Balances

Today was the first day of my time on a course called "A Balanced Life" at the Nuffield Orthopaedic hospital in Oxford which aims to use physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, mindfulness meditation and probably a few other things to help chronic pain sufferers lead as full a life as possible. I am knackered. It's going to be three days a week for the next three weeks and at the moment it feels insurmountable. I'm giving it my full commitment and taking the stated intentions on face value but I have to admit my encounters with the consultant in charge have left me wondering about the possibility of an underlying agenda. The staff doing the actual course (and the one I've just finished with the same team) are fine but the consultant....well....I didn't like his talking about his interest in theology during a consultation (very inappropriate in my opinion) and I didn't like his asking me questions then interrupting my answers and lecturing me on the basis of completely erroneous assumptions about me, I particularly disliked his contemptuous and repeated comments about my weight gain over the last year in which he repeatedly insisted on my weight being at a particular figure which when they then led me off and weighed me turned out to be overestimated by just over 30% of my actual body weight. When I got home I googled him and that's when my opinion changed from dismissing him as yet another arrogant, overbearing, self satisfied consultant with an ingrained contempt for the overweight to something more serious. You see his profile on the hospital website makes a proud boast of the fact that he was "closely involved" with developing the governments brutal reforms to incapacity benefit which, of course, include the new "fitness for work" test. In my opinion any association with that by a health professional are grounds to look very closely at their ethics and fitness to practice, when they boast of it as an achievement when writing their public profile it's deeply troubling. So now I find myself reflecting on many of the things said on this course and wondering if it's really about pushing the bounds of what we think we can do/ how much pain we think we can take, or is there an underlying assumption here about "shirkers, spongers and slackers"....almost certainly not, in fact on the surface this is just the sort of course I could have done with years ago but the contempt and financial hardship visited upon us by the current political regime makes me suspicious of anything that involves one of their lackies who helped them implement it.

On a brighter note I am pleased they include meditation in the course, I've been meditating off and on for many years and have started doing so daily again in the last few months to help deal with pain, help my mental health and just because it is generally a good idea with many benefits that I would recommend to any one. One of the first fruits of the course has been letting me borrow Jon Kabat-Zinn's well known classic on the subject which I've wanted to read for a while but couldn't afford.

The picture is a bit of an emergency blip today. I did take a few shots when I was out and about but then discovered I'd been happily shooting away without an SD card! Duh! I left it in Kit's computer last night and was taking pictures using the viewfinder rather than the screen so that I didn't see the warning message telling me I was a twit every time I pressed the shutter. (Sigh) anyway, I was struck by the shapes in my transparent new set of scales, a sort of Mondrian in monochrome....except of course that Mondrian would never have done anything in monochrome as colour theory was at the heart of his work...so probably best if we all pretend I didn't say that...