This week I was going to post my six tips for spotting a cancer scam. Because it's quite a long post, I composed it in Word first, intending to copy and paste it into here. But using control V or the 'paste from Word' function here didn't work, however many times I tried. And right now I can't be bothered to type it all out again. So you are spared my musings on the Gerson therapy etc until I've got the energy to try again.
I'm continuing the mindfulness theme instead. This morning dog and I went for a walk across farmland and through a pheasant shoot. The promised sunny weather hadn't yet arrived and there was a sharp breeze. I was thinking, as I often do, about how, when we don't know how long we're going to be at the party of life, our senses are sharpened. Others here have mentioned this heightened sense of awareness, and I started linking this to the way that mindfulness training encourages you to observe everything that is going on as you go through your day. So I began to think about each sense in turn and to document, in my mind, what I was experiencing. What could I see? The muddy track in front of me, the hedges on each side, still raw from ill-considered use of the flail, the intricate tracery of the oak trees' bare branches against the sky, a small flock of guinea fowl running away from us, then taking off to get back to the farm and safety, kites wheeling high above - then as we came over the rise, the Long Mynd and the Shropshire hills stretching away to the east in a blueish haze. What could I hear? the chitter of a wren in the hedge, angry at being disturbed, the mewling cries of buzzards, the soughing of the wind in a row of fir trees across the field, the slosh of my boots in the mud. Smell: slurry! Touch: the feeling of cold air coming into my nostrils with every breath, my feet cosy and warm in thick socks inside my wellies. Taste: mm, well nothing really! It was an interesting exercise nonetheless, and one I'll be trying again from time to time.
I don't have the stamina for long walks at the moment because of the chemo, more's the pity. But the dog doesn't either. She ran off after a rabbit and, I think, caught it, though I can't be sure because she was out of my sight for about five minutes, but on her return she was licking her chops - a tell-take sign that the chase was successful. She was also limping, so we didn't go far after that, as I'm concerned that the limp means she's suffering from arthritic pain, but she can't tell me that, of course. A little later, I stopped to sit on the trunk of a recently fallen tree to give us both a rest, and at my feet I spotted a rusty horseshoe lying in the mud. And immediately I thought of Edward Thomas' poem 'As the Team's Head-Brass'. Was that horse-shoe perhaps from an earlier time, brought to the surface by the recent heavy rains? In the poem, Thomas sits on a fallen tree, in his case an elm whereas mine was a fir tree. He watches a ploughman and his team of horses ploughing up and down, and exchanges a word or two with the ploughman each time he comes to where Thomas is sitting. At the time Thomas was trying to decide whether to volunteer to fight in the war that eventually killed him. The talk with the ploughman was about the fact that many men from the farm had gone to war and not returned, so there was no one to help him move the fallen tree. And Thomas responds that, but for the war, 'Everything would have been different, for it would have been another world'.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I hauled out my phone and found a Youtube rendition of the poem, beautifully read but I can't tell who the reader is. Worth listening to, if you like poetry, and an interesting reflection on how that war, which we're all thinking about at the moment because of the 100th anniversary, changed everything.
