Those who are familiar with my life will know that I have had an unfortunate encounter with the Old Man recently. My sister Dikka in Wales died in February 2022 and I went over for her funeral. And getting ready to come back I had a stroke.

Dikka was the first of our generation to go. She was young, only 58, even younger than my father who at 59 had almost kicked off the last generation over 30 years ago. Much of her life had been hard, full of whatever, but the love of her Welsh family had brought her back to the living, and she was making a new life for herself among the wreckage of the old. And now she was dead.

So off I went for the funeral. As usual in that musical land, it was a raucous affair, full of tearful memories and drunken songs to all hours. On the evening of March 10, I was packing for my flight home the next morning, when the world started spinning and my body came uncoordinated, and the next thing I knew it was next morning and I was being bundled into a car heading for the nearest stroke emergency hospital.

It was not a good kind of stroke, and the doctors are still not certain just what caused it. But it was certainly better than some in that place, who were totally incapacitated and worse. Within not long at all, I was walking around, my balance somewhat off but certainly improving over time. My voice is better now too, though still somewhat slurred when I try to say too much, and with an irritating lisp. The main effect been in my writing. When told to put down, for example, the alphabet, it requires real effort to do it properly. As you can imagine this could be kind of a drag to an artist such as I have always imagined me to be. Fortunately the impairment, through the mysteries of the brain, seems confined to the act of writing itself. Even typing on the computer (still, as with many of my age, a 2-finger affair) and actual drawing/painting, seems relatively unaffected; see the just-finished self-portrait above.

So that’s the story. I just heard about another sort-of cousin, about my (almost 70) age, who also bought it (though his father still lives at 93). I had not thought about mortality at all before this. I had retained the youthful tendency of my generation to imagine that we will live forever. I don’t take back my making fun of Dylan Thomas’s hopelessly naïve raging…

…but there will come a time when I am not here, and I guess I really have to make the best of it.