Joining the Parkinson’s club

Every person with Parkinson’s can remember, often in exquisite detail, the moment when they were diagnosed and, in essence, joined the club. I’m tempted to capitalise “the club”, so pivotal will its impact become in subsequent years. For me, 11 December 2006 was the date in question and, rather appropriately I thought, 11 AM. Like an armistice in a way only this amounted to the beginning rather than the end of hostilities

My diagnosis appointment was perfunctory but decisive, leaving no wriggle room. As time passes the detail fades a little. But it comprised all the usual stuff – walking up and down, finger tap and so on. It didn’t take long. The neurologist in question, a German trainee from Düsseldorf, handed me two or three leaflets detailing the condition and invited me to return six months later. In the meantime, I was referred to Kings College Hospital for further investigation and potential recruitment into clinical trials.

I don’t recall being particularly shocked by the diagnosis or the means of its conveyance to me. I have been a scientist all my life and appreciate clarity of thought rather than medical platitudes. “Give it to me straight, doc” has been my motto for as long as I can remember. And I think that’s the point. It worked for me but I suspect this approach suits rather few.

At the time I was diagnosed, there was and still is a degree of controversy about the means in which people are inducted into The Club. There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought here: on the one hand there is the gentle, soft-spoken and encouraging “we will help you all along the way” approach. On the other hand there is the, short sharp shock “get it over quickly” means of addressing the diagnosis.

There is of course a conundrum here. Parkinson’s is a long term neurodegenerative condition for which there is no cure at present. That’s the bad news and, grim though it is, it needs to be imparted to the patient. But it is also survivable, and can even be a source of inspiration, helping to refocus, in a positive way, the individuals life.

This duality has been a particular problem in terms of raising awareness. Paint a picture of unrelenting misery and the money positively gushes in. It’s a terrible condition and research is needed. Conversely, too fluffy an image, all smiles and laughter, pulls the rug from under the fundraisers’ feet. If the condition is that much fun we should all join. The truth is that it is both and also neither. Not surprisingly, few are able to walk this tightrope with conviction.

The diagnostic meeting is critical. At the end of the day, certain pieces of information need to be conveyed to patients at that first diagnosis meeting. Yet at the same time it’s important to acknowledge that once the P word is uttered, patients become immediately deaf to any further information. Most patients would be unable to tell you their birthday.

Given all the time in the world, one might wait until the P word has been absorbed before trying to pass over more information. But that situation doesn’t apply. In 15 minutes one must go from assessment, through diagnosis and onto treatment options. That’s a lot of big stuff to get across. And some things simply can’t wait six months until the next appointment. By that time, they will have Googled everything about Parkinson’s both good and bad. Books with titles like “I cured my Parkinson’s by colonic irrigation” encourage them (wrongly) to be feisty and challenging.

This is the point where I’m out of ideas. I can recognise the difficulties but I have no more to offer in terms of solutions. One thing we do know is that patients who are either given or acquire a positive outlook at diagnosis fare better than those who see it (wrongly) as a death sentence.. I’m pleased to see that, since my diagnosis, getting on for two decades ago, practice has changed. Increasingly diagnosis is made by neurologists rather than dilettante GPs, unused to imparting such a nuanced diagnosis as Parkinson’s. With Parkinson’s predicted to reach pandemic proportions over the next quarter-century, how we encourage positivity will have a huge bearing on outcomes for patients. We may not recognise it as such yet but we are part of a huge experiment that may even have bearings beyond Parkinson’s.

Melatonin mayhem

I get the weirdest dreams with melatonin. Let me give you an example:
I am a spectator at the Kokugikan stadium in Tokyo. The last bout of the day in which yokozuna Hakuho faces yokozuna Terunofuji. An explosive bout and one in which Hakuho prevails. He punches the air in victory (something yokozuna never do) and I decide to head for the exit to beat the rush of people leaving. I know a shortcut. Trotting along one of the aerial walkways in the stadium (there are none in reality) I meet Hakuho, armed with a revolver. He fires a shot and I feel it hit my shoulder (I think that corresponded with my pain as I fell out of bed.).

Suddenly we are in dense green forest in Greenland, walking along a long straight path from glade to glade with an unidentified girlfriend. We say little or nothing. The light is a beautiful dappled green , bright among the tall pines. Our breath and footsteps are the only sounds. As we walk, it starts to snow and by the time we emerge from the forest, the snow is more than a metre deep. Progress is slow but somehow we know that we have to reach this tiny chapel in the middle of a frozen lake.

As we reach the church, the girlfriend says “open the communion wine and choose a gun. They will be after us”. Suddenly there is now a third person with us. Unshaven, he speaks only in grunts. While I rummage around for glasses in the sacristy, he drinks from the bottle. Claret not Burgundy I note. There is a smell of incense in the air. We know “they” will be here by nightfall.

We wait and eventually, emerging from the fog are soldiers, perhaps a hundred, skeletal figures in bearskins tramping and stumbling through the snow. They open fire in a hail of bullets and as I am hit, I wake up. I am on the floor, wrapped in my bedclothes. It takes me a minute or so to work out where I am. I can’t find my wallet. Or the girlfriend.

Global economic Armageddon?

Tariffs, tariffs and more tariffs. There’s something about this whole tariffs farrago that is either ludicrously complex or exquisitely simple and I can’t quite decide which. But there are many players in this sequence. Let’s pick a single example of a country that makes cars and sells them to the US – we’ll call it LITTLELAND – that exports £100 million of cars to the US in the form of this 10,000 cars manufactured by CHEAPOCAR at £10,000 each. It costs CHEAPOCAR £8000 to manufacture each car. So the initial profit to CHEAPOCAR is £2000 per car (which incidentally will be taxed by the government of LITTLELAND) as it leaves the factories to the export company EXP2US. As the cars enter the USA, EXP2US is used to paying small import duties (let’s say 2%) to the US government. This makes each car imported into the US cost the dealers (SCREW-U) £10,200. SCREW-U will then sell the cars on at, let’s say a markup of £4800 making each car available to the customers at £15,000 apiece. SCREW-U makes £4800 profit per car.

Then let’s imagine a US president – we will call him FLORIDA ORANGE – who decides on a whim to increase the import tariff from 2% to 20%. This takes the price to the dealers from £10,200 to £12,000. Each car imported will now generate £2000 rather than £200 for the US revenue. SCREW-U now have cars costing them £12,000 each instead of £10,200 each. They now make £3000 less profit per car (a decrease of 37.5%)

Let’s summarise:
LITTLELAND – country of manufacturing cars
CHEAPOCAR – makes cars and exports some to the US
EXP2US – transports cars to the US and arranges import
SCREW-U – car dealer

These are the principal areas in which companies might have financial interests. Now I know it can’t be this simple because otherwise it would not have completely baffled the economists as to the rationale for these tariffs. But President FLORIDA ORANGE, clearly believes that he knows better than these proven field-if tested economists and that he can apply business rules to countries. I understand, and please correct me if I’m wrong, that FLORIDA ORANGE has a number of bankruptcies to his name so perhaps we should take his ‘famed dealmaking’ with a pinch of salt.

So who is going to pay for this nonsense? FLORIDA ORANGE clearly believes that it should be LITTLELAND which will have to pay £2000 per car to the US Treasury either directly or through CHEAPOCAR. Others may see it differently. But as long as the money is paid it matters little whether it comes from CHEAPOCAR directly, watching its profits from the individual cars evaporate or the same for LITTLELAND’s government. As for EXP2US, there is little incentive for them. Any money they might make will be eaten this up by the raised tariffs. The only obvious area of slack in the system lies with SCREW-YU, which will either have to take less money per car or pass the buck directly to the customer, presumably with some absurd justification. In the end it comes down to a very simple equation. Either Americans pay more for imported cars, or they don’t. If they don’t, then CHEAPOCAR suffers, making fewer cars.

Will somebody help me out here – because to me, this looks like global economic Armageddon. Please tell me I’m wrong. And why.

The foothills of dementia

Over the course of my life to this point I have been one of those people who happily talks to himself. Sometimes it’s just the odd word, other times entire sentences, paragraphs or scenarios. At school, in one of those boarding schools of random brutal discipline, I talked to myself and was roundly and openly vilified for the practice. “Stamford” I heard a prefect bellow across New Court “why are you talking to yourself? Are you going mad?” It reminds me, some 50 years later of that famous drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket.
I often talk to myself and find it no cause for concern. If it is an indicator that I’m becoming insane, it’s taking its time about it. I am no more mad than I have ever been for the last 50 years. Now when people ask me why I talk to myself I say “it’s the only way that I can be sure to enjoy intelligent conversation.”

However, brushing aside such jocularity for a moment, let me introduce a slightly darker dimension to such conversations. I mean of course The Big H. Hallucinations. From the marginal to the major, these are all a part of “The Parkinson’s Experience” as the great Phineas T Barnum might have styled matters. Partly the underlying pathology of Parkinson’s itself and partly the superimposition thereupon of complex psychotropic drugs, hallucinations represents that ragged edge between normality and delirium.

For me, hallucinations have been a predictable if, for the beginning at least, neutral companion, neither reassuring nor Intimidating. The usual stuff – crawling insects typically around the periphery of vision, disappearing upon any visual saccade.

Small animals too are not uncommon subjects of hallucinations, sometimes no more than a sense of presence rather than explicit visual sighting. What kind of animals? Mice, shrews and voles mainly. Certainly nothing much bigger. No need to worry about rats the size of cats.

As the condition progresses, the hallucinations becomes more complex and concrete. Visual persistence changes as well as does their perception as real, competing with real real, if you get my drift. Only last week, I was chased around the kitchen table by a guinea pig the size of a cougar. Fortunately, being of a reasonably widely read disposition, I realised instantly that this was not a guinea pig but a capybara. Of course that’s only part of the answer. I still haven’t established why a capybara was in my kitchen. This is where REM sleep kicks in, making the unbelievable believable. Once you have established that the house guinea pig is now the house capybara, anything is possible.

A good friend of mine was particularly troubled by hallucinations – not by the hallucinations themselves (for in truth he had none at that stage) but the idea of them, the notion that these alternative realities might one day show up to play games with his cognition.

Over the years, not surprisingly, the frequency, intensity, and credibility of my hallucinations has extended substantially. The flies and cockroaches are largely unseen, kept at bay by the mice, all the way up to the capybara. An entire food chain in action.

But the animal components of the hallucinatory landscape are infinitely less disquieting than the participation of human hallucinations. For a couple of years now I have been woken in the middle of the night by my children wanting to talk over matters of some urgency. Not in and of itself disturbing except for the fact that my children are all grown up now and dotted round the country. Dotted around other countries even.

How do these figures occur? As ghostly, pale ectoplasmic wraiths, translucent embodiments? No, they appear exactly as they would were they actually present. And do these figures fade away as I turn my gaze to them? No, again they are very real. I have become so accustomed to their presence that the only way I can distinguish them from their genuine embodiments is by trying to shake their hands. My hands pass through theirs.

I can hear you, dear reader, composing the question to me – if my hallucinations are this real, and I safe to drive? Will I find myself swerving into the path of oncoming vehicles or mowing down entire classes of schoolchildren? The answer is of course no, I can’t make those guarantees. And that is why I surrendered my driving licence last year. The toughest decision I have yet to face in the context of Parkinson’s, but a necessary one.

Am I becoming demented? Are these hallucinations the first foothills of dementia’s mighty peak? I don’t know. I have had Parkinson’s for some 18 years. Maybe I have held the line, like Stonewall Jackson’s Virginia infantry in the face of impossible odds. Maybe it can be successfully treated? I don’t have those answers to hand but I do know, if nothing else, it is time to ask the questions.

How was it for you?

You cannot open any webpage without becoming swiftly embroiled in a barrage of questions, increasingly probing and personal. I’m all for privacy and protection of my data but I can’t help feeling that by ticking these boxes I am neither contributing to my privacy nor maintaining it.

Go onto YouTube for instance. Five years ago this was easy and the limit of the interaction was to click the box. This brought up the video one had chosen, be that Japanese Taiko drummers, Christopher Hitchens spewing bile or The Great British Bake Off back catalogue. Or it might be Gavin and Stacey, Britain’s Got Talent (which on the whole, it often didn’t) or cheesemaking in Tasmania. That sort of thing. You click on the video, it starts, it finishes. End of relationship. That was fine. I liked that. YouTube was full of little nuggets. There were even Wagner operas there if you looked for them. YouTube was like the best attic you have ever visited, full of Edwardian candelabras, raffia baskets, wooden automata and Thunderbird models.

Try the same manoeuvre now and see what you get. Two minutes of videos advertising holidays in far-off destinations, served salmon pink cocktails on the beach at sunset by glamorous bronzed nymphs in bikinis. Or you can be told that the latest device for trimming nostril hair is “sweeping the nation” or perhaps “taking the world by storm”. Evidently these nonsenses work to the same script. One presumably generated by AI. And let’s face it, not the best advertisement for AI. In any case, unless you are very lucky in life, bronzed nymphs and cocktails are a world away from the windblown beach at Skegness in February, breakers lashing the rocks and sending more sanding into already gritty eyes.

You came to watch a short video on housing – remember? Well no, but by now you have completely forgotten what it is you sought in the first place. Oh yes, I remember – retirement homes in Sussex. The website itself is uninformative. They will be happy to furnish me with information but only if you I sell out an online form with my name in full, my preferred form of address (I rather like “your Imperial Majesty” but it doesn’t fit into the box), my email address, telephone number and availability over the next week for a sales representative to call me. This gets my hackles up immediately. I know a hard sell when I see one. And in general hard selling is reserved for those paragons of the property market, the timeshare. I click the box, against my better judgement and immediately another appears, telling me that I have failed to fill out several other previously unnoticed boxes such as the names of my children, criminal records, my bank account and so on.

After an eternity of filling out what seem to me to be utterly irrelevant answers to their questions I lose interest. If the retirement homes were that good value, the vendors would make that clear rather than rely on their persuasive powers on a phone call. Those of you who know me well would not put money on the sales rep in a mano-a-mano. I eat cold callers for breakfast. All of this shenanigans is sufficient to persuade me that I’m not interested in their retirement homes. I hit the back button, with the intention of clearing previous entries into the form, only to discover that this is somehow locked into the system. Whether or not I wish to buy their property, they still have my data. And as if that isn’t insulting enough, a pop-up appears from nowhere asking me to grade my experience. I’ll get to that in a minute. What was intended to be a few seconds skimming through possible retirement homes has turned into an odyssey of lost data. Fill out the form or not fill out the form? I am caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh yes, that assessment form. We cannot interact with anything these days without being invited, cajoled or blackmailed into assessing them in some way. Was your experience (A) ordinary, (B) fabulous or (C) amongst the most sublime experiences of my life? This kind of assessments are clearly not written by scientists. There is little space for anything except fulsome praise. And even if your experience was pretty negative clicking the “bad” box embroils you in a further cascade of misery – why was it bad? What could be done to make it better? Sisyphus knew all about this.

YouTube then and now. And don’t get me started on cookies. In five years YouTube has changed from being information delivered in a sprint. Nowadays it’s Iike wading through treacle. Get rid of it. All of it.

Okay, you can leave the bronzed nymphs behind. Everything else can go.

New year in Vienna

It has been my habit, and the habits of my parents before me, to mark the beginning of the New Year by watching the broadcast from Vienna of the New Year concert, with a glass of champagne in hand. The programme, based around the waltzes, polkas and gallops of Johann Strauss and his family, never fails to throw up a few novelties and surprises. In recent years (the last couple of decades) it has featured dancers from the Viennese ballet, performing in one of the many gilded palaces in Vienna, providing a stunning visual counterpoint to the musicianship on the stage.

The conductor this year, and it changes every year, is maestro Ricardo Muti. I haven’t seen him in concert for some while and he appears to have not slept in the intervening decades, with bags under the eyes the size of steamer trunks. Yet he remains a suave presence in front of the orchestra punctuating the music with the occasional gesture or baton flick. Every conductor finds their own way of communicating that intangible essence at the heart of every piece. Strauss came from the most absurdly musical family. We forget, in the light of his hundreds of waltzes, polkas and so on, that his father, brothers and even mother wrote music and, gradually over the years their music has been accorded equal status with that of young Johann.

The end of the concert is always the same. The last two pieces, invariably unlisted in the programme, are The Blue Danube and the Radetzky March by junior and senior Johann Strauss respectively. There is always a little bit of teasing here as well, with the conductor playing only the first bar of the Blue Danube, to the traditional audience applause before turning to the audience and assuring them that he and the orchestra wish them a happy New Year. The waltz, played then without further interruption is then followed by the Radetzky March to close out the show. The march, in celebration of the Habsburg Field Marshal Johann Josef Wenzel Anton Franz Karl, Graf Radetzky von Radetz, is as brief as the general’s career was long. The conductor turns from the orchestra to the audience and encourages their clapping along with the music. Nothing more you understand – none of the absurd audience contributions that mark, or should that be mar, the last night of the Proms in the UK. This is Austria, perhaps the most straitlaced and stiff collared of all nations.

The orchestra remains overwhelmingly male (perhaps 90%) and Austrian although it makes great play upon its international nature. It’s 2025 and high time this changed. Every once in awhile I briefly entertain the idea of applying for tickets. But being allocated tickets alone occurs approximately as often as total solar eclipses. In any case this is an idle exercise – without selling a kidney or two (perhaps throw in some liver) they are out of the range of mere mortals such as myself.

Oh well…Until 2026, Ein glückliches neues Jahr to you and yours.

Eighteen years of PD

Everybody with Parkinson’s remembers the anniversary of the diagnosis or ‘parkiversary’. I am no different except that I have had more than a few. I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s on 11 December at Pembury Hospital at Tunbridge Wells. In itself the diagnosis was unremarkable, being delivered in a brisk no-nonsense kind of way by a female German neurologist on secondment from Hamburg I believe.

“You have Parkinson’s disease, Mr Stamford” she said, instantly reducing my wife to tears. “Dr Stamford” I said “that’s Dr Stamford”. She looked bewildered for a moment before countering with “but you are not a medical doctor”. “No” I said “I am a neuroscientist” before giving her a brief summary of my prior research career. My wife, quietly sobbing into a handkerchief in the corner, brought this sparring to an abrupt halt. “But you started it” she said as we walked back to the car. “No I didn’t” I offered in a feeble attempt at humour “she invaded Poland”. My wife’s raised eyebrow indicated that the conversation was over. We briefly compared notes before setting off back to work.

All this was the work of a single lunchtime, exactly 18 years ago today. The neurologist, Dr Panzer*, did not invite questions. I just simply became a number, a new manila folder to be filled with shaky spirals, samples of handwriting, and all the usual scans. For that lunchtime, the folder had my name, address and GP. Dr Panzer referred me for an MRI scan and the pages began to fill up further folders (and this is a real folder, not a computer icon).

Before levodopa, life expectancy was poor. Six years from diagnosis to death. And if we are honest, six rather shitty years at that. To reach 18 years of Parkinson’s is, though I say so myself, something of an achievement, albeit a largely passive one, achieved through some 60,000 tablets, potions, salves, balms, and implanted electrodes to stimulate deep brain structures. Oh and exercise of course.

Eighteen years. If it was a lodger, and I sometimes think it is, albeit a largely unwelcome one, the notion of it occupying the spare bedroom in perpetuity would be decidedly unappealing. Even if it was one of one’s own children, 18 will usually be the point where it would be packed off to university with student loan and armfuls of books.

Okay Parkinson’s, it’s time to go. That’s you to go, not me. They have even demolished my local hospital and built a new one in the time you have been occupying my brain, bouncing around in my basal ganglia, lolling on the loungers of my limbic system. 18 years is too long to occupy anyone’s brain. You have wasted enough of my life. I would like to say it’s been lovely but it hasn’t. Take a hint. You are the worst kind of houseguest. If I could kick you out and change the lock, I would do so.

*You didn’t really think that was the neurologist’s full name?

The CD is dead? Don’t make me laugh!

I started collecting LPs when I was 15. I can remember the record in question (Hot August Night by Neil Diamond) and the first classical album I bought shortly thereafter (Peer Gynt by Grieg). At first I bought infrequently – I was only a schoolboy and my pocket money went only just so far. But I listened to a great deal of music and consequently bought discerningly.

By the 1980s, when I was in my early twenties, with four years of university behind me, I found myself drawing a salary as a research assistant. In terms of stacking up the vinyl I had money to burn. Almost literally. It was an opportunity to buy all those albums I had coveted. No more months of grim self-denial. It was time to splurge.

Almost every Saturday would find me skulking amongst the racks at the HMV Shop on Oxford Street, The Virgin Megastore at Tottenham Court Road or Tower Records at Piccadilly Circus. And for classical music, nothing could beat the Music Discount Centre (formerly Ron’s Music Shop) opposite Charing Cross station, sadly long since gone. Occasionally I would dive down into the back streets of Soho in search of rare jazz recordings. The shops got to know me and would keep me abreast of anticipated shipments of specialist live recordings as they euphemistically described what everyone else knew as bootlegs. And I walked everywhere, connecting the dots between the tube stations, piecing together a retail homunculus of London’s West End.

One might suppose this to be a young man’s indulgence, put aside or curtailed by each sequential life event – marriage, children and so on, with their associated dips in spending power. Wrong. Although I never quite ever topped the unfettered retail assault of my twenties, the habit continued unabated. I am now in my early 60s and the record (LP and CD) collection stands at a giddying 4000 discs. 4000 discs in 48 years is 83 albums per year. That’s a disc every 4 to 5 days. On average. I don’t know whether I should be ashamed or proud.

The truth of it is I love music. Almost every form or manifestation of music. From the Taiko drummers of Japan to the Fado singers of Portugal. From unaccompanied folk singers in Northumbria to the Symphony of a Thousand by Mahler. From the jingle jangle of Javanese gamelan to the woody resonance of a solo cello. A cornucopia of music.

And it had to be on LP or, latterly, CD. I was never a huge fan of cassettes. The quality was never adequate despite the weight of advertising trying to persuade us otherwise. Cassettes flattered to deceive. I started with LPs and postponed the decision to swap over to CD (or not) until the late 80s. I’m not sure why I was so reticent. The price differential between LP and CD was certainly offputting, with CDs essentially double the price of LPs. That wasn’t the sole cause of my caution.

Mixed messages seemed to emerge from the CD lobby. “Perfect sound forever” was the courageous claim of the CD manufacturers. Forever is a long time. And this kind of perfection was difficult to reconcile with those bizarre adverts showing CDs daubed with butter, strawberry jam and whatever. There are surely better ways of demonstrating the durability of this then new vehicle. In any case, it was hardly a fair comparison. I have always taken my LPs neat – no butter or jam.

CDs were easy – put them in the tray, press play. That was it. All of it. What could be easier? I guess that was another attraction for many listeners. They didn’t need to worry about any rigmarole.

Okay so the the sound seemed better on unbuttered CDs – brighter, clearer and more detailed. You really could hear one of the trombonists quietly break wind in the seventh bar of Mahler 5. On LP, his blushes were spared by the background rumble, snap, crackle and pop of the LP’s groove. For classical music, the pleasure of hearing the music emerge from silence, apart from the occasional flatulent brass player (why is it always the brass?) was worth the premium. For rock, the claimed advantages of CD were less obvious. And certainly you would have been hard pressed to detect any trouser coughing against the backdrop of John Bonham’s drumming.

I think my reticence in changing over completely to CD was twofold. Firstly and most obviously perhaps, I liked the physical presence of LPs much more than CDs. In the early days of CDs, often the cover design was little more than a scaling down of the equivalent LP and, whilst the writing on an LP sleeve was readable, the same could not be said for the minuscule text on the CD booklet. Call me picky but I quite like being able to read those background notes. Especially on jazz albums where documentation is everything – “Jellyroll Morton played this with a sprained thumb causing him to miss the entry in the second bar of Cold Ravioli Blues”. That sort of thing.

But the real root of my reticence is what I called the rigmarole. Secretly I think I quite enjoyed it. Putting the record on the turntable, carefully wiping it down with a carbon fibre brush to clear the surface dust, brushing the stylus with isopropyl alcohol before slowly lowering the arm down onto the disc. It was my way of showing my respect for the music and for the record itself. If I looked after it then it would look after me. So many of my friends paid little attention to such preparatory ritual and paid the price with records that showed their age in the ingrained surface debris and compromised sound.

And what of my LPs, mostly 40 or more years old and largely unplayed for most of those 4 decades? How do they sound? well, pretty good if I’m honest. With a decent if not state-of-the-art turntable, they have aged well. Protective sleeves have helped. The sound is bright and musical and whilst the flatulent trombonist is inaudible, the rest of the brass section rings out clearly.

I haven’t failed to notice the recent resurgence of LPs. And whilst I was reticent 40 years ago to change from LP to CD, I’m in no hurry to change back again. Sonically I think CDs hold the edge unless competing with the kind of turntables that need a mortgage. Pound for pound, CDs remain superior (in my humble opinion). No end-of-side distortion, more limited dynamic range and ever so slightly muddier sound quality. Plus, most remarkably, they often cost more than the equivalent CDs. That seems to me particularly paradoxical.

But what of Spotify and Amazon and the streaming services I hear you ask. To be honest I’ve never really been persuaded of their merits. A friend of mine once said of Spotify that it was music for people who didn’t really like music. I can sort of see what he meant. In some ways it is a step further removed from the circumstances of its recording. LPs have always offered abundant documentation whether pop, jazz or classical. CDs suffered from the compact format by either reproducing the LP documentation in an infinitesimally small font or by abbreviating the content. Spotify offers next to no information and, should you wish that, it will be found on your computer.

Once you invoke the computer as a source of musical pleasure, you are inviting trouble in my view. If you have to listen to a piece of music with a laptop on your knee, you are not concentrating on the music. And by doing so you are devaluing, whether consciously or otherwise, that music. At the end of the day a laptop is not a hi-fi component.

Renting virtual music (and with the streaming services, that is exactly what you are doing) is akin to leasehold versus freehold. If a streaming service becomes bankrupt, why do you think all your music will be? Let’s not delude ourselves that handing over our music to 3rd parties is a good idea. Remember Napster?

In the end it comes down to the fact that I like to have something in my hands – documentation, programme notes, librettos with which to enhance my connection to the music. Balancing quality of sound and convenience in a robust format remains my preferred approach to the music. I’m happy that doomsayers are predicting the demise of CD. I don’t see a format in decline. The CDs I bought in the 80s sounds just as good today – better in fact as I have upgraded the hi-fi over the years.

My friends are ditching their CDs, persuaded by these modern music delivery systems. I am unconvinced and gladly taking those unwanted CDs. Happy to help.

Long live the CD.

Jon’s last ride

Jt wasn’t supposed to end like this. In the cinema of my mind, I saw it very differently – a mighty V8 Jaguar comes to a halt. Rugged, good looking man (myself obviously), removes Ray Bans, eyes screwed against the low sun, one last check in the rearview mirror, a blip on the loud pedal, one last snarl from that mighty V8 then silence. Pan across the valley to the familiar shape of Neuschwanstein castle as the music swells – “The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla” by Richard Wagner. Closing credits roll as the music thunders to conclusion. Screen fades to black.

That sort of thing.

Epic, heroic and melodramatic all in one. Pete and l had discussed the idea a year or so back when it looked as though I was going to lose my driving licence. A series of narrative conversations about Parkinson’s, linked together by a journey through the various Wagnerian castles. Thoughts by Pete and Jon, music by Wagner. What’s not to like.

But somehow events rarely unfold so tidily. Like a friend who was looking for spiritual enlightenment at the top of Kilimanjaro at dawn only to find her moment of quiet reflection brought to an abrupt halt by four Dutch teenagers intent on mooning her until she left the mountaintop. Fatuous trumps heroic every time.

In my case, there was no Jaguar. No Wagner. No sunset. Just a momentary lapse of concentration approaching a sharp right-left corner in an this ageing Nissan Micra. A screech of tyres, and an abrupt admonishing yelp from my passenger as we left the road, crashed through brush and bushes, coming eventually to rest with that familiar sound of headlamp meeting tree trunk. A cause for celebration with hindsight although it did not seem so at the time (to the right of the tree trunk was a steep ravine, sliding into which would almost certainly have rolled the car).

No Wagner. No Jaguar. No roaring V8. No music at all.

So this is how it ends, I thought.

I know of no male who would ever volunteer the opinion that they were anything less than a god behind the wheel. It’s a machismo sort of thing I think, some DNA relic from our Neanderthal background. Let me break with tradition then and vouch the opinion, endorsed by my friends and anyone who has ever been driven by me, that my own driving is perhaps not the very zenith of automotive control. Put another way, and I have the Parkinson’s at least partly to blame, I am probably not a very good driver. I am the counterfoil.

As my passenger and I collected our thoughts and dusted ourselves down, we counted ourselves lucky. He could have shouted. He would have been within his rights to be angry. Or worried or fearful. He has known me for more than fifty years. He did not need to say anything. We both knew what this meant.

Given time I could have persuaded myself that it was just a one-off, an accident that would not be repeated. But I have a strong imagination and can easily deconstruct any event into a series of what-ifs. What if I had hit a person rather than a tree. What if the car had caught fire after the collision? What if? What if? What if?

It doesn’t matter how long you delude yourself that it will be okay, eventually it won’t. I picked my driving licence from the bureau, placed it in a Manila envelope with a brief covering letter and sent it to the DVLA.

It was not to a soundtrack of Wagner. It was not heroic. Nor noble. Just prosaic. The only thing I could have done. At least it didn’t end in Valhalla.

Espresso in the tumbleweeds

What once flowed onto the page in reckless abandon, words tumbling over each other in the need to be heard, is now barely a trickle. Where once I felt the need to express myself on virtually any given subject I no longer have that drive or compulsion. My fire is almost gone, flickering embers rather than crackling flame. It is a terrible moment for any writer – and I will just this once accord myself the luxury of that conceit, when they realise that the flame is gone, the fire cold.

The harder one tries the more the target recedes. Like an asthmatic dragon I have made effort upon fumbling effort to rekindle that fire. My desk is a shrieking bedlam of projects enthusiastically initiated then apathetically abandoned. An installation of empty espresso cups and Jaffa cake wrappers. Short stories, that novel I promised myself, plays, critiques, reviews and so on, a cacophony of incompletion, cheek by jowl with biscuit crumbs and coffee stains.

For months I have told others about my forthcoming screenplay, hoping against hope that, by talking about it, it might somehow become real. And it did briefly flicker into life, only to be too soon abandoned like some Wild West homestead shaped by the wind and tumbleweed. If I describe things often enough eventually I start to believe what I have said rather than what I have done. This is self delusion on an epic scale, the very grandeur of the deceit almost worthy of a certain ex-US President.

Parkinson’s lent me a voice, both figuratively and literally. The last five years particularly, when progress has been swiftest, discovery upon discovery in the perpetual flux of new and resurrected drugs, provided me with ample material to enlighten and explain for any readers so interested. Parkinson’s was my mojo. When you have written about little else for a decade, it’s hard to execute a credible volte face and speak with authority on other material.

I would like to believe, even in the face of such persuasive arguments to the contrary, that I will one day write a significant work of fiction – a screenplay, novel, or collection of short stories. Apart from occasional sputterings (https://jonstamford.com/writing/) the short story has largely eluded me as a genre. The novel too. And the less said about my moribund screenplay, the better.

Perhaps I should focus on maudlin self-pity. If the previous half dozen paragraphs are anything to go by, I’ve pretty much got that one nailed.

Class dismissed.