EPILEPSY: Clocking On

Don't Say Brainstorm - An occasional chat about Epilepsy...

This week it’s been National Epilepsy Week, a time to try and raise awareness about the very common and equally misunderstood condition I and millions of other people have.

It is a condition that can cause worry to people when you tell them you have it, because not everyone is fully aware of what it means.  Sometimes saying “I’m epileptic” results in a politely sympathetic, rictus smile trying to hide eyes that are way out of their depth.  Sometimes it provokes lots of curious questions.  Luckily, for people who don’t like being put on the spot, saying “I’m epileptic” is something you’re not likely to have to say.

The workplace is one place where you are going to have to say it at some point, however, and it’s probably the most awkward context.  Workplaces can be where people might feel more exposed to criticism or judgement than they would in social or familial ones.  But however well controlled your epilepsy is you have to let your employees know about it.  Apart from anything else, it means that if you have a fit at work people will know what to do; but from a less selfish perspective, it’s a really shocking thing to see happening and it’s unfair to leave people unprepared for it.

I always worried about mentioning it up in interviews.  I remember bringing it up once or twice in some of my first interviews when they asked if I had anything else I wanted to discuss, which made for some awkwardness at the time and then left me wondering later on if that had cost me the job.  It shouldn't feel awkward, because professional people shouldn't be prejudiced against medical conditions; but there are some employers out there who, given the choice between a sufferer and a non-sufferer, would choose the non-sufferer any time.  

I’ve worked for more managers who have been absolutely lovely about the whole epilepsy thing, but there are some ill-educated bastards out there so in interviews you have to be canny about it to give yourself a chance.  It is not right and it is not fair.  In a perfect world you should be able to say “I’m epileptic” outright and not have to worry about it costing you anything.  But it’s not a perfect world.  It bothered me for a while until I asked a consultant about it, who recommended letting prospective employers know the moment after a job offer has been made.  It’s blindingly obvious in hindsight – you’ve been assessed on your own merits, and judged worthy enough.  If they rescind the offer, they can only do so if the epilepsy would affect your ability to work or it’s discrimination.  It feels a bit devious to someone like me because my instinct is to be open about everything.  But I’ve found it a good rule to follow, and it means that if you don’t get offered a job it was because you failed on your own merits and not because of some condition you happen to have.

So once the interview’s done and you’ve got the job, then you have to tell everyone else and see what their reactions will be (I always think of this for some reason).  Where I work at the moment, I am supported extremely well, to the extent that they want to learn more about the condition to deal with it as best as they can.  I’m really grateful for that, because I have worked for some idiots in my time. I remember one manager from one of the Big 4 supermarkets say to me my epilepsy was “becoming more trouble than it’s worth”.  While I was coming round from a seizure on his shop floor, no less.  I believe he really thought that part of it was a ‘put on’ by me – that it was something I could control if I really, really tried hard and in the meantime was using as a convenient excuse to go home early.  In a different place, an office where I was temping, I had a seizure and almost everyone was really nice about it.  The one person who handled it badly was, again, the manager – he helped me up and out of the office to get me home but kept saying again and again and again “but we won’t be a able to pay you for this afternoon because you’re a temp you see, so you only get paid for the hours that you do, so we can’t pay you for this (etc).”  I wonder if epilepsy disturbs a certain kind of manager because they see it as something they have no control over happening in their office.  I felt sorry for the guy in the second example, because he was just a bit clueless and in a bit of a flap.  He was well-meaning.  The guy in the first example on the other hand was cold bastard.  

Those incidents happened a long time ago though, and there’s much more acceptance of disabilities in the workplace in general now.  I work for a company at the moment that have been terrific about the epilepsy – they want to learn more about the condition to make sure they are doing everything they can, and that’s wonderful.  I think epilepsy will take longer than certain other disabilities to be ‘normalised’ and accepted in a fuller way because of a lack of education about it, but things are generally changing for the better.  Awareness is continually being raised.

And a very happy National Epilepsy Week to all you at home!


Find out more about epilepsy (and Epilepsy Week!) at The Epilepsy Society and Epilepsy Action websites.  And please comment to let me and others know about your experiences with epilepsy.

TV: Prey

Prey, ITV's answer to The Fugitive, ended on Monday and it was a bit of a damp squib.

Prey was the perfect example of the thrill of the chase being more exciting than the ending.  The ‘hunted man’ story is enormous fun, especially when Our Hero is being hunted by the police, as the majority of dramas and films still have us on the side of the authorities by default.  Even when we know Our Hero is innocent, there is still something nicely subversive about being asked to identify with a man on the run from the law.

Our Hero in Prey is Marcus Farrow, a policeman wrongly suspected of murdering his wife.  Farrow’s got a violent temper but is on the whole a good person, and he is played by John Simm, which makes him at least 50% more interesting.  He goes to ground and tries to find out what really happened to his wife before the police catch him by doing research into a murky case he was working on at the time. 

There were lots of very good set pieces in Prey, nearly all of which featured John Simm on the run and nearly but not quite being caught.  Because Marcus Farrow had a violent character when irked, you were genuinely concerned that he might accidentally murder someone in his desperation.  Lots of sneaking around and subterfuge – this is what Prey did well.  Very well in fact, for at least half its screentime.

The ‘hunted man’ story is all about the set pieces, which is why conclusions can be such a pisser.  Yes, we do want to know what all the running around has been in aid of, but it needs to pull off the trick of being satisfying without being too drawn out or implausible.  But last episodes have to be about the conclusion.  Prey demonstrated in its third and final episode how hard it can be to finish a series with aplomb by giving us resolution, resolution, resolution.

The thing is, the cat and mouse stuff can keep on going for ages and still be entertaining even on a relatively simple plot, but Prey had a cover-up conspiracy as its premise which meant that it was setting itself up for giving an ‘epic revelation’ conclusion.  But it couldn’t convincingly do this, instead opting for one of the most clichéd wrap-up plots in thriller stories (the one person he thought he could trust whilst he was on the run turns out to be the baddie!  Who would have thought it!) But even then it didn’t quite work, because the big reveal of the villain happened far too early in the episode, meaning that too much of it felt like it was spent hanging around waiting for Marcus to catch up with us.  During the first two episodes, we had great fun complimenting John Simm on his cleverness from our sofa and basically enjoying the ride, but the last episode gave us too much time to work out that some of this was a little bit silly.

Which is a shame, because Prey was working really, really well as a cat and mouse chase drama – The Fugitive, set in Manchester – but sort of opted not to be one in the end and being a police melodrama instead.  Plot points were piled on for absolutely no reason – Farrow’s friend Shaun had betrayed him in episode 1, OK, fine.  But having Shaun then confess to Farrow he’d been sleeping with his wife for the last 10 years at the end made it seem like a soap with guns.  It managed to make the ending feel rushed and drawn out at the same time.  Prey kept the audience watching through the momentum of the action, but by its end it was obvious the action was supporting the plot and not the other way round.

At the end of it all though, I don't think it necessarily matters if the ending of something like Prey is a damp squib.  If you watch something that you pretty much know is going to be mainly enjoyable for the thrill of the chase, you can't complain that you didn't enjoy the bit after the chase had finished.  It just would have been a bit more satisfying if it had ended with more style instead of falling on back on cliche and melodrama.

TV: In The Flesh - Series 2

I watched the start of the second series of In The Flesh this week, and surprised myself by really enjoying it.

I’m not a fan of horror.  I feel guilty about dismissing a whole genre, because I like to think of myself as culturally open-minded,  but it doesn’t entertain me and I don’t really know why. 

I don’t like not getting it; it frustrates me that an entire genre can escape me.  A lot of my friends do like their horror (to the extent where some of them are involved in making horror films) so over the years I’ve seen some high-end examples that should have given me an 'in': a few Saw films, The Ring, Shaun Of The Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, Zombieland, Hostel - loads of the stuff really, and most of them in the end pretty much drew a blank, the occasional exception proving the rule.  If anyone wants to try me with more recommendations, recommend away!

It never works its gory charms and for me watching a horror film is a bit like staring at a blood-spattered magic eye poster for a few hours and then walking away baffled.  The only horror films I really enjoyed were Peter Jackson’s early attempts at film-making, Brain Dead and Bad Taste - they are extremely funny, good-natured and more fun than anything else he went on to make.  But that means that I enjoyed them as slapstick comedies rather than horror, so doesn’t really count.

The fact that I liked In The Flesh so much probably doesn’t count either then, because I enjoyed it as character-based drama that satirasies society.  Damn.  In The Flesh, nominally ‘about’ zombies but really uses them in an allegorical way to make a drama about society’s religious, racial and medical outsiders.  It’s set in a Northern community post-apocalypse and focuses mainly on 20ish Kieren, who suffers from Partially Deceased Syndrome (PDS).  He is an outsider who is making efforts at integration.  He takes medication to keep him ‘normal’ and wears contact lenses to hide his tell-tale glaring eyes.  He works in the local pub, but wants to go abroad and see Paris and gives every impression of being a normal 20 year old who just happens to be dead.  He represents the acceptable face of the undead – he wears make up to hide his dead flesh to make the point literal, in case the audience hadn’t picked up on that yet.  The idea of being a zombie is normalised into modern society in the same way that being a werewolf or ghost was in Being Human (albeit for more dramatic and less sitcom purposes).

He is not like the undead we see at the start of the episode, who perpetrate a terrorist attack on a tram by snorting some stuff that made them go batshit crazy and then killing everyone.  Not only do the trams in Nottingham look better than the Salford ones, you can bet NCT wouldn’t let that kind of thing happen on their turf.  These are the undead who give the undead a bad name, members of the Undead Liberation Army.  They have a cult-commune base, and Kieren’s old friend Amy is one of them.

The prejudice shown against the undead is all of the small town variety that UKIP trades on – women gossiping in corners, men sneering and making abusive comments in the pub.  In the midst of all this, a party called Victus has a new MP in town, trading on peoples’ fears of the other for political power (as if that could ever happen).  She is a black woman, in a rather unsubtle effort to show that being in a minority group herself does not mean she is not open to feelings of prejudice. 

It all kicks off in the pub at the end of the episode (it is made by BBC Salford after all), and it looks as if Kieren is going to stop trying to assimilate and join the revolutionaries, who are open about their difference to everyone if a little dogmatic with it…  It should be interesting to see what happens – I’m guessing that Kieren is going to enjoy the freedom in not having to pretend to be the same as everyone else for some time, but at some point is going to renounce their way of existing when they try to involve him in something naughty (possibly against his sister if the programme-makers are being unimaginative).  The UKIP, sorry, Victus MP has some agenda of her own which also drew me in – she’s already murdered a rabid undead, and persists in calling them ‘its’ instead of ‘hes’ or ‘shes’.  Bitch.  This was the start of a second series – I didn’t see (or, in fact, know the existence of) the first series and didn’t feel I was missing anything here, so I don’t know how much of this was a continuation or a new start.  It’s an interesting mashup of lots of different things, from thrillers to Coronation Street (the ladies bitching over a pint could have been cut and pasted from a soap), and although horror tropes are the most obvious ones on show, they’re actually the least integral to the storytelling.  Which is perhaps why I ended up enjoying it so much.

MUSIC: Pixies - Doolittle & Indie Cindy

There’s a new Pixies album, but first – the past…

 

It’s 25 years since the release of the Pixies’ Doolittle.  Doolittle is a slightly disputable masterpiece, but a masterpiece all the same – it’s the Pixies album which will always be on Classic Album lists, that’s for sure. 

I’ve always thought Surfer Rosa was their best album but maybe that’s because it’s how I got into the Pixies.  I’d tried listening to them before because of their indie reputation (massively influential on Nirvana and Radiohead and loads of other people I liked), but never really got them, apart from ‘Where Is My Mind?’ which I only really knew from Fight Club.  But once when I was ill and found a tape of Surfer Rosa in my sister’s cupboard I put it on on a whim.  The tape was on repeat and some time on the fourth go round it clicked and I understood it.  (Digression: I’ve noticed a lot of the music and books I cherish the most I hated at first.  Is this just me?  Is the lazy part of my brain attempting to stunt the culturally aware part or something?) 

Doolittle sounds less unique than Surfer Rosa to me, and therefore less of an achievement; but perhaps that’s because it was one of those albums that was so influential it became the indie norm.  It has a first half with skittish pop-rock songs with bizzaro lyrics and a darker, atmospheric second half bridged together by the a anthemic ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’.  Frank Black was obsessively listening to ‘The White Album’ during the making of Doolittle and in terms of making an album greater than the sum of its parts, it shows.  ‘Debaser’, ‘Monkey…’ and ‘Wave Of Mutilation’ don’t lose anything outside of the context of the album, but most of the other songs work better as slow-burning mood-builders, culminating in ‘Gouge Away’, possibly my favourite ending to an album (possibly not – it all depends on when you ask me, really).

Anyway, the big Pixies news this month is a new album, their first for 23 years.  After they split in the early 90s they started touring in the 00s, but these were purely ‘Greatest Hits’ shows – as a creative entity they seemed to have ended for good.  And then quite unannounced they started releasing new music last year.

The Pixies’ reunion has a lot in common with The Beatles’mid-90s reunion we mentioned a few weeks ago in two major ways.  One is that both bands had been dormant for so long and had an influential legacy that new material would always be compared unfavourably to.  The other similarity is that the reunion in both cases was missing a member.  The Beatles at least had two unheard John Lennon vocal tracks to base new songs around; the new Pixies songs have had no input from Kim Deal, their charismatic ex-bassist who quit two weeks before the new material started coming out. 

When ‘Bagboy’, the first new Pixies music in ages was surprise-released last year I was pleasantly surprised that it worked as well as it did.  Faint praise there, I know, but the song had and still has for me an aggressive strangeness and didn’t seem embarrassing.  It didn’t feel out of date, either – where it failed, it failed on its own terms and not for being a museum piece (like The Beatles’ ‘Free As A Bird’). 

And, in fact, a lot of the new material is just as good as some of the songs on Trompe le Monde and Bossanova.  The truth is that the memory cheats and the last two Pixies albums have songs as forgettable as some of the worst on Indie Cindy.  Indie Cindy has some great moments, just not as many as there would have been in their peak.  Playing it alongside Trompe le Monde I don’t see a massive gulf in quality – both albums have a similar killer/filler ratio (though Indie Cindy doesn’t have anything nearly as good as ‘Planet Of Sound’…)  It’s arguable that, for better or worse, Indie Cindy just picks up where Trompe le Monde left off.

Pixies songs in the 21^st century seem to be longer than 3 minutes and veer disturbingly into an MOR vibe sometimes, but they are recognisably Pixies songs. Neither does Indie Cindy sound like the work of a band who’ve cynically slung any old rubbish together to exploit their influential reputation.  They do sound like they’re into what they’re doing whether I think it works or not and that’s the main thing.  ‘Bagboy’, ‘Magdalena 318’, ‘What Goes Boom’ and ‘Snakes’ are all songs where it gels together really well.  ‘Magdelena 318’ is especially weird and insidious, Frank Black’s subdued but still powerful vocals with a mournful surf guitar mixed with a more typical crunch.  On the negative side: ‘Blue Eyed Hexe’ is a fairly weak re-hash of ‘U-Mass’; ‘Another Toe In The Ocean’ and ‘Ring The Bell’ are bland and forgettable.  The title track has some appallingly bad lyrics (“I’m in love with your daughter… I’m the one who’s got some trotters/You’ve many mouths to feed”  Oh dear). 

There’s one thing that nags me.  Indie Cindy isn’t really an album so much as it is a compilation of all the new material that’s been filtering through since ‘Bagboy’ was released for download last year – there is nothing on this album that hasn’t been released already.  This is a major irritation, and undoes a lot of the general good feeling I have toward the band when listening to it.  There is a lot more of a sense of artistic viability in some of these tracks than there was in The Beatles reunion tracks, one-woman-down or no; but releasing an album out of 3 EPs (the last of which was only out a month ago) seems like a casually cynical piece of marketing, and makes it feel like the whole thing was done for the money after all.

Anyway, I’ve deliberately not read reviews of the new Pixies songs to try and make for a non-biased blog, so I’m going to go and read what savagings they’ve no doubt been getting in the press…