ROAD RAGE

My driving instructor told me that I would have to learn to drive twice. Once to pass my driving test (which I did first time, rather fortuitously), and once to learn to drive like everyone else does (i.e., with little regard to the laws of the land, the rules of the road, or the Highway Code). He also gave me some more sound advice to be a good driver: in addition to getting from A to B, my aim should be to avoid causing other road users to brake, stop or get out of my way.

SOUTHALL ODOURS

I step out of my house and immediately notice the artificial “cotton fresh” scent of odour suppressants wafting south from the old Gasworks site. How can this be? They finished remediating the contaminated earth in 2019, and people have been living there in the new homes they built since 2021. Still, it’s better than the smell of petrol, which is what we had to put up with day and night for months on end in 2018.

Like I was two years ago, when I last had a blood test, I’m “pre-diabetic”, so I’m going to see if I can cut out sugar from my diet and go for a half hour walk every day. Had half as much sugar in my morning coffee and didn’t even notice the difference, and had a cup of tea just now with half as much and it somehow tasted too sweet?

WHAT YOU WRITING FOR?

I was in Hounslow, west London last year. I went to a cafe in a leisure centre. I’m not proud of it, I was volunteering with my son’s school. And I’m alone, I’m not eating or drinking and I’m writing in my notebook, right? Teacher walks over to me: “Hey, what you writing for?” Isn’t that the weirdest fucking question you’ve ever heard? Not what am I writING, but what am I writing FOR?

At the risk of coming off like a poor man’s Gregg Wallace, I enjoy a four nut granola every morning.

No side effects from yesterday’s vaccine. GP called to discuss my imminent demise. She said I’m “a fat bastard and need to get out more.” I need another blood test next week to confirm. She was very nice about it.

Blood test results suggest I’m in imminent danger of heart attack, kidney failure and cancer.

Had my pneumonia vaccine and diabetes blood test this morning. Nurse was very kind and thoughtful. I didn’t pass out, although the blood test was quite painful. Now I have vaccine side effects to look forward to later…

Retreated to the relative safety of the bedroom where I’m finding solace with Radiohead and OK Computer on a loop. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } An airbag saved my life

Wife wants to know what I think about the Assisted Dying Bill. She’s strongly in favour: “It can’t come soon enough for some people,” she says.

Breathless again. Ffs.

I bought an acupressure mat (bed of “nails”) a couple of months ago to help with back pain, relaxation and hopefully to help give me a bit more energy. I used it for half an hour or so a couple of times a week, while listening to music, and it helped with all of those things. I hadn’t used it for a month, though, due to not feeling well with one thing and another.

Notionally returned to wfh today. ✅ Made chilli sans carne ✅ Emailed work to say I will try to ease myself back into things, but still feeling exhausted ✅ Declined work meetings on health grounds ✅ Had a three hour nap ✅ Woke just in time for a late lunch ✅ Picked kids up from school

LIVING AND BREATHING

I have vague memories of seeing Florence + The Machine on the BBC at Glastonbury, possibly in 2009. She was the big new thing, breathlessly jumping around all over the place, climbing up the gantry, as she showcased her debut album Lungs. Lungs album cover photoshoot stills - Tom Beard 2009 Or maybe it was 2015. Ship To Wreck sounds so familiar and like it would have caught my ear.

I recently read: How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy (of the band Wilco) 📚. It’s full of practical if fairly obvious tips on how to write and get your creative muscles going. Here’s a poem I wrote based on two books I regularly read to my little kid at bedtime.

Three days of feeling relatively well. Today I’m coughing, wheezing, short of breath again. Feel shot.

The air outside is thick with the smell of tar and vehicle emissions. Not doing my cough any good.

Wife reckons she has kidney failure due to her high blood pressure. She says her kidneys are due to expire in 2074.

Wife is making plans for my imminent demise.

Now they want me to have a blood test (routine annual test for diabetes). I hate blood tests, though, and occasionally pass out. I missed last year’s.

Damn. Felt much better yesterday since starting antibiotics on Monday evening, no coughing and a decent sleep last night. This morning I’m coughing again, though. Maybe triggered by the cold air on the school run?

I’m so tired I went for a nap, but these corticosteroids won’t let me.

Thought I was getting over my cough, but it seemed to be getting worse again over the weekend and last night. Got some antibiotics and steroids from my GP.

Finally feel like I’m getting my breath back after four days of having trouble breathing in, wheezing and feeling like I’m emphyseming.

Coughing like a bastard this morning. Probably shouldn’t have smoked those twenty Roosters my Dad brought back from Kenya thirty years ago.

I’m officially old. I now require eye drops, ear drops, nasal spray and an inhaler just to start the day.

Distractedly scrolling through my Facebook feed, which is now entirely made up of various treatments for ADHD in adults. Now browsing reviews for mushroom gummies (hoping to find a bad/magic batch).

LIZ KENDALL - MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS

Trials of employment advisers giving CV and interview advice in hospitals produced “dramatic results”, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall told the BBC. No. No they didn’t. The Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions was referring to her experience of visiting a severe mental illness Individual Placement and Support (IPS) programme. In the community. Mental health patients are in hospital usually because they are incapable of living life in general let alone getting a job.

One positive outcome of my immune system going into overdrive in response to the covid vaccine is that my psoriasis has (temporarily?) calmed down.

COPD

Last week I received confirmation of a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) based on results of spirometry tests back in August (it took that long for my GP surgery to get the results from the test centre, and only after my own intervention after their repeated failures). My GP helpfully seemed very keen to blame my twenty-odd year history of smoking. I first smoked at about age 20. My parents were smokers (wasn’t everyone back then?

THE HANGOVER

I had my covid vaccine a week ago today. As expected I had a torrid night with violent shivers, nausea, headache and generally feeling like crap. While that was the worst of it, I had a whole 48 hours of ‘mild flu symptoms’, followed by a whole week of feeling like the day after going on a massive bender. I was hoping for a good night’s sleep tonight, in preparation for a long drive tomorrow, but it’s Diwali.

THE SOUTHALL GASWORKS STORY

The story of how the remediation of Southall Gasworks highlights the environmental injustices faced by communities of colour. The disregard for the health and concerns of these residents raises questions about the inequitable distribution of environmental burdens and the role of local government in protecting vulnerable populations. It also highlights the potential conflicts between development, profit, and public health, and the need for greater transparency and accountability from authorities and developers.

Nine year old said he wanted to grow some potatoes, so we planted chitted seed potatoes in bags tonight. He said he didn’t know it was so much work!

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

Andy’s post on Kingstonian Football Club losing their home reminded me of the loss of Southall’s football ground, and a chance meeting I had with an old supporter a few years ago. Jim had lost his coat. He remembered leaving it in the Halfway House pub next to the entrance to the Southall football ground on Western Road. He told me he lived in neighbouring Hayes with his wife, who would be very angry with him if he went home without his coat.

JOURNALING

My nine year old started keeping a journal at school so we can read what he’s been doing at school every day. (Replaces the “What did you do at school today?” “Can’t remember” alternative). It’s terrific. He wanted to know what I’ve been doing, too, so I am reciprocating. I’ve never kept a diary a journal before, but I’ve enjoyed doing it these past couple of days. It’s fair to say, though, that my lad’s days are far more interesting and fun than mine.

Back cover image of the dec 1975 issue of “issues in radical therapy” (via danielle carr on Twitter.)

LAST WORDS

These are my last words writing from the café at the local leisure centre where I go every Wednesday during term time as a parent volunteer for my son’s swimming class. It’s their final session today. My lad has gone from being so anxious about swimming that he didn’t want to go at all, to wanting to go for swimming lessons now the class sessions are over. The café that was closed has reopened, although I still haven’t bought anything.

Annual (eek!) morning walk.

THRIVING?

My son’s school’s Thrive teacher is leaving. She helped transform my lad’s experience of school from being one where he had weekly if not daily challenges with regulating his emotions and his behaviour, to one where he enjoys school every day. She’s going to be very greatly missed. I managed to tell her this today and thank her for her work. It was so sad to hear her story. She has committed ten years of her life to helping our youngsters get the best start in life, and done lots of extra work getting accredited to do so.

Wife has returned home after being abducted by aliens (scroll down past the football).

CURRICULUM VITAE (REPETITUM)

Following on from my success delivering the news to my local community, I took a break from the world of (very part-time) work to focus on… playing in my first bands. And learning to play the guitar. Much of which came at the expense of any interest in or motivation to study, or revise for ‘O’ Levels, and later ‘A’ Levels. Living in a small rural market town, some of my friends, and my own younger brother, in fact, had Saturday jobs bush beating - literally (as far as I know) beating bushes to encourage game birds to fly to their sporting deaths.

DOCTOR'S ORDERS

My local pharmacy: Come and get your FREE flu jab! Me: My local pharmacy: Come and get your FREE flu jab! Me: I’ve come for my FREE flu jab. My local pharmacy: That will be £16.95, please. Me: I’ve got two text messages from you telling me it’s free. My local pharmacy: Are you pregnant? On dialysis? Undergoing heart surgery? Me: My local pharmacy: Do you have asthma? Me: Bingo!

RESPONSES TO MY OPEN LETTER TO PETER MASON

I got a reply to my open letter to Peter Mason[pdf], Leader of Ealing Council, and one of my local ward councillors. Slightly oddly, he addressed it not just to me, but also to CASH (Clean Air for Southall and Hayes, and my neighbour Angela Fonso (who heads up the campaign group. You can see a record of all Mason’s Letters to CASH, if you’re interested in the history. I’d also submitted two Freedom of Information requests(FOIs) to try to get answers, as I didn’t expect a reply (as he has never replied directly to any of my previous questions).

RISKS TO HEALTH FROM REMEDIATING SOUTHALL GASWORKS

AI is more ethical than Ealing Labour Party. No money was exchanged. What are the risks to health from remediating Southall Gasworks on site in the open air? The land is highly contaminated with benzene, naphthalene and a while host of other VOCs, PAHs, heavy metals, “blue billy” and asbestos, and surrounded by residential streets. The local community is mostly of south Asian and African heritage, and it is known that people with this heritage can be genetically vulnerable to naphthalene poisoning.

I AM THE LEADER OF EALING COUNCIL

I asked Google Bard to advise me on a local matter. I am the leader of Ealing Council. I have received more than 250 reports about a BAD odour nuisance and air pollution from the remediation of the highly contaminated Southall Gasworks land. We had a public meeting where 250 angry residents complained about health problems as a result of the air pollution, including eye, nose and throat irritation, respiratory problems and infections, and even cancer and death of loved ones.

UNDER POISONED SKIES

Watched Under Poisoned Skies on BBC iPlayer last night. It’s the sad and shocking story of children in Iraq dying from leukaemia as a result of toxic air pollution from mega rich oil companies burning off excess natural gas in the open air near their homes. Benzene (found in the air) and naphthalene (found in the children’s urine samples) are the main carcinogens. Levels of benzene are between 3 and 9.

SOUTHALL RESIDENTS TO GIVE BLOOD SAMPLES

After six years of campaigning for justice: “The fact that gas used to be manufactured from coal has been lost to the public consciousness, but the chemical legacy remains.” “These communities already have multiple disadvantages with air pollution, overcrowding and poor housing. This is another burden being placed on them.” Via: Scientists to examine health fears at west London luxury development

RESPONSE TO EALING'S AIR QUALITY STRATEGY AND ACTION PLAN

Ealing Council’s draft Air Quality Strategy is a 64 page document together with a 40 page Action Plan, and the consultation period runs until 30 January 2023. It’s taken me the best part of six weeks, all my spare time over Christmas and New Year, to get through it all, make notes and cross-reference to try to make sense of it all and offer some feedback. Really, there must be a much longer consultation period if Ealing Council is genuinely interested in residents' views.

Surprised I haven’t been asked to remove this review of FM Conway. Is 5,000 views a lot? I guess, at the end of the day, it makes no difference.

STRAWBERRIES FOR PIGS?

Little did we know at the time, but these little strawberries were usually engulfed in a toxic plume of benzene, naphthalene, and god only knows what else. Sensibly, the wife refused to eat them. We later discovered that official planning documents for the nearby old gasworks, which was being dug up in the open air for new homes to be built on the contaminated land, stated that no vegetables should be grown on the land.

HOW I CAUGHT COVID

I tested positive for coronavirus yesterday. I started to feel unwell – like I had flu – on Sunday afternoon. After a night felling too hot and too cold, Monday morning I had a temperature of 38.3°C. I went to my local walk-through testing clinic later that afternoon. It was a self-test. If I’d known, I would have ordered a test-at-home kit, although I wouldn’t have got my result as quick.

HIGH TRAFFIC NEIGHBOURHOOD

Took me an hour (as opposed to 10 minutes) to drive my lad home from school this afternoon, thanks in part to the High Traffic Neighbourhood (‘Improving access for HGVs’) in Southall ‘Green’. Like a rat, I tried the side streets and back roads option and found those to be jammed, too, and Scotts Road - although confusingly still two-way throughout - is now No Entry from the eastern end.

A SUCCESSFUL HOME DELIVERY AND THE LOCKDOWN/LOCK-IN.

My second son was born late Saturday night (what would normally have been my beer night) two weeks ago, after a short, but intense, labour. He was delivered at home by two brilliant midwives, who were fully protected courtesy of customised #tinap bin bag aprons, unused clean air protest dust masks, and disposable gloves my wife stocked up on back in February when – without any scientific advice whatsoever – she somehow accurately foresaw the current coronavirus global pandemic somehow reaching the UK’s shores (and airports).

RETURN TO WORK

I returned to work last week after my extended absence due to respiratory illness, which may or may not be related to three years of breathing the poisonous gasworks' air. I find I now have to literally climb over two rough sleepers camped outside the door of my workplace in order to get in. There is no more space in the nearby doorway, and the doorway around the side entrance is similarly occupied.

SOUTHALL UNDER SIEGE: THE NEIGHBOURS FROM HELL

‘A lack of scrutiny,’ says John Freeman, Regulatory Services Officer at Ealing Council. He’s talking about lessons to be learned from the council’s response to the new asphalt plant built in neighbouring Hillingdon borough in 2014. ‘We didn’t expect there to be so much odour from a new building, or so many complaints.’ Moving swiftly on. Oppressive odour The highly contaminated old gasworks site in Southall has been kicking up a stink, too.

INCONSIDERATE CONSTRUCTOR

Lorry driver on his phone while leaving ‘Southall Village’ building site, right next to school entrance during school run. Got a load more verbals from the driver and his colleagues on site - ‘Did he hit anyone?’, ‘He doesn’t work for us!’ All part of the Considerate Constructors Scheme, aka Couldn’t Care Less Scam.

LOUDER THAN WORDS

We are all consciously or unconsciously re-enacting previous unresolved experiences of loss, or absence, of relationships. These disappointments evoke in us resentment and anger, which control us until we can forgive - to see the victim in the perpetrator. We remain victims all the while we are unable to forgive, and all the while we are unable to let people into our inner worlds of pain - to protect ourselves from breakdown, but also to protect other people from this part of our experience for fear of what it will do to them, and how they will react to us.

Had hearing test on Friday. 20% hearing loss in left ear. Ear canal is wafer thin in places, meaning wax build up. That, or a brain tumour.

My back is killing me and I’m practically crippled after being out in the rain all day training and coaching.

Thanks to FA 1st Aid trainer Richard Barnes for relating the story of how he had his left wrist cut through to the bone and dangling off.

Doing homework for the FA coaching course I’m on. Last night I suffered the ignominy of fainting during the bloody bit of the 1st Aid class.

TWENTY TEN (THE PREQUEL): THE CHEESEMAKER

Originally intended as a follow-up to part one of my milk-based food product styled personal review of 2010, this post quickly regressed into a metaphorical guide to the cheesemaking process, as you will see. By the end of the first week of March 2010, I felt like I was several thousand feet above sea level. High up a mountain, again, perhaps mostly due to the ever-decreasing capacity of my right lung, but plummeting to new emotional depths thanks to the leaden weights of my ever-increasing self-doubt and sense of despair, perhaps partly as a reaction to stopping taking my antidepressant medication (although I stopped because I was feeling worse, not better).

TWENTY TEN (PART ONE): HARD CHEESE

Abstract: Thankfully, there is no Part Two. Tags: snowcock, nanowrimo, manflu, cheese, depression Note: probably none of the links work now. I began 2010 by wishing everyone (except fascists) a Happy New Year and a promise to blog my reflections on the naughty decade in due course. Well, that will have to wait for another time, but here - thanks to my identi.ca memory aid - are my reflections on 2010.

WATERBOARDING ON THE NHS

Abstract: Gagging for it. Tags: waterboarding, NHS, bronchoscopy, torture, worklessness, Nazi, psychotherapy, banana, splat On Another Planet this week: controversial new government plans to tackle ever increasing worklessness using waterboarding. Techniques refined and perfected by secret military personnel known only by their codename ‘Our Boys’ are being piloted by the NHS in an effort to ‘encourage and empower’ people claiming statutory sick pay to return to work. One persistent malingerer, who asked not to be identified, claimed that he was subjected to an horrific ordeal at the hands of his torturers and says he was tricked into believing he was just playing a game of ‘doctors and nurses’.

CONFESSIONS OF A THORACOTOMY PATIENT

Abstract: Lung-form blogging at its cheesiest. Tags: thoracotomy, empyema, decortication, cheese, collapsed lung, chest infection, pleurisy, NHS, Last week I met a beautiful young Hispanic woman and we spent the night together. She cared for me deeply and carefully, and I gazed upon her lovingly as the morphine (d)ripped through my veins. She checked me out and made sure that everything seemed to be in working order. ‘Hi, I’m Sofia,’ she said.