Dear Readers, my dispatches will always be free and open to everyone. I am unable to use my hands and I’m writing, via dictation, with the help of my family. If you could become a paid subscriber and support me, it’d mean so much. Nothing much to report since last time. Stuck in the interminable hell of hospital. A mixture of boredom and trauma. Many fruitful and fruitless discussions with Isabella about whether I should stay here and make use of the good physiotherapy and get as strong and well as I can, or whether we should start making our way back to London where Isabella will have to live in alone in my house while I find a new rehab hospital.
Naturally, God will laugh when you tell him your plans (and perhaps also pick at the stigmata scabs that always appear around late March/April) but you should make them anyway, because your future is logistically very complicated. Being away from England for a prolonged period of time may have an impact on how much of the NHS you are able to access, free of charge, upon your return to home soil. I don't know what the current rules are, or whether any dispensation is given to people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves resident abroad for a lengthy period. Then there is the issue of whether your current hospital is better equipped to meet your evolving rehabilitation needs than whatever is available in London, and also factors such as cost, since you are obviously in this for the long haul. I am sorry if this comes across as depressing, but facing up to basic realities is what lays the foundations for the best possible recovery. One thing that is very evident: Your mental health, which will also play a very important role in your recovery, will be improved greatly by your return to England, and by being around friends and family, who will no longer have to get on a plane to visit you, or endure a hazardous journey on foot, across the Alps.
I am going to relate to you my own first experience of group sex. You may take it as an amusing anecdote, as a sort of thinly-stretched allegory for the pagan traditions of Easter, or as cue to scroll down as fast as you can, or even turn off your computer.
There is a wide-eyed school of magical thinking, that has gained a footing online, which states that your life will improve immeasurably when you start saying 'Yes' to things. Those of us who have seen a bit too much of the world (and who are now on the look-out for moisturising lotions that might take a couple of hundreds yards off a thousand-yard stare) will tell you that there are probably a great many more occasions where your circumstances will be improved by saying 'go away', or perhaps something stronger.
I was effectively my grandmother's carer for the final years of her life. During that time I didn't go out very much. When she died it came as a huge relief, even though I loved her a great deal; probably more than I have ever loved anyone, or ever will. Because she had been in physical decline for so long, and because I had made that journey with her, and had borne witness to her suffering, I made the wrong assumption that I had grieved for her while she was still alive. In hindsight that was something else. I also mourned her passing, though I did not interpret these feelings as grief until many years after the fact.
I was left alone in her house, which was falling into a state of disrepair and which remained unsold for a year. While turning out the drawers in her bedroom I came across a piecemeal stash of morphine tablets which I began taking. I was getting up at half-past five every morning to go swimming. I was reading a lot. I was pulling myself in a lot of extreme and contradictory directions.
I would often drive out to the ruin of a local castle. I had previously celebrated my 18th birthday party there, and had marked the occasion by vomiting whiskey and birthday cake in the direction of Canvey Island.
I remember being there once with a friend and standing inside the embracing, crab-claw ruin of the remaining tower. He was holding up my binoculars and attempting, unsuccessfully, to read the 19th century graffiti that had been carefully engraved into the arch of one of the inaccessible embrasures, on what would have been the second or third floor.
“I still can't read it,” he reported back.
“Erzsebet is a whore,” I suggested.
One afternoon in early July, I drove to the castle. It was the first day of the school summer holidays. When I arrived, there were a couple of police cars parked at the bottom of the lane. As I headed up the track towards the castle, I encountered small groups of teenagers who were walking in the opposite direction. They were all discussing some recent event in the hyperbolic manner that young people sometimes do when describing their own dramas; as if they have the power to unseat the world from its axis.
When I reached the castle, there was a large group of teenagers by the tower. The police were there and seemed to be conducting interviews. I sat on some foundations at the opposite end of the ruin. After a while the crowd dispersed. A man in his early thirties wandered over and asked me if I knew why the police were here. I told him that there had been a fight. He went away. A few minutes later he returned with a woman and asked me if I would have sex with his wife.
I said something that immediately betrayed my lack of familiarity with such arrangements:
“What, now?!”
They led me to a clearing, deep in some shrubbery, that they had obviously scouted-out beforehand. I lay down on a blanket with this man's wife and had sex with her, while he watched and masturbated.
I think it was a new experience for them. It was a new experience for me too.
My relationships prior to this had all been 'head first,' in the intellectual sense of those words. There was always a certain amount of highbrow foreplay before things got, in any way, physical. The problem with that approach is that an ardent, and also somewhat rehearsed, appraisal of the selected poems of Seamus Heaney might, with the right girl, open up the possibility of sex, but it is of absolutely no use at all in the bedroom. "Try silently reciting those verses that you can recall from 'The Tollund Man' while performing cunnilingus," said no-one ever, though Heaney may have appreciated the return to the oral tradition.
Leaning on an erudite image of yourself as a mode of attraction is all very well, but for the sex to be satisfying you have to dismantle that image and start again. Plus, as you grow older and more jaded that are obstacles and things to be discussed beforehand: "You appreciate that a lot of water has passed under the bridge – in fact, I may as well tell you now, there have been quite a few bridges. The bottom line is that I can no longer become aroused if you aren't dressed like Madame Cholet, from The Wombles." She may want to refer to you as 'Patrick,' after a grounds-keeper from some racy novel. You may have to envelope her in the waxy embrace of a Barbour jacket that has almost certainly been used as a bedroom prop before.
This may come as a tremendous surprise to people who live outside of the United Kingdom, but there is no such book as 'Debrett's Heraldry of Fucking' that might conceivably inform you of how to approach a sexual partner based on the symbolism in her family coat of arms: "I see the rampant lion indicates that I am to take you from behind, as was figuratively the case for your distant ancestors at the hands of the French, in the 1500s," etc. Remarkably, very few family mottos translate from Latin to 'take me roughly under the hawthorns,' or 'the safe word is cow parsley'.
I am making light of this, but in all seriousness, it is very hard return to return to an earnest discussion of Proust, where you were previously barely concealing your own ignorance, with someone who wiled away the afternoon hours sitting on your face. The dynamic has changed. The scholarly veneer has worn off like the finish on a cheap ring.
None of that was an issue with this couple. I understood that the woman wanted to be dominated by a strange man, and that her husband wanted to watch her being dominated. It was simple and satisfying sex, the way our forbearers did it, in the bushes, partly shielded from the beating glare of the sun, without the need for stirrups and riding crops.
I talked to one of my friends about it afterwards. He pointed out, rightly, that any number of bad things could have resulted from me following a strange couple into isolated undergrowth. I agreed with him that it was high-risk behaviour and that I probably should draw a line under it. Then I did it again because I was a flailing degenerate.
Dear Hanif, If you hadn't written this i would have thought it an unlikely story but there my education is widened yet again! At 78 I think I am sadly passed the stage when an orgy is on the cards...but hey, you never know..and at least I have an idea what it might be like! There, perhaps I make you laugh a little if its not too painful..at least a smile! X
Indirectly, but I relate to this: “Being in hospital, as most of you know, is like being in a space\time capsule, cut off from the outside world which has moved on without me as if I were already dead. I am feeling morbid and require cheering up.”
My dad has not only stage 4 melanoma but since Tuesday, sepsis, staph infection, and pneumonia. The past five days I’ve been in the hospital with him. This has been an 18 month long battle. But I know the feeling you speak of, that strange blurry non-reality of hospital life versus ‘normal’ real life.
What you write is powerful and unquestionably helps people. Keeping doing it. Stay strong.
In 1875, a notorious Mexican robber named Jose Sanchez crossed the Mexican-American border into Texas. He road many miles until he sighted a stagecoach way station.
He entered the station and found the station master, Noah MacMeister, on his knees, putting a locked metal box into a big safe. One other man, named Heinz Muffler, sat at a small table.
Jose drew his pistol, ordered Muffler to stand by the safe with MacMeister, and demanded the money. The station manager refused. Jose shot MacMeister dead. He fired once at Muffler, who fell to the floor.
Jose cleaned out the safe and filled his saddle bags with the loot, and then galloped at top speed back to the border, to safety in Mexico.
News of the robbery and murder traveled fast. Soon a deputy sheriff was despatched to find and arrest the outlaw.
Fortunately, Muffler had survived; as the only witness, he described Jose and the event in great detail.
The deputy hired a tracking guide and a Mexican interpreter. Many more months passed as the three men searched for Jose.
Finally, after a dangerous skirmish, they captured the bandit. The Sheriff began his interrogation.
Deputy: Ask if he’s Jose Sanchez.
Interpreter: You’re Jose Sanchez?
Jose: Si, Senor.
Deputy: Ask him if he robbed the Station and shot two men.
Interpreter: You robbed the stagecoach station, killed Station Master MacMeister, and wounded Heinz Muffler?
Si, Senor.
Deputy: What’d he say?
Interpreter: He admits the crime.
Deputy: Ask him where he hid the loot!
Interpreter: Where’s the money and the gold you stole? Tell us or we’ll kill you pronto.
Jose: Outside of San Saludo, I buried it three miles from the rock shaped like a bear, under an old tree between two cacti, nearby cow’s skull.
Deputy: What did he say?! Where’s the payroll and the gold?! He’ll tell us now or he’s a dead man!
Hanif, it saddens me that you’re marooned in an Italian hospital bed, far from your UK friends and family, your favorite foods, your (early) blooming English walked gardens.
What do you see from your Roman hospital window? Perhaps it’s the palazzo next door, a church, a pair of umbrella pines, a wall of graffiti, with one or more of those stylized fat Roman penises, a favorite subject of teenaged boy artists.
I know you’d far prefer a London street with beetle-like black taxis, red buses, drivers negotiating roundabouts, and people standing outside of pubs.
I hope you can find a way to get home and to receive the rehab help you need from the NHS. Please recover your health, reclaim your life, keep thinking, keep writing. As do your many admirers, I keep the faith.
Great to hear you are hanging there with the family and even some friends flying in. I care for the fact that you are cared and loved by so many, not really for the orgy story you just produced. But then, this story shows what makes you a fantastic writer with an irrepressible mind and limitless energy & interest about everything concerning human heart, soul and body. Love, hate, orgies, drugs, fights, illnesses, losses, jealousies, weaknesses, the whole range.
Well done Kier for joining your father’s team as a writing hand. He is getting the best rehab care in the world (Italy) according to a specialist consulted in Paris by a friend who has suffered similar problems and now continues with physio. (The other best is France, of course.) I don’t know if breathing exercises have been found, but Dr Andrew Huberman is an ace on trauma therapies etc. See Breathing Techniques to reduce Stress and Anxiety - Dr Andrew Huberman on the ‘Physiological sigh’ ( Tim Ferris) on YouTube. There are many other interesting full-length talks, too. Best.
I am able to comment. This is my Easter miracle. by the way - I have drafted out the non fiction writing thing but wonder where to post it. I will try and do it somewhere even if I have to type it all out on here OH there is a copy and paste thing that might work In the meantime - your orgy sounded very efficient especially with the raincoated observer - now what is the point of an orgy you're not going to partake of or in? a wasted opportunity really. OK just because I know you are very fed up or MORE fed up than before (is this like an itching wound a sign of you healing?) will share with you my cannabis soaked orgy time of it - in my teenage spiral of sleeping around with anyone really I did have a go at a threesome - unlike yours, we all took part or rather I just lay there and let them get on with it - of you are just seeking a full on sexual experience with pleasure seeking your main goal, it is to be recommended. Furthermore, you could know who it is ever so slightly - one night stands are for strangers. There were a million reasons why I was in this stoned set of circumsstances of which acid was a part of - this didn't lead to anything pleasurable and the trips after the first exciting one were BAD, You are still weighing up whether to leave the hospital. It's hellish being in a state of indecision and pretty sure you need to commit one side or the other. Finally - your son has he got over your revelations - pretty sure I never wanted that kind of detail from Mum or Dad - I mean Mum was brutally honest anyway which is probably why I find secrecy and privacy such a haven. glad you are having visits from the outside. Hospitals I hate them - and if you ever read the bit of writing I did (if I can engineer it and get it on here) it's in there - there's so much to say about them. They are full of trauma BUT they are full of other surprising stuff too. Thank you so much for letting me reply without being one of your paid up people. Take care more silver for the wishing well for your hands. MM X
My husband and I would be glad to visit you in hospital if a short visit could help you feel better just for five minutes. My husband happens to be a rehab medical doctor and I am an English Teacher.
Wishing you a Happy Easter , or so to say a Happy Rebirth ( today is the 9th of April, so three times three, and just like in ‘The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner’, it can be read as the symbol of communication with God.)
Hanif, I am so sad for what you’re going through. But please, don’t ever think your life is meaningless. Obviously, you have to decide what to do with your life, but please don’t ever think that your being alive is meaningless. I, for one, drink the nectar of your every word. Your past words will live forever - thank you, from the depths of my heart - but your current words are, I believe, changing lives in ways you may never have imagined. However, now, the most important being is you. I have tears in my eyes. I want to say I love you but that seems crass; I don’t know you and it’s ridiculous in most ways, but hey, your life has become ridiculous - right? - and your whole world is upside down and in some tiny way we are sharing your horrible, ridiculous life and those of us who feel are changed because of you and we can say these ridiculous things because in some tiny or enormous way you are changing our lives. Thank you. I love you.
I have always been moved by your writing, which at times can be uncomfortable and often, that it the very reason that I like it. Your entries now remind me of Jenny Diski and Jeremy Clarke. I wonder if you are familiar with them and if their work resonates with you? I also attach a link from my friend Philip Anderson who wrote articles for Independent Living. I found them thought provoking, comforting & inspiring. I hope they will be of help to you too. Thank you for being your self.
This is a tough knot to untie, to stay in Rome or figure out the way to head for London. The medical insurances and medical programs to cover expenses and services and the needed physiotherapy. What does Isabella prefer,—life in Rome or in London? All of that with the emotional heaviness of being in hospital, with its routines and its smell of death. This is very hard. Is at least the food interesting? Any progress in your rehabilitation? Hope anywhere?
Recently, I thought of you and Hans Canstorp from The Magic Mountain, thinking he is going to visit a friend in the Alps for some days, and finds himself remaining there for seven years. And so here you are, visiting Rome for a holiday finding yourself confined for God knows how long stay in a hospital in Rome.
The orgy narrative was sexless, passionless, cold. it was similar to someone rubbing their body against one’s will. Hanif, it was dam boring. I think a scene about masturbation accompanied by fantasies would have been more enticing, even comical, intriguing and/or sexual. The man dressed in black was not even Darth Vader, not scary enough to heighten fears or emotions. Could it be that you or your son felt refrained or embarrassed in writing that episode?
Oh well, we, your readers, think of you, sending you our best wishes. I enjoy your writings.
I had an experience where I went back to a friend's flat in Pimlico after meeting him and a friend of his in Soho. We were at a bar called the Atlantic Bar. My friend (with the Pimlico apartment) had trained as an artist at Ruskin College. Oxford. Ian, his friend, had studied at Oxford. He was an attractive young man with longish fair hair and he ran a flotation centre in South London. We started to talk in Nigel's bed and make out and NIgel started to sketch us. It was a good night but we did not go that far really, which probably I regret now. In the morning Ian asked if I had a boyfriend and I said yes, which was true, but if I had my time again I would have dropped the boyfriend immediately as that was not going anywhere, and not even mentioned him. I would have taken up with Ian instead. As it was I remember going to the flotation tank high on cocaine from the night before but never seeing Ian again. (Anyway I *think* I had cocaine the night before in the form of a cigarette offered me although maybe that wasn't drugs at all and it was just threesome-euphoria although I did not think it counted as a threesome if one member of the group is just watching.)
Naturally, God will laugh when you tell him your plans (and perhaps also pick at the stigmata scabs that always appear around late March/April) but you should make them anyway, because your future is logistically very complicated. Being away from England for a prolonged period of time may have an impact on how much of the NHS you are able to access, free of charge, upon your return to home soil. I don't know what the current rules are, or whether any dispensation is given to people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves resident abroad for a lengthy period. Then there is the issue of whether your current hospital is better equipped to meet your evolving rehabilitation needs than whatever is available in London, and also factors such as cost, since you are obviously in this for the long haul. I am sorry if this comes across as depressing, but facing up to basic realities is what lays the foundations for the best possible recovery. One thing that is very evident: Your mental health, which will also play a very important role in your recovery, will be improved greatly by your return to England, and by being around friends and family, who will no longer have to get on a plane to visit you, or endure a hazardous journey on foot, across the Alps.
I am going to relate to you my own first experience of group sex. You may take it as an amusing anecdote, as a sort of thinly-stretched allegory for the pagan traditions of Easter, or as cue to scroll down as fast as you can, or even turn off your computer.
There is a wide-eyed school of magical thinking, that has gained a footing online, which states that your life will improve immeasurably when you start saying 'Yes' to things. Those of us who have seen a bit too much of the world (and who are now on the look-out for moisturising lotions that might take a couple of hundreds yards off a thousand-yard stare) will tell you that there are probably a great many more occasions where your circumstances will be improved by saying 'go away', or perhaps something stronger.
I was effectively my grandmother's carer for the final years of her life. During that time I didn't go out very much. When she died it came as a huge relief, even though I loved her a great deal; probably more than I have ever loved anyone, or ever will. Because she had been in physical decline for so long, and because I had made that journey with her, and had borne witness to her suffering, I made the wrong assumption that I had grieved for her while she was still alive. In hindsight that was something else. I also mourned her passing, though I did not interpret these feelings as grief until many years after the fact.
I was left alone in her house, which was falling into a state of disrepair and which remained unsold for a year. While turning out the drawers in her bedroom I came across a piecemeal stash of morphine tablets which I began taking. I was getting up at half-past five every morning to go swimming. I was reading a lot. I was pulling myself in a lot of extreme and contradictory directions.
I would often drive out to the ruin of a local castle. I had previously celebrated my 18th birthday party there, and had marked the occasion by vomiting whiskey and birthday cake in the direction of Canvey Island.
I remember being there once with a friend and standing inside the embracing, crab-claw ruin of the remaining tower. He was holding up my binoculars and attempting, unsuccessfully, to read the 19th century graffiti that had been carefully engraved into the arch of one of the inaccessible embrasures, on what would have been the second or third floor.
“I still can't read it,” he reported back.
“Erzsebet is a whore,” I suggested.
One afternoon in early July, I drove to the castle. It was the first day of the school summer holidays. When I arrived, there were a couple of police cars parked at the bottom of the lane. As I headed up the track towards the castle, I encountered small groups of teenagers who were walking in the opposite direction. They were all discussing some recent event in the hyperbolic manner that young people sometimes do when describing their own dramas; as if they have the power to unseat the world from its axis.
When I reached the castle, there was a large group of teenagers by the tower. The police were there and seemed to be conducting interviews. I sat on some foundations at the opposite end of the ruin. After a while the crowd dispersed. A man in his early thirties wandered over and asked me if I knew why the police were here. I told him that there had been a fight. He went away. A few minutes later he returned with a woman and asked me if I would have sex with his wife.
I said something that immediately betrayed my lack of familiarity with such arrangements:
“What, now?!”
They led me to a clearing, deep in some shrubbery, that they had obviously scouted-out beforehand. I lay down on a blanket with this man's wife and had sex with her, while he watched and masturbated.
I think it was a new experience for them. It was a new experience for me too.
My relationships prior to this had all been 'head first,' in the intellectual sense of those words. There was always a certain amount of highbrow foreplay before things got, in any way, physical. The problem with that approach is that an ardent, and also somewhat rehearsed, appraisal of the selected poems of Seamus Heaney might, with the right girl, open up the possibility of sex, but it is of absolutely no use at all in the bedroom. "Try silently reciting those verses that you can recall from 'The Tollund Man' while performing cunnilingus," said no-one ever, though Heaney may have appreciated the return to the oral tradition.
Leaning on an erudite image of yourself as a mode of attraction is all very well, but for the sex to be satisfying you have to dismantle that image and start again. Plus, as you grow older and more jaded that are obstacles and things to be discussed beforehand: "You appreciate that a lot of water has passed under the bridge – in fact, I may as well tell you now, there have been quite a few bridges. The bottom line is that I can no longer become aroused if you aren't dressed like Madame Cholet, from The Wombles." She may want to refer to you as 'Patrick,' after a grounds-keeper from some racy novel. You may have to envelope her in the waxy embrace of a Barbour jacket that has almost certainly been used as a bedroom prop before.
This may come as a tremendous surprise to people who live outside of the United Kingdom, but there is no such book as 'Debrett's Heraldry of Fucking' that might conceivably inform you of how to approach a sexual partner based on the symbolism in her family coat of arms: "I see the rampant lion indicates that I am to take you from behind, as was figuratively the case for your distant ancestors at the hands of the French, in the 1500s," etc. Remarkably, very few family mottos translate from Latin to 'take me roughly under the hawthorns,' or 'the safe word is cow parsley'.
I am making light of this, but in all seriousness, it is very hard return to return to an earnest discussion of Proust, where you were previously barely concealing your own ignorance, with someone who wiled away the afternoon hours sitting on your face. The dynamic has changed. The scholarly veneer has worn off like the finish on a cheap ring.
None of that was an issue with this couple. I understood that the woman wanted to be dominated by a strange man, and that her husband wanted to watch her being dominated. It was simple and satisfying sex, the way our forbearers did it, in the bushes, partly shielded from the beating glare of the sun, without the need for stirrups and riding crops.
I talked to one of my friends about it afterwards. He pointed out, rightly, that any number of bad things could have resulted from me following a strange couple into isolated undergrowth. I agreed with him that it was high-risk behaviour and that I probably should draw a line under it. Then I did it again because I was a flailing degenerate.
Dear Hanif, If you hadn't written this i would have thought it an unlikely story but there my education is widened yet again! At 78 I think I am sadly passed the stage when an orgy is on the cards...but hey, you never know..and at least I have an idea what it might be like! There, perhaps I make you laugh a little if its not too painful..at least a smile! X
Indirectly, but I relate to this: “Being in hospital, as most of you know, is like being in a space\time capsule, cut off from the outside world which has moved on without me as if I were already dead. I am feeling morbid and require cheering up.”
My dad has not only stage 4 melanoma but since Tuesday, sepsis, staph infection, and pneumonia. The past five days I’ve been in the hospital with him. This has been an 18 month long battle. But I know the feeling you speak of, that strange blurry non-reality of hospital life versus ‘normal’ real life.
What you write is powerful and unquestionably helps people. Keeping doing it. Stay strong.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Hanif, here’s a joke.
In 1875, a notorious Mexican robber named Jose Sanchez crossed the Mexican-American border into Texas. He road many miles until he sighted a stagecoach way station.
He entered the station and found the station master, Noah MacMeister, on his knees, putting a locked metal box into a big safe. One other man, named Heinz Muffler, sat at a small table.
Jose drew his pistol, ordered Muffler to stand by the safe with MacMeister, and demanded the money. The station manager refused. Jose shot MacMeister dead. He fired once at Muffler, who fell to the floor.
Jose cleaned out the safe and filled his saddle bags with the loot, and then galloped at top speed back to the border, to safety in Mexico.
News of the robbery and murder traveled fast. Soon a deputy sheriff was despatched to find and arrest the outlaw.
Fortunately, Muffler had survived; as the only witness, he described Jose and the event in great detail.
The deputy hired a tracking guide and a Mexican interpreter. Many more months passed as the three men searched for Jose.
Finally, after a dangerous skirmish, they captured the bandit. The Sheriff began his interrogation.
Deputy: Ask if he’s Jose Sanchez.
Interpreter: You’re Jose Sanchez?
Jose: Si, Senor.
Deputy: Ask him if he robbed the Station and shot two men.
Interpreter: You robbed the stagecoach station, killed Station Master MacMeister, and wounded Heinz Muffler?
Si, Senor.
Deputy: What’d he say?
Interpreter: He admits the crime.
Deputy: Ask him where he hid the loot!
Interpreter: Where’s the money and the gold you stole? Tell us or we’ll kill you pronto.
Jose: Outside of San Saludo, I buried it three miles from the rock shaped like a bear, under an old tree between two cacti, nearby cow’s skull.
Deputy: What did he say?! Where’s the payroll and the gold?! He’ll tell us now or he’s a dead man!
Interpreter: Jose said he’s not afraid to die.
Hanif, it saddens me that you’re marooned in an Italian hospital bed, far from your UK friends and family, your favorite foods, your (early) blooming English walked gardens.
What do you see from your Roman hospital window? Perhaps it’s the palazzo next door, a church, a pair of umbrella pines, a wall of graffiti, with one or more of those stylized fat Roman penises, a favorite subject of teenaged boy artists.
I know you’d far prefer a London street with beetle-like black taxis, red buses, drivers negotiating roundabouts, and people standing outside of pubs.
I hope you can find a way to get home and to receive the rehab help you need from the NHS. Please recover your health, reclaim your life, keep thinking, keep writing. As do your many admirers, I keep the faith.
Abbracci tanti
Great to hear you are hanging there with the family and even some friends flying in. I care for the fact that you are cared and loved by so many, not really for the orgy story you just produced. But then, this story shows what makes you a fantastic writer with an irrepressible mind and limitless energy & interest about everything concerning human heart, soul and body. Love, hate, orgies, drugs, fights, illnesses, losses, jealousies, weaknesses, the whole range.
Well done Kier for joining your father’s team as a writing hand. He is getting the best rehab care in the world (Italy) according to a specialist consulted in Paris by a friend who has suffered similar problems and now continues with physio. (The other best is France, of course.) I don’t know if breathing exercises have been found, but Dr Andrew Huberman is an ace on trauma therapies etc. See Breathing Techniques to reduce Stress and Anxiety - Dr Andrew Huberman on the ‘Physiological sigh’ ( Tim Ferris) on YouTube. There are many other interesting full-length talks, too. Best.
I am able to comment. This is my Easter miracle. by the way - I have drafted out the non fiction writing thing but wonder where to post it. I will try and do it somewhere even if I have to type it all out on here OH there is a copy and paste thing that might work In the meantime - your orgy sounded very efficient especially with the raincoated observer - now what is the point of an orgy you're not going to partake of or in? a wasted opportunity really. OK just because I know you are very fed up or MORE fed up than before (is this like an itching wound a sign of you healing?) will share with you my cannabis soaked orgy time of it - in my teenage spiral of sleeping around with anyone really I did have a go at a threesome - unlike yours, we all took part or rather I just lay there and let them get on with it - of you are just seeking a full on sexual experience with pleasure seeking your main goal, it is to be recommended. Furthermore, you could know who it is ever so slightly - one night stands are for strangers. There were a million reasons why I was in this stoned set of circumsstances of which acid was a part of - this didn't lead to anything pleasurable and the trips after the first exciting one were BAD, You are still weighing up whether to leave the hospital. It's hellish being in a state of indecision and pretty sure you need to commit one side or the other. Finally - your son has he got over your revelations - pretty sure I never wanted that kind of detail from Mum or Dad - I mean Mum was brutally honest anyway which is probably why I find secrecy and privacy such a haven. glad you are having visits from the outside. Hospitals I hate them - and if you ever read the bit of writing I did (if I can engineer it and get it on here) it's in there - there's so much to say about them. They are full of trauma BUT they are full of other surprising stuff too. Thank you so much for letting me reply without being one of your paid up people. Take care more silver for the wishing well for your hands. MM X
Dear Mr. Kureishi,
My husband and I would be glad to visit you in hospital if a short visit could help you feel better just for five minutes. My husband happens to be a rehab medical doctor and I am an English Teacher.
Wishing you a Happy Easter , or so to say a Happy Rebirth ( today is the 9th of April, so three times three, and just like in ‘The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner’, it can be read as the symbol of communication with God.)
Antonella
Hanif, I am so sad for what you’re going through. But please, don’t ever think your life is meaningless. Obviously, you have to decide what to do with your life, but please don’t ever think that your being alive is meaningless. I, for one, drink the nectar of your every word. Your past words will live forever - thank you, from the depths of my heart - but your current words are, I believe, changing lives in ways you may never have imagined. However, now, the most important being is you. I have tears in my eyes. I want to say I love you but that seems crass; I don’t know you and it’s ridiculous in most ways, but hey, your life has become ridiculous - right? - and your whole world is upside down and in some tiny way we are sharing your horrible, ridiculous life and those of us who feel are changed because of you and we can say these ridiculous things because in some tiny or enormous way you are changing our lives. Thank you. I love you.
Dear Hanif,
I have always been moved by your writing, which at times can be uncomfortable and often, that it the very reason that I like it. Your entries now remind me of Jenny Diski and Jeremy Clarke. I wonder if you are familiar with them and if their work resonates with you? I also attach a link from my friend Philip Anderson who wrote articles for Independent Living. I found them thought provoking, comforting & inspiring. I hope they will be of help to you too. Thank you for being your self.
https://www.independentliving.co.uk/philip-anderson/being-mortal/
Dear Hanif,
This is a tough knot to untie, to stay in Rome or figure out the way to head for London. The medical insurances and medical programs to cover expenses and services and the needed physiotherapy. What does Isabella prefer,—life in Rome or in London? All of that with the emotional heaviness of being in hospital, with its routines and its smell of death. This is very hard. Is at least the food interesting? Any progress in your rehabilitation? Hope anywhere?
Recently, I thought of you and Hans Canstorp from The Magic Mountain, thinking he is going to visit a friend in the Alps for some days, and finds himself remaining there for seven years. And so here you are, visiting Rome for a holiday finding yourself confined for God knows how long stay in a hospital in Rome.
The orgy narrative was sexless, passionless, cold. it was similar to someone rubbing their body against one’s will. Hanif, it was dam boring. I think a scene about masturbation accompanied by fantasies would have been more enticing, even comical, intriguing and/or sexual. The man dressed in black was not even Darth Vader, not scary enough to heighten fears or emotions. Could it be that you or your son felt refrained or embarrassed in writing that episode?
Oh well, we, your readers, think of you, sending you our best wishes. I enjoy your writings.
Get well day by day. Minute by minute.
Tu lectora devota,
Ruth
I had an experience where I went back to a friend's flat in Pimlico after meeting him and a friend of his in Soho. We were at a bar called the Atlantic Bar. My friend (with the Pimlico apartment) had trained as an artist at Ruskin College. Oxford. Ian, his friend, had studied at Oxford. He was an attractive young man with longish fair hair and he ran a flotation centre in South London. We started to talk in Nigel's bed and make out and NIgel started to sketch us. It was a good night but we did not go that far really, which probably I regret now. In the morning Ian asked if I had a boyfriend and I said yes, which was true, but if I had my time again I would have dropped the boyfriend immediately as that was not going anywhere, and not even mentioned him. I would have taken up with Ian instead. As it was I remember going to the flotation tank high on cocaine from the night before but never seeing Ian again. (Anyway I *think* I had cocaine the night before in the form of a cigarette offered me although maybe that wasn't drugs at all and it was just threesome-euphoria although I did not think it counted as a threesome if one member of the group is just watching.)
Hanif, I’ve got a joke for you. I’ll send it later.
Paddy
That day... one of Nic’s uni mates died @ Edgware Rd.
How does Kier feel having typed up part II of the orgy story? Ha ha ha!
More of a twosome?!