Recovery from an operation is about as linear as a cat’s favourite ball of yarn. After a few weeks of disproportionate ups and downs, tangled up with some minor but disruptive post-op symptoms, I’ve had to force myself into a ‘slow and steady’ mindset; not an easy task for me. I’ve returned to daily walks in the countryside and gentle, incremental goal-setting.
Walks are great for reflection, which is one of the things my doctor has advised me to do. I reflect on my journey since my endo diagnosis, on the journey ahead, and on living the heck out of life. I reflect on the beauty in nature and on life’s simple pleasures, such as sleeping next to my darling husband. Even though he is less inclined to sleep through the night than to can-can his way through it, I am glad to be back beside him – tempus fugit, after all. Or perhaps rather, tempus pugilit.
I reflect on how bloody lucky I am, and how bloody lucky others are not.
Some days when I’m reflecting, the latter thought tugs at my mind, edging me towards the treacherous potholes in that non-linear recovery path. On days like that, I find it best not to tune in to the news, which can be pretty bleak at the moment.
My mind wanders: I read the news today, oh boy, John Lennon wrote. Totally agree with you, John. But now, a different question is troubling me: where on earth did that bit about Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire come from? Were the holes physical or metaphorical? Were they all concentrated in one place (a field maybe?), or were they spread across the region? And why Blackburn? Does it have an unusually large population of moles? Or do the people there just really love golf?
Back home, with the aid of Google, I learn that Mr Lennon sat down at his piano on 17th January, 1967, with a copy of the Daily Mail*, whose contents ultimately inspired him to write the lyrics to A Day in the Life. Juxtaposed with a news item regarding a fatal car crash was an article called The holes in our roads. The first paragraph reads, “There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one-twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey.” How oddly specific.
Aha! – so they were potholes, then! And each pothole could be shared between twenty-six people? Blimey. That’s a lot of knackered car suspension systems.
But that’s not all Lennon wrote about those potholes – the next lines in the verse are: And though the holes were rather small**, they had to count them all – Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
Well, those poor buggers in Blackburn must have been having a tough time. Not only having to put up with all the potholes (I empathise), but also having to count them all! However, I do think that reporting the whole sorry saga in the national press was taking things a bit too far. That statistic could have remained buried in the notebook of the council surveyor, affecting the world beyond Lancashire in no way whatsoever, had it not been plucked from obscurity to fill the Daily Mail’s spare column space that day and then found its way to the front of John Lennon’s piano. And now, no tourist in the world will ever want to visit Blackburn – not by car, at any rate.
But there are winners as well as losers in every situation, I realise. A quick bit of arithmetic based on the numbers in the article tells us that the the capacity of the Albert Hall must be approximately 104,000† – wow! I’m impressed, and I start imagining what an enormous building the Albert Hall must be, and how tourists must flock to London to marvel at its spectacular size as well as its architecture and history.
Sadly, however, Google is arithmetically brutal – it giveth and it taketh away. My illusions are shattered when another quick search reveals that the capacity of the Albert Hall is in fact a mere 5,272††. Gutted. Ah well, maybe arithmetic wasn’t our John’s strong point. After all, in that other song of his, he did seem to have trouble getting past the number nine.
* Sources: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20170421/283137133670937 and https://twitter.com/FXMC1957/status/1376904080157777922
** Were they, John? Really? I mean, twenty-six people (even very skinny people) in a pothole sounds like a pretty big hole to me.
† where Capacity = Number of holes required to fill Albert Hall / Ratio of holes to people in Blackburn, Lancashire
†† Source: https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/the-charity/about-the-charity/governance/
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