Archives: Random

Apparently, according to my blog stats, which wordpress very kindly provide me with, someone searched for “rude bits” and got sent to my blog….  Bet they were disappointed.

It’s Oli here. Hello! This won’t be long as it’s quite hard to type long things on my ‘berry and i’m still not up to much in the way of telephonic communication.

I really wanted to write to thank every single one of you for your wonderful prayers, thoughts, best wishes card, messasges and comments on the blog – all of which get emailed through to me on my phone.

I’m sorry i’m not replying or responding, but things are still pretty up and down and my hands are so shaky that texting is tricky. Kati’s update on the day will tell you much more, but things are improving greatly.

It means so much to get your messsages and read your words of support. I promise I’ll get round to a proper catch-up with everyone soon.

Take good care of yourselves cos i’m coming for hugs when I get out!

It’s closing in on 4am and I find myself sat in the lounge at my parents’ house if not quite wide awake then certainly not sound asleep.  Since I finally gave in to my night’s chronic lack of slumber just over an hour ago, I’ve been wondering to myself whether this point marks a new low in my struggle as it has been.

It’s extraordinarily tempting to call it that, but putting tiredness and busy-headedness to one side, if I try to clear up the picture a little bit I suppose it’s hard to suggest right now that I’m worse off than I was when I was admitted to Oxford back in June.

Certainly, chest-wise, I’m not doing as badly as I was then.  Yes, I’m still finding every day a struggle and breathlessness is increasingly a problem throughout the day, rather than being something which tended to isolate itself to certain times or periods which could be identified and focused on.  And yes, every night is seemingly harder than more recent times to gather myself and settle down to sleep – the effort of undressing, of washing both myself and my equipment, of simply sitting in bed reading is considerably more noticeable than it was a week or more ago.

On the other hand, I’m not spiking the temperatures I was spiking in June, nor am I confined as I was then to my bed, fighting for breath even at rest and needing the highest flows of oxygen I could muster with my various concentrators to see me to the bathroom and back.  I am, on the whole, physically better off than I was back in June, although it is tempting to be blinded to it by the storm of exhaustion that has settled in to my quiet little dwelling.

I can only surmise, then, that if I am physically better off than I was in June then in order to be feeling quite as badly as I do about things at the moment, then my head is very far from in the right place.  There is a line of which people often speak between living and existing – an invisible, intangible and yet undeniable line over which the simple matter of getting through the day becomes the be-all and end-all of one’s ambitions.  I am not entirely sure I have reached such a line yet, but for the first time in a long while it has become more to me than a mark on a road map which I may be approaching.  Rather, it is now a hazy, not-so-distant shimmer which presents itself as being not as far away as one would like or hope it to be.

At the end of last week, K and I made the executive decision to take ourselves back to Chez Parental in order to afford K more time to study for her college finals in a 2 weeks’ time and prepare for her uni interview without having to look after me and without me having to worry about whether she was spending too much time on me and not enough on herself (something at which I am incredibly bad at – I spend most of my life worrying that she’s worrying too much, which is a vicious circle in itself).

My mood, however, has not taken to the holiday particularly well.  I have no idea if it is purely coincidental, or if coming home carries an air of admitting defeat or some other such nonsense, but since settling back in here I have been distinctly more negatively-focused and have noticed the difficulties over-and-above the advantages.

Interestingly, I don’t think it’s particularly anything about being home, but more a reflection of the general difficulties I’m struggling with physically at the moment.  The biggest problem I’m facing is one of discomfort – I find it almost impossible now to be comfortable in any position at all.

Lying down is fine enough, but only if I am truly horizontal, which makes doing anything at all nigh-on impossible.  From there, there is lying propped up, which stresses my lower back and neck, there is sitting up, as on a sofa, which stresses my neck to the point of causing headaches and my upper back and shoulders causing breathlessness.  Sitting bolt-upright in a well-supported armchair is about right, but if the back of the chair is not vertical – like the study chair at home – my neck once again takes the strain if it is not supported or rested back.

When sleeping is a problem, it can at least be countered with good periods of solid rest during the day.  But when solid rest is completely unachievable – when it is impossible simply to crash out on the sofa and watch mind-numbing TV or brain-absorbing DVDs – lack of sleep becomes just as debilitating as a lack of breath.

When all of these factors are totted up and combined with headaches, odd, unidentifiable but frequently worrying chest pains, cramps and stomach aches on top of it, life becomes a roller-coaster of moment-to-moment misery through which you ache to enjoy that odd glimpse of sunlight glinting through the clouds.

That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed glimpses of golden rays in the last week, nor that the world is entirely shrouded in blackness, but compared to the fights and struggles I’ve had before, this one certainly feels like it’s ramping things up a notch.

I’m not entirely sure what the point of all the above is/will prove to be, other than a manner of half-an-hour’s distraction in the early hours of the morning and an outlet for all the mixed up frustrations which are mixing themselves up in the pressure-cooking wash-bowl of my head.  The dregs of an active, lively mind are swilling around up there somewhere, drained of colour and vibrancy by the hour of night and relentless, restless energy. 

If nothing else, I suspect this will go to show in the weeks to come the extent of any improvement on my part.  I can only hope that it marks the nadir of my fortunes and that things are all-the-way upwards from here.  If not, this is going to be a pretty hard place to visit.

I’ve long held an affinity for the way the American’s make their television.  They have a solid work ethic, a prodigious output and some incredibly high-quality programming which is all churned out based on a very rigid formula of writing and producing a season of some 20-25 episodes per year.

Most US shows work on a rolling basis, with a team of writers (the “Writers’ Room”, supervised by the Executive Producer/Head Writer or “Showrunner”) coming together to pitch storylines, plot character arcs and map out the direction of the show for the coming weeks and months pretty regularly, then going away and writing individual episodes alone.  Every show has a slightly different way of doing things, but most hour-long or half-hour shows work to the same essential template – Lost, Desperate Housewives, 24, Bones, E.R., Scrubs, House, Friends, you name it, they’re all run the same way.

A big part of the success of American television, of course, is the sheer size of the budgets that they throw at their dramatic or comedic output.  Compared to the cash we spend on our “series”, the Americans spend a small fortune on each episode, treating each 43-minutes of screen time (for an hour-long show, to make way for the commericals) as a mini-feature film.  We might think we have big-budget blockbuster shows over here, but even our biggest extravagances like Dr Who or Robin Hood pale in comparison – and they only run for 13 eps a season.

This extra money goes not only into “on screen” elements, but also means that they can afford the “writers’ rooms” which create the shows, something which is prohibitvely expensive over here.  If you’re creating a 6-part series (as most shows are over here, ignoring the tent-pole BBC Who and Hood and the “continuing dramas” which we refer to as “Soaps”), it’s much cheaper and easier to use one or two writers to write the whole thing, with a little creative input from the Producer(s) and possibly director(s) as you go than to hire a team of writers to work together on it.

In any case, British writers aren’t schooled in the writers’ room methods, meaning that even if we did try to do it their way, we’d probably end up turning out TV-Camels* rather than the American’s well-practiced Horses. (That said, there are still a huge number of US shows which fail to hit the mark and never see more than a few episodes or a single season.  Just look at Studio 60, or try Googling “Viva Laughlin”, it’s just that we rarely see them over here because our networks don’t pick them up)

All of which is just a long preamble into talking about what’s going on in the States at the moment, namely the Writers’ Guild of America strike which has seen writers from all of the country’s top shows – as well as their rubbish ones, too – down pencils, power-down desktops, shut their notebooks and hit the picket lines after negotiations on their new contract with the studios who produce their work broke down.

Essentially, the Writers’ Guild of America is like any other labour union (or, since they’re American, labor union) in that they negotiate the basic rates of pay that their members can expect and, indeed, demand, if they are working on studio movies and/or TV shows.  As part of the minimum deal, writers are entitled to “residuals”, which means every time the show is aired on TV, they get a small payment (based on what money the Studio makes) and every time someone buys a copy of the DVD they get a small payment.  As it stands, they receive a whopping $0.04 per $18.99 DVD sold.

The main bone of contention, however, is not with the DVD residuals (although they would like to double it to $0.08 per DVD, it’s not a deal-breaker, by most accounts), it is with digital “airplay” – the streaming of episodes via the Studio’s websites or the downloading of the shows through new-media outlets like iTunes and their ilk.  Right now, the writers who create the shows and are valued enough to earn good money and acceptable residuals on TV-play and DVD-sales get nothing for internet use of their work.  Nothing at all.

Now, the in’s and out’s of all this are clearly numerous and well-covered in many places across the ‘net – if you want to know more and more specifics, click the logo above right to go to the striker’s website, or see the explanations on YouTube – but suffice it to say from me that it seems completely, bafflingly down-right criminal that the Studios should be claiming that they don’t make money from paid-for downloads of shows and from the advertising they sell to tack on to the streamed versions.

The writers, honestly and fairly I believe, think that they are entitled to a similar cut of the profits of their shows from the internet as they get from all other forms of their distribution.   And since it’s very likely that more and more TV is likely to be seen via the ‘net in the years to come – indeed, many people are predicting that the ‘net will become the primary source for our television consumption in the next decade or so – it stands to reason that the writers want in on it.

There are always going to be the people who disagree with the principle of writers receiving residuals for work they’ve already done and I’m not really interested in trying to turn those people around, but beyond there I don’t see how anyone can say that writers don’t deserve a cut of the digital profits.  It’s not greed, it’s just fair and decent.  If you accept the principal that they should be paid a cut of the profits from screenings and sales of their work, then online sales has to come into the equation.

Anyway, all of that is a very, very long-winded and roundabout way of saying that I’m wholeheartedly supporting the American writers in their strike action and that if I were being paid to write now, I’d be putting my pencil down and if I could walk more than 10m without needing a long sit-down, I’d be with them on the picket lines.  If I was in the States.  As it is, I’ve just signed this petition.  Which is about all I can do, as well as urging you to do it too.

For now, the strike is having little impact on our TV schedules, but if it goes on more than a few more weeks, we’re going to see pretty big holes open up in our Spring schedules, including things like Season 2 of Heroes, Season 4 of Lost and many others besides.

It’s nice to write about something other than feeling rubbish.

* the old famous saying, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.”

I’m in the mood to write a really witty, random, stream-of-consciousness blog tonight, but I can’t because a) I’m knackered and b) I’m knackered.  Also, I’m pretty knackered.

(Incidentally, when I say “in the mood” what I really mean is “tired” since all of my best stream-of-consciousness is always written when I’m tired.  But not this tired.)

(Incidentally, it’s just occurred to me that I can remember the very lesson at school at which I learnt how to spell conscious and consciousness.  Odd, isn’t it?  That and “immediately”, although they were different lessons.  In fact, the teacher who taught us “immediately” taught it to us with a rhyme and to this day I can’t type “immediately” without the tune going through my head.  Weird, huh?)

Anyway, knackeredness (yay, new word!) caused largely by Oxford trip today, coupled with start of IVs, which I really should have predicted but thought I could get away with.  My wonderful physio set me straight, though, and made me see the better of kicking off today as opposed to Monday as was my wont.

For all you stat-monkeys out there, today provided a L-F of 0.7/1.2, Sats of 90% and a weigh-in at 54.4kg.  All of which is really not that bad, really.  But with increasing morning headaches, poor sleep and a newly-discovered need to turn Neve up just a trifle over-night, it made sense to kick off some IVs and head-off whatever may be on its way before it decides to settle in for the winter.

First dose this afternoon went fine and dandy, steroids started with them, so expecting huge appetite to kick in sometime in the next few days, too.

Can’t think of anything more to say.  Immediately — it’s such a nice song.

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Happy Birthday, Mummy dearest. xx

So it’s been a rough week.  My mood over the last five or six days has been up and down more times than Billie Piper’s trousers in an episode of Diary of a Call Girl (which, by the way, is so atrocious I beg none of you to waste 30 minutes of your preciously short lives giving it your attention).

It’s a struggle to keep yourself moving forward when you don’t know how you’re going to feel, physically, mentally or emotionally, from one moment to the next.  Right now, for instance, I’m feel strong, confident and happy.  Had I written this earlier this afternoon, it would have been a completely different story.

Therein lies the problem, really – how do you deal with a physical and emotional state that’s ever-changing from hour-to-hour?

If I was feeling permanently down or upset, it would give me something to focus on, something to seek to improve or seek help with.  If I felt permanently tired and exhausted, or chesty and rubbish, I could get on the phone to my team in Oxford and get them on the case.  But I don’t feel permanently anything, other than permanently changeable.

The plus side is, of course, that with all the downs come all the ups.  I know that when I’m feeling miserable, I’m more than likely only a couple of hours away from feeling OK again and when I’m feeling chesty, I’m only a physio session and a nebuliser away from being comfortable enough to make a cup of tea.

It’s the endlessness of it that’s starting to wear thin, though – the relentless ride through peak and trough which starts to grind away at the inner reserves one builds up over time to deal with the regular lifts and dips of life.

I feel like I’m slowly losing a sense of “me” – like I’m losing touch with the essence of who I am because I’m being subsumed by a constant need to “cope”, to get by, moment-to-moment from each new challenge to the next.  I don’t have room to let myself breathe (no pun intended), to stop and just plateau.

I don’t know if maybe there’s a sense of a time-pressure that still hangs over me, like I need to make the most of things while I can in case the day never comes when I get carted off to theatre for my new lungs and new life.  Since, physically, I’m seeming to be able to support myself in doing a little bit more at the moment, is the frustration coming from not being able to do quite enough to satisfy myself that I’m making the most of things.

If I’m honest, I don’t think that’s true at all, but there’s so much going on at the moment that I’m not entirely sure what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s real and what’s imagined.  I can’t put my finger on anything that’s making things better or worse and I can’t identify what it is I need to do to stop these endless fluctuations of mood and manner.

I suppose, though, that no one does.  I’d be a rather remarkable person if I knew to solution to all of my problems.  Finding the way out of the mind’s maze is the journey that makes the end all the more valuable.  But when you’re staring at a hedge with no sense of direction, it’s not much comfort to know it’s a shrubbery for learning.

As previously detailed in the hereabouts, I have a mild addiction to Studio 60. Not only that, pretty much all the drama on TV that really passes muster (read: gets on my Sky+ series link) can be found with an American accent on one of the 4 channels. (That’s not as in “one of four channels” because that’s just stupid: I have Sky and therefore a zillion channels, most of them pap. One of the 4 channels meaning Channel 4, E4, More4 or Another4*)

What this means, apart from the fact that I’m essentially paying my television licence fee in order to sit and watch dramas from the other side of the Atlantic whilst my money gets frittered away on 2 Pints of Lager and a Packet of God-Awful Soap Operas, is that I spend most of my viewing time fast-forwarding between ComparetheMarket.com idents which would appear to crop up almost randomly within any given Channel 4 show.

I fully suspect that were I, in my late-afternoon stupor, to sit and watch an entire hour of Richard and Judy, I would find that they’ve replaced the You Say, We Steal Your Money feature with Same Car, Dramatic Difference.

It’s not even really the fact that by the time you’ve seen them for the 44,352nd time they get a bit repetitive, same-y and repetitive. It’s the arbitrary way in which they are shoe-horned into the programs that really gets my goat (if I had a goat).

I know it’s unfair to blame it on ComparetheMarket.com, but hey – we live in a world where it’s necessary for Blue Peter presenters to apologise for the mistakes made by THEIR BOSSES to the littl’uns who wouldn’t even understand what they’d done wrong if they had it explained to them Very. Slowly. Seriously – if you’re old enough to understand what they did wrong, you shouldn’t be watching Blue Peter by now anyway. Go put your hoodie on and sit on a street corner with the rest of the degenerate youth of today.

The timing of the ad breaks in Channel 4 dramas is so ridiculously out-of-place as to be almost comical. I say “almost” because despite it’s cosey up nicely to the mistress of mirth, I still find myself throwing objects at the screen every time they break the flow of a scene to blare 5 more minutes of capitalist propaganda (too far – sorry, go all high-horse Marxist in the middle of my rant there…). It’s getting worse, too. Last night it was the TV remote, which threatened serious damage. Tonight I damn near through K at it.

I KNOW the Americans have a very weird system of throwing ads in almost willy-nilly, but at least they do it at moments that feel right to the show – in fact, all shows on Network TV in America are written AROUND the ad breaks, they actually plan for them when they’re knocking out the scripts.

So why oh why oh why oh why and a few more why of whys can’t Channel 4 either ride shotgun with the Americans and surrender to their ad patterns or – at the very least – work the ads into a sensible spot in the drama.

I’ve lost count of the number of times an episode of Brothers and Sisters has stomped all over the emotional denouement of a scene to go to commercials mid-thought, when there is a fade-to-black which pops up within 2 minutes of the return of the break. Would it kill them to hold off on the ads for another 120 seconds? Would the regulators go bananas? Would their ad clients be raging on the phone? I’m going to guess not – if for no other reason than I chose to heap all of my scorn for the shoddy ad-break practices of Channel 4 Television onto ComparetheMarket.com who have the misfortune of having spend hudreds of thousands of pounds on a sponsorship package for shows which get ruined by arbitrary commercial breaks thrown in by editors with no sense of emotional beats or story arcs.

So come on, people, sort yourselves out. We clearly can’t all enjoy US TV series ad-less, like Heroes on BBC 2, but at the very least we can stop the ad breaks being quite so unflinchingly (or is that flinchingly?) annoying.

I’m starting the Campaign for Correct Placement of Ad Breaks (or, rather more niftily, I think, CFCPOAB) today – to run right alongside Save My Remote Control.

*May or may not be a real 4 channel.

This isn’t actually a proper post, but I do have my internet back (more on that tomorrow) and thought I’d point you here to a letter I had published in the Guardian Media Section today.  It’s not often I big myself up, but I’m really rather proud of this chappie.

I’m in an advanced state of “how to deal with the dude at the window?”.

For reasons un-bloggable, the living room is currently out of bounds, so I’m holed-up, not unhappily, in the study, surfing the ‘net a little to catch up on some of my favourite, but not every-day sites.  Whilst I browse, the familiar clinking bang hits the wall and the half-creak, half-screech of a man climbing a ladder grows ever louder in my ear.

Sure enough, miliseconds later, armed with cloth and long wipey thing which has no discernable purpose beyond making it look like they’re actually doing something, a man appears at the window.

So now I’m stuck in that awkward zoo-like state of strangeness wherein you don’t know if it’s appropriate to turn and acknowledge him or just to ignore him.  You’re perfectly well aware that he’s there and he knows that you’re aware of it, too.  But where do you look once you’ve turned to look at him?

If you do acknowledge him, in what way and for how long?  Obviously, being in a first-floor flat, opening the window for a quick “how do you do?” isn’t going to be a warmly welcomed idea, and communicating through double glazing is hard enough when you can wave and shout and point at things, but given his donkey-on-a-pole status with buckets, chamois and wipeys everywhere seems a likely impossibility.

Is it rude to ignore someone who’s closer to you than it’s natural for one man to be to another if they’re not considering amourous relations or celebrating a sporting triumph?  Does the pane of clear sheeting between you justify the pretense of ignorance?

I figure that most people opt not to acknowledge their window cleaners if they have something sufficiently distracting to legitimately hold their attention away from the window (say, writing a blog or performing micro-surgery on a wasp unlucky enough to die slap-bang in the middle of the desk).  This conclusion leads me to believe that if I, being so occupied, were in fact to turn to acknowledge the presence of the ladderman, I would in fact so startle him as to risk his ability to maintain his balance and thus his position some 3 metres off the ground.  Not wishing him to become too prematurely re-aquainted with the earth, I decide on grounds of health and safety to ignore him completely and settle back, contented with my  caring and considered manner in dealing with the problem, into constructing my witticisms.

For some reason, though, I can’t escape the feeling that he’s just climbed down and moved on the next window whilst muttering to his mate, “That miserable git up there has nothing better to do than pull the wings off flies and yet he can’t even muster up a wave while I clean his bleedin’ windows.”