Sick Notes

SICK NOTES

SICK NOTES

Someone once wrote that they were not born a redhead but born to be a redhead. Some of us were fortunate enough to be both. We remained that way until mother nature and our father's genes (or so I believed) colluded to force our hairline to retreat in early adulthood and disappear completely by the time we left our twenties. There is something semi-Masonic about being a redhead. The actress Julianne Moore has mentioned how we tend to notice each other and 'notice our identity'. It's a club, a tribe, a minority. A ginger group, of sorts. Baldness never bothered me, but I was crushed by no longer being a redhead. Ginger. Of course there are greater losses, but these came later, and others will come later still. Long after the loss of youth, hair, looks and loved ones comes the loss of faculties, mobility and independence. And when it comes to pain and illness there is an argument that redheads feel it more than your average mousey blonde, strawberry blonde, chestnut brunette or black head. Says who? Well, this century, neuroscientists examined the mysterious ginger gene and revealed that redheads are more susceptible to pain.

11 mins 9 secs read

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SICK NOTES

SICK NOTES

Words spoken almost half a century ago by a man who meant very little to me at the time, and of whom I had little knowledge and little interest, came to mind when John Lydon failed to become the Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest - staged this month in Le Royaume-Uni - as front man of PIL, with the song 'Hawaii'.  These words were spoken in the high season of punk  during which  I collected my weekly copy of Sounds on the way to school, and perused it en route to the bus stop for the short ride to Camberwell, via the ramp of the brutalist estate completed three years earlier. Work begun in the high season of glam rock ('In every dream home a heartache'), with the final flagstone laid the summer the Philadelphia sound was wafting through walkways and stairwells, as it emanated from the Phillip's cassette pet belonging to one of our gang.

11 mins 50 secs read

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SICK NOTES

SICK NOTES

A wealthy, middle-aged bachelor once told me, apropos of nothing, he was saving homosexuality for his dotage. 'I'm saving The Beatles for mine,' I quipped. It was a steamy season in London and the two of us were seated in the rotunda at BBC TV centre, smoking cigarettes and staring skyward towards the golden sculpture of Helios. It was halfway through the 1990s, two decades beyond the moment in which the BBC and The Beatles came together to make history. In the seismic year of 1966 satellite technology made it possible for television stations across the world - with the exception of the USSR, naturally - to transmit as one. The world's first global broadcast occurred the following year: each country participating offered up something local and cultural. For Germany it was Lohengrin from the opera house that Wagner built in Bayreuth. There was a concerto from the Met in New York, and Franco Zeffirelli filming Romeo & Juliet in Rome (Paul McCartney was considered for the lead.)

13 mins 25 secs read

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SICK NOTES

SICK NOTES

I was sick. Poorly. Queer. Under the weather and out of sorts. I was ill. I prefer this to the previous words and expressions. It conjures up damp English afternoons. In fact all the illnesses that accompanied overcast days throughout the decades. Mumps. Measles. Hypergonadism. Kidney stones. As Prufrock’s life was measured out in coffee spoons, and the passage of Eno’s life in shirts, my adulthood has been punctuated by kidney stones. The last was surgically removed days before the nation went into self-isolation. The weekend before was spent with a catheter. It was retrieved by a nubile nurse who said that after her shift she planned to settle down with Love Island on catch-up and a kebab. Her look was one of alarm. Maybe she was shocked that my penis had shrunk to the size of a skin tag. Or perhaps she didn’t realise this bald, bespectacled middle age man was once a redhead. The next day the nation was under the weather; life in the time of Covid. In the silence myself and a neighbour, Mr P, made a noise. We were in an altered state.

13 mins 21 secs read

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