The Surgical Removal of My Physics... a Magic Bean

Surgical Removal of Physics!

What's he on about? 

You may well ask this question and you'd be right to do so. 

I've had a lump on my head for a long time - probably 5 or 6 years at least. A sabacious cyst. Something to do with hair follicles, but I think it's genesis had something to do with me getting my head kicked in during the final of the Gloucestershire League Cup Final. Some thug drove his bladed boot into my noggin and the cut went right through to the bone on my forehead, severing the nerves to one side of my head. I was numb of there for months, and when I rubbed the Poetter-esque scar later, I woulld feel the same rub mysteriously rendered by a phantasmal finger on the top of my head.... in the same placce where the lump developed. Coincidence? Who knows. It was freaky though. 

I never really minded my lump. I enjoyed having an obvious deformity. 

People would say: "You have a lump on your head". 
I'd say: "I know". 

Sometimes I'd detect a disapproving tone in their voice, which made me like my lump even more. For this reason, I kept it: 

'Yes, I may have a funny lump on my head that makes you feel a bit icky for some reason, but you must love me anyway.' 

Or tolerate me. Or do whatever you'd normally do to someone like me without a lump. Perhaps I took my lump too seriously. With tender love and care, my lump grew and grew atop my already funny-shaped head. When students or teachers would ask me what it was, I would give them a conspiratorial look and whisper: 

"It's where I keep my physics". 

My second brain, an add-on, a physics plug-in. 

I was in the gym a while back (crazy but true) rowing myself stupid as if I was Andy Kirkpatrick preparing his neglected body for a month for a month of vertical wall scramblinngs. When I desweated myself with a towel I spied blood. Holy moly! All that hard rowing had obviously angered my little lump. Benign lumps are fine; angry ones are not. So I went to hospital and, after having a health-screening that confirmed I was generally as fit as a fiddle (aside from the chronic pain in my back that doesn't register in tests), I paid a splendidly ludicrous sum of hard cash to a polite doctor who numbed my head with a needle, cut a hole and, with much scraping and yanking, pulled out what looked like a baked bean with all the tomato sauce washed off. 

Honestly. A bean. It may have been magic. I'll never know. She threw it away.

It is perculiar to feel somebody cutting away at your head, to feel the scrape of metal on bone, but to have no pain. I could hear it and feel the tugs and vibrations, but without the alarm bells of my nervous system sounding in what I imagine would have been rather unpleasant fashion, I was strangely divorced from the event. It was happening 'up there' behind me, to somebody else. What a glorious thing anaesthesia is. And hospitals in general.  Good ones. Ones that make you feel like you're in Star Trek. The newer ones, obviously.

So. Now I'm lumpless. No longer will my climbing helmet press all of it's weight onto one raised divet on my skull. No longer will people pass comment on the shape of my head (probably not true - one of my best friends told me I had a head the shape of an alien). When I reach up to give my old friend a companionable pat, I feel nothing but stitches, the sad signature of a magic bean that is no more, a magic travelling bean that has move on to new adventures without me.

But will I lose my physics? This is my concern. I shall have to test myself and find out.

Burma by Bike - The Road Movie

Motorbike rented from: http://mandalaymotorbike.blogspot.in/

I can thoroughly recommend them. Zach is a legend.

Burma by Bike... the Road to Mandalay

It's been a while. Why? Because I've been working hard on finishing Jacks. It's going well. I'm pulling 7 hour days of scribbling in The Atlanta, working through the chapters, sewing the complicated threads that hold the funny shaped book together. It's slightly weirdifying and I'll be glad when its over, but I'm thankful for the momentum and focus this place inspires.

To take a break, I flew over to Burma for a few weeks, hired a motorbike and tried to get lost in the countryside. It might have been a reaction to missing Bhutan and wanting to get back tot he villages. The experience certainly was similar in some ways: smily faces, small communities, Buddhism, pagodas everywhere and hardly anybody trying to scam you (I don't think anybody in Bhutan ever tried to rip me off). 

Of course, the two countries have one very massive difference - their governments. Although there is a reformist leadership in Myanmar now, you still come across rather disturbing aspects of control. They had a list of who lived where and they'd do night time 'raids' to see if anybody was not where they were supposed to be. If you stayed over at your cousins house, for instance, they might end up in prison for their hospitality. Up in the northern territories where I was, it was normal for the locals to have to pay protection money to the rebel Shan armies. Not just money, but men. They would leave you with one son and take the rest. I kept coming across villages with no men in. As usual, it's the normal people who get caught between the rock of the leviathon and the hard place of the freedom fighters. Civil wars are terrible things. Many that I spoke to didn't like either side and just wanted to be left alone to work their farms, dig up gold or just raise their families.

I won't write too much here because I'm considering putting a little e-book together about the adventure, but the bike definitely opened the country up in ways that backpacking wouldn't have. With a tiny 15l rucksac and the freedom of the bumpy roads I found myself in the company of gold-miners, soldiers, teachers, tea factory workers and bridge-builders, slept in chicken farms, restaurants and pagodas, found random festivals, musical and cultural and even managed to get lost in the jungle in the middle of the night (where I found the pagoda to sleep in). 
Anyway, here's a few random pictures: