Never sick nor sorry
On pain and reliability
I went to a campsite on a hill, and I met the man who owns it with his wife. I’d been emailing them directly for a week or so, and all the emails had been signed by him (I’ll call him R). I had gone to the campsite just to give my campervan a run out, as it hasn’t been used as much as planned given my last three months of poor health (more on that below) (good news for once). The campsite was quiet except for this extraordinary gathering of LandRover and RangeRover owners with a particular bespoke tent box. They were no bother but I couldn’t stop laughing at them. All that money— many many thousands for the vehicles, and many more for the tent boxes — for something so daft.
I went to this place because it has three swimming lakes. But it has only been open a year, and the lakes were created by R and his wife, and satellite data hasn’t caught up with them, so both of my swims showed on Strava as me swimming over grass. Sort of a Jesus reversal.
Anyway, R.
I got there, had a nap, and was getting changed into my new second-hand swim run wetsuit (a shorty wetsuit that is supposedly comfortable enough to run in and that I bought for the Frog Graham round, which is this year’s big plan). R was broad as, and gobby with it. Were you walking by the lake just now? Yes, I said, I was having a look round and deciding which lake to swim in. Did you hear the cuckoo? No, I said. I knew it, said R. I was watching you and said, I bet that dozy bint hasn’t heard the cuckoo.
I don’t mind forthrightness but this was a bit much. But it was, it turned out, very R. He had a bookings book open and said, show me your name and I did, and thought nothing of it.
I swam, I lit my barbecue, I ate my burger, I bought wood and kindling and turned my barbecue into a fire pit, and sat there reading my book, content. R came back with his litter picker. He was feeling chatty. “You looked like you were in a world of your own sat there reading your book,” he said, and I agreed that I had been. Then he said, “I can’t read or write.”
I think my mouth dropped open. Because this countered every assumption I had, that in North Yorkshire everyone can read and write, and that I was more likely to encounter someone who couldn’t in the far depths of Liberia or some vast and awful refugee camp.
I asked him why not. He left school at 15 without having learned and has worked ever since. That’s why he had scoffed when I asked him if he ever swam in his lakes. “I worked for myself and I lived in freezing cold caravans for years and I never want to be cold again.” Eventually he became a tree surgeon, set up a good business, and now owns this campsite. He has the wisdom of the outdoorsman: he knows his birds and who they are and where they come from, and told me that badger baiting still went on and he wasn’t particularly against it because the badgers “in that wood over th’eeer” ate the young of the visiting ground nesting birds, and that wasn’t right because then the ground nesting birds wouldn’t stop off any more. I told him I’d watched an oystercatcher — except I didn’t know it was an oystercatcher — in a screeching fury in the skies when one of the RangeRover people launched a drone. He told me they were nesting on the island in the third lake. He told me he hadn’t sent any emails because he couldn’t and that his wife had sent them signing them from him.
I looked up the stats and of course my assumption was ridiculous. Sixteen percent of people in England have “poor literacy skills,” enough to impede daily life. Without literacy, says the National Literacy Trust, “it is hard to live the life you want.” R. would disagree with that, I think: he seems content with his achievements.
I have told you about his nature wisdom and I admire it. But shit. What a loss and how deeply sad not to be able to read or write. And how strange to get to your 50s and not to have fixed that yet. I admire that he admitted it so freely, but actually I think he should feel some shame or at least some loss.
He didn’t see that. He saw a life of hard work that had got him rewards, and holidays in warm countries.
Pain makers
For three months, I had a headache. It was constant but varied in intensity, from the tolerable to the head-in-hands despairing kind. My headache disappeared last Sunday and hasn’t been back. And now I am sure it was a medication overuse headache. When I had the virus in March, I took painkillers every four hours for ten days. Then I took them to deal with my headache. And my headache never went away and the painkillers didn’t touch them. Finally I stopped taking them because they weren’t doing anything, and a week later, it was gone. Here is The Times doctor Mark Porter on it.
My mother detests taking tablets and it is a cold day in hell when she will take any painkillers, even when she clearly should. For years now I have said patronisingly, “but there is a reason they are called pain killers; they kill pain.”
That’s me learned.
Animal hero of the week
Vonolel. Weird name, good horse. And a small horse. He was only 148cm tall, and his rider, Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, known as “Bobs,” was also a shortarse at 5ft 4 inches. Vonolel, I read, was named for “the great Lushai chief.” Obviously I knew immediately that that was a Tibeto-Burmese people from Mizoram in the northern regions of India. Didn’t you?
An Arab grey, Vonolel played a role in the relief of the Siege of Kandahar in Afghanistan. He saw action in India, Burma and South Africa. Somebody was counting, and somebody calculated that in his lifetime Vonolel travelled 50,000 miles on his own four limbs*
(*personal annoyance: dogs do not have four legs. Cats do not have four legs. Horses do not have four legs. They all have four limbs, like we do. They all have shoulders.)
In all that time, he was never ill and never took a day off. He is now referred to as Vonolel The Reliable.
Queen Victoria was a fan. She gave him three medals. “Most unusually for a horse, Vonolel was awarded medals for his military service by Her Royal Highness Queen Victoria. These were the Afghan medal, the Kandahar Star and the 1897 Jubilee medal.” This is from the page at the National Army Museum website, which holds the Vonolel Bowl. Amazing. All that effort, all that courage, and the little pony gets, er, a bowl. It is an uncommonly ugly one. I get that the creator wanted to emphasise the horse connection but those hooves are creepy.
Vonolel was buried with full military honours blah blah. Bravo, little pony with your little rider.
And what about his human namesake? I expected to find a grand and fascinating story. No. His name was actually Vanhnuailiana, and he has a whole Wikipedia page. Lots of fighting of the grabbing territory kind. I prefer the horse.