Category: writing

  • The Pain Clinic

    It was snowing, they were late. The cropped, blonde nurse glared at her as her husband fled, keen to escape the clutches of the clinic which radiated an air of military strictness. This was the Pain Clinic. Where everyone is in pain, except – maybe the staff. She knew better than to explain to the…

  • The Exploding Bomb

    The pain of the world is beginning to creep inside me. I can feel it. The townships. The oil wells. The children with dead eyes and guns in their hands.

  • Afterwards

    Nights they break into our deepest sleep. A crack overhead makes us jump. Those summer storms. Glimpsing behind the curtain into the garden, we see the insistent gigantic drops splashing on the ground, churning soil to mud, blackening our carefully tended flowers. Then the drops merging to become a sheet, a waterfall, nothing like rain.…

  • Victory

    I want to live in a world of win-wins. But it seems that there is no chance, no chance at all. Like we are stuck in a never-ending boxing match in which only the opponent changes periodically. Only our strength is called for, not our love – that is our weakness. Who will be the…

  • The Bay

    At my age a thought starts to emerge like a small moth flapping at the window: what will it be like to age, to die? It is not a great age, fifty-one, but it is an age where one can speak of experience. More than half a century to look back on, five times older…

  • Reality kicks in

    13. Day Forty-two You haven’t heard from me for a while, not since day twenty-seven and today is already day forty-two of this Lyme Diary. I’ve been concentrating very hard on two things: planning for next year and what I want to do when I’m healthy again (that’s real proactive positive thinking, or what we…

  • Learning to Fly

    12. Day Twenty-seven The observant among you might notice that the numbering of these posts has changed. This is because I changed them. All of them. Day One is the day I started writing about my illness in order to externalise it, as part of the healing process (along with all the pills, dietary changes…

  • Walls Come Tumbling Down

    11. Day Twenty-one I didn’t write the blog yesterday because I was just too busy having a life. The 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall was something to behold, Berlin style. Big pompous show at Brandenburg Gate with Thomas Gottschalk and a spectacular domino event plus fireworks, while the more hands-on activist types…

  • Loud as a Whisper

    10. Day Eighteen You may have been surprised when I admitted to being a Michael Jackson fan, but I have another confession to make. I am a Trekkie. And after many years of being totally purist and insisting on only watching the orginal series, I have discovered The Next Generation and I like it. I…

  • Heal the World

    9. Day Sixteen Hey, I feel great. Almost no pain at all. Two whole days already. Probably because I stopped taking the Colestyramin. Or because I took it. Is it a good sign or a bad sign that there’s no pain? Was I having Herxheimer reactions (sign of bacterial die-off) and now I’m not? Well,…