Meningitis - your help required

Okay, so this isn't my usual type of blog post at all - but I need some help.
Next month I'm attending a forum, organised by Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Limited, on  public perceptions of meningitis.  I've been asked if I could provide the opinions of my blog followers.  The survey follows and if you could spend a couple of minutes filling it in, I'd be very grateful.
If you have any thoughts or opinions, do feel free to share them with a comment.  I'd be really interested to hear. For obvious reasons, I won't give my own thoughts right now... :)

Breathe damnit!

There’s this blog post I keep wanting to write but, every time, each and every time I start, something stops me. Ah well….never mind.

I went to the gym yesterday after walking the SP. Got on the exercise bike to warm up and it was like peddling through treacle. I didn’t have one bit of energy, not one bit. But I figured I could work through it, just keep going. Anyhow, I wanted to try out the new TRX. So I peddled on and got talking to the woman on the bike next to me. ‘Gonna try out the TRX?’ I said.
‘Nope,’ she replied. ‘It’s my first time back; I’ve been ill, so I’ve gotta take it easy.’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that,’ I said. ‘What was wrong?’
‘Pleurisy. Viral pleurisy.’ Ouch.

Then someone else came in, but in mufti, not gym gear. I hadn’t seen her for absolutely ages.
‘Hey, you! Long time, no see… What’s been going on?’
‘Pleurisy,’ she said.

If you wondered - this is the TRX

No shit.
And we chatted for a bit – about doctors and shrinks and floatation and diet and so on. And then she said. ‘Bottom line, I didn’t listen to my body.’

And I thought about that, as I half-heartedly went round the weight machines, every muscle crying quietly. But thought is all mind, right? And then I strapped myself into the TRX and did some planks – and then started doing crunches and then – right there – in mid-air, my body just shouted: ‘For pity’s sake, woman, enough already!!’

So I untangled myself, came home and went on Twitter and asked: ‘Do we listen to our bodies?’
And Twitter said: ‘No. Because my body alternates screaming at me "stop eating!" with "eat more!" :-/’
And Twitter also said: ‘My body tells me to sit on the couch and drink coffee.’
And Twitter said: ‘My body is shouting “Give me cake, chocolate and Ben&Jerrys!”
But does it? Is it? Is it really?

Cos that’s it, isn’t it? Mind tells us one thing; but body can talk a totally different language, if we learn to listen.

I’ve recently put an old book of mine, The Energy Secret, up on Amazon in Kindle format and in that I went through a series of stuff that might help us get in touch with our bodies. Note to self: sometimes you should follow your own advice, Jane. Not often – but sometimes.

And then I opened emails and read through one from a dear friend who has pulmonary edema right now and sighed. All these people with lung problems. Breathing. So fundamental we don’t even think about it very often; we just take it for granted.

I wrote about that too in The Energy Secret. About how there is a yoga proverb that says: “Life is in the breath. Therefore he who only half breathes, half lives.” The Buddhist tradition regards every breath and giving new life and every exhalation as a little death. In fact, look at pretty well every ancient system of healing, every branch of spirituality and will find lessons in the lungs. Breath for thought, eh? There are a whole batch of exercises you can use to shift energy, to change your physiology, your state of mind.

But really I like Bija Bennett’s approach best. Bija is a yoga teacher and writer and her little book Breathing Into Life is very lovely…it doesn’t ‘instruct’ per se, it’s more like breathing medication/meditation, with each page like a poem.  Like this...

Breathing into Life

Most likely
if you
happen
to fall into a lake
you may
remember to breathe
and
for a moment
fully appreciate
your life
and your breath.

Her breathings are both poetic and (quite literally) inspirational – with lovely titles like The Wave, About the Sun and the Moon, A Daily Bath, The River Flows, In a Cage, Reach in the Dark, Absolute Uncertainty, Ride the Waves, Return to the Well, Secret Spirit, The Disappearing Act.

Ah, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Flogging someone else’s book, rather than my own. Ah well. What goes around comes around eh?
I emailed Bija to ask her if she'd mind my reproducing one more…and she came right back and said "Of course! Use whatever you want!!" Which didn't surprise me in the slightest.  And I was so pleased as, see, all those people with lung problems, I reckon fear often has something to do with it…fear of feeling, fear of life...and this is all about just that… 

Dive Deep

Don’t be afraid to feel afraid.

Leave the safety of your sanctuary
and wander into something rare.
Instead of pulling away
turn around and face it. Because whatever happens
you won’t die. (You might cry or laugh, but you won’t die.)

Pay attention to what is going on inside you and
dive deep
into the depths of your fear.
Even when it feels like you are drowning
keep the agreement with yourself
to go deeper. Keep breathing.
The other side of fear is love.

Redirect your attention and change the pressure within yourself.
Don’t doubt, get discouraged, and stop the loving.
Feel into the feeling in your heart.
Really breathe fully
and continue to let it circulate and swell.
Allow a simple love of life to emerge.

Take time with it. Go further.
Expand the currents of your breath inside you and around you.
Discover more flow.
It may well be that you need to work through a lot of tensions.
And that’s all right. But the purpose is not just to work through them
but to move beyond them.

Your breath is the vehicle that moves you through.

Diving deep
inside
you’ll find
that your love is what’s really alive.






Note: Bija tells me that she's creating a new site which sounds really exciting... make a note of this URL and see how it develops...

My Proustian potato cake

For Proust it was madeleines; for me it’s potato cakes.  Well, okay, I'm talking about university while Proust was lurching to childhood but the Proustian scent of childhood for me is, bathetically, creosote and, sorry, but I’m not going into that here and now.  

Potato cakes on the other hand...  A big box arrived last week and we fell on it like starving shipwrecked people (which, actually, sums us up pretty well).  Food parcel!  Huzzah! Tally ho!  And not the usual sweets or popcorn or lollies but the very staff of life. Good old Bakestone had sent us enough baked goods to feed the proverbial (or should that be miraculous?) five thousand.  Big loaves, rolls, muffins, scones, buns…you name it…but what I grabbed - lasciviously - elbowing aside my child even - were the potato cakes.

I grew up in suburban South London.  We didn’t eat potato cakes there. I’d never even heard of the things until I went ‘up North’ to university in Manchester.  In our second year, six of us rented a house in Whalley Range:  three girls, three boys and a neurotic kitten called Guinevere (not my fault – Sig was heavily into Arthurian romance and technically she had installed the creature and claimed naming rights.)  What we hadn’t realised, as we naively took our keys from our toe-rag of a landlord, was that there was a seventh room.  And in that seventh room lived four people (a tired looking woman, her young pretty boyfriend and her two children) plus three ferrets and the most depressed cat I have ever met – named, suitably, Blue.

Image by Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum

I hadn't had a wealthy childhood, to put it mildly.  We were ‘hard up’ (as in I was the kid who got free school meals, free bus pass, coupons for school uniform and so on) but I’d not seen the kind of poverty that literally stunts children’s growth.  The older boy was 13 (if I recall) but he looked about eight.  He used to take the ferrets to Victoria Park to go rabbiting – in the hopes of getting some protein for the pot.  He used to shoot rats out of the window (and we half-suspected they went in the pot too).  But mainly the family lived on potato cakes. 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, they’re not really cakes per se.  They're not a pancake, not a fritter, not a rissole, not a farl...they're...ah, the hell with it, here's a recipe…make 'em yourselves. 

Potato Cakes

Ingredients
150g mashed potato; 80g plain flour; salt and pepper (I like black; some prefer white). 

Method
Season the mash and add flour to form a soft dough. Flour your worktop and roll out the dough to about 6mm thickness then flour the surface of the dough and cut into 5cm diameter circles.
Heat a non-stick pan without oil and gently brown the potato cakes.

Got it?  Now all you do is score the top lightly and slather on butter.  Utterly delicious.  But hardly a balanced diet huh? 

Anyhow.  The potato cakes got me on a memory jag and I was right back there, a skinny girl with long red hair and hurt eyes. 19 years old and neurotic as hell: physically fearless yet emotionally cauterised. My room was at the very top of the house, the old attic, shaped like a coffin with a balcony that looked out over a tree-lined street.  Our neighbours were mainly prostitutes – soft-hearted women who searched the streets when our cat went missing. The woman opposite said she’d seen the Yorkshire Ripper; that she’d told the police but they hadn’t come quickly enough.  And she called the police again when she thought I’d hanged myself – one of us (I forget who) had hung a life-size Batman in the hallway window.  We hadn’t realised how it looked, shadow-form, back-lit, head lolling to one side, from the street below. 

I overdosed on culture – saw so many films, so much theatre, so many bands, so very many bands.  Listened to albums in my room, wrote appalling poetry watched by baleful Blue.  Ah…but hey, enough already.  You don’t need to see my old life; that funny mixed-up muddled-up girl I was once…

Back to Bakestone.  I have to be honest (because, truly, life is pretty crap if you can’t even be honest on your own blog, isn’t it?) their bread isn’t really my bag.  I like my loaf earthy, shall we say…sort of like solid oblong muesli, stuffed with seeds and nuts; the kind that wags its finger sternly at your bowels and then puts them through an army assault course. Adrian, on the other hand, goes for freshly cooked baguettes, straight from the local bakers. But James, has to be said, loved Bakestone, the whole fell kaboosh of it and is lobbying for more.  But I did scarf the potato cakes. :)

Memory eh?  Funny thing.  Bodyworkers know it can be held in muscle, in fascia, in the bone.  You can press a point and jump back in time, clear as day. But then, hey, it’s also in the nose, in the tastebuds, in the fingertips. And – riddle me this - how can some sensory experiences you come across be so so familiar, when you are pretty damn sure you’ve never had them before? 

Where are your memories held?  What transports you to a different time, a different place?  

And, because music can do it too - here's one of the tracks that hurtles me back to that room (and, incidentally, I used to share a house with the bass player on this clip - but years later and in London - yeah, go Vern!) 

 

And this... (no, no Tom Petty stories)

btw, check out Bakestore's Facebook page for recipes and stuff... https://www.facebook.com/bakestonebread

I trust therefore I float.

Trust. One of those words you think about, long and hard and deep.  Do you trust? Totally? Utterly? Unconditionally?  Very difficult.

But, you know…at some point, somewhere along the way, you have to trust.  You have to let go, lean back and just…float; knowing you’ll be held; that you’ll be okay. And if you're not...hey ho. You'll still be okay.

And ah…floating.  I first floated in London for a feature.  I didn’t like the idea of it at the time – couldn’t help thinking about William Hurt turning into a wolfman in Altered States.  But then I tried it and…oh my…total love in 18 inches of Epsom salts.  Every so often I’d Google floatation tanks and not find anything round here – at least not a proper floatation room (rather than a poky pod). But then, last week, I had a message from a lovely woman called Jules I met a few years back.  She practices Chavutti Thirumal, the Indian ‘rope massage’ – where you lie butt-naked on the floor and the therapist uses his or her feet to massage you, using an overhead rope for balance. It is, quite simply, bliss. Possibly the only massage I’ve ever had where, come the end, I feel sated, finished, done – rather than biting the therapist’s hand and wimpering ‘just another five minutes, please?’ 

Anyhow.  Back when I had an income, I used to go to Jules for the occasional Chavutti and heaven it was.  And now it seems she’s working at a new centre in Braunton and she asked if I’d like to come over and check the place out, have a massage, have a float.  And I said… well, what do you think I said?  

Actually what I said (about 15 years ago) was this.  Floating was developed in the 1950s by Dr John C Lilly, a medical doctor who was also trained as a psychoanalyst and a specialist in neurophysiology.  He found that floating helped people think better, learn more easily, concentrate more fully. Some said their creativity improved; others felt younger and healthier.  Some even claimed their sex lives rocketed.  Almost without exception, people insisted they felt much calmer and more relaxed.

This gives an idea but you float naked and in darkness

The almost complete sensory deprivation caused by floating seems to agree with both our bodies and minds.  Blood pressure and heart rate become lower and calmer while oxygen consumption improves.  People suffering chronic pain find that they can obtain relief, often not just for the hour or so they float but up to three days afterwards.  Floating seems to stimulate the body to produce endorphins, natural pain killers.  Meanwhile musicians, actors and writers frequently float because floating allows the right hemisphere of the brain to operate freely, allowing much more creativity, imagination and the ability to solve problems. 

One of its most successful applications is in the treatment of addictive behaviour:  overeating, smoking, drug-taking and alcoholism all respond remarkably well.  Phobias often clear up quickly and anxiety states frequently disappear altogether.

Apparently an hour’s float is the equivalent of four hour’s sleep. Oh, bring it on…(incidentally, the last four words I said last week – or rather I thought them).

If you’ve never tried it, really you should. And if you’re anywhere around North Devon or West Somerset then shake a leg over to Hands On (okay, that clause bothers me but never mind).  Their float room is lovely – with lights underneath and a star-spangled sky above. You simply shower, bung in some ear-plugs, lie back and then, when you’re ready, turn off the lights and…float.  And I did and it was fabulous. At first my neck hurt and my shoulders hurt and I realized just how tense I’d been.  So I let go, leaned back into the water and trusted it would hold me and do what it needed to do.  And it did.

As if that weren’t good enough, I also got myself massaged by Phil, who owns the place.  Now I’m not fussy about a lot of stuff in life.  Okay, so I have an apostrophe issue and I can’t bear jeans that aren’t long enough and bananas have to be blemish-free and just ever so slightly under-ripe and…oh, okay, so maybe I’m more pernickety than I thought. But when it comes to bodywork I seriously take no prisoners.  Back when I had a job I reviewed massage for a living (yeah yeah, jammy or what?) and I can tell the second someone puts their hands on me if they’re going to be good or not. Phil was good.  More than good.  Up there in my top five bodyworkers actually.  He’s trained in sports massage, ayurvedic massage and Reiki but there was all kinds of stuff going on and, yeah, at the end I had to resist biting his hand and going, ‘more, more, more.’

Sooo.  Bottom line.  Nice place.  Small, nothing to look at from the outside but bright as a pin inside and – if Phil and Jules are anything to go by – damn good therapists. They do all kinds of bodywork too (osteopathy, aromatherapy, reflexology etc) - and also hypnotherapy and medical herbalism. 

It’s about an hour’s drive from me but I’ll be back… in that, at the very least, I trust.  J

Reality check

Okay, so you know how I don’t really use my mobile phone?  How I never get calls or texts because, quite purposefully, I chose the network that doesn’t cover where I live?  Well… Yesterday I got a text.  From my son.  Out of the blue…and, yes, without any network coverage.

“Here’s a hard question for u. If what people think becomes real – like ideas for buildings and all. If what you think becomes real… What is reality?”

 Holy smoke. 

So, that evening, when he came home from school I said.  ‘That text. About reality…’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said. 

Eh? 

‘Okay…but then, why did you…?’

He shrugged, in that eloquent way twelve year olds have, and sloped upstairs to his room. 

time to repeat this maybe? 

What is your iPod trying to tell you?

So I was chatting to Kim Bennett on Twitter the other day, as you do.

‘I liked the Beagle Oracle,’ she said. ‘I could do with a daily dose of BO.’  Ho ho ho. 

But really the pseudo-Beagle has been a crap oracle lately.  I fear he may be rather limited as a spiritual leader. His main messages appear to be:

Don’t listen!

Eat shit!

When in doubt curl up and go to sleep!

Run away!

Hmm, actually…maybe he isn’t so crap after all. 

But then, lately I’ve been going with the iPod oracle. How the hell did I ever live without my iPod?  I have literally thousands of songs on it now – every kinda thing you could imagine (from hip hop and heavy rock through acoustic stuff, pop and Latin-American dance to chanty floaty stuff and early church music.  Oh and a load of meditation tracks and my shamanic drumming tracks.)  And what I love to do is put it on *shuffle all tracks* and see what happens.  Really, it’s usually pretty damn good at giving me what I need.  I mean, what are the odds on getting five meditation tracks one after another when I’m seriously out of balance and need to go quiet?  Sometimes it gets an obsession with one artist or one song - I mean how many times do I need to hear Leonard Cohen's Closing Time?  Maybe it's just got a glitch... Or maybe not.  Who knows? 

Anyhow, in the morning I walk with James down to the bus and then I and the SP peel off for our walk.  I play the game that the first four tracks are the ones I need to hear.  And, you know, they always are.  Sometimes it stops there but usually it goes on, and on and on – message after message after message. Sometimes they make me laugh out loud.  Sometimes they make me wanna cry.  And sometimes it’s like having the finger wagged at you by a bloody stern teacher.  That fecking iPod can’t half get preachy on me sometimes.  You know, you should try it… it doesn’t have to be an iPod – anything that allows a real random shuffle.  YouTube doesn’t work here. And you mustn’t cheat…

Sooo, what did it play me this morning?  As the SP and I decided not to go up into the woods or by the river but rather to walk straight across the fields.  What did it say? 

It said:  

 So, what are they saying eh?  Music for thought?  Or just random noise?

And after those?  Eddie Vedder – Society.  Bob Dylan – Tangled up in Blue.  Roddy Frame – She Wolf.  Feist – Brandy Alexander.  Dido – My Life.  Syd Barrett – No Good Trying. 

I dunno, for some reason I am laughing my head off.  

Incidentally you should check out Kim's website.  She offers solo holidays for those on journeys, for those of a vaguely spiritual bent... in Greece, Cyprus or the UK.  Hmmm....how very very appealing...  www.serenityretreat.co.uk 

I am in total helpless lust (and no, I have no shame)

I am such a fickle creature.  See, me and CP, it’s over.  Well, not over but we’ve decided we’re just going to be friends.  It just wasn’t ever going to be one of those epic soul-tearing romances – we were never going to be Tristan and Isolde, Samson and Delilah.  We were more Gavin and Stacey.  But it was okay, it was fine.  We were ticking along, as you do.  And then Oscar arrived on the scene.

Oh my. How could poor CP possibly compare – all white and wimpy as he was - with Oscar’s gleaming purple manhood?  I mean, for pity’s sake, look at the damn thing. It’s positively pornographic.  Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine has landed in my kitchen.  It’s the Arnie of appliances.  No, scrub that – it’s the All Blacks en masse all rolled into one solid rock-hard muscled bit of kit.

Okay, seriously now. I’m getting a tad worried about myself here.  Normal people don’t anthropomorphise kitchen appliances, do they?  I’m a shocking projector, I know I am, but projecting sexual relationships onto juicers is going a bit far even for me. 

Right. Let’s get a grip.  I mean… I’ve always wanted a juicer.  Oh shit, this is getting worse, isn’t it?  No really, I have.  See, juicing is simply a brilliant way of sucking (Jane!) all the goodness out of fruit and vegetables.  Actually the experts reckon you should eat your fruit but juice your vegetables.  Why?  Cos eating fruit is easy but eating a ton of fresh raw vegetables is challenging. Also once you heat or cook veg you often lose their nutrients and the all-important antioxidants they contain.  By the time you buy juice from a shop it has probably been heated several times and is pretty well dead as far as its health benefits go. 

Trouble is, every juicer I’ve tried hasn’t been up to the job.  The performance was poor; the end result somehow disappointing and the cleaning up afterwards?  A fecking nightmare. But this beauty is the real deal.  It’s Australian so – yeah yeah – we know it’s going to be a macho cocky bastard.  But truly Oscar has dashing style and performs manfully.  You just chuck everything in and it grinds it through and – ta-dah! – there you go. And, bottom line, is it easy to clean? Hand on heart – it’s a doddle.  Honestly. I am the laziest person in the world and I can’t bear faffing around – but truthfully, this is simples.

Look, it's not just me with the sex thing.  I reckon the people who make this thing know all too well...read this...

"Besides our beautiful new Euro design with retractable carry handle and jazzy 4 colours to choose from, the new modern, ultem tough Oscar Neo features a pulp adjusting knob!"

Pulp adjusting knob???  I mean, come on!  

Could I just add here that it’s not just me that’s getting over-excited about Oscar.  We’re all fighting over his favours.  James keeps asking me if I’d like another beetroot juice.  Mainly, let it be said, cos he loves the way it craps out little pellets of purple poop.  But I’ve caught Adrian giving Oscar a surreptitious stroke too.

‘This thing is bloody brilliant,’ he said, with the look of awe a man gets when contemplating a personal god.

‘Wow,’ I said weakly, lost for words.  Adrian doesn’t usually get terribly excited about anything (except, of course, beer, Arsenal and arcane minutiae of WWII aircraft). 

‘But it’s not just juice,’ he said, with the gleam of the newly converted zealot in his eye.  ‘It minces, it chops, it makes sauces, it makes peanut butter, it even makes pasta for pity’s sake..’

‘It poops,’ said James. ‘Awesome poops.’

I looked at Oscar and sighed, shaking my head.  ‘You and me, love, we ain’t gonna be exclusive, you know.’

He dribbled sorrowfully. 

I gave myself a little shake.  ‘Anyhow, this is crazy.  It’s not even as if I like the name Oscar.  It’s all a bit Tin Drum somehow.’

And he looked back and winked suggestively.  ‘It’s okay, love. You can call me Neo.’

I’m Matrixed…totally Matrixed.

Okay, so Oscar Neo doesn’t come cheap at £249 but I figure he’s worth every penny. And then a bit more... www.vitality4life.co.uk

THE SANE PART

Some stuff I wrote on juicing before I lost the plot…

1.       Drink juice on an empty stomach – this allows it to pass into your intestines more quickly.

2. Buy the best quality vegetables and fruit you can – organic if at all possible.  
3. Soak fruit and veg before juicing – if non-organic.
4. Drink juice immediately you make it – it’s highly perishable and swiftly loses its active ingredients.Don’t mix fruit and vegetable juices – they can ferment in the gut and cause bloating.
5. Start by trying the vegetables and fruits you like non-juiced.
6. Once you’ve got a taste for single juices, experiment by adding additional vegetables or herbs.
7. Don’t eat all your fruit and vegetables this way. Juices do not contain fibre and so should not replace whole fruits and vegetables totally in your diet.

THE GOOD MOOD JUICE GUIDE

You can use juice to tweak your mood as well as tone your body.  Here are a few suggestions to try:

• Anti-anxiety: banana/yoghurt/honey/nutmeg
• Aphrodisiac: broccoli/red pepper/tomatoes/ginger
• Calm and cool: carrot/celery/mangetout
• Concentration:  carrot/spinach/celery/watercress/basil
• Depression beater: carrot/beetroot/sprouts/ginger
• Energy: strawberry/blueberry/apricot/yoghurt/maple syrup
• Get up and go:  pineapple/mango/banana/coconut milk
• Stress-basher:  lettuce/celery/avocado/peppermint
• Super sleep:  sheep’s milk/banana/cumin

And some recipes from the makers of the mighty Oscar…

Dracula’s Punch

INGREDIENTS: 2 apples; 1 cup of raspberries; 2 cups black grapes

WHY? Apples contain potassium and can help the body build resistance to infection; they also stimulate digestion and can help with weight loss.  Berries can help alkalise the blood.

Cupid’s Capsicum Shot

INGREDIENTS: 1 dark red capsicum; 4 medium carrots; ¼ chilli husk; pinch of black pepper.

WHY? Red capsicum is rich in vitamin A, C, potassium and silicon.  It can help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by helping to stop clot formations.  Chilli is a stimulant and is said to increase passion. 

Digester’s Delight

INGREDIENTS: ½ pineapple (remove core and stalk); 2 peeled oranges; 1 celery stalk; fresh ginger

WHY? Pineapple soothes sore throats, aids digestion and acts as an anti-inflammatory. It also stimulates pancreatic hormone secretions. 

Not convinced?  Look at this poop (I mean pulp) action