I’m free!

Not in the John Inman, tape measure up the inner-leg Mrs Slocomb’s wet pussy sort of way, or in the Billy Hayes escaping from a Turkish Prison at the end of Midnight Express sort of way (sorry if you haven’t seen that and I just spoilt the ending). But more in the way that Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms get released when you boil water. I feel like a gas breaking free of a liquid, atoms spinning off into the great wide open with great gusto and a tendency to be poetic. The fart you have been holding in until you left the dinner party and then could finally let rip outside. The cause of this sudden freedom: my Little Blue Car. I had a Little Blue Car before, the one that tried to audition for Strictly Come Dancing by waltzing across the motorway slip road before pirouetting into the barrier with about the same amount of grace as Mr Blobby and Ann Widecombe’s love child on skates. But that was the Old Little Blue Car and now I have a New Little Blue Car, thanks to Zurich insurance, loans from the Bank of Mum and tallying up the coins we found down the side of the sofa. I jest not – our sofa is like a savings bank. And a pencil case. And somewhere to store nasty letters from the bank you don’t want to read. Shergar is quite probably down there somewhere, and Lord Lucan, The Holy Grail, Atlantis and Amelia Earhart (or at least her plane).  We take the cushions off and ‘Cyclonic bagless technology vacuum’  it regularly, but like a bed-ridden American, there are folds and flaps and deep, deep pockets that seem to harbour the collected flotsam of our lives.

So how has NLBC brought about such a feeling of freedom and why did OLBC not offer the same? It is all about my foot.  The ‘neuropathy’ in my left leg has made driving a manual car absolute agony (manual gear box, not manual as in ‘feet out the bottom, running as per Fred Flintstone’). I was OK for the first mile or so but after that every depression of the clutch caused me to grimace and groan from the pain.  I know it was real pain as I was doing it when there was nobody present to give me any sympathy. This has tethered me to a radius of about three miles, maybe four if there is not much traffic and a good tail wind. Trying to get anywhere at rush-hour is hard enough but the stop-start trudge of the traffic calls for more clutch work than you realise, and doing a hill start which requires controlled release of the clutch has been an uphill struggle. I’ve managed. I had to.  It was that or taxi fares. A return trip to the hospital was 6.8 miles, total cost £17.20 on the worst occasion – or I could grit my teeth and pray for light traffic.

Traffic is a fickle thing and you throw yourself on its mercy when you live in a city.  Like a menstruating Lesbian, it is best avoided when it is having a heavy flow day or showing signs of congestion. Catch it in the wrong mood and you can lose half your life just trying to pop out for a pint of milk (to find out you have been stuck in traffic so long they only sell milk in litres now). It is an angry, unpredictable beast.  And, by the by, whoever came up with the idea of speed bumps and then tried to explain them away as a method of ‘traffic calming’ should know that calming is the one thing they do not produce.

We have a plethora of early warning systems for traffic problems – you can check your route on t’interweb and have traffic updates texted to your phone, there’s ‘real-time’ updates to your GPS but everyone who has used these with any regularity knows they can’t be relied upon – your route is just as likely to be completely clear as tailing back to the Chanel Tunnel. And if you ‘come off at the next exit’ you are probably going to find yourself in an even worse pickle as two dozen articulated wagons, several hundred angry commuters and Mr and Mrs Wilburton in their Ford Cortina towing a two-person caravan all try to make their way along country roads barely wide enough for horse and dray. Predictions of traffic flow are at best, best guess; you can put up as many cameras as you like, build computer simulators that can plan twenty years into the future, install traffic lights and RTA broadcasts but nothing in the world can predict that Mr and Mrs Wilburton’s caravan is going to get a puncture on the top of a blind hill.

Avoiding rush hour is not always possible, like when you have a date with a voluptuous MRI scanner.  My most recent MRI scan was scheduled for way after Rush Hour (quite deliberately on my part) but the Gods wanted a giggle and caused several other patients to cancel so that I was summonsed early (half way through a cup of tea no less) prompting a hectic and whirlwind crawl, bumper to bumper across the city.

Whoever coined the phrase ‘rush hour’ must have done so with an absolute sense of irony and a tongue so far in their cheek that they caused ulcers and probably couldn’t speak properly for days. Serves them right. Maybe it is because people rush out of the office at exactly the same time, eager to get home in time to watch The One Show (although I can’t see why; that new Welsh woman is unintelligible most of the time and fluffing her lines the rest. Still, she LOOKS like Christine Bleakley and as most people are gnashing away at their beans on toast so I doubt they noticed the change).  Or maybe it is because they get a rush from the extreme sport which is ‘getting out of the car park’.  It can be chaos and at every opportunity some fuckwit will do something stupid, like the mother who pushes he buggy out into the road to force the traffic to stop, or the bus driver who adopts the ‘I’m bigger than you’ method of crossing three lanes of traffic. People lose all sense of fair play when they get behind a wheel. Box junctions become disputed territory – mini versions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Horn blowing and angry gestures replace common courtesy.  If you do dare to ‘let someone in’ you are met with a torrent of abuse because being nice is a sign of weakness and the pack descends on you ready to take you out at the next set of lights.

But one muddles through and hopefully reaches one’s destination with a full complement of wing mirrors and not too many new dents or scratches in the paintwork.  A little flustered, weary but ready for one’s appointment nevertheless. This was by no means a first date; the MRI and I are getting quite pally. I call her Maggie, which seems an appropriate shortening of her first name.  It’s her penetrating stare and the way she sees right through me that I find so magnetising.  She makes the hairs on my arms stand on end and in fact on this occasion I nearly fell asleep in her tender embrace until a nurse came in and broke the spell. We still keep in contact – she writes, I align myself to magnetic North when asleep in bed at night, and attract iron filings.

I heard from her few days ago when my results came through. They were looking for evidence in my spine of pressure on a nerve causing the leg pain; in medical-speak Perineuropathy or radiculopathy. Ridiculopathy more like, judging by the report which came back in such medical jargon that it would keep campaigners for plain English moist for months: “Heterogenous marrow signal with geographical area of high intensity on the STIR sequence”, “tear in posterior annulus at the L5/S1 level” and “There is also a low signal seen within the marrow of the iliac bones with no corresponding high signal change on the T2 sequences.”

I Googled and Wiki’d and Binged (or should that be Bonged?) to try to make sense of it all and think I deciphered it to mean that they can see where the lymphoma used to be and that I have a slightly slipped disc but there is no evidence of anything pressing on the nerves.  In other words, “we didn’t really find anything new”.  The whole report is trimmed with an air of not wanting to commit to a diagnosis in case it is wrong, which seems to me to be a sad indicator of how far we have wandered down the path of “where there’s blame there’s a claim”.  Do we really want a litigation culture of ambulance chasers and the inevitable waste of valuable time and resources that this demands?  Culpability and accountability are fine but medicine is not an exact science.  We know a huge amount, we have scientific methodology and validated processes but in the end so much of it if down to guess work and intuition. If the doctor makes the right call you get better. If not, you stay the same, or get worse and he tries again with another guess. With treatment like mine no two people respond the same to the drugs, and we just don’t understand enough to be able to predict exactly what will happen in every case. I have always said that in science there is no truth, only what we believe at the time. Once the atom was thought to be the smallest particle – and we held that as true until the atom was split. Doctors are the shaman of our day; they point their sticks and shake the bones and utter their mystical truths. Most of the time something miraculous happens but sometimes it does not. We keep going back to them because they are the best chance we’ve got so let’s not make their jobs impossible and leave them feeling so much pressure from litigious consequence that they are afraid to try their next best guess.

Of course, in all this, I am left with no idea of the next steps. The leg people say it isn’t legs and the spine people say it isn’t spinal. We are not quite back to square one, as we have eliminated two major possibilities but more back to the drawing board  and I will have to wait and wonder.

I can live with the leg pain for now. I’m on new pills and they seem to be working well although I fear the recent phase of itching may be an unpleasant side effect. I could scratch my entire body to pieces, rake it to shreds with a sharpened fork, dig my nails in and scrape furrows into my arms and legs, not to appease my inner masochist but to try to gain some relief. I’m almost hoping it is eczema – from which I suffered as a child and which is known to be triggered sometimes following my treatments. At least if it were eczema I would not risk having to stop the pills for my foot, which have made such a difference, hence my newfound freedom.

I can now drive in relative comfort and certainly no more pain than when sitting on the sofa. Getting an automatic car was such a good idea. OK, it’s a bit ‘slippers and Horlics and tartan blankets round your knees’ but for me there is a damn good reason to go automatic. Although you have to be careful hw you tell people: if you say ‘I have an automatic’ they immediately fall to the ground, dive for cover and call for an armed response unit. In truth, it is technically a semi-automatic as I CAN override the gears, but by similar token, you can’t announce in public that “I have a semi” without risk of prosecution for lude behaviour. But sod it, I DO have a semi – a little blue semi – and now I’m not limited to my 3-mile radius. I really do feel like I have been released from a virtual prison. The world is my playground once again. It is hard to explain how emancipated I feel or how much being unable to get around took away from me, lessened me, encumbered me. For those of us who drive, we take the skill for granted, we don’t think twice about it, there is no stress or pain or restriction. To lose that is to lose a freedom. And there are so many of these freedoms that I fear we soon all may lose.  I just hope that the current government spending cuts don’t leave us all realising that you often don’t really appreciate a thing until it is gone.

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Closed down the school, the clinic
And the local butchers shop
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They sneaked into power
And this is now what we got

They took away all the jobs
and billions from the public purse
The charged all the people
for the pleasure of their curse
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They sneaked into power
And took away what we’d got

Hey student, student
They’re gonna charge you extra fees
Education cutbacks adding to the squeeze
Jeeze!
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They sneaked into power
And ruined the whole darn lot

Late last night
I heard it on the news
Benefits are going
The poor are really screwed
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They sneaked into power
And the country can go to rot

They sneaked into power
Serves us right that it’s gone to pot.

Speaking of things which have gone, summer is now but a distant memory and we seem to have jumped straight through to Winter bypassing the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness to dump us unceremoniously into winter’s icy grasp. We don’t seem to get autumn’s any more, not the chocolate box autumns of my youth anyway, that lasted for months and brought the brightest days, clearest skies and the russet rustle of richest leaves. I picture orchards full of trees dripping rosy apples, hazel nuts and walnuts falling from the branches, conkers and harvest festival, hedgehogs. It has all become so grey. The trees try to don their splendour and wrap themselves in colour but somehow the damp and dark days diminish their dazzle and leave but a dank and depressing dreariness; they shed their leaves as tears. Each morning recently I have awoken in the hope of a bright, crisp day when I could wander off with a camera and try to capture a little of the magnificence of the season and each day has lived down to expectation. Or, in fairness to Mother Nature, when she has shown us a flash of her scarlet and gold, I have been stuck in a waiting room unable to enjoy anything.

We had one nice(ish) weekend and one day a few weeks ago which was dry enough for an hour or two, allowing us out with the cameras and one afternoon when I gathered some leaves and berries which I brought back home to photograph. These images were actually taken on our dining room table where I could control the light and not get rained on! They came from a little earlier in the season than I wanted, but I still wake every morning hoping for a clear blue sky and a chance to jump into my wellies and go wander down by the river with Ratty and Mole and Mr Toad and jam sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer.

Maybe I sentimentalise the season, remembering the good bits of many past autumnal days and blending them into a composite that becomes more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it is always mostly monotone and shivery-cold. I blame Michael Fish – things have never been right since he mis-forecast that hurricane and again, we see a ‘science’ that is based on best guesses. Our local forecast is seldom right for now let alone tomorrow or later in the week. They stand there in front of their animated maps promising so much and stating things in such absolute terms when really they are just making calculated guesses; guesses upon which we base our lives and make decisions and take chances, just the same as with the traffic updates and the medical prognosis. But maybe that isn’t such a bad thing as a guess always leaves room for things to turn out better than anticipated. In that at least there is some hope, some small chance that it will be sunny or the traffic jam will have cleared or I will get better one day. Maybe.

One of the problems I encountered whilst on the last lot of treatments was that I was advised to avoid flying – one assumes in an aircraft, although avoiding hang-gliders and micro-lights seems to me to be a good life rule anyway and I don’t have the upper body strength for Icarus wings. It was all to do with an increased risk of blood clots. You will recall that the medication had played havoc with my body’s production of both white and red blood cells. I guess it works a bit like this: Take an average school playground to represent my blood, full of all types of cells, or ‘children’. So, take away the white kids (best not tell anyone you are doing this or you’ll probably have bother with OFSTED) to represent my while cells, and then take away the black kids (or red cells) and what do you have left? Just a load of Chinese kids.  Now, we all know what the Chinese are like, they group together (12 to a house on our Avenue, with Chinese Karaoke Opera playing at all hours but that is a gripe for another time). So the Chinese kids represent the platelets in the blood and, as per our MSG-loving friends, the platelets are responsible for clotting.  So I guess that explains why I was susceptible to Deep Vein Thrombosis and no way was I going to risk that (if only because of the stockings which are never flattering). This meant that we were not able to go to my Brother-in-Law’s wedding in Northern Ireland or even think about a holiday abroad. We did, at one point, hatch a cunning plan to get the train to London and then on via the Chunnel for a long weekend for two in Paris. But we would only have argued as I would have insisted on going up the Eiffel Tower and David would have insisted on NOT going up the Eiffel tower. I can’t imagine many things that I think he would rather not do. Well, not that don’t involve naked women of the opposite sex. So, the extortionate price and the almost guaranteed end of our relationship, plus the fact that the meds made me feel completely wasted, demoted that idea to the back burner and tagged it with ‘maybe when you are feeling better’.

Stopping the medication though had the huge bonus that I was once again allowed to take to the air and so David and I started shaking piggy banks and checking down the back of the sofa for enough money to get away.  He briefly revisited the notion of gay Paris (which I doubt really lives up to that name) and soon started to look towards the Mediterranean. We had Crete in mind; maybe on a subconscious level I thought that the Minotaur’s Minoan Maze might prove less complex to navigate than our lives at the time.  In truth we just wanted somewhere in the sun that wouldn’t be too full of ‘Brits Abroad’.  Neither of us have any interest in 24-hour binge drinking, sunburn because you passed out from the Vino, falling down outside the hotel and ending up in a foreign A & E department with concussion.  Something less vulgar was needed, something with more than three stars and absolutely no Karaoke or Kiss Me Quick hats. When you put limited budget, must be sunny, not on a hill (Hill is just a misspelling of Hell for me; Hull is too but for other reasons), decent star rating, all inclusive and a time-slot with no wriggle-room, choices are limited but we found somewhere in Crete as we had hoped. LastMinute.com had just the thing and so we booked it. In a race against the clock I had to get my passport renewed and that was an uphill battle in its own right with my photograph being rejected twice and a holiday booked for a few weeks hence.  But a late passport was the least of our concerns when, lying in bed watching the news one night I heard “Holiday firm Travel Options who also run Kiss Flights have today gone into Administration…” and my heart sunk.  I checked the paperwork. I re-read the small print. I read it again, just in case I was seeing things. There is was, as I feared, “Holiday tour operator: Travel Options”. So three weeks before we were due to fly we found ourselves without a holiday.

I really don’t know why I was surprised at this. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected it. People say I am a pessimist, but I never saw this coming. After three years stuck in a nightmare with all we have been through I honestly thought that the Karma of the Universe would grant us just a week away. But if Karma is a chameleon it has blended so far into the background of our lives as to remain invisible, and clearly we have no right to expect just a little good fortune. Thankfully ATOL and the Civil Aviation Authority will step in and luckily we were covered to get the full amount refunded. One day. But that means a claim and forms and all that kafuffle. It is not a speedy process and not one that can respond to the fact that David’s holiday time from work was committed for a few weeks hence.

The Royal Bank of Mum stepped in to lend us enough to book another holiday and there followed a few days of internet scrapping with all the other people who found themselves in the same position. I would find a holiday on t’interweb and before I could press ‘book’ it was snatched away by someone else. But tenacity is (or at least should be) my middle name and I found us a holiday in Turkey.  With a huge sigh of relief and the little stash of spending money we had saved or been kindly given by our friend in Germany who took pity on us, we eventually took off for the sun.

Turkey was a delight (see what I did there?) and much more than we expected. To be honest, that wasn’t much to ask of it though as my only knowledge of Turkey comes from Midnight Express and centres largely around an Istanbul Prison in the 1970s. Oh, and a vague recollection of a song:

Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you’ve a date in Constantinople
She’ll be waiting in Istanbul

The weather was splendid and the accommodation, although small, was quite acceptable. The complex was vast but well designed and never too busy; we always managed to find a sun lounger and there were enough pools for the yabbering yoofs and braying brats to be kept well away from the more tranquil adult pool. Nobody forced you to ‘get involved’, there was no enforced ‘Welcome meeting’ where “Hello holidaymakers, I’m Sharon-but-you-can-call-me-Shaz and I’m here to make your holiday go with a bang” attempts to flirt with anyone under 60 and you are obligated to play bingo and take part in a belly dance contest. Any ‘entertainment’ was sufficiently distant to not disturb us if we wanted peace and quiet. We went ‘all inclusive’ and that proved to be a great success. The food was plentiful, tasty and edible – which I do find important qualities in gastronomy. There was always fresh salad and fruit, with meats cooked on barbecues outside each night. They did the most amazing things to watermelons, avocados and radishes and even offered a class in fruit carving, although nobody’s letting rip with a scalpel on my plums in the near future thanks you – I like my fruit to remain intact. We don’t drink alcohol but Coke, Fanta and water were all freely available as were ice creams and even midnight snacks.

We were in an area rich in Roman and Byzantine ruins and hired a guy to take us on a personal tour of some of the best historical sites. This was far better than the more organised boat trip which we also endured later in the week. It cut down the amount of walking and waiting by an enormous amount and meant that we were not stuck in the hotel but could be driven round the best sights of sites in air-conditioned comfort. We could take as long as we wanted at each location and didn’t have to stand in queues. The amphitheatre at Aspendos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspendos is stunning and the best preserved in the world. Not being attached to a coach trip, we were there at a time when the place wasn’t swarming with happy snappers and between us we got some great photos, despite David getting vertigo anywhere above about three steps up and me being a semi-cripple practically crawling up the ancient stones akin to Edmund Hilary surmounting Everest, except HE had Sherpas. That good old British do or die attitude kicked in and I made it to the Gods and boy was it worth it. If anyone ever wondered what the Romans did for us, apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, they should stand at the top of that place and listen to the acoustics. Add sound engineering to the list too!

We also visited the aqueduct that fed Aspendos town on the plateau hill above the amphitheatre, which was a stunning sight against the clear blue sky and must have looked amazing when it was first constructed. Photographs can’t do justice to the sheer scale. We travelled back via the gladiator town of Perga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perga but my gammy foot prevented too much exploring!

The next day we took a more familiar group excursion which failed to live up to the brochure’s promises or the enthusiasm of the chap who sold it to us but did let us see the ancient town of Side (pronounced See Day) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side%2C_Turkey and the temple of Apollo which was about as Epic Roman Ruin as you could possibly hope to see. Bazaars and queues and children and tourists and far too much walking for poorly me when we thought we would be on a boat all day. Luckily I had just started some new tablets for my foot which helped enormously and at least shifted the pain from right in my face to periphery attention – but that is a digression for later.

We spent much of the rest of the time by the pool, with books and bottles of coke. I swam for the first time in ages and vowed to do more when we got home. We lazed and dozed and generally relaxed and for a few days we could pretend we were how we used to be. David had half a day (which turned out to be much longer) off on a quad bike doing manly macho things and getting covered in dust so that when he came back he looked more like a clay cast of himself than flesh and blood. I too got caked in mud but in a different way as I treated myself to a Turkish massage and ‘relax therapy’ at the hotel. And THAT was amazing, albeit I had to keep telling the guy that if he tried to massage my left foot he would end up with it in his face. A Turkish coffee body scrub is as close to heaven as I think you can get without exchange of bodily fluids although I was less convinced about the merits of painting my face with mud. So we both had a day getting down and dirty even if not together. The journey back to the airport was something of an experience, then mini-bus driver got lost, tried to sell us Turkish wives, narrowly missed a wandering goat (the moped driver behind didn’t) and I think tried to draft us into smuggling him into England as an illegal immigrant.

It was a great holiday made all the more special by the fact that we had a whole week together and all the health hiccups and work worries, bills and bustle of ‘normal’ life were set aside for a while. But the bubble burst and we had to come home to find it all still waiting for us.

The universe is supposed to be about balance, Yin and Yang, that bloody Karma chameleon, and we foolishly hoped that a nice week away was our entitlement, our payback to balance out all the grief we had endured over the last few years. How very naive of us – it worked the other way; a good week in Turkey meant that something awful HAD to happen upon our return and to set the Universe back in kilter, driving to work one day David hit a patch of oil and played pinball with the motorway crash barrier gaining a new high score and crunching my little car in the process. On the down side he was by a matter of fluke driving my car that day but on the plus side nobody else was involved and he wasn’t hurt.

My poor baby was battered and bleeding, with broken joints and scratched skin, but rushed to hospital by a man from the RAC who shook his head and did a good impression of Rolf Harris saying “it was just toooo week, I don’t think it’ll make it throooough the night”.

So we locked horns with the insurance industry and started to try to pick our way through a process which seems designed to confuse, obfuscate and complicate. I could write a book on what happened but for your sanity and mine I will try for brevity. I was entitled to a hire car for four days while a decision was made about whether my vehicle was a write-off. This happened, I got a car from Enterprise without fuss, but the four days expired before I had heard any decision about my Fiesta. Under the terms of the policy if the car is to be repaired I should have a hire vehicle for the duration of the repair, but if it is beyond economic repair (BER) then I cease to qualify. But what happens when, on a Monday morning, you have taken the four-day hire car back but still don’t have a decision from Zurich? I was stuck – I might be entitled to a hire car for the next few days or I might not. I couldn’t make any plans, couldn’t arrange my life at all. No point in hiring a car if Zurich were going to give me one anyway. But Zurich didn’t understand that. Asking a simple question like “when will you have the decision?” proved too much for the Bangalore helpdesk muppets.

I have every respect for helpdesk staff; they have a difficult job, take all the flack, have to be extremely good at their jobs, have a huge amount of product knowledge, patience and skill. I know. I have been one, I have run support desks and David spends much of his life staffing one and coming home exhausted and frustrated with tales of idiot customers. But Zurich’s offering is something else, something born from the pits of hell and staffed by people who have clearly dropped a chromosome and been plugged into a ZX81 to compensate.  I reference a computer here because clearly they had no will of their own and everything was driven by very set scripts. If you asked a question that was out of sequence or not on their screen you sent them into a recursive loop with lights flashing, steam coming out their ears and “does not compute” warnings blaring in the background.  Computer says ‘no’. Really, they could not answer even the simplest question unless you phrased it exactly as they had it in front of them, and when David phoned they could hardly understand him at all. OK, so he is from Northern Ireland but he doesn’t have that strong an accent. How they can’t tell if he is saying ‘eight’, ‘two’ or ‘three’ I will never know.

The details are not important, the outcome was. My car was indeed written off and eventually it was established that I would not get a hire car and would have to just wait and be patient for the settlement figure to arrive. No, they could not send it by bank transfer as it had to go by cheque because, for some reason, that is an easier process. Who uses cheques these days? I can’t remember the last one I wrote. They are out-dated, slow, expensive to process and prone to getting lost in the post. Bank transfers are fast, cheap and secure. But Zurich remains firmly positioned in the 1990s and nothing I could say would get them to budge.

Clouds and silver linings though. This has meant that my car will now be replaced. We had just paid it off, so at least there was no negative equity on it or hassle with outstanding payments. We have found a new car, well, new to us. It’s a Peugeot 207 1.6 VTi and chosen not so much because it was in very good nick and with low mileage for an 07 plate but because it is an automatic drive. I know automatics have a bit of a ‘grandpa in his slippers’ reputation but my reasons were sound.  At the moment I can’t drive very far at the best of times because my left foot is still causing pain and using the clutch after more than a few minutes becomes a new form of torture. So I’m limited to a 2-mile radius provided I have popped enough pain killers to floor a charging rhino. Thus an automatic, which has no clutch and can be driven without any involvement at all from the left foot, seems an ideal answer.

We should collect it at the weekend. There is still plenty to go wrong. The cheque from Zurich will only just have scraped through clearing, as will a cheque from my mother who has once again come to our rescue and lent us some extra money to help. Of course the Insurance paid a lot less than the price of a new car so we had a shortfall that is going to stretch us to the limit. We have gathered together every spare penny we can find and shoved that all in the bank and I think we will scrape by at the weekend with just about sufficient funds to make the payment, IF (and it is a big IF) everything lines up, the bank remember to raise the transaction limit on our card, the tax goes through with no issues and we manage to sort the insurance. I am sure that Murphy and his Law will be waiting in the shadows for us though. And what goes wrong won’t be what we expect. Maybe a tornado will blow through the showroom and destroy ONLY my new car. Maybe there will be another strike at the refineries and there won’t be any petrol to be had. Maybe a jelly monster from out of space will eat us all. Something will go wrong. Wait and see!

Now I am giving the liver treatment a break I have has time to concentrate on other things with the people at the hospital including the aforementioned leg pain. During all this trouble with cars I have had two appointments at the hospital (which is why having transport was kind of important) to look in more detail at what is causing the pain.  We all thought it was neuropathy, problems with the smaller nerves in the foot and leg. So the first test was to check this and involved Nerve Conduction Velocity (NCV) tests of the electrical impulses between various nerve endings. This was just like a TENS machine, sending measured pulses of electricity down the nerves and measuring the time they take to get from A to B. That was simple enough, if a little disconcerting to have bits of your body made to twitch outside of your control. Dr Frankenstein was on to something. The next part of the test though was much more gruesome and involved a needle deep into the tissue of the muscles in my legs and ‘listening’ to the pops of electrical activity as the muscles were tensed and relaxed. That but was less fun.

The outcome seems to be that it isn’t neuropathy that is causing the problem but something further up. Put simply, the problem isn’t at the plug; it’s in my ring circuit. That means spine. That means an MRI and I have now been for that scan too. Whilst I only feel pain on one side the tests showed that the muscles are very weak, surprisingly so, or at least they are functioning as if they are not getting the full signals. I suppose some weakness is to be expected, I am not exactly active, going for a jog or even a walk is not really an option at the moment, but  they think that these tests show more than just a weakness due to lack of exercise. Who know what they will find or what the outcome may be? It could be compression from a slipped disk, an infection, a trapped nerve or anything. So that may be another challenge, but I shall persevere, I shall climb every mountain, ford every stream, and follow every rainbow, ’till I find my dream. (Am I starting to sound a wee bit too much like Julie Andrews?)

Our leisure centre has finally reopened, following all the hassles with the residents association and people who had not paid their bills, the repairs and the politics. But the pool is once again functioning, albeit not as nice as the one in Turkey and so we are trying to go swimming a couple of times a week and that will help build some strength back and hopefully I will start to feel a bit better about myself. My body image is the stuff of another blog. I just hope nobody decides I have to have an operation on my spine. I played Operation as a kid and it put me off the idea of such things completely. Do surgeons really think you have a ‘bread basket’ in your stomach and ‘charlie horse’ in your right thigh? Does a buzzer go off and your nose light up if they don’t have a steady hand? And the poor man who gets operated on ends up with no ‘bits’. You know, THOSE bits. Just look at the picture. He had all those important things removed (his funny bone and his Adams Apple) and they still managed to whip off his goolies too. And I’m not risking THAT!

I am ashamed that it is so long since I last sat down to update the dusty pages of my little blog so forgive the cobwebs and the feint smell of mildew (that’s me, not the blog) for I feel appropriately chastised by those who have been generous enough to miss it and kind enough to encourage me to scribble a little more.

I have my reasons for this absence, some better than others. When I last wrote I was standing on the brink of a new treatment regime intended to scrub out my ailing liver and lend me a new lease of life. Any lease though has an associated cost and for me that was some very bad reactions to the drugs. In simple terms my body stopped producing enough white blood cells (which fight infection) and red cells (which carry oxygen to the muscles, organs and brain). This left me as pale as a ghost and about as weak. I am told that the effect was the same as if someone had drained a third of the blood from my body and then asked me to run a marathon. I ended up having to visit the hospital every day, ironically so they could take more of my blood to test. I’m sure I was left with little more than ectoplasm and will power flowing through my veins.

Think of that shot they always show on wildlife programmes of a new-born quadrupeds (horse, camel, cow, deer – whichever you pick). The scene where the said baby tries to pull itself tottering, wobbling and frail, exhausted from its recent trauma, to its unsteady feet for the very first. That’s pretty much how I felt, although thankfully with only two legs to coordinate and no hump (if you were thinking camel). The solution, in both senses of the word, came in the form of booster injections; two for the haemoglobin, one for the white cells. Along with the original treatment, which was also injected, I was jabbing my stomach every day for 14 weeks with anything up to 4 different syringes. I don’t know about you but I don’t really enjoy sticking needles in my already sore and punctured tummy. I’d rather have a cup of tea. just for future reference.

I endured all of this with as much strength of spirit as I was able and the unending endurance of David who must fear my hospital visits even more than I do because of the hell I then put him through. Now, I am a very firm believer in “Murphy’s Law” as it never seems to fail me. It played out in its usual style in this case too and after 14 weeks I was not showing a significant response to the medication and the treatment was stopped. The trials and tribulations of the last few years meant that I was simply not strong enough to cope with a dose sufficiently high to make a difference and so that 100 days of hell was for nothing. To be honest it was a relief, just to give my bruised and perforated stomach some respite. I know I will have to go through it all again one day, maybe with new and better drugs and that is a Damoclesian sword of some weight. Part of me feels like I failed, like somehow if I had tried harder or squeezed one more drop out of each syringe, the outcome would have been different, but clearly at the time the drugs were poisoning me and not having the beneficial effect I needed.

Through all of this I have kept myself sane with the garden, pottering around, doing little bits of jobs at a time, but grateful for something to distract my mangled mind from the medical mayhem that left me feeling like I was living in an episode of Casualty – and not even a very good one. The new greenhouse became a bubble of ‘other space’, somewhere unimpinged by needles and tablets, blood tests and scans. An escape. I could do as much or as little as any day’s symptoms allowed, with no pressure beyond the challenges of a late Spring and frosts that ate into the season like locusts leaving the land barren. To close the door to the greenhouse was to shut out the telephone, the calendar of hospital appointments, the drawer of tablets, the sharps bin for discarded needles and that whole part of my life and I honestly think that break, even for a few minutes, helped me stay marginally on the right side of survival.

I could sit on my little plastic stool in true gnomic fashion, dibbing away at pots of seeds, watering seedlings with the sprinkler on the hose and generally doing Percy Thrower proud (substitute Chris Beardshaw or Alys Fowler if you must and if you are too young to remember the days when it was perfectly normal to see a Percy out in the garden on BBC One). The heavy work has been down to David, the Dimmock to my Tischmarsh if you like, and I have to say I am proud of what we have achieved. In no particular order, we managed potatoes, runner beans, French beans, peas, lettuce, carrots, spring onions, full-sized onions, garlic, beetroot, sweetcorn, strawberries, cape gooseberries, sweet peppers, jalapeños, apache chillies and hundreds of tomatoes. I also have rhubarb (or bubub as my Grandfather always used to call it) and two grape vines which won’t crop for a year or two. For fun I grew some sunflowers and they added no end of colour, as did the French marigolds and nasturtiums, which are both supposed to act as natural pest control methods. Adding to the fun crops, we still have a good-sized tub of purple potatoes – yes, they really ARE purple all the way through.

On the same theme we have some heritage purple carrots too. I need not discuss the fact that carrots were originally purple as that is quite well known these days but to actually see one and eat it is quite odd – they taste exactly like any other carrot, no hint of purple at all.

Two small plots and a 6′ greenhouse have meant that we didn’t buy any veg or salad for the duration of the Summer, so I wonder how many food miles that has saved. I would quite like one day to check the countries of origin of a weekly veg shop and tally up just how far things have travelled. There is, of course, no taste comparison to even the best food you buy in a super marker – no matter how super it claims to be. There is something quite special about podding and eating some peas straight from the plant you grew yourself and knowing that no nasty chemicals were used, they have not been refrigerated, packed, shipped, stored or stacked. We don’t claim to be living The Good Life just yet, we would argue far too much about who is Tom and who is Barbara if we tried, but the garden has given me a the escape I needed from the more clinical part of my existence.

With the seasons as they were there was a quiet time with the veg, when seeds were sown, bulbs planted, spuds chitted and nothing I could do would speed up nature’s clock while they grew. With a decent period of dry weather and still the need to be outside we plotted a plan to build a pond. I had two in my last house and have always wanted one here too, but time and lack of inspiration had contrived to drop that down the list of priorities. But I needed something else to do, a project to occupy my mind and so the pond idea was resurrected. Even when I was fit and well, the prospect of digging something on the scale we wanted would have been beyond my reach and David, whilst willing and able to help in the garden is not fool enough to get roped into a task of that magnitude. He did offer, bless him, but with the same tone a death-row inmate might offer to paint his cell – I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. But thanks to my mother’s kindness we found ourselves with the funds to ‘get a man in’ and said man was got. The excavation took him an afternoon, it would have taken me a month – I make no exaggeration; I was not strong enough to wield a spade so would have had to manage with a trowel!

I have to say that the guy who did the work probably hadn’t dug many ponds before. The plot of land is on a slight slope, it rises by about six inches towards the patio. Despite a detailed diagram, example photos and all the measurements written down for him he never quite managed to grasp the concept that water tends to have an affinity for the level and if you make a pond with one side higher than the other it will only ever fill to the height of the lowest part. You all know that. I know that. David knows that but Doug (I shall call him that as it seems appropriate – what do you call a man with a spade in his head etc) didn’t know that and couldn’t grasp that the high point needed lowering. OK, I can forgive him for maybe not quite having the same vision for this aquatic fantasy that I held in my head but some basic common sense would help the guy no end. I thought as he was digging that maybe he had not quite understood the plans so again I explained that the level needed to be dropped at one end to compensate for the slope. He nodded with the understanding that a slug might have when presented with a quadratic equation and then proceeded to dig in the shelves around the edges. He knew I wanted a shelf of about 6 inches around part of the pond and another one at twice that depth to allow for planting marginals and lilies. But the numpty only went and dug these in parallel to the existing sloping ground, NOT on a level so, when the water was put in, one end of the shelf would be under the perfect 6 inch depth but the other would practically be dry. I gave up the fight and thank god I was having one of my better days or else either him or me would have ended up at the bottom of the hole waiting to star in a future episode of Brookside.

David cantered home in his shining armour and put things right, even managing to use the huge spirit level that I had been waving at Doug all day. The pond was lined and filled, and over the next few weeks I taught myself how to lay the edging bricks. Of course, these things I have to do slowly and on a minuscule scale so I was mixing mortar with a trowel and only enough for a few bricks at a time as my energy was unpredictable and I could end up flagging (no, not laying flagstones) at any time. So, bit by bit the edging was laid, everything was tidied and it was ready for draining. My inept attempts with the mortar were not always successful and loads ended up in the water. Lime mortar is bad for fish. It makes them dead. So it had to be removed by draining the pond. One learns from ones mistakes. I never said I was any good at it! That’s why I’m not a builder called Bob – although I’m sure a Digger called Doug could have found new skills at which to not excel.

No story is complete without a countdown to add to the drama and this is no exception. Ours was not so much your usual ticking clock or digital countdown but more a very traditional version. Think by way of example of a bucket of sand with a hole in it – when the sand trickles out the bucket is lighter and tips a fulcrum to set fire to a rope attached to the swinging axe… Our example was bigger – it was water in a lake that was slowly running out and as a result a hosepipe ban was due to be triggered any day. So amid imagined tension-building orchestration and quick cut-away shots to water guages in Crummock Water we had to get the pond emptied, cleaned and refilled before aqua became a black-market commodity and possession carried a higher penalty than cocaine.

We did it, with one day to spare. “The Ministry of Water today announced a hosepipe ban in areas including Manchester, Salford…” I think at one point we had more water stock-piled in our pond that United Utilities had in its entire reserve. But we were prepared, we had a butt, we could catch rainwater in hollowed-out oranges and bathe in the dishwasher. Stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. If things got bad I had ice cubes in the freezer we could melt down for soup. Of course, the day of the ban was wet, I mean piss-wet-through wet. And it kept being wet. Wet with a capital WET. The wettest wet since sliced wet. God, or Nature or the Baby-Jebus-in-the-sky has one bitch of a sense of humour and we had a month of wet Sundays and enough wet Wednesdays in a week to get anyone called Noah reaching for the power tools and books on animal husbandry. On the plus side I didn’t need to water the gardens and the butt was always full for greenhouse irrigation.

Political equality forbids me to draw any connection between the dark and ominous storm clouds and the General Election and of course this year we had all the razzmatazz of an American-style fight for the top job – except the Yanks fight over the White House and our guys bicker over a terraced council house. How frightfully droll that the outcome was the one thing that absolutely nobody in the country voted for and hardly anyone wanted. So Morecambe and Wise moved in to Number 10, no doubt sharing a bed and re-enacting the ‘breakfast’ sketch every morning. If I’m honest, I have pretty much now forgotten which one is which. Its like Ant and Dec. Does anyone really know? The Labour party were left to lick their wounds as Gordon was given an enormous political wedgie and frog marched out of the limelight. At least when Mr Brown said he’d keep an eye on things’ you knew it got his full attention. Still, maybe time will show that four eyes are better than one. This of course left the Labour party with a dilemma – who’s name to put on the letter-heads at Party HQ? They would have to elect a new leader but the ProntaPrint order has to go off, well, pronto. Solution: put the Miliband brothers up for the post – that way the business cards could just say Mr Miliband whoever gets the job. Now THAT is the sort of money saving scheme they should have adopted before the country fell into the economic abyss. Oh well, ‘all change’ at Downing Street and that is Tweedle Dum, Tweedle  Dee and Milib-Andy-Pandy safely ensconced in their new positions and the country thrown back to Thatcherite strikes, unemployment and cuts. As ‘about the size of Wales’ is now a recognised  unit of measure, and allegedly  we need to cut back as much as it costs to run ‘a country about the size of Wales’ for a year I think I have seen a solution here…

I shall leave you for a short while contemplating the absurdities of the British political system, our declining manufacturing industries, growing unemployment and cutbacks to the NHS which quite honestly make me fear for my own survival, while I slip off and write Part II.

The few days of sunshine we have had of late have at very least given me a chance to take a few photos that at least give the impression that Spring is here, and the clock change is a pretty good landmark. I remain unconvinced about daylight saving and its costs/benefits. Part of me really just wishes we could stick to one time and stop all this temporal confusion. We (the Brits) created GMT, it runs through our country and from it every other time on the planet is measured, yet for half the year we don’t even use it ourselves! Oh well, the plants and wildlife isn’t bothered by such man-made contrivances, although our cats just see it as an opportunity to moan on for twice as much food (in which ever direction the clocks jump).

One thing I haven’t lacked over recent days is company. Usually it is a somewhat hermitic existence that I endure, and beyond David my only mortal contact seems to be with the Postman (who is the stuff of 70s sit-coms meets Hammer House of Horror) and the two cats. But the last week or so has been a veritable overflowing of visitors and a maelstrom of activity.  I am reminded of an episode of “To The Manner Born” where Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton is feeling more than a tad lonely but sates her need for human contact by employing an endless stream of tradesmen (you could call them tradesmen then, none of this tradesperson malarkey) to provide her with quotes, measurements, estimates and designs for work she had no intention of ever commissioning.  In the course of the last month we have had so much work done on and around the house that at times I have felt like we were living in the middle of an episode of Property Ladder, minus Sarah Beeny’s latest baby bump and billowing boobs, of course.

The boiler (I refer here to our heating system, NOT Ms Beeny, in case you were wondering at the somewhat inelegant conceptual juxtaposition), as recently reported, was the first to receive attention, has now been upgraded to a combi and is wonderful. But that lead on to us buying a new bathroom suite, thanks to some extra money that landed in David’s lap. Sales prices, pre-VAT increase benefits, extensive ‘shopping around on t’interweb’ and a good deal of bartering landed us a pretty good deal and we ended up with bog, bath and basin residing in the back bedroom for a few weeks. Brian, the plumber, was off sunning himself in Tenerife (presumably on the proceeds of our boiler installation) and seemed strangely reluctant to curtail his holiday to spend a few days in our ‘smallest room’. Some people have no sense of urgency!  This however did give us time to fill the remaining floor space in the spare room with tonnes of tiles and gallons of grout and eventually Brian succumbed to the allure of a semi in Salford and commenced demolition. Brian comes complete with his sidekick somewhat inevitably called Charlie. They are both local people. Obviously the bathroomectomy meant long periods with no water but I remembered my boy scout training and has sufficient bottles filled in advance to still be able to provide endless brews (builder’s strength with a mountain of sugar) throughout the day. I have to say my water storage abilities were second only to a camel although with much less spitting and far fewer Arabs.

We had a few challenging moments with no loo, but having spent a couple of months in hospital I am no stranger to pissing in a plastic container (although did take care to ensure that the ‘in’ bottles were never mixed with the ‘out’ bottles – or at least I think I did). Thankfully we were flush-enabled before any greater urgency required for more creative waste disposal solutions.

Why do people associated with the building trades always think that they can drop plaster, nails, bolts, screws, grout and polyfiller down the loo and expect it to flush away? All you ever get is some sort of modern art sculpture in cement and metal stuck solid to the bottom of the pan which requires scooping out or plunging to the brink of extinction? At least that isn’t such a bad job with a new toilet; maybe it is their way of paying you back for whatever they found in the U-bend of the old one. Those dentures were NOT mine!

A bathroom stripped of all its ceramics is a sorry site (sic) and it just shows how shoddily modern buildings are thrown together. Slowly though the new suite migrated from the bedroom to its new home to a fanfare of blow torches, clanging wrenches and clattering in the loft as the wiring for the shower was moved. Apparently the loo fittings are ‘a bugger’ and the bath outlet is ‘uncommonly low’ resulting in more holes being bashed through the walls and I had to shift all our patio furniture, bins and garden paraphernalia to allow external access. I don’t DO furniture removals! Do I look like a Bernard Cribbins song character?

Right said Brian, outlet is a bugger, couldn’t be much snugger,  little room you know
Tried to budge it, couldn’t even nudge it, he was getting nowhere and so
He had a cup of tea

Right said Brian, gave a shout to Charlie, up comes Charlie from the floor below
After straining, heaving and complaining, we was getting nowhere and so
They had a cup of tea

Charlie had a think and he thought they ought, to
Take apart the cistern
And the thing that’s like a piston,
But it did no good,
Well I never thought it would

Right said Brian, have to make a new hole, right behind the new bowl, wouldn’t take a mo
Took his hammer, hit it with a clamour, should got ‘em somewhere but no
So Charlie said lets have another cup of tea and I said right-o

Right said Brian, have to get my ladder, sod your straining bladder, you’ll have to wait to go
I was cursing, insides nearly bursting but it got us nowhere and so
They had a cup of tea

Right said Charlie, that’s the waste disposal  that I just suppose’ll really have to go
Into the soil pipe, but the fitting is the wrong type and so
They had a cup of tea

Right said Brian, climbing up a ladder, with his crowbar gave a mighty whack
Was he in trouble, half a ton of rubble, landed with a thwack
So Charlie and me had another cup of tea on the patio out back

I’ll said to Brian, thanks a lot for trying, but I really have to poo
He said he ought’a reconnect the water and that’s the thing that he would do
If it wasn’t for the leakage, the risk of major seepage and so
I had to hold my pee

Right said Bri, gotta sort your ball-cock, think it’s got an airlock that’s blocked your overflow
But when he started flushing, the water started gushing
So with much relief to me I got to have a pee and then they went home

Now nepotism rules on the Avenue and Brian had organised for his son-in-law to do the tiling for us. Just to explain the intricate family relationships involved here, Charlie is Brian’s son and he lives on the estate. Brian’s daughter, Ruth, lives diagonally opposite from us, about 20 yards away, and she is married to Rob the tiler. Rob couldn’t come round to tile our bathroom for a week, so we were left with naked walls, no shower and old grout in all our crevices.

But this was not a week of rest by any means. Having shifted the patio furniture for Brian to access my soil pipe (Matron!), then moved it all back again when he had finished, we found that it all had to be moved yet again! A while ago we were approached by a man in a fluorescent jacket and gruff tones with an offer to fill our cavities as part of a council scheme. Never ones to turn down such an offer we agreed (who would turn down a man with a big hose offering to pump you full at no cost at all?). It’s amazing what the council will subsidise these days. I wasn’t aware that my cavity was in need of such attention, but he drilled a test hole and announced that I was in need of a good lagging, so who am I to argue? He left, promising to return with a team of burley workmen (again, a bargain) and we have been waiting to hear his gang bang at my front door. They chose this week to arrive, and so we had to shift all the patio stuff yet again, to give them the access they needed. When you have a gang of men coming up your back passage waving their hoses, you really want to ease their entry as much as possible. Now, the noise of several men going flat out with hammer drills and a huge foam-spewing nozzle is enough to give anyone a headache. Add to this the fact that the integrity of my cavity had been compromised by Brian bashing through an extra hole and we ended up with foam ‘snow’ drifting into the bathroom and it has been quite a fun time. Still, they promise that we should be 30% more efficient (or I assume that equates to a 30% increase in green credentials – if we go much greener we’ll be positively vegetative).

And on the subject of all things green we have now also welcomed a new greenhouse to the back garden. My seedlings and propagators were taking up all available window space in the house (we had even cobbled together a second tier on the kitchen window), so that looking out was much like peering through a jungle. B&Q had a sale. Say no more. To be fair we bought a greenhouse frame, base, glass, all the doings to make the foundations, weed barrier and slate chippings for less than the frame itself was supposed to cost. And they supplied a better model than the one we reserved.

So, at one point we had boxes of frame, base and glazing also piled in the back garden, along with bags of sand, cement and slate, all of which were included in the items that had to be constantly moved around to allow Brian et al to position their ladders.

Now, neither David nor I naturally gravitate towards DIY tasks (hence the need for plumbers, tillers and very odd job men). Our relationship with DIY is much like our ability to fly – we don’t have the right tackle, if we tried to fly unaided we would hurt ourselves and anyone around us and we are better off paying a man with a machine to do the flying for us. God chose to give us the gay gene, not the DIY gene. (Only lesbians get both).  But just occasionally we get overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of ‘how difficult can it be?’ which more often than not ends in disaster. We don’t do tiling because once a hammer decided to miss the tile targeted for removal and appeared again in the next room. We don’t do plumbing because indoor fountains are only cool when you plan them. But a greenhouse foundation – that’s just some holes in the ground, right?

Well, yes, and no. Remember too that I am very limited in energy, stamina, flexibility and strength. Picture a somewhat gnomic figure sitting on a stool, hunched over and picking away at the lawn with a trowel, stopping every ten minutes for a rest and wazzed up to the eyes on pain killers and you’ll not be far from the truth.  Two years ago the work of levelling the plot and digging a few holes for concrete foundations would have taken me an afternoon. Now though, picking away with a trowel and having to stop whenever anything needed lifting, shifting or manoeuvring was a somewhat herculean task.David has the muscle that I lack, but has no idea of how to go about things; I have the planning skill but not the execution. In true Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt style we ended up with the required number of holes in the right places, dug to the appropriate depth.   I invoked all the Gods of trigonometry, geometry, calculus and advanced quantum physics to ensure that the base was both square and level. I was only one step short of sacrificing a virgin to appease the heavens but they are only available in Salford by mail order (– or is that male order?). The foundations, unlike the virgin, were duly laid. We were committed (probably should have been years ago). Once that concrete set there was no turning back. Even a slight wonk at this stage would mean that the frame would be twisted and the glass would not fit. You want excitement in your life, you want pressure? Build a greenhouse!

A weed barrier membrane and slate chippings were added, as per the best gardening advice websites I could find. No way were we up to laying a concrete floor and I don’t think my nerves would have stood for slabs. I have read so many websites on the subject that my eyes are crossing and the only conclusion I have reached is that no two gardeners seem to agree on a single method of doing anything. At all. Ever. The slate will be fine and looks quite good, at least for now. How well it will stand the test of time remains to be seen.

Now, as a kid I was much more in the Lego camp than Meccano; an opinion which the frame construction has only served to strengthen. I turn cold at the thought of anything that needs a spanner and somehow scaling up Meccano to full greenhouse size did nothing to make the job any less fiddly or frustrating. But slowly and surely a structure began to form and I can say that for a moment I felt the same sense of pride that Isambard Kingdom Brunel must have felt when he tightened the last nut on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I just wonder if he too shared that awful sinking sensation when he realised that Strut F2-4 was suppose to be fitted with the recessed flange pointing towards the apex (on Model £4552D only) or that he had forgotten to insert bolt E12-6 into slot G (Fig 2)?

With the skeletal frame balanced tentatively on the base our next task was to glaze the beast. A few ‘challenges’ awaited, not least of which was that the boxes containing the glass had been left outside at B&Q so were sodden. Place two identical panes of glass together with a film of water between and try parting them. Go on, I dare you! They were laid out on the lawn to dry off but even after a good few hours it took extreme persuasion to force them apart. None of these panes were labelled at all, or if they had been the wet had obliterated all trace. It would have been ok, but some of the panes differed in size by just 2mm – that is 2mm that meant they were either fractionally too big or too small for all but one specific place. This fact was buried very deep in the minutia of the installation diagrams and I can’t believe we were the first people to have practically dismantled the frame thinking we had somehow got that wrong, when in fact the ‘square by all but 2mm’ glass was the wrong piece.  Four panels were cracked, but not so much as we couldn’t fit them temporarily but we’ll have to get them replaced at the weekend.

Fitting the automatic opener for the ‘window’ required a degree in advanced mechanics. I say ‘window’ because the term is somewhat redundant in an already fully glazed building – the whole thing is one big window, which is why the term ‘ventilator’ is often used. Of course I can’t test that the vent will open at a suitable temperature until the greenhouse reaches such a tropical clime, and with snow forecast I guess that won’t be for a while. Typical though, isn’t it? I was getting all excited about sowing out some veg directly into the garden in soil that has been fed, manured, nurtured and generally had more products thrown at it than a queen getting ready to go out on a Friday night, and still I dare not actually plant anything for fear of frost!

The base was, if I say so myself, perfect. The frame fitted without so much as a wobble or a twist – I don’t think an experienced foundation-digger could have made a better job. I shall be writing myself a letter of appreciation. You see, all those lessons in geometry at school were not in vain after all. Although I confess that at 43 years old I have still found no sensible use for the Quadratic formula!

I take more credit than I should for managing this wondrous erection. I certainly could not have done it myself and believe me, where the instructions say ‘best with two people’ they are not kidding! We managed with one and a half! David has had to do all the lifting, carrying, reaching and clipping, and I have been reduced to the position of navvy, handing tools and trying to fathom the instructions. His patience has been unparalleled and for all the trials and tribulations we never once mentioned divorce, murder or even creative insertion of a screwdriver. I have to say that David has been brilliant throughout – he’s magnetically repulsed by DIY so how he has kept his temper and good humour I shall never know.

We dismantled the old plastic greenhouse thing and, in a stroke of eco-recycle-brilliance with a few well placed hacksaw cuts it now forms staging and has saved us about £80 if we had bought new. It is certainly as good as anything we can buy custom made for the job, and we’d only have thrown it away.

Over the last day or so I have been transferring plants and seedlings from various window ledges to the new greenhouse, amid the comings and goings of Rob-the-tile. You may remember I said he lives over the road, about 20 yards away? He turned up yesterday morning having DRIVEN HIS VAN here! It isn’t like he had much equipment to bring – a spirit level, trowel and chisel – everything else was waiting for him here.  He did the same thing today; it will have taken him longer to get in the vehicle, belt up, drive here, unbelt, disembark and lock the van than it would to walk over the road. He did walk home for lunch – I was tempted to offer him a lift!

It is looking good so far – when he finishes today there will just be the grouting to do in the morning and hopefully we can get the shower back up and running. I hate having baths; I really don’t see what people like about them. The water is always the wrong temperature, they hurt my bad foot like crazy and you lie there wallowing in your own filth. But by the weekend all that will remain is the addition of a shower screen, decorating the bits that are not tiled, laying a new carpet and buying a new cabinet. Oh God, when I say it like that it sounds like we may never be sorted again. Oh, sod it, at least now I can go hide in the greenhouse and pretend I really am a garden gnome!

March has sprung with all the zest of Zebedee on valium or a slinky trying to boing its way back UP the stairs, but at least made an attempt to be springy, and the last few days have been glorious with sunshine and blue skies. It makes a change from the rain and cloud of recent weeks, but I suspect that winter is but playing possum. We have finally managed to edge the veg plots – a cunning plan to try to ensure that we don’t end up mowing more crops than we get to eat – and we eventually got round to digging in several bags of well-rotted manure.  It frustrates me that I have to rely on David for the manual labour, but any physical effort still leaves me exhausted and panting for breath. I sound a bit like Darth Vader making a dirty phone call! I did manage to cover the two plots with fleece though, so that should start to warm the soil and hopefully get seeds off to a good start when eventually I can sow outdoors.  I’m looking forward to being busy in the garden – I can potter for hours and when there is an end product I don’t feel like I have wasted my life so much.

I have a few seedlings already coming up in pots on the kitchen window – peppers and tomatoes mainly, although today I also started some plugs of sage, parsley, basil and chives, to get an early crop of herbs. I’ve run out of window sills now though. There are really only two in the house that I can use – any put on the others would fall foul of the cats, who have no respect for anything if it is in their way, and Solo has secured his vantage point both downstairs and in the bedrooms. He sits on guard chattering away to himself as though he is giving a running commentary on life in the Avenue. Maybe he is. Should I float the idea of “Desperate Felines” with the BBC? There IS a ginger cat on the street – who I shall have to refer to as Bree from now on.  I digress.

Most of my bulbs are now at least showing signs of spring and we have had the crocuses in flower; they bring a little cheer into an otherwise overcast existence.  I have hyacinths, tulips, daffs and grape hyacinths all yet to come to flower, although they are at least shooting so we should get a nice display. I should really be using the pots and tubs for veg, but a little splash of colour in the garden is an indulgence I think I have earned.  Speaking of colour, I’m also planning to plant some nasturtiums amongst the veg this year – they should look pretty and are not totally against the whole ‘Good Life’ ethos as they are edible and lovely in salads. That is if the slugs don’t get them first.

I hate slugs. This year I have bought some slug traps to sink into the soil and hopefully lure them to their deaths. I normally don’t like killing anything – I would shoo a wasp or a fly out of the house rather than squish it, but slugs are the exception and they should die with exquisite agony in the full knowledge that they are an affront to Mother Nature and all things good.  The only thing they are any use for is target practice – load a few into a hand-held catapult and see if you can hit a tree/wall/bus etc.  You may remember that last year I managed to cover the tennis courts opposite with splattered slug innards, and this year I may have to up the forward attack in my war against the little slimy bastards. Copper is supposed to give then mild electric shocks. I think copper, wired to the mains, would be an even better idea. Let them spit and frizzle if they try to get at my spuds! There is some satisfaction in the look of terror in their stalky little eyes when you approach with a large tub of salt or a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays. I’d live and let live if they buggered off to someone else’s garden. It isn’t like they NEED to eat my peas and carrots – there is plenty of other vegetation available, so I have to conclude that they do it out of spite.

I am taking the war airborne next – or at least off the ground as I’ve decided to grow strawberries and tomatoes in hanging baskets thus hopefully elevating them above sluggy reach. The sneaky gits will probably find a way to foil even that plan – probably bribe a thrust or two to parachute them into the baskets. But I am steadfast. I shall not flag or fail.  I shall fight them under cloches. I shall fight them up the walls. I shall defend my land, whatever the cost may be.  I shall fight them in the baskets, I shall fight them in the plots, I shall fight them in the greenhouse and in the tubs. I shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this garden or a large part of it were subjugated and withered, then our vegetable plot, armed and guarded by the best slug pellets money can buy, would carry on the struggle and, step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the potatoes, new and old.

We are still getting frosts and it is way too early to move any seedlings outside to the greenhouse-thing we have. (It is really just a plastic bag on a frame, looks as cheap as it was, can’t be heated  and only holds a handful of pots, but its better than nothing) With the cold we have also had blue skies and yesterday I did have a meander round the estate taking a few photos for a community website we have been designing. This is the so-called community which is rapidly transforming into a Lancastrian version of Palestine, and all over the issue of the blessed swimming pool repairs. Since the proper last residents meeting the sides seem to have declared outright war on each other. I fully expect reports over the next few days that one group or the other has developed WMDs and I wouldn’t be surprised if I see Kate Adie and a BBC crew dressed in khakis and trying to file a live report from behind one of the hedges amid the screech of percussion shells and grenades. A small faction of pool protestors has already lodged complaints with parliament and Watchdog, in an attempt to remove the current residents’ committee and managing agent (who are walled up in a fortress of bureaucracy and legal protection. Others are simply refusing to pay for the pool repairs, withholding funds, meaning that there are further delays and I doubt we will have the facility back in working order this side of summer at this rate. I just want to swim. Was that mortar fire and a rocket launcher I just heard?

To be honest, I went out to take the photos yesterday as ‘busy work’ to try to take my mind off the fact that I had another hospital visit scheduled for that afternoon, at which a decision would be made on  whether to start the next phase of my treatment. Now that the cancer is in remission (touching wood) there are still some residual problems that need to be addressed, including damage to my liver. My kidneys are also under close scrutiny as some of the medication I have been taking is known to cause renal problems. Because my liver is one step away from best being served lightly fried in butter with onions and a nice bottle of Chianti, that has huge detrimental impacts on lots of other bodily functions,  even if indirectly, and could be the cause of my sickness and mood swings. My pancreas is also not a happy bunny, but again this may be as a result of medication or my lily-livered liver. So the upshot of all this is that following more poking, pricking, prodding and postulating they want me to start treatment to fix my liver ASAP.  That is likely to be at least a year of injections, tablets and generally feeling ill. Allegedly it is ‘a walk in the park compared to the chemo you have been through’ but still not something I am looking forward to.

I knew this would be needed, so it was no real surprise, but I had hoped we would get a little bit more time before it all kicked off. Knowing about something and it actually happening are two different things and this is not a situation I face gladly or with anything but a heavy heart. I have the rationalization that going through this is better than the alternative but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish it were avoidable. I really wanted to be able to go away on holiday for a week before we were plunged back into the helter-skelter of medical mayhem. I owe that to David, who has been my rock over the last two years and who I am now asking to go through something similar all again. He deserves a holiday; we both do. But this next phase is a pretty unsubtle spanner in that particular jet engine. We wanted to go to the Maldives – tropical beaches, minimal intrusion from other tourists, sunshine and white sand, books to read and lagoons to snorkel, children only available spit roast as a course for dinner, no mobiles or interweb or TV or stress. We have been saving like squirrels for the last 18 months, but prices are extortionate and we were just a few months away from having the pennies. But that is all blown out of the water now as I expect to start treatment in the next fortnight so our tropical tranquillity is now unattainable. So I’ll be starching my stiff upper lip and soldiering on with grim determination, facing whatever this treatment throws at me with good old Dunkirk spirit. I shall fight it in the hospital, I shall fight it in the wards and I shall not be defeated. But if you go on holiday to somewhere sunny this summer, don’t send me a postcard.  I hate to see a grown man cry, especially when it’s me.

I’ve been somewhat remiss in not having blogged for quite a while now; I think my muse has finally succumbed to the need for hibernation, and with the cold weather who am I to deny? And to be honest, there hasn’t been any major event of interest worthy of its own journal. So today I will aim for a catch-up of what has been happening and share with you the few insights that the last few months have brought.

I last left you  with our house in disarray as we were in the middle of having our boiler replaced. All went remarkably smoothly, despite having chosen to undertake this challenge when the country was colder than the chiller cabinets in Asda, and still in a state of panic due to ‘the coldest winter since the last time it was this cold’.  But despite the ‘idiosyncratic’ nature of the old heating system, and fears that every pipe would explode under the pressure of the new one, all went to plan and we now bask in the comfy warmth of consistent heating, a thermostat that actually works and the savings of not having to heat a huge tank full of water every time we wanted to take our coats off indoors. Let’s hope the fuel bills reflect all our efforts and at least we can enjoy the smug inner- glow of knowing we are now several shades greener with smaller carbon footprints.

I talked also last time of our Residents’ Association and the fated pool, which was leaking faster than a cabinet enquiry and in need of much TLC (aka money).  The various interested parties did indeed meet and, as expected, we spent a good few hours in heated debate, name calling and tantrums the like of which I have not witnessed since primary school. We really were back in the realms of, “My dad’s bigger than your dad”, “You kissed her behind the bike sheds”, “He stole my sweeties” , “…’cos…”, “I don’t want to play any more”, “I’m telling on you” and, “You’re smelly so there”. The playground bully demanded most of the attention (and our dinner money), employing the tactic of just repeating the same thing over and over and at increasing volume, then staring with an “I’ll get you” menace at anyone who challenged that point of view. When the representative from the Management Company tried to answer questions he was pelted by verbal eggs, and the incontestable argument of “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”  before he could actually make his point. And reason was thrown out the window long before the bell went for the end of play time and the various gangs skulked off, presumably to either set off stink bombs in the lifts or at least nick off down the 7-11 for some fags and a bottle of Lambrusco.   Needless to say, nothing was resolved, progressed, or promised and our pool remains as empty Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard the day before her child benefit’s due.

I have also suffered the annual indignity of the ‘birthday celebration’ which, for anyone over about 20, serves only as a reminder that you are just another year closer to oblivion, that your mortal coil is showing grave signs of rust and that your allotted ‘Three score years and ten’ [*] is sounding much more like a marketing ploy than any sort of promise.

* [Figures based on recent  Bureau of Statistics survey in association with Hello Magazine and Laboritoire Garniér – sample of 32.7 people surveyed, 8.92 responded and of the responses, 83.4% said that they were not dead. Oh, and 8 out of 10 cats prefer not being dead too, which is like, over half but they have nine lives anyway so what do they know?]

I tell you, I think myself lucky to get to the end of the week, let alone having any aspirations to reaching retirement age. Which is a shame as I think I’d make a very good grumpy old man and have no problem at all with being a burden on all around me. I’m practising slurping soup, afternoon napping, wearing slippers and complaining that music is too loud, but the TV too quiet and pointing out random things that were better when I was your age. Of course, with medical advances average lifespans are increasing and with stem-cell research we’ll soon be able to re-grow any bits of us that drop off, fail or turn to mush. Soon enough we will become real life examples the indestructible stars of the cartoon world. No plummeting  anvil will stop us. No head-on collision with a rocket-powered train will derail us for long. Falling from a mountain precipice into a near-bottomless ravine, with an enigmatic ‘pfuutt’ of dust to mark our demise, will not in fact mark anything but our exit stage left in the direction of the nearest Acme Stem-Cell and Burger drive-thru. “A new left leg Sir? Certainly, and would you like fries with that?”

I mention this on the anniversary of the announcement of the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep (1997) and a recollection of the amusement that I felt back then at the negative propaganda and scaremongering that surrounded all things genetically modified. We would all soon be growing third ears and x-ray vision! We’d be creating designer babies by the crèche-load and mutating into human-triffid monsters. But that was such a knee-jerk reaction when you consider that we have been playing around with genetic manipulation since the first farmers realised that certain types of crops grew better than others, and that they could breed fatter livestock with better pelts if they only mated the ‘best’ of their animals.

We have been cross-breeding plants and animals for thousands of years, to steer production towards the characteristics we felt desirable at the time. We breed grain for certain conditions or for its resistance to certain disease. A cultivar by definition is a cultivated variety of a plant that has been deliberately selected for specific desirable characteristics (such as the colour and form of the flower, yield of the crop, disease resistance etc.). When propagated correctly the plants of a particular cultivar retain their special characteristics. THAT is old school, Ladybird book of Agriculture, Farming for Dummies.

Travelling on the train last Autumn I was struck by how much shorter the wheat seemed to be in the fields we passed, compared to what I remember from a few decades ago, as farmers have bred short-stemmed varieties much less susceptible to wind damage.  This is nothing new – agriculturalists pick the crops most suited to their needs and prevailing market forces. We used to call it ‘cross-breeding’ – these days we opt for the more sinister connotations of ‘genetic modification’ but what difference does it really make if the process happens  over a few generations in a field or a few months in a laboratory? The end result is the same. As are the risks and the benefits. If we are going to survive as a species we will have to embrace these technologies, find ways to increase yield and grow crops in ever-more inhospitable environments.  We can’t afford to take some hippy moral high ground based on ignorance and a fear of the latest buzz word. It is stem cells today, was genetic modification last week and cloning a fortnight ago, but they all amount to the same thing: a scientific development to which the public have a pre-programmed reaction – fear. These days social network sites are blamed for sparking public outrage, but the process has been happening ever since mass communication allowed viral spread of such hysteria. It is just a bit quicker with Twitter. We seldom stop to consider how much the media colours our opinions on all matters from politics to science, the weather to Cheryl Cole’s relationship challenges. I remain undecided whether we need quite the amount of ‘news’ with which we are bombarded, especially when that news is heavily weighted with opinion and commercialisation. And I wonder if this doesn’t sometimes negate us from the responsibility of making up our own minds.

When we are told that “Thousands sign petition to stop embryonic stem-cell research” are we not then almost incited into adopting a similar opinion? It is easy to get enraged with the rest of the mob.  Sometimes just reporting a thing is an act of influencing opinion. We used to call it propaganda and we used it as a weapon.

This dalliance with genetic engineering isn’t something limited to food supplies either. There are plenty of examples through history of our experiments in Eugenics – the selected breeding of humans to try to improve the race. The obvious example is, of course, the Aryan experimentation programs of Nazi Germany and the killing of disabled (or otherwise ‘broken’ people) through involuntary euthanasia. But similar thinking has been applied in countries across the globe, from Australia to Japan, Scandinavia to the USA. We do it every time we terminate a pregnancy on the grounds of likely disability or illness. Even going back through time the writings of Plato and his stories of Atlantis are based around the concepts of Eugenics, with the Atlanteans  representing a Nordic super-race at war with the Athenians. (And there is some suggestion that Hitler was trying to recover the genetic purity of Atlantean blond-haired master race.)

Taking a wider perspective, it could be argued that any medical interference is unnatural and a disturbance to the order of life. Be that through medicines to prolong life to prenatal embryo scanning. How is the mother who decides to abort a Downs child any different to the farmer who plants wheat which has been cultivated for its yield, or indeed the child who is inoculated against polio? What about the patient who accepts a heart transplant or chemotherapy for cancer? What about the couple who can’t conceive without medical intervention – I remember the frenzied news reports of the first test-tube baby, although the practice is commonplace today and hardly newsworthy. These are all meddling with the natural order but all provoke different emotional responses – usually depending on how close we are to the discovery. The mark of civilization is surely how we deal with these things and how we ensure that they are focused for good. And we WILL come to terms with cloning, genetic modification and stem-cell organs because these things can never be un-invented. Pandora has a very leaky box. We can’t go back, we can’t undo the research so surely better we embrace it and look to the future with open eyes and considered safeguards rather than drive the experiments underground?

Maybe I am biased – after all, I have taken many medicines in my times, to prolong my life (some of them were tested on animals, all of them were tested on other people), I have eaten bread made from cultivated corn (but I have not yet mutated into some horrendous carnivorous UK version of Audrey II), I have chomped on a steak or two which were undoubtedly sliced from farmed cattle (yet I show no signs of growing horns, hooves or a second stomach), I have grown carrots known to be unaffected by fly, and, heaven forbid, I have even eaten battery-produced eggs.  When I was a kid, if someone in the neighbourhood contracted mumps or chickenpox they held a ‘party’ with all the local children attending to try to catch the disease – these illnesses are much less dangerous in pre-adolescence than if contracted in adulthood and offer some degree of immunity if caught as a child. Is that not just a primitive form of stacking the medical cards and trying to outsmart nature? I have taken inoculations against tetanus and to allow me to travel to foreign lands without fear of dying of some local pox. I’m guilty of having chosen both the seasonal and swine flu jabs, preferring that to the potential ‘natural’ risk of death. Not content with that though I have also been guilty of using ocular enhancements, removable devices to correct my failing vision, without which I would almost certainly have fallen off the aforementioned precipice in my near-blind state to land at the bottom of the ravine with a billow of dust – which is just as well as there are so few Acme stem-cell drive-thru establishments in Salford. I was born prematurely, in a time when the chances of survival were much lower than they are today and practices were barely one step up from casting spells, pointing bones and sacrificing baby lambs to appease the Gods of midwifery. Without medical intervention I would not be alive. The same can be said of my battle with cancer. If the natural course of events had been unhindered I would not be here now. As an individual I guess I make a mockery of Darwinian Theory – I’m certainly NOT the fittest by any measure, but in that there is also some hope – as a species we are finding ways to adapt, to survive and to overcome the current challenges we face; this starts at valuing and preserving the life of an individual and is then expanded exponentially to benefit the whole race.

In historical terms, a few centuries ago someone who administered potions to cure the sick was seen as a witch, a Sharman, one who conjured magic and fear. Then they became apothecaries, chemists and medics and held in the highest esteem. Our attitudes change as benefits are proven. So too will they change with body-part replacements. After all, we have organ replacements now, and even whole face replacement, as macabre as sounds to our current sensitivities. But how many of us would refuse the surgery if we found ourselves in need? Moral high grounds are very dodgy places to build an ideology.

I have not yet commented on the other factor which comes into play as part of the argument for or against scientific advancement. Sooner or later someone will raise an objection on the grounds of religion, usually citing arguments that we should not try to play God, or that what we are doing is sacrilegious and a corruption of God’s will. I guess the stance taken by Jehovah’s Witnesses is an extreme example, with their religious refusal to undertake life-saving blood transfusion treatments. My religious views are no secret but I wonder how a Jesus known for having found a way to feed several  thousand people with a few loaves and fishes, would object to us looking for modern equivalents. This also was the man who healed the sick, drove out madness, returned sight to the blind and raised Lazarus from the dead. Surely there can be no serious religious argument against medical research and if we are guilty of interfering in God’s great plan, then so is his son.

On the subject of Jesus, i was amused to read that Elton John has recently expressed an opinion that Jesus was in fact gay. Wake up Elton – that conspiracy theory has been going around since people were first nailed to trees for being different! I assume you are basing your argument not just on his sense of compassion and taste in open-toed sandals but also for the fact he spent most of his life getting pissed with a bunch of twelve other blokes and singing Tim Rice Lyrics? Way to go Elton. That is almost as funny as the hype and fanfare which preceded the live episode of EastEnders last week. Was I the only person in the country to be completely underwhelmed?

Why all the fuss? What was SO special about the BBC broadcasting live television? After all, it isn’t so many years ago that ALL television was live. I wonder what percentage of new output from the BBC is live – a fair amount I would speculate, when you consider news and current affairs programming, sports, coverage of major events, political debate and even phone-in shows. Live drama is hardly a new concept – THAT has been going on in theatres for centuries. Combining drama with a live broadcast isn’t new – look at the early soap operas, sketch shows and so forth. Okay, so drama is faster paced these days, but current technology, sets, lighting should all be able to cope with that. And EastEnders was far from a totally slick production – I noticed camera goofs to rival anything seen on Acorn Antiques, and it was very clear where spacing shots had been written in to allow for time slippage. Did I see Miss Babs loitering behind the bar in the Queen Vic and was that Mrs Overall poised just off camera with a plate of macaroons and a fresh mug of coffee?

Still, as Marion Clune, AA producer [*] once said: “We professionals notice – Joe Public never clocks a darn thing”

[* Thanks for the correction!]

As I write this I have the eager attendance of two strange men who are currently gauging the size of my flu, with the intention of giving my pipework a good seeing to, for, after three years of saving, we are finally getting our central heating system replaced.  Of course our old boiler just scraped through as being ineligible for the government scrappage scheme (it is rated F and would have to be G to qualify). Goodness knows what a G rated system must be – an open camp-fire maybe, a candle over a pan of water, or perhaps just sitting round an exposed kettle element. I thought the deal sounded too good to be true, and Mr Brown didn’t let me down.  This was all supposed to happen a few weeks ago, plumber booked, loft cleared, but the country was at the time crippled and helpless under a blanket of white unpreparedness.

I read an interesting article the other day that echoed my thoughts on the scaremongering prevalent during the snow – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8460245.stm – It questions the mathematics behind claims that the bad weather cost the economy hundreds of millions of pounds, and takes a somewhat more balanced view noting a few key points:

• Some businesses will have suffered, but others will have benefited. Our plumber says he was rushed off his feet with call-outs to burst pipes and broken boilers. Ditto panel beaters and the supermarkets who’s shelves were stripped in a frenzy of panic buying.
• Some businesses will simply have deferred work and whilst they had a lean time a few weeks ago, they will be doubly busy catching up with a backlog. People who, for example, didn’t get their hair cut then will need a cut and blow job eventually. The industry didn’t loose out – there is no less hair to cut in total. Manufacturing orders won’t have been cancelled – just delayed.  After all, the whole country was frozen so cancelling an order for Blivets from one company and placing it with another would have gained nothing.
• Other sales will have rocketed – warm clothes, anti-freeze, road salt (which probably had a higher street value than cocaine!) and of course fuel.

So whilst yes, there will have been individual losses and hardship, I doubt that this will show as more than a minor blip in terms of impact on the GDP. I can’t help thinking that there is something very English about making things out to be far worse than they really are. I have always thought that there is an inherent optimism in being pessimistic; if you expect the worse then you will be prepared for it, and if it doesn’t happen you will be pleasantly surprised. Maybe that is the English way. A stiff upper lip is only any good in a crisis. That said, you’d have thought the apocalypse were upon us with all the moaning and gnashing of teeth, prophets of lost profits and every news broadcast pre-empting the end of the world as we know it. Scares were mongered and the gloom of doom was upon us.  Yet we survived against the odds and life returns to its routines.

Over the past few weeks a bit of a row has broken out in our little local community. All the houses, along with two blocks of flats More about them in a minute), in our estate are tied in to a contractual relationship with our Management Company. The land is all leasehold (contractually we have to pay a peppercorn a year to the estate) and is administered by the Riverdale Management Company which is also responsible for upkeep of common ground plus the Leisure Centre. Last summer, the pool developed some problems and it transpired that many of the pipes had to be dug up and replaced. The upshot of this was a bill for £39,000, shared between all the properties (over £150 each) and demanded by the Management Company before the work would be completed.  Obviously this was a lot of money to find just before Christmas and resulted in an eruption of emotive reaction from the residents. We now see a community divided. Forget Northern Ireland, forget Iraq or Afghanistan – it is quite likely that WWIII will be fought in the hinterlands of Kersal Dale.

This seems to be a battle being fought by about four different factions: the management company and their legal representatives, the people who refuse to pay, the people who have already paid and are furious about any further delays and the resident busybody who is whipping it all into a frenzy yet refusing to show her hand. In among all this are demands that the company books be reviewed, accusations of skulduggery, insider dealing and extortion. People are up in arms and spitting blood. Families in one email distribution list are forbidden to speak with neighbours in another list. False personas abound, as people fear to reveal their true identities. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else amid accusations of being a spy for the management company or a blackleg who has broken the unofficial picket line. Of course, every niggle going back 20 years is now being raised, above and beyond the pool repairs, and we see added into the mix issues about parking, television reception in the flats, key fobs and the hours worked by the caretaker. Why do the residents of the flats pay the same as those in houses, when their upkeep is clearly more costly? Why has the intercom not been fixed?  Who are the members of the residents committee and why have they not been arguing the cause? Is Iris Robinson involved? If not, why not?

There is a meeting scheduled next week between the residents and the solicitors. I expect there will be blood. And it is all pointless posturing anyway. The terms of the contract (which you have to sign to live here) give Riverdale the right to charge “any sum they deem to be reasonable” to cover “any repairs they deem to be appropriate”, so I expect their legal position is significantly more watertight than the actual pool itself! I agree that we have a right to know how the management fee is being spent and why provision was not made for repairs but, like with the snow, this is a massive over-reaction. Don’t mention the pool. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it. People speak in code, not willing to reveal on which side of the barricades they wish to hang their flag. “What do you think about the pool?” – “What do YOU think?” – “Well, I can see both sides.” – “Me too, I’m glad it is all out in the open.”

All this prompted me to look back through our deeds, to check the details of the contract and also to try to understand how Riverdale came into being. It seems Riverdale Management Company (in various previous guises) took over the Kersal Way estate when our houses were built. When we moved in we knew that this area had been flats but I had no idea of quite what had been here. My curiosity took me to a number of resources including a website chronicling the history of this estate – http://www.kersalflats.co.uk/index.html from which I have included some photos with kind permission of the site owner.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

This area was wasteland until the late 1950s, prone to flooding and little more than marsh bog, overlooking the old racecourse and nestling in the vale created by the crook of the river. Following a boom in manufacturing in the city and as a response to the post-war housing crisis, the government hatched a plan to provide high-rise housing in what turned out to be a massive experiment in social engineering. In what was one of the largest developments of its kind in the country (and a “model for future living”), twelve blocks of flats were commissioned along with a parade of shops, community and health centre, pub and play area. Building work took place from 1958 through to the late 60s. As they rose, the flats became a major part of the skyline, visible from miles around. The land was cheap as it sat in the flood plain of the river Irwell so was thought to be unsuitable for development, but needs must and the flats were raised on stilts, a double-edged solution which meant that when the river broke its banks in 1980 the flats remained dry but each was surrounded by its own moat.

At its height, the estate housed 3000 people, but declined from the mid 80s and became “A dumping ground for problematic persons, criminally orientated individuals, and the socially and economically dispossessed*”.  Families were relocated and crime flourished.  The thrill and promise of living in these new modern homes, with hot water and ‘space age’ lifts brought together a community, but it was not sustainable, investment dwindled, neglect set in like the mildew on the walls. Kersal Dale moved from des-res to dump, its reputation plummeted and in October 1990 eight of the twelve blocks were demolished amid much media attention.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

At the time the controlled destruction represented the largest explosive demolition ever undertaken and made national news. I have a vague recollection of seeing footage at the time, and copies of the videos are still available on the website. The intention was to refurbish the remaining four blocks which were passed into the hands of a development company, but even that plan was ill fated and a further two buildings were later demolished. All that remains are two of the twelve blocks, originally called Shakespeare and Shelly (they all took names of poets, as Byron was born and lived in Kersal), re-skinned, refurbished, revitalised and renamed.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

You can see from these two photographs how the flats sat in the landscape. I have marked the remaining buildings on both the old and new images, plus the location of our house. We would have occupied the ‘green’ area in the middle of the development.

When we were looking for properties in Salford I remember checking the Google satellite image for here and remarking how green and undeveloped it looked, never realising that until a few years previously it had been such a ‘metropolis’- not so far distant from Fritz Lang’s futuristic “city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners.”

Whilst I can easily map the old onto the new, see evidence of where the flats once stood, relate to the buildings on an academic level, I find it impossible to stand in our back garden and really feel what it would have been like to be surrounded by touring concrete skyscrapers. I can look at comparison photos and understand the layout, but I just can’t relate on an emotional level.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

This place was once the home of thousands of people, a community, families with lives and stories and experiences. They lived in flats which had open fires (no central heating) and windows that in winter were an inch thick in ice (a far cry from the minor inconveniences we suffered a few weeks ago).  Here I am getting a boiler fitted, where they had to lug sacks of coal up the stairs when the lifts were broken. They will have had a very different relationship to this piece of land than the one that David and I now court.

Much of the land remains vacant, decisions to redevelop now retracted following the current economic depression. Plans made a few years ago are no longer viable, and parts of Kersal are being reclaimed by nature, returning to the way they were only 45 years ago, with nothing but fading photographs to show the high-rises were ever here, but at least we have our leisure centre with its empty, leaky pool. I just hope that history is not repeated where someone decides it is not worth the effort or money to fix and it, like the flats, will fall into ruin.

* quoted from http://www.kersalflats.co.uk

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

If a UFO arrived in the skies above the United Kingdom last week the small green fluffy creatures from Alpha Centauri would be forgiven for thinking that we had never seen snow in our country before. It always amazes me how everything grinds to a frozen standstill and we fail completely to cope with what is, after all, an annual occurrence. Supermarket shelves are stripped bare, like an eviscerated carcass in a post-apocalyptic locust attack; road salt and grit pass hands with a black market value greater than cocaine; emergency services are stretched to their limits by calls to attend idiot drivers who have spun off the road having driven at speeds far too fast for the conditions. Accident and Emergency wards are bursting at the seams with ice-related fractures, sprains, broken hips and dislocated shoulders. I bet 90% of the injuries sustained were on people who didn’t really need to go out in the snow anyway. Trains get stranded in the Chanel Tunnel and Gordon Brown sweeps in, superhero cape aflutter, to coordinate Britain’s grit reserves. One assumes the bat-cave war bunker under Downing Street has sprung back to life and Mr Brown is seen saving the country from his twat-mobile. Schools are closed for health and safety reasons – presumably to ensure that the kids don’t slip on the ice. These are the same kids who are then left unsupervised to run amok, throwing snowballs at motorists or careering down hillsides on plastic bags to brain themselves on the brick wall at the bottom.

Maybe I am uncharitable but I have little sympathy for the people who put themselves forward for the Darwin Awards, by venturing out on frozen lakes and rivers. Clearly they fell into our gene pool by mistake too.

Quick tip: if anyone ever wants to invade Britain, do it when we have a light covering of snow, you will find us completely paralysed and at your mercy.

Our friendly Aliens must be pissing themselves as they watch us panic and thrash around, when our neighbours in Scandinavia are no doubt equally bemused by our inability to cope, as they simply lock on their snow tyres and throw another copy of Mamma Mia on the sauna fire.

Every year we are dealt the same rhetoric: we don’t get these conditions frequently enough for it to be financially viable to change our infrastructure and planning contingencies. So every year we are left with a metaphorical trousers round our ankles while our government has pissing competitions in the snow.

But our leaders want to have their iced cake and eat it too. On one hand we are told that it would not be economically viable to better prepare for these ‘freak’ annual conditions, but in the same breath they protest the billions of pounds lost to the economy caused by the snow. (That is, of course, fuzzy mathematics. Yes, some industries will have suffered due to lost production or revenue, but I suspect that just as many will have gained – I bet the AA has seen record uptake, the power companies will be rubbing their hands with glee and whilst bin men may not have been collecting rubbish, I bet they have been gainfully employed by councils for clearing roads. Panel-bashers and heating engineers will be quid’s in. If we haven’t bought bread, we HAVE bought de-icer. If people have been eating tinned or frozen food this week, they will replace those supplies next week. I expect the real costs to Britain.com will soon be smoothed out again.) There is much we could do to prepare for such conditions, which climatologists tell us will increase. In a world of advanced telecommunications, home computers and web-casts there are many businesses which could operate adequately with their employees working from home. We are told to not clear our paths for fear of prosecution if someone believes a driveway to be ice-free but slips on the patch we missed – maybe we need to look at more appropriate legislation which encourages people to clear snow.  Maybe if school catchment areas were limited to walking distance, for teachers and pupils, then there would be less need for closures in all but the most rural areas. I remember that if it snowed during my childhood we just took boots and a change of shoes, but still walked to school. We had snowmen competitions on the playing field, even if there were only a few teachers about. And that was before the mothers all had 4x4s and kids could raise a claim for negligence if they grazed their knee.  If we ran out of bread, there was always yeast and flour in the cupboard. Mother always had a couple of pints of milk in the freezer and the skills to cook up a fortnight’s worth of decent meals from the contents of her pantry.

In Germany there is a requirement for every household to clear the pavements outside their property and keep it clear of ice and snow during daylight hours. In fact, in many areas of Europe there is a legal requirement to fit winter tyres during the coldest months. People buy anti-slip pads for their shoes and wear a few more layers.

We don’t even require British drivers to undertake skid-pan tests experience before they are allowed to drive, so most people have no idea how to react when roads are icy. I was trained by the Cumbria Police Driving School and to gain my licence I had a full afternoon on a skid-pan, and had to show two things: firstly, that I could recover from a skid and secondly (more importantly) that I could drive at a speed and in a way that minimised the chance of skidding in the first place. There is no requirement to demonstrate these skills to get a UK licence, nor is anyone taught and tested on motorway driving, or how to deal with poor visibility. Is it any wonder that Mr Muppet ends up shunted into a ditch at the first sign of a frost?

It doesn’t help that our weather forecasts are so inaccurate. I appreciate that it is a very complex field, with conditions changing all the time, but if any other industry produced such poor results and offered such limp excuses, then they shouldn’t be paid their massive annual bonuses. Maybe bankers freelance as meteorologists, and use the same bit of seaweed to predict financial storms as they do approaching weather systems.  Arthur C Clarke famously said that any technology sufficiently advance is indistinguishable from magic. I wonder if the Met Office has not misinterpreted that as ‘if your technology is pants, bamboozle them with hocus-pocus’. In their defence, the Met Office do say “we can never create a perfect forecast system because we can never observe every detail of the atmosphere’s initial state. Tiny errors in the initial state will be amplified, so there is always a limit to how far ahead we can predict any detail.” So a ‘Barbeque Summer’ is rained off and nobody seems to have seen this cold spell coming. It seems that even short-term forecasts are as much guess work as science and just a few days ago we were battening the hatches ahead of more record-breaking low temperatures due to continue to the end of the month, and yet today it is a positively balmy 2 degrees above freezing and the ice is all but gone. If when working on IT contracts I had put together an estimate that was so far off track, I’d have been sacked on the spot. No wonder people still take bets on white Christmases – if it were anything other than guess-work, Ladbrokes would not take the odds.

But it is not all doom and gloom. We had a wonderful hour out on Saturday, taking photos in the snow. I stumble along as best I can and we can’t go far because I still can’t walk any distance. But the photos are all from just a few hundred yards away from our home and it always amazes me that this area is so rural when it is in fact in the middle of a major city.  Of course, blue skies and crisp white snow makes it easy to take a decent photo.

No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century that our world was about to end. As men busied themselves about their various concerns, worked and studied like the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet across the gulf of night, forces vast and cold and unsympathetic regarded our planet and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.

I was there the day that England fell. I, alone, bring witness and hope that someday, somehow, my words will be read and understood.

Lingdale in the 1940s

Our mystics had foreseen it, bent over their charts and globes, reading the signs, interpreting the ancient symbols but we ignored their warnings. Age-old lore told that this had happened before, many moons ago, in the days of our ancestors, but the wisdom of the elders was lost and we would never know what magic they used to survive, to withstand the menace, or how they endured the darkness to carry on the human race.  Their stories were legend, tales of how communities came together to face the danger, sharing food and shelter, managing to survive without the comforts we take for granted in our modern age. That was in a time gone by, a time of wonder and comradery and now our scientists and philosophers spoke in hushed tones of something terrible on the horizon, a gathering of forces beyond any man’s control. But we had closed our minds and dulled our senses, never really believing it could happen to us.

As the night drew closer, slowly and with the inevitability of a ticking clock, a great darkness descended and it began. It came from the sky in the North, devouring starlight and eradicating the winter moon. Our eyes turned to the heavens and our hearts filled with dread. The beast approached and its breath froze the land to iron, a frosty harbinger of the terror yet to come. We felt it sting our skin, bite at our clothes as we huddled together in terror. Some of the younger ones were excited, they thought it all a big adventure, never guessing the torment that lay ahead.

As the world was bathed in a milky light we turned our eyes to the night above, and gazed in wonder at the advancing menace. Some of us were gripped in awe and fell to our knees in prayer as it all began. The Parson gave thanks for our deliverance, for surely Armageddon was at hand. He threw himself to the ground and made the sign of the angels, praying for deliverance.  The Artillery man stood helpless, knowing that no weapon would offer even the slightest protection.  Our healers and leaders scrambled amidst preparations which were woefully inadequate. And in our stupor we found ourselves paralysed, unable to take action to protect ourselves, nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide as the devastation rained down upon us.

Word passed around, from community to community, messages sent, warnings given. I was there, like everyone, capturing the scene, recording the events and trying to warn those at the edge of the destruction, willing them to get away while they still had time. Save yourselves! But of course there was no retreat for there was nowhere to flee. How stupid to think there was any escape from this almighty threat.

We heard reports that London remained free, and many set off in that direction, only to perish on the journey. Small pockets of resistance, brave souls against the forces unleashed upon us. We knew that we would never make it to the capital; the roads were blocked and travel was treacherous. And even if London stood today, it was only a matter of time. The London Eye would close as surely as we closed our minds to the destruction falling on us from above. News came in of small groups, families, friends found huddled together, trying to gain shallow comfort from shared body warmth, and physical contact as the blackness closed in around them.

For hours it continued, through the depths of night, relentless, and as the morning came those of us who survived the first attack gazed out upon a changed world. All that had been familiar was gone; all that we had known was buried. Nothing was recognisable. The places of our childhood wiped from view, our lands lay smothered, our homes buried beneath a shroud of despair. No crops would grow in our fields and our factories lay desolate and empty. Those weak of will had raised effigies to our invader, trying to appease the spirit that wreaked havoc among us. All around vehicles were abandoned, as their drivers had made a final run for safety, their tracks just visible as another wave of destruction swept overhead. In the distance a light, a sign that someone may have survived the night. But it guttered and died, along with our hopes.

As I write this now by the dying light of my final candle, I know I only have enough rations to last a few more days. I doubt I will survive much longer. A while ago I thought I heard a signal on the radio, but that has faded now and I know I am alone.

Lingdale in the 1940s

There was news of some survivors near the coast, but I doubt that their story is any better than mine. I have family in the Northern Wasteland, but they will have perished as reported conditions there were worse still. The last contact I had just brought news of their suffering, isolated without food and struggling to survive, terrible conditions deteriorating every hour. I heard the locals had fought to keep a track clear, so that vital supplies could be shared, although by now the community will have fallen, unable to withstand the onslaught but brave to the end. If only we had learned the lessons from history, tried to understand how our ancestors had coped. Maybe the outcome would have been different, but instead our world ground to a halt, falling apart, unable to function.  We remember those heroes who fought on against the odds, warmed by the flame of self sacrifice: the men of medicine who tried to calm the wounded; those who battled on in our power stations, trying to keep the fires burning; farmers in the fields.

Yet, in the stillness there remains a beauty and I see a lone creature out hunting in the wilderness. Life, of a sort, goes on. And while our own race may not survive to live and love, to sing and sigh, to dream and dance, perhaps somehow our world will recover. We may never really understand the forces that bore down upon us over these fateful days, and it is too late to wonder what we could have done differently, what actions we could have taken, what preparations may have been effective. The summer sun is fading as the year grows old, and darker days are drawing near. The winter winds will be much colder… oh, hang on a second. The sun is coming out. I think there’s a thaw on the way and the snow is melting. Ooops, false alarm. As you were.  Business as usual. Don’t know what the fuss was all about really.

I received a letter this morning, special delivery from the North Pole, and I thought I would share it with you all:

Dear Adrian

Thanks so much for your letter, which arrived today and compelled me to put pen to paper myself. I am sure you will be as sad as I am about my news, but I thought it only right that I should break it to you myself. I’m sorry to say that Santa Enterprises Inc and its subsidiary, Rein-Air, will stop trading on December 26^th this year.

As you are probably aware, the business has been operating at a loss for some years now and we have been forced to realise that we simply do not have the means to continue into 2010. All outstanding orders will be honoured but the official receivers will arrive on Boxing Day to value the few company assets we have left and will then wind up the business.

There have been a number of factors which have contributed to our demise and I feel it only fair to explain some of these to you and our other loyal customers. Obviously it will come as no surprise that we have been hit very hard by the economic downturn: people just don’t have the money to buy expensive gifts anymore. That has a knock-on effect to production and we have had to lay off almost half the Elf workforce. The price of raw materials has rocketed too, making it uneconomical to manufacture key items at the North Pole. We did try to leverage the global markets and even sited a few factories around the world, in places like Africa, China and South America, but the Elves just couldn’t stand the heat and we found that the smell from their body odour was tainting the products.

The new landing strip we had to build turned out to be a bottomless money pit – you will recall that fuss about the old strip not passing Health and Safety regulations and being declared un-sleigh-worthy. We took out a loan to build a new sleigh-port closer to the coast, but we had not anticipated quite how quickly the ice cap was retreating and within months the runway was not on permafrost but on dry land!

Rudolf caught a nasty virus while holidaying on Mexico and so was unable to meet his responsibilities for stock control and materials distribution. This left us with his work to be distributed amongst his colleagues but they involved the unions and the whole matter got out of hand. To top it all, we had a bunch of climate change protesters demanding that we measure the reindeer for methane output, which apparently exceeds international standards and we have had to get them all fitted with ‘emission collection bags’ before they can undertake this year’s deliveries. That just added insult to injury after I had to fork out for special anti-glare visors for them, following that damning report by the Chief Medical Elf that their eyesight was being damaged by the increased light from all those blessed house decorations.

We have seen a massive tail-off in traditional toy orders over the last few years – kids these days just don’t want the sort of product that we are set up to produce. Oh, we tried re-branding but with very limited success. It seems that simply prefixing a product name with ‘i’ is not enough. We thought we might get away with iCandy and our new Post Office themed board game – iQueue – looked promising in market research but they never really took off. A huge linguistic misunderstanding left us with an over-order of iGlue, originally destined for the Eskimos – we were stuck with that for ages! The” iSaw,  iScrew, iBang” carpenter set failed to capture anyone’s imagination.  And of course, when we tried to branch out into consumer electronics we were sued by iTV.

Our traditional ‘main crop’ products are all now pretty much redundant – people just don’t buy their music in any tangible form these days and I defy anybody to wrap up an mp3 file with paper and a ribbon. Even the Christmas Number One (originally a marketing ‘opportunity’ that I came up with years ago) is now all electronic with hardly a vinyl disk passing hands. It is a travesty! Our long-running contract with Grannies Ltd was not renewed. We used to supply 93% of the world’s knitwear to elderly folk around the world, so that they could pass it off as their own, to the delight of nieces, nephews, sons and daughters, but who wants an Aran cardigan any more?

The divorce from Mrs Clause cost me dearly too. She is now living with her Civil Partner, Brenda, in Basingstoke. She claimed irrevocable breakdown of marriage after that nasty incident with the Elf – he really was helping me zip up my new Santa costume, that WAS a carrot in my pocket  and his eyes were only watering because of the cold. And how dare she claim that I showed her no warmth? It’s living at the pole that is frigid, not me!

I’m not entirely blameless in the demise of my business I suppose. I haven’t kept up with current trends as I might have, but I always thought that tradition and family values would be enough to keep us going.  I’m just not a creature of the 21^st Century. For example, I received this letter the other day and have absolutely no idea what it is on about:

I’m going to send him an Airfix model of the Eifel Tower and a yo-yo, but I expect they will be returned! I mourn for the days when a box of Lego and some plasticine could keep kids amused for hours – but even commissioning that Top Gear bloke to do some extra promo hasn’t increased sales in traditional toys. Nobody is interested if it doesn’t plug in or download. Take last year, for example, we had over a thousand apples returned because they didn’t come with the latest version of iTunes!

My SOS (Save our Santa) appeal was a wasted effort – we had very few donations and those that did arrive were all in incorrectly stamped envelopes which ended up costing us more in postage fees than we made in total. We tried, we failed.

Anyway, we must look to the future. I know I will leave a gap in the market, but commercialism moves ever onward and I suppose I’m no worse off than that profiteer from Nazareth who thought he had the Winter monopoly a couple of millennia ago – and look where that got him! So I expect that next year you will be able to get everything you need for Christmas as a podcast.

I’m relocating to some new accommodation in Dubai – I heard there is plenty of property there going for a song. And even though the Christmas market has collapsed, I fancy trying my hand at oil prospecting – I’m sure that is an industry that will remain buoyant for many thousands of years to come.

Have a happy Christmas, and thanks for all your support over the last 42 years. Love to David.

Santa xxx