Commitments

JON: As I was idly leafing through the blog posts the other day, it became horribly obvious that I have not been pulling my weight in the blogging department. I have lots of excuses, some of them quite inventive, even inspired – but staying silent for almost 4 months has been a mistake. Politicos say that a week is a long time in politics, and 4 months is too long with PD. A lot can happen, and has, in that time.

As you know, I have started taking Danish lessons. These are what is termed “total imersion”, which means that the teacher conducts the classes entirely in Danish, and we poor students struggle bravely to keep up. It makes a certain amount of sense as students come from all over the place and have no common language other than Danish.

The lessons last from 8:30 am to 2:00 pm, 5 days a week … yes, you that read right: 5 days a week. Since I find myself exhausted when having to maintain concentration for more than 10 minutes at a stretch, this is…a stretch. So we have decided that I will go to class twice a week, a rather more achievable ambition. Consequently, my Danish is still minimal, and I linger at the “the cat sat on the induction cooker” stage (so don’t yet know how to say “the cat broke the induction cooker”). I feel I am making little progress, though I can see my fellow students improving steadily – though mainly improving their English during the breaks.

But what of the other days, I hear you ask. Am I off out having fun with the natives and their herrings? Well, no. Two days a week are devoted to physiotherapy, and the last weekday I spend trying to recover from the combined mental and physical strain.

I started to take physiotherapy shortly before our holiday. It is turning out to be somewhat worse than I expected (and you know what an optimist I am). I went hoping for massage, relaxation and a generally pleasant experience. How sadly mistaken I was. The clinic owns a full set of the most horrific implements of torture you’ve ever seen in black leather and brushed steel – and I’m expected to eagerly jump on these things to “work out”, because “it’s good for me”. Do I look that gullible?

And to bring you right up to date: yesterday we went to Copenhagen for a lecture on cantopedia, a subspecies of voice and music therapy. What, I wondered as I sat in my discrete corner, is an arch cynic and all-round poo-pooer of new age crap in all its myriad forms doing at a lecture given in Norwegian to a Danish audience, with the lecturer’s acoustic guitar as a teaching aid? Marie had issued a three-line whip so I couldn’t get out of going, and I am embarrassed to report that I believe there may be something in this canto-therapy.

Parkinson’s is a strange disease. We Parkies can go from full-body rigidity to fluid walking in a matter of moments with the right musical stimulus. Magic – and I mean that, because it seems to me that a fair bit of the scientific basis is still wobbly, but I can see and feel the effect for myself. I’ll tell Marie to explain the idea in her next post as I suspect she understood rather more of the Norwegian than I did.