My last press-up

I used to like press-ups. You can do them anywhere and they exercise the chest, arms and shoulders in a way that compliments the lower-body work-out I get from cycling.

Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago I went down for the first of a set (30 I hoped), when instead of a nice tension across the pecs I got a crunching noise from the shoulder/neck area. I stopped and wondered what had gone wrong. Neck felt a bit tender, but no big deal.

Later, however, I developed a white-hot stabbing pain all along the arm to the tips of my fingers that even the leftover hospital-strength cocodamol from the bike accident didn't touch.

Hard to explain how little effect these powerful pills had - there was zero diminution of the pain and absolutely no rest from it. I was rolling around the floor and trying ice and heat, meditation and medication, but to no avail.

Eventually I did what I only do in the most dire of emergencies - I went to the doctors.

Fortunately I saw a sympathetic nurse who had experienced similar symptoms while doing yoga.Turns out I have in my spine something called "facet joints" which connect vertebrae and control the twisty motion in the same way that disks control the bendy motion. Somehow I've damaged one of these and in the aftermath my ulnar nerve was "pinched".


You've got to love the term "pinched nerve". Sounds like such a minor thing - like a Chinese burn.  Instead it's a total immersion pain that makes it impossible to think. Getting my foot crushed did hurt - but the pain could be numbed by drugs and ice.

Nerve pain is a completely different animal. There's no prospect of numbing the pain - instead you have to interfere with the way the brain works when it receives the pain signals. This brings you into the realm of drugs that were originally designed as anti-depressants.

I was put on a low dose of amitriptyline just before bedtime - starting with 10mg and going up to 20mg - compared with the antidepressant dose which is around ten times higher.

I can't actually say if this helped but I was able to sleep, which was something of a medical miracle. The downside was that sleep brought me hyper-real, disturbing "Philip K Dick" dreams where I would be walking along a city street and everything around me would start breaking down like a malfunctioning amusement park before melting like a Dali painting while the Universe shouted random error messages at me.

Heaven alone knows what ten times the dose does for your dreams, but I stopped taking them as soon as I felt that I could get to sleep naturally, which was three or four nights of surrealism later.

I'm still pretty sore - but its just "normal" pain which I'm coping with normally with paracetamol and ibuprofen. I'm also getting some physio and acupuncture. Pretty naffed off that it's taking so long to mend but I'm sure I'll be a menace to traffic on my bike before too long.

Think I may have done my last press-up though.

13 @ Olivier Theatre

Mike Bartlett's "13" is a glorious mess of a play with immense ambition, tons of passion and a big muddle of complicated ideas. Bit like the inside of my head sometimes.

The plot is simple :-

* There's an all-too-believable war coming between Iran and a "US-led coalition"
* A number of people in London are suffering from a shared dream of monsters and they are sleep-deprived and going slightly round the twist.
* A charismatic preacher arrives in a London park, stands on an upturned plastic bucket and starts to talk philosophy to passers-by. An anti-war protest crystallises around him.

The ideas involved are far from simple - religion, war, death, politics, the nature of protest, social media, how crappy my generation is and how great his is ...

Bartlett continues his habit from "Earthquakes in London" of having more than one subplot play out on stage at the same time, with the actors from one subplot passing through the other like ghosts and having radically different conversations over the top of each other. Sounds complicated, but somehow it works - although you don't get much in the way of silence and stillness.

I loved this play - loved the ambition, loved the passion, loved the big muddle of complicated ideas.

Politely Illegal

He was very polite. When the policeman first asked him to blow into the bag, he refused politely saying there was no point because he knew that he was over the limit. When he was told that not taking the test was a crime, he still refused. Politely.

Back at the station he remained polite, but refused to take the  test. He was reminded that if he refused to take the breath test again he would be charged with the offence of refusing to take the test. He refused. Again. Politely. And was charged with refusing to take the test.

Then he was led to the cells and asked the policeman how long he would be inside "10-12-14 hours - until morning anyway".

Then in one possible scenario, he panicked, changed his mind and asked (politely) to be allowed to take the test. But the copper told him to stop messing them around and get in the cell.

In the other possible scenario, that conversation never happened.

Then in the morning, even though he knew he had been over the limit, and even though he had consistently refused to take the test, he got an expensive lawyer to very impolitely try to get him off on a technicality.

The lawyer made much of the fact that couldn't be sure that he hadn't had a final change of heart that had been cruelly denied by a policeman in a hurry. And OK, so he left it late, but is it possible to define how late is "too late"?

We didn't have much sympathy for these argument and found the guy guilty.

What boggles me though is that this civilised, polite guy, did something wrong, got caught, acknowledged it was wrong, felt shame for doing it and yet still expected somehow to escape punishment. What is in his head ? Does he feel himself a victim? Does he feel he's been "punished enough already" ?

One interesting fact I got from the defence solicitor - it takes about 1 hour for the alcohol in breath to fall 7 micrograms. So say you decide to play for time and manage to delay the process by ten minutes then your reading would only be one microgram less. If you were twice the limit you'd have to stonewall for five hours - by which time you for sure would be charged with refusing the test.

Suspended

I have to admit still being puzzled by suspended prison sentences. To me, a crime is either so serious that only a prison sentence is appropriate or it isn't. What are we actually saying when we suspend a sentence ? And how do you explain it to the victim of a crime when the perpetrator "gets off with" a suspended sentence order.

I had two recent examples that might help. Both of these came into my court on the same day.

(1) A rather nasty common assault - two drunk young women beat up another drunk woman - with kicks and blows to the head with stiletto shoes. Had a bunch of equally drunk lads not intervened, I'm sure there would have been a murder. Both girls had little previous. Sentence : 12 weeks immediate custody

(2) Local cab driver with a serious cocaine addiction that he funded by stealing golf equipment from cars at the many plush golf courses in my area. Charged with theft and possession. Fairly extensive previous for similar. Sentence : 12 weeks suspended.

So what were the difference ?

* The girls had no dependents i.e. nobody else would be harmed by them being imprisoned
* The girls had committed a violent crime
* The girls were first-time offenders
* The cabbie had substance issues that probation reckoned could be addressed through a drug treatment programme. This could prevent further offending in a way that 12 weeks prison would be unlikely to manage.
* The cabbie had children.

There's no scientific way of putting the above together and deciding to get G4S to take the girls down and releasing the cabbie rather than vice-versa. We could have decided it was a "bit extreme" to send two first-timers to prison. We could have decided that the cabbie's considerable previous meant that he was due some stick this time. In the end, we need to decide which outcome is best for society as a whole.

Now there's a phrase that bears repeating : "... we need to decide which outcome is best for society as a whole"

Heck of a job description, isn't it ?!

Gummigeschoss

... is the German word for "Rubber Bullets". Sounds to me like a new type of Haribo - a bit like Gummi Bears, just shaped like a bullet.

Anyway, I left for a holiday in Germany the night after the riots kicked off . My foot was still messed up after the accident and I had meanwhile picked up some species of fever that burned so fiercely that I couldn't sleep and so I watched over and over again on the 24-hour news channel as familiar towns repeatably burned and the financial markets entered a repeated death-spiral.

I couldn't help humming "Ride of the Valkyrie" - it was that kind of night.

While in Germany I wasn't out of touch because I had the "Bild" newspaper and my erratic German language skills.

Here's a link to one of my favourite articles :-

(original)       Kann ich jetzt noch nach London reisen?  
(translation)   Can I still travel to London ?

What's the German for "Yes - of course you can - just avoid the bits that are on fire" ?

After a wonderful holiday full of good beer, Currywurst and way too many Brötchen, I came back to find that the English press and political establishment weren't any more coherent than a sleazy German tabloid with more boobs than headlines.

But you know what ? I'm going to be one of the few people in the country who doesn't have a strong opinion on "What Must Be Done". You see, I don't live in these neighbourhoods and anything I said would be under-informed and naive.

Exactly like the Lie-Dem MPs for Waitroseshire who seem to think the Mags and Judges should have given the thugs a nice big hug and a community centre.

Or the Tory Boys who ran amok in the early '90s with the Bullingdon Posse - they want a big stick for poor people who smash stuff up.

As for the Labour Party - I couldn't work out from their impenetrable billshut what exactly their position was. Sorry.

Vote Stan.