Our gardening project expands

 

Conductive continuity
 
As always happens when I begin a project with my conductive groups our work expands and different aspects of living become part of the whole conductive experience. As we wait patiently for the garden to grow, the first tomatoes have set but are we are a long way off harvesting, and we have many associated jobs to do as the project evolves into sometime bigger and more encompassing.

One of these jobs is naming the plants. We are not going to be quite so strict as at the Chelsea Flower Show, where every plant on show in the separate exhibits has to be labelled, but it is important that the children and adults who use the garden learn to recognise what has been planted. 

Later during the cookery classes they will also learn how to use the produce in different recipes and they can go out to pick what they need just outside the door; therefore they need to be able to recognise it.

So as the project evolves reading and writing came to the fore this week, as the children have been painting the plant-names on signs that they made last week. Those who wished also drew their own image of the plant in question.

We want our raised bed to look in top form when we celebrate our twenty-year conductive anniversary next Sunday, we expect our visitors will wish to take a look at and admire our ever expanding plot! 

In the heat, as our thoughts turn to cooling water, we are already thinking about our next project which is to find half a wooden barrel to make into a small water garden, then after this we will turn our talents again to painting, decorating some wooden fruit boxes to plant-up and perhaps sell next year at the summer fete.

We have a busy week ahead of us, during which our gardening plans will evolve to incorporate even more live skills and experiences.

Books, blogs and phones

Communication between friends

My phone was broken this week but I did not miss it, even though I was glad to get it back today in normal working order again.

One friend called to ask whether I was OK. She had noticed my absence because she missed her daily doses of my photographs of our work – she works in the offices of our Association and enjoys seeing what we get up to and seeing  what she works so hard for!

No one else seemed to notice my absence from the smart-phone world because I still had Skype and email connections from my home-computer.

I thought that I had not missed the phone until looked back through my emails to check for those I had not read. There were a few, all from the blogs that I follow with the latest blog posting sent to me in my email inbox. Most of these blogs are American so the emails telling me about new postings usually arrive during the night. I read them on my mobile phone in bed, between alarm calls. There are three. I doze between the first two and read the blog postings before the third.

This is one posting that I missed from a blog that I have only recently began to follow –

http://jacklivingwithparkinsons.com/2015/03/05/the-only-place-you-are-a-burden-is-in-your-own-heart/

It is good once again to read and learn about life with a motor disorder from a very personal point of view.  

Here is another posting that I missed this week, from an old favourite –

http://www.ellenstumbo.com/cannot-go-back-today/

And of course I missed the daily offerings, packed with so much valuable information, from Dean’s Stroke Musings. I had to find time to read these in the evenings on my home computer rather than in the early hours on my phone –

http://oc1dean.blogspot.de/

I discovered two advantages of having no mobile phone. The first was that I read books undisturbed by phone calls and messages on the bus and tram, and the second, also to do with reading, I read books instead of emails in bed in the mornings – something I have not done for years.

Language

I have two books on the go: a heavy one that I take to work as it is too heavy for bedtime reading, and a smaller one, Lingo, a Language Spotter’s Guide to Europe, by Gaston Dorren. This is an amazing book.

Many of you must have seen people, usually men but I have also seen a woman or two over the years, standing at the end of railway platforms writing down the numbers of all the engines that they spot. Well this book is written by someone who spots languages in the same way as train-spotters spot engines!

I love the footnotes at the end of each language-chapter, especially the second note which is always a word from the specific language that the author has picked out that does not exist in English but one that he believes should perhaps be adopted.

I enjoy books on language and culture so much because my day revolves around so many languages. I love to read about how these languages evolve and Lingo makes a very entertaining journey from one country to the next, describing how the languages travelled to become what they are today.

My life is full of different languages and cultures I have often written about how many mother-tongues we have in our groups.

One Friday I spoke a bit of Hungarian, I worked with three different Hungarian conductors and I met another four. I worked with two children whose mother-tongue is Turkish, with one whose mother-tongue is Dutch, and another whose mother-tongue is Russian. I worked with only two German children, one of whom gets top marks in English and Latin – and between the conductors we are fluent in Hungarian, English, German, and Swedish, with a bit of Greek, Italian, French and Russian!

More about the brain

The heavy book that I carry to work is The Brain’s Way of Healing, Stories of Remarkable Recoveries and Discoveries by Norman Doidge, who also wrote The Brain that Changes Itself.

In my opinion this his newest book, The Brain’s Way of Healing, is not quite up to the story-telling standards of Oliver Sacks but it is well on its way to being in the running. Oliver Sacks is quoted on the back cover as saying that this book is – ‘A remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.’

With Oliver Sacks’s next book being published in the spring, and its possibilty of being his last, it is good to read a few new books that follow in his footsteps. Another one of my recent reads in the same vein is – Reaching down the Rabbit Hole by Allan Ropper and B. D. Burrell.

Food for thought for a journey

I hope I have given some readers some food for thought over the weekend or on the journey to work next week.

Notes

Gaston Dorren (2014), Lingo, a language spotter’s guide to Europe, Profile Books. IBNS 978-178 1254 165

Norman Doidge (2015) The Brain’s Way of Healing, Stories of Remarkable Recoveries and Discoveries, Allen Lane- Penguin Random House, ISBN 987-1-846-14424-0

Allan Ropper and B. D. Burrell (2014), Reaching down the Rabbit Hole - Atlantic Books, ISBN 978 1 782 39547 8

Reading in the winter on the tram

'A glance out of the window as I read', Winter 2014

One of the things that I enjoy most about the winter is tucking my bike up for hibernation and buying a public transport ticket for the cold icy months. I enjoy doing this because it means I get ¾ hour in the morning and another ¾ of an hour in the evening to read!

With my Chekhov finished and the next book not yet begun, on Friday I had my current copy of Time magazine with me where I read about Carl Djerassi who died at the end of January, aged 91.

Reading his biography, where he is described as a Renaisance man – ‘an eminent professor, chemist and pioneering bio-medical entrepreneur’ … ‘he also wrote poetry, plays, and novels, collected important art, started a cattle range and established an artist’s residency program’, I thought about András Pető.

At only sixteen years of age Carl Djerassi emigrated from Austria to the USA where he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt for help. It was her intervention that allowed him to attend university and begin on his successful journey through life.

What I wondered as I sat on the tram on Friday reading about some of the things that Carl Djerassi has given the world during his lifetime was – what if AP had chosen to emigrate to the USA from Austria rather than to return to his homeland of Hungary? What if AP had lived in America and had had someone intervene to help him start his journey through life in his chosen country? How would Conductive Education have developed had AP been in America with the support of grants and scholarships?

Who knows, but it could have been a different story.

You can read about Carl Djerassi here –

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-31/carl-djerassi-chemist-behind-birth-control-pill-dies-at-91

http://time.com/3691563/birth-control-pill-carl-djerassi-contraceptives-died/

http://time.com/3696871/carl-djerassi/

Reading

 

Full moon, February 2015

And observing

I remember that during the time that I spent in Hungary, 1989-1993, one of my regular activities on my trips to England (usually just once a year) was to make a special trip to Norwich city-centre to spend an hour, or maybe two, in a bookshop.

I would make a beeline to one particular section of the three-storey shop where I would select a pile of books about two feet high. I would pile them up on a table and then sit in the armchair provided to peruse them in a bit more detail before eventually dividing them into three piles. One a pile of certainties, another pile of next-time-I-am-home purchases, and the last one a discarded pile.

Over the years I have become quite proficient and fast at choosing what I want to read and what I need for my work. I have developed my book-buying technique so that it now also includes diligently reading all the book reviews in my weekly English newspaper and making notes to buy those I pick out at a later date or even order them online.

There was no internet book-buying in the late 1980s. I had no access to a computer in Hungary, in fact I had not seen one until I visited Germany for the first time in the winter of 1992/93. There was no world-wide-web, no googling to discover just the book that I needed for my dissertation, but despite that my library steadily grew.

In those early days books came into my hands through the bookshop purchases described above, via visitors who, if asked in advance, would bring requested titles, via my sister if we dared to risk the Hungarian postal service, and of course through my favourite place in Budapest – Litea, a book and tea-shop combined which invariably had an extensive selection of English titles, many of which were translations from Hungarian classics which I  read and widened my knowledge of the Hungarian culture.

For over twenty-five years I have not had ready access to an English bookshop apart from on trips home. I cannot go for a wander at the weekend and pick up a few books as I would if I lived in England.

Of course there are the usual English language novels at the local railway station, and at the airport there are the latest fashionable reads, but I rarely buy novels, I sometimes receive them as presents which I greatly appreciate.

So I still bulk buy when I am at home!

I think it shocked my sister yet again when I used her Christmas gift voucher, and more, to buy my latest pile of books. One of them weighed one and a half kilos and it brought my luggage right up to its allowed limit!

Amongst the books I bought this time was Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole by Allan Ropper and B. D. Burrell. This book has recently been a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, but somehow I missed it, so I am even more glad that it jumped out at me on the shelf as I was perusing.

This is another book in the style used in many of my favourite books, i.e. using the technique of story-telling to explain medical matters through experiences with patients and colleagues.

Operative observation is what AP and Co. would have called it.

The chance to make detailed observations of my clients is so important to me in my work and so necessary to decision making and planning. This is why I believe that the bits-in-between are often the most important parts of my practice especially in the “getting to know you” stages.

Whether these in-between-times are play-times, trips to the garden, chats with husbands, wives and carers, the moments when mums or dads arrive to collect children, lunchtimes, or taking off, and putting on, jackets and boots times, all the observations and conversations that take place play an important role in the decisions made while planning conductive sessions, just as the observations that the neurologists in the books I read make while they are chatting with their patients have a huge influence on the diagnosis that they make.

PS

Recently I have also read Two Roads by Wendy Cope, who I can thank for inspiring me to start to write again and The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov who I suppose I can say the same for, as despite there being some depressing stories in this book his descriptive narratives are something worth aspiring to.

Notes

Reaching down the Rabbit Hole by Allan Ropper and B. D. Burrell - Atlantic Books, ISBN 978 1 782 39547 8

Two Roads by Wendy Cope - Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, ISBN 978 1444 7953 6 3

The Lady and the Dog and other Stories 1896-1904 by Anton Chekhov