My current earbook is Getting Better by the said same Michael Rosen. [Which may remind you* of Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux the mantra of Émile Coué (de La Châtaigneraie) 1857-1926, the doyen de personal development through the power of positive thunk. * if you aren't part of la francophonie try every day in every way I'm getting better and better with or without earworming Frank Spencer]. Getting Better is short and packs a lot of hurt.
His father and mother were intellectual Lefties from East London: their first date turned into The Battle of Cable Street an anti-fasch riot in 1936. Foter was never satisfied with academic progress of his sons in a cliché of ambition-by-proxy my-son-the-doctor. Sod that: so much unhappiness trying to tonk square pegs into round holes.
Young Rosen shrugged into the academic mantel, did well in school and went to Oxford, but in his early 20s his body was sapped by Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a progressive disease where the immune system declares that the thyroid in non-self and starts to destroy it. The thyroid produces thyroxine which is the 'metabolic hormone' and without it, everything slows down: bowels, heart-rate, s p e e c h. Because the effect are system wide, hypothyroid is hard of diagnosis and it wasn't until his mid-30s that Rosen got treatment. Added thyroxine is one of the miraculous cures of the 20thC and treatment made him better.
It was unfortunate that, as his undiagnosed hypothyroidism was kicking in, Rosen was trying to progress a career (permanent + pension) at the BBC. Despite some creative successes, he was let go by the Corporation and thereafter had to dig his own channel as a free-lance. It is hard to be off the pay-roll, but for some it can be a stimulus. So many mediocrities were kept on the books [bloboprev last para] at the BBC. Years later it was revealed that his career at the BBC had been coshed by MI5 because The Man feared his leftist credentials.
Rosen developed as a children's writer, getting words down on paper at his desk allowed him to be agreeably absurdist and laughing quietly at his own jokes. But when a fan, a teacher at a large primary school, asked him to perform for a hall full of 400 kids, Rosen was a dull dull dull failure. The teacher kindly showed him the way to be better at playing a children's poet. I felt a rush of empathy because, when I worked at The Institute as a hack teacher of science, I consciously put on my happy face when I strode down the corridor to perform in class - learning was bound to be better if I left my mumbling, stumbling, diffident self at my desk.
In 1999, when he was 53, Rosen's son Eddie contracted meningitis [Neisseria meningitidis prev] and died at home in his bed. He was only 19 but had already delivered a play into the late 20thC canon. So much potential, so sad. That kind of shit really knocks you back. But moping, let alone griping about life's unfairness won't bring the boy back. Rosen Sr. tried to follow a similar playbook to, similarly bereft, Mo Gawdat - stuff all that might-have-been; focus on the actual 20 decades worth of happy days.
In contrast to his chap, Rosen didn't die at home. He didn't die in hospital during the first Summer of Covid either. Tim Robinson (and 000s of other elderly Brits) was not so lucky. Rosen copped a 'Rona, went downhill and was taken to hospital. Between the jigs and reels he spent 40 days and 40 nights intubated in an induced coma and everyone was surprised (because the odds were against that eventuality) that he woke up. Another 50 days of physio and occupational therapy got him back on his feet and eventually he threw the final stick away and went home. He has some sensible, useful things to say about engagement with your own healing. Like my audiologist, OTs recognise that the major part of their job is putting it back on the client. Nobody gets better if the OTs do all the heavy lifting: ya gotta work for your own salvation. But, as with the other adversities visited upon him, Rosen got better from Covid because he didn't give up.
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