Old geezers, blokes & gents this week. Our neighbourhood is now mostly overrun with tourists so its getting harder to spot the old characters that have always lived in this area. But they are still there and I am sure they must be thinking…what the hell happened to this place? I think that and I’ve only been here since the 90s and I’m considerably younger. (I don’t know what constitutes considerably but I’m going with it)
I’ve tried to take photos of the tourists but they all look the same to me. Walking down Portobello these days is like sailing through a sea of puffer jackets…head to toe in uniqlo. I’m not dissing them it just doesn’t get the creative juices flowing. And then I see a craggy old characterful dude, his entire existence etched in every line in his face and that’s what I want to shoot. (not like kill obvs, that would be murder, I know they’re old but shame on you)
I’ve always been drawn towards characterful faces as anyone who follows this blog will know. I just find symmetrical beauty quite dull. I’m watching Boardwalk Empire at the mo (I know, late to the party) and I just marvel at Steve Buscemi’s face. It’s spectacular. Anyway I digress…
One day I will be one of these old characterful guys shuffling down the street, but the spirit of me will still be encased within the worn exterior. And that will be so for every one of these men this week so we should not judge by external facades. Who knows who might be living inside? Actually that’s sounds quite ominous. It wasn’t meant to be. I don’t mean like an alien or anything. I’m not saying they’re lizard people. Ok, I’m done..
p.s forgot it was good friday but hope you all have a splendid long weekend…
Yes some people are still wearing masks. Not many but I am one of them. This week marks the 4th anniversary since I got Covid and I have been sick ever since. A year in I developed full blown CFS and since then I had 3 or 4 partial recoveries only to relapse further each time. Last year rendered me housebound as my condition continued to deteriorate sending deeper and deeper into the chronic illness hole. And the more I tried to burrow out the further down it sent me, each new depth of hell more horrendous than the last. Bummer huh? Well don’t worry, it gets cheerier..
I tried everything under the sun to get better. And nothing worked. I was starting to give up hope of ever recovering and had become a physical, mental and emotional mess. I lived in fear of doing anything because everything caused my symptoms to flare up. It was pretty grim. And then in October I joined a program called CFS recovery which treats Long covid/M.E/CFS as a hypersensitive nervous system issue and through brain retraining they teach you how to regulate your nervous system which has essentially got stuck in survival mode. In an attempt to keep you safe your brain has signalled the body to shut down and stop you from doing anything. It is not your body attacking you. It is in fact your brain in over-protective mode. It is ultimately an act of love. Ahh, bless.
It’s a shame it’s been such a friggin ball ache as have found it utterly fascinating. And here comes the sciency bit..
Basically you have to convince your brain you are not in danger by not responding with fear and panic to the symptoms that it is actually generating. It’s a difficult thing to get your head around. No wonder it’s such a misunderstood condition. And the symptoms aren’t psychosomatic, they’re very real indeed . The nervous system is in control of most of our bodily functions and when it thinks it’s under attack it renders anything it considers non-essential inoperable. It doesn’t care if it makes your suffer, it doesn’t care if it makes you unhappy. It doesn’t care if you can’t work or see your friends. It just has one mission: to keep you alive and it does not care about anything else.
After a long period of reconditioning your brain you create new neural pathways and it eventually signals the nervous system to come out of fight or flight. This process can take anything between months and years and you have to go through multiple “progress cycles” where your symptoms flare up even more and you have to pull back activity whilst your nervous system recalibrates. It’s completely nuts how it works but it does work.
Since I joined this programme I have gone from being couchbound and unable to do even the most basic things to walking 40 minutes a day. I can socialise again and am back on public transport. I am a long way from being able to live a normal life and there will be lot of ups and downs ahead but eventually I will be fully recovered. So what will I do then?
I can now see my life as I previously lived it was completely unsustainable and I probably would’ve always crashed and burned at some point. Covid pushed me over the edge but it possibly also saved my life and that is the way I am now choosing to see it.
There are specific types of people that get disregulated nervous system disorders. They call them Type A personalities. Perfectionists. People pleasers. People that push themselves till they break. I was one of those people. I only ever stopped when I hit the wall and before that I was always running around like a blue arsed fly. It was exciting but utterly exhausting. And no, flies don’t run. They fly. Obvs.
So even though I had been desperate to return to my previous existence I can now see how unhealthy it was and I now wish for something else. I am for the first time looking forwards instead of backwards. But that is because I now have hope. Thanks to this program I can now see a life ahead of all of this. And I can now see that this will make me a more resilient person than I ever was. Chronic illness will make you weaker but it will also make you stronger.
I know it might not sound like it but I am one of the lucky ones. I found a treatment that is working but I am just one of 65 million worldwide dealing with this debilitating condition and many of them are suffering without help or hope. It was long covid awareness last week, which ironically no-one who didn’t have it would’ve noticed. We are all the forgotten casualties of a war everyone thinks is over but please spare a thought for those who are still on the battlefield, fighting to get their lives back.
It took me over six months to get back to Portobello Rd which is just a 5minute walk from my flat but it might as well have been at the top of Mt Everest because I did not have the capacity to get there. Before I became housebound I would be down there every day, even throughout my illness, and if I ever skipped a day I felt off. I felt liked I’d missed something. The street also became my number one destination for taking photographs so for me going there was like going to work. And you go to work every day right? And then it was like I’d got laid off. I was actually laid up but the end result was the same. And for most of my months indoors I pined to be back there, desperate to be back amongst the throng (is that right? sounds right looks wrong..and btw wtf even IS a throng anyway?)
I was so excited to finally get back there but the moment I put my foot down on the street it was actually incredibly anti-climatic. Nothing had changed. I had been on this intense journey (even though i didn’t actually go anywhere) which seemed to have lasted a lifetime and here I was back on the ‘Bello and it was as if I had never left. The flower seller was sat where she was always sat looking at her phone. The old narky guy who was always in the window at Joe and the Juice was still there. Eerily the seemingly same tourists were standing in the doorway of the Ginstitute taking pictures of each other.
The falafel guy who I had spoken to every day just said..oh, havent seen you in a while like it had been a few days. I’d been gone half a year and no-one had noticed. Not that I expected them too. Actually maybe I did a little bit. Actually tell a lie, I imagined there would be crowds cheering my triumphant return, ticker tape, a mariachi band, the full fucking works. And nada. Not a sausage. I didn’t take it personally. It just shows how wrapped up in their own heads everyone is. And that’s fair enough. We all are.
But having said all that I was still happy to be back, although as you can see from the photographs not everyone was. There had probably been some relief that there wasn’t that guy going round sticking his camera in people’s faces as they went about their day. Fair enough. And it took me a little while to get back into my stride but once I see someone I can’t resist capturing that’s it, I am off and running. Well not actually running. I’ve just mastered walking again. One step at a time…
p.,s what’s going on with that woman’s bag? What does that mean? And isn’t a weird thing to put on a bag?
I’m on fashion detail this week..I don’t really have any interest in the world of fashion but I am fascinated by people’s individual fashion choices. We sub-consciously zoom in these micro style decisions and formulate an opinion on the person who made them. What are they trying to say? What kind of person wears that? Do you think I could find it in a medium? I am sure that looking at this zoomed in perspectives this week you have unconsciously tried to fill in the blanks and work out what the rest of them looks like. We can’t hep ourselves. Our brains need the full picture. But I’m afraid I can’t (or won’t) provide. You will just have to live with the mystery and your imagination.
I am also showing you these close-ups as clues to where I have been taking photographs. Can you guess where? It shouldn’t be too hard to work out but If anyone sends me the correct answer I will give them a year’s free subscription to my blog. Cant’ say fairer than that. All will be revealed next week.
