Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.
Much better than the 'established' version mentioning only two and three - especially if for the best part of your life you've been one / a wanderer yourself.
I don't know how much it's a consequence of the chemoradiotherapy I'm undergoing, and how much a result of eating too little (my daily caloric intake hasn't been what it should have been since the Sunday before last), or indeed, how much the former influences the latter. I do know that I tire ever more rapidly. At the moment I seem to need nine hours of sleep a night - and two more hours of dozing throughout the day. Once more I'm unable to walk to the bus stop without (more than once) stopping and squatting for a while along the road to regain the necessary strength. And while there was, so far at least, hardly any loss of weight, my today's chemo session had to be postponed after the blood tests showed too low levels of leucocytes and platelets.
It's the old viscious circle of course: the more you sleep, the less time you have to eat, the less you eat, the weaker you are, the weaker you are, the less you eat and the more you sleep. But I'm through half the therapy already; I'll see this through.
Although what I wrote in my first post here still largely holds, it did snow on Hogmanay night and yesterday afternoon. Not very much, but enough for a bit more than a mere skiff of snow still covering roofs and even pavements every here and there on New Year's Day (making me have a wee dander) and today - St Mungo's Day, the day of the patron saint of Glasgow. So at least there are some small mercies to be grateful for ...
In The Papers of Tony Veitch, William McIlvanney mentions "that Glaswegian walk, in which the shoulders don’t move separately but the whole torso is carried as one, as stiff as a shield". Now I would lie if I said I've ever noticed this during my three and a half years there. Still, the words filled me with pleasure, because I probably walk like that: throughout my life, friends would be telling me I walked "as if I swallowed a ruler" and other things to that effect.
Untypical in more ways than one. To begin with, for some reason I had already had a sort of Christmas feeling in late October, when the company temporarily closed due to lack of orders and we all had a week's holiday.
Then on 3rd December I was diagnosed with cancer, and getting sick leave and not having to attend at work did feel a wee bit like Christmas coming early too, if solely on this account (and despite spending two half-weeks in hospital instead).
But eventually Christmas proper arrived, and after five spent either in hospital, in rehab or visiting my parents, I could once more spend it according to my own wishes. Watching what I wanted to watch, listening to what I wanted to listen to, eating what I wanted to eat and so on, all these when I wanted to. (It's not easy to have a sort of 'British' Christmas when living on the Continent with no other Brits around you.)
The only fly in the ointment was the disease: the related pain, especially at the beginning, and having no idea whether this wasn't my last Christmas ever. But then, one can't ever know that for sure, can one? Still, I believe that under the circumstances I enjoyed it; the proof being that now it's almost over it feels like it went by incredibly fast.
In a sort of afterword to the 2016 edition of his Lanark: A Life in Four Books, Alasdair Gray mentions: "I was terribly stimulated by the highly coloured American comics which first came to Britain in the late 1940s when I was in my early teens. They showed [...] females with figures and faces like glamorous film-stars of that time, but wearing much less clothing, and since the representation of normal sexual practice was forbidden by the USA moral code their adventures involved them in capture and bondage instead." I have a different yet similar experience: coming into my teens at a time when homosexuality was more or less a taboo topic, it simply didn't occur to me to have 'bona fide' sexual fantasies; mine instead involved the other form of male-to-male touch: fights, captures and so on.
I remember that having a New Year's Day stroll twelve months ago I felt it in my bones that this year would be better that the one before. So much for my power of clarvoyance.
Because we all know what happened: Covid-19. Which didn't affect me personally as much as most; instead, I developed a tumour again, oesophageal this time.
Of course, things are rarely all bad. A silver lining of all those lockdowns was that Tommy had much more time to reply my mails. In fact, he began writing comparatively long ones, ones that resemble letters more than social media messages.
And during one of the less restricted months I went again, after several years, on a trip with my friends from college. It wasn't one of the best trips I had with them over the years, yet it was good enough to be a highlight of the year.
And so on. But all in all it was a bad year indeed. Basically I was just going to work, reading books (in a pub when possible - ay, I did enjoy that), struggling to keep up with my language(s) studies, scarcely fulfillling self-imposed tasks faster than adding new ones, and insidiously becoming sicker and sicker.
I don't feel anything in my bones tonight. But mere reason tells me that unless the cancer (or something else) kills me - which unfortunately at the moment doesn't seem at all improbable - the next year can hardly be as bad, let alone worse, than the one which is eventually almost over.*
* it's still not been midnight in my homeland, although it's already past it here in my exile
