The various events of June have dried my mind out, it is now a sere mass of grey matter and I have come to a full stop. Every morning for the last two weeks, i have come down the stairs at the crack of sparrow fart, dawn to the unpoetic, sat at the keyboard and nothing, not even a sentence.
It normally takes me about four hours to write a 1000 words, think, edit, rewrite, edit and type out, but these last two weeks nothing, in fact for the most of June, nothing. I might have been bothered about two major areas of research I have set myself, but nothing there either, only indolence, torpor and langour. I cannot set my mind to churn the way it has for the past seven months. So I have decided to rest up until the 1st October, concentrate on the research subjects and hope that I can get them out of the way for the Autumn.
It was not just that the words would not come although that was my Becher’s Brook, but there are so many other fences to jump. The glorious weather, a fascinating series of one day cricket against the Australians, a lake more or less outside the front door which had a 24 hour shimmer in that glorious June, the planning of a continental trip later in the year, the garden and vegetable plot that seems to want care evey five minutes with its burgeoning crop brought to fruition by the finest June on record, the thoughts of the twins thriving in Manchester and thinking of the life in front of them, I am sure and I hope that it will not be as hard as the past 60 years.
So there it is and apologies to all my readers who have been waiting patiently for most of June to pick up the glowing pearls that emanate from my keyboard every morning. A full stop will clear my mind, let me enjoy my enjoyment and stop making me feel guilty about taking time off. All my working life I have felt guilty at taking time off, even when working seven days a week. A weeks holiday, a round of golf made me a nervous wreck, it really was not worth it, but now I am retired, I am master of all I survey. So full stop until October and thank you for having me.
Please excuse me if I am inaccurate but I am speaking about an unusual subject for me at least, but I do understand logic and after nearly 40 years of marriage I am beginning to understand the courage and emotion that make up the female psyche and I know one thing for certain, women know their own bodies and as vacant as some of them might well be, they understand what is right and wrong for them. There is another thing that I am certain of, men have not got a clue about the inner workings of a woman’s mind and body. After years of study and examinations, the murky males who populate the maternity departments of hospitals and call themselves doctors and even worse, gynaecologists and look at women from a different perspective than most of us, have no idea about their patients’ innards and minds than we who admire them on a Saturday night out.
To them a maternity department is a well oiled conveyor belt with all operatives ticking along in unison like those in a car production plant, producing fully formed units every 20 minutes or so. But this in reality is not the case and drugs and other additives are added to fine tune the system. But this should not be the case. Each woman is a unique machine, a Rolls Royce and is hand built to perfection depending on their environmental circumstances. Each woman is different in a million little nuances; each woman needs empathy, not sympathy and certainly does not need to be patronised.
Most women nowadays understand drugs and their misuse and overuse and consultation and agreement is required, not dismissal and overbearance. A psychotherapist with no maternity training would make a better maternity doctor than those who have trained for years in obstetrics. Without a doubt when it comes to producing babies, mind is more important than matter. Pumping them full of antibiotics and birth inducing drugs, like a cow in the field, is not what the normal woman wants. Environment and nature is the thing to instil into these maternity mechanics.
On conveyor belts hundreds of things can go wrong. Take the case of the North Dublin woman, Melissa Redmond, who went for an initial scan on her expectant third child, after a few miscarriages and was told the foetus was dead and the hospital set in motion the machinery to remove the embryo by D&C procedure two days later and gave her an abortion tool and some drugs that would help the operation. The lady agreed to all this but knew in her own mind that something was wrong. Her body was telling her different, she knew her own body and everything felt good. Wisely she went for a second opinion to her G.P. who confirmed to her that her baby was live and well and in fact the bouncing boy was born in March this year. If she had used the abortion tool or taken the drugs given, prior to presenting herself at hospital that new life would not be..
You might recogniSe the hospital, that conveyor belt to hell, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, famed for Dr Michael Neary’s antics of removing the wombs and ovaries of women as they got out of their cars in the carpark. To him, no woman was a vital unit until these parasitic organs were cut out. To read more of this lady’s experiences which was well reported in depth by Fiach Kelly and Breda Heffernan in today’s Independent click here.
I, as a father of six, am well experienced in natural births, long labours (four hours) and short labours (ten minutes), hospital births and home births and I know the most important thing for my wife was environment, nature and absence, My absence that is, whilst she underwent the joyous and personal effort of birth. I was obviously welcomed back into the family as soon as the messy bits were cleaned up.
So my daughter, who became pregnant last autumn and was later told she had twins, swore she was going to have her multiple birth at home, like her last child, in peace and harmony and without drugs and insistence and clockwork routine. She had suffered trauma with her first two births in that den of filth and grime, they called Wythenshawe Hospital, a few years ago. Let us hope that they have now got their act together.
This time she had independent midwives on call and every thing was progressing well until time stepped in. Even independent midwives have to send their charges to hospital if they are more than three weeks premature and Katy was 35 weeks gone when she started to have regular contractions yesterday and she reluctantly had to go to Stepping Hill Hospital, where if she had let them, she would have been hooked up to the conveyor belt and pumped with antibiotics. An institutionalised midwife explained the system and a foreign doctor, who did not have a proper grasp of the language, never mind the mind of the mother, told her she would be endangering the lives of the unborn if she did not enter into the spirit of his system and have steroids administered to the foetuses.
Her husband could see the trauma his wife was in and with the obstinacy only those born in Northampton have, told the doctor to fuck off, which released the tension momentarily. Katy suffered an adrenalin rush which halted her labour and they came home, exhausted and annoyed. Her contractions started again this morning and she waited until they were coming thick and fast before submitting herself to an understandable husband’s six mile hair-raising drive to hospital. An hour later, Tom, her first child was born at 10.05am and as I write between tears, he has already settled on her right breast and we are waiting for the second. It is important to know that in this case the hospital staff did not have chance to start up the conveyor belt, at least nature if not environment took its course. My wife telephones me from the ringside and tells me that a doctor in a book she is reading tells that the safest place to have a baby is in the back of a taxi on the way to hospital, to sever the umbilical and tell the driver “home James”. The phone rings once more with the news that George was born at 10.30am and is settling down well on the left one. Alleluia! Alleluia!
Mother, father and fourth and fifth born swear to be out of hospital this afternoon. I wish I was there instead of tapping the keys of this ever devouring machine of mine. I can hardly see the keys for these last few lines so emotional as this morning become. Alleluia!
As a post scriptum to this happy occasion the first pictures, as if by miracle have come onto my computer screen. The two young bucks look like their father and mark my words, they look obstinate buggers.
First of all I would like to apologize to anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis. I have been very busy and have only managed to squeeze in one blog in the last week. A cousin of mine died a week ago, trgically young at 54 years of age and I went over to England last Thursday to a very emotional but lovely funeral. A funeral is a very necessary and cathartic experience for all that have been touched by the deceased’s life. The tentacles of humanity, stretching out and gathering in all those people, who have at some stage had their spirit lifted by the finished life-force, for one final celebration. It is happy and sad and necessary and this particular celebration was made all the greater by the beautiful panegyric of the priest, Father Bernard Sparks, a great and longtime friend of the family.
I left the gathering after a couple of hours and went back to my daughter’s house in a very contemplative mood. For reasons I will not bother you with, I had not seen the lady, my first cousin, for a number of years. As you all grow up and move around and settle into a path of life, touch can easily be lost and this is what made this death all the harder for me. At one time I was so close to her and her family and now I would not have recognized her in the street. She died before I knew her and yet at one time I knew her well. Somehow I had missed out on a good life and that is a big miss.
Away I came and the following morning was more than pleasantly surprised from a comment I received on a blog I wrote on 12 January 2010 called The Importance of Blogs. I had just heard that Catherine, who has just died, was terminally ill and I dedicated this blog to her and her family. It traced her mother’s family tree back to the Famine in Ireland, it was a piece of their history they were unsure of because of their mother’s premature death, nearly 50 years ago.
This comment was from a lady who had just read this blog and realized that she was a second cousin of mine and Catherine’s, her grandfather and my grandmother were siblings. She was from a branch of the family that had gone their separate ways in the 1930s and for whatever reason touch had been lost.
That is why the blog is such an amazing and powerful tool if used properly. You often think that once a piece has been posted, that is it, gone and forgotten, but the internet and blog field leaves it there like a bright shiny cherry on a tree waiting to be picked and eaten by passing strangers. It is there for evermore, hopefully to be appreciated by everyone and that is what happened. So now as one cousin goes another comes to light and hopefully will not disappear as quickly.
As I was writing these words this morning, there came news that will only double my efforts in this field. My daughter, Katy, has entered the final stages of pregnancy with the anticipation of twins. She is slightly premature but the experts say that this is normal with multiple births and that mother and foeutuses are fine, with estimated weights of 5lb with still four weeks of cooking to go. However she will now have to go into hospital for their delivery, a thing she dreads. She was looking forward to a home birth and had an army of midwives lined up to take care of any eventuality. She will have to be forthright and clear minded and not let these tinkerers of mortality, the doctors, try to bully her into treatment she does not want, just to suit the timetable of the maternity suite.
My wife has flown the coop and is now in Dublin boarding the Holyhead boat with a rolling pin in hand. God help the doctors at Stepping Hill Hospital. I am left with the young fellah, a mop and bucket and various dusters and told to make sure the house is perfect on her return. That might not be until these twins are weaned so I have plenty of time. The male’s station in life as with all things historic is a lonely one, but I suppose I have the pub and my blog and all the interesting things that both these channels deliver, but I must get on, the mop is doing a lonely dance in the bucket of hot water I prepared earlier.
St Patrick’s Day 1973 dawned clear and bright: it really was a lovely day for March. The sun shone and it was very warm, in my recollection probably the best St Patrick’s Day for weather. After a couple of liveners at the Conservative Club, it was down to St. Robert’s church, where we had chosen to marry because of its light and colour as opposed to Helen’s parish church, St. Cuthbert’s, which was brown in its different shades. Kevin, my brother, was best man and Ann, Helen’s sister, was chief bridesmaid. The two of them still courting and for a good while longer until their final sad breakup. The other two bridemaids were Helen’s school friend, Angela Pelham from Langley and Carmel Caffrey from Leicester who was at university in Manchester and was courting Matt Towey, Helen’s brother. Helen looked a treat in her wedding dress; even now looking back on wedding photographs of the beautiful bride, I bless myself on my luck.
The wedding breakfast took place at the Vth Inn in Manchester, on Crown Square, a part of the Stanneyland’s empire and soon to be an upmarket Italian restaurant, Isola Bella. We had the feed and I, nervous as a kitten, spluttered out a few words of thanks. We all agreed that speeches were all a serious waste of drinking time. We left the Vth Inn in our gleaming green 1600GT Capri and headed for the club where a full afternoon and evening’s entertainment was on the cards.
Cleverly I had instructed my mother to have a wrap up of bacon, egg and sausage waiting at the Club for the first breakfast at our new house the following morning. We had bought a house in Chorlton on Mauldeth Road West for £7,000 from an old lady.
Everyone gathered at the Club whilst some serious drinking took place and in the evening a band called the Kentucky Ramblers took the stage, I have never heard of them since but what a great show they put on. We were drinking till 2.00am when I left with my bride. Jim & Peg Towey had done us proud paying for the meal and a few rounds of drinks, my mother paying for the flowers and I paid for the buffet in the evening. When you think that after 12 hours drinking, I drove home with Helen, we certainly took some chances those days.
With my last dregs of energy I carried Helen over the threshold and I was soon snoring my head off in the new bed upstairs. Worst of all I had left my breakfast parcel at the Club and so on wakening at 7.00am the following morning, starved with the hunger, we decided to head for Towey’s, where Jim was just up and we soon had breakfast on the go.
After that the whole of the following week was taken up with a male celebration of the union. Jim Towey and his brothers, Pake, Mick, Tom, Matt, Malachy and myself and Jim Duffy, their brother in law, and a fellow from Clare called John Lehane, used to sit down at the lunchtime opening and drink our fill. These men were all in their middle 50s and having gone through that period myself, I can only admire their concentration, powers of endurance and attention to duty that week.
I remember one dinnertime session, the pubs shut at 3.00pm those days, Bert Flint, the landlord of the Old House at Home on Burton Road, gave us some leeway and did not start shouting time until five minutes past the hour. There was the Towey’s, Jim, Pake, Mick, Matt & Malachy, Jim Duffy, myself and of course the ever present John Lehane, eight men and twenty four pints on the table. We drank them and were on our way home for 3.15pm. Back to a wonderful dinner at Peg’s and then a quick snooze before setting off once more for the Old House at 7.00pm. the women with us this time, those that wanted to come that is, most of the older women had seen this craic so often they stayed at home and waited for the men to run out of steam.
After a week of this enjoyment or carnage, everybody went home and we were left to our twosome and hard facts had to be realised. I was one week into married life, totally skint, with a mortgage and HP payment due. Over the previous two years I had been playing golf and with my previous good fortune I had bought a highly prized kangaroo skin golf bag of professional size and quality off the Australian professional at Shifnal Golf Club in Shropshire. I sold it for £60 and threw in the clubs for nothing, thinking I was that poor I would never play again. This gave us some respite and I settled down at last learning how to make a family with my beautiful and patient bride.
