Knitting and drugs

 

 

This morning our local church hosted the Community Keeping Active Christmas Luncheon*.   

For the luncheon I made a stack of salmon and cucumber sandwiches and carried them carefully up the steep hill to the church hall, I was a little late and the room was already buzzing with ladies in lavender twinsets arranging platters of quiche and sausage rolls. The men were all in properly smart suits with ties and Good Shoes. Here I learned quite a lot about the French and English yarn industries (genuinely fascinating) and  also more than I needed to know about badminton and exercise schedules.

After lunch  I went back down the hill, beyond my house and further on down until I arrived at the very glorious tattoo parlour where Frank, my current houseguest is working, I had been invited for a tour and was not going to turn down this educative opportunity. Frank used to be female, he has a lot of tattoos and  an impressive reputation for his work. He's not too keen on doing the sort of tattoos that people want him to do** but we all have to make a living.  Artwork was pinned up around each person's work station - someone was very keen on scenes depicting Egyptian sphinxes and Aztec gods overlooking landscapes of brightly coloured limbs climbing out of holes bearing bodily organs.

My afternoon learning was mainly about which drugs inspired what sort of artwork and also to be careful  about getting too popular for the work you do during the more transient phases of your life.

 

* I am currently living my life backwards: last week the church hosted the Community New Year Party  

**  wolves howling at psychedelic moons,  weeping faces ....

Today was my last day

at the Brain Surgery

I arrived early. There is a broken bench on a paved area in front of the surgery. It was sunny so I made tea then came back outside, balanced a bum cheek on the wobbly seat and ate my breakfast marmalade sandwich.

Tattoo man has removed the big pieces of junk he used to keep in front of the Surgery including all the pieces of kitchen that were torn out two weeks ago. What remained was a tumbleweedy wilderness of food packaging, broken flowerpots, lumps of dried cement, rotted wood bits, paint scrapings and rusty screws. Long weeds grew between the pavers.

A plastic bag dancing on the wind would have completed the picture but my breakfast bag was pressed into service as a glove so that I could clear away the rubbish and pull out the weeds. My search for a sweeping device in the Surgery yielded a stumpy circular hoover-attachment brush and the final crumbs of rubbish were shooshed into my glove bag at exactly the moment the first patient arrived. We had our last morning together the Brain Doctor and I, then our last lunch. The last patient was one of my favourites, a woman who always puts her child on my lap so that we can draw spiders while she sees the Brain Doctor.

Now I'm off to Edinburgh, another cat ... and the festival!!!

Tattoo Man has left

his home above the Brain Surgery, he's packed his drill and his vests and he's taken the internet with him.

The Brain Doctor, doesn't understand how the internet works and it was a while before I could make him understand that shouting at his computer wouldn't make the emails appear. He  has barely spoken to me since I told him that I would be also be leaving so I find myself missing the sound of boots crashing up and down the stairs and the sight of a too-naked male body bursting into the surgery.

Last night Rabbit took me out for a Last Supper

The Brain Surgery was closed for a while

Because the Brain Doctor went on holiday, before he set off the tattooed man who lives upstairs offered to refresh the surgery kitchenette in lieu of rent.

I didn't know about this  until I encountered the broken-cupboard-mountain blocking the path to the front door.

Inside, on the floor of the waiting room are two large cracked boxes, spilling out the things we preferred hidden: Christmas baubles, mismatched crockery, leaky cleaning products, oversqueezed toothpaste tubes and skanky brushes ... men's underwear!

The kitchenette gapes next to my desk like an enormous mouth with several teeth newly extracted - a little bendy tap is perched on a shiny new sink,  there are no drawers - spoons, knives and forks are piled on a draining board that is made of such thin metal the weight of the cutlery is bending it. Rugged patches on the wall mark where cupboards had been .

There is no longer a cupboard door concealing the pipework under the sink which is a good thing because when I turn on the tap I can see immediately that water now flows directly onto the floor.

Doodling

I still share the control panel at the Brain Surgery with Rabbit, sometimes the Brain Doctor picks up a call when one of us is out on a break, I can tell when this happens because appointments are blocked in with wavy patterns instead of patient details.

Yesterday when we got to the bit of the appointment book with a wavy doodle there was no-one waiting to be seen in the surgery

I asked the Brain Doctor who the doodle signified

A new patient
Do you know him?

No

Do you have his number?

No...
he talked so much, he just rambled on and on for so long I couldn't bear to ask him to say anything else

This was the point that Tattoo Man came downstairs in his vest to update us on the status of his internal bleeding

Tattoo Man is back

He and the Brain Doctor dealt with the biscuit situation over new year

and now he's busy clumping in and out, using heavy machinery and making sure that I can see what fine muscles he has.

A tattooed man lives above the Brain Surgery

When he clomps up and down the stairs the surgery shakes and those of us in the waiting room hunch up a little like we're in an air raid shelter.

Tattoo Man doesn't just tread the stairs, he also bursts into the waiting room in his muscle-revealing vest and shorts. Sometimes he powers through to the store room to see if he left a drill there, sometimes he just stops by to tell an amusing traffic warden story or show a tear-inducing video clip.

the Brain Doctor is British so he has never directly let it be known that he is less than happy with this arrangement