'The short-faced bear is an extinct ancient bear that lived in North America 11,000 years ago. They were extremely large bears, weighing more than 1 ton (1000 kg) and standing up to 12 feet (3.7 m) tall. Despite their enormous stature, the bear could run up to 40 miles per hour (64km per hour).' Source
'For generations, Plains Indians drew pictographs to document their daily experiences.' Source
Image from article 'The visions of artists with epilepsy: Implications for neuroscientists'
In 2011 I was diagnosed with epilepsy. An earlier version of this post originally appeared at Nourishing Obscurity in 2014; (I think) that original post has been lost in NO's technical problems.
I have decided that it should be posted again because my 'journey' has reached the happy conclusion of me being now free of epileptic seizures.
Part one below is my archived copy of that blog exactly as it appeared originally so references to specific dates or times are to be read as being 'as if' eight years ago.
Part two is an account of how I came to be cured and should be read as a separate chapter.
Woke up this morning on the kitchen floor, which was odd because I had already woken up half an hour earlier in bed and come downstairs for breakfast.
Doc said I had a sudden fall in blood pressure which prompted my own sudden fall. He also said: ‘Sorry I can’t do anything for your cupboard door.’
Fortunately my head is harder than that door. I’ll see him next week for another check. Meanwhile he changed my BP tablets.
At first the GP thought it might be related to my blood pressure and subsequently I saw a cardiologist at one of the local hospitals.
After a brain scan, an EEG (twice), an ECG and an Echocardiogram and after much consultation it seems that I have some form of epilepsy.
Now I am trying to understand what is happening and how best to deal with it so what follows are a few of my thoughts on this malaise and an attempt to describe what it feels like during what the doctor calls an episode. Over the past year I have read a lot of material on neuroscience and related subjects so I almost know what I am talking about.
Currently I am under the care (if that is the right word) of a consultant neurologist and fortunately for me she turns out to be one of the leading specialists in epilepsy. That doesn't stop me 'discussing' my condition with her. "You don't normally do what you are told" she said last week but I do, I do...eventually.
The difference is that I am looking at this from the inside, as it were, and unless she has experienced a similar 'episode' then she must rely entirely on testimony from her patients to which she then applies her considerable experience and knowledge.
Following the first falling down, there have been other episodes over the past eighteen months or so. There is no regular pattern to them and they do not always result in the classic seizure prompting loss of consciousness. The doctor explained that they tend to come in clusters and that seems to be what is happening.
One of the indications prior to a seizure is a moment of 'hyper-reality' which is how I would describe it rather than 'déjà vu' which is the usual expression but, to me, that is something entirely different. It is more like a clarity of perception or as Wordsworth wrote-
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem.
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
Awaking from the subsequent loss of consciousness there might be a brief period of confusion but not always. Sometimes this can be minimal and at other times it can be profound. Normally it would be a case of 'where am I?' and on one occasion it was 'who am I?' and where others might have had a fear of loss of identity it just aroused in me a bemused curiosity.
A typical episode would include a bout of 'intensive' thinking followed by a surge of energy through the body and breaking out into a sweat and then it subsides.
There is no regular pattern in all this; symptoms can occur singly or in combination and I have come to believe that it is triggered in some way by my thinking. I can be aware of the 'overcharged' intense thinking whilst following my thought process but at the same time I am also aware of observing this state as if I had two centres of consciousness.
Two examples:
1) Watching the BBC4 programme about Electricity I had quite a big surge/shiver of energy and sweating while I was following the narrative.
It occurred to me that my feelings were not unlike what happens when a cable/wire/circuit is overloaded; so maybe, as an analogy, my neural networks are being overloaded in some way, generating heat and the surge feeling is a resonance throughout my system?
It happened again at the end of the programme while Jim Al Khalili was demonstrating how a Faraday Suit will allow high voltages to pass over the body and that mirrored what was happening within my body.
2) I was thinking about ringing my cousin to ask about her mother, my father's sister, who had similar symptoms in the years before she died. And just thinking of what I might ask her, the 'energy surge and sweating' started and I was able to curtail it by thinking of something else and waiting until it subsided.
At other times I have been thinking about and trying to understand these episodes and this appears to induce one. I have noted this to the doctor and asked her if it were possible to induce a seizure just by thinking about it but, so far, she reserves judgment on that idea.
And then, for the first time, I fell down outside.
This was in November last as I was on my way to buy the morning papers. Fortunately my neighbour saw what happened and picked me up. One minute I was walking along and then the next thing I remember was regaining consciousness and seeing a slightly out of focus face and feeling his hands supporting me by the shoulders. I have no recollection of falling nor of getting up again. I am told that we had a coherent conversation while I was lying on the ground and how that can be explained is a mystery. How can I be unconscious (as in unaware of my surroundings) and yet conscious (as in being able to have a conversation but without the automatic process of memory formation of that conversation) at the same time?
Then last month I fell down outside the house again but prior to falling I had that 'clarity of perception' mentioned above.
As before, I can't remember falling down or getting up again and there were no witnesses this time. I find it interesting that I got to my feet again without being consciously aware of the action of standing up or of replacing my cap and my glasses. My 'inner zombie' was in control; on autopilot.
There was a moment of slight confusion afterwards so I went back into the house to staunch the wound on my forehead and to change my glasses, having broken the ones I was wearing.
Then I went to see the local GP and she put two stitches in my left eyebrow. (Why am I blessed with such nice lady doctors?)
Some further thoughts on the feeling of 'déjà vu' or 'hyper-reality' are expressed in these words and they are a reasonably accurate description of what I have experienced-
Everything.....is Brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within. All colours are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and....the mind's capacity for recognizing fine distinctions of tone and hue is notably heightened.
Somewhat alarmingly that was what Aldous Huxley felt and saw after taking mescalin!
So my brain is spontaneously and for a few brief seconds generating a chemical process which mimics the effects of psychedelic drugs.
Or is it?
Because I had exactly the same hyperreal effect when I was drawing this picture. My subconscious took over completely to the point where the class tutor said she was going to demonstrate some technique and I wanted to get up and watch but I couldn't move, so 'locked-in' was I in the process of looking at and drawing the subject before me. That was a very weird experience and it has me searching for some way of explaining it.
I woke up on the floor of the dining room and I was staring through past the double doors into the kitchen. The sun was streaming in through both windows and I didn't have a single thought in my head; I was just lying there. When I say not a single thought I mean the constant internal chattering had ceased, no words, only an awareness of the image before my eyes. I don't know how long I was lying there but eventually I stirred myself and got up to sit at the dining table. And then the brain started to function and I thought "I must have fallen over again."
This latest 'episode' happened shortly after my medication had been increased to 4x250mg tablets of Leviteracetam. At first I had been prescribed 2x250mg tablets, subsequently increased to 3 and then 4 as my episodes/seizures continued.
So I rang the hospital and made an appointment to see the neurologist. I explained what had occurred and how this one was different in that there was no immediate thought of 'where am I?' or 'what happened?' which are the usual things as the mind comes back into focus. She said that I would probably need to increase the medication again but she wasn't sure by how much and she would let me know.
I did not mention that I had noticed that adding the third tablet had preceded a seizure as had this fourth one but I was not sure if there was a connection or not. Surely not, the medication is supposed to 'cure' me or, at the very least, to mitigate the effects of the malaise? And I recalled reading that nobody knew how Leviteracetam worked, only that it was an effective treatment. I did ask her that question at a previous consultation but her answer was suitably vague because neither she nor anyone else knew the answer.
It was the same in our first meeting when I asked "What is the cause of epilepsy?" The answer at that time was that nobody knows the cause or causes but they know what can trigger a seizure; the strobe lighting effect is the 'trigger' that everyone knows, we often hear warnings on TV news reports - 'contains flash photography'.
So I returned home and waited for the 'verdict' to arrive in the post. It was three weeks before the letter arrived and when I read it I just went"Wha....!!! NO! That can't be right!"
She had recommended a doubling of the tablets to eight per day instead of four. I sat down and thought about it and after a few days and bearing in mind that I had a suspicion that the tablets were helping to induce the seizures (as noted above) I decided to reduce the tablets to three per day and then wait to see what would happen.
It is well established that antibiotics have lost their effectiveness thanks to their being overprescribed. And the same goes for painkillers, valium, ritalin and many more. Does the same thing happen to essential prescription medications? (I do not consider painkillers to be essential. I have never taken any nor have I ever been prescribed antibiotics.) How many prescription drugs lose their effectiveness over time as the body assimilates them? How many eventually become a problem as the body's immune system must be compromised in some way by constant use of what to the immune system are 'foreign' substances?
So having gone back to three tablets per day I waited to see what would happen.
For three months nothing happened, the longest spell without any seizure or any hint of a seizure, without all or any of the preamble described in part one earlier. I went back to the hospital to see the doctor for a previously arranged appointment after those three months. I explained how I had reduced the medication and why. She was not amused and, to be fair, she had a point. I was disregarding her advice which was tantamount to questioning her professional expertise and integrity. But I explained my reasoning and we had another long discussion about how there were so many unknowns in the field of neurology, something she had already acknowledged even in our first meeting.
So it was agreed that I would continue along my chosen path and a further appointment was made for three months hence. Those further three months passed without incident and in the next consultation she agreed to gradually reduce further the tablets and I did that until I reached a point where I finally stopped the tablets completely which I think was in 2015, I can't recall exactly when. And so far, seven years later, there has been no relapse nor even the hint of a relapse.
Am I cured? I don't know but I am seizure free and that is the most important thing.
So how did I do it? Again I don't know but I will say that psychosomatic illness is an acknowledged medical fact and I must assume that psychosomatic wellness is also a medical fact although an unacknowledged one. It needs to be more widely known and promoted.
Here is Jeanne Achterberg talking to Jeffrey Mishlove about "imagery in healing" and how what, in sports psychology, is known as 'visualisation' can be used by anyone to promote their own well-being. That is not to say that presciption medication should be abandoned but they are not necessarily the only route back to wellness, as I have satisfactorily demonstrated to myself at least.
And anyhow the body seemed perfectly well able to look after itself. In reality, of course, it always does look after itself. All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all. When it does anything more - when it tries too hard, for example, when it worries, when it becomes apprehensive about the future - it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and may even cause the devitalized body to fall ill.
In the book Irreducible Mind, professor Ed Kelly writes that the brain is permanently on the edge of instability
"....neurotransmitter molecules are released into the synaptic cleft. The release is triggered by arrival of calcium ions at critical sites in the transmitter storage areas, the vesicles. But as these small ions pass through their membrane channels (diameter circa 1 nanometer) their positions becomes nearly fixed; hence, by Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, what happens next must be represented as a cloud of possible trajectories in the vicinity of the vesicle. This injection of a true quantum uncertainty - that is, an uncertainty involving more than incomplete knowledge of classically conceived details - goes on constantly at every one of the trillions of active synapses in the waking human brain, and this by itself is sufficient to establish that the brain is subject to quantum principles. This necessary entry of quantum uncertainties is also consistent with the findings of dynamic system theorists, who emphasize that in the waking state the brain operates continually on the edge of instability, with small changes in input potentially leading to large changes in overall behaviour. (p. 612)." http://www.amazon.co.uk/Irreducible-Mind-Toward-Psychology-Century/dp/1442202068
Folly Farm in Berkshire, a Jekyll, Lutyens garden being restored by Dan Pearson, one of the best current garden designers.
I was rifling through a pile of old gardening books looking for inspiration when one of my favourite tomes came to the surface, Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden and soon became engrossed in that Edwardian age of style, both from the point of view of house and garden. It was also a reminder that with another 800 house estate being approved nearby we are losing both style and space in increasing amounts; what constitute a home these days is little more than the old terraces provided in Victorian times.
The book is assembled from the archives of Country Life magazine, the choice of dentists waiting rooms or was. It is as much about Gertrude Jekyll’s association with Edwin Lutyens as it is about gardens: his houses compliment her gardens and vice versa. It is hard to envisage such glorious abodes and surrounds these days. Miss Jekyll's own house Munstead Wood was designed by Lutyens and was described by her a small house with plenty of room?
The house was built on 15 acres of land adjoining her parents' home which they purchased for her, though small is not a word one would use to describe it today. It was large and expensive to build: £4000 in 1897, that equates to around £365,000 in today's money, for a large country house in fifteen acres near Godalming, Surrey that would buy today a one-bedroomed flat. Land and labour were cheap then and even Lutyens being the architect was included in the price, see below what that price gained you in 1897 and weep.
This is the courtyard aspect; it is much bigger from the front, but this is the most appealing side to the house:
And below is the Wood Hut in which she lived whilst the house was being built. That is also still there, it all gives an insight into the type of living for the few during that elegant age.
The Wood Hut
It would be easy to fill pages with pictures of Mr Lutyens' glorious country homes, most in the arts and crafts style. All had or used local stone brick and wood as part of the brief and all were harmonious with the surroundings and Miss Jekyll's inspired plantings. Lutyens himself laid out many of the garden designs and Gertrude filled in the planting areas with her plant layouts.
Her palettes of colour are still used in today's designs or adaptations to the modern versions that account for restrictions on size, as very few today can accommodate four-hundred-foot flower borders, as she herself had at Munstead Wood. Her use of grey leafed plants was not something of the age but later designers have used that part of her planning in increasing amounts.
This example is at Hestercombe in Somerset, a garden that was considered to be the pinnacle of Lutyens layouts with wonderful long pergolas and rills; the planting by Jekyll was the perfect complement:
Gertrude Jekyll was very late to garden design design and plants. She had grown up a mainly solitary child with two brothers away at school and an elder sister who married and lived in Venice. Her desire was to be a painter and inspired by Ruskin and Turner she she went to art school in South Kensington, the use of colour was to come to good effect when she started to plan garden layouts.
She was also very interested in the crafts and did more than just paint on her travels to Europe, Algeria and the Levant. She produced embroidery metal objects, carving, gilding and photography all of which stimulated her later colour and design in gardens.
A couple of small designs for friends were followed by designing the garden for her parents at Munstead House; it was here that she learnt her craft, admitting to mistakes that would stand her in good stead when she moved next door and designed her own garden.
Even at this stage she suffered from poor eyesight, something that would blight her later years but it never stopped her working. After Munstead Wood her long association with Lutyens would produce a hundred gardens and four hundred in total over the course of her life. As well as designing she wrote profusely for Country Life and other publications to the total of over a thousand articles, not all gardening but including the arts and crafts she was so fond of, and managed to write fifteen gardening books as well as running a nursery later at Munstead Wood. Even at the age of 86 just two years before her death and nearly blind she wrote 43 articles for Garden Illustrated in the one year.
The Lutyens association was one of those that defy the usual norms. Both just seemed to work together as though it was a single business and it produced some of the most sumptuous buildings and gardens of any era.
Lutyens' work extended beyond the country house and the Arts and Crafts style, and included many memorials including the one everyone knows, the Cenotaph. The list below gives many of his works here and abroad, but there are many others, some now no longer standing.
By coincidence Lutyens studied architecture at the very same South Kensington School of Art that Jekyll attended and they met only a few years after he started practice. As an aside he designed several buildings for the then Midland Bank for whom my wife worked; she always remembers going to head office in Poultry in the city of London and describing the amazing interior; it survives as a Hotel.
Some photos here of before and after its conversion.
Plumpton Place in East Sussex is a building that has origins from 1568. The Jekyll-Lutyens association was to restore and rebuild the house and gardens, which had fallen into disrepair, after their purchase by the founder of Country Life, Edward Hudson. This was no mean undertaking as the old moated property needed substantial works. Lutyens rebuilt with taste and added some other buildings and additions; Jekyll had the 60 acres of gardens and lakes to attend to.
Jekyll was eighty-five by the time this project came along and her eyesight was so bad it was a miracle she could work with the information forwarded and come up with planting suggestions in such detail and at such short notice. When all the detailed plans were in Hudson asked for all the plants suggested to be delivered including a few thousand columbines and two thousand of a particular Iris; this was planting on the grand scale, not something seen very often these days in the private sector.
The property went through several ownerships subsequently and was the interest of George Harrison and Patti Boyd but the owner refused to sell to them. A few years later it was sold to one Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame who lived there till 1980 - the double height music room would have appealed:
Several of the houses and gardens during this long collaboration became almost a template for the age. Lutyens moved on from the Arts and Crafts architecture of the period, but Jekyll’s designs continued. Later the style became less popular and many of the gardens were lost forever, including her own at Munstead Wood - she never made any arrangements for it to be continued after her death, believing gardens are a transient thing, but in the end her means to look after the house and gardens had dwindled after the Great War and she could not afford the staff to maintain it all and it became overgrown and the house no longer was updated.
Fortunately the garden survives in a smaller form; the rest including the Hut was sold off in parcels so it is all there but not whole.
Her style as I said became an anachronism, yet it remains one of the most important periods of garden design and planting; the colour palettes are still used by a majority of garden designers and her grey themes are very much in vogue again.
Visiting Lutyens properties is not that difficult but few are open to the public: the Lutyens Trust lists those that are, others are occasionally open under local charity status; and Jekyll's gardens are in a similar status including Munstead Wood.
There are a few Youtube videos showing gardens by Jekyll and the houses of Lutyens; not all the gardens are as they were, but they give a fair picture of the original schemes.
Munstead Wood:
Le Bois des Moutiers - this French property was redesigned by Lutyens and Jekyll designed the gardens, a rare venture outside the UK:
Vann, in Surrey:
Hestercombe, Somerset:
Lindisfarne:
And a short BBC Teach about Jekyll:
Gertrude Jekyll at Deanery Court, a collaboration with Lutyens
Music this week from the Gipsy Kings. Can't remember where or when I first heard them, it must have been thirty years ago. Doesn't time fly!
From the Wikipedia entry -
"The group members of the Gipsy Kings were born in France but their parents were mostly gitanos, Spanish Romani who fled Spain during the 1930s Spanish Civil War. They are known for bringing rumba flamenca, a pop-oriented music distantly derived from traditional flamenco music, to worldwide audiences. The group originally called itself Los Reyes."
The Conservative government's decision to impose a 'pay pause' on public sector workers and override decisions by third part arbitration bodies (see more on Broad Oak for 6 January) continued to cause trouble in industrial relations.
On 29 January 1962 there was an unofficial one-day strike by railway workers on parts of the London Underground and 'the South-Eastern Division of the Southern Region, where about 40 per cent. of normal services were run during the peak hours,' the Minister of Transport (Ernest Marples) reported to Parliament. Commuters were forced to find other ways to get to and from work.
'The worst day for London traffic since the invention of the motor car' was the result of Monday's one-day token strike by railwaymen on the Underground and on British Railways Southern Region. Mr. Gunter, the 'shadow' Minister of Labour, told the strikers that they were wrong and doing their cause harm, and the Government that it had lied to the railway- men and cheated them. At 8.45 that evening (according to a letter from a Liberal MP to the Times) there were six Conservative MPs in the House to take part in the debate on industrial relations and the transport crisis. Mr. Gaitskell told Mr. Woodrow Wyatt that his idea of a Liberal-Labour pact to fight the Tories at the next election was a red herring that had become a dead duck. The post office workers ended their work-to-rule.'
At that time the railways were administered by the British Transport Commission, which had its own financial difficulties - 'Rising costs, industrial action and competition from road traffic meant that the British Transport Commission was in financial trouble by 1955.' The Commission was replaced with new authorities under the Transport Act 1962 with effect from September 1962.
Labour MP Ray Gunter argued in Parliament that industrial relations were not only a matter of the ethical treatment of workers but had implications for morale affecting British competitiveness as we headed towards membership of the European Common Market:
'Do the Government ever stop to think how our industries are to be geared to the European market if we are to go in? How are we to keep pace with modern techniques if there is to be bitterness, sourness and frustration? if the men whose aid we wish to call upon have been soured, how can we expect to achieve results?'
30 January: 'Fourteen of the 21 member states of the Organization of American States voted to oust Cuba. Six other nations abstained, and Cuba voted against the resolution, which barely passed by a 2/3rds majority.'
'In what became known as the "Tanganyika laughter epidemic", three students at a girls' boarding school in the Tanzanian village of Kashasha began laughing, and other students reacted. Within six weeks, 95 of the school's 159 students were laughing uncontrollably, and on March 18, the school closed and sent the pupils back to their home villages. The mass reaction spread to the villages of Nshamba, Ramanshenye, and Kanyangereka and affected hundreds of people before halting in 1963.'
1 February: 'U.S. President Kennedy delivered "the first presidential message entirely devoted to public welfare", proposing that federal aid to the poor be extended to include job training programs and day care for children of working parents.'
'The Soviet Union and Ghana ratified a $42,000,000,000 trade pact, with Soviet engineers to assist in the construction of new industries and railroad lines in the West African nation.'
2 February: 'Three U.S. Air Force officers were killed when their Fairchild C-123 Provider became the first USAF plane to be lost in Vietnam, as the U.S. carried out Operation Ranch Hand. The cause of the crash was not determined, although the concern, that it was shot down by Communist insurgents, led to orders that the defoliant spraying aircraft receive a fighter escort.'
'Pope John XXIII announced the date for "Vatican II", the first worldwide conclave of the Roman Catholic Church in almost 100 years, to begin in Rome on October 11.'
'The last underground shift was worked at the colliery in Radcliffe, Northumberland.'
'The Soviet Union conducted its very first underground nuclear test. Previously, the Soviets had conducted all of its atomic and hydrogen bomb explosions in the atmosphere, including more than fifty since ending a moratorium on testing.'
3 February: 'The United States embargo against Cuba was announced by President Kennedy, prohibiting "the importation into the United States of all goods of Cuban origin and all goods imported from or through Cuba". Presidential Proclamation 3447 was made pursuant to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, "effective 12:01 A.M., Eastern Standard Time, February 7, 1962."'
'At 7:05 am Indian Standard Time (0135 UTC), a "doomsday period" (as predicted by Hindu astrologers, began. It was reported that the astrologers had predicted that on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, the earth would be "bathed in the blood of thousands of kings" because of the alignment of six planets, the Earth, the Sun and the Moon. In Britain, Aetherias Society director Keith Robertson spent February 4th awaiting disaster along with many of the society's members. He had forecast that "very soon the world will do a 'big flip' when the poles will change places with the equator... 75 percent of the world's population will be killed", but the alignment and eclipse ended without any notable disaster.'
UK chart hits, week ending 3 February 1962 (tracks in italics have been featured previously)
