John Fleming’s Weekly Diary No 34 (a) – My dog clone and a bat swoops down

… CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 33 …

I was determined NOT to get into medical whinging in this week’s blog diary, but it didn’t work out…

Andy Dunlop weighs up the mysteries of the codes

SUNDAY 6th SEPTEMBER

In my last blog, I mentioned that, at St Pancras station, I had heard an announcement for ‘Inspector Sands’ which I said was a coded message meaning that there was a major emergency in the building.

World Egg Throwing Federation President Andy Dunlop today reminded me that the phrase “Inspector Sands“ was used because of  the need to throw sand on a fire.

So it is fire-related.

“It could just be a bin fire,” he told me. “Major stuff (bomb, other terrorism, robbery, armed people) tends to have different codes… No, I’m not telling you what they are.”

Wikipedia reckons ‘Inspector Sands’ can involve bomb threats, but I trust Dunlop. He has been around a bit and is a President and therefore beyond reproach.

I also asked him about my doppelgänger dog Rigby, who had been exhibiting the same symptoms as me.

“He is doing great,” Andy told me. “Treatment working it seems. Very happy.”

I can only dream of having treatment.

MONDAY 7th SEPTEMBER

I had a bath. I had been having trouble recently – with no warning – getting out of my bath.

My new technique is to put in more and more and more water until the bath overflows, casting me out in a tidal wave of Archimedean proportions.

That may not be altogether true; but what follows is…

I got a text from my GP:

Injecting a little bit of uncertainty into my mind and arm

“If you DO NOT want a flu vaccine we would appreciate it if you would email us to let us know so we can remove you from our RECALL list. This is very important as, this year more than ever, vaccines supplies are expected to be in extremely high demand. Thank you.”

I have no idea if being injected with a small dose of flu when I already have some unknown calcium/kidney/other problem is a good idea. I will have to get advice.

In late afternoon, I got raging toothache.

What next? Gout? Hiccups? Bodily takeover by aliens from Alpha Centauri?

TUESDAY 8th SEPTEMBER

My raging toothache got worse overnight. A veritable symphony of comedic ailments. Might be an abscess. Might not.

After a couple of hours of not sleeping, I took a couple of paracetamol. No effect. I also managed to develop heartburn and, after an hour or so, chewed a Gaviscon tablet. And I then developed very loud, OTT hiccups. My nose started to get a bit sniffly. Then a hacking cough, though I think that was from the heartburn.

Obviously taken after-the-event and, frankly, really rather over-dramatically posed…

The only way to stop the heartburn was to try to sleep sitting upright in my bed, with a pillow between my head and the wall.

After about three hours of sitting upright, half-sleeping, I woke up with the raging toothache worse and the back of my neck and my right collarbone giving me pain. But that was to do with getting hit by a truck in 1991, not any current problem.

Well, I did say there was a symphony – a veritable cacophony – of comedic overnight ailments.

Obviously, when I woke up, there was my of-late normal bone-dry mouth – no moisture inside my cheeks, nor on the roof or floor of my mouth, nor on my tongue, which felt almost stuck to the inside of my cheek.

I drank water. As always.

All this pretty much repeated itself throughout the night, though the heartburn went away and I sort of was awake at 8.30am, having slept vey sporadically and, it seemed to me, rarely.

At 9.30, I phoned my dentist. There are still restrictions because of the coronavirus. Basically, you can only get an appointment if it’s an emergency. I could only see my own dentist for my toothache in a fortnight; I could see another dentist in the practice next Monday. I could have a ‘normal’ appointment in October.

A stronger, hopefully more effective, bedside

As the paracetamol tablets were having no effect, I went to Boots the Chemist and they recommended I try co-codamol (paracetamol & codeine) of which I can theoretically only take two tablets four times a day for three days (because, after that, it can become addictive). In fact, the pharmacist told me, it would be OK to take two consecutive three-day courses, which would get me to Monday. And I also bought some Orajel Extra Strength to rub on the tooth; again, limited to four times a day “short term” (whatever that means).

For the rest of the day, the pain – not ache – pain – ebbed and flowed, depending on how close I was to the four-hourly point of taking the tablets/gel.

To add to the jollities, in the post, I got a CCd letter from my Kidney Man consultant to my GP telling him how I was doing. This was a duplicate of the same letter I got last week, except with an extra page showing dates.

The letter had been written by my Kidney Man on 29th July about the phone appraisal he had with me on 6th July. The letter had then been transcribed by his secretary/assistant on 6th August, modified by my Kidney Man on 28th August and the letter was posted out on 7th September.

It referred to a future meeting the Kidney Man would have with me in August which, of course, has already happened.

As if to confirm the dream-like nature of the day… at dusk, a bat appeared in my back garden.

My eternally-un-named friend tried to attract it by rubbing the edges of two 10p pieces together; then tried to ward it off by holding aloft a large bulb of garlic. I think this merely ended up confusing the poor winged creature. My eternally-un-named friend wore a jacket with her hood up in case the creature was suddenly attracted to and got entangled in her hair.

I can barely believe all this either.

But all this is true.

Spot the fast-flying bat, held at bay at dusk by a bulb of garlic held by my eternally-un-named friend

… CONTINUED HERE …

Listening to my own death rattle and the circling black bats of Borehamwood

Dark thoughts and dark deeds amid the shopping paradise that is Borehamwood in Hertfordshire

I buggered my back two Mondays ago. Well, it’s an old, unrepaired spine injury, I blogged about it.

After osteopathic attention, it was sort-of mending this week.

Lying on the floor and walking a lot both help – not simultaneously.

But I also have a bad cough. And, yesterday afternoon, a coughing fit must have dislodged something and I was in agony again.

The bad cough thing involves mucus in the nose and throat which may explain what happened in my mind at around 5.00am this morning, in that strange semi-consciousness time between sleeping and waking and dreaming.

I couldn’t move much because it resulted in multiple phantom scimitars being sharply shoved into the base of my spine and I was lying there listening to myself breathe through light mucus muck in my throat. A hoarse, throaty, liquidy, breathy, inhaling-through-water sound like listening to my own death rattle.

In 2001, I sat in a dimly-lit room for 45 minutes – or it might have been 90 minutes, I can’t remember – listening to my father’s breathing as he died. Just the two of us. His death rattle went on for the whole time. 

So listening to my watery/throaty breathing this morning, pretty much unable to move, was like lying there listening to my own death rattle.

Which is something I would like to do twice…

Well, the first time would be interesting… just a flash forward to what it would be like to die…

The second time, I would not really care whether I heard it or not.

It seems such a pity to miss experiencing your own death with all your senses which, I guess, many or most people do. I think the doctors pump you full of morphine to kill you off if they are certain you are going to die fairly soon… Better, they think, to have ‘a quiet death’ than all that throaty rattling sound.

Anyway, I did not die, of course, and my eternally un-named friend came up to Borehamwood this afternoon to see me, bringing stewed apples.

As dusk set in, she asked: “Are the bats still here?”

“Bats?” I asked.

My eternally-un-named friend and bat bush

“There used to be bats in that big hedge/tree thing…”

“Were there?” I asked. “I don’t remember.”

“You seldom do,” she told me.

This is true. I have always had a shit memory.

A few days ago, my friend Lynn (not to be confused with Lynn Ruth Miller) told me that she and I had gone to some sort of premiere screening of Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil.

According to Wikipedia – always correct on factual detail – this must have been in 1985. 

I have absolutely zero memory of this.

But, then, once I mentioned to Lynn that, although I had worked on the children’s TV programme Tiswas when Sylvester McCoy had been semi-regularly appearing on it, I had never seen him perform live on stage.

“Yes you have,” she said. “You’ve seen him perform in West End plays at least twice. You went with me.”

…or she might have said “three times”… I can’t remember…

Anyway, when she said it, I then did vaguely remember having seen him on stage in Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist. This seems to have been in 1981.

That was a long time ago.

Anyway, back to bats…

As my eternally-un-named friend and I stood in my kitchen tonight, with dusk setting in, she said to me: “Unlock the back door.”

The aforementioned bush/tree is close to my back door.

“Give me two 5p pieces,” said my eternally-un-named friend. “They have ribbed edges.”

“The bats?” I asked.

“The coins,” she said. “If you rub the edges of the coins against each other, the bats can hear it… It summons them.”

“Rubbing two 5p coins together?”

“Any coins with ribbed edges.”

She rubbed the two coins together.

My eternally-un-named friend summons the bats by rubbing together two 5p coins

A bat shot out of the bush/tree and swooped round in a circle.

“Does this mean bat shit on the grass tomorrow?” I asked.

“They usually go a lot faster…” said my eternally-un-named friend.

“That was pretty fast,” I said.

“…and they do a figure-of-eight,” she continued.

“Why do they do a figure-of-eight?” I asked.

“Well,” she conceded, “maybe they don’t do a figure-of-eight, but it looks like a figure of eight. They go really fast. That wasn’t. That was just a circle.”

“Surely,” I suggested, “if it looks like a figure-of-eight, then it IS a figure-of-eight.”

“You are just being difficult,” she said. “It’s going so fast that, if you try to take a photo, then it looks like a figure-of-eight in the photo. But I’m not really sure. Alright, I am now guessing… You are so annoying.”

When we shut the back door, we found there was a daddy-long-legs in the kitchen. 

That is another story. 

I won’t tell it.

But the daddy-long-legs survived.

UFOs, toad-vomiting, the KGB, the CIA and Saddam Hussein’s gay marriage

I went to the first day of the Fortean Times‘ UnConvention at the University of Westminster today to see comedian Helen Keen’s hour long show It Is Rocket Science! which blends science, comedy and bizarre facts and unusually sat among even more bizarre fare. She was wildly enthusiastic, even by her high standards.

Fortean Times is the self-proclaimed ‘Journal of Strange Phenomena’ which non-readers assume concocts loony stories of crop circles, UFOs and conspiracy theories but which regular readers know casts a sceptical eye on anything strange and apparently inexplicable.

Presentations in today’s UnConvention included Ian Ridpath comprehensively demolishing the so-called Rendelesham Forest UFO Incident by going back to the original sources – US Air Force reports, UK police records and audio tapes actually recorded at the time – to reveal rational and arguably even mundane explanations of allegedly alien events which have escalated into OTT UFO myth – basically, he convincingly argued that the alleged ‘alien craft’ was a combination of a known falling fireball that night and a local lighthouse’s flashing light. It was an interesting dissection of how a myth gathers momentum.

As was Jan Bondeson’s talk on “The Bosom Serpent” – hundreds of years of stories of snakes, frogs and even a hen lurking inside people’s bodies. Jan, a senior lecturer and consultant rheumatologist at Cardiff University by day, came over as a cross between Dr Strangelove and Jimmy Carr with a droll line in dry humour. I was particularly impressed with his telling of the true tale of Catharina Geisslerin, the so-called Toad-Vomiting Woman of Altenburg, and how the cure for another historical figure’s frog-vomiting was to drink three pints of horse urine. Well, I guess that would cure you of complaining about anything else although the alternative remedies of luring snakes out of their lair in people’s stomachs by enticing them with sweet-smelling milk or cheese or even using an improvised fishing rod seem a tad easier.

Then there was Mark Pilkington on myth-making by the world’s Intelligence services and tales of how a Chinese lantern can become a time-travelling Nazi flying saucer and how Communist insurgents in the Philippines were routed by the CIA’s leaked fictional rumours of a winged vampire (something only topped by Helen Keen’s revelation in It Is Rocket Science! of American plans in World War II to attack mainland Japan using thousands of bats with miniature bombs attached to them).

Aside from Mark Pilkington’s tales of the KGB’s First Directorate and their successful plot to spread a false rumour that AIDs resulted from CIA plans to develop a genetic and/or ethnic weapon… and the Rand Corporation’s 1950 paper by Jean M.Hungerford on “The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare”, I was particularly interested to hear that the US Government’s short-lived Psychological Strategy Board as long ago as the early 1950s had suggested using existing respected cultural organisations to spread stories.

In the 1990s, I knew a Western European who, during the Cold War, had been a deep cover sleeper agent for the Soviets. He had been ‘run’ via the East Germans. When he was caught by the Americans in Germany, they debriefed him in Washington, but not in any CIA or Defense Department building. He was instead debriefed by the CIA in the offices of a major international cultural magazine.

The most fascinating thing I learnt during today’s UnConvention, though, was about Generoso Pope Jnr, a man I had never heard of before. Formerly employed by the CIA’s psychological warfare unit and with links to the Mafia (his son’s godfather was mob boss Frank Costello), Generoso Pope Jnr bought the New York Enquirer in 1952 (allegedly with money from Costello) and re-named it the National Enquirer, spawning future stories which not only claimed that the existence of the Mafia was a myth concocted by the Communists but also, via its sister paper the Weekly World News, publishing stories of an alien face on the Moon, the dead Elvis Presley seen working in local grocery stores and a gay marriage between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden with the happy couple adopting a shaved ape baby named Robert, who posed as a human child.

Now THAT’s what I CALL a conspiracy theory!

And who would have thought either the Mafia or the CIA had a sense of humour?