Smiling in Slow Motion

DECEMBER

DECEMBER Tuesday 1 Slept well and ate a good breakfast. The doctor came and said that hardly anyone went totally blind with toxoplasmosis. This put my mind at rest, as I feared it would gallop in from the night like drawing black velvet curtains. Wheeled through the hospital for an X-ray. If that's OK, after eye tests at Mary's I will be out on Thursday. God what a lot to keep in the air. I'm the juggler, with two films, a book and a script all under way. David has been looking through the scripts in the archive - a great surprise as Jubilee had some really macabre dialogue which never got into the film, the four-week shoot erased dialogue in favour of image. The book has napkins scribbled with ideas, letters from Toyah [Wilcox] and the original plastic surgery notes from Adam Ant. It is full of mad drawings of camera angles, invented for the mind rather than reality. Perhaps I drew them in as we filmed. Akbenaten has quite wonderful watercolours by Christopher in a large book with the king's name on the cover hammered in brass. Wednesday 2 A woman crying in the night, my green bomber put me to sleep. I woke at four and wrote an introduction for the Wittgenstein book, then I fell asleep and woke again at nine. My temperature is playing up and I am still terribly breathless. I told my doctor I felt on a razor's edge. He said they would not release me until they had done the ward round tomorrow - there might be one or two things brewing and I could come up in a rash, so no Dungeness this weekend. And the sound dub? Let's keep our fingers crossed. I'm happy to stay, I'm not certain I could look after myself - HB is right in the middle of his course, although he says he will give it up for me, sweetheart. Stravinsky's Persephone on the radio - I must get the CD. There is a Stravinsky season, all his music has an unmistakable fingerprint. Fell asleep and sweated it out, 98° by 4.30. My breathing is easier, but my 271 SMILING IN SLOW MOTION energy is so low. I ate my lunch. Tomorrow I go to see Clive Migdal at St Mary's about my eyes, then back here for the five-o'clock doctors' round. Thursday 3 Oh, dear, another day begins and there is so much to do. I think it best to do one little thing a day and carry on. Up at seven, shaved, bathed and took a taxi to St Mary's. It was almost an hallucination driving through darkened streets across the city. The driver got me there quite quickly in spite of the rush hour. I arrived before the clinic had started, but the doors downstairs opened, climbing the stairs did not wind me as I thought it would. I sat alone for quite a while before others started to arrive. I am able to get about, but very weak. Perhaps I've grown too fond of my little room in Andrewe's Ward for my own good. Slight night sweats, but if nothing brews up by this afternoon I will be allowed to go home. Livingbecomes a long shot - at moments, with allthese drugs and drips, you imagine you are knocked for six, will never sit up or walk out except in a body bag. At least I have HB to look after me, some people are alone. Some new posters: Survivor's Clinic Times, Psychology Clinic Times. The eye drops are in, vision blurs, the annus horribilis continues, problems everywhere for everyone. A strange purple man with long hair in a band talking to himself and walking fast hither and thither with loud boots, he is building a tower of plastic mugs. I wait and wait. The wheelchairs arrive. It takes all morning whatever time you get here. I think the CMV has started up in my right eye, I feel the black closing in. Maybe this is because there is so much talk about eyeconditions - which are becoming more common as people live longer. Michael Corder here, visiting a friend. 1didn't notice him as my jugsy eye blotted him out, there is a retreat into sickness. A terrible indecision about leaving Bart's. The last thing I want is to be readmitted within the week. I have...