Tough day ahead

Thursday 31 January 2019

Awake since 4am, tossing and turning in the bed, uncomfortable with constipation.

Headache as I shave and shower, not paying attention to Radio 4 droning on about the interminable Brexit machinations.

Shut the front door and venture into the darkness. Sub-zero today and I step gingerly over the icy patches on the way to the station. 

Dozing on the 7:12 to Blackfriars, too tired to check my email, but at least I have a seat.

Chest already feeling tight with the stress of another night of disturbed sleep.

Despite my recent optimism and positivity, most days in the office are tough, but today will be extra hard to see through to its conclusion.

Photo album

Saturday 12 January 2019

Every January I spend a weekend in front of the computer designing a photo album of the previous year.

It takes ages. I typically snap around 2,000 images each year, mostly on my iPhone, and these have to be merged with Clara’s, filtered, uploaded to a website then painstakingly annotated and arranged into a photobook of up to 150 pages.

The end result is well worth the effort. In an era of digital photography, we rarely look back at photos from several years ago, but when the highlights are professionally bound and sit invitingly on the bookshelf, we do actually get them out and enjoy the happy memories. There’s something about sitting on the sofa, with the weight of a hardback album in your hands, looking at sharp images on glossy paper, that makes the reminiscence more palpable than glancing at a screen.

The 2018 album I am putting together this weekend has highlights of trips to Seville, Barbados, Cornwall, Canada, Madrid and Budapest. These along with a smattering of pictures of the cat and odds and ends like a dramatic October sunset snapped on the way home from work. It’s remarkable how much we see and do in a year without trying too hard.

But nowhere in my album will you find any reference to my Parkinson’s.

Why is this?

Why in my photo album do I present a rose-tinted view of my life, without any allusion to the elephant in the room?

It’s a common enough trait. On social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, most people tend to show off only the good aspects of their lives and gloss over the bad and the merely humdrum. Happy, smiling, perfect families. Beautiful bodies and faces. Exotic excursions. Healthy activities. Doing good things for the planet and society. Sunny, blue sky days.

My photo album is no different: the images that make the cut are all the ones that show people and places at their most, er, photogenic.

Am I in denial? Am I trying to portray life as something better than it really is? Am I living in a fantasy world, pretending everything is wonderful when truth is unpalatable? In a competitive world, am I trying to deceive myself or others that I have made it in life and that I am living the dream in spite of my condition?

I’ve no doubt this is the case for some people.

For myself, I simply take the view that it’s better to focus on the good things in life. When I sit on the sofa flicking through the photo album, I want to revel in the nostalgia, not be reminded of what I have to live with every day. The stiffness in my hand as I turn the pages tells me all I need to know about that.

And so, here are three pictures that made the cut in the 2018 album, all taken with an iPhone: a sunrise over the North Sea, a sunset over South London and another sunset, seen from the air shortly after taking off from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport…