My brain: after the review of the break – a fierce mantra for all of us to live as a | Television and radio

THe for the first time we meet the writer and presenter Clemency Burton-Hill in this documentary on the Arena, is in complete, flowing, issuer, promoting his new book on classical music, Year of wonder. The next time we see her, she is struggling to write your name. The former clip is from 2017, the second while Burton-Hill was recovering from the cerebral hemorrhage he suffered in January 2020 at 38 years.

My brain: after breaking it covers the two years after the brain lesion of Burton-Hill. He begins to register in his hospital bed, having clearly grasped the journalistic potential to document such an event that collects life. He tries to speak, but much of what he says is incomprehensible: he can remember most of the words, but he has lost the ability to tell them actually. His terror and his despair, however, are crystal clear. “I don’t know he will go well”, in the end he manages to pronounce, his voice falters violently.

It is not good. While the physical and verbal progress of Burton-Hill in the next two years seems surprising from the outside, its emotional-handed landscape by the fury, impatience, anxiety and pain-signs that the psychological repercussions of its bleed brain are too profound to be fully articulated. This is despite his absolute candor: his body, he says, is “frozen in neurological winter”. Instead of deepening the technicalities of the medical conditions of Burton-Hill, this fascinating, raw and intimate documentary is simply a witness of a woman who sails in the loss of her former self with superhuman courage and determination.

That former self was defined by a love for music. Burton-Hill has lost the feeling on the right side of her body, which means that it is initially impossible for her to interpret her beloved violin. He was a talented player and the instrument was a “ally and a friend” for a long time: we see his four -year -old Bach 1 minuet; In home videos he is violining the air on the sofa. He spent his career by enhancing the virtues of classical music, therefore his inability to play is now the source of much frustration and sadness.

It is a career that Burton-Hill is extremely eager to return. Before the hemorrhage was working on a sequel to Year of Wonder; He soon finished the book in meticulously. It is an incredible-but result while he tackles a test with his publisher, Burton-Hill is suddenly overwhelmed by agony. He is desperate to put the book behind him because “he cannot have pieces of my former life that cause me”. Collaborate with his past either highlights what has changed.

As the whole affair of the child who plays the child suggests, Burton-Hill has always been a high-level perfectionist (she graduated with a double first from Cambridge). Combine it with a “paralyzing doubt” and you have someone for whom the result and success of the career are enormously validating. Considering the catastrophic health problems of Burton-Hill, he is saying that an observation from an insensitive doctor constitutes one of the most brutal scenes in the film. She era Writer and musician, implies. “So, after the mourning phase, he is discovering: what can I do now that he will make me in a way that (those things) have made me?” While Burton-Hill tears, we realize that he has just been robbed by something precious: his belief that one day will excel at work as he did once.

Yet they are the most generic elements of Burton-Hill’s life that move more to look at. At the beginning, she is tormented by the fact that she is too exhausted to play with her children; Later it is sold off by the admission of the major who is forgetting as it was before breaking. While his family background is not particularly comparable on the card-in Father is Humphrey Burton, conductor of the artistic program of the 70s Aquarius (he also founded the young musician of the BBC year, which Burton-Hill presented in 2010)-his dynamics are universal. Burton was a most absent father, his daughter braised his affection for life. One of the most emotional moments here has nothing to do with brain bleeding; Instead, he involves his 90 -year -old dad who cries for his parents’ regrets.

The documentary ends at the end of 2021, while Burton-Hill launches the second another year of Wonder Book. Previously, he explained the concept of a recovery window of two years after a cerebral hemorrhage, which presumably is the reason why the film ends there. But let you ask you how she is facing, three years. Have you continued to go in terms of career or to change your passions and priorities? Did he make peace with his new reality? I would like to think that Burton-Hill held himself in the admirably fierce mantra with which he approached his brain injury then: no acceptance, only challenge.