Day Eighty-Five - Drizzle, PopMaster and Visualisation

I was thinking today about how we are spending our lockdown time. My sister is painting and drawing, my brother is singing songs and posting videos on Facebook, I'm reading and writing which includes this blog. So it seems the Arts are pretty much covered by myself and my siblings! Creativity rules, I guess.

But from the sublime to the ridiculous now. I've heard mention of PopMaster from various people but I hadn't really understood what it was. And somebody said they'd been doing it all day a few weeks ago. I still didn't know what they were talking about. But my dear friend enlightened me at the weekend.  It's on BBC Radio Two at 10:30 in the morning each weekday. The DJ is called Ken Bruce. And it's a pop quiz. It comprises of two rounds of 10 questions scoring points along the way, some of the questions have bonus points. My friend and I have decided to do it each morning. I'm glad. It's nice to have a daily connection with her. Anything that might help her take her mind off what might be ahead. And we are obviously going to compare our scores too. It's fun. She beat me today.

A few years ago I got bitten by a cat in the garden. He was a great big tabby cat. And he'd been coming to the garden fairly regularly. We had reached this kind of unspoken understanding. He didn't appear to be a sociable cat. He just seemed to want somewhere to have a little snooze in the sun. Fine by me. But one day he actually approached me. He allowed me to stroke his head. And then he sat down by my feet. I was thrilled of course, believing that some kind of barrier had been transcended. Then I must've made a sudden movement of some kind and startled him for he suddenly sunk his teeth into my leg, right leg just below the knee. It shocked him because he leapt into the air, shocked me too I might add! So with my leg pouring with blood I hastened into the house and cleansed the whole area with Dettol and cotton wool. Thought I'd done a thorough job. But by the evening the leg had swollen up like a balloon and I knew I was in trouble. I went to the doctor and was prescribed a course of antibiotics. They didn't work. The leg continued angry, red, painful. They prescribed another course of antibiotics. No better. My doctor friend in Boston was furious. He said I should've been sent to the emergency room and had intravenous antibiotics right away. I remember struggling through tai chi class when one of the ladies there who is a spiritual healer offered me a little technique that she thought might help. Using visualisation. She told me to imagine the infection being attacked. So I imagined the Chinese terracotta army marching over the infection relentlessly stamping it out. With that, a third course of antibiotics and some manuka honey I finally got on top of the infection and it cleared up. But I've always remembered that technique. When someone I knew was diagnosed with throat cancer I used the same technique for her. She is very keen on horseriding so I imagined horses stampeding over the tumour to shrink it and destroy it. She did recover and was in remission. Sadly, earlier this year the cancer returned and she subsequently had surgery. But the point of all this rambling is that I'm trying the same visualisation technique for my dear friend. She is a keen and stalwart Spurs supporter. So I imagine members of the team viewing her tumours as footballs and kicking the hell out of them. I have told her that's what I'm doing and she seemed quite pleased. I don't know if it will help or not but it feels like I'm doing something.

It was drizzling this morning. And I still went out for my walk. I'm glad I did. There was virtually no one about. I went a little further than usual which I'm very pleased about. But if weather in March was atypical it's certainly atypical, too, for June. I wore a woolly hat today! And if I'm honest I'm not warm at the moment. And it's strange how the change in the weather changes my mood too.  I know my mood is also affected by other circumstances. I'm unsettled. Restless. I can't seem to achieve anything worthwhile. I have the feeling that if the weather had stayed fine I might be outdoors doing something. I'm feeling very alone and isolated today. But maybe that's because it's a contrast with the comparative 'social' weekend I had, with all the ringings of the doorbell and birthday shenanigans. What is also interesting and unsettling is that for the first time during this lockdown I really, really wanted to go out. I wanted to go into town. I wanted to go to the library. I wanted to go back to normal. And I won't say I've never felt that during these last few weeks, well months, now But the desire was extraordinarily strong today, the strongest I've known it.

New Zealand has lifted most of its lockdown protocol now. I have to admire their prime minister. She embodies what true leadership should be. You get the impression that she is never anything but honest and open with her population. They've no coronavirus there at the moment. Isn't it absolutely incredible? And I know people would argue that New Zealand is just a small island. But I'm not sure that it's about the size. I think it's about somebody taking decisive and quick action. Oh and also having a population that actually respects what she does and says. Believes her, too, I would think. But she still won't have the borders opened. Absolutely crucial. And it's quite funny because on social media people are saying they want to go and move to New Zealand. Ha ha. They totally missed the point.

You might remember very early on in this blog when lockdown had just begun I said I was going to start systematically playing my CDs. You must've been wondering how that's going? Or you might not. Regardless, I'm going to tell you! I suppose I've played about 100. But the problem is some of them I haven't heard for awhile and I like them so much that I play them more than once. Or they trigger a memory of something else and I go scuttling off to find another CD and start playing that. And at other times I just need to be quiet. I just need the silence.