Mindball

Today’s events triggered a memory. When I was a young TV director I worked on a show called Tomorrow’s World. You’ll be familiar with it if you grew up in the UK and are over forty I reckon. As a lot of my readers are not from the UK I shall describe it to you and my former colleagues will no doubt shout and say I am over or underselling it. Tomorrow’s World was a much loved science televison programme that had been on the BBC since the 1800s. It aimed to bring you the latest in science and technology and is now a fun watch in youtube because it made some pretty bold statements about the future and what we’d be up to. I think I did the first pieces on wearable tech with a crazy prof at MIT who predicted that posters would talk one day and send personalised ads. And the first pieces on Ai with chef Raymond Blanc and our presenter making a recipe with a slightly clunky computer voice instructing them and answering their questions with bizarre answers. Not much change there then. It was a magazine programme with filmed inserts from the UK and abroad and presenters doing demos in the studio. As a director this was how you cut your teeth, working your way up the greasy pole with short filmed inserts before they let you loose on the big stuff. If you were lucky you got to go on the foreign trips with your mates. If you were less lucky you were stuck on studio record in Teddington which I always found kind of stressful because well… TV is full of egos and time pressure. Nowadays I’d probably quite enjoy it but I was more anxious in my 20s. Wasted on me in that state really as I got to knock around Canada and New Zealand with my mates flying in little planes and helicopters, meeting astronauts, nearly extinct Kakapo birds, dolphins and a lot of pioneering scientists. I have a lot of good memories of these times and feel grateful for all the opportunities it afforded me.

Anyway today I was reminded of an event which pressed home to me the gift of being able to clear and control your mind. A sort of anti-achievement and a practice but a source of real power. When I was working on the show we used to have an annual Tomorrow’s World Live Roadshow. This was always super stressful but quite a lot of fun. We had to find visually interesting science stories, research and gizmos that could be demonstrated live. They would always go wrong but our amazing presenters were blessed with the skill of riding that out and often had to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, wrapping up their story to the second as the camera cut to the next location. While we were prepping an item called ‘Mindball’ during rehearsals earlier in the day the brand new Director General of the BBC at the time, Greg Dyke, and the future Director General George Entwistle (my mentor in my 20s and all round good bloke) found themselves in an extraordinary tussle. Mindball was a game for our time which involved two players sat opposite each other pushing a ball back and forth across a little tabletop court. Except, and here’s the catch, as the name suggests it was connected to you via a headband with sensors that pick up the brain’s signals and you could only win by focused control and a relaxed state of mind. If you ever saw Greg Dyke on walkabout you would remember him as a bundle of energy. A sort of market trader on Red Bull. A man who liked to take life by the horns and win. Watching him play Mindball was possibly one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Coupled with our deputy editor George, an ambitious young man, presented with the dilemma of really wanting to win and presumably knowing it was a bad look to beat the new boss. The net result was Mindball Carnage. These two men were the worst Mindball players ever. George would have won I reckon but, I think, threw the game to please the boss. Sometimes thrusting ambition will not get you to your goal and being one of life’s thrusters and winners who takes the world by force of sheer ebullience simply fails. My colleagues will have to remind me what actually happened in the show. It would have made sense to get a meditation guru on vs a top footballer or something but I expect the reality was duller. Greg and George would have made better tele. 

You can probably guess where I am going with this memory of science television from yesteryear. I trotted along to the hospital early to have a quick ECG. I’m super interested in what’s going on so ask a lot of questions. Sometimes they ask you to undress from the waist, others don’t bother but whatever. I was a bit surprised as it was a male nurse who asked if I wanted a female chaperone but I said don’t bother. After two rounds of IVF, a twin pregnancy and two bouts of breast cancer really nothing is sacred. It was still slightly uncomfortable with all the cold wires and sticky contacts all the same so I was breathing through the discomfort. When I say this I mean I lie back and think of England. I go into a semi meditative state imagining calming natural landscapes and I can summon quite quickly. I look to my third eye and see the colours and this nurse was giving off a deep calming sea green so I was very relaxed. 

He asked why I was having the ECG and I told him it was monthly with the drugs but also because I had an inverted T wave last time and they had later discovered the quadricuspic aortic valve. I have found this statement to be a source of delight because most of the nurses have not heard of my rare congenital heart defect/magic and I like to be the one to break it to them. Like the last guy, he said he would look it up.

After this was done I headed over to chemotherapy ward for a couple of monthly horse tranquilliser injections of hormone blockers and bone strengtheners. The needles are like the sort you’d see in a movie wielded by anmad scientist. Sometimes this shit is fluorescent. I’m like a walking cocktail. If I were a cocktail at the moment I’d probably be an espresso martini or something a bit common like snakebite and black. What would you be? It’s an important question to consider which I think about a lot when not drinking. 

The nurse looked at my ECG before she injected ne and said ‘Oh. It says you were bradycardic this morning. How are you feeling?’I asked what this meant and she said it was a posh word for having a lower pulse than usual. Lower than 60. Outside the range. I told her my resting pulse was often 60 but it had dropped to 55 in the ECG. I said I felt fine and I reckoned I could do it again if she put me on the monitor. Now I was kind of wasting NHS time doing this but I wanted to make a point that the range is not the range. And I wasn’t in the mood to be admitted for being chilled out. I discovered today in that room that I can wilfully control my heart rate, chatty and relaxed is 67. Swearing at drivers who don’t stop at pedestrian crossings and husbands who throw my Tupperware aware is 160. Meditating in a chair in a medical setting 55-58. I have been experimenting by myself today with my blood pressure monitor to check this is not an over claim. Try it sometime. If you have nothing better to do. It’s good for the parasympathetic nervous system I hear. Or invest in Mindball. I’m pleased to see they continued to develop it and sell it on Steam. Not sure if you have to have your own EEG monitor.

Once I’d had the drugs sleep nearly overtook me on my journey. I made it home along the draughty polluted highway of the Fulham Palace Rd. Stopped for a tuna teriyaki bento box at my favourite Japanese place, and nearly missed my stop I was so sleepy. Finally made it to my bed. Slept for 6 hours till dinner and now I am up writing at 1.30’in the morning. Those days of running around the world as a young director seem like a lifetime ago. How did I have the energy? Adventures will have to take different shapes from here but I am enjoying the challenge of winning whilst lying down and moving slowly as if through water.

My gig sold out and a new Justgiving Page raised over £1000 in 24 hours. People are so wonderful and generous. With takings from the first concert (oh yes more are planned!) I will be a quarter of the way to my 10k goal for this year. Someone kindly wrote to me to say I had set my goal too high as it looked bad to have only raised 10%. I think this is the orthodoxy of Justgiving campaigns but why shoot so low? Now I think I should have set it higher still. Oh well. Take a lesson from Mindball, Angela. Sometimes you can only win by doing less.