A funny thing happened on the way back from the toilet...

It was 4:23 in the morning. Unusually, my wife had asked me to feed our youngest because or eldest (also unusually) had woken up crying. I had done the zombie feed, burped her (the baby, not my wife), put her back in bed and made my way sleepily to the toilet. I got up to return to our bedroom. My foot was asleep... not uncommon after a stint on the khazi. I shook it out and continued walking. But it didn't wake up. In fact, by the time I got to our door about 10 feet away, my right arm felt funny, too. My wife, slightly annoyed that I was making such a commotion, turned the light on and asked I was OK. I looked at her, and I was suddenly very aware that I was not OK. I slid down the wall as she repeated my name and asked whether she should call an ambulance. My eyes must have said 'yes' because my mouth no longer wa0 doing as it was told. I wanted to scream out 'Yes, call the ambulance quickly!' I knew every second counted. I I knew it was serious.I knew I was having a stroke.

I wanted do be able do something other than lay there in a crumpled heap, moaning and drooling. I think I managed to mumble 'I'm scared,' and flop myself onto my back before the paramedics arrived. The looks they gave me and the serious, professional tones of their voices confirmed my fears. A muffled tear - the first of many that I would shed over the next week - worked its way down my lazy right cheek as she said those words. 'Listen,' she said. 'You've had a stroke. We need to get you to hospital'. In the background, I could hear her partner calling it in. '43-year-old male, FAST positive... no sign of head trauma...' I felt myself trying to correct her, 'Forty-TWO! I'm 42!' Even I understood the absurdity of trying to correct that tiny, insignificant thing. But it felt immensely important. My wife knew; she giggled a little as she translated my slurs.

With the help of all three of them, I got into the evac chair and they put a blanket over me to cover my modesty. 'I'm a drooling vegetable,' I thought. 'What dignity could I possibly have left?' As I got upright and strapped in, a neighbour arrived to help move me down the stairs. The way he looked at me reminded me again that this was real.

As I got to the top of the stairs, the oddest thing happened. Everything went... normal. My hand relaxed, my leg pulled itself in and my tongue shrunk. I looked up at my wife, showed he my fully functional hand and exclaimed in relief, 'Thank fuck for that!' A temporary glitch; a mini-stroke. I'd gotten away with it. I didn't have too much time to celebrate; by the time we'd cleared the last step, I was all strokey again. I sighed in despair.

Outside, a Welsh monsoon had blown into Devil's Bridge. The edges of my hospital blanket were dragging through the run-off river that was racing down our road. I remember think that the 'loading' was much clumsier than on TV; it was bumpy and rattly and noisy. My father-in-law's head peered around the door. Another set of eyes making a mockery of my wife's assurances that 'it was't that bad.'

They adjusted the oxygen mask on my face, strapped me down and with two unceremonious thuds as the doors closed we started the 12 mile trip to the ER. I was trembling from a mixture of cold, fear and spasm. The gas was making me nauseous and the unforgiving Welsh roads tossed me around like the lifeless ragdoll I thought I'd become. We stopped once to shut the door. My wife held my hand and kept me awake as we made our way agonisingly slowly to the hospital. I was literally putting my life and into the hands of a hospital I'd never trusted. The last time I was gettting treatment here (in 1996), the nurse showed me how to take a really deep drag on the nitrus oxide before he took out a pair of pliars, put his foot on my shoulder and yanked a wire from my previously broken finger. To say I was worried about the standard of care I'd receive is putting it mildly.

There is a certain degree of calm that comes with resignation. As far as I knew, strokes always won and they always kicked your ass. As they wheeled to have a CT scan, I was simply waiting to be told that my life was over as I knew it. My family, my job, maybe even my residency in the UK had been taken from me in an instant.  The tears came again - this time mourning the loss of identity and independence. As my wife tried to reassure me that everything would be alright, I tried to reassure her that I wasn't scared shitless. I don't think either of us would have won an Oscar for our efforts.

We sat. Well, she sat; I lay. But we both waited for the results of the scan that tell us how much we would allow ourselves to hope.

Say What?: When did raping become a good thing?

I've learned a lot about English since I've moved to Wales (and who says Americans don't understand irony?). Along with the obligatory lessons in hilarious trans-Atlantic homonym-based humour, I've also had some sharp lessons in the use of words that I took as being benign which really - if you look a little more closely - are really quite offensive in origin.

Exhibit A: 'spaz'. Now, back in my day, it was OK to call someone a spaz. I was little or no different than calling them a wally, geek, nerd or dork. Then, was so well-accepted, I'd argue, that it's been enshrined by the bastion of 70s and 80s comedy, Bill Murray, in the 1979 classic 'Meatballs':

I mean, in the US, there's a line of lip-balms called SpazzStick, an energy drink branded as Spaz Juice ("all the energy you need to annoy everybody else"), and a Transformer named Spastic. All of these seem normal(ish) in the US now, and it definitly wasn't an issue in the halcyon pre-PC days of my redneck childhood.

But the first time I called someone a spaz in the UK, the people I was with looked at me as if I'd just called MLK a nigger. 'You can't say that!' they said, in unison. 'Why not? He's a spaz!' I replied, incredulously. Turns out, they were right. In the UK, The National Spastics Society (now called Scope) was founded in 1951 to look after the needs of people dealing with cerebral palsy. So calling someone a spaz here was a big deal. Dunno... maybe it's now a big deal back home, too. But the point is that there are words that vary in meaning, where the 'sting' of the original meaning is either diluted or intensified by the mitigating factors of time, location, maturity or culture.

Which brings me alarmingly to another bit of evidence which might suggest that I am, despite my best efforts, getting older: when did raping something become a good thing? On Facebook today, a young man I coach posted a screen shot of a computer game score of which he was particularly proud. The caption read 'Raping'. And I thought...eh?? So I posted back: 'Is that meant to be a good thing?'. What followed was an unintentionally condescending explanation of the use of the word in 'modern talk': 'to do something violently and in a way to show absolute destruction of something. E.G. "I absolutely raped in this game." lol.'

Now, THAT definition of 'raping' doesn't sound too dissimilar to what I had in mind. Is it my 40(ish) years making me overly sensitive, and not allowing language to evolve? Is it my fatherly instincts exhibiting themselves with such a visceral reaction to the use of that word in such a casual, even positive way? Or is it a legitimate concern to think that a word that is so intimately connected to something so horrific is now just 'what kids say'? Probably, definitely, and hopefully.

I guess I just think that some words are just too laden with subtext to have their meaning changed so dramatically. And I guess I'm a little saddened by the thought that someone could say that they raped something, know what it 'could' mean to some people, and still be OK with using it. I think that it's kind of like me deciding that I don't mean what YOU might mean if I call you a kike, or saying I 'totally molested that dude in a game of darts'. Me deciding that subtext doesn't matter doesn't eliminate the connotations that people might have with certain words, and although I don't feel as though we should be overly dramatic about the impact that our words might have, I do think we need to be aware of our audience. 

And maybe, in truth, that's exactly what I need to remember here: the 19-year-old young man who bragged that he 'raped' his video game probably didn't have me in mind as his audience. And he's probably right.

But still...raped? Really? C'mon Generation Next: you can do better.

Things that make me go ewwwwwww: feet.

I think it's safe and not too controversial to say that most people have feet (apologies to any un-pedalled people out there). And I've got news for everyone who DOES have feet: your feet are ugly. That's right - you. Don't care if you're Olivia Munn or John Merrick, your feet are all kinds of nasty. George Clooney (is he still meant to be hot?), Brad Pitt, Kate Beckinsale, Anne Hathaway. Rank, gnarly, gross, blergh.

In fact, I bet you can't guess the pretty people these hideous hooves belong to. These are attractive, powerful and probably very kind people. But their feet make me want to hurl.

Now, please don't misunderstand. I'm suggesting neither that these people have particularly ugly feet, or that the look of their feet has any bearing whatsoever on their talent, their looks or their inherent worth as a human being. I'm just saying that just like pooping, everybody has ugly feet.

And I can hear the outcries of protest. 'Not me,' you say. 'I get pedicures and moisturise religiously'.  Yes, you; and no, it doesn't matter. If you have feet, they're ugly. Anybody who tells you that there is another option is selling something, and it's probably a disgusting foot skin grater like this:

So please: thinking about wearing sandals? Wear socks, too. Going to paint your toenails? Don't bother - that just makes it worse. And, for the LOVE OF GOD... the next time you take a holiday snap of the pool or beach that you're laying at, don't include your feet in the frame. Leave them out and let me enjoy the view. You may be beautiful, and the chaise lounge that you're reclining in might have the best view of a sunset on the most amazing beach the world has ever seen - but your feet are ugly. Fact.


PS... for anyone playing at home, those feet belong to Oprah, Katie Holmes and Kate Beckinsale. For reals.

Waiting to Exhale

I'm not a slob, but I often feel like the Out of Shape In Shape Guy from the 50s.

So I've decided that I'm going to do something about it. Wanna watch? If you do, go here:

http://bodybymi.blogspot.co.uk/?view=magazine

No pictures here, but it's probably safe to say that when I do post some before stuff, it won't be for the faint of heart.

You'll notice that one of the goals on there is to write more. You've been warned.

This is me doing.

One of the things I promised myself in another blog (not ready for sharing) was that I would commit myself to writing more. But you know… it’s HARD. Obviously, not physically hard. Physically hard work is stuff like what my brothers-in-law do: manual, hard, unrelenting, don’t-notice-the-time kind of stuff. Typing words into a computer is not hard in that sense – but having the discipline to make time for it is – for me – as hard as digging a trench or building steps from old railroad sleepers.

You’d think that maybe because I sit at a computer for most of the day most days, that it would be easy to squeeze off a couple of lines now and again, just to keep my rhythm going. But things get in the way. And don’t get me wrong – they’re not always work things. They are… distractions. And it seems to me that a productive life is one with fewer distractions. Or, maybe… a productive person is someone who is able to manage his/her distractions better than I do. Everyone must have temptations to do something that is actually nothing. Watch TV. Surf the web. Sleep.

Don’t get me wrong – I think that those things are great (well, I would, wouldn’t I?). But it’s occurring to me more often more recently that all the time spent doing those things is time not spent doing the things the better part of me really wants to do. Read. Write. Exercise.

It’s just… it’s the discipline thing. I am easily distracted and very easily entertained. I can -and have been known to - while away whole afternoons watching episodes of Friends that I've already seen dozens of times. Everybody must have their time-stealers... what is it that people find within themselves that helps them get beyond those kinds of obstacles?

One of the things we show our new players over here is a video called ‘how bad do you want it’? As coaches, we play it to our newly-freed university students to try to get them to realise that if you want to succeed in American football (or in anything else), you’ve got to want it more than you want other things. More than you want to spend time with your girlfriend of the week. More than you want to drink. More than you want to go home for the weekend because your dirty laundry basket it full and your gran has baked you some cookies. You’ve got to want it badly enough to realise that all of those other things are just distractions; they are obstacles to your goal. It’s not always an either/or choice – but it is a choice, and the choices we make define our ability to capitalise on opportunities.

If I were to sit down and add up the time I spend doing things during my day, I am sure that I would realise how much time I've really spent doing nothing at all. I’m tempted to keep a diary about my working day… but also more than a little scared of what it would reveal.

So there’s that. There’s the WANTING. And WANTING something is important. But we also go on to say that it’s not enough to want. Everybody wants. The difference between the ambitious and the successful is not the wanting, it’s the doing. And so many times, that is where we fail. We want, but we do not do.

My goal is simply to do more.