A GULP OF MAGPIES

 

 

Knowing that magpies

can be black and  white

or white and black

doesn't help in telling which this is.

 

The oystercatcher

by way of contrast

isn’t black and white, or white and black:

it’s orange!

The oystercatcher isn't a type of magpie, but the visual similarities have led to comparisons and some languages build that in. The Welsh term 'Pioden fôr', for example, translates to 'magpie of the sea'.

 

Magpies’ love of shiny things

used to be a popular excuse

for the hastily-flung-away ring.

Now we know they’re neophobic.

A systematic study was carried out by Exeter University scientists in 2014. It refuted the folklore myth of the ‘thieving magpie’ by showing that they are actually nervous of objects such as jewellery. Lead author Dr Toni Shephard said: ‘We did not find evidence of an unconditional attraction to shiny objects in magpies. Instead, all objects prompted responses indicating neophobia – fear of new things.’ The image is from Jane Daniell’s set of four etchings ‘The Thieving Magpie’, 2015, based on the Rossini’s 1817 opera semiseria of the same name. 

      

There are twice as many magpies now

as in 1970, but less than half the sparrows.

Yet, still, there are more sparrows.

Yet, still, I see more magpies.

 

Magpies: 0.6m in 1970, 1.2m now. House sparrows: 25m in 1970, 10m now. The wren, at 22m, is currently our commonest bird.

 

Spot what difference?

Males are 10% bigger

than females

and are slightly-more-than-correspondingly longer in the aerodynamic tail.

Cutting to the Chase

One for sorrow, Two for joy

Five for silver, Six for gold

Ten for the Devil himself.

 

There are various versions of the nursery rhyme referring to superstitions about the portent of the number of magpies seen together in a flock. The text is extracted from this one:

‘One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl and Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, Seven for a secret never to be told, Eight for Heaven, Nine for Hell, Ten for the Devil himself’

Having said all which, I almost always see just a solitary magpie. Confirming, I suppose, the current sorry state of the world.

 

Hush for Lisa…

Counting Crows

has seven members.

So what’s the secret never to be told?

 

The seven-strong Californian band Counting Crows has sold over 20 million albums since its formation in 1991. I don’t claim to be a fan, but how many corvid-counting rockers are there? As for ‘Seven for a secret never to be told’… Lead singer Adam Duritz has dated both Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox – so perhaps his relationship with Lisa Kudrow is the secret, meaning he has completed the full set of female Friends. The band’s most appealing non-secret is that they were termed ‘Accounting Crows’ after securing a particularly good recording contract in their early-nineties peak.

 

The intelligent magpie

is one of the few non-mammalian species

able to recognize itself in a mirror test –

and here’s my proof.

 

They start in December

and they start with a mud cup to anchor the sticks to come

into the fork of a tree.

I did say they’re clever.

  

 

I reckon you’d need

all these eggs

to make a decent magpie omelette.

It would taste a little wild.

 

Magpie eggs are edible, but contain only a third of the volume of a standard hen’s egg.

 

 

And this is Murgatroyd

mascot of Blue Peter’s rival -

a pie made of mag-

azine snippets of a televisual sort.

 

The British children's television programme ‘Magpie’ ran on ITV from 1968-80 as a rival to the BBC's famous 'Blue Peter'. I have no recollection of seeing it, or Murgatroyd – a rather free-form magpie, I have to say. I do remember ‘Blue Peter’, which started – like me - in 1958, and is still running.

 

Here’s a magpie

further off than I might have liked.

Is Catkin really

so very scary?

 

Look carefully! The magpie is on the second-highest pair of wires. The photo shows The Land on which my wife Steph keeps her pony. Catkin is the yard cat.

 

Magpies may be crows of a sort

but they don’t make a murder:

a tribe more likely, a mischief, a parliament,

a tidings or maybe - which I’m opting for - a gulp.

 

 

 

 

NON-HOLIDAY IN HOSPITAL

 

Non-Holiday in Hospital 

Written 21 - 24 Aug 2026 - Acute Oncology Ward, and 25 Aug - 1 Sept 2026, Oncology Ward D12, Southampton General Hospital. 

I felt able to classify my 16 – 21 July stay as as a 'Holiday in Hospital'. Less so this time: I was more like a writer in residence!

There could be some karma

in using a gut health product’s pot

as a spittoon

for my regurgitatations.

 

As carried in the car on the way in to hospital on 21 August. Repeated regurgitation of bilsih vomit proved to be the key to doctors deducing the latest development in my Stage 4 Bowel Cancer. A tumour had blocked off the path from my stomach to my digestive system. My medical notes state 'he presented to hospital with worsening back and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting and a history of delayed bowel movement for three days prior to presentation. Vomitus contained undigested food.'

 

Six times a day

then no poo for seventy hours!

Even as a boy I wasn’t thrilled 

by roller coasters.

 

The three poo-free days had preceded my admission to hospital,  after which an enema released a matching seven on the 22nd.

Acute Oncology

is on Level C. No reason not,

but did it have to be 

quite such a big C?

 

Corridor signage

         

Who knows

why they fed a tube

in up my nose?

I only know I didn’t like it!

 

I was told  that the main purpose was nasal feeding, rather than – as I had first thought – to extract vomit or bile directly from the stomach via the tube – then told later that nasal extraction was indeed the purpose! Either way, the insertion of a tube, as I recalled clearly from 2022, is an unpleasant process. Don't put me on the volunteer list of people on whom students practice their technique!

The infusion pump beeps

to say there is 15 minutes to go

before it beeps to say it's done -

to tell me at two I’ll be woken again at quarter past!

The monitor for the infusion drip above my bed, keeping me hydrated on consecutive six hour cycles. I soon learned that if woken by the bleeping at 01.45 there was no point in trying to sleep gain until the cycle finished at 02.00.

     

It's lucky I'm not a gourmand

as I haven't been fed for three days.

Still,

even non-gourmands get hungry!

 

The hospital menu is actually pretty good, the more so compared with nothing... 

          

The pain some people

endure in here!

Fancy me allowing a modest backache

to keep me awake…

                    

              

In the ward the patients come and go

without much talk of Michelangelo.

Come day three,

I’m the veteran of Acute Oncology.

 

‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.’ T.S. Eliot:  ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 1915. The image is of my water jug.

 

               

Ah, the clink of china!

Yet it’s hard to look

forward to breakfast

when you won’t be getting any.

The butterfly needle

is my friend as,

compared with the bigger cannula needle,

it does not sting much like a bee.

 

Muhammad Ali first explained his style in his most famous way in 1964:’Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, his hands can't hit what his eyes can't see’.

 

 

Modernity is here!

I find myself assuming

that the medical procedures

will follow suit.

At  02.15 on 24 August I was transferred from the old-style Acute Oncology ward to a more general oncology ward set in a plush new 4th floor extension – the same ward in which I took my ‘Holiday in Hospital' in July (but not in my own isolation room, despite my pointing it out as mine on arrival).

 

Suppose that, on death

my memories pass into another body.

Would I

still be no more?

 

What if that other body

remembers more than I do?

Would that mean

that I’d be more alive than now?

Cannula coverage for daywear

 

And if I knew that other body

was going to suffer

some horrible harm,

would it be for me to worry?

Cannula coverage to take a shower

 

 

I’m hungry enough

after five days of not eating

not to be keen on the doctor’s assurance

that up to two weeks is no problem.

It might look like a car park

from the outside, to you:

to me, though,

it’s a view.

The view being from the quieter non-acute oncology ward to which I was moved. Not many wards have a view out.

 

This is the time to park!

You don’t even have

to pretend to be disabled.

Yet no one takes advantage…

 

This morning’s carousel contains

a record line-up of infusions to come.

The fun never stops!

Except for when it will…

 

Now they want to measure

my urine production

as well as my blood pressure,

temperature, and aspirated products.

You'll have to trust me: those cardboard tubes contains my wee

 

 

When I sense my main tumour

through the pain in my back,

my own sense of tumour

comes under a small attack.

 

Ribbons on Emily's uniform

 

Here’s a quirk to contemplate

I used to be woken twice a night by 'hunger pang' sensations.

Now I’m not – although

I haven’t eaten for a week.

 

I do have a constant grumble of emptiness, but it doesn’t seem enough to wake me. That’s little loss, though: back pain, blood pressure readings, medication times, bleeping infusers and general ward noise have stepped into the role.

 

When I run short

of fortitude

the slack’s picked up

by having zero choice.

 

Following aspiration of stomach contents with a vacuum pump

Goodbye chicken curry, liquorice

coffee, blackcurrants and cauliflower curds!

I’m sorry not to say farewell through taste,

rather than through words.

 

I was nil by mouth for the week prior to being told that a permanent jejunostomy was likely to be needed: I would never eat or drink again, just receive everything through a stomach tube. That genuine list of eccentric favourites touches on the fact that curds are the dense, edible white head of the cauliflower plant, which actually consist of a massive cluster of immature, undeveloped flower buds and thick stem tissue. Not that I refer the ‘curds’ all that often when I don’t fancy a rhyme! In fact, the day after I had written this - the worst news I had yet received - the diagnosis moved on: a non-tube solution was possible after all.

Liane tells me ‘jejune’ was a cool word in the sixties

(What would she know? She was an unborn German)

so a jejunostomy must be a cool op.

Thanks for trying, Liane!

 

Artist Liane Lang  visited, leading me to break the privacy rule of not showing other people in these photos...I'm still not showing NHS staff  so fully without agreement, or other patients at all.

Eight days of taking nothing in 

has seen me drop by just eight pounds.

Dieting must be pretty hard

when it's done with food!

From 74.5 Kg (11 st 8 lbs)  on admission to 70.5 kilos  (11 st 0 lbs) on 26 Aug. Nurse Kim has an impressive collection of pens but shows no sign of using them to note my weight. Indeed, I was surprised that that among the battery of regular tests and measurements (temperature, blood pressure, pulse, blood sugar levels, blood make-up, oxygen levels, urine flow etc) I was not weighed at all. I only have the data because, curious about it, I asked to be weighed. 

That said, Steph likes me

to be eleven stone dead.

I don’t think she said

‘Eleven stone, dead’.

Bench halfway down the corridor to D12. 

Is this bed lying here

illegitimately? Perhaps it’s just resting.

Who can expect even a bed 

to be absolute give and no take?

According to the blue corridor notice shown here, which maybe should have been bigger, 'BEDS & TROLLEYS MUST NOT BE LEFT IN THIS AREA'

The chicken pie, vegetable lasagne

and macaroni cheese are all off today!

I take the disaster calmly,

having been ineligible for any of them…

I'm not yet sure what the hospital veggie lasagne looks like, but in my current starved fantasy, something like this online depiction...

Prince is from Ghana

He asks me about British politics.

I explain that Nigel Farage 

doesn't want him to help me get better.

If you took immigrants and foreign workers out of the NHS, the system would be unviable. 

1.30 a.m. is the time to write this

while the back pain’s back to keep me awake

but I haven’t got through the four hours required

before another Oramorph.

 

Oramorph is a brand name for morphine sulphate oral solution, a fast-acting liquid opioid painkiller served in a disposable purple syringe. It deals with my back pain (caused by tumour pressure) in about twenty minutes, then I can get to sleep again. My prescription allows it only every four hours.

            

Karen knocks over the urine container

I’d put in a stupid place.

Ah, the glamorous side of nursing!

Yet she still smiles...

I am still collecting urine for measurement - the aim to check that inputs from the constant drips are in balance with the flows out.

 

 

Will I recognise the time

when I’ve become ‘the deadest thing

alive enough to have strength to die’

and know what I should say?

 

Thomas Hardy: 'Neutral Tones', 1867: ‘The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die’. That's a night view with Sean's light on under the curtain next door.

Pleased as I am for them

it doesn’t help much after ten days nil by mouth

to hear the other patients praise

the unexpectedly good catering.

Who knew that GOO

stood for a ‘gastric outlet obstruction’,

here 'in the setting of metastatic colorectal carcinoma’.

I already have the T-shirt!

 

Those quotes are from my medical record. Sonic Youth’s album ‘GOO’ (1990) is a favourite of mine. The title refers to one of the songs – ‘My friend Goo’ which I took to be a play on yucky stuff and God and good as well as referring to lyric writer Kim Gordon’s cool-sounding friend. The surgical interpretation had not occurred to me! The cover features artwork by Raymond Pettibon, and I have owned a T-shirt version of that for  years – the photo shows me in 2024, when it seemed neat to wear a 'Sonic Youth' T-shirt to the opening of my 'Advanced Contemporaries' exhibition of artists over 60. I still have the (bypassed) obstruction, so now I can be GOO both inside and out!

 

I can't die yet

Not until I've written enough poems about death

to make people see

that they're all about life.

 

Written three hours pre-op on 28 Aug 2026. There’s always the chance with a total anaesthetic that you won’t come round afterwards. Only later did it occur to me that I might already have written enough such poems, making it a risky argument!

 

 

What to do when awaiting surgery?

I search online for what may be my last new word:

the patslide is ‘a smooth, rigid plastic board or sheet

used to transfer patients safely between a bed and a trolley’.

 

The view is from the holding room just before the operation. When the surgeon arrived I was given - for the first time - a choice of stent placements: a safe, well-established but temporary measure; or a newer longer-lasting solution with a 10% chance of life-threatening complications. Both would allow eating in the usual way, if not with normal food – a big improvement on the stomach tube that  follow a jejunostomy. I took the 10% risk.

 

I was still wondering

as the anaesthetist went through

his well-tried routine of jokey distractions,

just what  percentage might have swayed me?

 

 

So, I have a lumen-apposing metal stent

inserted between stomach and bowel,

the better to bypass a tumour blockage,

I believe this is good news.

That's the diagram in the gastroenterologist's notes through which he described my choice of options, but with my colour additions. I had arrived in theatre believing there were three options, as confirmed by the oncology team the day before: bypass surgery, a stent cutting through the blockage, or a stomach tube. Not at all, said Dr Tehami now, there were only two: a stent (red outline in the diagram) through the obstruction (blue) or a separately-placed lumen-apposing metal stent (LAMS - green) by cutting a path between stomach and jejunum. That latter was my choice: an Endoscopic Ultrasound guided gastrojejunostomy.

 

On the other hand, ‘Rats!’

Just when I’d spent long enough online

to bore my acquaintance with the ins and outs of a jejunostomy,

I find I’ve merely added to my stock of pointless knowledge.

Diagram online of how a jejunostomy would have worked.

 

‘Quite a day’

Steph texts me, ‘for a body!’ -

pretending to mistype

her playful coding of me as ‘a boy’.

Typing also goes on in the ward, too: Mandy's on admin.

. 

One bound - well, maybe later…

One stagger to the loo and I’m free!

A night without tubes,

and I’m allowed a mug of tea!

‘How do you cope’

asks Peter in Bed 4,

‘two weeks without food?’

‘I let my shorts fall down’.

I wish to complain

that I’ve nothing to complain about.

Where’s the provocation fun in that?

Even the food looks as if it’s going to be good.

 

Leaflets on the ward

 

Small puzzles of the world

No.  8,484.

Why do NHS shower curtains

not reach to the floor?

 

The consequence is that you have to be very careful where to stack your clothes. Hang on a mo, perhaps that's a complaint. It looks to me as if the designated puzzle number refers to both the rhyming slang / bingo call ‘84, curtains door’ and the commonest standard length of curtains, 84 inches.

                   

          

Anaesthetists

like their cannulas big and branched.

I’m told this is an ‘octopus’ style –

though it looks no more than troctopus to me.

 

Lunch has arrived!

I am extremely pleased,

even if

it won’t look much to you.

 

By Day 10 of nil-by-mouth I was down to 69.4 Kg / 10 st 9 lbs, but then a liquid menu was introduced - clear soup and jelly or yoghurt.

Looks like I was given an EEG while under

The sticker is hard to pull off from the hairs,

but I tell myself to man up in empathy

for all that women tolerate by wax!

It can seem that Steph thinks

she knows better than the nurses what is good for me.

My instinct’s to resist that,

only she's probably right.

           

I see I may be

‘overwhelmed by thoughts’.

Yes please,

bring them on!

 

'From the moment you're diagnosed, you may be overwhelmed by the amount of thoughts and questions you have about cancer' - Macmillan Cancer Support Leaflet: ‘Why me? What now? Who can help?’, as stocked in the ward. It lies on my rather stylish 'summer dressing gown', given to me three years by a friend whose own husband succumbed to cancer before he got to use it. Thank you, Helen - it has done me considerable service!

       

I have progressed to the puréed menu!

Better than a stomach pump,

yet ‘tempting’ would be to go too far:

even the photographs are unappetising.

Not yet enough to stop my weight falling further - to 68 k / 10 st 5 lb by Sun 30 Aug

 

This I like!

Were I stronger I’d be inclined

to make a fake-slip-down

in the banana’s honour.

Walking out to the main hospital concourse to get a paper

There is no pain I am receiving -

Oramorph has got my back -

and no obvious reason I should be receding

quicker than the tumours do their stuff.

 

Now that the stent links the stomach to the duodenum, the  medical emphasis switches back to my wider collection of tumours: their growth or spread will be what determines how soon I die – that’s the only obvious reason ‘I should be receding’. Except this quatrain started when the words of Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’ came to me wrongly, as per the title. ‘There is no pain, you are receding’ is correct. Appropriately enough, the song does refer, literally, to numbness caused by an overdose of tranquillisers - albeit the more metaphorical anatomisation of societal numbness is its point in the structure of ‘The Wall’ (1979). 

Come the 32nd

anniversaries could get too predictable.

I know! Let's have one

in hospital!

27 August was the date. Cards remained at my bedside.

 

This won’t stay this neat for long

but I claim it’s not my fault:

Hospital blankets tend to fall off

because they are designed that way.

 

Hospital blankets are made from smooth, lightweight, and low-friction cotton / synthetic weaves. They feature small holes that trap warm body air inside the fibres to balance thermal retention with comfort across varying room temperatures and patient conditions., and are also designed to withstand frequent industrial laundering. But they slip easily if not  tucked in with oppressive 'hospital corner' tightness.

 

At first I thought

the yellow pointer meant

the only way was up…

but maybe not?

 

 

Technology changes

at furious speed.

All the same, I'm sceptical.

How exactly is this going to fly?

 

That’s a bit of a tease. I understand the Air Ambulance van’s main functions to be providing backup when the helicopter is grounded (it carries the same kit), assisting with post-landing transport and taking part in community outreach events.

Rob says he’s bored silly

as ‘you can’t do nothing here’.

Should I be feeling guilty

about struggling to get everything done?

Rob was opposite me - most of the time in D12 the other three beds in my room were occupied by the friendly Rob, Sean and Peter. My hospital plan is appended at the end!

 

 

Henry’s an experienced maker of beds

He must have passed

the 100,000 mark.

I expect to be impressed!

 

Henry has been working in the same support role here for 25 years, and estimates he makes 18 beds per day. A working year contains some 230 days, so 25 x 230 x 18 = some 103,500 beds before mine. Hooray for Henry's!

 

Was it Keats who claimed

that truth was beauty

and beauty truth?

Well, we've got the truth…

It was Keats – no prizes for that! ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ – ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 1819

 

What might seem the most basic act

is getting rather complicated:

colour and volume must now be monitored,

 as well as time, and frequency, and score on the Bristol Scale. 

 

I reckon I’d need twenty lines

to set out all the future constraints

of my stent-and-cancer-adjusted diet.

Let’s stick with one: eat nothing that expands in the stomach.

The biggest impact of that dictate is: never again can I eat bread or bread products. The image shows dietician Zoë's breezily direct intervention in the standard booklet advising on 'Eating After a Duodenal Stent'

Let’s hope that Auden

and all who’ve gone already

to where they can’t be fed

will be OK with metaphorical bread.

 

W.H. Auden: ‘Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead’: ‘Secondary Worlds’, 1968

 

Why should I be mortified

that I might soon  be mort?

If I went completely French,

it couldn’t make much difference.

 

Triggered by a message from the artist Judith Burrows, who declared herself ‘mortified (forgive the pun)’ that she hadn’t replied to my email about ‘The Death Suite’ . The image is a Lithographic print made from her oil painting 'Lone Man Waiting (for someone or perhaps time)'. The word ‘mortify’ derives from the Latin ‘mortificare’ (to kill), which passed into Anglo-Norman as ‘mortifier’ (to cause to die) – consistent with the French word for death itself, ‘la mort’. 'Mort' is a English word, too, most relevantly for the note played on a hunting horn to announce that a deer has been killed.

Fear not!

This is the way out of the hospital,

not the exit that being here

was seeking to prevent.

Photo taken on the way to the discharge room, 1 September

Thanks / Notes

My wonderful wife, Steph, visited daily, hence several mentions. 

Many thanks to all the NHS staff, who  collectively sorted me, and were were always helpful and cheerful. They also answered my not infrequent questions about what was going on - practical and medical, but also as driven more by what I was writing!

Thanks also to my 'art network'. I was grateful to those who took the trouble to send me hundreds of  personalised messages of love and support (but I decided I couldn't add individual replies to all into the plan below!).  

Hospital is a time-rich environment: no need to clean or cook (or even eat, in my case), water the garden, do the bins, iron, hoover etc. You can't play sport or go out on trips. Sleep is difficult, leaving more hours awake. And for some reason, I didn’t feel like playing online chess: another hour per day saved! So if you’re feeling OK – and, much of the time, I was – it’s worth planning to make the most of it. Which I did by monitoring myself against the following, assuming a two week stay was likely (in fact, it was only twelve days. It felt longer!). Yes, I am a bit nuts, but people are used to it...

PLAN FOR ESTIMATED TWO WEEK HOSPITAL STAY                                     Yes or No

SAFE TO ASSUME WILL HAPPEN

Medical visits, tests, monitoring, procedures                                                                        Y

Daily visits and discussions with Steph                                                                                 Y

Family visits                                                                                                                           Y

 

ESSENTIAL

Understand what doctors are saying, as assisted by Steph, devise questions

ahead of meetings, and maintain medical records and notes                                                Y

Pre-plan future changes to recording in response to developments                                      Y

Deal with family comms                                                                                                       Y 

Phone Mum daily                                                                                                                  Y

Celebrate 32^nd Wedding Anniversary                                                                                   Y

 

DO IF POSSIBLE

Daft and implement activity plan                                                                                        Y

Maintain Instagram presence                                                                                               Y

Write and publish 2 x weekly FAD columns                                                                       Y

Photos and texts for photo-poems covering the period                                                       Y  

Set up artist visitors                                                                                                             Y

Produce autobiographical article material in collaboration with Emma                             Y 

Take forward ‘Holes, positive’ show                                                                                  50%

Respond to Bella re APT show                                                                                            N

 

NICE TO DO

Read daily paper, TLS, LRB                                                                                                50%      

Watch 1 x 'Nashville' TV episode daily                                                                                Y

Watch 'Match of the Day' programmes                                                                                Y

Expand musical range                                                                                                          Y 

Complete reading of James Schuyler biography in tandem with Collected Poems             Y

New York School wider poetry reading                                                                               25%

Read Knausgaard novel                                                                                        100 / 660 pages  

Proper consideration of Allen Jones's art via Mark Hudson’s book ‘Moves’                     N