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Image | | Paul Greer


We’ve had a rocky week here in the UK, ICYMI (unlikely).

There’s a lot of anger and resentment on all sides, and it becomes difficult to pull yourself away from the news stream because of the speed with which things are developing.

But we are where we are.

In a recent Guardian panel Paul Mason was asked to give one reason why he thought the Leave vote had won, he said this (I’ve typed it down as best I could from the audio):—

“Many people in this room.//who voted, like me, to remain will be going through a kind of existential crisis of the self, in the sense that the institution we have based our lives around is the EU. It’s the source of our law, it’s the source of our democracy, in as far as there is any, but also it underpins our opinions of social justice. Many of our life chances have gone, some of our young people feel as though their life chances are over, and our sense of self, of who we are, as europeans has been completely challenged by this.

Well.

That’s how it feels to be working class.

If in twenty years time your kids are offered the chance to ‘get one back’ against the people who did this to them, in one single vote, that’s what they’ll do.”

I’m hoping one thing that can come from this is that we learn to understand and listen to ourselves better as a country.

This is the first time I’ve managed to draw anything since last Thursday.

Windows in a public building.

Vball.

10 mins

Notebook: Myrtle.

One Year, one week and a day…

Image | | Paul Greer


I took this photo 374 days ago, after a chest biopsy. The doctors had detected a large something in my chest that was causing me difficulty breathing. I had a few dark months not being sure which direction things were going in, I couldn’t even walk down to the shop to get lunch without pausing to catch my breath, and I was being told I should prepare myself for bad news. I was injected with radioactive fluid, put through a large electronic donut, and had bits of me taken away for examination.

Fortunately, it turned out the something was a non-malignancy known as sarcoidosis. The cause is unknown. There is a theory that it is an auto-immune reaction, triggered by perhaps an infection (or stress, or grief, or tiredness, or not stopping). It produced a granuloma in the lymph gland in my chest which was pushing into the lungs. But it had appeared to have stopped getting bigger.

So one year, one week and a day later, the sarcoidosis has receded. I look a bit older, but I have given up sugar and alcohol, lost a big chunk of the weight I put on, have seriously reassessed some priorities,  I’m writing every morning and on Friday last week I ran for twenty minutes straight without stopping.

With a bit of luck and application, I might even try a half marathon in the autumn.

Hope all is well with you guys.

Be kind. Be useful. Et cetera.

 

Condensing

Aside | | Paul Greer

imageThe building work began this week and the many weeks of hard work clearing the garage and the existing extension ready for demolition payed off as we put the last box of random items that didn’t fit anywhere else into the car minutes before the demolition of part of the house began.

I’m not sure what our ratio for reduction was, we had some storage space, we sold a lot, assimilated various bits into the rest of the house and into the shed, but there was a lot that we had to lose.

It was very much a loaded process for us as each item seemed to hold another branching tree of memories. One example being a cardboard box which we had been keeping some paper work in, once cleared I picked it up ready to dismatle it for recycling, only to read the label and find it was the box that delivered the toys for my eldest’s first birthday, many years ago.

Notes from lost loved ones, postcards from the other sides, keep sakes from when we had time to keep stuff.

Some of the most difficult things to go through were artwork of various kinds. Especially the children’s, we have three so there were large quantities which we had to reduce or else we would not have had any room to live.

Then there was our own artwork, a constant stream of surprises, as we discovered forgotten box after forgotten portfolio. We tried a loss rate of 2:1 (thus keeping about a third of what we had).

So I was quite pleased with myself when I managed to reduce a very large plastic container of art, comics, notebooks, animation drawings into this suitcase.

It’s nice to lose some of the lazy stuff I could see in there, you could easily tell if a hand was drawn from looking properly or just drawing an approximation of a hand preprogrammed in.

I’m reasonably pleased with what is left.

I suppose I ought to digitize some of this stuff and put it on the site here. If it stands up.

Speaking of standing up, the garage this picture was takenin  just a few days ago isn’t anymore.

Exciting times.