Looking Out To Sea

• The knife-sharpening blocks with the little circular grinding stones inside are very effective.
• Two of the fingers on my left hand would say “too effective”. Ouch, blood, etc.

Is there a meaningful difference between

• someone who won’t vaccinate their child because it will give them autism
• someone who won’t vaccinate their child because it promotes promiscuous sex

And having asked that, what do you think about compulsory vaccination? I haven’t thought about it yet and I’m ready for bed. Comments please!

On Wednesday night we saw 4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile — ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’ — the story of a woman helping her friend get an illegal abortion in communist Romania in 1987.

I’m not sure what to say. I can’t really describe the great laughs you’ll have while watching. It’s a very numbing film. Don’t watch it for a first date?

Meanwhile, this is the 35th anniversary of the legalisation of abortion in the US, a law that the current crop of Republican candidates will be sure to repeal as part of their headlong rush to take the US back to the Middle Ages. Not that things are all rosy here — due to a strange quirk of jurisdiction our own abortion laws don’t apply to Northern Ireland. It’s still illegal to obtain an abortion there in most circumstances.

But if you want to see some gritty it’s-grim-oop-north drama about trying to get an abortion against the laws and norms of the society you live in, check out ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’.

I finished this at least a week ago, but I’ve been having a hard time putting in to words what I want to say. The book is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It’s a collection of case notes about people he saw over the years in his work as a neurologist. Straightforward enough.

You must read this book.

That’s really all I need to say, though you probably feel a bit more explanation is required. Essentially, the book is a testament to the fragility of our minds. Most of the stuff we understand about the mind (hell, about biology) comes from what we can learn when it breaks. This book is about all the ways it can break.

• There are people who lose all sense of “ideal” entities. The man could hold a glove but only recognise that was soft cloth, that it was a container, that it had five little pouches.
• There are people who lose all sense of their body. The woman did not know what her limbs were doing when she wasn’t looking directly at them.
• There are people who lose all sense of inhibition. The woman would involuntarily mimic every person she saw as she walked down the street.
• There are people who lose huge chunks of their past, or who continually lose the immediate past.

If ever there was a book that showed the mundane, tangible nature of the brain, it is this. Everything that you can think of, every ability you have, is centred somewhere in that bundle of neurons in your skull. And if some of them should fail you could lose your ability to recognise faces, to recognise your own leg or to even understand the concept of “left”, the opposite of “right”. Can you imagine that?

I don’t know what happened last night, but I went to bed feeling dried out, bunged-up and generally not very happy, and woke up feeling generally human. Hurrah for the immune system.

Helen and I are staying in Dunbar an extra day because we have a lot of large items to transport back to the flat, which would be beyond impractical on the train. Shiny presents! Yay!