The kingdom of the early morning

Sunday, August 9, 2015

The trials of authorship

It's August, six months since "The Vandervelde Documents" was published, and I am now fairly sure that the only one of my objectives it will achieve is that of having a book published. I always knew it would be hard to sell a decent number of copies, and I accepted that I would have to do most of the work myself, but I did anticipate some help from the publisher. So far I haven't yet heard of a single copy sold through their agency.

I can cope with constructive criticism, but I find it very hard to deal with indifference. Although I'm hungry for approval, I do not at all like promoting myself. It feels undignified. Dignity? I don't feel like a proud person. I can very quickly go from being proud of some achievement - the garden for instance - to feeling ashamed of it. I'm not ashamed of the 'Documents' but I can see all its faults, and would much rather set it aside and move on to a new project.

A month ago I set myself the task of writing a thriller with a very complicated and difficult plot line. The idea was to start the book in the middle and then work back to that point again from the future and from the past. Writing on a reverse time line has been done, but I only know one example - Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. This revolutionary structure would, I felt, make it conspicuous. If I could get it published by a 'proper' publisher it would also stimulate sales of the 'Documents' because it would be set in the same near future world.

I had got about a quarter of the way through this project when I was swamped by feelings of inadequacy. It was not working. I could not do this thing. I changed the format, did some sample chapters, changed the format again. Now it was making me tense and my particular brand of nervous tension is a project killer. Once something, some feeling of inadequacy, becomes a trigger for it I cannot escape. It strikes suddenly and lasts a long time. Migraine sufferers may know this mechanism, but I've never had a migraine so I don't know, and I certainly don't want to find out. The crawling sensation I get in my stomach is very unpleasant but I can still function. It spoils a day or two, but it's not disabling.

It is, though, something I am afraid of, and it is this fear which constructs a feed-back loop. If a certain activity - in this case writing - sets it off then I am afraid of the process of writing. At that stage even thinking about it becomes a trigger. For a week I tried, with the aid of beta-blockers alcohol and pain killers, to work through it. Teeth clenched I wrote and organised and wrote again, but it just got worse so 2 weeks ago I stopped. I had given in to one of my demons and I was ashamed.

Now I've had a holiday from writing and have begun again. I have written up my illustrated diary which has garnered some very favourable comments from the few facebook friends who have read it. Now, though, I have to bite the bullet and decide how to share it on the web. I have 4 blogs, most of them neglected. I have a facebook page for the Documents which has been neglected since April when I found that paying for it to be promoted had no effect whatsoever except to introduce me to a number of young ladies in far away countries who for some reason wanted to 'like' my page. I could simply post the diary entries on facebook, but I couldn't then insert the pictures in context.

I have decided to revive this blog. The early morning are even more important to me now that I have focussed on travelling alone to seek out the natural word. After mid-morning I usually have to share it. Even quite early there may be a few other dedicated souls around, but this space is big enough for the like - minded to enjoy each others' company. What I can't stand is anything that begins to look like a uniform. There are too many of us old men going around nature reserves in camouflage clothing weighed down with a mass of gear - the big telescopes and tripods, the huge zoom lenses and the expensive binoculars. "Look", I want to say, "I'm not like those people." But of course I am. I have the camo jacket (by favourite jacket, bought from Tesco for £15) I even have two camo caps. Now I have the 'scope' and the tripod. I started with just two gadgets: a super-zoom compact camera and compact 25 x 8 binoculars. I saw lots of lovely creatures and landscapes and took lots of amazingly sharp pictures, but in low light and at full zoom all I could get was a blurred dirty looking picture: enough to identify but with no artistic merit. I still use both, but now have a big super-zoom 'bridge' camera, a pair of 40 x 10 binoculars and an 80mm telescope. I have several books on wildlife photography and it seems all the pros use very expensive Canon cameras and lenses. Before I even consider this I am determined to get the most out of the two cameras and the telescope, and this is partly what I will be exploring in this diary.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

OMG what have I done?

OMG! What have I done?! (I know it's a bit of a stretch, but try to think of me as an eager teenager.)

I've committed myself! I can't go back now! I've thrown myself into the arms of the all-powerful, but deeply flawed, the wonderful but horribly irritating, that great power that rules the lives of half mankind, (and a fair proportion of womankind as well), the one we love to hate. No not God, but near enough. It's Microsoft of course!

'Ah,' you say,'most of us do Windows, but we can take it or leave it - we're on the tablets now.' True, but I have gone two stages further. I've committed to the uber-flawed Windows 8, and to that strange new beast the' Surface'. Why on earth is it called 'surface', and why in the name of some other all-powerful being is it controlled by things called 'charms'? We mere mortals can only guess at what goes through the minds of those precocious infants at MS headquarters.

This is what I am doing:

I have raided the kids inheritance and bought the not-yet-released-in-Britain 'Surface Pro 3'. Look it up - it does everything and does it well. It will be my only computer.

Next I'm abandoning what we now have to call 'Office Outlook'. We have to call it that because in an act of deep perversity MS have decided to call their new email and general organiser 'Outlook.com'. As if that weren't confusing enough there are two of them: the app 'Outlook.com' and the online version, also called 'Outlook.com'. The 'old' Office Outlook does not sync with Outlook.com, and it is quite difficult to get the data from 'Outlook' into 'Outlook.com'.

Just to complete the picture, I'm also committed to the wonderful 'OneNote'. It's a great piece of software, but things were getting too clear and organised for the MS geeks. They had to introduce some chaos, so along comes 'OneNote'. No, it's not the same. This is the free mobile app called 'OneNote' and (you've guessed it) it doesn't integrate with 'Office OneNote'. (I've kept the bits of hair I tore out some weeks ago. Let's face it I might need them.)

It gets worse: Windows 8 has a' Mail' app which looks exactly like 'Outlook.com' but behaves slightly differently. So, either the geeks have emigrated to the other version of Planet California, (the one with the same name as the earthly one) or this is part of a long term plan to change the nature of the Microsoft environment. I believe they are eventually going to either sell 2 different systems, or abandon the old complicated desktop set-up in favour of the new 'Metro' environment. If what we end up with is an attractive and functional operating system which keeps a highly efficient business environment, and at the same time keeps us entertained and in touch, then perhaps it will all have been worth it.

I don't know where this road is going to lead me. I know I will face total exasperation at many points in the journey, but I really think that what those MS geeks are trying to achieve is worth committing to. So there.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

A Cautionary Tale

This for anyone writing a book. The main reason I have written so little here lately is that for the last 2 years I have been working on a "future fiction" project. It looks at several different ways in which the next 80 odd years might pan out. All of them involve a major decrease in human numbers. It's by no means all doom and gloom though. One of the possibilities is a catastrophic event which reduces the population by a third and leaves the survivors with a surplus of materials but a shortage of skills. These are good conditions to recreate a more sustainable society.

The book began life as a series of fictitious documents strung together as the journals of an ageless figure who lives right through the century. However, more characters made their appearance and I found myself being drawn into their worlds, filling in the details and making them more real. In the process I began to be aware of all the problems of writing readable fiction. The book is now in three parts, 100,000 words and still growing, and I am determined to teach myself how to write a big story covering several generations. I'm now on what I think is my fourth major re-write, but after the previous one I decided to try some agents and publishers. I sent the usual sample material to half a dozen agents and one or two publishers.

As the first of the rejection notes began to arrive I was surprised to have a friendly email from "Pegasus Publishers" asking me to send the whole typescript when it was finished. Well, this was good news. I was off the slush pile and in with a chance. Of course I wasn't born yesterday (or even the day before) so I checked them out. The website looked OK: http://www.pegasuspublishers.com/ Next I did a search on "are Pegasus vanity publishers?" One answer said yes they were, but another said the opposite and led to this: http://www.pegasusbooks.net/about-us/frequently-asked-questions/ It was quite clear that they were genuine. Unfortunately I saw what I wanted to see and didn't scroll down far enough. If I had I would have seen this:We are in no way affiliated with Pegasus Publishing out of Cambridge, England.

So I was happy to have achieved "the final selection process which takes about 4 weeks", and didn't mind waiting. I noted the date in my diary and when I had not heard anything after exactly 4 weeks send a short note asking if they had any news for me. There was no reply, but 2 days later a large package arrived from Pegasus with two copies of a contract to publish! This seemed too easy - how had I, who had never written a book before, managed to get a publishing contract so quickly? Then I saw clause 15: "author's contribution to costs: £2500". At first, to my shame, I thought, "well, perhaps it is worth it if the book is marketed well." Then I did a bit more research on self-publishing and realised that Pegasus were not committing themselves to any print run and that you can get a few hundred copies of any normal sized book printed for less than £1000. At last the awful truth sank in: they had not read my typescript. Why should they bother when all their costs and profits were met out of the so-called "author's contribution"? The 4 week wait was just part of the scam. They probably know that many of us old 'uns have savings so could probably afford to lay out 2.5k to see their book in print.

I wrote a fairly polite reply declining their offer and telling them what I suspected. The reply from them was equally polite: a brief "thank you for letting us know and we wish you luck with your project" - a clear admission that it was a totally cynical way of making money out of gullible people. I was not to downhearted. I had suppressed my initial suspicions because I wanted their interest to be genuine, but I had used the time to do a lot more writing. I enjoy it, I'm still learning and I'm more than ever determined to produce something which will be fun to read but will also stand as my contribution to the debate on how to deal with global warming. If I can't get a proper publishing deal then I shall issue it as an ebook.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

After Cataracts: 20/15 vision

The coda to this story is the second operation a week later.

Now I knew what to expect I was really looking forward to it. Everything went smoothly as before until I got back to Hannah's house in the early evening. While the dressing was on I had no trouble seeing everything with my one treated eye which had now settled down and felt completely normal.

Then at 7 I had to take the dressing off to do the first lot of drops. It was a nasty shock. I was seeing double and the left eye was clouded.

It was Megan, my grand-daughter's fifteenth birthday and Hannah had planned a meal out in Pieminister - a down-to-earth restaurant in Stokes Croft specialising in pies. It was a difficult evening in a noisy environment feeling quite anxious about the operation. Still, the food was good and I managed to talk to Danny, Megan's dad.

When we got back I took the dressing off again and POW - there was the world in high definition 3D as clear as a bell. We had a follow up appointment at Optical Express at 8.30 next morning. We had to wait a few minutes for Guy the optometrist who lives in Cardiff and had got delayed in traffic held up by the dreadful weather. He did the standard eye tests and announced that I had 20/15 vision in both eyes - one better than the benchmark 20/20 vision.

Ever since then I've eagerly drinking in all the detail in my surroundings - even in near constant rain, everything looked great, and when some patches of sunlight lit up parts of the Usk valley on the way home I was enraptured.

How beautiful the world is. Why do we have to mess it up so much?

Friday, January 31, 2014

Cataract update

At least with private medicine you don't have to wait.
Oh yes? Think again. Thelma did the phone calls, first contacting the private hospital outside Carmarthen in mid December. Then the surgeon went on holiday and they couldn't find my notes. Eventually in the first week of January we got some sense out of them. "Ah yes Mr. Turner, Mr. Jones has a spot free in mid February. He's very popular you know."

Clearly not only was the NHS in a bad state in Wales but there had been a knock on effect on the private providers. Feeling a bit like a traitor to my adopted country I started looking for clinics in England and a google search threw up Optical Express in Bristol. As I was looking at their details a pop-up screen appeared: "How can I help you?" Within twenty minutes of typed exchanges I had a rough price and understood their way of working which necessitated a free consultation as the first step.
"OK, I'll go for that, when can you see me?"
I waited about half a minute for the reply
"We have a space tomorrow"
"Thel - can we go to Bristol tomorrow?" "Yes"
"Yes, we'll be there."
They even had a surgery spot available four days later. The consultation was very thorough, and they offered to do both eyes, one a week after the other, for £3000. This was a saving of £1000 on the individual eye cost and cheaper than most I had looked at so I agreed. However, when they found I was taking flomax tablets to mitigate the effects of an enlarged prostate they said I would have stop taking them now and wait for 2 weeks before they could do the first operation.

To help the time pass I worked away at the panelling, fitted desk and fitted bookcase I was making for our small study room. It was hard going trying to read measurements with the tiny strip of relatively clear vision I could get at the very top of my spectacles. I kept away from other people as much as possible to reduce the risk of getting a cold. Two days before the op I had to start with a regime of eye drops to keep the eye as healthy as possible. I had a sore throat which worried me.

At last the day before the op arrived. The sore throat was still there but no signs of a cold so we set off in the afternoon to stay at Hannah's place for two nights. The first operation was at 9.30 in the morning and we got there far too early. It was a cold day and the clinic was barely warm enough as I waited between a series of tests and brief chats with the optometrist, the surgeon, the nurse and the anaesthetist. At least the sore throat seemed to have gone.

Just get me that pre-op tranquilizer please! At last I was on the trolley with a drip in my arm and all became peaceful and still. Anaesthetic drops were put in my eye and a cover was put over me and stuck to the face. I felt hands moving around my face, various dim lights, a buzzing noise and something wet tricking down my face. After about ten minutes the cover was stripped off and a dressing applied. I was taken back to the chair I had been sitting in a few minutes before and offered a cup of tea and a biscuit, both of which were very welcome.

Somewhat unsteadily I walked with Thelma back to the car and when we got to Hannah's took a painkiller and went to bed.

I had my first glimpse of the new world when the dressing was taken off briefly to apply eye drops later that afternoon. There in front of me was Hannah's little painted dresser looking indescribably beautiful - clear rich colours, pale blue and red, and fine detail; brass handles which shone - an image which I knew would stay with me. Then the dressing went back and I had to struggle through the evening with just the one bad eye.

I went to bed early and managed to sleep until a reasonable hour when I finally got to the pay-off moment - the dressing came off and stayed off.

We are warned that it usually takes a few days for the eye to adjust so I was not expecting the astonishing vista which was laid out before me. It was as if what I was looking at was an old painting which had just been cleaned. All the dirty varnish had been removed and there was the original in all its sparkling colours - colours so rich and vibrant that I could not believe I had seen them like this before. Houses, ordinary streets, small back gardens, rain, dark clouds, black wet streets - they all looked wonderful.

As we were driving home I experimented with closing one eye and then the other. By some extraordinary bit of brain magic the left eye, which was almost completely clouded, could provide a semblance of stereoscopic vision when both eyes were open, and the clouding was just a faint shadow. I kept gazing round in wonder - a seagull flying overhead, distant hills, people's faces inside cars.

The only downside was that everyone, including me, looked older; with every wrinkle and blemish clearly visible.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

The Year of the Cataracts

A year of cataracts! I sounds like a sort of apocalyptic weather forecast.

If all goes well it will soon be over, but both metaphorically and actually I will see things with different eyes. I hope I will look back on this period as one of learning. The steady decline in my hearing which had been slowly narrowing my world has, in the last year, been joined by a rapid decline in vision and a much more dramatic reduction in the activities available to me. The first to go was bird-watching. I would catch a glimpse of an interesting looking shape in the sky but it would disappear as soon as I moved to focus on it. By the time my camera reached its first birthday I could no longer see the screen well enough to use it.

The next to go was driving. I had a last trip in the camper in September but I could not read the road signs so kept to roads I knew well.

The loss I felt most keenly was the printed page. Newspapers were the first casualties, but I managed to plough through a book in October before abandoning print. I could still read screens, so kept my brain active with the internet, ebooks and online news.

Then in November I began to record my "cataract blog". I will update it and sign off after the operations.

24 November 2013

It is now just over a year since I had my eyes tested and got new distance glasses. The optician did not diagnose cataract. It was not until February and my first trial trip in the camper that I became aware of a mistiness while driving. I began to suspect something else was wrong and did some internet research. Cataract seemed to fit and Mark the doctor confirmed it on the 12th of April this year. "No need to do anything now" he said."For most people it takes a long time to become a problem, but in some it develops quite quickly."

I soldiered on, but I was becoming more and more aware of a problem and came to the concusion that I was one of the unlucky ones. In late May I saw the optician and began the long process of getting treatment on the NHS. The first stage is an appointment to see a specialist, and there is a 4 month waiting list for this.

While I was waiting, I saw the ENT specialist who confirmed that there was nothing more they could do for my deafness, but he did agree to write to the Opthalmology department to confirm that I had severe hearing loss.

By September it was obvious that I could not continue driving, and I was having increasing difficulty reading normal size type. I could no longer watch birds, or take photographs. Life was closing in.

I saw the specialist on the 7th of October. The nurse who tested my sight was surprised how good it was, but the specialist realised that because the cataract on my right eye covered the centre of the eye, in bright light my vision was seriously impaired. She fully understood about how much sight affects the ability of deaf people to communicate and made a case for priority treatment.

I was now at day one on a 6 month waiting list - unless I could get a cancellation or was given priority.

A few weeks later I went to have the eyes measured for their new plastic lenses. I had decided that if I didn't get a better date than April, I would have to go private. I stressed to the technician that I was really worried that if I could not lipread I would not be able to communicate, and if I could not read then all forms of entertainment and information would be closed to me. She made sure I was on tahe list of people who could be called at short notice if they get any cancellations, and said she would ring admissions and see what was happening.

Good news - I'm scheduled for December!

Bad news - they are running two months late.

That meant worst case was late Feb, I decided I could cope with that and felt a great relief. Why, I asked myself, was I so averse to going private? I had the money - about £2000. Some of it was ideological - the typical leftie dislike of private medicine, but I didn't feel too strongly about that. Then I realised that mjy bad experience with private hearing aid providers was the main reason.

Last week I did my last woodworking job for money - the end of a long run of difficult repair jobs for the Slaters. From now until the op I would only do work for myself so that if I made a mistake the customer wouldn't suffer.

Some days I see really badly and start thinking again about booking a private appointment, but I'm actually coping quite well at present because I am spending a lot of time writing my book and really enjoying it. I decided that this was partly as a result of other aspects of my life becoming so restricted. When I had better hearing and much better sight there were so many things I could do that I never felt like sitting down for long enough to write seriously.

I'm fairly sure that one of the reasons for my good frame of mind at present is that Mark has prescribed a low-dose anti-depressant as a treatment for my stomach ache - which he calls Irritable Bowel Syndrome, a term which covers all sorts of different intractible problems. I'm not entirely sure it has seen off the IBS, but I do seem to be more optimistic and calm than I used to be. This may be because I am getting more sleep. I now find I can go back to sleep at the time when I would normally have been leaping out of bed - well not leaping exactly, more like levering myself out of bed.

So, I have made this resolution: I am going to wait whatever happens. If I can no longer see my screens to read and write I will spend more time just being - thinking, walking, cycling, doing exercises. I can continue writing by dictation. It will be very good for me to learn how to exist without constant information input.

8 December

I've stopped writing the book. Most of the anomalies and omissions have been dealt with and it's long enough. At first I felt elated - "I've finished a book!" but the next day depression set in. It was all rubbish and would make me look silly. I had a couple of bad days trying to read the computer screen.

Last week Thelma rang the admissions people and they said it had been postponed and would not now happen before March.

I decided to go private.

All this stuff about "just being" is all very well on a good day, but we've both had colds for a fortnight, and I'm feeling a great sense of anti-climax now that so much of my time is no longer spent writing.

29 December

I get waves of panic when there is a step change. Yesterday was bad - total blur-out in the right eye and left not much better. For the first time I struggled to read the white on black type on my phone. Then I remembered I could increase the font size again and it was better. Today I couldn't read my diagrams for the next bit or work on the panelling - something I could do 2 weeks ago.

What happens if I can't read at all before I can get the operation done? Even if I still can, for a few days afterwards I will be unable to read.

New strategy: even with three quarters of my hearing gone, I can still hear after a fashion. And perhaps if I persevere with my bluetooth headphones I will be able to watch videos and even perhaps listen to music.

Help came from an unlikely quarter - my much derided laptop is now gaining in my estimation. I tried a few film trailers but the sound was too quiet. Then I realised I hadn't turned up the volume on the headphones themselves. Try this music application. It is an internet radio app and is asking me to suggest an artist, and it will find other similar music. I type in "Sting" and here is Joan Armitrading singing loud and clear. I try Massive Attack and get one of theirs I'd not heard. Really good sound!

19 Jan 2013

I'm now counting down the days. Two weeks ago we finally managed to get some sense out of the private hospital near Carmarthen, but the best they could offer was mid February. I decided to give up on Wales and look to the nearest bit of England. Google soon came up with Optical Express in Bristol, and as I was typing in details to get an appointment a "live chat" option popped up. Within about 20 minutes I had got a price guide and an indication of availability, and a few minutes later had booked an appointment for the next day!

Thelma and I did the familiar trip to Bristol. The clinic was in the new Carbot Centre so for the first time we parked in the multi-storey linked to the shopping centre by an overhead walkway.

The appointment took several hours. At the end of it I was offered one eye for just under 2k but both for 3, and the promise that the second could be done a week after the first. They had put some strong drops in my eyes so that they could see through the cataracts better, and when I came out of the dark room into the main reception hall of the building I was amazed by the strong colours and the light. This altered perception took the edge off my disappointment when it transpired I would have to stop taking my prostate drug "Flomaxtra" for 2 weeks before the first op.

I signed up for 5 appointments beginning on the 23rd, and paid a deposit of £500.

Sitting in the car on the way back I was thrilled by the amount I could see. I could even read my phone screen without reversing the colours. What if the drops had made a lasting improvement? I certainly didn't mind a long wait with this level of sight.

The next day the effect was still there, but on the third day the accustomed mix of gloom and glare returned, seeming to be worse than ever. Since then I've struggled on with the panelling job in the study. It's getting very hard to read a tape now and I've had to give up using Sketchup to model the difficult bits - back to trial and error.

The man who did the eye tests said that the modern cataract operation came about because during the war surgeons had operated on the eyes of air crews injured by shards of perspex from shattered aircraft windows. They noticed that the eyes did not react to bits of perspex embedded in them. From that came the plastic lens and more recently the technique of using ultrasound to remove the clouded natural lens.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of technology would be available in a sustainable society, and it seems to me that this is a perfect example of a technology which does not depend on fossil fuel - it is simple the result of an increase in knowledge. How much of this knowledge would we have now if we had not exploited fossil fuel? If for example human society had developed with a powerful taboo on using something which cannot be replaced, would we have seen the exponential growth in knowledge which we have seen in the last 100 years or so? It seems one of our distant ancestors lived for thousands of years with the same stone-chipping technology. It seems probable that our brains have changed sufficiently in the last 2 thousand years to prevent this happening in the future.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Body Shock

I'm in shock. I am not who I thought I was. For all my adult life I have thought of myself as a reasonably tall man - certainly not short. I was 5ft 10 or 178 cm.

Now I'm a different person. This is how it happened:

A few days ago Hannah lent me the "The Fast Diet" by Michael Moseley based on a Horizon programme which I had watched with interest last year. I was convinced fasting was not for me. I have a rapid metabolism and need to eat regularly to avoid low blood sugar and exhaustion. Well, perhaps not. A much greater problem for me is nervous stomach ache. This can be triggered by ill fitting trousers or bad posture and again lasts for hours.Because it's mainly in my head it's very resistant to drug treatments.

There are probably many reasons why I have been so troublesome lately, but if I could get trousers to fit at least I could remove one of the most potent triggers. The root cause is that my waist is larger than my hips, but since I'm not overweight I've preferred to get my trousers altered until they fit exactly round my hips. It's not really working though, and I've never heard of anyone else having this problem, so it's time for drastic action - Intermittent Fasting as recommended by Michael M.

I'm convinced by the science because it's based on the dietary conditions we evolved to cope with: an irregular supply of fibrous plant food with seeds, fruit and occasional meat. The new discovery is that the irregularity is also important to us: our bodies are programmed to adapt to period without food, and switch to, as Moseley puts it, "repair mode".

Surely a day with very little food could not be any worse than a day of belly ache? I decided to try it but first I had to do the metrics - weight, height, waist circumference and Body Mass Index.

I knew my height and my smart scales did the BMI calculation - 22.5, comfortably withing the healthy area. I also thought I knew my waist size - 36" or 91.5 cm . Dear Micahel however points out that the waist is where the naval is. When I measured here it turns out my waist size is 37.5" or 95cm. Since it was a long time since I'd last checked my height I thought I'd better do this too.

This was the big shock. Shoes off I stood against a still unpainted door , Thelma lowered a set square until it rested on my head and made a mark on the door.

"Seventeen twenty? (I think in millimetres) That can't be right, do it again." There was no mistake. My height is 172 cm or 5ft 8". I'm two inches shorter than I have always believed. Surely I can't have shrunk that much?

It's profoundly disturbing. Just thinking about it brings on the belly ache. The "Michelin Tyre" I knew about really, but I was reluctant to call it my waist. Evidently the waist to height ration is a key indicator of health problems. Your waist should be less than half your height. 91 to 178 is not too bad, but 95 to 172 is decidedly unhealthy.

All this is on top of rapidly worsening cataracts, terrible hearing, enlarged prostate and keratosis! Quite enough to indulge in a bout of depression, and I duly woke up feeling depressed. Writing it all down is good therapy: know your enemy and prepare to fight back. The cataracts will eventually be cured and I can restore my waist size. I'm used to being deaf, the prostatitis is under control and the keratosis manageable.

Decent vision and comfortable trousers are quite enough to enable me to live a good life. Perhaps today the postman will bring a message from the hospital which will start the clock ticking towards my cataract operation.