Yearly Archives: 2020

Today’s story is about struggle with insomnia and how it really started to get the better of me. I found it quite hard to string together two coherent thoughts.

Today was mostly spent being asleep. But awake at the same time.

Today’s story is about how you have to start somewhere. Right? Apologies that a) I was basically asleep the whole episode, and b) the sound quality is so awful. I’ll do better. Next time, Gadget, next time.

Every so often, I read or watch something that makes me stop and think, “That’s me!” It’s almost always totally out of the blue and usually from an unexpected place, which makes it all the more strange and enjoyable.

The second half of 2019 wasn’t pleasant. I’d been struggling a lot with fatigue, muscle weakness, hip and joint pain and a number of other, smaller things that just got in the way of everything, from work to socialising to jobs around the house.

I’m blessed to have wonderful medical teams who are equipped with all sorts of tools and vast amounts of knowledge to help delve into the depths of any problem and figure out a solution.

The problem was, they couldn’t. I had blood panels, ECGs, CT scans, MRI scans (well, one MRI scan), X-rays, lung function tests, exploratory bronchoscopies, neurological test, physical tests and just about everything else you can imagine short of a mammogram. And still they came up with nothing.

I found it hard to describe to people what it felt like. Not just physically, trying to trudge through treacle every day, but mentally – fighting to maintain focus, but also to keep a sense of hope that a mind like molasses wasn’t going to be my new normal. It’s terrifying to think you might have lost a huge chunk of your quality of life for good.

Last week I was watching Resurfacing, the new Andy Murray documentary on Amazon from the producers of Searching for Sugar Man¹.

In it, his hip injury and on-going pain kept recurring, keeping him out of competition (and often off the court completely) and making him think he had no option but to retire. No matter what they tried, no one seemed to have an answer. That’s when his wife, Kim, said:

The thing that was really hard emotionally for Andy was that every single person brings hope and just some little flicker of “maybe this is it”.

Kim Murray

That’s precisely how I felt, put into exactly the right word. Every test, every appointment, every consultation offered new hope, but none ever delivered on its promise.

It’s so easy to lose hope, so easy to allow negative thoughts about the future to creep in and take over, and the light at the end of the tunnel can seem dim and distant.

Just knowing that someone else has been there before, that someone – however distant from you and unconnected – has felt the same things you feel can turn those thoughts around. It’s hard to plough a field that you feel has never seen human life, let alone had its soil tilled, but once you can see the cab of the tractor in the neighbouring field, you know the land is ripe for sowing crops.

The journey may not be over and knowing someone else has been there won’t hasten it, but it does help create confidence that anything is possible if we can only endure. Keep your eyes and your ears open: chances are that whatever you’re going through, someone else has already been there.

I’m renowned among those who know me for my eclectic taste in music that’s driven by my absolute lack of any musical knowledge whatsoever.

Growing up my music education consisted of one Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) song – Fathers and Sons – a selection of old folk/ children’s songs that my dad could play on the guitar ¹, Michael Jackson’s Bad album and Big Fun, a favourite of my brother’s and the reason I was gobsmacked to learn Blame It On The Boogie was originally a Jackson Five song when I was in my 20s.²

In the early 2000s I made friends with a wonderful Scot with CF and we spent many nights chatting via text and IM ³. He also discovered that I had a dreadful taste in music and so he burned me a CD⁴ to help me discover more artists.

In having a clearout at home recently, I found the CD case again (he called his compilation album ‘Jaffa Cakes’, a shared passion of ours) but the CD appears to have been long lost. This morning I invested some time in re-creating the album’s track list on Spotify.

If I’ve learned anything about music since my friends and, most notably, my wife started educating me properly in my late-teens and early-20s, it’s the ability for it to transport you to a time and place instantly.

As I write this, I’m listening to the playlist and remembering the days when life was so different.

The last two years – essentially the whole of 2018 and 2019 – have been horrendous, and at times it has felt that any light at the end of the tunnel we saw was nothing but a train headed in our direction. But listening back to this reminds me just how far I’ve come in the intervening years.

It’s been a tough journey, with much grief and sadness along the way. But I’m alive and I’m able to do things I couldn’t have dreamed of when I first listened to this CD.

Anders, who authored this album, has managed to not only take me back but also to bring me forward to give me deep gratitude for the life I have, despite challenges I may be going through at the moment and those that lie ahead.

This post is for Anders, though he’ll never read it. He died not too long after I was given my second chance at life, but this playlist is always in my heart.

Fate doesn’t hang on a wrong or right choice, fortune depends on the tone of your voice.

Songs of Love, Divine Comedy – from the compilation album ‘Jaffa Cakes’