Foxxy

Don't go thinking I've been idle, just because I haven't blogged for nearly three weeks. No sir. I've been a positive blur of activity and sociability, which is not my usual February behaviour - this is normally the time of year when I like to hunker down with a stack of books. That said, I've been reading a lot as well.

So, what can I recommend? As far as reading goes, I am becoming quite concerned at my inability to engage with fiction these days. I was given a copy of Julian Barnes' 'The Sense of an Ending' for Christmas (by someone who knows me well enough to know I wouldn't have already read it; an early adopter I am not.). I finished the slim volume in an afternoon, and was impressed by it, which may or may not be the same as having enjoyed it. It felt a bit like an extended essay on the subjectivity of memory and the emotional cost of excessive emotional caution, made flesh through the parable of an underachieving, largely unignited man who is looking back on a life not so much sepia-tinted as picked out in tones of beige. The shadow and light in his dullish life seem to have been provided purely through the machinations and convulsions of his school friendship group, and the intersection of that part of his life with his only significant love affair. Naturally, as demanded by the novel form, there are consequences that emerge for him in early-old age, and that's about the thrust of the book, as far as I could tell. Which is absolutely fair enough. As one who spent an uncomfortable couple of hours a few weeks ago leafing through her own diaries from her twentieth year, I know too well how we distort the truth through the filter of emotion in memory, even when we're recording events just minutes after they've happened (my own account of Christmas 1982 stands as a spectacular example of the 'unreliable autobiographical narrator'.). Anyway, The Sense of an Ending is still only the third novel I've read in the last twelve months, which may also reflect why I haven't written any fiction, either (not consciously, anyway. I could be embellishing this for effect right here and now, I suppose.).

Moving on, as I'm going right off on a tangent, I can also highly recommend Peter Ackroyd's definitively titled 'The History of England, Volume 1, which I'm regretfully almost at the end of. I love Peter Ackroyd - for me he's the popular historian who best brings it all to life, not only by means of his forensic historical research, but by his visceral, playful, passionate descriptive prose. Who wouldn't love to know that Henry II's favourite jester was one Roland the Farter, whose Christmas Special featured 'a jump, a whistle and a fart' (imagine the rehearsals), and who was so adept at these special skills that they earned him a Suffolk manor house and thirty acres? It's not all battles and coronations, though there are plenty of those too - where Ackroyd comes into his own is when he delves beneath the kingly crust, into the customs, superstitions and daily degradations of everyday life, seething away below as England gradually coalesced into a nation. If all human life is your bag, fork out some cash on this sturdy volume - you won't regret it.

Further away in both time and place, I'm also throughly gripped by Richard Lloyd Parry's 'People Who Eat Darkness'. This account of Lucie Blackman, who was abducted and murdered in Tokyo ten years ago, weeks after arriving to work as a nightclub hostess, is not the sort of book I'd normally be drawn to, fearing I'd find it voyeuristic and salacious. I opted for it on the basis of a fleeting memory from my own trip to Japan three years ago; a snapshot I took in my head while walking through Osaka's nightclub district late one night and glimpsing a tall, blonde young woman in a blue evening gown obsequiously greeting a drunken salaryman in the lobby of a club, and ushering him inside as though she'd been waiting for him all her life.

I'd long since forgotten Lucie Blackman's name, and like many people had confused her sad death with that of English teacher Lindsay Hawker, who ended up dismembered in a sand-filled bathtub, but seeing that young girl in her fragile finery for just a few seconds, with her tight, needy smile reminded me of the one who'd gone missing some years before. Richard Lloyd Parry, who was a foreign correspondent at the time and based in Tokyo, followed the case almost obsessively, and obviously has never forgotten Lucie Blackman for a moment. His book treads relatively delicately through some very tough territory, sketching a picture of Lucie's family that is familiar and troubling (aspirational, mismatched parents who never quite had enough money to afford the comfortable Wealden lifestyle they were trying to portray; the marriage imploded in an unresolvable torrent of mutual bitterness, so very much like many of the couples I've seen in my work over the years.). Lucie Blackman seems to have emerged from the mess as a rather lost and slightly silly girl, which we're all entitled to be at 21, who ran up a load of credit card debts and saw an opportunity to earn some 'easy money' in Tokyo so she could pay them off. The novel moves from the micro focus of Lucie's troubled young world to the macro of the Japanese sexual demi-monde and the inherent ambivalence towards 'gaijin' which led to endless frustrations and obstructions for the family as, despite their ruptured structure, they tried to find her, and to keep the case in the public eye. At times some of the avenues they explored leave you reeling as a reader - dodgy 'psychics', credible con merchants and wannabe 'heroes' all come and go, illustrating heartbreakingly again and again how malleable and credulous the desperate become. And knowing how the story ends before you begin reading means there is no redemptive denouement, just a thoroughly sad if beautifully written tale of human stupidity, greed, selfishness and, well, evil. For all that, though, I'm recommending it.

And what of music. I've not been reading in silence, you know. Mostly a lot of Steve Reich these days, which I find is perfect background music for an afternoon on the sofa with a Slanket and a book, but as I'm writing this I'm very much enjoying The Twilight Sad's new album No One Can Ever Know, which is not one I'd recommend for a sofa and a book. I've been following this band of young Scots for a few years now, since stumbling across them in a tiny, overheated venue at the Brighton Great Escape. They are one of the most intense acts I've ever seen live, and though that quality is often diluted in the studio their recordings give an excellent flavour of what to expect from the Real Deal. The new album is slightly softer in tone than those preceding it, with the addition of keyboards and a slight muffling of the previously dominant drumming, but there's been no watering down in the quality and rawness of James  Graham's piercing, keening vocals. Internal torment never sounded so melodic as when he lets rip, and judging by the new crop of songs, life hasn't got any less intense for him. It's irked me when I've seen this band sneerily dismissed as 'neo-shoegazers' - there's a lot more going on than effects pedals and feedback in any of their albums to date, but if you're new to them you might want to start with the new and work backwards into their special brand of Hibernian darkness.

And finally, speaking of darkness, here's the reason why I began this post in the first place (not that anyone's going to have bothered reading for this long; I realise I am talking to myself now.). John Foxx came to town on Friday night, and I was very happy to be there to greet him. This man is as cool as you like, a chiselled, lean silver fox unbelievably in his 63rd year. I've seen him several times over the last few years in varying (but not too varying - there's no danger of an acoustic set from John) musical incarnations, but his latest combo The Maths seems to suit him very well. Last year's album Interplay was a comforting return to his familiar themes of urban dislocation, dystopian visions, and cool alienation, and its songs - solid tunes, all - served him well for Friday's live set, interspersed as they were with the old Metamatic crowd-pleasers (he's never going to be allowed to leave a stage without doing 'Underpass', I fear.). The venue was rotten - Brighton's The Haunt is a bulb-shaped affair largely comprising a long narrow tunnel, which you won't be able to see a thing from unless you are well over six feet tall - and the crowd comprised far too many bad-tempered bald men of a forty-plus vintage who had clearly not been to a gig in many years and had forgotten, or never held, any notion of etiquette around passing through crowds without leaving bruises, or talking at top volume over the songs to your fascinating mates. I did feel that the band got as pissed off as me with the incessant chatter, but professional that he is John gave a sterling if forbidding performance, his audience banter strictly limited to 'good evening' and 'thank you - and goodbye!' He wasn't going to hang around and make friends, which went down particularly badly with the two latex-clad 45-year old goth groupies, who were begging unsuccessfully to be allowed backstage after the gig had ended. I'd like to think John was long since back in the bar of the Grand Hotel by then, swirling a glass of Chateau Lascombes 2003. He deserves it.

I think I'll wrap it up here...though I haven't even got started on the Day I Spent Alone With My Mother-in-Law yet. Always keep 'em wanting more, eh?

Beat This

Here's a little gem that was a proper shocker when it hit British screens in 1960 (complete with disapproving X-Certificate, relatively rare at the time and reserved for particularly depraved offerings.). Beat Girl depicts London just as it's beginning to swing, with its beatnik coffee bars and burgeoning Soho strip joints. The city is still pockmarked with bomb sites, and The Kids, who were toddlers during the War, are rearing up at their elders, who they certainly don't consider their betters. Eighteen-year old Jenny is a sort of Budgens Bardot, a pouting scowling Hampstead sex kitten whose Daddy is absorbed between his icy new French wife ('she's ancient - 24') and his architectural ambitions for a ghastly high-rise city to absorb the East End wartime flotsam. He certainly doesn't understand his daughter. "This language, these words, what does it mean?" he splutters like a bewildered Guardsman, after a tirade of hepcat abuse from Jenny.

We never quite find out what's happened to Jenny's Mum but there are hints that she was no better than she ought to be, and sure enough Jenny proves to be a chip off the old block, with a semi-disgusted fascination for the strip joints across the way from the coffee bar where she hangs out with a milquetoast Adam Faith and a muscular, miscast Ollie Reed. Jenny can't leave the fleshpots alone - and if you get hold of the uncensored version you'll see how the film earned its X in a couple of the scenes, particularly the one where the 'dancer' gets very imaginative with a thick length of rope. Hot stuff, daddyo. The Kids sit around sneering and pretending to be bored, in between visits to Chislehurst Caves where they frug and snog. In tune with the Existentialist paperbacks under their arms, they play chicken on the railway line because, hey, living's for squares. It's all heading for a Bad Place, and when you see Christopher Lee emerging from the shadows you know it's going to be a one way ticket to the Big House for somebody. Question is, Dad, who?

This is a sleazy, energetic little piece, rendered inevitably semi-comic by the passage of time and the easily parodied language of the self-conscious London beatnik scene. As such, it's worth an hour of anyone's time, and even if the film don't float your boat, you'd have to be a world-class square to be immune to the fantastic John Barry theme tune. Maybe you'll even get terpsichorial and cut a rug. Baby.

L'aprés-midi d'une ponce

To Chichester, pretty as a Georgian Theme Park, for the Edward Burra exhibition at Pallant House. Chichester is a pocket of Sussex prosperity and refinement; shops selling Barbours and polo  equipment abound, and every second building is a Palladian pile giving testament to the wealth and taste of some 18th Century merchant or other. It is not known for its 'edge' or presence of seamy underbelly (though I'm assured there's 'plenty going on if you know where to look', by a former resident who nonetheless moved out to Brighton as soon as he could.). It has as much in common with the world painted by Edward Burra as I do with Jeremy Clarkson.

But that hasn't stopped Pallant House putting on a fine exhibition of Burra's major works, and if you should find yourself wandering Chichester's well-maintained streets between now and Feb 19, you could do a lot worse than to swing by and have a look. Burra's stylised portrayals of street scenes from 1930s Harlem and Marseilles are energetic, funny, unsettling stills from a long-departed world; captured moments of sleazy glamour or simmering violence which can appear simultaneously innocent and disturbing. Partially disabled by a congenital illness which affected his ability to wield a paintbrush, Burra used watercolour thickly and heavily in constructing figures which can almost seem caricaturish at first glance, but which on examination are amazingly sly and subtle in their expression. There's so much going on in these pictures that you'll want to spend several minutes on each one. And how Burra's work changed after his own experiences in the Spanish Civil War, becoming less playful and more bleakly violent with every canvas. As he said himself, "what can a satirist do after Auschwitz?".

Burra settled to live over in Rye, a kind of mirror-image medieval town to Chichester sited fifty miles East along the coast. By all accounts he had an ambivalent relationship with Rye's prissy Sussex values, and as a genuine eccentric he enjoyed ruffling the municipal feathers of the deeply conservative community. I expect they all love him now, nearly forty years after his death.

This exhibition put a huge smile on my face, as did lunch immediately afterwards at the gallery's restaurant. I put away a huge plate of horseradish-smeared mackerel, followed by a batch of scallops and a whiskey and blood-orange jelly, and felt well pleased. We caught the train home along the flat Arun Valley coastline, watching the light change gently and feeling like we'd had a 'proper day out'.

Getting Out Of It

I've been quite the busy bee, making up for all that time lost to the sofa and the Slanket while I wasn't well. It's a huge relief to have some energy again and I'm trying to make the most of it without cleaning myself out financially in the process.

So a pair of free tickets from the BBC, for a recording of Henning Wehn's new comedy show,were very welcome. He's been around the circuit for a few years now, and is doing increasing amounts of TV and radio, but for anyone who hasn't come across the German Comedy Ambassador before he's a force worth checking out. A sly outsider's take on the idiosyncrasies of British life, and a man not afraid to issue deadpan reminders of where we as a nation continue to get it wrong, delivered in an extraordinary accent that's a kind of Bremen/Balham hybrid. He's a clever chap who doesn't shy away from much - there's certainly no coyness on his part about 'the war' - and   manages to do it without simply pandering to the average liberal metropolitan comedy audience. As he is keen to remind us, when he still lived in Germany he was a member of the Christian Democrats, which makes him a Merkel Man, and not a cuddly Green. Anyway, the show starts on Radio 2 next month, and if he's playing near you, give him a go. Last time we saw him down here, I took along a friend who'd never heard of him, and he laughed so much he had an asthma attack. Could there be higher praise for a comedian?

There was no danger of mirth-induced asthma, sadly, at Rich Fulcher's London show on Friday night. I used to love Rich Fulcher's madcap abandon, which to me hinted at a streak of genuine angry derangement, and I'd been loosely following his comedy career for many years, since he first turned up as a bulging-eyed Scientologist on a long-forgotten late night show called Comedy Nation in the mid-90s. I was thrilled for him when he landed Bob Fossil in the Mighty Boosh (he was particularly good in the radio version), and I had high hopes of his new solo show, based on '100 ways to stick it to the man'. On the night though, it was a massive disappointment; a show that just didn't get going. His 'ways to stick it' proved sadly unimaginative - getting the audience to write a joint letter to Richard Branson just gave the drunks an excuse to shout 'willies', inviting moans about bosses fell largely flat, and the supposed 'climax' of sending a pissed-up girl from the front row across the road to a Chinese herbalist, and filming her while she asked the polite and baffled man behind the counter if he had 'anything for huge fannies' just seemed puerile and a tad racist. This was dull, lazy stuff that didn't reflect his talent at all. Give it a wide berth unless you're really easily amused. Most of the audience weren't.

But, win some lose some. Saturday night picked up the average in spades, with Henry Rollins' spoken word gig at the lovely De La Warr Pavilion in unlovely Bexhill. While I never had much time for the boneheaded antics of Black Flag, and back in the day found the young Henry a bit ludicrous with his exploding pecs and chiselled head, he's now the age he was always really meant to be. Far more impressive as an angry fifty-year old than an angry twenty-five year old, and with far more to say that's actually interesting. And he's grown nicely into that body.

I don't know many performers who can march onto a stage (I don't think he 'strolls' anywhere), pick up a mic, and talk non-stop without notes or - get this - a single sip of water for two and a half hours, without losing pace or interest. Henry's way is that he spends one year 'inhaling' - travelling the world, usually to places that his government wish he wouldn't, like Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan - and the following year 'exhaling' - travelling the world to tell people what it was like. It's left  him a strange and fascinating blend of the deeply humane and the permanently furious. Fortunately he's also funny and articulate enough to fire the whole lot into your face without leaving you feeling like you've just been cornered by a nutter at a party. Though what it would be like to be in a relationship with Henry doesn't really bear thinking about. His favourite observation seems to be '...and that was intense', though I get the impression that he lives his whole life at such a pitch of intensity that for most of us, his average day would prove an ordeal of such emotional and physical laceration that we'd be bleeding from our eyes by bedtime. Henry does it, so we don't have to. And unfortunately, Bexhill was his last night in the UK, so unless you can catch him in one of the other fun places he's propelling himself through this year (if you can, you should)  you'll have to make do with YouTube, or his writing.

I came away feeling like I wanted to give him a cuddle. But as I didn't get to, I'm going to find a six foot steel girder and cuddle that instead, just to see what it feels like.

Stinker

Have you ever had to tell anyone that they smelled? Or worse still, been on the receiving end of a kindly/humiliating or cruel/humiliating comment on your personal hygiene?

I'm fairly confident that I would have been a moderately malodorous teenager, as my convent school operated a particularly neurotic policy towards the gym shower block, namely that it was out of bounds to all but the Sixth Form (who presumably were deemed mature and sensible enough to take post-gym showers without danger of spontaneous Sapphic orgies, whereas the rest of us, much as we might reek to high heaven after a cross-country run on a warm September day, could not be trusted with the fatal combination of hot water, soap and mass nudity.). Presumably we all smelt as terrible as each other, so the impact of our individual stench was lost in the mass fug, but by Sixth Form college we could all shower as often as we liked, so that smelly bodies stood out, and were unkindly hunted down. I cringe as I remember an unfortunate girl called Roxana, who had a terrible problem and would be followed down the corridors by packs of girls screeching "Roxana...you don't have to put on the Right Guard...". I suspect her problem was more to do with her diet, and having terrifying parents who belonged to a peculiar religious sect which banned the use of cosmetics (presumably including soap.).

At University, some of the girls in my Hall of Residence were given shared rooms - a terrible idea at the best of times and a catastrophic idea when one of you is new to the concept of feminine hygiene. A girl on my floor drew a particularly short straw with a room mate who owned two outfits, which were alternated and hung back in the wardrobe "to air' between wears, and both of which involved tights worn under jeans. By week four the situation had become intolerable and we all gaped in shocked admiration as the suffering party confronted her fetid chum with the (quickly immortalised) words: "I'm going to the Woolco. Shall I get you some deodorant?" "Yes please," replied the fusty lass, apparently without surprise or rancour. It may well have been a turning point in her life - two weeks later she got her first snog, so it was definitely win-win.

I've had a few clients who have left me with the problem of having to explain to the person after them that the stench in the room is actually a leftover from the previous occupant and not me - this has not happened often as I keep a supply of a very good French room spray, and can usually open the window for ten minutes between clients, but there have been one or two whose personal musk has hung around like an invisible cloak for hours afterwards. And I have had one colleague who knew he smelled dreadful and would freely acknowledge it, but blame it on his weight problem which he swore was 'glandular' (and therefore rendered his armpits immune to the effects of soap, apparently.).

My current olfactory dilemma involves my mother-in-law, a lady whose own sons will freely acknowledge as historically 'casual' in her attitude to personal and domestic cleanliness. When she got a couple of hairy dogs who remain 'lovably' untrained ("They've got strong personalities and that's how I like them" is the standard response, as her pets ritually mount all visitors and bay Pedigree Chum Breath into their faces), I knew neither mutt would ever see the inside of a bath, and years down the line the house has developed a Quatermass-like coating of pulsating, organic matter composed mainly of a dog-hair base emulsified with canine spit. If you enter the house, it will attach itself to you by stealth, and by the time you leave you will have miraculously 'grown' a whole new layer of skin and clothes covering, which you will have to peel or gouge off once safely home. And it's best to refuse any offers of food, unless you like it seasoned with a chewy topping of matted fur, saliva and Pal. Heston Blumenthal would be proud, and what's more the special aroma will follow you around for days.

And now she's preparing to put her home on the market and move to a smaller property. Which is going to mean viewings, and more worryingly, smellings. While the house I live in now was a bit of a wreck when we moved in, and smelled musky and unloved, I knew it would be freshened in the course of decorating and airing it, but with M-in-L's house, the odour is embedded in every fibre of carpet and every inch of soft furnishing. Only the noseless could fail to be affected by the stink, and as modern antibiotics have proved quite useful in preventing nose-rot, most prospective buyers will, it must be assumed, be in possession of functioning olfactory systems.

It fell to the eldest son to 'have a word' (the youngest one having promised 'to back you up' and then having hightailed it into the garden at the critical moment.). "It might be a good idea," Eldest Son ventured, "to get the carpets cleaned before you put the house on the market."
 "Oh, I don't think so. That just seems like a waste of money to me."
 "Well... the thing is...the house does smell a bit doggy."
 "Well it would, I've got the dogs."
 "Well yes. But not everyone likes dogs, and some people might notice the smell if they're not used to them."
 (slightly plaintive sounding) "But they're lovely dogs. And they don't really smell. I can't smell them."
 "No, but you're used to being around them..."
 (steely tone appears) "I'll buy a Glade air-freshener, then. You can get ones that plug in. If you're going to make a thing of it." (folds arms)
 (resignedly) "Ok then. That should take care of it."

Didn't she get off lightly, compared with poor Roxana?

Fashionably late to the ball...

Not wanting to appear too eager about 2012, I'm starting it a week after everyone else. So a Happy New Year to you (even to my 'unwanted but inexplicably persistent' reader from up the road - see October 10 2011 - you just can't keep away, can you?). The messages left after my last post were exceptionally kind.

So let's get the ill-health stuff out of the way before resuming the idiocy. I promise to keep it free of gore, and for added value there is a small cautionary tale involved for anyone who might need the services of their local hospital one day. The moral of my tale is  "ask lots of questions, and don't waste time trying to get your consultant to like you." Had I wasted time not doing the former and doing the latter, I would almost certainly not have got off with the relatively minor surgery I underwent last week - I'd still be laid up in bed, either a hospital one or my own, with big bits of me missing and weeks of recovery ahead, rather than back at work slightly tired and a little sore, but well and truly on the mend.

I've never had much to do with hospitals as a patient, and though I've worked in a few the jobs tended to be in secondary care units attached to Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology departments, so well away from the stethoscope- swinging, nodule-palpating end. And I've had very little contact indeed with actual surgeons. Nonetheless as a veteran of fifteen years' NHS service, I did feel fairly confident when I was first referred into 'the system' that I would be skilled and adept at working my way though it, knowing instinctively which questions to ask, and that I would easily build up a mutually respectful rapport with my consultant within which concerns could be aired, heard and discussed in an intelligent, clear and concise manner.

All that confidence evaporated in a matter of weeks, during which time I saw at least five different doctors, the first of them a Junior Registrar whose bedside manner consisted of repeating the word 'faaaantassssstic!' very loudly to each question I answered, even my name, and who aroused my personal ire by calling over my shoulder to my hubby (who'd come with me to the initial appointment) 'don't worry! I'll make sure I bring her back!"( I'm sorry...??). With every doctor I saw, the scale of what they proposed to 'do' to me got heavier and heavier, but the justifications got lighter and lighter, until the end-game argument which amounted to something like "we think you should have some radical surgery that will mean three months off work, not because your  actual condition is life threatening but because at some future point you might get a life-threatening condition, even though nothing in the tests we've done indicate there's anything like that going on." When my chuckling consultant introduced me to his student as "the lady I told you about, the one who doesn't like surgery" (oddly, I've yet to meet my nemesis, the "lady who can't get enough bits cut off her", though I am sure she's out there somewhere, bouncing around the Munchausen's scale) I felt all my hope and fight drain away, and knew I was not going to get out of his theatre without leaving some of my very self in the sluice - and not just the bit that wasn't working. As I bargained with  him about maybe taking this but leaving that, I could all but hear the clink of metal on metal from under the desk as he metaphorically sharpened his knives. I came out feeling that I'd done quite well to get away with a moderate amount of interference, and that though I was in for some pain and lost income, it would have to be worth it and at least it would just get the damn thing over.

So when an earlier appointment came up which meant travelling to a different hospital twenty miles away last week, I grabbed it with both hands. I felt incredible relief - not only had I managed to beat the surgeon down from his original plan to disembowel me, I was getting in almost three weeks early. What could be better? Though the designated morning was foul, with a huge angry storm raging right across the South of England, I was happy to make my way around the fallen trees and debris at 6.30am to the slowly-waking hospital where post Christmas staff were greeting each other and comparing their New Year weight gain as they checked the patients in. I was on the lookout for my consultant, who I was sure would be roaming the corridors like Sweeney Todd, stropping a razor thoughtfully on a leather strap in preparation for a good morning's cutting and chopping. I put on my tasteful backless hospital gown, climbed into bed, and waited.

When a small, confident woman in surgical scrubs put her head round the screen an hour later, I assumed she was looking for someone else. But there was my name on her list, and she was holding that list because she was the surgeon conducting all the procedures in Theatre 2 that morning. Only she wanted a word with me first. She couldn't understand why Sweeney Todd had opted to remove quite as much as he had. Was there some new information about my condition that she wasn't aware of? Because if there wasn't, it seemed most sensible to her to restrict the procedure to one which would deal with the actual original problem that my GP had found in the first place, back in June, have a look around, and if there were no other problems, to leave everything else alone. How would I feel about that?

How would I feel? I felt like kissing her. And so it was that I left hospital that evening, walking like a dowager and out of my mind on morphine to be sure, but with the 'problem' removed and all other anatomical parts still sitting snugly in my abdominal cavity where they belong. I spent much of last week asleep or watching crap TV under a slanket, but compared to what I thought I was in for, and thanks to this amazing, intelligent woman, I've got off lightly. What I'm left with is immense gratitude to her, but a certain residue of despair that the likes of Sweeney Todd are still roaming the corridors of, one presumes, many a hospital, looking for things to chop. As a friend who's a nurse told me some time ago, "you have to watch it with some surgeons. They're born to cut, and if they don't get maximum cutting value out of every intervention, they end up feeling that their time's been wasted." It's great to know there are other kinds of doctor out there, but disturbing to know that your chances of getting one may come down to simple factors like who's on the theatre rota on any given day. It could all have gone so differently. So, if you find yourself in a similar situation, don't be scared to ask question after question about why certain clinical decisions are being made. It was my body all along, but for a good few weeks there it certainly didn't feel like it.

Now, on with 2012. Doesn't it feel different from 2011? No? Oh.

With a Song in my Heart...

Right, I damn well WILL get this down, even if I still don't much feel like writing. Everyone gets to do an end-of-year round up, don't they? So here's mine.

2011 was the year in which I understood that it is actually possible to overdose on 'interesting times' and to end up feeling that you're standing on a rickety fairground ride which hasn't been maintained properly for thirty years, and in which all the moving parts are suddenly vibrating at great speed. You've paid your money to the greasy geezer in the booth so you've no prospect of getting off until the ride's over, but you can't help noticing that certain nuts and bolts are starting to fly off the main chassis, and there's a horrible clanking noise coming from deep within the engine. I dare say you know the feeling, if you've lived through this last year and read a newspaper occasionally.

I've little to say here about the redemptive possibilities of 2011's Arab Spring or the scientific riches heralded by the Higgs' Bosun - you'd have to take me to the pub for that -  but at a micro level, the level on which most of us live and experience daily life, it all feels rather serious, sour, and 'stuck'. I know that one friend's memories of 2011 will be defined by the moment (last week) at his firm's Christmas dinner, when he glanced at his phone to check an email that had just arrived, and found it contained notification of his redundancy. His boss was seated beside him at the time, and apparently stared fixedly ahead at the cracker on the table between them. Who hasn't got a story like that to tell now? If it wasn't you, it will have been someone you know.

For me personally, there've been some great moments in 2011 which I wouldn't have missed for the world - among them driving across the Mojave desert in an open-topped car with Link Wray playing full blast - but quite a few other moments which were not so great, most of them unfortunately arising from the sudden, serious expression on my GPs freckled summer face when she uttered the heart-sink phrase "I'm afraid there's something there...". And though there is indeed 'something there', it now looks like it's not the worst kind of 'something', so though I don't feel great right now I'm up for some surgery in a couple of weeks which should get me back to normal. But it's been a bit of an anxious, slow-mo time, which probably explains the gradual tailing off in blog activity as the months of 2011 went by. I certainly didn't want to write about feeling unwell, but as that's most of what I've been doing, I was a bit stumped.

It also explains - partly - the relatively paltry number of gigs I've been to this year. There've just been too many evenings when standing in a crowded venue seemed like the very last thing I'd have wanted, or have been able, to do. I'm still grieving for a few I had optimistically bought tickets for but been unable to go on the night, chiefly the sublime Wooden Shjips who were playing the Scala in August. They come round these parts so rarely, and they're never less than brilliant. I'm just hoping they'll be back after January is out, so I can catch up with them and their far-out noodling.

But proportionately, the gigs that I have attended in 2011 have been of very high quality so overall I'm pleased. Kraftwerk's 3-D show in Munich was akin to a spiritual experience; the word 'gig' just doesn't come anywhere near it. Killing Joke in April were an almost visceral re-introduction to the pleasures of being pinioned to the wall by the sheer force of sound, as were Mogwai on that warm night in July at the De La Warr Pavilion. On a much more low-key note, Pete and the Pirates were my new 'find' of the year, and the growth in confidence they showed between my seeing them first in February and then again in September this year was a joy to behold. In fact, I've rarely been to a gig as genuinely cheering as that second one of theirs - a night where even the coolest Brighton hipster in the room left the venue beaming with pleasure at just how good they'd been. Similarly, those lovely Electrelane women played a blinder to an adoring home crowd here in Brighton in July, and put many a smile on a pretty girl's face.

An amusing experience of being completely out-of-sync with an audience who were, to a man-jack, appearing to be having a great time was provided by Adam Ant's spring gig, which apart from a sense of uneasy embarrassment, left me cold while all around me were rekindling the pirate fires of their youth. And I'm not sure I'll be bothering with The Fall again for a while, as their audience nowadays is largely composed of middle-aged men who fart constantly and don't wash.

But I'm still in the market for gigs and songs, and though this lot disappointed me live, the song below will sum up the contradictions of the 2011 in my tiny insignificant corner of the world. As I sat listening to it on my headphones a few weeks ago in a sparse hospital waiting room, trying to self-soothe before an unpleasant appointment, I remembered that the time I'd listened to it before that had been from a huge swanky bath in a huge swanky hotel room in Napa, California. The windows had been open, the room was full of sunshine, and I had a California Girl's tan. The irony made me smile.

Life keeps changing, we just have to try and keep up. Thanks for reading my blog, and have a good End of Year Thing, however you choose to spend it. Pip pip.

Here's the song that proved to me that I'll never escape my 80s roots.