Conversation with Gemini
transcribe
On I go. Today is Thursday, the 17th of September, and my tinnitus is horrendous. If I look at the window—I'm looking at the window now—it's gloomy. I cannot see Birmingham. I should be able to see Birmingham where I am up on the hill. Because I cannot, it means it's misty. Also, we've got drizzle or mizzle, which is mist and very, very fine spray coming through the through the mist of rain, called mizzle—mist and drizzle. That's where the word comes from. Pardon me while I cough and spit.
Now, because my tinnitus is extreme—it's not Mickey Mouse stuff—the sound in my head is like ssssssss, like steaming. Like you've got into a hot kitchen or you've gone into a a laundrette, and it's going straight through my head. So, imagine a a jazz club and he's using the the cymbals and it's pssh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh, you know? Buddy Rich if you're old, or some of you modern guys. And it's just that fine note. Well, that's going straight through my head. It's enough to drive you to infinity and beyond, and that's why tinnitus can be fatal, literally, because it's that level of noise. It's like standing underneath the fire alarm for 10 hours. Not a little bit where you go, "Oh, the noise! Let's get out of the building!", but for 10 hours.
"Yes?" "Oh, I didn't know that!" Well, I've just told you. That's how bad it gets. So, you have to be extremely strong mentally, or be totally surreal to survive it. Yes, it's that bad.
"I didn't know that!" Well, it is. I'm telling you. That's why I'm telling you.
So, if you've got that in the back of your head and you're trying to write something, you cannot. Well, I couldn't. Normally, I could knock off a book in about six months; it took me four years to write Tinnitus Tales. They're not about tinnitus! It's what I wrote despite the tinnitus. That's why I called it Tinnitus Tales 2020 to 2024.
And it's intensely irritating that I get smart-aleck no-bodies say, "Oh, hello. I'm John's John's John, and I can give you book exposure, and I'm in the book club, and I can do all this, just send me so many dollars." Well, they don't say that first, but they're just obnoxious, nasty little people who have no talent whatsoever. They're just hawking themselves. They're just prostitutes of the books so that they can prostitute themselves, make a few quid from whatever rock they live under, and annoy people like me, 'cause I have no time for them, as I've got all this noise in my head already.
And then, because of my arthritis in my left shoulder, that kicks off, and morphine is not strong enough. Yes, really. And if you take oral, through your mouth, painkillers, they destroy your kidneys—even worse. So, it's a litany of stuff.
"Oh, I didn't know that!" Well, I'm telling you, and perhaps you'll listen and learn.
Ooh, he's so butch today. Yeah, but I can bite as well, you know. Just because I'm a nice person, and because I'm hope- hopeful for hope and share that hope with you, doesn't mean I won't bite your what's-it off if you annoy me. So, remember that. It's like the old story about the Kerryman: always soft and gentle, but if you annoy him, he'll shove a red-hot poker right up your backside. And I'm the son of a blacksmith, so I know about backsides and red-hot pokers!
Ooh!
Incidentally, when I was younger, I did put a red-hot poker on my brother's leg. What you do, that's the kind of thing you do with your brother. But he got his revenge, because he knew I always used to drink the dregs of of the pop in the glass pop bottles, which you were able to take round to the shop and get a a penny or a halfpenny return deposit on, which you bought Mojos and Black Jacks—little sweets—with the deposit money. So, I think my brother knew I'd drink the dregs. "Oh, I'll finish that little bit of pop." So, he peed in the bottle, and I thought, "Oh, that's strange. It tastes a bit salty." So, he got his revenge for me putting a red-hot poker on his leg by peeing in glass pop bottles. Just the ordinary, normal stuff and love between brothers.
So, now you know.
So, I've decided this morning, as the tinnitus is horrendous, as there I am lying in my bed going, "What's the noise? It's like... did I wake up in a jazz club?" tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh, etcetera, yeah? So, I'm do- I'm decided to do this, and then I'll get, uh, Gemini to annotate it. But it isn't good enough, because it misses it. And so, ideally, in the future, if things work out—if they ever do—I would I would record this, send it to the blind school down the road, Focus Birmingham charity down the road, and then they would transcribe it, and then we would post it. So, it's from my mouth, to their ears, to your eyes. Yep: mouth, ears, eyes, which could be a dance.
So, so there you go. That's that's the idea. What now I'm I'm doing, because it's—what time is it? It's half past, half past eight, 25 to nine in the morning. I've got out of bed, I'm still tired, because with with CKD, you're always tired. And with Stage 4 CKD, GFR of 17—and yours is probably 90, yeah—you gotta look after yourself and eat decent food. You can't go to the cheap and cheerful shop because it'll kill you, yeah, 'cause your body cannot cope. So, you have to improve with your diet. If you did that all your life, maybe you wouldn't have the the kidney failure, but it's a long litany which I won't bore you with now.
So, I will, uh, talk to you today, or this morning, about what am I talking about? So, I've the tinnitus has awakened me, so I'm I'm spending the time killing two birds with one stone now. If I can't do any- I get out of bed, 'cause it's like being... if you like, it's like all your mates, you're drunk, and you're in the gutter, and all your mates, "There's a good idea," so all your mates are peeing on you. Yes, it's, "Ugh, that's disgusting!" Yeah, they're all peeing on you, like with a firehose. Or they've they've done things with the fire extinguisher, because you're drunk and in the gutter, so, "We'll wake him up." So, they do that to you. And that's what tinnitus is like: you're in the gutter, the noise is in your head, it's it's incredible, drives you insane, and it's intolerable.
So, what are you going to do? You get out of bed so you're not a sitting target. So, I've got out of bed, I've got dressed, I'm not a sitting target. I've seen where which bedroom the cat is in, or where she is, 'cause she pleases herself. She's a cat. Do you tell a cat what to do? It's like getting your mother-in-law to obey you. It's not going to happen, is it, ever!
I'm thinking of my mother-in-law. So, I'm just laughing now.
So, so, so... I'm "soing" so... So, you you get out of bed, and then you then you come to your desk, and you switch on the microphone, and hope you don't switch it on incorrectly, so you're talking to yourself, going, "Why didn't that record?"
So, anyway, I've got the the mist is in the distance, I can't see Birmingham, there's drizzle, mizzle, going through the atmosphere, and that is going through my head and driving me insane—or driving me sane, whichever way you you look at me. So, I'm laughing at myself there, shouldn't do that.
So, so the the house is is tidy now, because we tidied it up yesterday. Well, I I can't do anything, 'cause I've got I've got a big lump as big as some women's breasts in the middle of my chest. This is my hernia, compounded with the quadruple heart bypass. So, that moves about and hurts, and sometimes my voice changes in tone. And then there's the arthritis in the shoulder. It's a litany. But in my head, I'm still gorgeous, and I'm I'm hoping one day a a 27-year-old with a PhD will say, "Oh, I fancy Michael," and then I can run away and have six or seven more kids, and raise lots of money for charity, but also have a nice life for myself, what's left of it. Statistically, probability, I don't know, might be four more years, and then I'm dead, because of the arthritis, the tinnitus, the Stage 4 kidney failure, and etcetera. Or, if I hang on, I might last 10 more years. Well, that's still not enough.
So, I'm negotiating with with Pier Giorgio Frassati, the mountain-climbing saint. I said, "You give me the years that you didn't have," 'cause he died at 24. Now, he was a great lad. He wasn't a hoity-toity holy kid; he was climbing mountains, helping the poor. 20,000 people turned up at his funeral, and his dad said, "Who are all these people? What are they doing here?" It was only then that they realized he was a good lad. Climbing up mountains, and he played practical jokes, and you'd probably smack him in the face, but he's probably too fast, he's climbed another mountain, so you have to chase after him. So, I have this mental picture of Frassati, and I'm saying, "Look, if you give me the years that you didn't spend because you got polio and all this stuff, I'll do some good works. But you have to find me a nice Italian girl, so I can have six more children with, as well. And hopefully she's a PhD, so she's got a brain as well."
And can you hear God laughing? Well, I can, going, "What? You're a lump of sad sack of... and you and you're fat, and you're ugly, and you've no"—I'm splitter deleted—"no chance on God's Earth!"
But God does miracles! So, I keep on praying, you never know your luck.
And the chances are somebody from inner-city Birmingham, directly opposite Dudley Road Hospital where St. Patrick's Church is—our home church—and I was the head boy at St. Patrick's School there... the chances of a little boy from that school becoming a writer, writing over 20 books, 3.5 million words, maybe up to 5 million if you add everything up that I've shoved on the the websites, but I'm not... I haven't put into books, and all the 2.5 million clicks, and 210,000 at least downloads in multiple languages... if you said back then, 57 years ago, "One day you'll grow up and be a writer," you'd say, "No way! Not on your Nelly!"
Well, Nelly's here. Actually, Nelly was my my dad's best friend's wife. I just remembered that! Auntie Nelly. Mick Caine and Auntie Nelly. He was a really, really funny man. I think he actually introduced my dad to my mother, so blame him for everything! Mick Caine, God, he was a wonderful man.
I can remember as a child—I'm just remembering this right now—I was I was banging my head on the concrete, saying, "Look, I'm hard! I can bang my head on the concrete!" Yes, I really did that when I was probably about three or four. That explains a lot, doesn't it?
But then, but then, but then... what then? Because I was afraid of Mr. Gallagher, who looked like the guy in from Duran Duran who played the organ, Nick Rhodes with the big eyebrows, because I was afraid of him, and he was my teacher, and he used to go drinking with my dad—not big drinking, but drinking at the weekend—I was afraid of him, so I hid in a book. And that changed my life when I was about eight, or or more, so I started reading and was top of the class, etcetera, top of the school, so they literally didn't teach me for a year, and just said, "Read a book at the desk in the in the hall," because I was so far ahead.
But once you go to grammar school, you're with people of your own standard, so you're not that far ahead. You're still top of the class in that region, but not top of the top of the class. But that's another story.
And, uh, one of my contemporaries, uh, Derek, it was his birthday yesterday. So, he... but he's, unfortunately, he's dead. So, he's, well, he died—cancer, smoking, I believe—so, yeah, God bless him.
So, that's a part of the part of the story, and I can be... I can meander on for days and days and weeks, because if you're part of a big family, you'd say, "What happened? Where did you go? Who did you see? What did you do?"
"I've just been up the road."
In them days, you had leather shopping bags or canvas ones. Plastic bags were not even invented. So, Mom, if you've got six kids, and a cat, and a dog, and all the lodgers as as well, you'd go shopping every day like a a Himalayan mountain sherpa on a trek to to bring in the shopping. So, I'd be... I was the youngest, until we had the late late baby, who became number six out of the family.
"Where did you go? What did you do? Who did you see? Who, what, where, when, why?" Which are the elemental questions of a detective, or a nosey child. So, you you learn stuff. And if you're not stupid beyond repair, you'll you'll learn stuff. And indirectly, I suppose that makes you a writer. Who did you see? What happened? Blah, blah, blah.
And then you have to... in time, you actually learn how to do it properly, or better, and then that's it. And same as when I write: I write the way I speak. So, if I was typing this, I'd be typing these words exactly the same, but because of the arthritis, I'm not doing that, because of the... it hurts too much, and the... and morphine isn't strong enough, and so I'm going round in a circle.
So, because because of the rain outside... I'm look- I'm just looking at somebody crossing the road now. You have to... this road is deadly; they're going to kill somebody. And that's one of the reasons I want to leave this street, before somebody gets killed, 'cause I warned them on all the stuff. But they'd rather spend money fixing the school's bushes, and spending 10 or 12 grand a year on the bushes. But outside in the street, they couldn't care less. And the council won't do anything until somebody gets killed. So, do you think I want to live on the street where a kid gets killed? No way! And I don't want to live on the on the street that's top of a hill, which is... you have to have oxygen on the way up. And I'm not... it's not that far difficult from from that, because where I live is killing me slowly. It's "Killing Me Softly With Your Tears."
So, I'm saying "so" too often.
I want to move somewhere nicer, where there's no hill to climb.
Gemini FAILED to transcribe my words, and it is not perfect anyway
AS IT has failed on its CORE function I will abandon transcription
with it
TRUST once lost is almost impossible to regain
and I know who else i am talking about
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