Open Writing

It’s been a while since I last wrote. That’s because I went to London for three days last weekend. One of the summer schools I’d applied to for a job, invited me to an interview.

While the interview terrified me the prospect of a reimbursed coach fare was irresistible. Have not been further than Leeds since
last August. As someone well used to flitting from one Asian country to another, I have felt as imprisoned in Huddersfield as the old man down the road who boasts he’s never left Yorkshire.

I managed to chase up a friend who lived in the next village to me, when I worked in Japan, and went to stay with her in Lewisham. She is now a senior manager in Tescos. Apparently the girl who worked in Hamamura, the next town in the other direction, works in the same store; moreover, Vicky claims there are loads of gorgeous men working in Tescos.

I went down to the Lewisham store the next day but was told they’re not recruiting at the moment. The interview was rather strange. It took place in the marketing director’s spacious, art-studio style flat. I was introduced first to the cats and then to the very pregnant Chinese wife, who was eating toast at the computer, dressed in her nightie.

I was prepared to be fired with questions on the third conditional, even to improvise lesson plans on the past perfect. I had swotted up my notes on the coach down there. However, I could not answer the questions which were catapulted my way:

1 Do you know the artist from Huddersfield, David Blackburn?

2 Have you been to Bradford playhouse?

3 Is it true that Huddersfield art gallery is being pulled down?

4 Do you have a cat?

My guide on how to answer interview questions clearly stated that jokes and personal, non-professional comments should not be made, so what should I do?

I was then seated next to a cat and presented with a cup of supreme jasmine tea and a plate of chocolate cookies. Was too scared to tell him I’m allergic to gluten as I thought it would look as though I’d present too much of a problem for the college cooks, but then what if the cookies were a test for the candidate? If you ate them, maybe it would show you were relaxed?

And I knew I already looked and sounded nervous as I perched on the edge of the settee and answered, ‘No I don’t/ haven’t/ don’t know’ to every question.

Sure enough my rejection letter arrived two days ago.

I am now trying to fill in five application forms as quickly as possible, and before now have not felt free enough to come and type this up at the computer.

So what has persuaded me to avert my attention from those application forms? I think it must be the fact that I am surrounded by tantalizing food elsewhere in the house, but the computer room is a food-free zone.

I am not on a diet. I have an endoscopy this morning at the hospital. (An endoscopy is a medical investigation, involving a tube being passed down the throat, through the mouth, to the stomach to take a photo and tweak a specimen for further examination.)

As a coeliac I have to undergo one every six months to check the state of the villi on my intestine wall. In most people these are
constantly dancing nodules, diligently absorbing all the goodness from food, but in a coeliac, as soon as gluten enters the system, the villi become naughty, and stubbornly collapse against the stomach wall.

The stomach becomes extremely bloated (when it happened in China the Chinese people in the swimming pool kept nodding to me, confidentially, and cooed, ‘Ahhh, with baby?’ The attendants
decided my swimming costume had become too small and tried to persuade me to buy a maternity one!)

Anyway, the bloated balloon of a stomach finally bursts and
out cascade all the contents, every time you scurry along to the toilet, or bush or back of a bike shed; whatever happens to be closest.

The net results are weight loss and depletion of iron and calcium. It can, apparently be cured by sticking to a strictly gluten free diet ..quite difficult in the west as so many products contain gluten..(it’s found in wheat, oats, rye and barley) ..and did
you know that even innocent foods such as soya sauce contain wheat flour, and pickled onions and many more things, including some brands of baked beans are riddled with modified starch, which, being an unspecified starch may also be infested with menacing wheat?

To get back to the point. I have an endoscopy this morning at 9.15 am..sounds early? Not when you wake up at 5.30 every day it isn’t..and not if you have been fasting since midnight…and it’s not just food which I’m restricted from but liquid too.

Spent the night having a dream I was in Finland and the locals kept
offering me traditional food. I’d take a bite then spit it out, apologizing that I had to starve for an endoscopy, and then felt very guilty for jeopardizing the procedure.

Then I woke up at 1 am, incredibly thirsty and wondered how I was
going to deparch my mouth for the next ten hours. Remembered the nurse’s advice to suck a button and wondered if she’d ever tried it herself.

Went for a walk first thing to distract my gaze from my dad’s cereal bowl. On the way out even the cat food looked tempting. Sat down at the dining room table shortly after to fill in the endoscopy consent form but the oranges glistened refreshingly from the bowl on the bookcase, and the bananas waved their peels at me provocatively and taunted me with cries of, ‘Go on, you know you really want one’..

So here I am. just 30 more minutes to go until I can set off, have my injection, fall asleep for a while and wake up in bed with something pleasant on its way to my mouth.