In the past, this website was sort of my place to keep family and friends in touch. I first set it up in 2005, just before going away to Peru on travels. It was a great. Facebook had been invented but wasn’t generally available or popular yet, other platforms weren’t well thought through or scattered, Twitter didn’t exist. But installing WordPress on my cheap Yahoo web hosting turned out to be one of the easiest ways to publish content and share it with the world.
But then the day came when I upset some far right people, and I realised some content had to go away. My trust in the world diminished. A man shouted abuse aimed at me at our house one night. Nobody else in the family witnessed this, incredibly – the kids were asleep, my wife was brushing her teeth with an electric toothbrush, and all I did was simply close the bedroom window and ignore the man. No point feeding a fire.
That was the moment when I realised that being hyper online, sharing everything, and also trying to fight to protect people from the malevolent sides of society came at a cost. Before that I’d been campaigning against Brexit, and continued to do so.
A year after that abusive night – I had a heart attack. I document some of that here, and here. I don’t recommend it, but I did realise that for most of my life I lived under a constant strain. As a kid I attended seven or eight (I actually lost count!) schools before I was twelve. I’d lived in multiple countries, and most of that with an abusive, violent and frequently drunk father. Each school was a new challenge – standing out, but then also being reasonably bright, and a bit weird was tough. But I learned about people, what makes them tick, and also that the only thing that really worked once a bully had decided you were a victim was to fight back. You could win a battle with words, or you could win it physically. It worked.
It always worked.
And it has to stop. I’m too old, too tired, too spread thin to fight and, more importantly, to take the damage. Obviously I haven’t been in a physical fight in a very very long time, but verbal fights? Arguments? Online battles with the world? Plenty. And I see many people just quietly standing at the side. They might agree, but they’re not going to fight that battle.
I disagree with ignoring injustice, but I’m also at that stage where I think that fighting small battles is pointless when there’s a broader war going on. So instead, from today, I’m turning my mind to making this blog about the intersections between design, technology, publishing and ethics.
Why? Because this is the stuff I know about these days. That’s all. And I hope I can make it interesting and useful to others.
At 18 I was skint and got made homeless. It took a lot of graft, patience and mistakes to get out of that and into a moderate middle class lifestyle. Here’s how.
When I was 18 I found myself in a weird situation. October 1987. I’d just started my first job, straight from 6th form, and was happy with that. My favourite song the year before had been The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades. I was optimistic and hopefull. I’d done my A levels finally surrounded by people who actually cared about education. I was no star pupil at 6th form, except at computers, but computers were the big thing so I had confidence.
All good then. I mean it wasn’t perfect, but I just had a fresh optimism. I’d lived with my grandmother since I was about 12 (my childhood memories are imperfect and I have few witnesses to refer to. I’d been casually fostered for a number of years prior, was fed up, and had been dumped with her. She was one of the few consistent things in my life and could see I was breaking in front of her. So I in effect ‘divorced’ my father and she took custody of me. She lived in a mobile home type caravan at the time. She was poor, but stability mattered more to me. I got my education. The future felt very bright.
I got through the various stages of ICI (then one of the largest chemical firms around) to get a job in their computer centre as a trainee printer operator, with the idea being to climb into a programming job. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, my grandmother had been in a lot of pain and, within a day of being admitted to hospital (this is another story to tell) where we discovered she had terminal cancer. Very terminal. She had less than a week left.
I was so very alone. My father turned up, signed over to me to handle everything, then disappeared to South America, never to be seen again. In 1986, my mother who I had some mild relationship with, had taken her family to Spain and, for some reason, me being told and having a goodbye seemed to be forgotten… so I’d accepted they weren’t a factor in my life. That was it. Me, alone, in the world.
Things got quite bad, quite quickly. Here’s what I learned, what I did wrong, and what I think I did right.
The world is not your friend
When you grow up, generally there are adults who look after your interests and needs, until you’re old enough to do it for yourself. But often you feel this interconnectedness with everything being generally good. Often in adulthood we discover things can be quite different – especially if we have some failures. I think learning that the world isn’t your friend is important. I discovered, for example, that if you have no cash, you can’t just take over a substantial asset (a house, in this case) and expect to not pay off debts that your grandmother had. The answer should be simple – I could have borrowed from another bank or building society to buy the house off my grandmother’s estate. Except her bank refused unless my grandmother’s estate was up to date on the mortgage payments. And because my grandmother’s estate had debts and no income, it couldn’t make the mortgage payments, and I was advised that if I paid the mortgage it would potentially make me liable for everything. When you’re an eighteen year old that leaves you in a bind.
The bank took the house, and I was made homeless, briefly (I kept a spare key and let myself in at night to sleep on the floor!), and I quickly organised myself and bought a tiny flat. Good job, because the council wouldn’t help me, the bank wouldn’t help, renting privately was almost impossible for me. Thank heavens I was organised and found the right combination of people.
Finance is risky and can be expensive
Because I was young with little credit history, all finance was risky. I figured that with my job and my flat I could now live a little and went stupid, bought myself a small engined sports car – a Scimitar SS1 1300 if you’re a car geek – a tumble dryer and washing machine all on credit, and thought everything was great. But I had nobody around to advise me I was being dumb, remember? No parents, and even most of my friends had gone off to university.
What happened was that when something went wrong with the car, it really stretched my finances to fix it. Then it got stolen and damaged, and I either repaired it myself or my insurance would get really expensive. Every little bad thing that came up, made life harder. But I discovered that I couldn’t just sell the car and forget about the finance – the interest and the way they did it meant that I’d need the value of the car plus another £1k to pay it off. I was trapped.
Toxic parents usually remain toxic parents
My father was still in touch with me, but for some reason thought I had plenty of money. So when he got into financial trouble in South America, he started giving me hard luck stories about how dangerous things were, that he was going blind (or a bit long sighted as we call it now), and he needed £1.5k. Or £3.5k in today’s money. I was 19, skint, and instead he banged on about how I must have had money from my grandmother’s death and my good job. “Yeah, Dad, but you’re not here and you have no idea.”
However, guilt led me to do my best. I sent him all my spare cash for a couple of months, before finally arranging a loan. I used some of it to consolidate my credit card debts, and two thirds went to him. I sent him, if I remember correctly, about £800 in total. He wrote to say he was struggling and needed more and he was in a dangerous situation I didn’t understand.
So I did what I felt was the right thing – I spoke to the Foreign Office, and eventually secured a facility for him to be able to catch a flight home, where he’d at least get benefits.
I called him, told him the good news, he was furious. And that was the last time I spoke to him. Ultimately, narcissistic, self-centred and selfish people rarely understand that other people have struggles. They just don’t get it. And they stay that way.
Stability matters
One thing I did right was to stay at ICI for many years. I kept that job. My head wasn’t in the best place, so I wasn’t the best employee, but I was useful and smart enough to keep it as well, and had some reasonable progression. For a while I’d been renting rooms after financially over-extending when I lived in my flat, and that job gave me the much needed anchor to my life. Eventually I bought a house with my then girlfriend. That stability then allowed me to think about taking a risk again… But it also established a nice final salary pension plan that will still be useful even 40 years after leaving!
I went contracting
Sometimes, income really matters. I don’t think contracting is for everyone. I hated some aspects of it, and it ruined my relationship at the time because I was away from home so much. But it really helped bring in money, which then really helps you to just establish a buffer of more than a month or two of money. Suddenly I felt like I had an actual surplus and proper savings. I got rid of the rust wreck of a Peugeot and bought a three year old Rover. I started to dress more smartly. I had nearly ten years of this solid and high income and it probably made the biggest difference of all to me.
At the end of my ten years, inflation and low interest rates made my mortgage look tiny, I had asset wealth in the house, shares, and low outgoings. When you’re in that situation, as many middle classes get born into, you can start to take risks. I decided to set up a proper web development business, now called Interconnect.
I could have lost a lot with Interconnect, and we came close to giving up. It didn’t ever give me more income than contracting – not even close. But it does give me another source of stability. And that, dear readers, is worth more than you might think.
I learned about how money and how the stock market works
There’s one book I read early one which just opened my eyes to the world of money. I’ve bought it several times, lent it to people, forgot who I leant it to and lost it! Doesn’t matter, it’s worth it. Its called How The Stock Market Really Works and it goes way beyond stocks, shares, and bonds, but into planning, risks, retirement and so on. In reading it, several times, I established a baseline of understanding that stopped me falling for scams, stopped me making bad investments, and generally helped me ensure I could make best use of the spare money I had.
I no longer pushed my finances hard
Now I understood money better, I knew that, for example, if you have assets of £100k and a debt you can’t pay of £50k, you’re in a really really bad situation. If you have assets of £10k, a debt of £100k and some short term cash flow issues, then you’re in a strong position to start negotiating. Why? Because if you have no assets and a big debt, the bank can’t recoup anything much if they send in the bailiffs. Once their costs are accounted for, they lose everything. So they’re more willing to negotiate. If you have loads of assets, you’re stuffed. That was, in effect, what the bank did to take my grandmother’s home from me when I was younger. They had no motivation to negotiate with me.
So you either max out your finances, Donald Trump style, or you very carefully segregate them. Because I value stability and security above all else, I segregate them.
I learned to think like an accountant
After ICI, I spent a lot of time working in corporate finance departments on their software.
Here’s a thought experiment. You have £10,000. You go out and buy a car for £9,000. How much are you worth? The naïve answer is £1,000. You see yourself as £9,000 worse off. But if your car helps you earn more money by opening up a job you otherwise couldn’t reach where you’ll earn £5,000 a year more, then you have two things happening:
First, your balance remains at £10k, because you have a £9k car and £1k of cash.
Secondly, you have a future benefit over, say, the five years you expect to have the car, of £25k. So over the five year period, assuming the car becomes worthless, you’ll end with £26k on the balance sheet. Or you use that £26k to put into a mortgage which, again, is generally a good move because it’s a limit liability loan secured on property which, in most economies, is a pretty safe bet.
But all accountants will say that cashflow is of utmost importance. You may have a pile of assets, but if you can’t service your responsibilities then you become insolvent – you can’t always easily sell assets without a big loss. So always think about cashflow – it’s best to be gently increasing your cash position as your wealth grows.
I learned to let go of status plays
When I was young I caused myself trouble by buying that sports car. It wasn’t, in itself, a bad buy on the surface – sports cars depreciate more slowly, the insurance on this one was the same as a similar powered Ford Escort, and it didn’t use any more fuel. And it’s not like a 19 year old needs to carry a family. Two seats was fine. Reliability wasn’t great either. But where it went wrong is that my boss therefore believed he paid me too much! My older superiors didn’t like that I had, on the surface of it, a fancier car than they did.
Of course, I was financed to the hilt, and they weren’t. They didn’t know that. They just assumed I had more money than I let on to.
Had I been in a humbler car, they’d have had no idea of my financial status.
It’s better to let people assume you’re a bit skint, and focus on reliability plays in order to establish your career. Took me into my thirties to work that one out.
Same with clothes. Stick to cheap clothes until buying them is easy. If you do what young me did and buy everything on credit at Top Man and Burton’s (yeah I know) then you’re setting yourself up for bad decisions and bad outcomes.
Adaptable accent and open attitudes
I’m actually quite Scouse yet a lot of people I meet and work with down South just think generic, educated Northerner with a light accent. The reality is I just adapt my accent to suit the situation. This means I don’t terrify upper middle class people, whilst I can still sit and have a chippy lunch with garage mechanics. Non-threatening to everyone, basically. I accept that most people know stuff I don’t, that they believe they’re trying their hardest (they may not be trying optimally, or coping badly, but I accept their belief), and generally try to learn from the people I meet.
Meet lots of people from different backgrounds
The more people you meet, the more lives you get to understand, the more mistakes you can avoid and the more opportunities can come up. Local politics can teach you how councils and Westminster works. Bankers can tell you how finance works. Medics can give you really good reasons why you shouldn’t smoke, drink, or eat too much sugar! Bin men can teach you that you can make a good living even if you’re not well educated (or are – there are some very well educated bin men and women out there). Truckers can tell you how their industry works.
Just avoid the cynical and the put upon – there’s little useful information there.
One good thing with the internet today is that there’s so much sharing online that you can virtually meet almost anybody, from African villagers to corporate board members. Just be kind and open and remember that they’re all humans, every one of them.
What about you?
None of the above is unique to me, or in any way makes me special. I just think they’re what helped me. Feel free to comment on what you’ve experienced. Everyone lives different lives and found different ways out of poverty traps. And of course, some people find themselves ground down by a system that can be unfriendly and downright hostile at times which means they can never escape, no matter how hard they work.
A year ago, I was sitting, shorn of all body hair and waiting to go in for a five or six hour operation. I knew the next two weeks would be hell.
It’s hard to explain the odd calm that came over me as I sat there, waiting for the biggest operation of my life. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel miserable. It wasn’t as if I’d been feeling terrible. I’d just had one bad morning two and a half weeks earlier where I felt rough, then more rough, then really really rough, then fine again.
It’s weird. You see heart attacks on TV and you get this idea of a mad bad event where you keel over, clutching your heart in agony. But it doesn’t really work like that. The night before I’d felt tired. In fact, for a few years I’d been feeling like hard exercise was a challenge. It took me an age to warm up for a sport, and then I’d be fine. But the first half hour was a chore. And if I’d eaten I was basically useless for an hour or so.
I put it down to age and asthma.
I wish I hadn’t. But thankfully, I got lucky, in a way.
So driving along to work I felt this tightness in my chest, a tiredness, and a general malaise. So I decided, as was sensible, to pick up some vitamin tablets on the way to work. That’s what you do when you’re tired. Take vitamins, and get plenty of sleep. That was my plan. But by the time I got to the counter, I felt even worse and decided to mention the chest tightness to the chemist. She very clearly said I should go to the walk-in centre and get checked out. Instead, of course, I decided I’d get it checked out at some more convenient moment. But by the time I got back to the car I realised I was very out of breath just walking slowly.
I was having a heart attack. I didn’t know it yet. I looked at my Fitbit on my wrist and it said my heart was doing a nice old 70 bpm. Normal enough for me. So why was I puffed out? Must be an asthma thing. But I decided that I would go to the walk-in centre after all. I drove, feeling increasingly out of sorts, parked quite badly, and shuffled in to reception.
A few hours later, I was hugging my wife in A&E at the Royal Liverpool Hospital. I was worried, but not terrified. The doctor dealing with me said “I’m concerned but not worried.” That was a relief. The diagnosis was swinging between heart attack and pericarditis. I was atypical. Relatively young, slim, non-smoker, evidently in reasonable health, and moderately active for someone desk-bound at work.
But they couldn’t satisfy themselves. The A&E cardiologist said I had to go in for observation. They observed me.
Observation is boring
I was sent up to a cardiac observation ward where there were a range of folk from really quite ill and very elderly to me. By then I was feeling fine, quite chirpy, and generally comfortable. My biggest complaint was that the ward was a bit noisy, with an elderly chap who was rather confused causing the most noise. But hey, I was alive, the food was tolerable, I had my Kindle and my phone. I started to obsessively read about the heart, interpreting ECGs and so on. It’s all quite fascinating. And complex. I won’t pretend a lot of it stuck. But now I knew the possibilities.
The rather wonderful Mr Fisher, my cardiologist at the hospital there, did a series of echocardiograms. He felt that I was 95% likely to have pericarditis, in which case a few tablets and I’d be right as rain within a couple of weeks. However, there was a 5% chance of something else, so he’d scheduled me for an angiogram at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital. If they found something, they would be able to stent me there and then and I’d be on the path to recovery.
95% chance of some tablets and everything was fine? OK, I cried a little and started looking forward to the family holiday we had planned.
Angiograms feel weird
An angiogram is where a fine catheter is inserted up to the heart, then a substance that can be detected using x-rays is released into the heart. This allows the surgeon to get a visualisation of the heart. It’s really interesting. And a little unpleasant, but definitely not much more unpleasant than a longer dental visit. It is surgery of a sort, and done carelessly it can do damage, so they always have someone on standby ready to whiz your chest open and do some emergency surgery.
Thankfully it’s usually very safe. It just feels odd, sitting there with this big machine whizzing around you imaging your heart, a massive TV screen to your left, and a very precise talking and unambiguous surgeon on your right instructing his team. I was anxious. He noticed that, and he said “just give him the valium. Now”. At least I think it was valium. In some ways my memory is a bit fuzzy.
Because then, as he finished everything up, he explained that a stent wouldn’t be possible and I would need what is called a coronary artery bypass graft. Four, maybe five. I… didn’t like that news. I felt shocked, scared, and unhappy. I’d gone from probably just an annoying health scare to looking towards having my chest sliced open and my heart operated on.
How do you even operate on a heart? It’s not supposed to stop. Right? Stopped heart = dead. No?
The wait
So then you just wait. And wait. They wouldn’t let me leave the hospital. I was at risk of another heart attack, the blockage was so bad, and they needed my system to flush out the drugs I’d been given when I was suspected of a heart attack. Risks, apparently. It took two and a half weeks from admission to operation. Long enough to think about my mortality, prepare some things, and do weird things like have a company meeting in the middle of the ward to ensure everyone knew what to do, and how.
It was an interesting time. People came and went. I got to know some, and would chat to them as they faced their fears. Most people were older, most were as surprised as I was. What really surprised me is that the image most of us have of people waiting for a bypass wasn’t really fulfilled. Sure, you had the smokers and the fatties. But loads of us were relatively active, relatively slim people. Not that athletic, mostly, but in a line-up of people most likely to need a bypass, you wouldn’t have picked most of us.
Sometimes I’d chat with people facing the operation the next morning and they were, usually, very anxious and worried. Some said things like “well, if I die… I won’t know it. It’s my family I worry for.” Others joked about having their last cup of tea. There’s some morbid humour, but it felt like a release too. A way of expressing anxiety with a laugh.
But the fact so many of us weren’t people who’d neglected ourselves felt terribly unfair. I struggled to deal with that.
Could’ves and should’ves
One chap, about ninety years old and looking in remarkable health, was in for a new valve. He said without it he’d likely not survive the year. With it he had a good chance of another five years. Yes, there was a risk, but as he said “I’ve had a good life.” I guess by the time you reach your nineties you come to a realisation that you can’t really have that long left, no matter what you do.
I talked about my own misgivings. I’d been a bit plump in my twenties, and I enjoyed partying and chocolates. I’d also been a hard working type with little time to do lots of exercise. He smiled and said something like “Life’s full of could’ves and should’ves, but they really don’t matter. You have to deal with the present and make things as best you can for the future. The past has gone. Leave it be.”
He was so right.
Getting closer
As the date loomed I thought I’d get increasingly anxious, but it just stopped. I wasn’t aware of being pumped with chill-pills. I’d seen more frail people go off to operation, and I’d chatted with them as they recovered. It was clearly hard going for them, but they lived and they seemed in good spirits. It’s a very hard operation to go through, I knew that, but now it felt tangible. I also had visits from colleagues, friends and family, so each day I had something to look forward to.
I did do some morbid things. I wrote a note to my family, should I die. I have no skeletons in the closet, but wanted to ensure they knew where to find financial stuff. I knew that they knew that I loved them. I kept the schmaltzy stuff to a minimum. Just crack on. What needs to happen has to happen.
The day itself
Now, this is where it gets more interesting, really. First thing you have to do is shave off all body hair below the neck. You’re handed a quality hair trimmer, with a sterile trimming blade, and pointed to the bathroom. Bzzzzzz! It takes for ever! And those things bite! Once on the balls. I wasn’t really sure where to stop, and I couldn’t really do my back on my own, so I left that, assuming they knew that too.
My operation, schedule for the afternoon, meant no food or drink. I read a bit, chatted with Romana, and refused to say goodbye. I was coming back. I knew it. I was confident. I’d already met the surgeon, and he seemed confident, precise, and concise. I like that in a person. We talked a little about technicalities and how the procedure would be done one me, what arteries they were harvesting and from where. I’d also spoken to another surgeon who I assumed assisted. He poked me and checked how various bits of me worked. I had a breath test. I had a lot of tests. But the day of the operation itself was quiet, really.
So I knew the operation was going to be a beating heart one, without using a heart-lung bypass machine. The attachment of the grafts would be done using some weird sucker machine (maybe called an Octopus) that would stabilise my slowed down heart, but at no point would it be stopped. Amazing. Each stitch carried out between the beats of my heart on arteries just 1.5mm wide.
And then it comes. The porters arrive, you give everyone else on the ward a wave, they say good luck, and you go. All the stuff you have is bagged up and taken away. You don’t need it the next day, and if there are emergencies stuff can get lost, so it’s better if a friend or partner handles it.
Then you wait in a pre-operation room with clouds painted on the ceiling. It made me think of going to heaven, but it was better than white tiles, I guess. That was when I chatted with Romana, ensured she knew I loved her, again, and waited. And then they come for you. You say goodbye, and off you go to theatre.
There, the anaesthetist I’d met before, hooked me up to a skullcap for monitoring my brain, and started preparing me with those injection thingies. A theatre nurse chatted and joked with me. Clearly there to keep my mind off things and keep me calm. And the moment comes. The anaesthetic is injected and you’re switched off.
It really is like that. You don’t have any awareness.
I’m awake and alive!
Actually, I remember a vague moment of having something pulled out of my throat, being conscious, and then out of it again. According to Romana when I first woke I became agitated, so they sedated me again for a while. When I next woke I had a nurse talking to me, giving a button to press with instructions about how it delivered morphine and would ease my pain. I couldn’t overdose with it apparently.
I tried.
I clicked that button again and again! Not to deliberately kill myself or anything, but because it was so nice! However, it’s rate limited. Keep pressing and it just beeps. When it kicks in you feel this warmth, and the pain goes. It’s a very nice drug and I’m not surprised people get addicted.
Romana came in. I was… not really in the best place. I was in pain. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I don’t even know if I have the order of events right.
Click. Oh, that lovely morphine button.
We chatted a little, but I remember very little. I had an oxygen mask, I was uncomfortable. I realised I had a urinary catheter in place, so I could stay still. She left, and I think I slept.
Intensive care is weird
One thing I never realised from films, is that intensive care really is just that. It’s actually, in this case, Post-Operative Critical Care. A nurse is stationed at the end of your bed and watches you constantly in the first night. At one point I remember being woken.
“David… can you breathe please?”
I took a gasp.
“You’re worrying me with your apnea,” she said.
I took a few breaths. I felt as OK as I could manage.
I could only see one other person on the ward, and he would wave at me and give me thumbs up. He couldn’t take his mask off. We waved and smiled at each other. I never saw him on the cardiac recovery ward, but he could have had different conditions – they do other kinds of surgery there beyond hearts.
The next day was a bit less painful. You get x-rayed in your bed, poked, prodded and checked. My blood pressure tended towards the low side, but you could see that at the 24hr point I was getting a lot less attention, all the pipes in my chest were out, stitches put in, and I was being made to sit for a while now and again. The second night I was definitely left to my own devices for a bit.
After a few checks the next morning, it was off to recovery.
Not my best, look, just two days after the operation. But alive and happy about it!
The poo of doom
Each day you feel better. You need less and less supplemental oxygen. You start eating normally again.
I’d also heard that after a major operation, you get constipation. Had I known this I’d have been tempted to stop eating two days beforehand!
Because after a few days, you realise you have to poo. Thankfully this comes once you’re mobile again. But even walking fifteen metres to the bathroom is still tiring on the third day. The poo won’t wait. Nor should it. Because the longer it takes, the worse it’ll be.
Man, you’re giving birth.
Seriously. I sat in the bathroom. It started to come. Very very slowly. It. Was. Huge.
And a huge poo is going to be unpleasant, no matter how much time you give it. I feel for heroin addicts dealing with that. Their piles must be quite something.
I strained, but only a little as I’d been warned not to. So I had to tolerate this thing… half in, half out. Slowly but surely, little by little, it came. But it seemed to never end. I swear, I spent an hour in that bathroom, swearing, cursing, and wishing I’d never been born. And if I pushed too hard my heart rewarded me with a palpitation or to and I’d feel breathless.
The thought occurred to me… what if I died right now? A poo, half the way out of my arse and me, on the floor? That would be the last thing the world saw of me. Ew.
Deep breath.
Carry on. Wait. Be patient.
Eventually, it was over. I hobbled back to the bed, grabbed my oxygen mask, and had a nap. I’d deserved it.
Eventually you get to go home
Six days after being open and lying surrounded by dedicated specialists, I was going home. They test you to see if you’re capable of being trusted. You have to walk a certain distance, unaided, and climbing and descend a flight of stairs. A group of you go together for this test. We all did it. There was some sort of air of celebration around us. We were survivors! This thing wasn’t going to defeat us after all! Each day we were stronger!
The homecoming
Getting to leave the hospital is a joy. I’d been taking walks and stepping outside anyway. I was very keen to be moving. I felt frail and slow, but it allowed me to feel like life was going to improve.
But in spite of that, on discharge, you’re given your bag of drugs and wheeled to the door. Once you’re off in your car, you’re no longer their problem. Until then though, they have a process to follow and they’ll stick to it!
As you can see, I had the weird hospital socklets and stockings on. The compression stockings help reduce the chance of a blood clot forming in your legs, and reduce swelling. You can see from this photo that my left leg, from which a vein had been harvested, was definitely bigger than my right
And that’s it. The next phase is about getting back to full fitness, work and leading a full life. I surprised myself, and I’ll share more soon. I’m planning to discuss stress, work-life balance, family and a few more things. And this blog may even come back to life a little bit. I’m bored of helping Facebook and friends to keep their platforms populated with content that is then lost in a silo. Longer writing definitely has a place. Please feel free to join me here.
We’re about 120km from the nearest town, so zero connectivity here. This will be posted on my return.
We’re at around 4900m up in a small hostel near Laguna Colorada. By Bolivian standards it’s comfortable but the altitude is really hard work and I’ve learned to be careful not to stand up too quickly.
It’s been a day of extreme scenery, sometimes feeling positively martian (in fact, scientists studying mars use the Atacama as the nearest option available on our planet). At Laguna Verde we took advantage of the hot spring there, but I quickly regretted it when getting out. Heat + cold + altitude made many of us dizzy and I never recovered all afternoon.
But that didn’t diminish the joy of seeing thousands of flamingoes here at Laguna Colorada. An amazing sight along with clouds of borax blown up by the winds.
The group I’m riding with is pretty cosmopolitan, Alex a Swedish/French guy, Diana a Spanish girl, Karim, with German, French and Arabic backgrounds and Pablo from Chile with Russian ancestry. And they’re a great bunch to travel with…a lot of jokes and ribaldry.
My hope now is that I acclimatise quickly, but the diet isn’t really full of iron so I’m not optimistic.
Tonight we’re sleeping in the coldest room I ever sat in. It’s -8 and there’s no freaking heating. With all that geothermal energy just beneath us this is irritating to say the least. And it makes me wonder how Andean peoples ever reproduce.
On the upside going outside reveals an amazing starscape. So much is visible it takes your breath away (as does the cold and altitude, but hey, I had some left!) I’ve taken photos which will be added to the gallery on my return. Just wait and see.
I remember San Pedro as being quite sleepy, with little accommodation available, but also with plenty of tourists and bars. It was sunny, warm, and pleasant.
This time around it’s somewhat less sleepy, a lot bigger (perhaps 2x? 3x?)…however, it’s the off-season and that means few tourists compared to the number of restaurants, so dining alone isn’t unusual and it somehow feels less social. It’s also relatively cool and very windy which means it’s as dusty as a building site.
I met some Americans in today’s restaurant of choice (Etnica, recommended) and I knew they’d just arrived because, simply put, they didn’t look dusty enough yet. Seriously, it gets everywhere, your hair takes on a thick appearance, and your clothes go orange.
Still, it’s not a bad place. I’ve booked a four day trip to Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni. I’m also going shopping for clothes suitable for the very cold temperatures…it will be at least -15C. I’ve already shelled out too much for very nice thermals, complete with odour absorbing charcoal, important when you’re only going to have a chance to wash every two days! I’ll almost certainly be incommunicado for much of this also. Consequently you’ll only get a splurge of info in four days or so.
I’m not even sure I’ll get to post this today…electricity has been off here for a few hours now.
I’ve done Arica > San Pedro before, albeit with a change at Calama. Thing is, I just remembered one of the more annoying bits…
Chile has concerns over various food pests and as a consequence you not only get checked for fruit, cheese etc on boarding the bus, there are also occassional checkpoints. So at 3.30 in the freakin’ morning the lights all come on it’s time to step into the cold.
So here I am, wide awake, irritable, and in full realisation that this bus was designed for a country where the average height is a good two inches (5cm) less than back home. So I’ve got my music on, popped my fleece on and hoping for some sleep. Soon.
Anyone who’s experienced the death of someone close to them will know that there is often a lot to do. No exceptions here, plus the added pressure of limited time. However, I’m not entirely unhappy about the time thing… makes me get things done.
Cementaria Parque de Arica
Center stage, as ever!
So, following the funeral I went yesterday to the cemetary to finish off the paper work. The tomb is owned in perpetuity by me, although a typical arrangement, that may seem strange in Europe, is to simply rent a tomb for a number of years. Once that time is up the coffin is disinterred and transferred to a shared grave. I also had to sort out maintenance again, in perpetuity. It’s not a lot each year, but with no easy way of paying fifteen pounds to an account in Chile every now and then I had no option.
I actually saw this happening on my second visit. You could see a clearly subdued couple watching as the coffin was lifted from a tomb, cleaned up, sealed in plastic, then loaded onto a hearse. It was a sad sight.
And it’s all made slightly bizarre by the music that’s piped into the cemetary. If you have a funeral it does seem to be suitably sombre, but at all other times they appear to often play cheerful music for the workers to enjoy.
Piping out the tunes
It’s tricky feeling sombre and respectful when you can hear an Abba song.
Still, at father’s tomb it wasn’t so audible.
I took some photos, walked around, paid my respects, and headed back to town for a meeting with the reverend David Hucker who carried out the bilingual service. He’s clearly a nice man, and initially refused my attempt to pay for the service. It had to be turned into a donation to his church before he’d accept. Given the service included a singer, I was amazed. The kindness of people here doesn’t cease to amaze me. We chatted about why he and his wife came here, my own background and so on. All very pleasant.
Headstones
I felt like I’d taken enough of Joaquin’s time so I decided I’d make the effort to arrange the headstone entirely on my own. With limited Spanish and nothing more than a vague idea of where a stonemason may be, I set off.
Now, this is where you have to admire the Chilean desire for efficiency. The hospital is at one end of a road approximately 1km long. At the other, lies the municipal cemetary (not the one Chris is in). Along this road are numerous funeral directors and various parked hearses, ranging from custom made examples to tired looking old American station wagons. Given this is one of the more important routes to the hospital, I can’t help wonder if it helps reassure incoming patients. Still, it’s efficient.
After some aimless wandering I spotted a suitable stone mason, went inside, and did my best. On Monday morning I’m either getting exactly what I wanted, or a very rough approximation with some crazy typeface. Let’s see. Again, Chilean flexibility and a can-do attitude helped. I explained I wasn’t likely to be around for much longer and that I couldn’t wait the usual week. He made it happen.
The House
It was very dark when I took this picture of the house Chris lived in.
The next job of the day was to visit the house where my father lived. He’d rented a room here for over ten years.
I had a real shock when the first item brought in was his suitcase. It’s the only recognisable item I saw in his belongings – the same cream coloured Samsonite suitcase he’d used throughout much of the eighties. It was a touch battered, but it even still carried a sticker for a hotel in Sluis in the Netherlands (a small, sleepy town once notorious for having the highest density of sex shops in the world) at which I remember him buying me waffles with cream and strawberries each time we visited on his tours.
From there on in it went a little downhill. There was no wallet, no photo album, no sign of his early past in South America. Apart from a couple of postcards from his days in Belgium(!) and his passports going back to the mid-eighties there was nothing. None of my letters to him were there, nor any photos of me or any of his children. I still have to visit another place where he apparently kept some stuff, but mostly I believe they were just things he sold on the market where had a small spot.
The old suitcase
So what did I find out about him?
Looking at his passports he travelled an awful lot up until around 2006 when he broke his hip-bone in a fall during a tussle of some sort. He’d been trading in clothes and, for a while, also appeared to be running some sort of homeopathy service. He was buying significant quantities of remedies from a german supplier in South America whose exact location I’ll be working out shortly. He had three books in his belongings, two of which were on homeopathy, with the other being an encyclopaedia.
The rest was mostly junk. Old lottery tickets, some snacks he sold, a collection of out of date milk cartons, old clothes (though mostly in good condition – looks like he still preferred to be smart!) and a lot of random notes. No notes, however, spoke of feelings, interestingly. There was no journal, no address book even. Just accounts of his work, routes he was taking and so on.
To a twelve year old, this hotel did the best waffles in the world. Ever.
There weren’t any signs of written correspondence with friends anywhere. I did, however, find a printout with what would appear to have been an e-mail address. So I now know that at least sometimes he went online. Maybe he did find me after all but opted to keep quiet? Who knows.
The house itself was relatively clean, with the downstairs occupied by the landlady and her son, and upstairs by various lodgers. But my father didn’t really spend much time there – as had been the case when I knew him, he preferred to be out at bars or selling at the market, using his modest room as merely a place to sleep at night and to store a few things.
And that’s really it, so far. There’s little more evidence.
The Wake
After this it was off to the bars where my father liked to hang out. He had a few acquaintances and friends there. People he would drink and play billiards with whilst arguing about sports, politics and any other subject that caught his attention. It’s fair to say he hadn’t changed much, in many ways.
Myself, Rafael, and a guy whose name is evading me right now. I’m drinking pancho.
So we’d agreed to meet up at the pool hall and have a few drinks and a game of billiards (or pool or whatever it’s called) in his honour.
It was fascinating to sit in the places my father sat, and play the tables he’d have played at. I didn’t get somber. In fact it reminded me that his life, whilst poor, wasn’t terrible. He had friends, and he had things to enjoy. That’s a big part of what we all need. So we drank a little, and I learned the favoured drinks of his friends – one called pancho, which is basically beer and Fanta mixed together, and another called hota which is a mix of wine and, believe it or not, Coca-Cola. Yes, I was surprised by that one too!
Later, as I tried to encourage one particular drunk friend of my father’s to NOT play with my camera, Joaquin told me he’d a call for his mariachi band to play a serenade. “Would you like to come,” he asked.
How could I refuse?
The bar and stools where he often sat
About two hours later I concluded that Chilenos are, essentially, completely mental. But in a nice way :o) They arrive, in their slightly too small costumes, from different directions at the specified address. And they must keep quiet outside and not be discovered. Because nobody expects the mariachi.
At the allotted moment they all pile into the house and the singing starts. The lady whose 50th birthday it was seemed bemused at first, but appeared to enjoy. Her husband, however, was a strong, surly type who looked like someone who made a living from ripping lorry tyres from their rims with his bare hands.
Still, he didn’t kill any of us so I gues it was OK for him.
And then it was off for a burger. I was granted my wish of a vegetarian sandwich, which turned out to be a chip sandwich with salad and avocado in it that tasted suspiciously meaty (cooked on the same griddle, no doubt)… but I had to chuckle at many of them ordering nothing more exciting than a cup of tea with their meal. Which was, of course, served in china, with a saucer. Don’t see that much in English burger bars at 2am in the morning…
A burger and a nice cup of tea at the end of a night out.
It’s now Saturday here and I’ll admit to a slightly lazy day. I got up late, wandered around town, had yet another terrible breakfast (they’re better in Peru, I have to say) and generally felt slightly subdued. The day before had been quite happy, really, and now it was simply about going back to normal. I have no tasks left until Monday, and attempts to find options such as teaching people how to create websites have failed to elicit much interest.
So I’ll go through the small bag of items I took from my father’s place, take some notes, and generally meander today. Don’t expect an exciting post tomorrow! I also have to decide what to do next. I still have two weeks to use up, but no clear leads in other countries. I suspect once I’m finished here it might just be time for a bit of a holiday. I just need to decide – relaxed, or exploratory? Any thoughts?
