And then there are bad days
My week in birds | inappropriate wishes | fix one problem at a time
Last week I found myself half-heartedly wishing to see the inside of a hospital A&E. Not a common wish for most people, but it would have been my Dad’s 70th birthday and he spent most of his life working in the Casualty unit as charge nurse – a real life Charlie Fairhead (which was even filmed in the A&E where my dad actually worked until he died). It has been over three decades since I last visited him at work, but I still remember the years pre-divorce when we used to collect him at the end of his shift. Arriving early, I would sit on a too-big plastic chair by the doorway of the small staff room, sitting on my hands and swinging my legs as I watched along the corridors of fast and furious activity for glimpses of My Daddy in action. Occasionally, he would flash into view and I would feel flushed with enormous pride at the sight of his strange pyjama-like scrubs jewelled with upside-down clocks and pens and stethoscopes, his commanding air always disappearing into another room. A kingfisher lighting up the length of his river.
Later in the car I would always ask any resuscitations today? And he would recall the litany of exciting and scary sounding events that had staggered through the ever-opening and closing clunky automatic doors for the 12 hours prior. Stories that would make my toes curl despite imploring him to tell me more. Memory is notoriously unreliable of course, but I still imagine how he ran the unit as if it all revolved around him. As a child I didn’t understand the vaster, taller hierarchies at play. How he was just a nurse in a doctor’s world. Though fragmentary, all I saw was a confident leadership – something so different from the man I hardly saw at home. Observing it, was always a heady mix of reassurance and disorientation. Creating a Sartre-esque nausea. Who was this man, what is this place. I am full of pride, I am disgusted.
But we should be careful what we wish for, shouldn’t we? How many times are we told this? Because in a stoke of dramatic irony and foreshadowing I did in fact get to see the inside of an A&E at close quarters this week. And then the Major Trauma Centre. And now – with some stability – we are making daily visits to the Neurology ward. At the weekend, on the eve of going on a holiday and book research trip for a month - a year coming - Neil got a call to say his mum had taken a bad fall down the stairs in the night and had broken parts of her neck and back and both her arms. Hers is not my story to tell, and the future is too unclear to call it. All we know is that everything has changed in an instant again for our tiny family, almost 8 years to the day since it last toppled on his axis when suicide amplified all of our grief into a cacophony from which none can ever full recover. Suicide makes a house of cards of one’s life. One false move and it’s all gone again.
Casualty departments – hospitals - are not the places they once were. Even with the rose-tinted nostalgia of childhood removed, none of it is how it used to be. The reasons are vast and complex and systemic, and most of us in the UK will know what I mean without me having to elaborate. It is no one person’s fault. It is a lack of investment, a different type of training, a different culture these days. It is complex patient co-morbidity, it is people living longer, it is chronic underfunding shrouded in a ‘you can’t speak against our beloved NHS’ omertà. Yesterday, a plaintive whimper kept in the confines of my own body as I watched a duck eat trash beyond the ward window. These feel like the times.
Our current involuntary residency is in a hospital in the North. How good people can keep caring at all when their own care and environment is so chronically under-invested in, is a dark miracle to me. Along our corridor aptly named Grey Street, nurses still hurry around getting very little natural light all day. Visitor toilets are reminiscent of those you might see in a neglected petrol station at midnight at the end of a busy bank holiday. Every day this week I have trudged down a flight of stairs, averting my gaze from a once lovely stained glass vignette of the Lancashire coast, which now has a hole punched through a scurry of Oystercatchers held together with yellow and black tape.
Life can turn in an instant, we know this. What I haven’t said yet, is that the day before all of this my publisher made an offer on my third book (maybe I’ll just come back to that another day and we’ll pretend like the news is new!), I was still in the afterglow of everything I detailed with joy in my last Substack, and Neil and I were on the cusp of making a big lifestyle change that would change the rhythm of our life in 2025 and beyond. Since the devastation and personal ground-zero of 8 years ago and a 7 year-long public inquest, we have got a lot better at living in the full appreciation that everything can end in a second. We have worked through the ensuing anxieties that make it hard to trust in the possibility of good outcomes, though we still don’t speak out loud about any of it lest we wake the Fates and Furies. We have broadly made the commitment to serving life instead of commodity in the Second Half, culminating in this new gamble towards personal freedom.
But that isn’t how freedom works of course. You can’t bargain for it. It’s there then it isn’t. It’s a flash of emerald and then a vacuum of empty air. It is the fast-flowing river of all things between. One person has it, another doesn’t. Do any of us, really? It isn’t clear what the months and year/s ahead will look like for us now; if we will ever see our plans come to fruition. Instead, we are returned to the weathering that whittles and shapes us. We are holding our breaths. But every new peek behind the curtain of the way the world really is – contingent, weird, maybe more sick than we realise – is a reminder to pay attention. To do what is necessary and pay respectful service to unseen forces. To live while you can and stay bold even in the face of uncertainty. This is the path we’re all scrambling along.
In a moment of clarity, this week’s new wisdom: fix one problem at a time. Which invariably starts with let the dogs out for a wee. Then eat something. Then drink something. Then set your Out of Office. There is a sequencing to personal calamity that helps soften the blow, and will pattern your gradual emergence if you let it. There is a way that you can be carried by appointments, surgeries, circadian rhythms, feed times, texts to reply to, cancellations to be made. I imagine it will only be a week or so now before I am pitifully grateful for my own bed, for an email that will brighten my day. Before long, we will surely be saying it could have been worse. Part of the patterning is not caring for a short while; giving in to the bigger picture.
Yielding is my growing edge, though. My greatest challenge at times such as these is to let go of work. By which I mean, psychologically. Cancellations can be made, and people are very understanding (thank you). But even a few days separated from my thoughts and ideas leaves me unmoored and eerily unhinged. I don’t have a brain well-suited to screensaver mode. If I don’t write for a day or two, I don’t feel like myself and yet I can’t write my more substantial ideas in high-stress situations because crisis casts a patina over creative work in the same way that when you look at a photo of yourself taken in difficult times you can see it quite plainly in your eyes. Likewise, I was pretty deep into thoughts around re-shaping my therapeutic practice thanks to the engagement of a new supervisor for my work, and losing that thread for even this short time is unsettling. It’s humbling to be shown my inflexibility; how deeply, neurologically, I feel the inconvenience of being thrown out of my systems and structures without consent. Maybe we are all, only a couple of steps away from being unmasked.
As I write this, rain is lashing against the conservatory window. I forget the wild weather in the west, now we live slightly east. By the time the weather reaches us at home, the clouds have usually emptied themselves over the Pennines first. Not completely of course, but enough. I’m grateful for this. I’m thinking of the room I just painted a muted gold. How beautifully it will be catching the afternoon light. By contrast, this Lancashire rain has the sea in it. It has an Atlantic expanse. Blue tits and Great tits take short sanctuary on a feeder as I peck at my keyboard. I watch them dart around, their resolve un-dampened. Eat. Fix one problem at a time.
Weathering is available in hardback now from wherever you get your picks. It’s perfect for autumn - largely written in autumn and winter - and a companion for life as it comes to you in lashings of rain and disruption.
Juno and old-man Flint, my in-laws doggo. Articulating something of the moment we all find ourselves in.
Oh Ruth, I am so sorry. I am thinking of you all. Your words are eloquent and beautiful and serve as a reminder of the fragility of everything. Sending love to you all. Xxx
I am so sorry Ruth! This all sounds very difficult, and it seems at an important point of change in your life, too. How you, or anyone, write so beautifully about a crisis while in it, is a dark miracle to me. I deeply resonate with the psychological yielding part. I am still learning to yield to the things I do want... And yes, I also want to say: congratulations on the book offer, this is great news amidst a terrible time. May it help with the yielding a little bit... Sending love to all of you. xxx