The summer rains

A decade or more ago, I used to suffer from chest pains. Once, when I was travelling as a passenger in a car, it was so severe I asked the driver to take me straight to hospital. She looked sceptical, but I insisted, so she acquiesced and took me to Princess of Wales in Bridgend, where they did a battery of tests. They kept me in.

“Just as a precaution” the doctor said. She was a young, pretty woman with unfortunate hips and a kind manner that seemed genuine. By that time I was dying for a cigarette, but they had already confiscated those, along with my clothes, shoes, money, and watch. I had abandoned my pre-rolled joint in the car park, anticipating this and spent my time wondering if someone had picked it up before the summer rain shredded it into nothing. They let me keep my phone, which for once was charged to hilt.

Twitter was my saviour that night in my uncomfortable bed amidst the moaning, hurried feet and chatter of the ward. I argued long into the night about the merits of a Labour politician I had taken a shine to. My battery gave out just after three in the morning, by which time my chest pains had receded and I had made a decision.

I was not what you would call a smoker. I liked a joint, but stupidly, instead of smoking raw weed, I laced it with tobacco, which in turn addicted me to nicotine. Cigarettes became a requirement rather than a pleasure. I was long past the stage of waking up and fumbling for my cigs as the first order of business. I was a vehicle for nicotine, not a user of the drug. That night I decided to eject my passenger.

The next year was difficult. My battle against nicotine continued, aided by patches, pills and vapes. The latter was really the key in breaking the tobacco habit, but it brought with it a dependency on nicotine in a different form. Admittedly, it was one that carried few of the perils of cigarette smoking, and none of the unpleasant, socially unacceptable odours characterising the hardened smoker. I lost the cig-musk, the cig-breath, and the cig-teeth. What I gained was a five pound a day habit and a dramatic increase in the other kind of pounds: the kind that sat heavily on my waist and face.  

It took ten years of vaping to finally admit to myself that I was still addicted and I needed to break the habit before I could finally declare myself free. That admission occurred in the most unusual of circumstances. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

Two months after an unsettling General Election in Britain, in which the Conservative Party, now ideologically miles from their roots and enthralled by popular nationalism, rather than their more acceptable form of one-nation Toryism, won a large majority in the House of Commons, with a minority popular vote. Debate had raged on the left about the causes, some said it was the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, others the knock-on effect of Brexit, still others managed to blame Tony Blair, who left office in 2007, some thirteen years earlier, for losing the trust of the working class. I am not going to argue the merits of each position here. The left lost and lost badly. Historically badly.

As a result, Corbyn left and after a long and tedious election process, Sir Keir Starmer won the leadership. That’s where we are now. I do not know what the future holds, but the here and now is set against the backdrop of a crisis the new Conservative government never dreamed in their worst nightmares would colour their first few months in Government.

The pandemic of 2020 and Prime Minister, Boris Johnson are as ill-met a pair as it is possible to contrive. Johnson is a playboy, who sees political elevation as a game, he wasted weeks developing a response while toying with “herd immunity” as way out of the first real test he faced.

As an aside: never trust anyone who thinks of you as being part of a herd.

The consequences of herd immunity were far too severe, even for wasters like Johnson and his pet lizard, Dominic Cummings. The initial estimates of nearly a quarter of a million dead, would have finished Johnson’s career, buried it in a lime-pit and set fire to the entire Conservative Party as an encore. Even they could not carry out their scorched earth policy to that extent.

As it is, we are left with a health service that has suffered a decade of underfunding, a population living on scant wages from zero hours jobs, eating poor quality food, and underpaid nurses, police and infrastructure workers trying to deal with the greatest health crisis we have seen in more than half a century. Then just for good measure, throw in anti-vaxxers, a citizenry brought up on anti-social norms of individualism and dog eat dog attitudes, conspiracy theorists who blame everything from 5g broadcasts to homosexuality, celebrities who have generally stupid opinions on everything being given airtime in preference to experts, a government scientific advisor group who are largely at odds with the bulk of the scientific community and worst of all, a far-right ideologue in the form of Dominic Raab in charge of the day to day running of the country because Boris bloody Johnson has only gone and caught the virus and is currently in ICU.

As of now, about five thousand people in Britain have lost their lives as a direct result of contracting the Coronavirus, Corvid-19. We are way ahead of most other countries in terms of killing off our vulnerable – the USA being a dishonourable exception. The rest of us are locked in homes pondering on how long we can last. It has a very “end of everything” feeling about it.

Anyway, I was sitting here wondering what today will bring, doing the things I normally do, only remotely, with all the concomitant difficulties that brings, and I noticed I am reaching the end of my stash of vapes. My tinnitus is playing up, which causes me to use more, just to give myself something to do, so the choice is – risk my life by going out and getting some more, or give up altogether. I’ve decided the latter is the preferable choice. It is going to be really tough, in difficult circumstances.

I have also decided to self-medicate my tinnitus. I’ve seen doctors and hearing specialists, but they have not been much help. They tested the extent to which my tinnitus has affected my hearing and the answer was “not very much” from an object standpoint. From my subjective perspective that is actually a massive pile of bollocks. I do not swear much in normal life, but in this instance, my day to day life is affected massively by the constant swish of my ear pulse and I have to really concentrate when someone is speaking to me. My hearing might not be affected, but the net effect is it is misdirection. When someone talks to me, I hear “swish, swish, swish, so this is the critical point, swish, swish, swish”.

This has impacted on my sense of wellbeing as well. I feel ill and usually, if you think you are unwell, you probably will be. There is also the ever present vertigo, which makes my head swirl and causes me to be unsteady on my feet. Sometimes this is bad enough to cause me to stumble and on one recent occasion to actually fall over. Luckily I was not in perilous circumstances when it happened. Stairs, or crossing the road could have been a fatal scene setting. Sleep is another area where I crave the normality of my past life, only for it to be denied by the swish of my demon.

Anyway, a fellow sufferer forwarded an NHS page that suggests Cinnarizine is useful in treating some types of tinnitus, so I’m going to give it a try. It also causes drowsiness, so happy days. Or daze.

So, I’m planning an assault on my tinnitus coincidental with nicotine withdrawal and I apologise in advance for my future blog posts being dominated by these two aspects of my life. I will try to make it entertaining.

Meanwhile, I am praying for summer rains. If only to give my flowers and kitchen garden a chance to flourish this year. I think I may need both. One for my mind and soul, the other for my earthly needs. Anyone know any rain dances?