A Room With A Deja Vu

I'll make this Saturday Blog very brief as I've got an incredibly busy schedule. There's just so much I need to make progress with today.

Only joking! As if.... Well now,  Deja Vu. What an appropriate theme during this extended period of semi-lockdown and social distancing. However, believe it or not these topics were all chosen way back in December before we had even the merest hint of what was coming our way in 2020! Them's the breaks - and next week (spoiler alert) it's 'Silence'. Hold the excitement.

I get the impression that since the prescriptive curbs on our activities were brought in nearly three weeks ago, millions of us are doing pretty much the same thing day after day with only the subtlest of variations - that goes for everybody from key workers to home workers to the self-isolating. Get up, do A then B then C then D then sleep and repeat. Some of us, if we're lucky, have more than one room to do it in.

Occasionally I feel sorry for people without internet capability. They haven't had The Marvellous Mrs Maisel (series 1,2,3) to keep them amused  - but then I also think they're not really missing what they never had and perhaps being off-grid is the sanest way with so much fake news and sheer trivia bouncing around the bandwidth.


A room with a view of a room with a view of a room with a view et cetera...

One item that attracted my attention, because it's a poem that has been posted and shared repeatedly on Facebook in recent days, is the 'Pandemic' poem that goes:

And the people stayed home
And read books and listened
And rested and exercised
And made art and played games
And learned new ways of being
And were still and listened more deeply... etc

which I've seen being described as a poem dating from an earlier pandemic (Spanish flu, 1918-20), written by the Irish poet Kathleen O'Meara, the striking feature being its powerful sense of deja vu.

The fact that O'Meara died in 1888 (thirty years before Spanish flu) ought to set alarm bells ringing! The work in fact appears to belong to a retired American teacher - also called Kitty O' Meara - but it was written just a couple of weeks ago. Thanks, fake news! That's deja vu out the window then...

...except that the American lady's poem bears an interesting similarity to one written just weeks earlier at the beginning of March by an Italian writer, Irene Vella. Vella's poem is far more detailed and there is a suggestion that O'Meara may have translated and plagiarised a précis of the Italian's original. I've no idea. If one is being charitable, one may say that it's just a curious but not necessarily surprising coincidence, that the impact of Covid-19 has somehow evoked strikingly similar poetic creations from multiple pens on different continents - almost like a universal response.

One thing you can be sure of is that there is no plagiarism involved in my latest. It's totally unrelated to theme, and I did Covid-19 last week. This, therefore, is just a piece of Easter Saturday silliness. In my own mind, I rank all my poems - League One, League Two, Three, Four if you wish - and this is definitely League Four...but maybe hoping to make the play-offs. Like I said, it's just a bit of fun - and we could all do with some of that right now.

Press Conference
Hard upon his sensational return from elsewhere,
when asked if he had any impressions to share
from those long years of intrepid traversal,
the explorer answered reporters thus:

"If there's one abiding lesson I've learned
from my sojourn among the Litotes,
(a most self-deprecating race, by the by)
it's the importance of doing your own irony."

Bemusement reigned. The odd flash-bulb popped,
short-hand was scrawled and brows furrowed
as the assembled corps trawled their pun stores
in search of a leader to caption their copy.

The best of the crop, before it became chip wrap,
simply read, dead pan: Homecoming falls flat.

Thanks for reading. Stay isolate, S;-)

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Deja Vu.... or Maybe Not

Deja Vu. 

Now if my A level French serves me right the literal meaning is 'seen before' or 'already seen.'

Personally, I've had quite a few incidents of this in my lifetime, and it really is the strangest feeling, as though I'm trying to grasp at something that's just out of reach.  I couldn't tell you what happens next, but as it begins to happen I feel that I already knew.  If you've ever had such a feeling you'll understand. Occasionally, it has felt as though it's not just deja vu, but deja deja vu, as if the scene playing out has happened several times.

The brain is such a wonderful, complicated and intricate organ.  I did a bit of research on deja vu and it seems there are a couple of explanations.

From Wikipedia: 
Two types of déjà vu are recognised: the pathological déjà vu usually associated with epilepsy or that which, when unusually prolonged or frequent, or associated with other symptoms such as hallucinations, may be an indicator of neurological or psychiatric illness, and the non-pathological type characteristic of healthy people, about two-thirds of whom 
have had déjà vu experiences. People who travel more or watch more movies are more likely to experience déjà vu than others. Furthermore, people also tend to experience déjà vu more in fragile conditions or under high pressure, and research shows that the experience of déjà vu also decreases with age.


The Science Museum puts the second type more simply:
'One explanation for déjà vu is that there is a split-second delay in transferring information from one side of the brain to the other. One side of the brain would then get the information twice – once directly, and once from the 'in charge' side. So the person would sense that the event had happened before.'  

A few years ago, I had a very odd experience, which I suppose was the antithesis of deja vu. There were several hours when I didn't know what was going on, I didn't recognise anything that should have been familiar, and when I came round I only remembered some of what had happened when somebody told me several times. 

It was the day after we had returned from Lanzarote, and I had to deliver a parcel in town.  Having lived in Blackpool for about forty years, my husband thought it rather strange when I repeatedly asked him where the post office was.  The first couple of times he answered patiently, but by about the fifth time he was becoming not only annoyed but also slightly concerned.  Apparently - and I have no memory of this - I then went upstairs and started pulling my clothes off, telling the husband repeatedly that I was hot.  At this point, he was somewhat torn...... However, after I'd asked him several times if I was having a stroke, he decided he needed back up.  Our daughter arrived just in time to hear me shouting at my husband that we had never been to Lanzarote! As I discovered afterwards, she was also terrified, but her police training kicked in and she managed to calm me down.  

The first thing I remember was 'waking up,' standing on the landing, seeing our daughter and asking what she was doing there.  She had been there a couple of hours by then but thought it best to say she had just arrived, and calmly led me downstairs and onto the sofa.  This is where the fun began.  I had come round by this time but had no idea what had happened. I was surrounded by paramedics from two crews, plus our neighbours from across the road, one of whom is a paramedic, the other a psychiatric nurse. Dave had spotted them loading their car and dragged them over to check on me before his 999 call was responded to. We didn't find out till afterwards that they were off to the Lakes and leaving early to avoid the traffic. I must have asked about twenty times, "So, what happened then?" Each time, to my puzzlement, it became funnier and funnier.  The paramedics were in fits, even the one who was repeatedly checking my blood pressure and hoping for it to come down from its sky high reading.  Eventually, our daughter insisted that I lie down and stop asking questions. I got transported to hospital, the neighbours finally set off to the Lakes, and I prepared myself for a barrage of tests.  

My Brain Aches

As I'm here, typing this all these years later, it's obvious that I survived, but strangely, despite all the tests, none of the medics could give me a diagnosis.  The following morning, I sat up in bed, got the laptop and googled the symptoms.  The diagnosis popped up. Word for word, it described how I'd been the previous afternoon, even down to the stripping off and worrying that I was having a stroke. I realised at that point that that I’d had a couple of previous episodes. Once when we were on a walk in the Lakes I couldn’t remember how we’d got there.  At the time, we put it down to hunger, and hurriedly found a cafe. However,  filling myself with soup, I glanced at my phone and didn’t recognise anything on it: the emails I’d sent, the Facebook posts I’d made, even some of the photos. It was a weird and slightly worrying feeling at the time.  I haven’t had an episode since the big one - at least, I don't think so.

My diagnosis? Transient Global Amnesia - a difficult one to remember. 

Oh and if anybody feels he’s been short changed by this post on Deja Vu please read again for a similar effect. 

Deja Vu by Jill Reidy

I’m pretty sure

I’ve been here before

You poured the tea

Or was it me? 

We ate that cake

For goodness sake

That horse

Of course 

It trotted by

With scruffy guy

He called out 

Real loud, a shout

We caved 

And waved

And then

And then

And then? 

It’s gone

Thanks for reading....... Jill Reidy

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Deja Vu - Old School

We watched the film, ‘To Sir, With Love’ the other night. I recorded it from one of the classic movie channels a few weeks ago. I’d seen it a long time ago and couldn’t remember it properly, but snippets kept coming back to me.

“Do you know what,” I said to my husband who happily goes along with my indulgence in old films – or he suffers in silence – “this is like a modern version of ‘Spare the Rod’. Do you remember?”

I think there was a nod of agreement, but I stayed focussed on Sidney Poitier as his character, teacher Mark Thackeray displayed a smouldering, deep in thought expression. In a role reversal from his part some years earlier in The Blackboard Jungle, he was finding a way to ‘get through’ to his class. Déjà vu Max Bygraves in ‘Spare the Rod’.

Both films are set in London’s East End, depicting deprived areas with hard to reach, hard to teach adolescents. Their teachers are naïve young men, aiming to change the world, and change their careers using teaching as a stepping stone. No spoiler alerts here, I promise. ‘Spare the Rod’ is real and gritty compared to the more light-hearted ‘To Sir, With Love’. Roll out ‘Please, Sir!’ as the same mix successfully became a comedy.

 

  

There was nothing funny about having to visit high school when summoned by a teacher needing a chat about one of our teenagers. Sadly, this was a regular occurrence and I felt more dread than déjà vu. I was certain that I would die of embarrassment. I worked in a primary school at the time and I loved it, but felt like I was losing control of my own children. I’m happy to say that both are now lovely, well-behaved, responsible adults with children of their own and I am as proud of them as it’s possible to be. I hope I’m here with words of wisdom for them when my grandchildren reach their teens.

When I started high school at Palatine Secondary School, it was at what became known as ‘the old building’ on Bennett Avenue. A new school was being built on St Anne’s Road which eventually we would move to. I wasn’t happy, I was very miffed, if that’s a real word. I was clever, yet I’d failed my 11+ and couldn’t go to Collegiate Girls’ Grammar. I’m still ashamed. I grew to love Palatine and always felt more at home in the original school rather than the new one. The old school is now part of the Blackpool & Fylde College University Campus. It was certainly déjà vu to return fifty years after becoming a first former. I enrolled in an evening class. I was in one of my classrooms. Very little had changed, it might be the same sash window, the same brass-knobbed door and half-tiled wall, but tables replaced desks, blackboard had gone and the wood flooring, if it was still there, was hidden beneath carpet tiles. The long corridor on the ground floor was now divided by safety glass fire doors, and I couldn’t see through them from one end to the other but I did wander around on my break looking for the familiar. I could almost hear ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ coming from where the main hall used to be. I sensed a feeling of belonging.

     I borrowed this poem,

 

Thanks for reading. Stay safe and take care in these worrying times. Pam x

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