Moral Calculus

[I put off posting this last night, and went to bed too tired to log on. Some of the references to being tired, lateness, etc... won't make sense as a result. Nevermind.]

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I was going to write tonight about the Romance half of the equation from the other night, and then I was going to write about today's journey amongst the second-hand book-shops in Chiang Mai - big recommendation to Backstreet Books (no website) near the old city gate - but a foot massage and a hot bath got in the way. So, long as this post is, it could have been longer.

Quickly then, on the romance. You'll find a reference to this in some posts on my old blog, around January 2006, where I had said this:.

Speaking of hippies, E@L visited a great family-run pottery, home-stay, coffee-shop, garden local artist's enclave place built out of old (REALLY OLD) rice barns and various Thai-farmyard found objects - will get back to you on the details, they're in his room.

Throughout the visit vague and subtle fireworks of matrimonial set-up paranoia were sparkling in E@L's peripheral inner-vision as the conversation pointedly turned into Thai whenever the girls (newly-hitched Pla and recently divorced, very gorgeous, painter, University lecturer Unn) were looking in E@L's direction... Was the word farang just mentioned? Farang HUSBAND?!? Mum and dad seemed OH SO friendly to a total stranger...

Rrrunnnnnn AAAwwwwaaaaayyyyy, Brave Sir Robin...

Suffice to say, things haven't turned out well for the lass in question - long story short; pregnant to the wrong person again (coulda been me!) - and E@L fell under the scrutiny of a desperate mum and dad once more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Not quite as quickly on the books. (You'll have to Google the books I mention if you're interested, as I am drafting this off-line; only have a few minutes of internet time remaining in my room account.)

I felt the need (from what turbid depths do these urge arise?) for something new to browse whilst having my Java Frappuccino at Starbucks (not another insipid Cappuccino "Ice-Boom" from WaWee Coffee, please!) now that the work day was over. (At four o'clock. They pay me for this?) Yes, I needed something heavier than the clutch of little books I bought on Monday.

Hmm.

Thinking of other books (such as Wide Sargasso Sea) that I started and never completed, I remember that I had borrowed William T Vollman's You Bright and Risen Angels from a weird young stoner hospital orderly I worked with; shit, it must just have been published in those days, and I'm not sure I ever gave it back. I know I didn’t finish it because I bought his Whores For Gloria and The Ice-Shirt when they came out and never finished them either. Strangely, that stoner orderly who walked round with the book in his pocket, ostentatiously taking it out to ruminate over a favorite passage every now and then between bringing patients down for barium enemas (I'm talking way, way before endoscopy, Creepy) or whatever dehumanizing thing we would inflict upon them, was the spitting image of the young Vollman (in the snippets of photos I had seen of him then. Vollman, not the orderly). I call him young because he is the same age as Michael Jackson. (Vollman, not the orderly.) It was pointless him (the orderly, not Vollman) being such a pseude about the book, because I was the only one who gave a fuck about literature in the entire hospital, apart from out part-time night-shift girl (who knew someone who went with a girl who was living in Helen Garner's Monkey Grip house and had put me onto Anna Kavan) and I kept pestering him so much to browse the truly wonderful chapter epigraphs in that book, he eventually lent it (gave it?) to me, so *I* ended up walking around all day with this huge, unread rectangular bulge in my radiographer's lab-coat pocket, feeling interlecheral but being a major psuede in my turn. Then he got sacked. (The orderly, not me, not Vollman.)

Anyway, I've no idea where it is now (the book), though my sister hints at revelations boxed in her garage, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, what?

Vollman strikes me as being someone a Chiang Mai visitor would read. A poverty-class intellectual, professional whore-monger, a verbal historian of the underclass, a little bit out there with his guns and maybe some libertarian beliefs (?) and I'm thinking some violent/revolutionary tendencies from reading too much Ché Guevara in kindergarten, and mostly, his extreme volubility and unending supply of one-upmanship travel stories. I'll have to find out more about him. Someday.

So I figure there'd have to be a copy of YBARA in a second-hand book-store somwhere in Chiang Mai. Surely. Such an alternative touristy place, the exact type of place my old hospital orderly would frequent - if he kept a job long enough to get money for airfare.

Big assumption?

Long story short: third book-shop I went into. BINGO! I am fucking brilliant about these things.

Just for interest sack I went into the bookshop next door, Backstreet Books, and it was, as mentioned, much better than the many musty Gecko ones and it has a much larger range - an excellent range in fact of both second-hand and new books. Mostly paperbacks, not too many hardback 1st edition Graeme Greene's lost in here. B-S Books even has an Oirish Literature Section and I grabbed a fair condition paperback copy of Banville's The Untouchable. It was manned by a rambling, mumbling, slightly eccentric but CHARMING Irishman (didn't get his name), so that figures...

But the major score for the evening in Backsteet Books was another work by Billy Tom Vollman! Step forward again, sir!

Rising Up and Rising Down - Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means is the abridged (only 734 pages) version of Vollman's seven volume, 23 years in the writing, magnum opus of the same name. This is Viking Saga stuff. Wow. This is not a book you'd find in any old bookstore!

So much of Vollman's stuff is basically interviews with the strange people he meets, right? Which is fascinating in itself when you go to the extreme places Vollman likes to head to, but in this work he uses those interviews as case studies in violence, freedom and, well you know the rest. In these condescension-free interviews he focuses on why people who have committed acts of violence did the things they did, how they got to be where they were - in the position of thinking violence was the right thing to do, etc…

I read a bit of the South-East Asia section - in the mid 90's Vollman spoke directly to rebels and leaders in the southern Thailand… fascinating for me, in light of the continuing struggles in the provinces there, and, obviously, me being in Thailand at the moment.

However, right in the heart of the book, the pumping heart to the meat of the rest of it, is Vollman's Moral Calculus. He uses these case studies to derive a way to assign some sort of moral value to these peoples' acts of violence, terror or rebellion. The Calculus is centred around that pan-religious ethic - the Golden Rule. He breaks it all down methodically, with schoolboyish assiduousness.

So when that Thai rebel in Pattani shot and killed an unarmed government worker, and admitted being pleased as he did it, was he justified? To calculate; fold Justification 5(d) to Punishment 4(a) and divide by Maxim For Tyrants (3) until the edge of Definition 5.3.C1 is just visible on the corner. Sort of thing.

Anyway I don’t think Vollman really expects his Calculus to usurp plain common sense, or the International Court of The Hague for that matter, but by using this vast and exhaustive approach he certainly has humanized the problem of violence, even evil, and if he makes any of us think more deeply before assigning blame or making overhasty judgments on issues like terrorism and political violence, when the question of who are the rebels or terrorists and who the government arises, as it so often does in the third world, then it will have been 23 years not wasted.

Obviously I have only skimmed the book (whilst in a German Beer Garden drinking Erdinger Dunkels) so this is only a brief first impression, not a deep and researched review.

And I feel, like the orderly with YBARA in his pocket, that no-one out there really cares about me and this book.

What a revelation.

E@L

(Sorry if this doesn't read easily; late, first draft - I try rewriting it on Friday, or tomorrow if I have time.)

Pist

Just a note to say that bottle of Semillon/ChloeSauvignon must've been off. I feel a tad wobbly.

Choice of restaurants on the Ping river: too loud, too crowded, or too trendy. I went the trendy one because I could read from my selection of second-hand book treats in peace.

The choicest: either Longinus on "The Sublime" [As in the human body, so also in diction swellings are bad things...], or a 1960 paperback of Dylan Thomas's Adventures in The Skin Trade. Close third: three of Strinberg's plays in an early Penguin Classic edition, followed by Jean Rhys's second novel Quartet, followed by a Signet edition of One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich and a great treatise on Babylonian Heavan and Hell poems - quite pertinent!

There were many exquisite books for the taking, but I have only so much time left - that's why all of the above purchases are compact (no swelling!), with nothing over 200 pages.

E@L

Fukt

Today's round of golf played like one (or more) of the forty thousand PG Wodehouse golf stories (each a perfect gem and perfectly amusing to boot) with E@L as the hapless twit who inevitably bungles both the golf game AND the romance.

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But first let me tell you how fucked I am. I am fucking fucked. The fuck with that, I am way fucking fucked beyond simply fucking fucked. In fuckt, the fucknicity of my befuckedness fuckers belief. I am so fucked, the fucktoids of my fucktedenal gland have become refuckulous. It is prefucktosiously imfucktable for me to go to fucking work tomorrow, that's how fucked I am. I am fucknaceously and efucktably fuckdeded.

To quote Lily Von Stupp, I am gefückt.

Everything below the ears ist KAPUT!

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Here is an example of the Wodehouserliness® of my game today. For the sake of being stuck between two fours and still with unending flights of fours up ahead, E@L has joined a group of local Thais who are pretty good golfers. There is one guy (let's call him ThaiHat) who has exceptional local knowledge and experience of the course. He's over fifty, semi-retired, very fit and strong, and plays this course every week. He doesn’t play textbook golf at all, his swing is short and choppy with no follow through, etc, etc, a million faults… yet he always out-drives, out-chips, and out-putts the others (but he doesn’t outdrive E@L! Not today he doesn't!). The skill with which he uses the weaknesses in his game, on this course, is such that they seem like strengths. You know the type. The local amateur champ. He swings like the owner of the course in Caddyshack, he really does, yet takes pars consistently and if often putting for birdie! He walks off the green and gets into his cart before others have finished putting, he drives his cart to his ball far beyond where others are still hitting, yet he is affable and pleasant to talk to. Like a true arsehole. Lke E@L thought later, a cop.

Well anyway, E@L had finally worked out what was wrong with his short game - he had only brought his sand-wedge in the traveler's half-set and he had been playing it like it was, and thinking it indeed was, in reality, his pitching wedge. Fucking idiot. That explains why he was playing so well from the bunkers, yet coming up 15 yards short on his approach shots. Also, as he'd put only an 8 iron as his next club down, there was this glaring gap in firepower whenever he was between 130 and 90 yards from the green… (which all golfers will knows is about the second most common distance from which one approaches the green).

Yes, so E@L has finally realized his club selection error on the par five 17th and is feeling much more confident, so much so that he is on in regulation, though his sand-wedge from 70 yards (How hard to hit it? He can't work it out now) has left him on the lower end of the green with a 30ft uphill putt for birdie.

As E@L is lining up for the putt, ThaiHat seems fit to remind E@L that this is a, "Birdie putt!" E@L chuckles and says, "Yes, it is." He resets his stance and lines the putt up once more. "Uphill," says ThaiHat as E@L is just about to take the head of the club back. "And for a million dollars," quips E@L who then finally makes his stroke, pissweakly, like he had no fucking breakfast, and way off to the fucking right…

It was like that pretty much AAAALLLLL day. Apart from off the tee, where E@L was slamming it brilliantly, straight and long, down the middle of the fairway - about 80% of time.

Which is why the romance part of this blog post has to wait, because just now,

E@L

is fucked.

[Addendum: just had a brilliant soak in the tub. Massage (gentle) tomorrow. And, damn: Forgot to check the final score; 48 out, probably close to the same coming in - two pars and one 8. Six balls lost to watery graves for the day.]

Update

Ear infection, sorted.

Back ache, lingering. Will I play golf in Chiang Mai tomorrow? Mmmm. Maybe Sunday.

Foot pain, status quo. The NEW new drug Remeron has a few side effects like drowsiness that kick in before the benefits do. Of course.

Only one hour on the internet card here in Le Meridien, cheers.

E@L

Not Self-Aware (I Am a Tourist In My Own Life)

I have real trouble turning off my internal narrator. The enthusiasm of this continuous monologue is what first made me think I should try my pen at writing/blogging. Then I found out most people have a voice inside their heads who comments on the action, that other people have their own internal narrators and that I was not unique after all. How disappointing, I thought it was just me. But no, we all have one.

Except for those people who, as Izzy insists, are Not Self Aware.

Like the guy tonight that everyone in our cheap Outback style Chiang Mai restaurant found out was from Las Vegas. He lives here, we all leanred, but those people he was with before, they were not his FREINDS, they were his NEIGHBOURS. The Vegan guy would not shut-up. He kept talking continuously at indiscreet volumes to the two Thai girls at his table. On and on he goes. "That happened to my mom, who is," he leans forwards and speaks slowly, "EIGHT EE SIX YEARS OLD." They kept eating, not looking at him. Wondering, what the fuck is he yelling at us about? No doubt. He then sends back his steak because it is "a touch more medium than well done. I prefer it more WELL-DONE/medium than medium/well-DONE, as I requested, so could the chef please JUST COOK it a little bitty MORE, thank you sir, I'd appreciate that." The blank-faced waiter nodded and took the meat back to the kitchen, shrugging his shoulders to the chef.

My waiter rolled his eyes. Tourists. Not self aware, as a species.

This guy could not be self-aware as the voice in his head would not be able to get a word in edgewise. I often wonder, are people who talk incessantly like this capable of… like, *contemplating* anything? Can they ever stop... and just… think? Ever? Are they afraid of what their inner narrator might tell them?

I'm trying to get rid of my inner narrator. I was once told he is slowing me down. Then again, other people say that I think too much. I'm not doing any thinking, of course, I'm just listening to the inner narrator. I've been presuming he's been doing the thinking for both if us and therefore knows what he's doing, and ergo facto, so do I.

Perhaps I should study my Eckhart Tollë a little more, eh? BE in my present. Stop listening to that inner voice. Stop worrying about the future and regretting the past (which is what my inner voice is or should be talking about, according to Tollë, rather than saying mundane things like "Long shot: Phillip picks up his fork and examines it for traces of dirt").

And keep those cheques and money orders coming in, says Eckhart.

Yes, I should stop being an actor in the movie that is my life and just live it without awareness. Like a brain-washed new-age zombie. Like a tourist.

As long as I am alive to live it that is.

I just hope that they way to achieve this inner calm is not by talking loudly to uncomprehending people in restaurants, like a total wanker.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The country town of Nan was a bit quiet last night.


Street market at 9pm. More street than market.

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My narrator was haranguing me on helium for the drive back from Nan (on the Nan river, same river that flows through Phitsanulok from two weeks ago) to Chiang Mai; he was having a field day. I only wish I could recall some of it for you. Passages of great descriptive power, episodes of dramatic irony and then some of irony and drama by themselves. Discourses of great social and political import. All of them concerning feats of dangerous driving even more harrowing than earlier in the week. Feats to leave you gasping. More knife-edge curves and split-second swerves… More good luck than good decisions on the corners… It got to the point were E@L had to say, "Please DON'T text while you are driving at twice the recommended speed, on the wrong side of the road, going into a blind curve, with the setting sun right in your eyes!!"

Reply; a pleasant "Hoka-ay. No ploblem. Solly."

As I couldn’t sleep due to anxiety for the first hour of this trip and due to a full bladder for the last, I also wish that the pictures from my mental camera could be downloaded to share with you. Other than close-ups of oncoming trucks, I mean. Snaps of rice paddies reflecting the burnished clouds of sunset and the silhouettes of the hills.


Oops missed the rice paddies.

Snaps of the teak jungles draped in a suffocating omnipresent vine infestation. Snaps of village markets, rickety shanties on those hillsides, plus large modern mansions with satellite antennae. Snaps of the weather-beaten, lined and tanned face of the man pushing a tractor-tyred cart to the market, or the weary grandmother in traditional hill-tribe dress keeping a hand on the exhuberant children under her supposed control right by the road-side.

I think next time I'll go by bus.


This bus pulled up next to us at the lights in Lampuang.



Somebody, please explain.

E@L

Nan -- With The Lot II

E@L was kidnapped today. Taken from the Chiang Mai airport, whisked off in a dark van by a person who spoke no English, and driven for hours into places unknown.

"Are we going to my hotel?" asked E@L. "Le Meridien in Chiang Mai. I have booked on the internet for tonight until next Friday."

The driver looked confused. "No go Chiang Mai. Tonight I go witchew Nan."

Nan. That was the name of the hospital E@L was to do the demo at tomorrow.

"But tonight I stay Chiang Mai hotel, right"

"No, no. I take you Nan." It is a very long 'a' in Nan: Naaaaaaahn.

We had been driving for two hours already, which is why E@L thought he had better check.

"Nan is, tree, tree… tree tousant kilometer. Take [he held up three fingers] four hours more to drive. You go Nan two day, Chiang Mai I drive you Friday."

Shit. For some reason, E@L had done this trip's accommodation booking himself, online. That means he had to pay in advance. Shit. He had no idea that Nan Hospital was not in Chiang Mai. That there was actually an entire province, 200km (not 3000) from Chiang Mai, called Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahn.

E@L had confirmed with the Thai team about the trip twice, to makes sure there'd been no schedule changes. Yes, you can book, schedule no change. But no-one mentioned that Naaaaaaaahn was a separate place, distinct from Chiang Mai and that a separate hotel booking had to be made.

Shit. Why had E@L decided this one time to book himself and not just turn up, expecting everything to have been done for him? Mainly because they normally put him up in a shit hotel (the Imperial Pei) when he goes to Chiang Mai (which is rarely).

So he's gone searching online for nice deals at better establishments - like maybe a Lanna Villa somewhere, or maybe there'd be a special at a top-line hotel, seeing as how the Thailand Tourist Industry is a basket case at the moment. And there was. The lady who organizes his Thai trips could not get a better corporate rate than the on-line rate for the classy new Le Meridien in the heart of town, so she said he could book it himself. She neglected to tell him that he'd only need it from Friday, not from Wednesday.

Shit. Amazing drive though, over three mountain ranges. Fantastic scenery. Village tribes in hovels, kids playing by the side of the road, water-buffalo being driven up paths, terraced crops on the hillsides, wild jungle in several national parks, waterfalls,… As mentioned, it is about 200km as the crow flies, but more like 350km by road. Long and Very Winding Road. And it was lock to lock for the entire freaking trip across those mountains. E@L tried to sleep but was getting tossed awake at every corner. Sleep would have helped him not see the danger at each glance where his driver cut across the double yellow lines or overtook slower vehicles on the approach to a blind corner or a crest. And going as fast as he could, of course. Eventually, as they were coming into yet another blind hair-pin bend at speed and the driver pulled out across double yellow lines to overtake about 40 yards before the corner, E@L had to cry out: "No, no, pull back! Please, stop trying to kill me, OK?"

"OK, solly," the driver said, and from there on in he went like a grandmother going to church on Sunday. It took nearly six hours.

p.s. The hotel in Nan is shit.

(...but it has free Internet.)

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I swear to doG I am going to die on one of these business trips. I've told you before. Check the old blog. Forget the immense cardiovascular risk factors, strokes, heart-attacks and prostate cancer.

E@L has his date with destiny as a passenger in a Datsun.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Something to tide you over. From The Chronicles of Bruce)

Bruce finished his burger, licked his lips and scrunched up the burger-juice-filled paper to place it in the ash-tray.

Remember ash-trays? Remember cigarettes?

"True story," he said. Immediately I went into disbelief mode. It must have showed. "I kid you not." And he put on this butter-wouldn't-melt look which was quite hilarious on someone with his school-of-hard-knocks appearance. Big shoulders and arms to match his belly, a huge red head with no hair and a bristly goatee and moustache on his acne-pocked face. His thick fingers hardly seem long enough to wrap around the stubbie holder of Beer Chang, but he had already put two down while nibbling on his burger.

"OK" I said, "the hamburger story, let's hear it."

"Righto," he laughed and wet his whistle. "You know Soi Cowboy, right? You're not a total beginner here, right?"

I nodded. I knew it. I fingered the label on my coaster.

"Here's the set-up: This is a few years ago, before I was living here. We had this work do in Bangkok, training, marketing, whatever. We'd been at it in the conference room all day, so then we moved on and had few beers and some Thai nosh at Cabbages and Condoms , you know it? Soi 16, not bad grub if it's your first time in Thailand, not too pricky. Know what I mean?

"Prik is chili, isn’t it?" I half-guessed, the bulge of a Thai phrase-book in my pocket.

"Correct. Full points. And afterwards, we put the most of the ladies into a couple of tuk-tuks, while the boys and I, plus one or two of the more… adventurous, or maybe broad-minded is what I mean to say… anyway two of the ladies from the company joined us, and we crossed over the road to Asok and went to Cowboy to check out the show at Long Gun. We stayed there a while, watched the banana popping show and the lesbian show… The girls thought it was hilarious, but tame. It could be pretty gross for some I guess, but not as bad as it used to be at over the road there at Nana, pre-Thaksin. But these ladies they thought it was a tame! They wanted to see some real on-stage fucking. I swear to God, women, I'll never understand 'em. I had to take the girls to a gay-boy show next night, see some real action, but that's another story.

"Anyway, it was getting late and no bird in the bar had really taken my fancy. I suppose I was in one of those moods, you know how it is. You can get so over the whole girlie bar racket, right? Some of the other lads had hooked with a bar-girl each and had already headed off to some short-time hotel, or maybe they'd risked the 1000Bht surcharge for a guest at the hotel, I don't know.

"There were four of us left, the two company ladies, and one other guy - we called him L-G (or Algie, like from that Oscar Wilde, some play...) We called him that because it was his idea to come to Long-Gun tonight, as it's his favorite place - obviously it was, because he knew the girls' names and he had already picked up his favorite, a girl called Pim, he'd taken her out a few times before. Actually there were five of us, counting her. And then there was me, with no lady… We were walking along the Cowboy strip up to Soi23 past all the theme bars to find a taxi when L-G noticed a hamburger stand right at the end. There was a girl buying a burger there. She was in normal clothes, a bit suggestive, but not in the uniform of one of the bars on the strip.

"I said - They looked good.

" - The hamburgers or the girls? Long-Gun asked me and everybody laughed.

"I said - I meant the burgers.

"So he said to me - Why didn’t you get one?

" - Burger? I asked.

"He said - No, the girl! There's one right there for you, and you can share the burger with her as well. It's a bargain!

"This pretty girl, she was a stunner actually, had paid and was just collecting her burger and turning to walk away when Long Gun approached her. I swear to God he said, - My friend is very shy, he would like to take you home tonight. Indicating to me. She stopped, looked at me for a second and smiled, and then she nodded!

"Well as you can imagine I was very embarrassed, but I got over it. We got in the taxi together with her still eating her burger. We went back to my hotel, I paid the excess and she stayed the night. And she was brilliant in bed. I kid you not, some of the best sex I've ever had. Just a random girl who happened to be standing at a burger stand. And she was lovely and polite, and had this perfect body. It was amazing."

Bruce was rubbing his chin and staring out over my shoulder.

"Did you get her name, her number?" I asked him. "Did you ever go with her again?"

He gradually focused back on to me. "No, of course not. I wouldn't want to have her number, I might be tempted to call her. That's not how I operate. I'm not like L-G. Gotta keep a distance. Variety keeps you safe. You never know, otherwise I might fall in love with one of them. And that'd be the fucking end of me, wouldn’t it?" He laughed and knocked back the last third of the beer.

"Bloody L-G, you know he married that bloody hooker, Pim. Stupid fuck-wit. She took for a grand ride alright. But that's another story, too...

" 'Nother one, love!" he called to the fierce-eyed waitress who was upset because Bruce could never seem to recollect her name.

E@L

Viral Camera Ad (forgot which brand...)

Just doing my bit for the bandwidth.

E@L

Still Practising After All These Years

Yes, Goddam E@L, write that fracking novel so that no-one can buy it and it can sit on the airport rack, going around forever as people rush past on their way to grabbing that Clive Cussler formulaic brain balm to use as a flotation device in case their Airbus falls out of the sky.

Well hang on, I do have a full-time job and sometimes I have to work for it. I'm either in the office being continuously distracted (At 5:20pm Friday night; "E@L can you do a presentation first thing Monday morning?") or on the road, in the sky, in a waiting room. Whatever excuse you want, I got it.

Late starting novelists: OK, it takes time to write a novel.

It takes time for most people to learn how to write to novel-length. It takes time to write well at that length. It takes time to write to that length. It takes time to land a publisher and it takes time to get that novel to market. And suddenly, it makes sense why so many debut novelists just happen to be in their thirties fifties.

E@L

Back-up Date.

[Hey, spell-checker! I mean Back Update!]

Woe! Begone! Not a good time to be E@L.

Before I get on to my back, the left ear trouble turns out to be otitis externa with cellulitis extending down as far as the angle of my jaw. My ear and face feel puffy and numb, like after a local anaesthetic. My GP thought it might have been the parotid gland that was swollen, but ENT specialist, he da man! picked it up. More drugs for that. Naughty E@L was using cotton buds, there was trapped wax, soaking up water from swimming or sweat, softening the skin of the canal. Sharp edge of inner-ear head-phone pods must have sratched the skin. Result: Infection.

He also said my slowly increasing deafness might be due to the exostosis which is partially blocking (about 40%) the canal. He asked if I swam in cold water as a child! Hey, I was surfing GOD back in those days, down at Peterborough (the Well and Massacres), Gibson Steps (next to Twelve Apostles, all seven of them), etc... That's where the Southern Ocean touches Victoria and the water is always freezing. The exostoses grow becasue of the cold water for some reason. Mine aren't bad enough to require sugery. (Exostosis: Benign bony growths, in this case under the skin of the outer ear narrowing down the ear-hole.) So antiobiotics and steriod eardrops from him.

As for the back, the GP gave me some muscle relaxants - I asked for diazapam but she just laughed as if I were joking...

2 x BP tablets, 4 x peripheral neuropathy and foot-pain tablets, 1 x cholestrol lowering, 1 x anti-inflammatory, 1 x muscle relaxant, 1 x antibiotic, plus 1 x eardrops.

That's 10 different tablets I'm on and I'm only 52. I reckon if wasn't for lunch (crusted roasted potatoes microwaved to a rubber pulp by the fine people at the usually excellent PS cafe!) I'd rattle when I walk.

Bring a wheelchair for

E@L