Latest medical...

Well, yesterday I had my glucose tolerance test; results should be available either tomorrow or the day after. My left arm was sore for the rest of the day after having needles stuck in it by the very nice but rather heavy-handed nurse. This morning I have a spectacular blotchy pair of bruises in the crook of my elbow. I look as though an elbow-fetishist vampire has had a go at me.

Meanwhile, though, there is good news from Mum. She went to see the eye specialist at the local hospital and discovered that her mild Dry Macular Degeneration has suddenly morphed into Wet Macular Degeneneration, which sounds nasty but is treatable (unlike the Dry form, which just quietly gets worse over the years). The treatment involves having a series of injections into her retina, through her eyeball, which she is horrified about, but it's apparently a very good treatment with a high success rate. Because it is most effective if done quickly she is having her first session later this week, so at least she doesn't have time to get herself too worked up about it, and the friend who is taking her to the hospital had his cataracts done six months ago and is being very reassuring about how easy and painless eye surgery is.

So I am still concerned about myself, but very much relieved for Mum.

Cultural relativism

Last night I felt really low, so I went to the cinema to see “Up”. I wanted some fun, and to be entertained. Tonight I have a concert of lush nineteenth century classical music, which will also suit the way I’m feeling just fine. I couldn’t handle anything too heavy just now. Hormones, you know?

I’m a great believer in the idea that there is a place for pretty much everything, culturally speaking. For some of it (horror movies, the more saccharine end of pop music), that place is not part of my life; but I’m pretty eclectic in my tastes. I listen to Stravinsky in the afternoon and The Icicle Works in the evening, and I love them both. I read Rebecca West, and then Anne Zouroudi, and I am blown away by “Rashomon” only to sit hooting with laughter at a Pixar cartoon the following week. Does this make me a relativist or just lacking in properly defined tastes? Do I care?

I don’t, actually. I like my tastes, and that is enough for me.

“Up” was good fun. A bit of a “switch your brain off and enjoy the ride” movie, but not totally mindless. The animation is superb and the plot although daft is entertaining, and the dog characters are gorgeously, hilariously spot-on doggy. The only problem was that getting up to leave at the end I hit my right leg on the metal drink-holder on the next-door seat so hard I thought I had cut it open. I hadn’t, but I now have one of my characteristic violet-and-rhubarb coloured bruises down my calf muscle; it looks as if I was in a kick boxing match, not out for a peaceful night at the flicks.

Aftermath...

One of those odd post-pub things...

My right foot hurts. It's puffy, tender, and just starting to turn faintly purple under the tan. In a couple more days I think there's going to be a socking great bruise there. At some point on Saturday night, someone or something must have landed on my foot - on the scale from "gentle bump" to "horse trod on me" this is shaping up to be close to the horse end of the spectrum. A sheep, perhaps.

I have absolutely no recollection of what it was. A sheep, perhaps? In Ealing on a Saturday night, anything is possible...

I've been trying to get a nice picture of a bruised foot off the internet to paste here, but bizarrely everyone who has posted pictures of their feet with bruises has made them not-public-copy-able. Weird. One of the Press team made some suggestions but none of them had pictures of bruised feet. Oh, life is a weird place sometimes.

Spent yesterday evening going back through the first half of "Ramundi's Sisters" doing rewrites and trying to excise purple. After getting some very useful feedback from one or two people I am now on a mission to try and see my writing as if I were someone else and not me; not to feel precious about my purple but to see it coolly and chop it out when it serves no purpose (ie, a lot of the time).