Clarke to go and see at venue Cymru and The Kite Runner is on stage at the Storyhouse. In Chester on Friday .
No car
No social life.
No work
No life

Anyhow it’s Interior Design Masters tonight on tv.
Which is camp as Christmas 

I’ve made macaroni cheese for tea, with onlyRoger in tow, Mary has been loaned out to Trendy Carol’s Hubby again today.



Two night Shift Stories

Nurses get paid more for night shifts. They bloody well deserve it too
It’s a completely unnatural time to be working, which encroaches not only on the day you work but the day before and the day after.
It’s like being effectively jet lagged once a week and research has proved the practice to be dangerous to physical and psychological well being .
Working nights can also be dangerous. You are on minimal staffing, have minimal resources , and in 40 years I have been involved in several violent situations , all centred on a night shift where help often didn’t come.
Night time, is also the time people are at their lowest ebb…..that’s why more people pass away in the wee small hours than anytime else. 

My worst night shift ever was back in my psychiatric days 

“ After I qualified as a staff nurse in mental health' I got a job in a prestigious psychiatric hospital in North Yorkshire. The hospital had only seven wards which were all situated within a beautiful Regency style building in it's own grounds. The wards were carpeted and sympathetically decorated in a period style and their day rooms filled with comfortable sofas and occasional furniture.It was a pleasant place in which to work.
I was placed on the mother and baby unit , where seriously ill post partum women and their offspring were admitted for treatment, but most of the other wards catered for acutely mentally ill patients, patients with cognitive impairments and people suffering severe epilepsy..
Staffing generally was very good , but when there was an emergency situation on a ward then an alarm bell would sound and each ward would send a " runner" to help with whatever problem was afoot. No wards were ever locked.
I was telling some of the junior staff this story last night whilst on a break, as a sort of lesson of how Intensive Care is one of the few places in nursing that is probably safest from assault and injury ....things in the early 1980s could be very different!
I remember one night at the hospital when at around 4am the alarm bell sounded. I was one of the five nurses who responded to the call,
The emergency was on the epilepsy assessment ward , a ward staffed by both general and mental health nurses. On duty were three nurses. A heavily pregnant girl, a young staff nurse just out of training and an experienced male staff nurse. All three had been sitting in what was essentially a glass box which overlooked the dormitory of patients on two sides.
The office was essentially an observation room.
Out of nowhere, a powerfully built male patient had suddenly become agitated and very confused and had hurled himself at the windows of the nurses station. He shattered the glass with his body, and like an animal he went for the nurses inside. The male nurse hit the emergency buzzer then bolted out of the office to get help, but as he ran, the office door bounced shut , locking the two women inside. The pregnant nurse, with great presence of mind clambered over a desk and jumped through a window into the grounds to safety but unfortunately the patient caught hold of the young female staff nurse before she could flee.
By the time we arrived on the scene a couple of minutes later, the patient had fractured her jaw and had broken her arm as well as biting her badly on the side of the face.
This was the only time , I have been truly frightened at work Over the years I have been personally abused many times by patients and relatives alike. I have been screamed at, shouted at, spat at and in one case threatened with a broken teapot! but this situation with a brain damaged patient and a young helpless staffnuse still lingers long in the mind.
A scary story to share with a group of nurses in the wee small hours of the morning eh?”

But as usual things need a balance and this short take should fit the bill



 Christmas  Night 1986
It was very cold and snowy and I remember.
I wasn’t very happy.
I had just started work in the November.

A new staff nurse role, in a new city of York
I’d barely been there a month and still lived at the nurses’ home at Clifton Hospital a couple of miles out of the city.
I knew no one properly and I was homesick
And already I had been put onto night duty.
The ward was quiet. 
A psychiatric admission ward with twelve or so general admission patients and an attached mother and baby unit with a half complement of two mums and two newborns.
We had three staff of duty. Staff nurses clive and I covered the main ward and Sue who was a motherly enrolled nurse took charge of the nursery.
Around midnight Sue and I were in the darkened office, each of us feeding a baby.
I couldn’t see her face properly just a glint of her glasses from the lights from the snowy garden.
She was asking me about me, and I had been yacking on in the dark for an age.
I had no idea what I was doing but my baby was large and content and sleepy so from the get go..so I was lucky.
“ Are you gay John? “  she seemed to ask me out of nowhere and she nodded when I defensively replied no, just a little too quickly .
“it’s ok if you were you know? ” She said slowly in her broad flat Yorkshire accent  “I’ve always loved gay men”

And in the comfortable silence that followed, something quietly and inexplicably shifted in me 

As we fed babies in the dark on Christmas Day”

Everybody


My favourite lisping Spanish choir
And orchestra 
Can anyone spot my favourite woodwind player??



 

The Art Wall part 1

 The next couple of blogs will explain, in part, the significance of the paintings, and drawings and prints and fabrics chosen. It’s not static, it has to be fluid , but most, (but not all) have a special significance to me

First it is this little map 


This was a gift , a secret Santa gift given to me on the first Christmas I worked at the hospice. It was given to me by Sionad a woman that couldn’t be more Welsh if you had dipped her in a mixture dragon poo and Bara Brith

It signifies the purchase of my cottage. A thing that could only have happened when I managed to get a full time job and a contract saying so. Despite my age, the Halifax took me on as a customer and the cottage and the village remained mine and Sionad remembered my relief on that day and had the map made accordingly as a Christmas gift.

Note there is a heart and a Gray ( Grey) one where the cottage stands


Catherine, Princess of Wales reveals cancer diagnosis


A pitch perfect reply to Fleet Street et al
Gracious and supportive and incredibly Brave 
Brava !!