Lessons from the master JR Worsley

When I am teaching, as I have been recently over a busy two weeks in Beijing, a question I am asked often serves as a reminder of some important incident which took place during my training or my early years as a practitioner, which I now see set me thinking quite differently about my practice.  Each of these incidents proved a catalyst, opening up new directions to my thoughts.  I am surprised to find how many such important events have occurred in my acupuncture life, and appreciate now that without them I would not have made the often unconventional detours I did.  Much of my development as a five element acupuncturist, and reflected now in my writings, has been based on what could be considered the rather unconventional approach I have adopted when measured against that of many of my peers.

I have often thought that the tone was firmly set early on when I was asked to teach an evening class about acupuncture at a London evening institute at a time well before complementary practices were in such common use as they are today.  This was also when I had only just qualified.  It meant that I was free to develop my own thoughts about my practice unhampered by others, since there weren’t any others around doing what I was doing.  I found myself talking about five element acupuncture to a very wide range of lay people, and therefore had to couch my thoughts in very general terms, rather than assume that my audience and I spoke the common language familiar to all acupuncturists.  I taught at several of these institutes during the first few years of my practice, allowing the differing groups of people who came to my classes to influence how I expressed myself and how far what I was learning from my practice could be translated into a language they could all understand, from the builder, the retired postman, the young student, the bank clerk and the unemployed people who crowded into my classes evening after evening.

This allowed me a freedom to be cherished, something I did not realise until later, for I was able to develop my own ideas quite independently of other professional acupuncturists, and quite unhampered or inhibited by opinions about the practice of acupuncture which might well have differed from mine.  When I rejoined my fellow acupuncturists two years later as part of my first advanced training course under JR Worsley, I brought the often rather odd ideas I had developed into my time with him, a time which proved to be the most exhilarating of all my years of acupuncture training.  It also proved to be a time of heightened tension in the five element world as it coincided with JR Worsley’s own fight to keep the college he had nurtured so carefully for the past 20 years untainted by the introduction of other less traditional forms of acupuncture as he felt strongly it would be.  Eventually he lost this fight and had to resign, and this led almost directly to my starting the School of Five Element Acupuncture (SOFEA) with the express intention of continuing his work of spreading the practice of this branch of acupuncture, and often, to my delight, with his active support.

I took every opportunity I could to observe JR in his interactions with patients, and was fortunate that the time of my postgraduate training with him coincided with his last years at Leamington. There was therefore a rather febrile atmosphere at the Leamington college during my last years there, with acupuncturists lining up on one side or the other of unfortunately an increasingly hostile divide.  Sensing this, I made every effort to stay as close to JR as I could, attending all his seminars and taking many patients to private consultations with him.  I view these few final years at Leamington as forming my own personal apprenticeship to the master of five element acupuncture.

It was during this period of intense activity that I experienced many of the seminal moments which have set my acupuncture practice on such a fulfilling course.  In particular I am now enjoying reliving some of the profound lessons I learnt when studying with JR. The first of these occurred when I was sitting in the classroom at the Leamington college during a lunch break watching a video of JR with a patient, in which he was asking the young patient a question.  I remember her looking puzzled, thinking for a minute, and then saying, “I’m not sure how to answer that”.  Unnoticed by me, JR had come into the classroom, and was standing behind me.  I heard him murmur, “Only a II CF would say that”.  Translated into the acupuncture language in common use now this meant that only a Fire person who was Inner Fire (the Small Intestine is given the Roman numeral II in five element acupuncture) would express herself in those terms.  Not only did this teach me a lot about the distinctions to be made between Outer Fire’s much more articulate responses to a question and Inner Fire’s verbal hesitancy as it tries to sort out its thoughts, it also taught me a lot about myself, and has continued to do so over the years, for it has made me, an Inner Fire person, so much clearer to myself.  So, I asked myself, was this the way I respond to questions, with the initial brief air of puzzlement this patient showed, before finally sorting out an answer to give which satisfies the Small Intestine’s need to pass only what is pure on to the Heart?  Now, whenever I try to work out whether a person’s Fire element is that of Inner or Outer Fire, I always draw on the image of this girl’s puzzled face to help me decide.

 

Wood can't afford to have doubts

I was with a Wood friend today and after a few hours in her company I realised that I wanted to ask her an odd question, which was, “Do you ever have doubts?”  I wondered why this question had popped into my mind and realised it was because the hours with her had in a subtle way undermined me.  She seemed so sure of everything she said, stating everything as an established fact.  It was as if I was listening to many statements all having the effect of a pronouncement, a kind of “this is so”, and “that is so” and “that is all there is about it.”

I asked myself why this had thrown me as much as it obviously did, because here I am now half a day later still slightly disturbed.  Mulling this over, as I always do when something happens which throws me off-balance, I realised that the strong certainty with which she talked about things had caught me on the hop by highlighting what I felt were my own uncertainties and making them look liked weaknesses.

If I look carefully at the times when I think of myself as uncertain, it is not in fact the result of weakness, rather the reverse.  It represents merely the necessary time my Inner Fire (Small Intestine) needs to weigh up possible alternatives, because I always have to allow myself to see two sides of every situation.  In contrast to Wood  I am asking myself: “It may be like this, but I must also consider whether it may on the other hand be like this.”  And then my Inner Fire carries on with its ceaseless work of sorting what it is right for the Heart to do.

The Wood element, on the other hand, has other priorities.  Not for Wood is the luxury of weighing up pros and cons.  It is there to get on with things, and its decisions have to be rapid and taken in a “no turning back” kind of spirit.  Once made, these decisions have to be put into effect as soon as possible, and once it has decided what its opinion about anything is, that fixes it, if not for all time, then certainly for the immediate future.  During the time I spent with my Wood friend, I heard many statements of fact which sounded as though they were my friend’s firm opinions.  With each of her emphatic statements I could feel any confidence in my own certainties fading a little, as my Small Intestine tried to take on board what was being so firmly offered as fact.  It often felt itself swayed by these dogmatic statements because it couldn’t give itself enough time to assess whether at heart it agreed with them or not. 

This was another important lesson for me on the differences between Wood’s ability to make decision and my own, and also gave me further insights into Inner Fire’s potential weaknesses, as well as its potential strengths.  These are related to its need always to see the other side of the question and therefore to evaluate the relative merits of the arguments being presented to it.   I feel that Wood has no such hesitations.  Once having made up its mind, that is it.  And as I put it myself, it can’t afford to have doubts, because doubts will hold it back from acting, and action is above all what Wood wants.

Thus do I learn a little more each day about myself, about my Inner Fire and about my relationship to the Wood element.

Adding something to life

One way of viewing the qualities of the elements is to regard them as aspects of ourselves which we can choose to use wisely or unwisely.  They can therefore be seen as placing a responsibility upon us.  Should we not make sure that we use them in a way which adds something to our life rather than detracts from it?  And not just to our life, but to the lives of those around us?

I have always kept on my desk before me a quotation from a very wise old Austrian, Dr Oskar Adler, who I have mentioned before.  He brought into our family a surprising aura of the esoteric which always seemed to sit oddly with our own more practical, down to earth view of life.  And yet he had an important influence over us when I was young, one which had a subtle effect upon me and which slotted almost imperceptibly into my increasing understanding of those very aspects of life summoned forth by my knowledge of acupuncture.  He was a musician and an astrologer, and where I learnt the most from him was by reading his fascinating books on astrology just as I started on my acupuncture  training, for they showed me surprising parallels between the two disciplines, enriching my understanding of the world of the elements, and giving it a wider dimension.

The wise saying of his which has accompanied all my writing over the years is one in which he writes that each of us has a duty, a duty, I repeat, to pass on to the world beyond us whatever we have learnt in whatever form this is and however slight or insignificant this may appear in our own eyes.  These words produced such an echo in my mind, and still do, that they became the impetus to my beginning to write my thoughts down, first in the form of handouts for the students at SOFEA, my acupuncture college, then expanded into one book after another (now six), then into my blogs and now into what I am writing here, which may well become my seventh book.  Without the encouragement his words offered me, I might never have had the courage to write anything at all.

And I believe we owe it to the world to leave it a little bit changed, obviously, we hope, for the better, by the way in which we live our life, and this means not only by producing something creative, such as my writing or a painting or a poem, but by how we live our lives.  Our passing through should cause some perceptible ripples to form on the groundswell of life, rather than for us to die leaving everything around us untouched.  From a five element perspective, such ripples will relate to the specific characteristics bestowed upon us by the elements which form us, since these give a different shape to the flow of life through us, and therefore a different kind of way in which the manner of our passing will impinge upon those around us.

 

 

Horary treatments

Many things have happened during my years of practice which still make me laugh at myself, none more so than my attempts to give my patients what we call horary treatments at the right hour of the day (or night).  The word horary, used as far as I know only in the context of acupuncture now, comes from the Latin word meaning “hour”.  Horary treatments are treatments given at specific times of the day which are seen as having a particular relationship to different elements.  The 24-hour day is divided into six four-hour periods, one specific to each of the elements (two for Fire), and, within these four-hour periods two two-hour periods relating to that element’s yin and yang officials.  Thus the hours from 3 – 7am relate to the Metal element, with 3 – 5am that of the Lung, (often the time of day when people take their last breath), and 5 – 7am that of the Colon (which is why this is an excellent time to empty the bowels ready to take on food between 7 - 9am, which is the Stomach’s horary time).

Giving a patient a horary treatment, particularly in the season of that patient’s element (for example some time in the early morning between 3 – 7am in autumn for the Metal element) is considered to be the very best treatment of all.  Bearing this in mind and remembering JR Worsley’s exhortation to us not to forget horary treatments, even if they are at anti-social times, such as in the middle of the night, in the full flush of being a keen new practitioner eager to put everything that I learnt into practise, I gathered together two of my Wood patients for a horary treatment in the night, the best time being just before 1am still in the Liver’s horary time and just after 1 am just into the Gall Bladder’s horary time, carefully setting my alarm for 12.30am to be sure to wake up.  To my surprise both turned up on time, and I completed the treatment, congratulating myself on doing what a good practitioner should do, however tired I would feel the next day.

Imagine my horror then when a few months later I realised that with the greater experience I had gained since then I now recognized that neither patient was Wood.  Imagine also my confusion when another patient, who this time I was sure was Wood, and I had also scheduled to come during the night, overslept and never turned up.  Was I to phone her home, though I was reluctant to do so for fear of waking the whole household (this was the time before everybody had mobile phones by their beds), and how long should I stay up in case she arrived late?  Even when I felt I was treating the horary points at the right time during the night, did this justify the possible inconvenience which my previous sad experiences had shown me?  Finally, too, had horary treatments proved to be the uniquely excellent treatments that warranted all this trouble?

I cannot say that the results of giving horary treatments at more sociably acceptable times of the day have prompted me to consider that facing the possible hurdles of night-time treatments is worthwhile.  But I still like to remember with affection my novice practitioner’s enthusiasm.  Certainly my patients were terribly impressed that I was prepared to sacrifice a few hours’ sleep for them, which I am sure made our relationships all the closer, perhaps the best result of all.

I now think back rather sadly and with some nostalgia to a time when I so enthusiastically tried to put everything I had been taught into practice, and realise that I, older, much more hard-bitten and less idealistic, but perhaps not wiser, would be unlikely to do the same now.

What to charge patients

Since my formative years coincided with the birth of the NHS and free medical care for all, I feel deep in my bones that at some level all medical care, including what I offer my patients, should be free.  This has always made me feel uneasy about charging my patients, making it all the more difficult for me throughout my long practice life to know at what level to pitch my fees.  I am, after all, a freelance acupuncturist dependent on my practice income for my financial survival, unlike those working in the NHS who are employed by the state, so charge I must, but how much?  Do I add into this figure the number of years I have been treating, and do I have a standard rate for everybody? But what about those people who can quite understandably not afford the weekly fee needed for treatment?  Hidden within this, to me, vexed question of the level of fees to charge, too, is the conviction that it would be wrong to deny treatment to somebody I could help simply because they cannot afford it.

This problem has bedevilled all the years of my practice, and seems to have grown if anything more acute since my move first from my home practice to the SOFEA clinic in Camden Town, and finally on to Harley Street, of all places, to what is considered to be the pinnacle of medical practice, where I now work amongst those who are happy to charge the most exorbitant fees that I would be ashamed to charge anybody.

My arrival in Harley Street was the result of one of those chance encounters which seem to punctuate my life, and had nothing to do with a desire to work from the very heart of London’s private medical world.  If anything, I would have preferred to move my practice somewhere else, but this clinic just fell into my lap, a chance too good to miss.  I was walking along Harley Street and passed a handwritten notice in a window saying that there was a clinic room for hire.  It turned out to be an ideal place for me and for others from SOFEA, its greatest advantage being our freedom to use moxibustion without other practitioners complaining of the smell, and access to surprisingly large storage areas for the many SOFEA files which needed to be kept for the requisite minimum of seven years.  It also happened, luckily, to be only a few minutes’ walk from my new home.  But as I walk to Harley Street each day, I am aware that I am walking past many medical practices where what I have decided to charge my patients would be viewed as ridiculously low.  What would those working in these very luxurious clinics say, I think, were they to know that I continue to charge some of my longstanding patients the very reduced rates I have offered them over the years, with the occasional free treatment thrown in for good measure?

One of the reasons why the whole issue of fees has proved such a problem for me is because it has a lot to do with my assessment of my own worth, something I am unclear about.  How do I value what I do, and do I put a monetary value on this, and, if so, at what level?  What fee to charge therefore still remains a sensitive subject for me, particularly as a few days ago I happened to note from the web that a former student of mine is charging three times the rate I now charge.  Is she right to do this, and am I therefore being unprofessional not to do the same?  Or is there still some value in retaining the idea that the vocation I have chosen represents my desire to help others, rather than doing it for financial reward?

I realise I have ended up after all these years doing what a tutor during my original training told us not to do, which was to charge different levels of fees for different patients.  He said that this only led to confusion, and he was right.  “Stick to one fee and let the patients decide whether they can afford to pay it.  Don’t make their financial circumstances your concern,” he told us.  And this is what I have always found difficult.   

I have come to the conclusion that my problem with working out how much to charge touches on my dislike of meanness, and its counterweight, my desire to be generous.  I regard treating as a gift I am offering my patients.  To ask them to pay for this is in some senses much like giving somebody a present and then holding out my hand for them to pay for it.  Even though I recognise the need to make a living, to charge the high fees which some would definitely consider appropriate for my many years of practice and my level of expertise represents not the gift I would like to bestow on my patients, but smacks of meanness.  For somebody who would always prefer to give than to receive, this inevitably causes problems, still unresolved within me to this day, after so many years of practice.

 

Oh dear! Oh dear! I find that I am addicted!

I am reading a fascinating book by Adam Alter:  Irresistible: Why we can’t stop checking, scrolling, clicking and watching, about our obsession with our smartphones, our emails, our endless Twitter twittering and our fascination with Youtube. 

It makes for a sobering read, none more so than when we are told that leaving a very young child unsupervised in front of those children’s gadgets which transfix a child’s eyes for hours, but deprive it all too quickly of the ability to look people in the eye, actually damages their little brains.  Even something so harmless as talking to a child on Skype reduces the importance of eye-to-eye contact because the child cannot apparently pitch its eyes at the right level on the screen to evoke the kind of immediate response it looks for in the presence of another person.

Not being a two-year old, why did I come to the depressing conclusion that I, too, was addicted, but what to?  Of course it is to my emails, the only bit of electronic equipment I use.  I have, reluctantly, accepted the need for a Facebook account to pass on my blogs to a wider audience;   I can go for days without looking at it.  But I am, I now realise, hooked on checking to see if any new emails have arrived, so worried I apparently am with the need to answer them immediately, as though not doing so is impolite.

From reading this book I gather that this is a definite sign of an addiction.  I don’t have a smartphone so I can only check up on my emails when I am physically sitting in front of my computer, ready to tap away on a large keyboard with an old-fashioned mouse to hand.  Having now counted up how often I find myself returning to the computer when I am at home, and realising that my first action on coming back home is always to hurry to turn it back on again, I acknowledge that I do have as much a problem as if I had immediately to grab a glass of wine if I was a heavy drinker.  It may not be as harmful to my health as drinking too much, but it is probably as harmful to my peace of mind in its own way, because each email demands something of me, and often these demands are worrying or disturbing.  I am as much in thrall to this wretchedly addictive piece of equipment as anyone hooked to chatting endlessly on Twitter.

Of course, it is not only me, but all those countless others I see in the street or in cafes, their fingers twitching away at their smart phones, their eyes unable to look away to see the world around them, so busy are they scrolling up and down looking for God knows what.

I know that those emailing me can wait a few more hours or even a few more days for an answer from me, so I am resolved to watch myself now and reduce those compulsive excursions of mine to sit in front of the computer.  Let’s see whether I can manage this!

Being incurably curious

I have just passed a lovely sign on the outside of the Wellcome Collection in the Marylebone Road here in London.  Appropriately for its name and for what the Wellcome Collection does, which is focused on medicine and helping the ill, it says in bold letters “Welcome to the Incurably Curious”.  On the bus ride back home I decided that it would be good to adopt this as my own catchphrase, but with a slight modification.  I would amend it slightly to read “Welcome to the Curably Curious”, in honour of my calling as an acupuncturist, because it is our curiosity, in five element terms, which, far from “killing the cat” as the saying goes, helps us to cure.

And curiosity is what we need, an infinite dose of it throughout every minute of our working lives to help us understand our patients better and through this understanding restore them to good health.

I have always been incurably curious, from childhood onwards, staring unashamedly at people to try and fathom what makes them tick and how they relate to others.  I think people have always at some level puzzled me, challenging my Small Intestine to understand what is going on in another person at every new encounter.  I suppose it was therefore only natural that I would eventually gravitate towards a calling which feeds my desire to explore the intricacies of human relationships, however late in my life this was, for I only started practising acupuncture in my mid-40’s, exactly at the midpoint of my life when viewed from my present standpoint.  I am a living example of the dictum that it is never too late to change the direction of one’s life, and that it is often only by passing through the dark days that light begins to shine through.

For I came across acupuncture, or as I like to think somewhat fancifully, acupuncture found me, at a crossroads in my life, with the early part of my adult life, that of being wife and mother, almost behind me, and the next part hidden behind what seemed to me to be an impenetrable fog.  So the moment when I encountered acupuncture for the first time surprised me with its rightness;  it opened a door wide on to a completely new vision of life which has fascinated me, occupied me and preoccupied me ever since.

As a coda to this blog, I have just read the following passage in a book by Barney Norris called Five Rivers meet on a Wooded Plain (a lovely title in itself). This seems to me to describe very acutely what intrigues me so much about encountering other people:

“So I love watching the way another person holds themselves when they are alone and thinking.  Their actions and postures are windows into the vast and secret worlds below the surface of the day around me, the lives of others.” 

I love the thought of those “vast and secret worlds” which surround me.

 

"1 of the 48%"

I am still reeling from the result of the referendum.  And I don’t agree with many people’s passive acceptance that “Brexit means Brexit”.  It certainly doesn’t, or at least only if we, who so violently oppose cutting ourselves off from Europe, tamely accept that it does.

So I am on a personal mission to fight what I consider to be the good fight.  I have bought some badges supporting the EU, one of which I now wear proudly everywhere.  It says “1 of the 48%”, and has already provoked an argument from a “leaver”, but also much support from others.

And then I make sure that I buy a copy of the New European, which calls itself a “pop-up newspaper”.  It appeared within a week of the referendum, and gives a very healthy European slant to the news.  Originally, they said that there were only going to be 4 weekly copies, as a brief protest against the referendum result, but we’re on to copy 3 now and people are buying it, so I hope it changes its mind and carries on.

I also heard Paddy Ashdown talking on the Andrew Marr programme yesterday morning about a new group he and many others are bringing together called MoreUnited (www.moreunited.uk ) which, as he put it so persuasively, is there to give voice to the voiceless, those who don’t want to belong to any political party, but feel fervently that Britain should not cut itself off from its international roots.  It wants to campaign strongly against the idea that we have to go along with the idea of Brexit, rather than ensuring that we continue to fight against it.  So that’s another cause I decided to support.

And finally, to my own surprise, as somebody who has always been a floating voter, not attached to any particular party, I have thrown caution to the winds and have joined the Liberal Democrat party, because they are the only party who has said that they will base their plans for the next election solely on fighting to remain in the EU.

So it’s been a politically rather hectic few days for me, my pro-European feelings strengthened even more by the terrible events in France and Germany.  This is surely not the time to withdraw into an isolationist shell, as though we are trying to tuck ourselves out of sight in this corner of Europe.

 

The disappearance of things

I have written before about a very interesting old Viennese musician and astrologer I knew many years ago called Dr Oskar Adler.  I remembered one of the things he would say after a curious incident which happened to me yesterday.  He believed that it is pointless looking for things that we have mislaid, because they really go missing.  You have to leave some time, and then they will re-appear.

I had further proof of this rather esoteric belief again.  Anybody of my venerable age will know that the one object they treasure above all others is the old people’s free bus pass, which allows us to hop on and off buses and in and out of tube trains at will, and gives us the kind of freedom denied previous generations of the elderly.  I always check that I have my pass before I leave home.  This morning, to my dismay, it was not where it usually is, tucked safely away in the front compartment of my rucksack.  I searched for a long time for it, looking into all the pockets of all the clothing I might have been wearing on my last trip outside, but could find it nowhere.

I decided that I should immediately apply for a replacement at the local Post Office, and so headed outside to do just that.  I was standing on the top step of the short flight of stairs leading to the road outside, when I happened to look down.  There on the pavement, tucked closely against the front railings, was my bus pass.  The road sweeper had obviously recently been, because the pavement was swept completely clean, the only object in sight on the ground being this little plastic rectangle in its white cover.  If I had grasped the right-hand rather than the left-hand railings to help me down the stairs I would have missed seeing it completely.

I still can’t think how it got there.  Rationally I could say that it might have slipped from the rucksack as I got out my front-door keys the day before, but I prefer the more mysterious explanation.  My bus pass decided to do one of those disappearing tricks the Dr Adler persuaded me to believe in, and simply took it in its mind to re-appear on another day. 

In the past, when something similar has happened to me, which it has done several times, the time between an object’s disappearance and re-appearance has often been longer, sometimes a few weeks.  And once I found the keys to my house, which I had desperately hunted for for days, hidden away a few weeks later under rubbish at the bottom of an outside dustbin.

I like to think that there are indeed “…more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet).  This little incident lifted my spirits a little, just a little, from despairing and dreary contemplation of the weekend's political turmoil.

Europe - In or Out?

Oh, this wretched referendum being forced on this country against our will!  Who wants a referendum except those who want us to get out of the EU?  Certainly, I don’t, and I don’t know many people who do.  I have always regarded myself as European to the core, and never a Little Englander, so I fervently hope that there are more people who think like me out there voting on June 23^rd than those who don’t.

I come of a family for whom Britain’s connections to Europe dominated throughout the years of my childhood during the second World War, and one which had suffered deeply and often tragically from the xenophobic and racial hatreds which led to the war.  Unhappily, these now seem to be rearing their very unpleasant heads again, as poor suffering migrants, escaping the kind of persecutions my mother’s Austrian Jewish family had to suffer, are now being made scapegoats for many of the real problems people in this country (never the rich, mind you) are suffering.

I think we are going through strange and extreme times, of which the referendum is one symptom, as are the other odd signs of this, such as Donald Trump’s successes in the States, the rise of increasingly right-wing, almost fascist parties in Europe and the corresponding, and necessary, rise of parties of protest, such as those in Greece or Spain, and even what is happening to the Labour Party in this country.  The political uncertainties all this creates raise disturbing echoes of those at other troubled times, most obviously in the 1930s, which led to the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria, my mother’s and my birthplace. 

In turn, this has been accompanied, for me personally, by a renewed interest in the tumultuous background to my earliest years during the war.  By coincidence, several things have concurred to bring this period of European life to the forefront of my thoughts, among them the reading of some highly interesting books which have illuminated this period for me.  First there is the recently published book by Philippe Sands, the international lawyer, called East West Street :  On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, a book of great interest not just to lawyers but to all those whose family suffered persecution under Hitler.  Philippe Sands interleaves his legal discussions relating to the background to the Nuremberg trials with discoveries about the history of his own family in Nazi-occupied Poland.  Co-incidentally, there are connections with my own family, since Philippe bought my mother’s house in Hampstead, and my mother’s cousin helped him decipher and translate some of the handwritten German documents he discovered during his search for his family.

The reading of this book also coincided with a re-introduction through a friend to an Austrian writer, Ilse Aichinger, whom I remembered reading some years back but had completely forgotten about.  She told me of Ilse Aichinger’s only novel, called in its first English translation, Herod’s Children, published in its original German in 1948, with the translation appearing in 1956.  This book, too, is about the period of the second World War, and follows a group of Jewish children in Vienna whose only permitted playground is a graveyard.  It is not a realistic representation of Viennese life under the Nazis, but a kind of mythical transposition viewing the world through a child’s eyes.  It is a book which deserves a much wider readership than it has at present.  So I am now on a mission to try and interest Daunts’, my favourite bookseller, to re-publish it, as it deserves to be out there again as one of the discoveries of forgotten masterpieces which they pride themselves on publishing.

Finally, to round off these few weeks of immersion in the past, I saw an amazing film called Son of Saul, about a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp, who is part of the Sonderkommando, those prisoners who were set apart and given a few more months of life in order to act as guards shepherding their fellow Jews into the gas chambers.  He thinks he sees the body of his son, and the film is the story of his despairing attempts to find a Rabbi amongst the prisoners so that he can give his son a proper burial.  I was persuaded to see the film only after a friend reassured me that you do not directly see any of the terrible events taking place, but as dim background to the camera’s view which is trained always upon the father, particularly just on his face.  It is one of the most moving and, yes, uplifting, films I have seen.  Go and see it if you can still catch it.

Nostalgic memories

It is strange to become aware of social change happening before my eyes as happened today.  I was reading an excellent book about Shakespeare’s life by James Shapiro, called 1606 – Shakespeare and the Year of Lear.  Shakespeare wrote Lear around the time of the Gunpowder Plot, with Guy Fawkes one of the conspirators.  For the next 400 years this day has been remembered by the fireworks displays we hold on 5 November.

But I now realise that things have changed almost without my noticing it.  It must be many years since I last passed a few ragamuffins on the street pushing along an old pram in which they had stuffed a hastily-dressed puppet, and calling out to me as I pass, “A penny for the guy?”  We still celebrate Guy Fawkes Day with fireworks, but children no longer re-enact the event symbolically by wheeling a model of Guy Fawkes around in an old pram.  Are there indeed still any shabby old prams out there suitable for this, rather than the huge modern contraptions blocking our pavements?  And pennies have long since disappeared.   But I was pleased when my colleague, Guy, told me that he remembers as a child dressing his teddy bear up in old clothes, propping him up in the street and begging passers-by for pennies.

Another nod to our past has thus gone almost without our noticing it.  Just as I can’t remember how many years it is since I last heard groups of carol singers knocking on doors up and down the street before Christmas, although maybe this still happens in small rural communities where people know their neighbours.  Some of the carol singers would gather in groups and collect for a charity, but often we would open our door to two or three young children, who would launch into feebly singing a few odd bars of “Good King Wenceslas”, before grinding to a halt because they didn’t know the words.   Perhaps nowadays, too, it would be considered too risky for young children to knock on doors on their own in the evening, another sad indictment of the times.

When customs such as these which have persisted for centuries lose their relevance, dwindle and die out, a little fabric of our social history is torn away with them.  Now all the new customs are created, not on the streets but at one remove on social media through our mobile phones.

 

A nostalgic trip into the past

I am reading a rather delightful book I picked up by chance in the library.  It is the diary by somebody called Kathleen Hey who was a shop assistant in Yorkshire during the Second World War.  It brings back very clear memories of my own childhood, particularly the four-year period we spent escaping the London Blitz to Bowness-on-Windermere in the Lake District.  Opposite the small house at the lakeside, a former café, into which we crammed our large family of relatives and friends who had escaped to England from Nazi-occupied Austria, was a small, derelict refreshment kiosk to which we as children would press our noses because, displayed on its dust-covered shelves, were cardboard replicas of the sweet and chocolates now no longer available in the wartime shops.

I was reminded of the feelings of longing I had each time I passed the kiosk by what I have just read in Kathleen Hey’s diary, as she describes a few days’ holiday in Blackpool:

“There were queues at all food shops, some serving customers (residents) at one counter and visitors at another.  By the time a woman on holiday has shopped for her family the morning will be gone.  There are no cigs, sweets or matches though many of the windows are attractively dressed with dummy boxes.”

I still have some of this longing for chocolate which must have been sparked by the dummy boxes in the empty kiosk all those years ago.  Give me a box of chocolates now and I am hard put not to finish it at one go. 

Thus are we all conditioned by what happens to us in our childhood.

Another chance encounter

Readers of this blog know that I enjoy going to coffee houses and doing my writing and my reading over coffee.  Often, too, I don’t finish the cup, but just enjoy the smell and the feeling of excitement it always give me.  I have traced this back to when I was a teenager, and the first coffee shop in London opened in Wigmore Street.  This would be where I rendezvoused with an uncle who, being originally from Austria, was helping me with my German studies as I prepared for my university entrance exams.  Then a second coffee-shop opened in Hampstead, and again I can feel the thrill of travelling up to North London from our South London home, emerging in Hampstead High Street opposite the Everyman Cinema, and feeling myself in the heart of London’s intellectual life.  A coffee shop, a book, and something to write with and write on therefore still remain tinged for me with the exciting aura of the past. 

And I would like now to acknowledge the friendliness of all the staff at one of my favourite coffee houses, Paul’s, here in Marylebone High Street.  I now know each by name, and they always greet me with warmth.  And, too, to my surprise, I discovered recently through a chance encounter that two people who are often here at the same time as me happen to have known this same uncle who introduced me to coffee houses all those years back.  This is another example of what is called a serendipity – something that happens quite by chance, but seems somehow to be pre-ordained.

I love the word serendipity*.  Firstly, for its sound which has within it a clear reference to a kind of made-up childish word I use, “dippity”, which is in not in my dictionary, (although “dippy”” is, meaning “crazy” or “silly”, and” of uncertain 20^th C origin”), and for me describes a somewhat scatty kind of a person.  And this always sets me thinking on a well-worn, nostalgic path which leads directly to my mother.  For I remember her well one day, a few years after I had established my acupuncture college, saying to me, “I always wonder how a flibbertigibbet like you got it together to run a school.”  So to her all the length of the half-century of the lives we lived together I must have remained this very scatty, dippity sort of person I certainly was as a child.

The thought of this serendipitous meeting with my uncle’s acquaintances in my favourite coffee shop this morning brought this all back to me.

* The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “serendipity” as ”the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident” (coined by Horace Walpole in 1854)

Alittle bit of unexpected cheer

I am watching with fear as the world, which often seems never to learn from its past, hovers yet again on the brink of another financial precipice, with the rich making sure that they get richer whilst the poor only get poorer.  And I can hardly bear to look at a newspaper or listen to the news because everywhere I see the desperate faces of asylum seekers risking their lives, and often losing those lives, in an attempt to escape the horrors of wars.  I can understand what being a refugee is like, although at one remove, for half my family, my mother’s half, was Austrian Jewish and many of them were forced to flee to this country before the second World War, most escaping the concentration camps only because my English father could vouch for them.

And then I think of all those rich and influential people sitting around behind police barricades in five-star hotels in Davos, flying in and out in their private planes, to discuss from a distance what to do about the poverty in the world.  And the gap between their world and the world outside seems to grow ever wider.

It is sometimes too much for me, and I have to take refuge in reading all kinds of escapist literature, my favourite being detective stories, where good always triumphs.  I am particularly fond of the gentle old-fashioned English country village kind, which takes me back to the nostalgia of a simpler life, with echoes of my own childhood.

I am cheered, though, by hearing that at last this country will be doing something about the hordes of unaccompanied children who live in appalling conditions just a few miles over there in the camps in Calais, a prey to child traffickers.  It seems as though one or more thousand will be allowed in.  And high time too!

...............


There is a happy postscript to the blog above which I have just read in today's Guardian newspaper:  "Teachers flood Dunkirk school for refugees with aid offers".

This is a heartening story of the school a teacher and friends have set up in the mud of a refugee camp in Dunkirk, of the success they are having in teaching the refugee children, and of the many other teachers volunteering to cross the Channel to offer their help.  Hoorah, hoorah!

How sad it is.....

As I get older, leaving many years trailing behind me, I am aware that nostalgia for the past creeps up on me more frequently than it used to.  There are so many things now which are different from what they were, and though some of these differences are undoubtedly good (though here I have to stop and think hard without for the life of me being able to come up with even one example), many more appear to my ageing sight to represent losses which can never be made good.

A small, apparently insignificant, but to me important, example of this is something which happens every morning.  As I make my way out to pick up my newspaper and indulge in my early morning coffee in one of the many coffee shops around here, I step over the wet pavement outside the front door of a block of flats, and exchange good morning greetings with a young woman who is busily washing down and sweeping the front step and pavement outside clear of any rubbish.  She laughed when I told her that this piece of pavement is probably the only one now in the whole of London where the age-old practice of making sure that the pavements outside our houses are kept clear for passers-by by their owners still takes place.  Now we leave all that to the road sweepers.

And just as we leave it to others to clear the pavements outside our houses, so we now leave many other things to others, without concerning ourselves with whether in so doing we are making others’ lives harder or more unpleasant.  I notice that if there is something like a cardboard box in the middle of the road, nobody crosses over to push it to the side away from the traffic.  I remember my father stopping our car regularly, and getting out to remove some rubbish or a large stone to the roadside, because, he told us, “A bicycle or motorbike might not see this when it gets dark, and come a-cropper.”  The present reluctance to get involved extends to people stepping over any obstruction on the pavement, often at some inconvenience to themselves, rather than pushing it aside to the gutter.  Let alone how very rare it is for somebody to lift up a bike which has fallen over blocking the pavement.

It seems that more and more people are reluctant to put themselves out in any way, as though walking round obstacles is always preferable to removing obstacles.  Is this increasingly selfishness, inattentiveness (everybody talking into their mobile phone – or taking selfies!) or a fear of litigation, in case their actions cause problems?  Whatever, as they say, it seems to me to be a sad indictment of modern life that less and less people are concerned for the wellbeing of others and apparently more and more engrossed in their own.

But am I merely another example of an older person saying that “things were better in the old days”?

Music

I have just held a very heart-warming book launch for my new book On being a Five Element Acupuncturist, which has just been published.

 

My lovely new publisher, Jessica Kingsley, of Singing Dragon Press, was there to wish my book well on its way.  She has just emailed me to tell me how surprised she was that there were so many people at the launch involved in some way with music, and wondered why I had not mentioned music once in all the blogs included in my new book.  This in turn surprised me, because I had never realised that I had not written about music at all, and it made me think why this might be so.

 

I have come up with two reasons, one more profound than the other.  The simpler reason is because my hearing has got progressively and unfortunately rather rapidly worse, so that I am now finding it increasingly difficult to listen to music both live in the concert hall and on the radio.  I noticed this most acutely recently when I went to a concert in my beloved Wigmore Hall at which a Haydn quartet I know well from first to last note was being played, and I could not recognize it at all to start with, as though I were listening to some discordant music.  Gradually my hearing, magnified by my hearing aids, attuned itself better to the music so that after a good few minutes I began to appreciate that what I was hearing were indeed familiar sounds.  But, oh the sadness of being brought up so cruelly short by my body’s increasing frailty.

 

Interestingly, though, I can still play the piano, or occasionally now my cello, presumably for the same reasons that a totally deaf percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, can “hear” what she is playing because, as she says, she “taught herself to hear with parts of her body”.  And also because I hear the piano’s tones and the cello’s vibrations much closer to my ears than in the concert hall or on the radio.

 

The deeper reason is that I can write about what I read, as I often do, because I am using my own words to describe the words of others, but I do not possess a language which can describe music.  It has its own language of sound which I don’t have the understanding or knowledge to translate into words.

 

So these, Jessica, are two of the reasons why music is absent from my blogs, though so integral a part of my life since the days when as a young child I squatted on the floor listening to my grandmother and her quartet playing through the chamber music repertoire.  Apart now, of course, from this blog.

The need to write

I love reading of people who, often to their own surprise, have found themselves spurred on to write, as though they have at some point in their lives found themselves unexpectedly before an open gate which beckons them out on to a landscape of words.  I have just come across two heartening examples of this.

Katharine Norbury, who is about to publish her first book, The Fish Ladder: a Journey Upstream, writes, “…suddenly I thought “I’ve got something to say!”, so I started saying it.”  “At my age it’s very relaxing to know there’s something out there that has some of my philosophy and thoughts in it…. I’m very happy that I’ve finally said something.”

And in the biography of a rather delightfully odd writer of detective stories, Suzette Hill, I found the following: “At the age of sixty-four and on a whim, she took up a pen and began writing.”

I have written books about acupuncture and continue to write this blog which gives me the chance “on a whim”, as Suzette Hill says, to write about the odd thoughts I have.  But I have never written anything in greater detail about my life, nor have I ever wanted to write anything fictional.  As I said in my blog of 2014 (28 December), apart from blog-writing I seem to be facing a book made up of blank pages, as though they are waiting for me to write words upon them. But I am not yet clear what words these will be.  I would like, though, to be able soon to say that these blank pages are starting to fill up with my writing, and then be able to say with as much glee as Katharine Norbury does, “I’m very happy that I’ve finally said something”, and, in my case it would be truer to say “something else”.

I am a technophobe

I am frightened of modern technology and the speed with which it changes.  In the old days hardly had I got used to the old VHS tapes when I had to learn how to use CDs,and now there are DVDs and smartphones and tablets and all manner of ways of listening to the radio and TV, or downloading programmes I have missed.  To me, it’s a bewildering array of complex bits of equipment, all of which need to be plugged in somewhere to be charged or to be connected in strange ways I don’t understand.   And all of which, I am told by younger people as they manoeuvre their way seamlessly through it, are apparently there to make my life easier.  This is not to mention social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, which adds yet a further dimension to what I could do. 


In the past I have always called upon family and good friends to help me navigate my way through what I see as very choppy waters, but surely it is high time for me to confront my fears and at long last learn how to use my iPad, which I’ve had now for more than a year, rather than looking at it apprehensively each morning as I dutifully charge it up before putting it aside unused for another day.  


So today I have finally decided to contact somebody who call himself a computer geek and provides a one-man support system for people like me.  Dare I lift the phone to ask for help, or will I leave it for another day, as I have left it for so many days?


As they say: “Watch this space”!

 

 

Autobiographies

I read in the newspaper this weekend the story of somebody called Freda Kelly who had been secretary to the Beatles for many years and has only just now been persuaded to write about her time with them, something she had so far refused to do.  She sounds a lovely, balanced person and I was very struck by some of the things she said, such as:

“I never wanted to write a book.  I always thought they would want the juice, the argument bit, and I don’t believe in that.”  And, after being persuaded to tell her story by her daughter, “I wanted to make a little film for my grandson … to know what his granny did in her youth.  He’s three.  I want him to be proud.”  And finally:  “I’m not obsessed with money – I only need enough to live on.”

It’s such a relief to come across somebody so different from all those famous people nowadays who think it’s alright to write (or have ghost-written) an autobiography before there is anything in their life, apart from their fame, to be written about.  In my day (such a horrid, but true expression), I thought autobiographies were only written towards the end of a life as a way of the author assessing what has happened to him or her, not as a way simply of making a lot of money.  And I notice that some famous people now write more than one autobiography, as though they view their life from a different enough perspective to make another book worthwhile.  Surely we need some distance from the events in our life before we are ready to assess this in any meaningful way?

I have often considered whether I would ever like to write my own autobiography, and always decided against it for various reasons.  The main one is that I like being absolutely honest and I dislike hurting people, so that I would hesitate to write the truth about important episodes in my life.  I can hardly restrict what I write to people who are safely dead because many of those who knew them are still alive, and may be upset by what I write.

I was struck by something Mary Beard, the classical scholar, wrote in one of the books of her blogs.  She said that she regards a blog in some ways as being both a diary and an autobiography.  As I, too, am thinking of publishing my blogs in book form, perhaps that will take the place of my autobiography.

Explanation for this gap in my blogs

My readers may have noticed that it has been quite a time since I posted my last blog here.  This was unfortunately forced upon me by an unexpected stay in hospital as a result of a sub-dural haematoma of the brain.  Thankfully I am now much restored, and, to general relief, including my own, my brain is unaffected.  I have been told that all that hard mental work I have been doing trying to learn Mandarin and updating my books for re-publication by my new publishers has helped to keep it active, and has actually benefited my recovery.  So roll on my next Mandarin class!

 

I have been advised, though, to cut back on my travels for the next few months, something I was at first reluctant to agree to, but have now come to see as sensible.  So this has brought to a halt my next planned expeditions to Beijing and Nanning for the time being, as well as one or two shorter European trips.

 

In whatever happens to me I always try to see the lessons life is teaching me.  Quite apart from having to deal with the after-effects of my illness on my body, the most difficult thing for me so far has been to acknowledge the fallibility of this body, and accept that I will need to take it increasingly into account as the years pass and weigh more heavily upon it.  It has made me aware, too, of how lucky I have so far been with my health, and how fortunate to have managed to do what I have wanted to in relation to my acupuncture work.  Most importantly it has given me the opportunity to spread my love of five element acupuncture as widely as I can.  More of this in my next blog.