Autumn: research & lumberjacks & novel reprinted

Watching the 2003 film Monsieur Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Coran the other night, I was reminded of my time in France at L'Université de Caen, in the scene where the son feeds his father cat food and passes it off as pâté. My flatmate and I used to buy jars of pâté, from Carrefour that looked and tasted like cat food. I still remember the red and white chequered lids. I came across my carte de séjour the other day, which gave me a pang, more than just the nostalgia of finding student items from the '80s, it was when my life changed forever. In this student ID photo, I'd already picked up the Coxsackie B4 virus (while still at home in Scotland) and was having bizarre, frightening symptoms, with no clue, of course, of what lay ahead. In the photo, I'm wearing a purple and red and white lumberjack shirt - my then boyfriend's. Lumberjack shirts were fashionable then. 

The lumberjack theme is resonant:

In interesting new research from Professor Montoya's team at Stanford, they've found specific brain anomalies in ME patients:

The analysis yielded three noteworthy results, the researchers said. First, an MRI showed that overall white-matter content of CFS patients’ brains, compared with that of healthy subjects’ brains, was reduced. The term “white matter” largely denotes the long, cablelike nerve tracts carrying signals among broadly dispersed concentrations of “gray matter.” The latter areas specialize in processing information, and the former in conveying the information from one part of the brain to another. That finding wasn’t entirely unexpected, Zeineh said. CFS is thought to involve chronic inflammation, quite possibly as a protracted immunological response to an as-yet unspecified viral infection. Inflammation, meanwhile, is known to take a particular toll on white matter.

In the reporting of these findings, one news outlet accompanied its article with a photo of a tired looking lumberjack. It's hard to overstate how fucking irresponsible this is, though we are used to articles about ME with stock photos of fatigued women decoratively slumped over laptops, or sitting on beautiful white sofas looking a wee bit peaky. And as for the illness being 'real', well, the wise/informed among us have known that for decades. But when you get idiots in the medical community renaming a serious neuroimmune illness as 'chronic fatigue syndrome' - as happened in the late eighties/nineties - and reframing the illness to suit their own agenda - you probably can't expect the media to be anything other than sloppy.

*

I used to count the years after I got ill in 1982, I stopped some time in the late nineties. But, still, when autumn comes, I know deep down that another year has passed. The State of Me has, happily, just been reprinted. The cat food scene is in there, of course.

Blue

Yesterday was the first day I wore my winter coat. At the eye hospital,  I sat next to a window, the sky more blue than it was in summer, and a perfect autumn tree full of tiny birds flitting  from branch to branch. It was hard to tell them apart from the falling leaves. Enchanting.

Cromwell's a moth

I love cowl necks, cosy and lovely, but they catch crumbs - especially if mohair - and you feel like you have a Captain Birds Eye beard. Not so lovely. Makes me feel like a Tudor (the polo neck, not the beard - yes, I used this line in my book). I am reading Wolf Hall, everyone's called Thomas, it's hard going and my headache was so bad I could barely read at all last week. But the writing is beautiful, quirky, funny and moving and you feel the book is doing you good, you will be enriched after reading it. I'm only at page 160 and I know I will be many weeks finishing it (650 pages). When I googled Thomas Cromwell a while back the keys glitched and 'Cromwellsamoth' came up as the search term. I often think of this.

Leaves & kids

I just watched four leaves fall and spin to the ground, one after the other. I wondered how they 'know' when to leave the tree, what is their precise moment. My cousin's nine-year-old was here last weekend and asked if she could rake. (I can't rake and always get others to do the leaves.) The feisty wee girl that she is got two piles of leaves. Her four-year-old brother 'helped'. It was warm enough to sit out with coats and my cousin and I had coffee in plastic cups and Hula Hoops while the kids worked. Then they started to argue over whose pile was whose and the rakes went back in the shed. After dinner, I was telling my cousin about the Pope and her girl drew this in five minutes. She is a wee talent.

Strange Times

We have no government and volcano-cancelled flights are almost a daily occurrence. And spring - as always happens here in May - has given way to autumn.