Round Six - 'The Return of Ulysses'

The 'Wind in the Willows' is a book written for children. One of the things I find odd about it is that despite that, it is scattered about with Latin phrases.

When I first read it, after the excitement of the Wild Wood and meeting Mr Badger, I turned the page to Chapter Five to find it entitled 'Dulce Domum'. I had no idea what language that was, let alone what the words meant. I found the content, about Mole returning to his old home, rather sentimental and a bit of a let down.

Then after another episode of Toad's adventures, there was a chapter called 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn'. I had no clue at all what any of that was about. The chapter's climax is a mystical vision of the god Pan - the player of the pipes. This was all over my head. I just thought it was weird and moved on to the fun bits of the story, culminating in the excitement of the final battle for Toad Hall - mysteriously called 'The Return of Ulysses'. Who he? The text contained no explanation, for the simple reason that back in 1908, for middle class schoolchildren, none was necessary.

The book started life as bed time stories Kenneth Grahame told his son. The boy, Alastair, was educated at home by a father who was steeped in the classics, as were most gentlemen of his time and class. In a letter to a friend Grahame casually mentions that his five year old son has a copy of Horace on his bedside table, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. So in fact Alastair would have understood all the references which passed me by.

Today, classicists have become an endangered species, which I think is rather sad. I know a few of them and find them to be among the most congenial of companions. I feel rather protective towards them and their now rare and somewhat arcane knowledge of past worlds. It gives them a valuable perspective on our own age, freeing them from the myopia that affects most of us.

Ulysses was the name the Romans gave to Odysseus. So what happened when he returned? When he landed in Ithaca he kept his identity a secret from everyone, including his wife Penelope, who was besieged by a group of arrogant and unwanted suitors who were eating her out of house and home. Finally, Penelope brought them Odysseus' bow and promised to marry the one who could string it and shoot an arrow through a line of twelve axes. None managed it, so Odysseus showed them how it was done and promptly set about using it to slaughter them, with a bit of help from his friends.

And in a similar way, as pictured above, Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad returned to Toad Hall to drive the stoats and weasels from it in a rather less bloody fight.

And analogously my rogue B-cells have been under assault from the deadly accurate monoclonal antibodies polatuzumab vedotin and rituximab, aided by a few other chemo drugs, and the scans indicate that the trouble makers are reeling in retreat, as you see here:

However, before completing round six, it looked as if some were still cowering in dark corners. I still had a bad cough and the shortness of breath had come back as well. An x-ray suggested that fluid had built up in the lung again, so a few days ago I went in to the Brompton to have it drained for what I hoped would be the last time.

No-one expected the outcome. The ultrasound used to guide the insertion of the draining tube showed to everyone's surprise that there was very little fluid in the lung, so little in fact that the consultant abandoned the procedure. He reckoned that in the two or three weeks since the x-ray, my body has cleared out most of the fluid of its own accord - which is what we had always hoped would happen. So that was good news.

The bad news is that the symptoms remain - I am still coughing and getting out of breath very easily. So given that the lung seems to be clear of fluid, the new hypothesis is that the lung walls have stuck together and failed to expand. We should be able to see more clearly what is going on when the final scans are done in mid-November, but in the meantime I am doing some breathing exercises prescribed by a lung physiotherapist (I didn't know there was such a thing) to help the lung to expand again.

So it is not all over yet. Nor did Odysseus' slaughter of the suitors bring final peace. They had vengeful relatives who tracked him down. The confrontation was resolved by Athena, who had been guiding and aiding him throughout his odyssey. So ultimately the fortunes of a mortal were in the hands of a goddess who looked out for him.

Athena's symbol is the owl.