STINGING NETTLE

My 7 year old nephew and I sit together to write a poem about his summer holidays in England - it’s all very well to assume a holiday is only about ice cream and laughter, but what about the unexpected? Maybe even the unpleasant?

STINGING NETTLE
by Rafael Tayabali (with some help from his Aunty Shai)

It hurt. It really hurt,
That stinging nettle I found.

It was only yesterday,
In a place far, far away

Where the pigs and cows live,
And English shire horses roam.

I thought the pain would last forever,
But before I knew it, it was gone.

‘Scruffles! We have no paper left!’
Says my Aunty Shai. So goodbye.

(A poem for dverse poets Open Link Night) 

BOOKMARK A POET

A few months ago I was interviewed in style (at home no less) by the short story writer Alex Ruczaj for the Cambridge radio station Bookmark, which she, until recently, co-presented with Leigh Chambers. I've known Alex a while and attended a fiction workshop that she organised. She writes beautiful stories, with fascinating character premises and a blog. It's nice knowing working writers - writers in the middle of their craft - who have little ego and lots of passion. Or at least it seems that way to me. The best part about my Creative Writing Masters has been the development of friendships with writers who make the world of being a writer feel real.

Leigh Chambers (left), Alex Ruczaj (right)

http://cambridge105.fm/book-night-28-03-2015/ should provide you with the link page, and if you scroll down to where it says Podcast: Download, click on 'Download'. That should open up the radio interview link (oh how tremendously technical I sound). I am interviewed 34 minutes and 45 seconds into the programme, to be exact…
http://cambridge105.fm/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/bookmark-2015-03-28-13_01.mp3
I hope the link works but if it doesn't - I shall tell you I sounded quite good according to reliable sources. Alex asked me about my blog - how I began it, why I began it and the wonderful paths it has led me down. Sometimes I miss the first years of blogging - there is something I yearn for about those times - lost now to the mass of social media sites. I am not sure what it is I yearn for, but I know it is a shared longing among my early blogging friends.

Where I sometimes write by the window, and where I was interviewed...

I meant to upload this interview soon after it was available online, but my mind lately has been distracted by writing my first book. An exhausting business. How do they do it? However. Onwards.

THE EXPERT OF SMALL THINGS

Picture Cambridge on a sunny morning. Here, this will help...

Imagine arriving, not at the entrance to an imposing college courtyard but a court nonetheless. Imagine being greeted by your favourite surgeon and feeling perfectly at ease as you climb some stairs with him by your side talking about your recent trip to India...

Imagine almost reaching the top of those marble stairs and being dazzled, not by the (really quite cool) ceiling architecture, but on finding the room packed full of strangers, all sophisticates in the field of neuroregenerative science expecting you to present the Human Face. 'Just a handful of people in jeans' was how The Blue Eyed Surgeon had described the event to me. I turned around and pretended to flee down the stairs...
The focus on this year's course at the Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair is on inflammation and I was one of the patients interviewed - the other was a man living with Parkinson's Disease, whose life story included surviving the Gulf War - if you can describe developing Parkinson's as survival. Apparently the military have taken partial responsibility for what is believed to be a result of chemical nerve agents deployed - I didn't realise almost half of all Gulf War veterans are suffering some form of multi-system illness. I thought the soldier was a hard act to follow. He had a DBS in his skull! (If Keith hadn't leaned over and explained what a Deep Brain Stimulator was, I wouldn't have known either).
Prof Martin introduced my case, asked me on to the stage to elaborate on life with SLE, and then presented a fabulously grisly series of images and video footage of the various operations we have endured together (at opposite ends of the knife and scissors). I realised that it was the first time I was being given the opportunity to weave glaucoma and lupus into the same conversation. In clinical environments I am usually expected to siphon off the relevant aspects of my case to the particular departments. Here, I could be whole for a while.

When the floor opened up to questions, a man at the back of the Cripps Court auditorium asked me a delicious question about the marriage of living with chronic disease and my life as a creative writer, which gave me full opportunity to be my poet self. In fact, through the course of the interview, I found myself mentioning the fact that I am a poet several times to my own surprise. The word kept falling out of my mouth. How have I coped with life endangering and sight endangering diseases? Poetry! The gift of finding beauty and connections - the gift of seeing more than what is visible or tangible or even real in the most concrete sense. It is an unreal thing to be sick all the time. Unreal to have been contemplating your mortality since you were a teenager. I can't begin to imagine how I would or possibly could have unravelled my life without literature, art and poetry.
I thanked the stranger for his lovely question. Later I learn that the 'nice man at the back' is only the head of Stem Cell Medicine at Cambridge - Professor Robin Franklin.
Yes, I'm name dropping! What of it? And yes, I took a selfie before I left the house - because who doesn't?