Dear Readers,
Until now, I have been shielded from the costs of disability because of our wonderful and vital NHS. This will change when I get home due to the considerable costs of remodelling the house, and my need for round the clock care.
I ask, therefore, that if you enjoy The Kureishi Chronicles, believe in paying for good writing, and want to help with my recovery, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
One of my first jobs in the theatre after leaving university was to work as a stage manager on an expressionist production of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I have to say I wasn’t much cop as a stage manager, I was far too disorganised, always losing things and in a panic. What I really wanted to be was a playwright. But Steven Berkoff, who directed the production, was very generous with me, and I became his letter writer and sideman for a few months before Ericka Bolton got me a job at Riverside Studios, working for David Gothard and Peter Gill. This meant that I got to see Kafka’s’ Metamorphosis on many occasions, in different theatres around Britain, as we travelled around in a van. Often now, lying helplessly on my back, I think of Kafka’s beetle or insect - what a rich metaphor it is, and how it works on as many levels as you like. I recall also how repulsed and angry Gregor Samsa’s family and other visitors are with him. As his health deteriorates, he is found to be disgusting, and I believe towards the end of the story he is pelted with apples.
I was discussing this the other day with my analyst, and we were saying that in reality, when you have an accident as I did, suddenly becoming as disabled as I am, you find that the people around you are immensely sympathetic. They want to help you. They love to give you things; they rush to your side. They imagine how they might feel if they were in your situation, how they would want to be loved. Kafka is of course a pessimistic writer, and his view of the world will always resonate, but I have found my friends and family, and even people I barely know, to be incredibly compassionate. They write me letters, send me presents, offer to visit, and make extravagant financial offers, which, in the future, I may have to take them up on.
It has been odd to spend so much of my recent life, to share so many intimate events, with strangers. Only this morning, a young female doctor put a finger up my arse to test how responsive my rectum was. I meet more people here in a week than I did in a year in my previous life. I have been in five hospitals since my accident on Boxing Day 2022, and so it should go without saying that I have met scores of nurses, doctors and physios. I have learnt that it is a good idea to be kind and polite with the people that are trying to help you. I do my best not to be grumpy. Though I can hear myself being irritable and old-mannish. It is a temptation I try to fight against.
But one thing I have learnt is how easy it is to talk to people; if you want to, with a few simple questions, you can trigger a tsunami of confession. Lying on my bed, in the evening, while being changed, I have found that I can unlock the most terrible and unsettling stories. Many are so bizarre and outlandish, they wouldn’t be out of place in a Kafka short story: tales from asylums, accounts of kidnap, hostage taking, and other forms of violence and emotional terrors. People like to talk; they want to tell you about themselves; they want you to know them. Often I find it overwhelming; too much of it is difficult to take in. I ask my analyst, and other friends who are therapists, how it is they are able to listen all day to so many frightful things. But it is their work; they have chosen to do it, they know how to protect themselves. As a writer, I too am curious about the dramatic lives of others, and you would think I would welcome these responses. But often I find it too much, I require more distance – I had more distance from others in my previous life, and it was a distance that suited me. I met friends where and when I wanted. They would be a limit to what I would have to put up with; I could control it. But now I am here, and wanting to be kind, I ask these new people simple questions, which at times can trigger an avalanche of confession and truth. I hear things I want to forget quickly. This is not a pub, people tend not to tell you things that are cheerful; you don’t hear many jokes. I was speaking to one patient, a taxi driver, who picked up a suitcase at the airport and broke his spine in two; another kid, a friendly and lively boy who whips up and down the corridor in his wheelchair, was disabled after being tasered by the police.
Of course hospital workers are overly optimistic, they like to tell you that you are making progress; they want to feel that their work isn’t futile, but I am aware, even as they tell me all this, that I am still a broken man with a smashed body, and that is the truth.
The nurses here are from all over the world, literally. And so their stories have a universal resonance, and are told in a variety of accents; there are Filipinos, Indians, South Africans, West Indians and many from Ghana and Nepal, for instance. There is much talk in British politics about cutting down on immigration, but as we know, the British people want two things at once; an efficient NHS, and less immigration. Unfortunately for provincials, the NHS and the care homes only survive on a constant stream on immigration, and I’ve noticed, being in hospital so long, how many new immigrants there are, people who have come to the UK recently on working visas. There are thousands of them.
One thing that has changed in my life this year is that I get to spend much more time with people that I know. Tracey said to me the other day that she sees me far more now than she ever did. Every morning I call my sons and family on Facetime. One of my friends, Samreen, who lives close to the hospital, visits me a few times a week, to bring me food, a headscratcher and now a backscratcher, with several heads. She and I are able to hang out for much longer than we would normally; sitting in a pub or bar, the meeting would usually go on for no longer than ninety minutes, and we might not see each other for months. This emergency has created a space for the more complex friendships.
I’m doing physiotherapy every day. I can stand up for about twenty minutes at a time, usually with physios either side of me, or in a standing machine, that holds me from the front and back. I do not have the strength to take a step, so I cannot think about walking at the moment. The occupational therapists have been working on my hands, but I still cannot grip anything, brush my teeth, feed myself, or pick up a pen. I feel stronger in my body,  but I am spending a lot of time bored out of my mind in bed, because I have a sore arse from sitting in the wheelchair. I have an electric wheelchair now, which means I am more independent and can get around the ward, into the day room and into the garden, if it is not raining. But as I say, sitting for long periods, with all my body weight on my arse, is not something I’ve got used to. So I am back in bed a lot of the time, which is incredibly boring and depressing. But I have been told that I will leave here on the December 20th, to go home, where I hope I will receive care and attention for much of the day. I am obviously looking forward to going home at last, and being with Isabella full time, back in the neighbourhood, but I am apprehensive at the same time. I will keep you informed.
Your loving writer,
Hanif
When I first got permanently sick, a very strange thing happened.
Some of my friends rallied round and expressed their support. I am grateful for that, as I am not very good at asking for help. They would tell me they had looked up my condition on Wikipedia, and they would make allowances for me, and keep an eye on me over stretches of bad days and weeks.
Then there were other people to whom I was close, who in the wake hearing my diagnosis drifted away, and who I haven't spoken to since. I took it personally at the time, and I suppose that it is personal when somebody picks one of your darkest moments to severe a mutual friendship.
In time, I learned to let them go and not to ponder too much upon their whys and wherefores. I know there some people who do not like to be around others who are sick. It unsettles them. Perhaps it unearths bad memories. I sympathise up to a point. Having had two friends suffer unpleasant deaths (one violent) as a result of alcohol abuse, I find it difficult to be around others who are engaged in their own struggle with substance addiction. I want to be supportive, and know that I should be, but it is hard for me.
In other cases I have come to accept that maybe these fading friendships were less robust, or otherwise more precariously weakened than I thought they were. The beginning of a new chapter in my life was all the impetus that was needed for these people to call time, in the same way that you can put down a book at the end of a chapter and never feel the urge to pick it up again.
My indirect experience of patients who have been in long-term rehab and who have subsequently returned to their homes is that, in many cases, they improve dramatically. It makes sense that, having been ensconced in the artificial environment of a hospital, a return to a familiar setting, albeit changed by your long absence, allows you to rejoin the life that you left behind and better define your future. The ongoing presence of friends and family seems to have a bolstering impact upon post-inpatient recovery.
On the other side of the coin, it marks the point where life begins again. Where you have to make some kind of peace with your condition and work inside such constraints, while at the same time gently pushing against these boundaries.
As with all things in life, it helps to be both optimistic and realistic. There is a somewhat controversial, but very well-liked, and at heart honourable and decent, Internet personality, who is terminally ill. Nobody knows the cause. Everything that can go wrong with a human body seems to be happening to him at once. There appears to be no hope and it seems now that the end is approaching.
Despite his failing body, I have never encountered a more cheerful human being, and I have worked around some very upbeat stage-four cancer patients. Recently, he garnered reams of pleasure from putting up outdoor Halloween decorations over a month early, and then tormenting another controversial Internet personality who took umbrage at this premature celebration of the season, even monetising the rage of his critic and sinking the profits into additional candy and raffle prizes for the trick or treaters in his neighbourhood.
Whenever I find myself low in mood, I think of that man and his upbeat attitude to life in the face of a slow and unpleasant death. By the end of 2024, if not this year, he will gone. There are plans, that I hope will come to fruition, to cremate his body, and turn it into fertiliser that will be used to grow potatoes, that, in turn, will be distilled to make vodka.
Going home is always good. Your writing voice always sounds so strong and wholesome. That voice is sending the vibrations to your physical body slowly but surely looking for synchronisation. I always look forward to reading your observations and stories . You are loved by many