A world without string is chaos

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
Eudora Welty



I found myself looking at this tangled up mass of string and bits of wool in the small hours of this morning and thinking along somewhat similar lines to both the quote in today's title and the one from Eudora Welty. I would have done so for longer if I hadn't run out of lighter fuel and felt so peckish.

The particular tangle of different life paths that made me think of Eudora Welty and prompted me to dig out and reread my favourite story of hers "The Worn Path" were those of my grandmother and Thatcher. I talked about this in my letter to Miliband and in the comment section of one of this weeks blips. It's a subject that until now I've rarely talked about but it's been much on my mind this week. Two very different lives . In Welty's story an old woman, no doubt suffering from dementia, travels a well worn path, with all the scale of an epic quest, through both a physical and distorted mental landscape because she needs to get medicine for her grandson who has almost certainly died years earlier. Like Phoenix Jackson in the story, my gran used to go on journeys over old familiar routes prompted by her dementia, always with a firm and compelling goal in mind. In her case the old path was up the steep road winding out of the deep gorge that housed her home in New Lanark, down by the falls of Clyde, up to the old town of Lanark above us. My mother would watch from her window vantage point overlooking the road where it started to climb out of the village, waiting for her to come in the evening, shopping bag in hand - off to the chippy to buy dinner for up to a dozen of her relatives that she had left, hungry and demanding, around her table. The fact that, as my mother told her once when intercepting her, they had all been dead for many years - some since the Great War - did not phase her, "Aye..." she said, in that long drawn out eyebrows raised aye that leaves no doubt as to the speakers opinion of one's stupidity, ".....but they'll still want their tea." If she had lived in the Ritz, like some, she could just have dialled room service.

It's been an emotional roller coaster of a week since they announced Thatchers death, from the high induced by the sense that we were shot of her to the lows of the unexpected tsunami of fresh blood from old wounds that reopened. It's all been heightened ( and deepened) by my current drug state. After the very nearly suicidal reaction to my new antidepressants a week or so ago I briefly went back on my old ones intending to call the whole change off. I thought better of it though and decided to give them another chance and try and ride out the readjustment. So Mondays announcement caught me in a highly volatile state and its difficult to judge whether my reaction would have been so intense otherwise. On the other hand the country is full of people who obviously feel the same way and I know I would have been even more psyched if it had happened a couple of decades ago when it might have made a difference. I will be glad when Wednesday is behind us but I hope the momentum and sense of unity in opposition that has been reawakened can be harnessed and continued and that we all won't fall back into the defeated sense of futility and inevitability that has poisoned many of us for so long .

I had someone coming round on Friday to fix the dodgy Internet connection but the place is such a tip that shame and practicality meant I had a lot of clearing up to do. It's got this way because of all the things I can't do, so I was dreading it. Then on Tuesday I had another "event" in my spine where a couple of my disc prolapses decided to move significantly and further crush my spinal root nerves. These happen every so often and usually mark a permanent shift downward in function and upward in pain. This one was bad, it's the first time I've actually fainted from pain. I tried to spend as much time immobile and firmly supported as possible inte hope it would ease enough to let me get on with thing but no luck. Thursday night came and I had no choice but to get on with things. I ended up unable even to half stand and finished up on my knees, crawling around in fits and starts clearing up as bet I can. Then on Friday the guy didn't show up! Inevitably I'd made things a lot worse and even maxing out my morphine wasn't even denting the pain just giving me the tell tale little symptoms of the outskirts of overdose. So I resorted to my long hoarded, emergencies only supply of other, unprescribable drugs. Hence my extended and deeply meaningful contemplation of tangles.

I wish I was at the party in Trafalgar Square tonight. I am in spirit but I'm just in too much pain to even think about the journey, even though I live so close to London. It's not looking like I'll be fit enough by Wednesday either and that really bothers me, the day needs to be marked and not surrendered to those who wish to celebrate and mythologise her.

Oh well off to have my own little party and join the revellers in Trafalgar Square via rolling-news. I've had the stuff on my playlist going constantly. My favourites are definitely Elvis Costello's Tramp the dirt down and John Mcullagh's I'll dance on your grave Mrs Thatcher

Wonderful to see the BBC being pushed into having to play "Ding! Dong! The wicked witch is dead" on their chart shows.