More than reading, living.

What a busy week. Work, concerts, theatre, you name it I have done it, and I have also been reading books.

I don’t have the feeling that I was reading these books, though. I feel like I was right inside the books, that I was living a different life. A life that I would love to be part of now. It is a life similar to what I was working in, over twenty-five years ago.

It is difficult to describe

When it comes to reading I am a late starter, an opsimath, like Alan Bennett’s Queen in An Uncommon Reader. I didn’t read an awful lot until I was eighteen years old, when A-level English was over and I did not have to read any more.

Our house was full of books, but I didn’t read more than two or three of them, the same two over and over again: The Folk of the Far-away Tree and Shadow the Sheepdog, both Enid Bylton classics. My sister read books to me, my Mum read books to me, I read the Beano, usually while sitting up a tree!

Then I left home and then I got a new pair of glasses. Only then did I start consuming books like someone who hadn’t eaten for months.

I read books on anything and everything. In my first year as an art student my twenty-five-pounds-a-term student grant was spent on paper, paints and books: oh yes, plus a flying jacket to keep me warm while outside drawing.

I collected books on trees, books on painters, classic novels, books on art therapy, lots of poetry books and many more.

Now I am collecting books on and around Conductive Education!

I am slowing getting through the reading that I missed when I was at the PAI training to be a conductor.

Now I receive copies of papers from some of the NICE conductors, things that they had given them in their training, and recommended reading from several sources.

This week I have finished reading all three volumes of The Road to Life (An Epic of Education) by A.S.Makarenko, in a lovely 1951 Soviet English translation. I read the first volume over a year ago and I have just tracked down the second two through Abe Books. They were actually sent to me from a disused church in my home town, Norwich. All three volumes are in quite good condition and smell delicious, good enough to eat!

I was hooked after the first volume and I had been imptient to read on, to discover more about Makarenko's work and life so, as I spied the small parcel on the stairs one morning earlier this month, I unpacked it with glee.

I have been reading Makarenko to and from work all week, in my lunch hours, and even on the tram to the theatre. I would have read in the interval of Joan Baez if there had been one. Now I am hooked on his writings and I feel myself a Makarenkoist through and though

Tears, not sad ones

A. S. Mararenko makes me cry.

I cried often while reading these three volumes. Not because of the desperate state of affairs that he describes, bcause he makes even the accounts of all the work to be done full of optimism and somehow a wonderful thing. The need to move onwards, developing and creating, going through new hardships, all this doesn’t make me cry either.

He makes me cry mostly because I realise as I read further, that I have been right all the time. Right to enthuse over every tiny thing that a child says, or does, or sees, or is excited about. It is what my Mum did and what my Dad did and still does with me. My life changed when I left that environment at eighteen, I missed it very much, but I took this skill with me. I incororated my parents' ability to enjoy and enthuse over the little things in life, to be thrilled by every change in development, and to encourage further interest and adventure. The ability to take time. I believe too that I share their ability in transferring this enthusiasm to others.

Time doesn't tick by, it stands still

I realised while reading A. S. M. that I have been right all these years to delight in all that children and adults do. I discovered that I am right not to have been deterred when someone asked me to hurry up when I listened to the detailed explanation given to me by children or by adult clients of something that they had experienced. Where else will someone find the time to listen and try to understand, if not in my group?

I realise that I am right to value how, in my work as a conductor, time itselfseems to stand still. Time allows me to enthuse, to be delighted and thrilled by the small things in life, time allows me to notice these things. Just as it did when I was a child, poking under leaves looking at frogs with my Dad. (Oh no, I forgot that happened last Easter!)

In Road to Life A. S. M talks about making healthy human beings, creating healthy souls and bodies. That is what I always wanted to be involved in. I suppose that is what I have always been involved in.

Please sir, I want some more

I have finished the books now and I want more of the same. Maybe I will go on to the Lectures for Parents, maybe I will watch the 1953 Soviet film The Road to Life.

I felt that it was so important for me to write about, to enthuse about and to share my excitement about what I have been reading, but I really don’t know at this stage what more to say.

Doubtless I will return to A. S. M., but this is all for now.

Notes

Beano -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beano

A.S.Makarenko -

Road to Life (An Epic of Education) volumes I, II, II., Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1951.

Alan Bennett -

The Uncommon reader, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 13:978-0-374, ISBN 10: 374-28096-7

Please Sir, I want some more -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7JOAtF9CIg

A journey round my skull

The Dancer, October 2004 by Susie Mallett

I always maintain that I learn more about strokes and other disorders or illnesses from the mouths of my clients or from the books that sufferers or their loved ones write than from any text book on the subjects.

Slowly I have gathered a collection of stories in my head and of books on my shelves, some written by famous people, some of whom are already writers of numerous books. Some authors are less well known and others not known at all.

One of the best I have read to date is “The Diary of a Stroke” by Martin Stephen, but there are many others worth a read, including “My Year Out “by Robert McCrum, “Lucky Man “by Michael J Fox and “A Leg To Stand On” by Oliver Sachs.

The Dairy of a Stroke is written in amazing detail, describing all that my clients tell me about and much, much more. It is full with information about those first few hours when no one dares to tell patients what is happening or what has happened to them, of the next days when the world seems to slow down and fears set in, the feeling of being alone, trapped in a world without means of communication. This is just a short mention of just one of these books. I will get round to writing about others one day, I am sure.

As I said in a previous blog, when I am in Budapest a must, even more a must than searching for tin toys, is a visit to Litea. Not only do I enjoy the atmosphere there and the tea and the people, but I always manage to find really good books and last Saturday was no exception.

Between consuming delicious coffee and walnut cake I used the 30 minutes that I had in Litea to check the shelf of books by Hungarian authors translated into English. As always it was a treasure trove but I had limited myself to one purchase because I had no time in the next two days to find a post office and ship more books back home! Of the half-dozen books that I had scattered around me between my coffee cup and cake it was not difficult to make the choice. Among them there was a book called “A Journey round my Skull” by Frigyes Karinthy, which has a forward by Oliver Sacks who is probably my favourite read in the field of neurology, and this one caught my eye. In his forward Oliver Sacks says that he read this book as a 14-year-old, and that it had a great influence on the style of the case studies that he wrote later in his life. If this was the case then I knew that I had found the right book and off I went with my purchase in my pocket to my next port of call, which was a visit to the wonderful open air train museum to the north of the city!

A "Journey round my Skull" was written by the Hungarian journalist and popular comic writer, Frigyes Karinthy, 1887-1938, and was published in 1939. Karinthy wrote many novels, short stories, poems and theatre pieces, he also translated "Winnie the Pooh" and "Gulliver’s Travels". Now here he was using his literary skills and wit to write about himself, about his illness and his recovery, producing what Sacks describes as the first ever autobiographical description of a journey inside the brain.

I haven’t quite finished the book and I am learning something new with every page I turn, not only about neurology but also about life in Hungary in the 1930s. It is certainly worth hunting it out on Amazon.

A few of the other books on my shelf

"A Leg To Stand On", Oliver Sacks, ISBN 0-330-29093-2
"Rescuing Jeffrey," Richard Galli, ISBN 1-56512-270-4
"My Year Off ", Robert McCrum, ISBN 0-330-35240-7
"The Man Who Lost His Language", Sheila Hale, ISBN 0140-28495-8
"My Stroke of Luck", Kirk Douglas ISBN 9-780-060-01404-9
"Zum Schweigen Verurteilt", Gerhard Reinhold, ISBN 3-927-442-801
"Lucky Man", Michael J Fox, ISBN 0-7868-9056-8
"Daniel Isn’t Talking", Marti Leimbach, ISBN 978-0-00-721701-4
"Nobody Nowhere", Donna Williams, ISBN1-85302-612-3
"Thinking In Pictures", Temple Grandin, ISBN 0-679-77289-8
"Footprints in the Snow", Julie Hill, ISBN 0-330-39186-0
"Living Proof", Michael Gearin-Tosh, 0-7432-0680-0
"Crazy", Benjamin Lebert, ISBN 3-462-02818-9

Notes

Open air train museum

Magyar Vasúttörténeti Park – 1142 Budappest, Tatai út 95, Budapest.
http://www.vasuttortenetipark.hu/

Tin Toys – http://konduktorin.blogspot.com/2008/11/trip-down-memory-lane.html

Litea – http://konduktorin.blogspot.com/2008/11/time-for-tea.html).

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

We have all the time in the world

"Snow-flattened green", by Susie Mallett, March 2010

There is another interesting article in this week's Weekly Guardian, this time in the Weekly Review.

Chris Arnot writes, in "Pictures of health", about a set of books used for encouraging conversation and to wake up memories.

The article describes books that where first developed by Helen Bates, architect and illustrator, to encourage conversation between her ten-year old son and her mother who was developing demetia.

It describes much the same things that I do in my stroke and multiple sclerosis groups to encourage delving deep into locked-away memories, and then to talk about them.

I use photographs, paintings and series of images to develop communication skills and use of more abstract thinking, and to encourage the use of the imagination.

The project written about in the Guardian Weekly and now put in to action in six care homes in England, is called "Pictures to share".

Chris Arnot writes that this project is:

" a combination of striking images coupled with a few lines of large-print text to stimulate memories of past pleasures and experiences. One of the books is called Beside the Seaside, hence the importation of beach-balls and sand.

Other titles include In the Garden, Women's Work, A Sporting Life and A Funny Old World."

I looked them up in the Internet and discovered that there are many more titles. You can even flip through the pages to make choosing your title easier.

While I was browsing around this site I discovered that under "resources" on the left-hand side of the page there were links to You Tube. It is hoped that these selected clips will stimulate conversations and spark the memories of the clients, just as the books do.

Here on the You Tube links I found my old favourite, Louis Armstrong, and it is here that I found him singing the title of the posting: "We have all the time in the world"

I was sorting through my files the other day, the ones containing all the pictures that I have collected over the years, all glued on to separate pieces of card and kept in individual plastic sleeves. I was looking for appropriate images to use with my new stroke client.

It seems that yet again I may have missed the boat, but on the other hand maybe I have just been given more reassurance that even without making it on to the boat I am on the right track.

What I have been using with my clients for years has popped up its head in a project in care homes in Coventry, in central England.

I will not be investing in any of these very nice looking books, although I am very interested to hear from anyone who is using them in their work.

I will stick to the hand-made versions though, if there is at some time a bit of spare cash in the pot, I may be able to put my pictures into little books instead of being stuck on separate pieces of card.

Notes

Guardian Weekly -

5-11 March, 2010, Weekly Review

Pictures of health by Chris Arnot

Pictures to share-
http://www.picturestoshare.co.uk/shop/books

Louis Armstrong -
http://www.picturestoshare.co.uk/useful-resources/youtube/louis-armstrong

Homes for home-libraries

 

Emmi's son George signing books for Raphi and Kati

More about books

I often wonder what will happen to my books when I die. I often think about giving them away now while I am alive, but I love being able to get up and look up a poem, I love being able to get up and find out what Mária Hári said or what AP wrote, and I love to put my hand out and take any one of Oliver Sacks’s books from the shelf. I like having my books around me, I like delving in.

After the posting that I wrote when I was reading Chekhov my friend Emmi sent me the following about finding a new home her friend Susan’s home-library –

Our Holocaust-survivor friend Susan died in Szeged in her 99^th year during the first week of January this year. She had a good library. My sister Magdi had the sad task of emptying her flat, and thought there would be plenty of interest in her books from book-sellers. This was a big disappointment – she nearly had to pay the bookseller to be allowed to leave a pile of GOOD books at his place!

Miraculously at these time, one of her younger Budapest friends, (married, learning English, 3 children) asked my sister’s advice of how to build up a home-library (they had none) since one of her daughters loved to read. Here was the solution to the book problem in Szeged.

This young Budapest friend and her husband drove down to Szeged in a small truck with my sister and became happy owners of an excellent collection of world literature (good hard-backed volumes, the type that I love to read). They also assisted with shifting some of the smaller pieces of furniture and all the paintings from the walls in Susan’s flat which was a big help for my sister.

There are still some readers amongst us then!

Thank you Emma, I do so hope my home-library problem will be solved as well as this when I no longer need it.

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