Fits and starts and short circuits

Hi MG here.

Many apologies for the both the penguin’s silence and mine from the beginning of the year. The penguin is perhaps understandable, they lost little Wotan at the beginning of October. Both Fricka and the Penguin were there, and the whilst he was well fed, little Wotan seemed to waste away until he seemed a mere shadow of what he had been in September. Finally he died.

Fricka immediately headed off to the sea. The Penguin was mindful of his obligations to do the blog, irrespective of the pain, just as last year, when little Fricka was in the most mortal danger, but still he soldiered on. This time it was different. Perhaps for the last time, he emailed me with the news that he was going back to sea immediately, without finishing the blog and in the hope that I would take up the cudgels in the event that he would eventually return....... or did not.

Nothing is certain, all one can do is pray to a nameless and faceless god, and a largely faithless one at that, and hope for the return of the Penguin and Fricka.

Well I as I have finally got round to it, it has been a stressful time, I thought I would take as my subject, failure of expression. The complete inability to get across your message. The way a deaf person attempts to sign without the other parties being able to. To speak Finnish to an English speaker and to not find one word cognate. All you have is expression, gesture, waving off heads, and all so ambiguous. One mans handshake and is another mans insult. Anybody’s who headed to a country, whether for business or pleasure, who has not got a word of the language, finds that they‘re cut off, from everything, unless they can find someone who speaks their language. And what if language they speak is gobblydegook?

Well, I suffered a stroke 5 days ago (I don’t know if it is the same in American, possibly cranial infarct). I had the good fortune I didn’t suffer paralysis all down one side, merely a little one on the right of my mouth, but in the initial stages, I could not speak a word. That’s not to say I did not know how to speak, it was simply what was coming out wasn’t even gooblydoogook, these meaningless sounds as much akin to human speech as to a baboon’s cry of pain. Eventually about half an hour later I could manage ‘My name is Malcolm Goodson’. What was strange was that all the time the internal voice was working, it could say what ever it was wanted, it just went seriously awry when you speak it aloud. Seriously weird! I of course ended up in hospital!

I am getting better but I guess it will be bit of a haul to get me back to anywhere like I was, and I might not even make it. Just don’t make me come down and beat you up because I might be barely intelligible. I may talk like I am Celebral Palsy victim, but I still have the brain the size of planet, and don’t you forget it !