Yes, the Camino Can'cerre, rather the post treatment life. I won't lie my brain is massively different and I've left a lot of the baggage of life along the way. It's not just my brain that's lost stuff, I've had a good bit of atrophy in my life.
My ambition to kick a ball across the Camino again is real, as is going to the meadows for a kick about with Caitlin. I might even treat myself to proper boots.
My football career is the stuff of legend. That's if you like the legends where there's no happy ending.
I loved football at primary and when we left for Maryland I remember as a p4, playing in the playground with the P6's and 7's. When I went to grade 5 trials at Darnestown I was the only one who could play. I remember the Seneca valley team in the Maryland championships but not much else. After 2 years I returned to p7 and I was told to concentrate on basketball. Football was pretty much over and I could be left back as I had a left foot. At that age I hadn't worked out that you were supposed to just play with one. I'd always used both my feet.
My family and near neighbourhood didn't do boys clubs so I knew nothing about how football in Edinburgh was structured. As a Hibs supporter I should've known my history but alas I didn't. I could've joined one of these boys clubs but lacked the capacity. We played up the Pollock's instead. We played in the park until they planted all the trees.
By secondary the first eleven football team had already been picked. I remember wondering how they knew all the good players. I wondered what made someone a good player. As ever I wondered for a moment then that moment passed. Never push at a closed door. This was a closed door. It never changed until I was in 5th year, then I got to play.
I played basketball instead and wished I played football.
At university the first team had already been chosen too although at least they had trials. The locker room was full of chat so before the note went up we all knew both 1st XI, 2nds and 3rds. I was 2nds for sure. I had an engine a head and 2 feet apparently.
I was pulled aside early on. Andy Taylor asked me to join the 3rds. No training, mostly drinking and you could smoke on the bench. I gave it some thought, then took two others from the 2nds and signed up.
I never looked back. We played to our strengths and enjoyed the party. We played some tough teams in fife as our level meant it was village and town teams. Most didn't like students and loved going through you. It certainly improved my control, quick pass and toughened me up. I was far too fair and I learned that fouling was an important, muy importante, part of football. The dark arts needn't be deployed but you must make sure they don't bite you.
It's a bit like business. Pretending that people are honest, or even aspire to being honest, is folly. They want to get through the day at best and at worst, at all costs, as a winner. My favourite incidence involved some guy called head of procurement from a bank. He had that swagger of a guy going down and how I loved taking him down.
It was 2000 and he told me he was there to serve notice on the contract his bank had with us.
I said it's six months, will that be enough time and he said "I know it's 6 months, I'm heading of procurement". We'll get you I thought, you must be head of procurement.
I said if it runs over these are the terms and he said it won't run over we are the bank. He stood up as if to dismiss me in my own building and I smiled graciously.
Thank you for you.business over these years it's been a joy and a privilege to serve your customers. May I wish you and them all the best for the future as I guess we won't meet again, I smiled.
He shook my hand with a pitiful benevolence. Inside I was roaring with laughter as I knew the script. He was indeed the bank and the bank never delivered. 5 months later he was back in our office.
I greeted him like a long lost friend who I had been fortunate to meet for 5 minutes once in my life
He said he wanted to renegotiate the terms and I said that's great news.
I asked how much more he wanted to pay and assured him it would reach all the staff who had been serving out their redundancy notices. I promised every penny of the increased amount would be used to augment their redundancy payments as looking after staff had been key to looking after their customers.
He explained he was not there to negotiate up but rather to not pay the £1.5m compensation I'd put in the penalty clauses.
I said he should've gone to Specsavers, a joke he didn't understand as he had had a humour bypass. I said I couldn't possibly renegotiate with the staff fulfilling the contract to stay longer and receive less. I then described what each member of the team were doing after they left us. Some were retraining, some emigrating and two were going to university. One sadly had been forced to sell their house as they were in the middle of a divorce, couldn't find another job and wanted to make sure they didn't get into debt with the mortgage so had downsized.
I forced him to sit through me slavering for 15 minutes about the impact on people I liked and then I smiled and said we would spend the £1.5m wisely. We did. Most of the staff didn't leave but the ones who did were getting 6 months to a year in compensation.
As I shook his hand and said sorry I couldn't have been more helpful I couldn't help but remark on his lovely watch.
That's a lovely watch, I said.
He told me all about it. He never noticed I don't wear a watch. I think I stopped wearing them when I was in my teens. He was still telling me some drivel about the watch as he slithered out the door. I'm happy I broke it to him so gently as these guys get upset when they lose.
We went to the pub and had a pint or 6.
I found it symptomatic of the banks. No suprise to see them bankrupt 8 years later. They had a lot of clueless bullies in many senior positions. This idiot is probably picking up £1m a year nowadays. I hope I taught him a lesson but I doubt it. He looked far too in love with himself for a wee pleb like me to mark him even with a medium sized mallet.
He got the train with one of my colleagues and accused me of being a fearsome negotiatior. I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my pint. I said to my colleague, tell him one day I just fell foul of first impressions and he'd left one on me. From the moment he walked through the door, assumed control of the meeting until he departed that day I knew he'd get stitched up like a kipper.
To use the penalty box tap on the shoulder to make him look the other way was all I needed. In his case, he only needed a mirror to look into, he found himself so mesmerising.
I often wonder why I only took him for £1.5m. What was it that made me think those were the right numbers. £100 per client taken on after the cut off seems so unfair now. £25 for every individual line of stock in a valuation also looks a tad punishing but it was 99/2000 and the dot com bubble. We had to look at the opportunity cost of doing this work and not for an ongoing client. We also had to charge for all the clients as they had missed their deadline and that involved another cut of data. As my techy laughed as he hit send, that'll be £1.5m please. Even footballers don't earn £1.5m per second.
I went to Maggie's today for a bit of advice and how helpful they were. I've got myself straight and I also got a lovely cup of coffee and cake. I knew I should've done this more often.
I got the answers to a lot of small questions and then got even more when I spoke to nutrition. I now know it's February 4th at 2:40pm that I get my results. If it's all clear then the tube may go that day. Excellent news as I have been having stingy trouble with it. My sciatica is back in my right leg so I'm trying to sleep on my left, alas the tube is on my left. I'll always remember which side my stomach is on now. I was so good with maps, in Grade 5 I could draw a map of the USA and do the 48 states, even what and where the state capital was. Even now I shout Salem when someone asks the capital of Oregon in that excitable pub quiz child way. I just wish I'd drilled my anatomy into the same box. I have no idea which side the appendix is on although I'm pretty sure I've still got one. Every time I'm at Midlothian Physiotherapy I look at that map of the body on the wall in a curious kind of way. It's the way I looked at Picasso's Guernica in Madrid. Fascinating but nothing going in my akull. I'm clearly aware of what I like to look at, but my interest didn't hang any labels. Strange how you can have a photographic memory for some stuff, often nonsense, but the brain slides the shutter to view only, for other stuff. Like all of us, we look in the mirror and say, I'm just wired that way.
Simon, Chris and I were out for a stroll on Thursday after the dentist at the western had done a wonderful job on my gob.
We took the loop around the Dalmeny estate and my pictures don't catch the sky quite as well as some of those Turner paintings.
The sky was full of that aurora borealis in grey. There must have been about 20 different shades of grey as the clouds moved across the light, stunning it was, add the piles of shells, beach, the sea, isolation and Crammond island the complete a magical experience.
It was supposed to be raining but happily we did a 10k loop with the 3 of us and the dog staying dry.
There's so many of these walks that make an old man very happy and following it up with a trip to Leith Depot for a late lunch was superb. Scorpio leisure are playing Leith Depot Thursday 30th so that's another date in the diary.
Friday.
Today was more Reflexology and reiki. Such a phenomenal part of my treatment and recovery. I've been a fan for 30 years, it works for me and depending how your wired it may or may not work for you. I swear by it as it seems to calm me down. Talking of being calmer than before, why do journalists on the TV news use the expression "more calmer". Ah'm no linguist but if you want to educate people with the news surely you use language. I genuinely thought more calmer sounds totally like a bampot slavering after 10 pints. Clearly I was not as calm as I felt an hour ago when driving back from reflexology listening to the car radio.
The radio 4 programme on common misunderstandings of fuel for the body was fascinating and a reminder that when you are exercising you need to fuel up or your body will use muscle to satisfy your energy requirements. That point is often missed by me..no fuel means my body will use muscle which in turn leads me to feel exhausted. The study extended to people from around the world and how activity levels weren't the be all and end all. Who knew how many of our basic bodily systems require calories and it helped explain why I felt like I needed 3000 calories daily during treatment, which I'm sure I muttered back at week 4 to nutrition as noted on this blog.
It was weird realising that relationship which I had always got completely wrong. At 18, I stopped eating sweets when I got obsessed with my weight and started vomiting every night. I'd used smoking to suppress the appetite although I will concede to getting the munchies whenever smoking a joint. Apparently you get the munchies only if you inhale.
Lately I've been eating scones with cream and jam. They're the way forward especially with exercise. I remember Graeme Obree talking about slow and fast release carbs before his daily 50-100km bike ride. "Yeah, I have a jam piece and a pint of milk". Not an ounce of fat on him as he discussed why he wouldn't take all the nonsense supplements when he joined a team for the tour. It was a programme I saw about 20-30 years ago and it always makes me smile when I hear stuff about diet that I've heard before and ignored.
Another person who told me to fuel up was Simon in 2007. He'd eat a packet of biscuits for every bocadillo that I ate. He ended up thinner than me, 500 miles later after a month on the stomp. I got it wrong and only when I moved onto donuts for breakfast did Simon finally get a chance to see how to make me move in the morning. During treatment I started taking 4 sugars in my tea. It's amazing how slowly it started making a difference. I should add while Simon knew the answers back then it too took him until 5 years ago before he saw the correlation between exercise and fuel. His weight is under control nowadays because he walks 80km a week. All diets failed him, so he went to the one thing that always works, low level activity.
What is less amazing is how quickly I resorted to type and said sugars bad honey is good. Honey is good, it really is, but I'm not sure it's worked as well. It's like my jam and yoghurt that has been binned for Weetabix and no sugar. At least I have added biscuits to my rucksack so there's always some sugar.
Stu also used to tell me, "less bread" and so I did start taking sugar in my peppermint tea. I still couldn't bring myself to eat cake even though I love it. Basque gateau is superb as are the donuts. If I write it often enough I'll start to believe it. Golfers always have a bacon roll or whatever before their round yet donuts is what they need. You see them powering down on the back nine and toiling up 17. When I was at my best I always had hazelnut cake in the bag. I've forgotten how much of that cake I baked and ate, during golf. Nowadays I don't take cake and I'm rubbish again. It's a recurring theme this forgetting. They used to call me rainman 2010-2015. They don't call me rainman now. I keep forgetting to turn up and play. That's the thing about golf, you need to arrive at the golf club not lie in your bed thinking about it. I'm sure when I baked the hazelnut cake I had a better memory too, or maybe they only called me rainman when I had the hazelnut cake, not because I knew every shot everyone played, especially the ones they'd forgotten to count.
It's why I laugh at a lifelong obsession with weight and yet a bit of cancer, alcohol abstinence and a loss of appetite has me scrambling to keep my weight up to 15/4. I've tried like a bear to get below 100kgs. I was below 100kg before I even started the treatment. When I stopped drinking I lost 10-15 kgs as I was still doing the exercise. I'll have to look back to the earlier posts to see if I was doing the cake.
It does feel like 3 -4 months I've struggled to keep the weight on and I'd drop to 75kg in a month without too much effort.
I've gone back to trying to drink 2-3 pints of full fat milk. During week 4 of treatment I had 4 pints of Guinness as I knew I was being weighed the next day and was too light. It worked, I was 1kg heavier but I forgot to have the Guinness the following Wednesday as I was not up for alcohol. If only I'd drunk milk.
This has indeed been the hardest part for me. A regimen I just couldn't get comfortable with. I've been as free as a bird since 2009 and rules really didn't sit comfortably ever. Some reasoning, some logical explanations sink in, often though I would ignore signs, it's how my antenna work. Before I kicked a ball with my diagnosis I'd hunkered down for an alcoholic's respite. I knew I needed to present my body in a decent shape for them to treat. Anything less was indecently arrogant. These people are trying to help you. They are trying to save your life. You need to give them a decent liver to process the treatment. Yeah, I'd worked out immediately it was one of those moments when my reasoning resulted in response. As I sit here chuckling, writing about energy levels and exercise I'm aware that it's often not the case.
Many if us ignore the obvious answer as we strim around the edges and ignore the jungle in the middle. In the column marked things I'm good at is talking about stuff and in the column marked unfinished business or things I'm not good at it's definitely sticking to the plan. It's full of thinking not doing.
A bit like the deadbeat Christmas annual. It's due out in 2025, 40 years after the last time we took some to the shops. Collecting those jars full of 10p paid for so many jars back in the early 80's but work got in the way and like the deadbeat label the fanzine bit the dust.
On that note I'll hit publish and be done.
I'm in a holding pattern waiting for February 4th so a stroll on Tuesday and a gig next Thursday should move the calendar along nicely.
Sadly Elizabeth's funeral is the same day. Elizabeth and David were great pals of my mum and dad. One great memory is in France and as the windows swung open Elizabeth sang out "high on a hill..." From Sound of Music. My mum was in hysterics and I always remember my mum with Francis and Elizabeth enjoying life and laughter.
In the great world of sliding doors and what if game, Elizabeth's son Paul introduced My brother to WoodMac which led to me getting a job and then Stuart, Alan, Alan and half the southside. If we hadn't got a job as a school boy in the post room who knows where life would go.
Similarly, Elizabeth's husband David walked with my Dad along the Camino in 2003. I had gone to look after my mum in France while my Dad was away. We had a great time, tracking their movements and harvesting the bumper summer crops of September in France. We juiced so many kilos of tomatoes. Fun times and great memories. If I hadn't been there looking after my Mum I'd have never thought Simon and I could do it in 2007. Both Elizabeth and David will long live in my memory and will get candles lit every Camino.
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