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Tuesday February 21st

Here's another allotment picture: Stan is very keen his contraption for growing beans be shared with the world, so great and innovative is it's design. We call it Bean-Stick Bothy:

he double dug the trench, and treated it to sandwiches of horse shit, bone meal and chicken crap.

He's making dinner tonight.

Saturday February 18th

We've spent the day at the allotment, so here's a selection of pictures which will make visible the brilliantness of this little bit of land we can almost call ours. We've planted five trees - three apple varieties, a morello cherry and a victoria plum. Stan is effervescently optimistic about their future. After the trauma of lugging huge clods of earth about while digging the trees little beds, I spent a few contented hours tidying up the rhubarb bed. Somehow I equate digging up huge dockan roots with enjoyment. Compared with the heavy-duty digging Stan does, making out I'm a weak baby makes good sense.

southern wing of our shed, Vratch Heights.

our stove and pantry

old railway fire which heats up Vratch Heights marvellously, so long as you chuck in sticks every 10 minutes. Surely this didn't power the trains of old?

the 'work top' with uh-huh-huh deck chair

old milk cartons Stan cuts up to make name tags - what a clever chap!

I think he must've pinched this blackboard during a daring raid on a darts club. It's for reminders of when to plant he tells me: note to self - buy him delightfully-coloured chalks & use them myself to draw faces and bums, like a bairn.

a small selection of tools left by the previous tennant of Wirrit Glen.

A glimpse of Stan having swirled his compost. We collect our veg scraps in the little green bucket he's clutching. He is somewhat obsessive about it.

He has put up 12 bird boxes: some are specific to bird species like this Tit box.

useful collection of tubes.

ah - lunch. We normally have it an hour after arriving at Wirrit Glen: sandwiches and tea outside cause me too much excitement to wait until actually hungry.

Here's the allotment...

my mercy me it's getting some exciting at Wirrit Glen. Sunday we spent the day digging in horse shit

November 3rd 2005

What has this come to: polka.mittens - my respite from the world where I could indulge my pretensions mightily is now a place from which I hide mightily. This entry smacks of high-tech sock-drawer tidying and similar procrastinating actions. Yes, there's an exam tomorrow for which I'm woefully under prepared. Microbiology...What's disappointing is that I started studying 6 weeks ago. Cue many complex mind map diagrams of the differences betwixt gram negative & gram positive bacteria. These pictures became highly involved, and I fitted in details about antibiotic therapy, cell wall properties and other such gems. The shitty fact now remains, as I sit here shaky from too much tea and cottage cheese, that yet again I'll enter the exam room hoping for a fire alarm to go off, or that I develop a short-lived case of whooping cough (Bordetella pertussis to you).

Even more wonderful is Stan & I's reincarnation as gardeners. In a 1-bedroomed top-floor flat? Yes...with an allotment in the shadow of banana-hued social deprivation in Springburn: to clarify - we've got an allotment now, and it's in the north of the city in an area called Springburn. Overlooking the allotments are four yellow skyscrapers. Yellow-brick road to where?

This part of Glasgow is classified by the Public Health Institute of Scotland as being in postcode area G21 3. The data about this area can be found here: men living here can expect to die 11.6 years earlier than those living in Hyndland, a part of the West End which is no more than 10 minutes away by car. The percentage of people in Springburn rating their health as 'not good' is 79% above the Scottish average (as we stroll along to our allotment bearing organic horse shit & rare onion seeds); in Hyndland (2 minutes from where I stay), that figure is 50% below the average.

Morbidity figures tell of real social deprivation and dis-inclusion. In Springburn, the percentage of those admitted to hospital for alcohol-related reasons is 71% above the Scottish average (Hyndland is 53% below), and levels of breast feeding at 6-8 weeks are similarly polarised: Hyndland mums get the breast is best message - the level here is 128% above the Scottish average. Meanwhile, levels of breastfeeding at this stage of development are 59% below the average in Springburn.

Here 's a pub near our allotment:

But wait! This is Glasgow!

This really is a mean city - divided by minutes, yet those babies being breast fed 10 minutes to the north will potentially die younger and will continue with learned health behaviours which will only compound the statistical probabilities of geography. This is the challenge for us new nurses-in-training.

As an aside - look at the gate to your vegetable-kingdom-to-be: Stan really is handy.

any gardening tips?

August 7th 2005

The milk of human kindness,” I said.
“Is just a sour smelly stain on the maternity bra of life”.

Read Bonfire of the Insanities.

Dignity - a great song by my old favourites, Deacon Blue. I bought one of their albums - on tape - when I got my first tape player for my own room. Mrs. D. was with me at the time: her face, in my memory as I bought that tape, along with a Phil Collins one, is a picture of disdainful tact. Before that I'd made do with mum's collection of LPs & at that point of the early 90s, space-age CDs.

The ghettoblaster - as I then had to call it - (ghetto-anything in Orkney is a bit cringey) was about 2 foot long. It had huge clunky buttons which to me were straight from the future: a relic from the original Star Trek set more like. It had 'surround sound' and 'x-bass'. When these buttons were pressed, the tinny-ness diminished only slightly. Nevertheless, I loved it, and made a stand for it: two wooden mini-crates of the sort tangerines are packed in at Christmas. They were made fit for their purpose with a spot of decoration: one - a green/blue swirlyness with 'sea of death' painted in orange above the clarted-on waves; the other with some crappy potato-print stencil gone horrible wrong. When I see backwards, the sea-crate is there: the other one is a horrific squidge representing my would-be artistic tendencies. These new additions to my burnt orange and najavo-print bedroom worked well.

Forgive me while I continue to look back - I shall get to my point eventually (click here to skip the following). Yes, my bedroom circa 1991: a rather pretentious child - little change there! - , I thought it good to adorn my bedroom with flotsam & jetsam, literally. There were dreels of cork floaters, of the sort that drift off fishermens' creels. Sea-washed globules of old glass arranged in glass boxes meant as the dainty resting place for pot pourri. A rabbit's spine, all the vertebrae lovingly fused together with blu-tack, mounted on a large tongue of driftwood. A nightmare to dust all in all.

My mum still has on her wall a picture frame I made her out of wood scavenged from the Rackwick shore, collected as I sang along to some dour grungy band, feeling misunderstood and deliberately miserable: a time in my life my lovely Mum & her friend A fondly refer to as the 'Brown Period' due to my habit of wearing an ill-fitting old man's brown cord jacket.

I'd a load of books, which I would change the order of on my shelves: arranged by author, arranged by alphabet, or - the ingenuity! - arranged by publishing house: as if one day I'd say, 'by jove, I really fancy a HarperCollins today'.

My purpose here was to investigate not my interior decorating hell, but to look at the issue of dignity for a patient on a hospital ward.

I'm going to mention a patient whose name I shall say is Dora. Dora is approaching 90 and has had a left-sided stroke which has left her unable to move her right side. Her communication and swallowing abilities have been severely compromised by this. She is doubly incontinent and so is at a great risk of her skin breaking down. To counteract this, she is helped to change position every couple of hours; at this point her incontinence pad is changed. Thursday night, she was to catheterised. This procedure would ensure she would not have to undergo the loss of dignity of being incontinent of urine, and thus her skin integrity could be ensured.

Dora, terrified, used all the strength she had in her legs to tell what her mouth couldn't: she was dying from the humiliation. I know not whether she understood what purpose the procedure was going to serve her. Is it better then that a patient undergoes the slow-burn loss of dignity from constant incontinence, or that the patient has to endure a highly stressful half hour in order that she be spared the regular pad changes & potential for skin breakdown?

I don't know the answer at all. I felt uncomfortable and stupid as I held her hand & stroked her hair, telling her how well she was doing, that it would help her, make her feel more comfortable. Smiling into her eyes I said all this: I would've hated that cheerful face that knew naught of what my life had been, and what it now had become, but that I was doing so well.

August 3rd 2005

Just home: it's 7.41am and the marmalade & low-fat butter clad toast is sooking up my gloom nicely. Had my first dead body to deal with last night.

The patient, who I shall call Zeena, in accordance with the NMC's principles on confidentiality, was an old woman with so many different diseases and infections raging within her it was little wonder she could be heard to yelp 'nurse! HELP ME!!' several times an hour. This is no joke - I was told on my first day just to ignore her, as she actually didn't need help, she was attention seeking. Maybe she was. Once I found her using her wheely side table as a zimmer frame, claiming she couldn't walk. Next hour and her pillows are re-propped up behind her:

"Zeena - are you comfy?"
"Aye, fine"
• decontaminate self & exit isolation room; apply alcohol gel hand rub
"Nurse, help me PLEASE!"

So was her day: yelping and sleeping to gather energy for shouting. There was, I felt, a huge slice of mischief behind her and a few times I could see little crumbs of it as I cared for her daily needs. Trimming her finger nails last week was once such task. The manner in which I was pinged with curvatures of keratin as I manipulated the inadequate hospital scissors through her nails seemed almost deliberate. As we laughed over her digital assault of me, she talked about her dead husbands and son. She wanted to die she said.

So last night, washing and wrapping her up in a sheet was extraordinary. I'd seen my paternal grandfather (called Dad by us kids) lying in the room he'd shared with Granny as he awaited burial. He'd looked the same, only waxier, colder and so far far away. It was a sight that scared me. Dead bodies are actors holding their breath, jaws and cheeks plump, not people who mean the world now gone forever. Seeing Zeena there, a husk of the woman I'd known for so brief a period scared and fascinated me equally. So pliant in death when in life so recalcitrant.

Her right eye opened a crack as I dried her left arm: it was the same look she'd give as you backed out of the room, ready to slather alcohol gel into your hands. The look of 'now, do I need help? How can I get her to stay in here with me'.

Finding a balance for patients like Zeena is something I'm finding very hard: the patient who vocalises their need for more attention may either become a fond favourite of the nurses and carers, or may become thought of as a nuisance. Zeena became the latter in the minds of the staff, and me. Some at my last placement were in the former category, all of us rushing to help. Another patient - A - was thought of as a nuisance; highly anxious and questioning, she was dying from lung and liver metastatic disease, from an unknown source, at the same age as my mother. Being a fresh-faced student nurse, I spent a lot of time with this patient. She affected me and I've learnt better ways of caring and communicating from being able to have the time to talk. That's what scares me about becoming a registered nurse - not having the time to spend with those that need it, like A, like Zeena and like those 'in-between' patients who by virtue of their compliance and self-care, avoid our 'fond favourite/nuisance' detector.

August 1st 2005

In the knowledge that there are 5 weeks until the sunday of my doom (see left), I've been running all week. Saturday morning was the worst run I've ever had: worse even than being out-paced by a tubby 8-year old smoker. A fit of poots once home (I'd to walk the remaining 3 miles of the 8 I'd optimistically decreed I'd do) and I was to be found on the race hot line trying to cancel my entry.

Somehow I now feel I'll fail myself if I don't do it: madness - my hip joints are creaking as it is during the constant grind of pacing wards clutching urine-filled bed pans. I've put on about half a stone since the 10k in may, and with each centimeter I run, it is there: thick deep wobbles round my hips & belly, held in check only when my running breeks are pulled high up my waist, right up into the folds of my crotch.

Nursing's going great: how bizarre it is to look back then forwards, imagining how I'd feel about caring for anything other than where my next packet of fags were going to come from or who was going down the shops to buy the sweeties that were my staple diet along with pizza and curries.

Don't let me make out it's all great. We're being constantly assessed while we're on our placements: how much of my burgeoning nursing skills are inherent, and how much are the cynical performance art of one who knows how to do well? A few years of working in The Flattie, the public bar at the bottom of the Stromness Hotel taught me a lot about communication. Just now - and I must admit to being in a bit of a bad mood at present - I see myself as a confidence trickster: fooling those around me. So what kind of nurse will this writer's next incarnation be? The snappy barmaid? the ratty office worker? Or paranoid and self-indulgent, secretly scoffing a curlywurly bar as I wait for the green man to change?

June 20th 2005

Take this absence as proof that students don't necessarily have it easy. While hardly down the mines day and night, this poor student seems to get little time to herself. Hardly a shame really seeing as I do manage to eak the odd night out here and there...

What horrified me was seeing '8 weeks to the 10k'; an event from some time ago indeed. Rest assured, I completed it in fine time, 53 minutes and 50 seconds. J, my nursing chum has forced me at knife point to enroll for the half marathon on the 4th of september. If I can get free bananas and cereal bars like we did after the 10k I shall be most chuffed.

As I have a tendency towards blustering and indignant responses to mildly annoying events, I've been a bit of a pompous git these past few days. Today, the arrival of yet another post service blunder saw me bustling up a hill, the shortcut to the sorting office. Internally I practiced my 'that'll show them' monologue which was to go this way:

• me: Sir, this is card states I have ignored previous indications of my parcel having arrived. I can assure you (peer to read name badge), that I most certainly would not fail to pick up a package were I actually informed one was awaiting my attention. What's more, I have noticed a pattern, and find your service to be inconsistent and lacking due care and attention. May I have an official complaints form?
• postie: Oh Ms.Groundwater, please accept my apologies and two books of first class stamps. Rest assured this will never happen again.
• me: Thank you post man, you are an excellent representative of your trade.

Reality was that I was left mouthing and huffing as the postie dismissed me saying 'aw.. riite'. At £5.60 per hour, he didn't give a toss.

The week previously I had a phonecall which garnered a similar response.

• call centre person: Ah, hello is that Mrs. Groundwater?
• me: Erm, yes.
• call centre person: Hello. How are you this evening? [micro pause] I am calling from the Well Woman Project based in Manchester, you might have heard of us? [micro pause] We are based on NHS statistics about the prevalence of breast and ovarian cancer in women of your age and so we're calling everyone from the ages of 19 to 49..
• me: Are you an NHS-funded body?
• call centre person: Er, no
• me: Are you seeing to make money out of this?
• call center person: Er, well we are an insurance company offering women in your situation the opportunity to provide for their loved-ones should they be affected by cancer.
• me: Eh, excuse me but I really do not appreciate this phone call. You are making out you're an NHS body when in fact you're attempting to frighten me and others like me into taking out your policy.

What a cynical maneuver: this one got me so bloody angry that Stan had to listen to me rant for quite some time. Should you get a similar call, just hang up.