Apoplectic

As long-suffering readers of the blog may know, one of the potential changes a stroke survivor might go through, is an increase in the frequency of anger. The UK Stroke Association suggests meditation to ameliorate the negative emotional changes that a patient go through.

Stroke Bloke, 2009
DON’T. TELL. ME. WHAT. TO. DO.

[Maybe a jaunty ditty from the Apoplexy Newsletter might help?]

At this stage of my recovery, some of the potential triggers for post-stroke anger – fatigue, frustration – are less of a problem than they might have been previously. Or, to be more accurate, maybe the new normal accommodates coping techniques or adjusted expectations to navigate them. But the news and current affairs I’ve been subject to here in Scotland this week have been just too much.

Who can even with this?
Today’s 10 o’Clock News. Probably.

A lot of people I know and respect have been going on social media breaks over the past year or two. Unfortunately, I feel obliged to stay aware of the broadest range of developments from the broadest range of viewpoints and have come to the conclusion that the best way to do that for now appears to be… Twitter?!

Also unfortunately, even the news stories which might seem superficially positive this week have been pretty terrible.

Yeah. It’s not great. Maybe Morrissey, the Pope of Mope and Tiny Ricky’s hero, can help me get through the week…?

Yeah, after his latest hateful outburst Moz and I are through. I’m not even going to link to a report on it. I’ll leave the dissemination of right-wing hate speech to Aunty Beeb.

Ian "I don't believe he was a racist" McDiarmid recited Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech
They broadcast a racist speech by this guy this week. I’m not even joking.

So rather than latch onto the negative, I’m going to accentuate the positive. No regular post this week. Instead, here are a few links to prior meditations on where we are and where we might have been. Next week, back to Walt Whitman, I think…

Goodnight. And please, don’t have nightmares.

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2 thoughts on “Apoplectic

  1. I replaced twitter with a once or twice a day read of washpo slashdot and politico and am much happier for it, despite the news they report. You don’t need real-time politics. It makes you sad.

    So even though I may miss the next amazing tweet, I will note that my favorite tweet ever https://mobile.twitter.com/tricialockwood/status/289148349003730947?lang=en is a few years old… so if there’s another one that good I’ll hear about it in due course.

    1. Oh, ca c’est magnifique!

      I’m glad that your stripped-back regime is working out. But it feels like it would be difficult to maintain here and now. I remember, as a Scotsman abroad, being quite taken aback by the quality American broadsheets’ approach to news, where it seemed that there was at least an attempt to report The News in the majority of the main section, with opinion and comment separated onto their own specific pages.

      This, of course, is not the British tradition. The Scottish newspapers are dead on their feet, despite the open goal of the most newsworthy years in the country during my lifetime. The Grauniad, for all my complaining, has at least retained an interest in quality investigative journalism – in partnership with the NYT and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. But that seems quite separate from the paper’s general reporting. A once or twice daily visit to what I guess would be The G’s equivalent to the kind of sites you mention – their Daily Politics blog – is like having a stroke brain: you kind of check out what it says, and simultaneously watch it to see if it’s leading you astray. Which is exhausting.

      It’s a blog, with the apparent invitation to participation and democracy, but I once came across a remark on it which was quite simply an obvious lie, or so wilfully careless to make no difference. I politely pointed it out to the folks with the bylines, and never heard a thing. The lie stayed in place.

      So, endless fury and vigilance it is. That can’t be bad for a stroke survivor, right?

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