Owenwatch:

I saw him tonight and he wanted you to know he has a new morphine machine, the last one was acting up a bit. He is at the stage where the shock of the new has worn off and the adrenalin/fear of the upcoming operation has gone... so boredom is beginning to creep into his day. Sleep has been difficult at night too. The ward bay he is in has only 6 beds and the past two nights have seen a new patient being admitted around 3am each time! Oh and the Alter Kocker in the end bed talks to himself all night.

It now looks like he won't be out till Monday, the troublesome disc has caused more internal damage than was originally thought so the surgeon wants to keep him in for a bit longer to make sure he's responding as he should.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is a big day.. he is going to attempt to stand for the first time since the op... say a prayer to your personal Jesus.

On other matters...

Just finished reading Jill Dawson's WATCH ME DISAPPEAR which is about Tina, a woman in her 40s, returning for her brother's wedding to the Cambridgeshire village where she grew up. Inspired by the Soham schoolgirl case of a few years ago the book tells of Tina being haunted by the memory of her best friend at primary school who disappeared one summer afternoon and was never seen again. She also cannot shake the gnawing fear that her own father might have the murderer.

Dawson certainly conjures up the strange sunlit world of a ten year old girl that contains the long shadows of sexual curiosity and unspoken family tension. She also captures the limbo of guilt and unresolved feelings that Tina feels at her friend - who she had recently had a falling-out with - disappearing yet being present in the newspapers and television re-invention of her personality. This all comes to a head when Tina is asked by the police to "be" her friend in a televised reconstruction of the girl's last known journey.

So there was I, being quietly gripped by the narrative and in particular the spot-on evocation of growing up in the early 1970s when suddenly there it was, staring out at me on page 195...

"...cutting out pictures of Clodagh Rogers winning the Eurovision Song Contest..."

OI DAWSON NO!
Clodagh RoDgers didn't win bloody Eurovision!!

I should know... I was watching the bloody thing through teary eyes.

Now over the years I have learnt to gloss over cultural references in books or tv shows where an actor or a film are muddled up - but it's hardly like Eurovision isn't well referenced on the damn internet.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.