Essay - Corpus

Care?

22 May 2017 2 Comments

Beatrice Hale

Courtyard of Mitchell Hospital, Aberdeen

‘Care’ can be a misnomer. It should mean compassion, love, looking after, affection. All the positives in one word.

But it doesn’t.

My great-aunt, Georgina, lived for many years in The Mitchell Hospital, a nineteenth century Presbyterian Church supported ‘sheltered care’ facility. It was located on The Chanonry, the street which had grown up beside St Machar’s Cathedral in Old Aberdeen, a once independent township with a history of more than 1,000 years, and with many finds dating from about 4000 BC.

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The language of grief

15 May 2017 1 Comment

Sandra Arnold

Knowing what to say to bereaved parents can be extraordinarily difficult. Language often fails in this context because of unfamiliarity with death, the decline of mourning rituals, and an increasingly secular, urban and mobile society. Language can also fail when we try to describe a bereaved person. Phrases commonly used, such as ‘breaking down’ and ‘losing control’, are those used in describing dysfunctional machinery. Grief is spoken of in the same terms as an illness from which people ‘recover’ and ‘return to normal’.

Karate and health

8 May 2017 Leave a Comment

Bronwyn Dalley

Many of us have been there: it’s after midnight and everyone in the house is asleep, but we’re at our desks reading, thinking, writing. Keep it up for a string of nights and things can get weird. The mind plays tricks and the body turns languid. Perhaps it wasn’t odd that, many nights into revising a manuscript, my body began almost automatically moving from one position to another: I was performing a kata – a formalised pattern of karate movements. I had done Seido Karate for several years, but by the time of this unexpected nocturnal practice I hadn’t trained for five years and thought I’d forgotten everything.

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Fallout from the Jones Fracture

1 May 2017 1 Comment

Kath Beattie

GP to orthopedic specialist: “Yes, a Jones fracture. At the base of the left foot fifth metatarsel. She’s here with me examining the x ray and swearing…”

True, I did remark, “Oh bother!” (or something similar). After all it was December 10^th, and I was booked to travel to my sister’s 90^th birthday party in Auckland on the 21st, followed by tramping with a niece, then a flight to/from Whakatane to visit my youngest sister… get the picture? And I was being told that the fracture was serious, that the moonboot was to be worn day and night and most importantly the foot was never, never to touch the floor.

Like playing the piano blindfold: “Life on the Spectrum”

1 May 2017 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Musician and teacher Julie Hanify has played the piano since she was a child, but for most of her life she felt like she was “playing blindfold”. In her memoir Small Blue Thing: Life on the Spectrum, Julie writes:

I had the sense that each note was in its own world and that the next note was a total surprise, as if it were on the following page. Reading music was like leaping note to note over an abyss. I lived my life like this. I’d be in the moment with no forward thought or planning for the next.”

When she was 43, Hanify was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The prescribed medication improved her brain’s capacity to filter and sort multiple stimuli. Now, for the first time ever, she could sight-read music. More generally, she was able to sense the present moment as having been shaped by the past and as contributing to the future. With a sense of sequence as a frame for life’s experiences, Hanify could grasp previously elusive concepts like anticipation, planning, and cause and effect. “Medication”, she writes, “changed my life”.

An ode to clutter

24 April 2017 2 Comments

Lorraine Ritchie

I flick through the House and Garden mags at the supermarket (although I do have an old collection of my own) and wonder at the perceived modern beauty of black and chrome kitchens and tidy open living spaces: “where is all their stuff?!” I think to myself.

When we were young, the local grocer’s shop at the corner of the next street was owned at one stage by the Clutterbuck family. I fell in love with the sound of their surname and, most probably, the fact that it contained the word ‘clutter’.

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