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How many of you followed the practical advice above? I'm watching a programme discussing the volume of porn available on the internet, shops, and my bedroom, and also the media has been flooded with the story of Jacqui Smith's husband ordering two blue movies - raw meat 3, no less - and then the tax payer being charged for it.
I think it's hilarious how hypocritical people are being.
First off, ignore the whole taxpayer thing. I'm pretty sure it's an honest mistake. And why the hell didn't he just go on the internet. Maybe he didn't know the sites, and if so: http://www.redtube.com/, http://www.xvideos.com/, http://www.tube8.com/ should help.
What I'm interested in is some of the media reaction from people who should no better. Her husband has been deemed as having a "porn habit." If two films constitutes a habit, I am in real trouble. BIG, neurotic, problematic, psychotic trouble. Two films is a breakfast, not a habit. And I know most blokes are the same, and many women.
But no, this poor sod, who was alone one night with an itch he just couldn't scratch without watching a cockumentary, is being villifed - willified, if you will - because of it. His, and Smith's mistake, was including it on a list which the Sunday Express got hold of with a firm grasp and still haven't pumped dry.
The first porn movie I ever saw was called "Heavenly Desires" and featured legendary blonde actress Seka, who had a spectacular physique. I can't really remember the plot other than the fact that she dies, becomes a ghost and shags some people - despite the fact that there were certain scenes which had become grainy through constant watching to the point where I could judge to the nearest millionth of a second where the first scratchy line would appear, and which part of the genitals would be obscured first as the shredded tape rasped through the desperate spools of the JVC machine to my left.
I loved it and watched it for years. And then thought, "no I've had enough", and recorded the fight between Lennox Lewis and Phil Jackson from Atlantic City in 1994 over the top of it. From a single fist to fisticuffs in one go. And guess what? I regretted it straight away.
Nowadays I barely ever watch porn/watch porn sometimes/watch it incessantly (note to self - delete as appropriate if you can be bothered). But whether watch it or not I know one thing - I won't think any worse of people who do.
Monday 30 March 2009
Thursday 12 March 2009
Football - a matter of life and death? Hardly
My Father died on Monday.
I had been leaving the Coventry - Chelsea FA Cup quarter final and about to get on a bus into town when I realised I had a message on my phone. I listened to it. Sadie said ring me urgently. I did, and she said she would call me back. She did.
She had had to call me back because she was in a hospital. My Father had collapsed at a lecture in Lincoln and had been rushed to the County Hospital where he was in intensive care with a bleed to the brain. It wasn't good.
I put the phone down and just told Emma that we needed to go to Lincoln, a 75 mile journey. Emma, her uncle and his friend looked at me quizzically, and really I had no idea what I was saying. The enormity certainly wasn't entering my brain yet.
We got, eventually, to my car. M69, M1, A46, and we would be in Lincoln. The journey was gloomy and terminal as the thoughts rattled around. Would he live? If so, would he be damaged? Where were the rest of our relatives? Would he survive until I got there? Although I knew very little about what had happened and was really just floating along in the car with a painful lump in my throat inwardly I knew the answer to these questions.
The weather was bleak, the sky greying. My brother were outside when I arrived. I cried for the second time. David told me that he was under sedation and this would be taken off the next morning - if he didn't wake then, he never would.
We went in, through a security door were you had to ask to be let in. We would have to do this again probably 20 times in the next 24 hours. No other occasion would hurt me like this one.
Dad was on the bed, eyes closed but looking directly towards the curtain entrance. A huge tube was snaking from his mouth and two other smaller pipes crept from his nose. He was wearing a grotty yellow smock. Machines beeped and pulsed behind him. I cried again, a sickening, straining crying.
A nurse told me something or other about him having life-threatening injuries, which were inoperable as they were clustered deep into his brain where it meets the spinal cord.
This was not a surprise. She said that if he did come out of the medically induced coma - and this was no more likely than not - it was not likely that he would come out in an "appropriate fashion". That meant brain damage.
So we sat, and watched. He didn't move at all. Nurses came periodically to inject, and wipe, and swab, always addressing him by name before performing an action. Quite sweet.
Em and I were tired so we tried to imbibe as much caffeine as possible. The tea was fairly hideous but temporarily soothed a desperate pain, that of a swollen throat and a heart that knew, in its core, that my Father was going to die.
I didn't eat.
The nurses turned the lights off in the ICU as nightfall came. Other people were lying there. Another younger man was the only one like my dad who wasn't moving at all. Others breathed in a troubled fashion through oxygen masks, or slept. Dad didn't move. The nurses periodically asked us to leave so they could perform that action for him, rotating him, cleaning him, checking the padded machines conected to his legs were working and he wasn't suffering circulation problems in his inanimate, useless legs.
Who knows what was in that mind? Was it a mind? I circled the bed countless times, trying awkwardly to avoid the wires. Surely he could hear us. He knew our anxiety, and would react. Surely this figure, this 55-year-old lump of flesh and bone and sinew, was not how my Father would finish his life. Surely it was a matter of time before the 1/2 cup of blood which had leaked into his mind and was straining it to bursting point, would do the decent thing and evaporate or leak away. Surely.
I learned what the figures on the machines were. Blood pressure. Heart rate. Co2 output. Pulse.
At 10pm we went to rest in a Siberian room, on a sagging bed. My eyes evacuated a crumpled contact lens. I got six hours sleep, a whirl of thoughts on disability and my dad's reaction to it; selfish, guilty worries on the effect on our upcoming holiday to Borneo; financial worries; prayers for my stepmother and brother and sisters. I got up at 5.45am.
We went back and Gail and her sister Marlene were already there. There had been no change overnight. The sedative would be taken off in three hours. More tea. More cappucino. But no more hope.
The sedative was taken off. Within five minutes dad's blood pressure had rocketed, his throat gagging as blood surged around the body at an unsustainable rate, his head screaming crimson, until the sedative was replenished. I was not there and am eternally grateful.
The consultant arrived at 1oam, starting at the other end of the room, slowly gliding round the ICU and examining the other patients. I listened and learned nothing. Dad's blood pressure had crept up again after dropping off.
We were told to go out while he was examined, and sat in the front foyer.
We came back an hour later, perplexed. Maybe a new angle on his situation had been revealed. Maybe the blood had gone. Maybe there was hope.
The consultant called us into the relatives' room. A tiny room where terrible words would swirl and haunt.
They were to turn the sedative off, and one of three things would happen. His blood pressure might rocket to the ultimate, causing heart failure and death within minutes. Or somehow his body would stabilise and his blood pressure would lower again, and his heart would beat and he would breathe for a brief period as the ventilators were removed, until the part of his brain that was damaged - which controlled breathing - ceased to function. This could be brief. The third opetion was that he might breathe indefinitely until he died of an infection to the lungs, or even hunger. All three options - the only three possible - would lead to the death of my father.
Gail's crying will live with me forever. Emma cried. I just sat still. I asked why it had happened. We will never know the true answer. A weak artery from birth. An abnormal vein. Who knows.
I went back, and the same vacant shell was there. However where there was hope 21 hours before, now there was only despair. The same figure. The same beeps, the same bed, but with a human facing extinction.
I kissed him. Touched him. Touched his psoriasis, one of the things I would never normally go near but one of the things that made him him. I whispered in his ear small wisdoms which are not for this blog. And then Em and I left, and I turned and looked at him for the last time.
We left soon after and drove home, leaving Gail to be with him in the dying embers of his life.
He died at 4am on Monday morning.
The funeral is next Thursday at Gedney Church.
It was a weekend that will never be repeated, thankfully. How can you go from a weekend where you're going to kick the arse of a Premier League team of twats to sitting in a fruitless vigil at the bedside of your dying Dad? It still doesn't seem possible that someone who rescued me through my teenage years, and helped me through University, and always saw the best in me in those times, can never be there to see my children, or marriage, or career flourish.
Whether this blog is a catharsis or not, I don't know. It is not comedy. It is opinion, and thought, and reflection, and is a window into a hell that I hoped would come in 20 or 30 or even 40 years' time.
The odds of a tragedy such as this are incalculable and rest assured it will not happen to you. I hope to God
I had been leaving the Coventry - Chelsea FA Cup quarter final and about to get on a bus into town when I realised I had a message on my phone. I listened to it. Sadie said ring me urgently. I did, and she said she would call me back. She did.
She had had to call me back because she was in a hospital. My Father had collapsed at a lecture in Lincoln and had been rushed to the County Hospital where he was in intensive care with a bleed to the brain. It wasn't good.
I put the phone down and just told Emma that we needed to go to Lincoln, a 75 mile journey. Emma, her uncle and his friend looked at me quizzically, and really I had no idea what I was saying. The enormity certainly wasn't entering my brain yet.
We got, eventually, to my car. M69, M1, A46, and we would be in Lincoln. The journey was gloomy and terminal as the thoughts rattled around. Would he live? If so, would he be damaged? Where were the rest of our relatives? Would he survive until I got there? Although I knew very little about what had happened and was really just floating along in the car with a painful lump in my throat inwardly I knew the answer to these questions.
The weather was bleak, the sky greying. My brother were outside when I arrived. I cried for the second time. David told me that he was under sedation and this would be taken off the next morning - if he didn't wake then, he never would.
We went in, through a security door were you had to ask to be let in. We would have to do this again probably 20 times in the next 24 hours. No other occasion would hurt me like this one.
Dad was on the bed, eyes closed but looking directly towards the curtain entrance. A huge tube was snaking from his mouth and two other smaller pipes crept from his nose. He was wearing a grotty yellow smock. Machines beeped and pulsed behind him. I cried again, a sickening, straining crying.
A nurse told me something or other about him having life-threatening injuries, which were inoperable as they were clustered deep into his brain where it meets the spinal cord.
This was not a surprise. She said that if he did come out of the medically induced coma - and this was no more likely than not - it was not likely that he would come out in an "appropriate fashion". That meant brain damage.
So we sat, and watched. He didn't move at all. Nurses came periodically to inject, and wipe, and swab, always addressing him by name before performing an action. Quite sweet.
Em and I were tired so we tried to imbibe as much caffeine as possible. The tea was fairly hideous but temporarily soothed a desperate pain, that of a swollen throat and a heart that knew, in its core, that my Father was going to die.
I didn't eat.
The nurses turned the lights off in the ICU as nightfall came. Other people were lying there. Another younger man was the only one like my dad who wasn't moving at all. Others breathed in a troubled fashion through oxygen masks, or slept. Dad didn't move. The nurses periodically asked us to leave so they could perform that action for him, rotating him, cleaning him, checking the padded machines conected to his legs were working and he wasn't suffering circulation problems in his inanimate, useless legs.
Who knows what was in that mind? Was it a mind? I circled the bed countless times, trying awkwardly to avoid the wires. Surely he could hear us. He knew our anxiety, and would react. Surely this figure, this 55-year-old lump of flesh and bone and sinew, was not how my Father would finish his life. Surely it was a matter of time before the 1/2 cup of blood which had leaked into his mind and was straining it to bursting point, would do the decent thing and evaporate or leak away. Surely.
I learned what the figures on the machines were. Blood pressure. Heart rate. Co2 output. Pulse.
At 10pm we went to rest in a Siberian room, on a sagging bed. My eyes evacuated a crumpled contact lens. I got six hours sleep, a whirl of thoughts on disability and my dad's reaction to it; selfish, guilty worries on the effect on our upcoming holiday to Borneo; financial worries; prayers for my stepmother and brother and sisters. I got up at 5.45am.
We went back and Gail and her sister Marlene were already there. There had been no change overnight. The sedative would be taken off in three hours. More tea. More cappucino. But no more hope.
The sedative was taken off. Within five minutes dad's blood pressure had rocketed, his throat gagging as blood surged around the body at an unsustainable rate, his head screaming crimson, until the sedative was replenished. I was not there and am eternally grateful.
The consultant arrived at 1oam, starting at the other end of the room, slowly gliding round the ICU and examining the other patients. I listened and learned nothing. Dad's blood pressure had crept up again after dropping off.
We were told to go out while he was examined, and sat in the front foyer.
We came back an hour later, perplexed. Maybe a new angle on his situation had been revealed. Maybe the blood had gone. Maybe there was hope.
The consultant called us into the relatives' room. A tiny room where terrible words would swirl and haunt.
They were to turn the sedative off, and one of three things would happen. His blood pressure might rocket to the ultimate, causing heart failure and death within minutes. Or somehow his body would stabilise and his blood pressure would lower again, and his heart would beat and he would breathe for a brief period as the ventilators were removed, until the part of his brain that was damaged - which controlled breathing - ceased to function. This could be brief. The third opetion was that he might breathe indefinitely until he died of an infection to the lungs, or even hunger. All three options - the only three possible - would lead to the death of my father.
Gail's crying will live with me forever. Emma cried. I just sat still. I asked why it had happened. We will never know the true answer. A weak artery from birth. An abnormal vein. Who knows.
I went back, and the same vacant shell was there. However where there was hope 21 hours before, now there was only despair. The same figure. The same beeps, the same bed, but with a human facing extinction.
I kissed him. Touched him. Touched his psoriasis, one of the things I would never normally go near but one of the things that made him him. I whispered in his ear small wisdoms which are not for this blog. And then Em and I left, and I turned and looked at him for the last time.
We left soon after and drove home, leaving Gail to be with him in the dying embers of his life.
He died at 4am on Monday morning.
The funeral is next Thursday at Gedney Church.
It was a weekend that will never be repeated, thankfully. How can you go from a weekend where you're going to kick the arse of a Premier League team of twats to sitting in a fruitless vigil at the bedside of your dying Dad? It still doesn't seem possible that someone who rescued me through my teenage years, and helped me through University, and always saw the best in me in those times, can never be there to see my children, or marriage, or career flourish.
Whether this blog is a catharsis or not, I don't know. It is not comedy. It is opinion, and thought, and reflection, and is a window into a hell that I hoped would come in 20 or 30 or even 40 years' time.
The odds of a tragedy such as this are incalculable and rest assured it will not happen to you. I hope to God
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