A Calm So Deep

I've had such a fun month. I'm truly loving everything life is throwing at me these days, which is mostly friendship, love, food, and fun. I also have a job! It's a paid internship at a marketing/PR company in Great Portland Street, that i'm ecstatic about starting on monday. These leisurely meandering days will soon be a thing of the past, and I can't wait to hurl myself into normality.

Health wise, i've put on quite a bit of weight - I was this weight a couple of months ago before I had that stream of colds and coughs around christmas, yet then everything was utterly different. Before, when at 50kg, I felt (and was) absolutely (relatively!) huge around my tummy and my face, everywhere else still scarily skeletal. Now however, my face and my tummy look the trimmest they've been in a good long while, but my arms, legs, bum and hips have filled out! I'm so over the moon - I feel womanly... and sexy and.... normal! I've been taking peppermint capsules and charcoal capsules (charcoal in the middle of the day to stop them absorbing the other meds), and they seem to have made a huge and noticeable difference to the bloating. My chest has also been the clearest it's been since my transplant over a year ago - why I even had clear lung gunk the other day! I'm not waking up fighting for breath, nor reaching for the inhalers before I can even think about doing anything with my day. I can't fully express what an incredible feeling it is; it's just so liberating. I'm managing to keep up if not thrive on this fun and hectic lifestyle I have at the moment, filled with gigs and pubs and outings. I may start some cipro next monday, just to buffer myself for the onslaught a working life may have on my body.

Almost everyday I go for a ramble across Wormwood Scrubs to keep these puffers stretching - a huge bit of parkland just round the corner from where I live. It hosts fantastic views of London - every landmark you can think of I can see from this windy spot. Anyone that knows me (or reads this blog!) knows i'm a sucker for a view, and I could easily spend hours up there, whiling way an evening watching the beast that is London, now suddenly draped in serenity and stillness. Wordsworth writes of my city: 


Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

(Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, 1802)

Everytime i'm up there I think of that mighty heart lying still - such power and such majesty, yet seemingly so calm, so tranquil. "Never saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!". Again Shelley pops to mind - the "unremitting interchange" between your surroundings and your own mind, "which passively now renders and receives fast influencings" - his deep calm heightens my deep calm, as it's true - never have I felt a calm so deep in such a long time. This view, this space, this endless horizon perpetuates my happiness and i'm left overwhelmed by just how awesome life finally fucking is. Of course the splendour falls short of what somewhere beautifully high up like Primrose Hill has to offer (you know i've actually never been, whats that about!), but it still more than adequately satisfies my Romantic tendencies, and my love of all things beautiful, all things sublime.** My housemates and I would cartwheel and do 'yoga' on there all the time, but now they've sadly left me i'd feel like a bit off a loony toon doing abysmal flips by myself. Instead I arm myself with headphones, tea in a water bottle and a kitkat in the pocket, and fill my lungs with the crisp air right down to the forgotten sleepy tips.

I'm definitely going to work hard so this fantastic spell doesn't catapult downhill as soon as I start working - I honestly haven't felt so good or so content in such a long time, and I hope this simultaneous deep calm and energy lasts for as long as is humanly possible. 


*PS I don't have osteoporosis anymore!!! I fucking love you Liv II !!

**Interestingly, normally the sublime is associated with terror, but I seem to go with Shelley's interpretation (and radical departure from the normal interpretation) that the sublime can lead to a greater understanding of nature and 'truth' (yourself? Everything?). I remember he wrote somewhere that for a "cultivated mind" the sublime has this alternative meaning, and I guess he means those not influenced by the supernatural, or those that believe in religious ideologies ("large codes of fraud and woe"). I've never found the Sublime terrifying, it only heightens my love of everything beautiful, and seems to cement me within this mysterious and bonkers world. 

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

A stream of blabbering consciousness

OK I'll try not to go too Virginia Woolf on you, because we all know that could end up disastrous and potentially boring. No promises though. I KNOW I keep posting about CF stuff, but to be perfectly honest, not much is happening in my life right now apart from CF shizzle. Trust me, I cannot wait until I can start blogging about a life like the one I had a couple of years ago! And it'll be even better because it'll be a life without hypos and blood sugar monitoring and creon with every meal and shitty hangovers. I stumbled upon a blog where the person complains about having to monitor her blood sugars for 48 hours whilst in hospital, and how annoying and tedious it is because she can't snack or eat anything too sugary etc etc. I wanted to scream at the screen "try doing this every single day!" 48 hours in hospital doesn't even take into account energy used to travel places, walking about, socializing, drinking - every single thing that affects sugar levels. I'm just jealous. It's such a delicate art to get right, takes so much forward planning and thinking ahead, even seems mathmatical at times when trying to calculate how much energy you'll use against how many carbs you've eaten against how much insulin you should therefore take. It's hard. I like to think of it as keeping my little grey cells active whilst they otherwise would be rotting away as I watch Neighbours day after day. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, wasting and sitting and stewing as I slowly become a shrivelled body with an australian accent. I already have a shrivelled pancreas - two decades of it being completely defunct. I can't get over how lucky I will be to have a new pancreas. Proper life changing shit right there. Did I ever write that i'll have two pancreases?! They're not going to take the current one out for some reason, but due to it's shrunken size it won't take up much space. Odd huh. I keep having Tarentino/CSI style visions of my autopsy and the forensic pathologist discovering this absurdity within me. "Holy moly! This gal's got two fucking pancreases! Whatta freak!" My mind is slipping into it's black comic ways. It does this all too easily. This sunny facade hides a comically sinister interior. Maybe it's because i'm not fazed by blood nor gore nor shockingly blunt facts about the body. My mum's dad was a doctor, and she brought me back his book of colour photographs of the insides of the human body. Cadaver after cadaver after cadaver. I'll be honest, it was a little queezy-making at first, but you de-sensitize very quickly to the puffed out organs and rubbery skin that almost looks like Egyptian papyrus paper. It's fascinating. Imagining that once they were functioning entities with blood rushing through them, powering them, as they relentlessly work to enable people to write drivel on blogs (it's an old book, so they were probably writing drivel in ink to lovers far away or to the next door neighbour asking them to please refrain from having the wireless on too loud.) But now they're just artificially coloured ghosts of lives that once had been, delicate yet scarily robust as if Damien Hirst had created yet more modern art soaked and protected in formaldehyde.  I now have a weird fascination with finding people's livers and spleens and doing that 'tap-tap' thing doctors do and pretending I know where everything is. The thing is, it's not hard when they're bloody massive, but normal people's ones are hard to find! Still, I go, "ahh yes, no hepatosplenomegaly here". My mum looks at me like i'm frickin bonkers. But go on, say that word, and I bet you'll want to say it again and again. I read on wikipedia, it's the simultaneous enlargement of both the liver and the spleen. Hepato - spleno - megaly. I passed a degree thanks to wikipedia. I love you wikipedia, you unreliable beautiful source.

How's that for stream of consciousness. Actually, kinda shit.
I could go on, but I won't. Because I know you stopped reading a long time ago and just skipped to this paragraph because it was shorter. 

I'll bullet point the rest.

- Today I am eating jelly babies and catching up on Once Upon A Time and painting strawberrys on my nails. 

- Yesterday I used my Freedom pass for the first time, and caught two busses home BECAUSE IT WAS FREE AND BECAUSE I COULD. Saved 5 mins of walking. Felt brilliant.

- Our Sistine Chapel bathroom is nearly finished and looks beautiful. I'm going to order candles with Raphael's cherubs on from amazon. Then create and frame a photoshopped version of our cats, that would look a bit like this.

- Watched Bright Star again last night with a fellow Keats lover while eating ice cream and (more) jelly babies and carbonnara. Not all together. I love Ben Whishaw.

- I need to wash my slippers because they're getting a bit smelly. Sorry.