#35 – Are You Having an Epiphany?
Snow drifts through the shaft of light from the security lamp on the corner of the building.
I’d woken early, a consequence of the various mechanical devices driving me towards health. The low groan of the pressure relieving mattress re-inflating occasionally was the backbeat. The chug-chug-chuggedy-chug of the vac pump was the harmony.
Pressure sores. Avoid at all costs. Life in a wheelchair isn’t all basketball and BBC inclusivity drives. Often there’s a large amount of hospitalisation involved. Sometimes it involves big events.
The time before the last time I saw my friend Kevin in hospital he had two feet. The last time I saw him that had changed. I mean, he’s in a wheelchair, it’s not like he needs both of them to get around. Still, it’s like Dickens description of Wackford Squeers the one-eyed headmaster in Nicholas Nickleby. ‘He had one eye when popular prejudice runs rather in favour of two.’ He is after all a baddy. What better way to designate his evil persona than remove an eye?
Kevin raises money for his charity so it can be of benefit to people newly in a wheelchair. He shouldn’t be losing a leg! Or even just a foot. The difficulty of these bodily changes is that it does rather place one at the Bond villain end of the scale. I mean, there is Professor X in the X Men. To be honest there’s also Phil Squod in Nicholas Nickleby, he’s only got one arm and he’s a hero. If I remember correctly, he saves a life. He certainly saves the day at some point. Maybe it’s my inner prejudice coming out.
Anyway, I was chug-chug-chuggedy-chugged out of my slumber at 5.54 this morning. As lying in bed listening to an intrusive noise is even less fun than wheeling about with that noise following you, I got up. I wheeled through the soft darkness of my flat. I like to get things started using the ambient light of the street lights bouncing off my walls. It’s gentler than straightforward electricity and there are literally four LED or LCDs on my route to the kitchen. That is a panoply of mood lighting. I feel like I’ve participated in a piece of immersive theatre before I’ve even had a glass of orange juice.
So, I reached the lounge and submitted to the fierce fluorescence of the kitchen light. I put the kettle on and then reconsidered. I turned off the light again and went to watch the snow falling through my lounge window. There wasn’t much wind, so the snow drifted mostly downwards. The light on the side of the building was orange and the streetlight was white. They gave the snow intermittently different character as it floated to the ground. It was as though it was a trans elemental phenomenon. I identify as orange. I identify as white. Said snowflake after snowflake.
The whistle on my kettle called me back to the task in hand. I went and made coffee.