To blog or not to blog

This might be a bit of a ride today – white water rapids-style, more bends and twists than The Nemesis at Alton Towers, a few blind alleys, bit of looping back on ourselves but all at break-neck speed, so hold on tight. I’ll try to not toss you off!

I didn’t sleep well again last night and spent much of the time pondering the nature of the Universe, as you do in such situations, and wondering what it is all for. What WE are all for. What I am all for. You see, by rights, if you follow Darwinian theory, I shouldn’t be here at all. I don’t really fit into the model. Or do I? Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on what he called, “The survival of the fittest”. First off, you have to realise that even that statement can be taken two ways: The survival of the most fit or the survival of the best fit. Does ‘fit’ mean ‘strong’ or does it mean ‘suitable’? I believe he meant the latter and that the life that will survive is the one that can adapt to best fit its environment.

Environments change; nature takes her course; we pollute and destroy and alter everything around us. We’re no different from other species really, beyond the fact that we have the intelligence to see the consequences of what we are doing. Maybe we don’t live as sympathetically with our environment as some creatures, but we’re no worse than others. We built the Aswan Dam and destroyed acres of natural environment – the beaver builds dams and blocks off the flow of the river further down-stream. It’s just a matter of scale. Everything is always in a state of flux; it is the nature of an ever-expanding Universe. Our planet is not stable; it quakes, rattles and rolls. We can’t hope to tame it, just adapt to the changes it throws at us. THAT is why we evolve, why species change. When the oceans and lakes are drying up, fish grow legs and become reptiles. So what part of the animal population is at the cutting edge of such a transformation? It is those members of the species who are different, who are mutated and who look slightly different from their peers. The fish with the stumpy legs was probably bullied at school! And it’s his ancestors who grew up to be T-Rex with a slightly more impressive dominion over the playground of life than those bully-fish!

So, evolution depends on deformity – if every creature remained an exact clone of its parents then there would be no scope for the species to cope with change. If a mutation occurs and it is useful, it is retained, developed, nurtured. If it is not useful, it is rejected and the DNA is preserved untainted. And we’re all, to some degree, mutations – the result of combining the genes of our different ancestor pairings going back through the centuries. I am the combination of genetic material provided by my parents, they of theirs and so on back through time. And the Human race has been around a while now, probably not in geological terms, but I’d have thought long enough for certain genes to have been eradicated.

Current thinking is that there is a ‘gay’ gene. Evidence suggests that it occurs more commonly in larger families where there are three siblings of the same gender, but it is pretty widely spread throughout the population. They are not sure what circumstances cause it to trigger, but it does and you end up with people like me. So where do we fit into Mr Darwin’s theory? Gayness surely represents a developmental cul-de-sac, a dead-end. It makes no sense in the context of the theory of evolution. It should have been wiped out millions of years ago. Well, IF the sole purpose of any life form is to procreate, which seems to me to be the way things work around my neck of the woods.

Step back from things for a minute and try to look at the Human Race as if you were a vastly more superior alien being, (you can choose to call this being God, if that suits your way of thinking). What must we really look like? Are we really that superior to other species on the planet? We’re certainly not the most abundant, the most organised, the most destructive, despite how we may wish to claim those pedestals. Locusts kill more than people, as do bacteria. They say there are more worms on the planet than humans. We are, in fact, not that different from any other hive system. Oh, we like t think we have independence, that WE govern our own individual lives, but we don’t really. We conform to the hive as much as any bee or wasp. We have our different places in society – the workers, the elite, the builders, the hunter-gatherers and we are allowed some freedom but it is limited. The bee is allowed to decide which flowers it visits but it still has a quota of nectar to fulfil. We still conform for the collective good. We are Borg, we just don’t know it! You may disagree. You may think you are free to do what you want, when you want, but you’re not. You are governed by rules and regulations that we have created for ourselves as a society. They have associated punishments if you break them. You drive on the correct side of the road, don’t you? Let’s say I get an early morning delivery which arrives when I’m still in bed – would I get out of bed naked and answer the front door with no clothes on? No, I reach for a dressing gown because I am bound by laws of decency, even though the one thing we all have in common is the basic tools of our biology, but we have rules that dictate when these can and cannot be shown. Why are a man’s nipples fine to be seen in public, but not a woman’s?

We have a whole plethora of different rules set up which dictate how we live our lives – we call them many things, but they all serve the same basic purpose: to keep us conforming with the greater good. Call it legislation, call it morality, call it tradition, call it custom, call it religion – it is just semantics for the same over-riding principal, steeped at different levels with increasing threats of punishment, ranging from a fine, to social stigma or imprisonment to perpetual damnation in the pits of hell.

We are Borg. Resistance is futile. We assimilate our environment, we colonise, we strip resources, and all with the aim of procreation and the perpetuation of our species. And in every hive, each unit has a purpose. So, where do us gays fit that model?  Hold that thought.

I’m playing an online game at the moment called Tribal Wars. You start out with a rudimentary medieval village. You build troops for defence and attack, plus a farm to grow your village population. And you set out to conquer your neighbouring players’ villages. You join a tribe for more power and support. Eventually one tribe will become bigger and more powerful than all the others and will conquer the world. It’s a God game, plain and simple. Some of your troops you train up to be highly skilled, some you leave as cannon fodder, disposable, just there to clear a path. But in Tribal wars, if and when one tribe becomes so big that it has taken over the whole world, a new world is created and we get to start again with our rudimentary villages. It’s not quite like that in reality!

I’m thinking goldfish bowel syndrome here – they say that if you keep a goldfish in a small bowl it will remain a small fish, but put it in a pond and it will grow to a size appropriate for its environment. I don’t know how true that is, or how scientific, but the concept is valid I suppose, and appropriate to illustrate my argument at least. What if the Human Race has coded into it some sort of trigger that tells it when the population is reaching a critical mass, where the resources of the planet can’t support it anymore? That isn’t a new idea – we have had population control for many centuries, even if only through changing attitudes to large families, the introduction of contraceptives or, in places like China, legislation limiting the number of offspring any particular pairing are allowed to spawn. I’ve though this for a long time: maybe the gay gene is there for the same purpose. It kicks in to help keep the population from exploding beyond its means (be they physical, environmental, geographic etc). THAT too would explain why evolution has not wiped out gayness. Homosexuality isn’t a solely human trait either – we can’t claim it as our own aberration. It exists in many other creatures, such as the primates and marine mammals – in fact there are over 1500 species that practice homosexuality:

• Swans
• Dolphins
• Apes
• Elephants
• Giraffes
• Lions
• Sheep
• Hyenas
• Lizards
• Fruit flies

The list goes on, as do I!

I could take a somewhat questionable stance here and proffer the argument that being gay frees one from the pressure to scatter one’s genome as widely as possible and thus concentrate on other matters, such as art, recreation and entertainment. There is certainly a wide and varied list of gay men and women who have added to the planet’s cultural heritage and maybe have been able to do so because they were not spending their time and resources on pampers, expressing milk and Mothercare. I’ve added a few names that you might recognise, in the list below. Admittedly, some of these people have only dipped their toes in the gay pool, or maybe more correctly, have bowed to popular pressure for conformity, but I’m not trying to judge, merely make the point that we’re too important to Homo Sapiens to be a genetic cock-up.

* OK, fictional, but if JK can ‘out’ him, so can I!

So we make great cultural contributions, but that isn’t enough to counter Darwinian Theory – paintings and poems do not sustain a growing population or ensure the survival of the fittest. Creativity doesn’t give a good enough reason for the gay chromosome to buck the evolutionary trend (and let’s be honest, there are plenty of gay people out there who are cultural philistines despite their floppy hair and make-up).  There has to be another reason, especially when taken with the greater concept that homosexuality is not a homo-centric trait. The only thing I can think of is that we are a genetic restraint in the same way as the fish bowl confines growth. I suppose the point I’m trying to convey is that maybe homosexuality exists for a reason, and part of that reason is as fundamental as population control. It’s not a new concept – many science fiction stories look to a society that is, at least, more tolerant of gay behaviour for that very reason. Gay people represent a significantly reduced drain on the planet’s resources. If we say that every heterosexual couple produces two children, and those two go on to produce two more each, and so on through time, then the planet is going to collapse under the sheer weight of the maths! Maybe we are the trigger mechanism built into the grand design that prevents a species from over-reaching itself. For the time being, we are restricted to this particular goldfish bowl, if our tribe conquers the planet absolutely, then, to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a Great Programmer who will can just create a new world for us to start again. Or maybe there is? Maybe we’re just the archers and swordsmen and cannon fodder of a great online game, but that is a theological argument for another time. And the hive mentality? We still conform, albeit on the edges of society sometimes. We’re becoming more welcome in the collective – laws give us rights now, civil and human. It’ll be a long while yet before all in the hive are happy to have non-breeders around, but we’re here, we’re queer and, despite Mt Darwin, we’re not going anywhere! Ah the Brave New World!

The first ‘live’ music performance I ever saw was Tom Robinson (I don’t count being dragged to see the Black and White Minstrels on a rainy afternoon in Scarborough, age about 10, as being a proper live music performance). He sang the quintessential “Glad To Be Gay” – a song which has now, thankfully, lost its political edge, but turned me on to live music for life and gave me a connection to other gay people, if only through music. Tom changes the lyrics every few years so that they remain current and appropriate, so here’s my attempt to do the same:

The British perception has come a long way
Now it is trendy to be friends with a gay
Gone are the days we got killed for our ‘crime’
Queer bashed, and tortured and sentenced to time
Picking on gay boys, knocking them down
Hit them and beat them, and slap them around
Now we have nightclubs and pubs of our own
The British perception has certainly grown

Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way

Now we have freedom and rights under law
Protected from violence like never before
We’ve got civil union, and now we can wed
But not in a church with a cross overhead
They’re calling this progress but where are we now
When a kiss in the streets starts an anti-gay row
Legal protections are fine as they go
But still the old hatred is boiling below

Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way

And now they say gayness is blamed on our genes
Beyond our control, we were bound to be queens
The argument’s rational and carries some weight
We’re not on this planet just to procreate
We’re here to give colour, laughter and flair
And art and music and be debonair
We’ll write the best poem and the catchiest song
Admit it, Gay Anthems make you sing along

Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way

Maybe our DNA carries a goal
To cut down the babies, population control
We’ll never have children to use your resources
Or keep us together avoiding divorces
Yes it’s sad when our branch is the end of the tree
A surname dies with us, and our ancestry
Forget evolution, Darwinian theories
The fact of the point is there’ll always be “queeries”

Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy THIS way

I have a suggestion for inclusion on the next revision to the National Curriculum: Ark Building for beginners. If the current weather is the pattern for Summers to come, then we’re going to need to take drastic action pretty damn quickly to avoid getting washed completely off this green and pleasant land of ours.

Yesterday, so much water fell from the heavens in such a short period that guttering collapsed under the torrent and at one point our back garden was an inch deep in water. Today is no better, although at least accompanied by the pomp and circumstance of a decent thunderstorm. It’s been thundering and lighteninging (what IS the verb form of lightening?) for several hours and is so dark I need the main lights on to see to type!

I note without surprise that [the Met Office via]the BBC have downgraded their predictions of a “BBQ Summer”, a term they now say they invented to make the concept more accessible to the press, and are saying that they only ever claimed that there was a 65% chance of nice weather. Way to back-track Auntie/Met Office! The past has not been so well re-written since 1984 (the book, not year!)

I guess we’re officially in the middle of St Swithin’s 40 days of rain (his day being 15^th July), so by my counting, this is set until about the 23^rd August. Thought that’d cheer you up.

It would have been Emily Bronte’s birthday today and the weather seems somewhat appropriate. It’s very Wuthering Heights out there. Wouldn’t take much to imagine Heathcliff trudging along in the pouring rain, sodden cape, rugged good looks, or the ghost of Cathy banging at the window singing a Kate Bush song and very pissed off that she got axed halfway through the book!

I’ve been to Howarth, where the Bronte’s lived and on a day like today what a God-forsaken place that must be. We went on a Sunday. It was shut. But you could see why Wuthering Heights is such a jolly romp (not) and indeed why they were such a sick family. It’s all in the town planning. The church and graveyard are on the top of the hill, above the town. So, someone dies of consumption (what we’d now call TB) or pneumonia and they get buried in the church yard. The bodies decompose and all the nastiness then gets straight into the water system and is drunk by the townsfolk at lower levels. Circle complete. Always a good idea to contaminate your water supply.

That said, maybe our water supply is being contaminated as we speak by the decomposing bodies of thousands of slugs which have been washed our of my garden. Oh wishful thinking. The buggers seem to be waterproof and having a wonderful time. I pulled twenty off the sweetcorn yesterday. And I don’t mean small ones – these were a good three inches long and looked a bit like Phil Mitchell would look if he were a slug. “You calling my bird a Slug, you slaaaag?”

On a good note, we have a new oven! Yay! The old bugger is consigned to rust in the garden until such a time as we take it to the tip. It will not be missed. We will be holding a short memorial service this weekend at the recycling depot where-after there will be a cremation – appropriate in so far as the oven itself was a firm believer in cremating things. It has asked that donations be made to a local charity (me). It leaves behind a grill pan and cooling rack. May it Rust in Peace.

The sparkling new beast arrived yesterday and we fitted it last night. Its lovely. It has a separate grill. I’m in heaven. This is the closest I’ve come to a sexual stirring in over a year! It has lights and a timer and a clock and more than one shelf and a top oven and a fan that works and a defrost function and a slow cook mode and I love it! I’ve been running it on full power for a couple of hours to burn off the factory smell you always get with new cookers. God knows what they make them with – whale I imagine, judging by the pong. The house smells like an arson attempt in a kipper factory. The last oven used to consume about 52p per hour when it was on full power – and that remained constant during the cooking process. This one has about 10 minutes at 60p and then drops down to less than a penny an hour to keep itself up to temperature! It is a thing of beauty, efficiency and wonder. This afternoon I shall cook a joint of dead cow and, if I’m feeling really brave, I might even do Yorkshires. Because now, I can! And I’ll not be using Delia’s recipe for ‘Yorkshire Pancakes”, nor Nigella’s obvious tendancy to flirt with her ingredients. No, just plain, old-fashioned cooking, as advocated by Mrs Beaton and Ms Craddock. I’m just hoping my yourshires turn out like Fanny’s!

And to top things off, the sun just came out!  One of my favourite song lyrics goes as follows:

I see it and I hear it
But how can I explain
The wonder of the moment
To be alive
And feel the sun
That follows every rain

Brownie points if you can name the song and artist. Shame on you if you can’t – you’re not allowed in my gang any more!

Quick health check: I’m still here! Boo! Shit, I almost made myself jump then! Started on new pill regime and hoping that they will agree with me, or at least not insist on having stand-up arguments in public places with my digestive tract. I have my fingers crossed, which makes typing quite an experience, but so far still feeling like someone’s been at my insides with an egg whisk! Wish me luck, say a prayer, send me positive vibes or just feel sorry for me – I’m not above a bit of well-placed pity.

Getting increasingly worried about Chinese-woman-over-the-road as there has been no sign of knickerage for quite a while now and I can’t believe anyone can drop from three-pairs per day, rinsed, if still slightly stained, to no pants at all for the last three weeks. It is possible I suppose that she is suffering in the ‘smalls’ department in the same way as I am suffering in the radish and beetroot patch (no euphemism intended) and she’s developed a serious infestation of slugs, but it’d take some goings on to not notice invertebrates in your pants! Can you get bikini-brief blight? Maybe when they have special fried lice they actually mean lice, not rice… Maybe she’s over-scrubbed and the lacy bits have dissolved? Vanish did excatly what it says on the tin. She had a Cilit Bang and her pants were gone in a Cif… I kind of miss the local colour of having her ‘knick-knacks’ hanging in her bedroom window. Even through the torrential rain they brightened up my day.

Oh Mrs Woo, what shall I do?
I’m getting kind of guilty ‘cos your knickers aren’t on view
This funny feeling
With your panties not revealing
Oh won’t you hang them out now, yes please do
I really miss your gusset
With its lovely shade of russet
And the elasticated girth (I know I shouldn’t fuss it)
Oh Mrs Woo, what shall I do?
I really miss your Chinese laundry views

Now Mrs Woo, I’ve got a naughty eye that flickers
When I spy your frilly knickers
Oh Mrs Woo, what shall I do?
I really miss your Chinese laundry views

I did have a thought yesterday that the humanitarian thing to do would be to pop down to M&S and get her a triple-pack that I could pop through her letter box under cover of darkness, you know, just in case she is financially strapped and is having to choose between undergarments and rice.

But then I realised the sheer horror that such an action would cause me and realised I’m just not that charitable. You see the world just isn’t set up for men to buy women clothes. It’s fine the other way round – ladies can buy men’s clothes without a hint of embarrassment or hindrance. It is just assumed that the pack of boxers is for hubby, boyfriend, male relative or slightly butch lesbian lover. But the minute a bloke tries to buy anything ‘feminine’ the eyebrows raise and there is guarded mutterings of transvestites with chicken filets down bras, inappropriate skirts and very bad makeup. It doesn’t have to be anything ‘naughty’ like pants either. I once bought my Mum a cardigan for Christmas to much consternation in Debenhams and barbed comments from the checkout ‘Christmas temp’ that, “Ya know thatsa woman’s top dontcha luv?” Er, yeah, and I even know that womens’ clothes button up on the other side, but that’s only because aforementioned mother once bought me a ‘shirt’ that buttoned up in completely the wrong way. How WRONG did that feel the first time I tried it on? Like wiping your arse with the other hand. (Ok, crude, but try it and you’ll see what I mean!) Less said about the blouse incident the better and I am too much of a gentleman to ever have pointed that out to Mum. (If my sister is reading this: Say anything to Mum, I’ll tell her who really broke my bedroom window when I was 6!). So, back at Debenhams, mohair cardy in hand and check-out troll fixed with a look designed to melt iron, I tried to embrace the spirit of the festive season and explained that the purchase was intended as a gift for a female relative. She was none too convinced and interrogated me further. I was naive, I didn’t stop to think about my reply when she asked, “Are you sure it’s the right size pet? What size is she?” Now women’s clothes sizes are a foreign language to me. I have no concept of the difference between a size 10 and a size 50. Could be anything. But the cardigan looked about right and I tried to reply with an authority on the matter that I confess I really didn’t feel. Now, considering that the troglodyte already had me pegged as a screaming tranny, my answer, as I implied earlier, could have been crafted more skilfully. But, to my horror, I heard myself reply, “She’s the same size as me, but with tits”! I might as well have asked her if she had a French maid’s costume I could try on too.

Department stores are minefields. They are not nice places to be. Maybe I am tainted with the memories of having been perambulated round such places as a young lad with a slightly younger sister. But age has not improved my opinion of these danger zones. I think it is a size thing. I make no secret of the fact that I’m not a tall guy. I’m decidedly un-lanky at five-foot and a bit (it changes depending on who’s holding the tape measure!). Department stores are inherently sizeist. Normally my height doesn’t bother me. It isn’t an issue. Unless some crass moron says something imbecilic like, “I bet you’d be pleased if platform shoes came back in fashion.” No, you knob, because then everyone else would be wearing them too and the relative height differences would remain unchanged. Did they not have ‘education’ where you grew up? And don’t suggest I should wear any other sort of high heel or you may find, to your disadvantage, that ‘stiletto’ is a type of knife as well as a style of footwear. Besides, I hope I have explained adequately already that I am in no way drawn towards a desire to cross-dress. So yes, I admit it, I was at the back of the queue when they were giving out height. But think about it logically: that means I was at the front of another queue and modesty forbids me to disclose which queue that was.

If, unlike me, you are of average height or taller, then you probably won’t have noticed this, so I challenge you, next time you are in any of the major high street department stores, check this out: They stack the shelves with the large sizes at the bottom and the small sizes at the top. This is more noticeable where they stack trousers or jeans, folded onto shelves. The bigger sizes are always on the lower shelf. On more than one occasion I have found that the jeans with a 28” leg are stacked so high that a person with a 28” leg couldn’t possibly reach them. At this point I guess I risk a restraining order from Debenhams, who’s bee would be very much in my bonnet if I were indeed a transvestite with an affinity for such headgear. For, it was in the very same branch of ‘Debs’ that I first noticed this farcical situation. There was no sales assistant anywhere near to help, as far as I could see, and why should I have to demean myself to ask for someone to reach me down something from the top shelf? Incidentally, I have never been able to buy dirty magazines for the same reason – I’ve had a tough life! Regular readers of my blogs will know I have several issues around buying clothes and hopefully you can appreciate some of my exasperation. My only option was to jump as high as I could, grab wildly at the pile of ‘short’ trousers and pull several pairs off the shelf at once. At which juncture (and points to anyone who gets this quote…) “as if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared”. I shall provide an edited version of the conversation to illustrate how I feel it should have gone.

Shopkeeper:
Can I be of assistance Sir? It seems we have rather inconsiderately stacked those items on an inappropriate shelf.

Me:
I’m indebted for your concern and for the fact that you have noticed the error of this situation. Could you perhaps help me understand why a nationwide store of such repute should make a mistake of this magnitude?

Shopkeeper:
The placement of items is governed by a design proposed by our marketing department. I will, of course, write to head office forthwith and demand the immediate resignation of the head of marketing.

Me:
And can I therefore be assured that this situation will be rectified across all branches in your network?

Shopkeeper:
Most certainly Sir, I shall in fact action the change as a matter of highest priority upon completion of my most helpful and enlightening conversation with yourself, to whom I wish once again to express my deepest regret and humblest apologies.

Oh, and another reason for disliking department stores of this ilk (and for balance I shall cite House of Fraser as the main culprit here) is that they insist on surrounding the entrance/exit routes with make-up and perfume. You can’t walk into one of the blessed places without gipping at the dreadful mix of toilet water, channel dredging No. 5 and Jean-Paul-French-Git (poor [sic]  homme). If I wanted to smell like a French tart I’d go to a patisserie!

So my reluctance to venture forth on a knicker-purchasing mercy mission is, I feel, fully justified. Maybe I could get Tescos to deliver? But therein would lie a theological dilemma: is it wrong to purchase party packs of petite and pretty panties from anyone other than the patron saint of pantaloons, St Michael?

But hold that thought. Something else has just occurred to me that might explain the apparent disappearance of Chinese-woman-over-the-road. Maybe she’s pregnant and gone wherever it is Chinese women go to spawn. They must go somewhere. I mean, I don’t think I have ever seen a pregnant Chinese person. Have you?

Hello. I’m Adrian. It’s been a week since my last blog. (Oh God, I already sound like the start of an AA meeting, and I don’t mean the AA that take 3 hours to tell you they can’t fix your car at the roadside and you can wave goodbye to that little bit of spare cash you’d been saving for a holiday ‘cos this isn’t going to be cheap. There are some circumstances in which you really don’t want your head end blown and covered in oil! I mean, of course, the AA that help people who like a little tipple now and then, which considering I have had one glass of wine in the last year, is probably not an organization I need to join just yet).

Some of you will know the reason for my absence, and as much as I would like to claim alien abduction or an Agatha Christie-style ‘missing week’ I’m afraid the reality is somewhat less enthralling. Not long after completing my blog last Friday I was hit by the most awful stomach pains which got progressively worse as the day wore on until about 2pm when I ended up having to make my second ever 999 call. (The first was when I came across a road accident – a drunk driver had plowed his car into a telegraph pole and was unconscious at the wheel with a an empty bottle of scotch in his hand and half the steering wheel smashed into his nose!)

So, ambulance on its way, front door unlocked, curled up in agony on sofa and an absolute pig of an ambulance man turns up and gives me a load of abuse for having phoned 999 without first having ‘self medicated pain relief’. I knew what was wrong with me – it was a return of the pancreatitis I had a year ago. That’s not a pain you forget or fail to recognise. It’s a BIG pain, it laughs in the face of paracetamol, it kicks sand in the eyes of ibuprofen, it gives a wedgie to panadol and tweaks the ear of asprin. So I told the pigamedic that I was having an attack of pancreatitis and he gave me a ‘couldn’t care less’ look and hurried me out to the ambulance. When I say ambulance… I’d have been more comfortable in a wheelbarrow! It might have had suspension once, but those days were a dim and distant memory. We have quite a few (too many) speed bumps between our house and the main road, and it seems, ambulances with poorly people in them have to take these bumps as a challenge, seeing if they can actually get either the vehicle or the patient airborne. I begged the paramedpig to let me lie on the bed but he insisted I should remain in the seat, which was the most uncomfortable position for me, but obviously my own fault for not taking a lemsip earlier! I asked again, “Please, each time we go over a bump I’m in agony. Can I lie down, please?” “We’re nearly there now, he said, and I could see out of the window that we were only just down the bottom of our road with about another 5 miles to go! Bastard.

Thankfully they A&E people were a bit more reasonable and pumped me full of morphine. That said, they put a line in my arm to deliver the drugs then whisked me off for an x-ray and in the process managed to knock the needle straight out again, about which I was none too chuffed. I’m not the easiest person to get needles into or blood out of – after a year of being a pin cushion my veins are starting to get wise to the process and like to have a bit of fun with any approaching needle, playing hide-and-seek or dodging out of the way at the last minute. We can play for hours.

So I was admitted to the local hospital. I find it strangely disturbing that anyone would call a hospital ‘Hope’ – it’s one step up from ‘Fingers Crossed’ or ‘If You’re Lucky’. But Hope hospital it was, and thankfully they put me in a room of my own. It was almost a year ago that I had pancreatitis before, which led to the discovery of lymphoma, and indeed it was to Hope that I was admitted that time, but put on an open ward which consisted entirely of old men and wind. Seriously, they had competitions at night to see who could fart the loudest. “Good one Bob, but I’m brewing a tornado”. Belching and farting to the point that was some sort of meld between the sulphurous pits of hell and the Frog Chorus.

On the plus side, I had four days nil-by-mouth which was actually a kind of relief because at least I didn’t feel like vomiting for the first time in about six months! And David, who shall remain depicted as my knight in shining armour, and rightly so, did everything possible to look after me and cheer me up. Everyone should have a David, but he’s mine and I’m not sharing! The pancreas sorted itself out and they granted me parole, on condition that I went to see my consultant at my usual Hospital, North Manchester General, later in the week. Yesterday I did indeed have an appointment with him and we have juggled some of my medication so that hopefully now the sickness will stop and things can start to move forward again. Wish me luck!

Should I be worried? Chinese-woman-over-the-road has not hung any knickers in her bedroom window for five days now. Very strange. In fact the curtains have remained closed throughout. But people have come and gone from the property, as well as a car. What to think?

There are several possibilities that occur to me, but I am limited in my knowledge of Chinese family life and ritual, so hard to work out with any certainty which it might be.

1. She is dead. The people coming and going are mourners. But there have been no fireworks, coloured lanterns or even paper dragons, and I’ve not come across a Chinese tradition yet that didn’t involve all three of them!
2. If the knickers were some sort of indicator of her availability for ‘personal services’, maybe she’s having a week off.
3. Again, assuming the knickers are a foreign version of a Chinese prostitute’s ‘Vacancies’ sign (I’m thinking like a UK B&B might display. For rooms, not prostitutes of course. Although in Blackpool…) Maybe she is ‘full up’ – metaphorically I pray, although quite possibly literally too – she’s quite small so it probably wouldn’t take much to brim her tank, so to speak.
4. Because the car has been here a little more often than usual, maybe Hubby is off work and this has curtailed her extra-curricular shenanigans. Or he’s getting to canoodle her noodle for a change. “You wany lice with that?”
5. (And I’d like this to be true, but the amount of rain we have had recently leads me to put it quite low in the list…) She has actually bought a washing line and is drying her smalls outside. Unlikely: It is raining cats and dogs, or as she might call them, supper.
6. You may have noticed in previous posts, that they have a large satellite dish on the porch. I’m wondering whether I have been barking up the wrong tree here and in fact it wasn’t the knickers that were the important factor at all, but their associated coat hangers… Maybe the whole unit formed an elaborate radio telescope, with the hangers boosting the signal, and she has, in fact, been engaged in some sort of shadow espionage? The dish does point directly over the street and into the bedroom of Chinese-people-next-door. Maybe THEY are international terrorists and Chinese-woman-over-the-road is one of the good guys. Of course, she has to disguise the hangers with knickers, so as to remain undetected. My God, we have a Triad living next door! And the absence of knickers? Just means she has had to go undercover. (Maybe under duvet, if hubby is home a lot). I’ve heard of Neighbourhood Watch, but really!

With all this in mind I feel we need to take a few precautions. If she’s dead, then it could be Swine Flu from too much Char Siu and crispy pork balls. Best make sure we don’t wander too close. If she really is a spying then the only thing to do is make sure it is not US she’s checking into. Would the DHS really go to the level of erecting the housing estate equivalent of Jodrell Bank just to check I’m not claiming an inappropriate level of DLA? Best insulate the house from prying radio waves anyway. I knew I was saving those foil cartons for a reason. Ah, hang on, maybe not; they came from the Chinese Take-Away. It’s a conspiracy I tell you! Foiled again!

At this point I have to apologise if my typing gets a bit crap. I have a contact lens checkup this afternoon and so have to wear my lenses for a few hours beforehand. They are fine for socializing, out and about, but terrible for watching TV or, worse still, seeing anything at all on a computer monitor. So, if I spell things incorrectly, or use the wrong word, please rest assured that they look right to me! And it’s MY blog!

I want to try out a little anecdote on you, run it up your flagpole and see if it flutters, as they say. I’m thinking it could help me win friends and influence people. The story goes as follows (and you are supposed to come in half way through!):

And so Davina McCall said to me, “Oh my God! That made my eyes water!”

What do you think? Kudos points for me? It’s true – here is the proof!

And no, I’m not going to tell you the preamble. I have to respect Davina’s dignity as a lady and I’m not the kiss-and-tell type. Use your own imagination. Although, on second thoughts, maybe even that isn’t wise. Just suffice to say that I made Davina’s eyes water.

I’ve not dared venture into the back garden, or what has now apparently become the prime holiday destination for all land-living invertebrates in the UK. They’re setting up little stalls now, selling each other ‘kiss me quick’ hats and miniature postcards with “Wish you were here” and “Salford by night” on them. They’ll be rushing to put slimy towels on sluggy deckchairs next and starting “Slug 18-30” holidays. I WAS going to put down some beer traps, but I think that would just encourage them.  Larger-lout slugs I do not need. It is pouring down outside and they are all rain-bathing and taking delight in the perfect climate. Those on the all-inclusive deals will be heading off for the strawberries soon for their all-you-can-eat lunch. I never thought I’d say this, but what’s needed here is Thrush!

For anyone interested, I finally managed to speak to my proper doctor yesterday about the suicide pills I’d been prescribed. He’s much more sensible than the other muppet, although I’m still not thrilled with the outcome. His thoughts were that the killer tablets I’d been prescribed maybe were not entirely to blame for the increase in liver enzymes that showed up on tests the last time I took these little bundles of joy. His suggestion was that I take them for a fortnight, then they do another blood test to see if the pills are doing any damage. Oh I just love the suck-it-and-see approach to medicine. Do you watch House, with Hugh Laurie? Same attitude: if it kills him we’ll know it wasn’t the right medication.  I’m being unfair, he did say that a fortnight on these pills couldn’t do any real harm, although by the same token, neither does a person’s first cigarette; you’d not expect them to be available on prescription though. They say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, but if that were true I’d be looking like Atlas at the moment, ready to hoist the world aloft. Do you think HE had a bad tummy too?

One of my biggest regrets in life is that I wasn’t aware of the Apollo moon landings. I’d just turned two at the time and have very few recollections from that period of my life, well beyond a sticker of The Magic Roundabout on the end of my cot and Mum’s very large Swiss Cheese plant which had delusions of becoming a Triffid and was probably the inspiration for Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors”. I have a vague memory of the layout of the house where we lived, but I suspect that is more from photos I have seen than any actual first-hand recollection. But the moon landings must have been so exciting. (Feel free to add your preferred conspiracy theory here – if you don’t believe they actually took place. Flag blowing in a wind that couldn’t have been there, horizon too close, wrong level of light reflection off the lunar surface, Michael Jackson killed by Martians, Loch Ness monster now residing in Area 51 bunker etc… )  The point is that for once there was something happening that captured the imagination of the plant. Maybe I have a somewhat sugar-coated view of what it might have been like, with the entire world watching to see Apollo 11 blast off from the Kennedy Space Centre; a world for once united. As a species we seem prone to unite at times of tragedy, disaster or the occasional pop person popping off, so when we come together to witness something good then that has to be a positive moment in human history.

Today marks the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, and I suppose provides an interesting check-point in how far the world has come – or hasn’t come! They say that we have more computing power in a digital watch than they had on board the lunar module, and I suppose that is the biggest change. The power of the information age with instant communication and all the benefits and problems that are associated. The Internet and mobile phones, which everyone has these days and nobody could possibly live without! How did we cope? I suppose we also have a better understanding of our planet, its resources and its fragility and it seems at last that we are recognizing that we need to get our act together to resolve some of these bigger issues. I’m no Greenpeace tree-hugger but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (see the link back there?) to realize that we can’t rely on fossil fuels forever, even if we found a way of extracting their energy that didn’t screw the atmosphere. Oil and gas are finite resources; they won’t be here forever. Nuclear technologies are touted as much cleaner; they don’t pollute the atmosphere in the way that burning coal does, but what to do with the radioactive waste? That has always seemed to me to be the dilemma with nuclear fuel – spent plutonium rods are not something we want hanging around.

The trouble is, there are several ways to look at things, and the world is lead by the people who have a commercial perspective. In simple terms, the process runs like this:

From a commercial perspective, every element needs to be commercially viable, from acquiring the raw materials as cheaply as possible to dealing with the waste with the minimal amount of cost. And in the nuclear industry the cheapest way to dispose of the waste is to bury it, at sea, in caves, or even, as some have suggested, to blast it into space. But as a process that sucks. Who in their right mind can think that it is a good thing to manufacture any product that is going to result in a waste material that is so toxic, so long lasting and so, well, ‘indisposable’. Well, the people who control the budgets I guess, but ultimately the consumers too; we want cheap. Look at the outrage when petrol prices went over £1 a liter. But cheap isn’t right. And therein lies the dilemma. We all want cheap power but it seems the cost of that is not so much economical as ecological. What we need is a process where the final part of the production line produces either safe waste or, better still, none at all. Take out the commercial aspects and a system that produces so much toxic waste as a by-product should never get the green light. But it is the financial aspects that take priority in all such matters, and who cares if the planet is uninhabitable in 300 years? But I’m a hypocrite I use electricity. I like my gadgets. I fly abroad. We’re a way off the perpetual motion machine yet, but there ARE alternatives. I personally really approve of wind turbines. I don’t find them offensive in any way. OK, so they change a landscape (not I didn’t say spoil), but not in the way a power station does. We HAVE to look to renewable. We live on an island, we’re surrounded by coast, and wind and sunshine and all that energy that just needs tapping. But again, it needs investment and a willingness to embrace change on a big scale. I thought we were moving in the right direction as a country, with our efforts in recycling. We do what we can to recycle, but even that has gone tits-up. A few years ago the council used to collect and recycle:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Cans
• Jars
• Bottles Glass)
• Bottles (Plastic)
• Plastic bags
• General plastics with the recycle mark on them (egg boxes, spread cartons, yoghurt pots)
• Domestic waste.
• Garden waste (if there was space in the domestic waste bin, but nothing more than that. We compost all vegetable waste, food peelings, egg shells and garden debris anyway)

They introduced new wheelie bins a couple of years ago and now they take:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Plastic Bottles
• Domestic waste.
• They also have a garden waste bin which you can request, but we compost anyway.

How is that progress? We WANT to recycle, but half the stuff they used to take now goes in as landfill. I know recycling costs money and the recession has meant that the end-users are not buying the recycled materials (we hear of magazine mountains), but the recession won’t last forever and surely we could stock-pile the waste so that when business picks up we have a plentitude (and thus, theoretically, using recycled materials would be relatively cheap?). I guess it is good I’m not a politician or a leader of industry, as I am sure things are not as simple as I’d like to think are!

I’d love to put up solar panels (we face south so it’d be ideal), or even a wind turbine, but they are just too cost prohibitive. Even with grants, we can’t afford the initial outlay – especially now that I’m not working. But wouldn’t it give the failing building industry a boost if there was a scheme to equip older properties with energy-producing devices? I had a look on the B&Q website today, Argos and Homebase too; you used to be able to buy a wind turbine from them. Can’t find the product in their catalogues anymore. I’d hoped that there would be demand for these sorts of green energy generators and that this would drive down prices but it seems the opposite has happened. As I said, I’m a hypocrite, I want to be green but I want to do it in a way that is easy and cheap, But for me and my present situation, easy and cheap is the only option available to me. Unless someone wants to donate a winning lottery ticket?

We grow some veg, but not enough to make any impact, although we are considering turning over part of the back garden to provide a small veg patch. We wash clothes at 30C, dry on the line whenever the weather permits, or else on a clothes horse (I can’t remember the last time we used the dryer). We don’t heat water during the summer as the dishwasher is more efficient for cleaning pots than it would be to heat a tank of water, and it uses less water. Similarly, the shower only heats what is needed, when it is needed. We have an energy monitor that tells us exactly how much power we are using at any time. At the moment I’m burning up 3.7p per hour. We have got that down by ensuring that nothing is turned on when it need not be, not leaving things on standby, using energy efficient light bulbs and even having automatic shutdown on things like the computers and printer. We’re saving to try to get our old boiler replaced with a combi version, as the current installation pre-dates Noah. We WANT to be green!

I don’t suppose a small veg patch in the back garden will save the planet, but if it means we can cut down on some of the packaging and air miles associated with at least a little of our food, then it is worthwhile. I don’t care if my carrots are curly or my peas are not of uniform size. There’s something special about eating your own produce anyway. If only I can deal with the bloody slugs! I know, God’s creatures and all that, but why can’t someone come up with a clean energy system that uses slugs! Bloody things. They munch their way with gay abandon through plants I have been nurturing for months. They perforate my peas, they pillage my potatoes, they rape my radishes and bugger the beetroot. I hate them. There is NOTHING loveable about a slug. You never see them in family units so I’m assuming even their mother’s don’t love them. And it makes no difference how many hundred of the buggers I catapult over into the tennis courts (actually, by now, it must be quite hazardous playing tennis over there, for all the splattered slugs, but that’s someone else’s problem – Wimbledon and me are not likely to become acquainted!), the slimy little shits just come back ten-fold. At least snails have shells – slugs are too bloody lazy to even grow those. They can’t even pick a gender and stick to it – the bloody things are hermaphrodite and they can live for 15 years! They serve no useful purpose other than as food for those further up the chain, but it seems that round here they are on nobody’s menu. They LOVE slug pellets, well the pet-friendly ones we are reduced to using because of the cats. I’m going to try the ‘tub of beer’ trick, but honestly, we’d need a brewery for the infestation I face every day. Honestly, I feel like I’m under siege here.

Maybe I should start up a ‘National Slug Catapult Tournament’, with prizes for the person who can project their pest the furthest. What do you think? Possible 2012 Olympic sport? Hermaphrodite hurling. I had thought about engaging Chinese-people-next-door in conversation and asking them if their brat had heard about the new craze for slug racing. I’d let them come round and collect as many slugs as they could, then take them to school for playtime fun. (How do you start a playground craze these days? Are any of the Blue Peter presenters on Twitter I wonder, could drop them a hint and maybe they’d do an article…Or even an appeal! “Send a slug to the Somalia” or “Molluscs for Malawi”– could work. I’m sure they are a rich source of vitamin something and they have a high liquid content which could provide a viable source of drinking water if each package of 10,000 slugs was sent with a mangle…) I have a couple of other ideas too – I wondered if Chinese-people-next-door might be persuaded that Lancashire hot pot is made from minced slug, and is what they should eat if they want to be a full part of our community. Or else (and I think this might be less successful) I could come up with a medical use for them and give something back to the NHS… Do you think maybe they could be trained to suck blood like leeches? Or, maybe their slime has healing properties. I may package them up in little bags with condoms to give out at Manchester Pride, on the grounds that a properly farmed slug can produce ample lubrication for even the most intense man-on-man action. “Never be caught in a tight spot again; always carry your handy slug-o-matic lube dispenser!”

And if all that fails, in deference to the historic events of 40 years ago, how much do you think it would cost to send the horrible, useless, grungy, spineless little bags of snot to NASA and get them to sling-shot them into lunar orbit on the next mission that passes that way? On second thoughts, they’d only turn round and evolve and come back to Earth for vengeance. Oh my God, what if Neil Armstrong had trodden on a slug on his way out to the launch pad and took slug DNA to the moon? Actually, didn’t I see something like that in the glass box on Torchwood???”

What to do with a wet Wednesday that holds all the promise a bowl of soggy muesli? It’s there; you just have to wade your way through it, knowing that eventually it’ll be gone and maybe, just maybe, things will improve. It’s hard to be enthusiastic, effervescent and charming when you’re knackered. I didn’t sleep well, as is sometimes the case. I don’t know if this happens to you, but I can lie there for a while, life buzzing through my head, thinking about things I need to do the next day, crusades to be fought, cooking to be cooked, and I am fine, starting to drift, feeling a little dopey, nicely relaxing. And then I get an itch, or a cough, or go all sneezy and I’m wide awake again, not sleepy and that is the point of no return. Once I’ve had that thought then there is no going back. And when I’m not sleepy, by definition I tend to not be happy either and get quite grumpy, made no easier by my apparent dwarf fetish – I’d go see the Doc about it, but I’m too bashful!

Last night, while trying to sleep, I was waging a personal battle and trying to work out exactly where I stand on a particular topic. In the end I had to admit defeat and agree to disagree with myself.  It is a real dilemma when you can see both sides of an argument, made worse by the fact that supporting either side with any degree of conviction can result in social stigma, rejection, hatred and possibly the daubing of a red cross on our front door. But we’re friends here right? I can confide in you? You’ll stick by me through thick and thin? As Shakespeare once quoth:

“Love is not love that alters
when it alteration finds”

Will you still love me? Deep breath. Here goes: It is grammar and the use of the English language that is bothering me. There is a huge part of me that believes that the degradation in literary and spoken standards is a bad thing. I’m a pedant when it comes to English. I get annoyed when I see inappropriately used punctuation, badly composed sentences, rules broken and structure disassembled. I shudder if I pass a greengrocer’s shop with a notice saying “Potatoe’s on special offer” or “Kid’s shoes on sale”; are they really selling the shoes belonging to a single child?  I refuse to use a supermarket checkout marked, “10 items or less”, when they really mean fewer. “There were less people at the match today.” Really? In what way were they less, of a more lowly background perhaps or maybe they were all below average height?

I risk the danger of re-writing “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” here, and my inner-stickler is nowhere near as honed as that book requires, but really, sometimes I do get quite frustrated. So many people just seem to not care about grammar these days, and I find that to be a terrible shame. There is a photo I saw on the internet the other day of a sign displayed by Susan Boyle’s neighbours in anticipation of her return from “Britain’s Got Talent”, which read, “Susan your a super STAR in our EYE’S WELL DONE”. One has to commend the intention, but condemn the execution.  I think they meant to write, “Susan, you’re a superstar in our eyes. Well done.” Even allowing for an intentional reference to “Stars in their eyes” they could perhaps have managed, “Susan, you’re a super ‘Star In Our Eyes’. Well Done”.  Maybe I sound snobby, and I risk being branded for a high and mighty attitude, lording it over people who know no better, but our language is such a critical part of our lives, it is a tool that has such power and creativity, and misusing it is on a par with daubing the Mona Lisa with Emulsion or playing a Mozart concerto off key. I’m not angry with the people who misuse language, just with the system that has left them not knowing any better. Surely in this day and age there is no excuse for anyone leaving school without an understanding of the basic rules of punctuation? The state is letting people down, and it matters. It is not snobby to want to see the correct use of bus, bus’s, buses and buses’. (Singular bus, belonging to a bus, more than one bus and belonging to more than one bus.)

We have these rules for a reason. A punctuation mark tells us so much. It expresses ownership, where to stress a sentence where to take a pause, where to breathe. Consider: “Let’s eat, Harry” and “Let’s eat Harry”. The punctuation mark gives us a clear understanding of what is meant and avoids confusion. So why not use these dots and squiggles correctly?

I see red when people use ‘into’ incorrectly. “I am going into the bank”, or “I am going in to deposit some money”, but not “I am going into deposit some money”.  And when did ‘upto’ become a word? My pet hate at the moment is the use of ‘invite’ as a noun. Please feel free to send me an invitation, or to invite me to your party, but I suspect you may struggle if trying to post me an invite, as nouns are notoriously difficult to coax into envelopes!

In one of my earliest blogs I told of a letter I had written to Sainsbury’s (note their trade name does take the apostrophe, whereas no apostrophe is associated with Marks and Spencer, but they have cheated and started to call themselves M&S anyway). This letter complained about a television advertisement for new potatoes and an offer which would be available “for a few short weeks”. This was perfect bull vs. red rag territory for me and so I wrote asking what right Sainsbury’s had to truncate the length of our weeks, from exactly which part of the week they intended to subtract time (explaining that if they had to shorten the week I would prefer they did that between 0900 and 1700 on a Monday through to a Friday, leaving the weekends unadulterated), whether they would give us the stolen time back at a later stage or whether this was a cunning plan to fiddle with the laws of relativity. To their credit, I received a suitably tongue-in-cheek reply and I think they got my point. An advertisement on national televisions, seem by millions of people, from a company as influential as Sainsbury’s should at very least employ correct use of our language.

On the subject of TV ads, I do enjoy the ones which proclaim that “Nothing works faster than [product X]”. So use nothing; it is cheaper and it works faster! And, “Nothing makes the sun safer”; no shit! It is a boiling maelstrom of super-heated gasses; suntan cream won’t make the sun safer. The best you can hope for is that it may protect you from the sun’s harmful radiation.

Ill-considered language in commercial advertising is nothing new though; it has been a slippery slope from the days when Beanz Meanz Heinz. Is it any wonder that spelling standards are falling? Weetabix in not much better. And less said about Nutz magazine the best I think.

There is a café we passed the other day which proclaimed, “New opening hour’s” and also has a list of “Todays Special’s”. Never-the-less, it is gratifying to know that they are now “Open Sunday’s til 23:00pm”!  Does anybody ever proof-read this stuff? Does anybody care? Are children not taught the basic rules of grammar anymore? I am no linguistic expert, I don’t have qualifications in the subject beyond O’Level but I do know the difference between they’re and their, I understand the positioning of the possessive apostrophe (most of the time) and I like to think I have some ability to inject commas, colons and semi-colons in roughly the right places. I welcome any of you to inspect my colon use, and let me know if you see an inappropriately placed semi-! I mentioned the possessive apostrophe before and admit that it can be a bit confusing. If the car belongs to the Jones family is it the Jones’ car or the Jones’s car? Are they collectively the Joneses?

Mr and Mrs Jones = The Joneses

The house of Mr Jones = Mr Jones’(s) house

The house of Mr and Mrs Jones = The Joneses’ house

‘Keeping up’ with the practices or possessions of Mr and Mrs Jones = Keeping up with the Joneses

English throws us all sorts of challenges to keep us on our toes, especially since it borrows words from different languages and is a compound of many different roots. Technically it is a West Germanic language (Dutch, Afrikaans, Low German, High German), with a good smattering of Norse, Viking and Norman for colour and a fair peppering of Latin and Greek. No wonder even the English get it wrong! Consider words such as sense, age, clue, direction or hope; these can all be negated with the addition of the suffix ‘less’, so hopeless, ageless and so forth, but what about “ruthless”, meaning cruel, callous, without mercy? Who killed off Ruth? She sounded nice! Someone who is not inept isn’t said to be ept. What is the opposite of dishevelled, shevelled? Would one mantle something that has been dismantled? I used to be disgruntled, but now I’m perfectly gruntled. What do you have to be doing to be frivolous? I demand the introduction of the word ‘frivle’ with immediate effect! I want to be able to go into a room and start to frivle.  Exceed has no opposite, which seems a bit unfair in respect of traffic offences where you can be fined for exceeding a speed limit but those dithering Sunday drivers who always drive far slower than necessary don’t even have a word for what they are doing! And we have those blessed words that take opposite meanings depending on their context:

• to clip: to cause to be together; to cause to be apart
• to consult: to give advice; to receive advice
• fast: not moving; moving
• to lease: in exchange for money, for a time to give up possession of; to gain possession of
• a strike: a hit; a miss
• to wind up: to start; to finish

Another word to avoid, especially if you are advertising an event, is bimonthly; it means ‘twice a month’ or ‘every two months’; ditto biweekly and biyearly.

Sometimes the rules just get out of hand; ‘uni’ generally relates to a singular aspect of an item, unicycle, unicorn, but not in respect of unisex, where both genders are involved!

We use once, twice and thrice, but thereafter the pattern stops, but not so with primary, secondary, tertiary, where the sequence continues quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, denary – I bet you didn’t know that!

We can’t even stick to basic rules about plurals; you can’t assume that ‘s’ on the end of an object will turn it into more than one:

cow becomes cows;
pig becomes pigs;
but what about the sheep in the field? How many, one or more?

Conversely, what about all the things that already carry an ‘s’ at the end? Bellows, binoculars, forceps, gallows, glasses, pliers, scissors, shears, tongs, braces, briefs, flannels, jeans, knickers, pants, pyjamas, shorts, tights, trousers. ‘Scissors’ is a word guaranteed to fry the brain of anyone who considers it for too long. If I have one of these items, should I say, “The scissors is in the drawer”, or “The scissors are in the drawer”? Maybe I try to circumvent the problem with. “I have a pair of scissors in the drawer”, but even that could mean that there are two of them.

I was once challenged (and failed) to come up with a sentence which contained the word ‘and’ five times in succession, with no intervening words. It had to obey the laws of grammar and make sense. The answer was as follows: The sign-writer had left no space between “Pig” and “And”, and ‘”And” and “Whistle”.

There is a (probably apocryphal) story of a bar in Kentucky or somewhere with a sign “Ladies Welcome. Liquor in the front, Poker in the Rear.” At least that brings a smile to the face.

I cringe when I see Americanised versions of our words, such as color and favorite. I can forgive them for creating their own words for things, with lorry becoming truck, a chemist becoming a drugstore, a dual carriageway becoming a freeway and a pavement turning into a sidewalk. Even lift to elevator is okay by me, since we used to call them rising rooms so have no cause to complain. But why do they butcher so many of our words for no reason?

colour > color
humour > humor
favourite > favorite
theatre >  theater
kilometre > kilometer
cosy > cozy
realise > realize
dialogue > dialog
traveller > traveler
cheque > check
jewellery > jewelry
tyre > tire

In England we go to hospital, we do NOT get hospitalized, although that is a term that seems to be creeping into general usage, along with many other ‘-ize’ bastardisations.

But herein is my dilemma: Language has to be allowed to evolve or else it dies. Words are constantly being re-worked to have different meanings. The obvious example is the word ‘gay’, which have moved from meaning ‘happy and jovial’ to ‘homosexual’ and even now seems to be mutating further to mean ‘bad’. When the yoof [sic] of today say, “That’s gay”, they just mean ‘bad’ and probably don’t even reference ‘homosexual’ in their thinking at the time. I can’t hear ‘gay’ without the ‘queer’ associations, but I genuinely believe the meaning is moving on from that. Language does that, it messes with meaning, sometimes to the point when the original sense is totally reversed. Something that is wicked these days is good. This is not a new phenomenon; try these words that have reversed their original meanings:

Artificial
This originally meant ‘full of artistic or technical skill’. Now its meaning has a very different slant.

Nice
This comes from the Latin ‘not to know’. Originally a ‘nice person’ was someone who was ignorant or unaware.

Awful
This meant ‘full of awe’ i.e. something wonderful, delightful, amazing. However, over time it has evolved to mean exactly the opposite.

Manufacture
From the Latin meaning ‘to make by hand’ this originally signified things that were created by craftsmen. Now the opposite, made by machines, is its meaning.

Prove
Originally this meant to test. The old meaning survives in the phrase ‘proving ground’.

Tell
Its original meaning was ‘to count’, which is how we came by the term ‘bank teller’.

God alone knows what qualities to expect from something that is claimed to be cool, hot, bad, or even radical!

So often I hear data used incorrectly – data is the plural of datum, so “the data is correct” should really be, “the data are correct” or, if a single piece of information then, “the datum is correct”.  We do the same mangling to media (plural) so we should talk about the newspaper medium as being one type of a larger group of media.  We play sports in one stadium or several stadia (not stadiums although again, this is now becoming a more widely accepted pluralisation).  In the same way I get stressed about the plural of cannon, for which the rules seem to be changing. A cannon is a piece of artillery, a big gun. The plural is also cannon, in the same way as aircraft drops the ‘s’ when found in multiples. These days you will hear reporters telling you they hear the sound of ‘cannons’ firing in the distance and I wonder if I have any right to demand the language should not adopt this form. Maybe with language there is no right or wrong, just current use, whether that deviates from accepted rules or not.

I hate txt spk to my core and thankfully it does seem to be dying a pretty rapid death, as mobile phones offer increasingly sophisticated predictive text and reduced prices for messages, so there is no longer the call for the same degree of brevity. I am delighted though that Twitter does not seem to fall foul of txt spk too much, despite the limitations of 140 characters per message. It is an interesting discipline to try to convey news, feelings, concepts in such a restrictive space and yet few seem to resort to abbreviation beyond the occasional ‘&’. These days there is just no excuse for poor spelling, with spell-checkers attached to every type of technology. MS Word will help you with grammar, correct mis-spelt words and even suggest alternatives via its synonym and thesaurus technology. So if you can’t spell, run it through a word processor first! That said, beware and remember to proof-read everything at least twice. In earlier versions of Word my surname was auto-corrected the Pervert and therein lies a tale or two.

We add new words all the time, mostly derived from technological advances, such as blog and blogosphere, but did you know that these have also now mutated into Vlog (a video-blog) plus Vlogosphere and you can watch a Webisode of a ‘programme’ made especially for web-release? You can take a staycation, which is a holiday taken at home, and you might do this with a frenemy – one who pretends to be a friend but is actually an enemy.  On your staycation you might become a locavore – one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible.  To google is now a recognised verb in the Collins English Dictionary, but has yet to make it to the OED. I suspect that Twitter will soon receive its own recognition soon, with new definitions for Tweet and possibly the inclusion of Twitterati!

There are a few words that I think should be added to the dictionary. In big department stores quite often the escalators going up are in a different location to the ones going down, so I think clarification should be provided by the introduction of upscalator and downscalator.

My niece once came up with a brilliant new word.  She was asked to make a round of teas and coffees, with people giving their ‘orders’ as she wrote them down on a pad, being a proper waitress. She put sugar in my tea, which I hate, and so I asked her if she knew she had done this. She checked her pad and looked up at me, and sad, rather guiltily, “I’m sorry Uncle Adrian, I must have misunderheard”.

I’ll not delve too deeply into the issues I have with the way we write numbers these days! 24/7 is 3.428 and please will someone tell me, how long is 3.5 minutes? Is that 210 seconds (3 1/2 minutes) or 230 seconds (3 minutes and 50 seconds)? I guess THAT is a debate for another day!

So you see I am torn between a desire to maintain the traditions and structure of English as I was taught it, full sympathy for anyone trying to make sense of it, and a recognization [sic] that we need  to embrace a language that needs to change, adapt and grow. What is wrong and what is right? Language is a tool of courtesy. It has been created to aid understanding. Punctuation is about clarification, making sure the meaning is unambiguous. To not bother with such things is discourteous and, in some cases, dangerous. Evolution with courtesy, and if error is inevitable, let it at least be through ignorance rather than laziness. Oh, and will someone give the National Curriculum a kick up the arse and bring back a few of the old values. As Winston Churchill once said, “That is the type of grammar up with which I will not put, innit”!

Yesterday saw me storming of the Bastille. OK, I admit it, TODAY is the anniversary of the exact date, but I re-enacted my own metaphorical version (or rather tried to). Those of you who tuned in to yesterday’s episode will know the plan. For those of you who (shame on you) missed the instalment, it is available on my newly-activated, high definition, ergonomic user interface tool, called the iScroll bar. Go to www.oberonuk.com on your interweb-enabled computer-me-bob. At this stage you might need to use your iEyes in conjunction with a contemporary iReader such as the much acclaimed iBrain. (That bloke iNewton has a lot to answer for – if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t have a world full of Apples, or this predisposition for inserting an ‘i’ into every available orifice. Have you ever tried to get peas out of an iPod? Bloody nightmare!)  So, access reading mode and if you are having trouble with resolution, you may need a special plug-in called iGlasses, which are available from a number of retailers and also double as a handy fashion accessory. If you have any problems, please contact our helpdesk at the address not given anywhere in this document, where your call would have been important to us if we gave a fuck.

So, we’ll start today’s chapter with a the briefest recap:

Issue: Idiot stand-in doctor, wrong pills; could kill me
Requirement: Alternative pills
Solution: Call hospital to resolve.
Problem: Hospital like Fort Knox
Assumptions: Kray twins still unavailable to access via spurious means.

Up to speed? Great. So, my mission was simply to speak to the correct consultant and either get a reassurance that the tablets prescribed are not the ones that he took me off before because they were turning my liver into paté or get some alternative ones prescribed. Now, hospitals don’t like you to have direct line phone numbers to anyone, and are very cleverly managed so that no department knows who works in any other department. Phoning the general reception line is fine, as long as you don’t mind the 20 minutes of library music (or in this case 3-minutes of Elvis singing ‘Love me tend – your call is in a queue – me do” repeatedly, ad nauseum and don’t actually want anything doing. As soon as you start to ask for a specific department or person it seems that the Babel fish the receptionist keeps in her ear somehow short circuits. You say, “I need to speak to speak to Doctor Smith in Outpatient’s B” and they hear, “I think I need an x-ray of my knee” and they put you through to Radiology. 20 more minutes of music and the nice lady in Radiology can’t understand why you have been put through to her, but there is a Dr Smith in Maternity, click, “Love me tender…”

So having confirmed that I am not in the midst of a miss-carriage and I need Outpatients B, we now have to establish if this is NEW Outpatients B or OLD Outpatients B because they have moved during the building work and some of the numbers have changed, but not it seems the internal online telephone directory. Click. “Are you lonesome tonight…” No, I don’t want to talk to George, the foreman of works for Balfour Beatty, who are currently erecting a new mental health clinic where Outpatients B used to stand. If this carries on much longer I’ll be their first patient! Perhaps it would be better if they transferred me to main Reception?

Maybe the Community Service girl on the switchboard will have got new batteries for the Babel fish by now and anyway, I’m game for a laugh. Elvis has moved on to “Blue Suede Shoes” and I’m still in a queue. But you know when you are waiting just a second before the call is actually answered you get a little click and your heart fills with joy? Except this time it is the click of the automatic system cutting you off and the husky tones of a BT automated announcement tells you “The other caller has cleared. The other caller has cleared.” Kick a man when he’s down, why don’t you!

Another call then to the main switchboard, this time Elvis seems to be giving advice about swine flu amid selected tracks from his back catalogue and I’m wondering whether “Catch it, bin it, kill it” with a suitable rock beat could become quite a catchy hit.

Well, its one if you catch it,
Two when your blow,
Three when you kill it,
Now go, flu, go.
But don’t you sneeze if you’ve got the flu.
You can do anything but sod off if you’ve got swine flu..

Now, I’m thinking that maybe the problem isn’t a faulty Babel fish – maybe somehow it is me not speaking clearly enough, so this time I make sure I enunciate with absolute care and deliberation – the effect of which is that I sound like a slowed-down record: “Pleeeeeaaassse Caaaan iiiiiii speeeeeeak tooooo…”  It isn’t quite the same as speaking to foreigners which calls for fast and loud with lots of enthusiastic hand gesturing, this is more the way speech would sound if heard through a vat of treacle. But hey, it works and “You want Outpatients B; I’ll put you through now…” Oh the delight, the sheer unadulterated joy. Thank God for Tenna Lady, or I’d have dribbled on the sofa! And I even get a confirmation at the other end of the line: “Hello, you’re through to Outpatients B…” Who needs Ecstasy when you can get a high like this just from a phone call? Bring on the endorphins! Bring on the endorphins! “…The department is currently closed for lunch, our opening hours are…” Oh the downer! Woe, woe and thrice woe! This is addiction and rehab in the space of five seconds! More highs and lows than Altern Towers, more ups and downs than Pamela Anderson’s boobs on the Baywatch titles. I now have rampant serotonin and a craving for chocolate! Book me in at the Priory now!

But I knew the fortress would take some punishment before I got so far as the portcullis, and those arrow slits above A&E are not entirely decorative. Hospital consultants, much like MPs, are blessed with impenetrable moats, and usually a gaggle of ducks in tow too!

So lunch is cooked, eaten (but not enjoyed) and I allow plenty of time for the return to duty before I redial Reception and settle down for some more Elvis – Swine Flu Rock this time:

The Doctor threw a panic, said I looked too pail.
The nursing staff was there and they began to wail.
I sneezed and coughed and turned my head away
Catch it, bin it, kill it, is what I heard them say
Its flu, everybody, its flu.
Everybody in the whole room knew
The early symptoms of the new swine flu

I love being on hold, it gives one quality time to do those jobs that might otherwise be neglected like grow a little more gray, watch some paint dry, waste away precious minutes of life that will never be replaced, contemplate one’s place in the universe and notice that bit of laminate flooring that seems to be lifting…but I also use the on-hold time to come up with a different plan. “Hello, I’m phoning from the General Medical Council and I need urgently to speak to Dr Wilberforce Smith who I believe is holding a surgery in Outpatients B”. Oh, THAT registered with the Bablel Fish and within seconds, “Hello, this is Dr Smith’s secretary. Can I help you?”

“Yes please, I need some advice. I’m one of Dr Smith’s patients.”

“I thought you were from the General Medical Council?”

“No, sorry, the receptionist must have mis-heard, I said I needed a general medical consult.”

“Oh, I see, how can I help…”

So contact at last was made, through fair means or foul. The Trojans had a wooden horse, I had the GMC – all is fair in love and war. Actually, Dr Smith’s secretary was very nice, took my details, understood what I was asking and lulled me into a totally false sense of security with promises that she would not only speak to Dr Smith, but also my proper doctor (who was ill last week thus the reason I was lumbered with the Smith in the first place,) and someone would phone me back.

And I bloody fell for it! I should have known better. I’m kicking myself. It’s the oldest trick in the book and I just jumped in with both feet, eyes open, actually believing her. Oh, she’s good. She’s VERY good. Strap her to the Enterprise and call her a deflector shield.

And now I’m impotent – literally (thanks to the chemo) and metaphorically. I can’t ring back today for fear of being too pushy. I have to wait, to give it time for the various conversations to take place, or more likely the post-it note to fall off her monitor and end up in the hospital incinerator along with a ton of bloody swabs and a couple of artificial arms! But how long to wait? A day? Two? I’m worse off than when I started. And now I have to walk around with my mobile phone super-glued to my thigh in a pointless attempt to thwart the part of Murphy’s Law that guarantees if I DO get a call it will be when I’m on the loo and the phone is downstairs.

So, unlike the French Revolutionaries over 200 years ago, my own particular Bastille remains resolutely un-stormed. And woe betide anyone who mentions anything about eating cake!

I’m having a Boomtown Rats type of Monday already. I don’t like it. Can I have a new one please? This one seems to be broken.

I wrote on Friday about my pointless trip to the Hospital the previous day and the fact that the medication prescribed by the ‘supply’ doctor was something I had been given previously and had been forced to stop taking. This was the tablet that caused mind-altering visual anomalies which, in a night club after several pints, may have been appropriate but for any other situation seem a little too psychedelic! “Hey, wanna score some uppers man? Serious trip guaranteed!” – Except, for me, the serious trip would be a fast track to A&E. It took several chemists, none of whom held stocks of these pills and eventually a next-day order from Boots before I actually got the drugs and further investigation reminded me of another reason why I had been taken off them: they can do nasty things to your liver and at the time of taking them my enzymes were sky high and my liver in an offal [sic] state.

So today I embark upon a quest to speak to someone at the hospital who can sort this out. My hopes are about as high as a daschund’s scrotum, but I shall soldier on. You see, speaking to a consultant without an appointment is on a par with Frodo’s quest over the Misty Mountains, through the Mines of Moria, across the Dead Marshes, over the Mountains of Mordor and to the summit of Mount Doom; nigh on impossible and usually needing three books/films to tell the tale. Oh, so I probably fit the Hobbit size requirements, but I’m NOT about to celebrate my eleven-first birthday and I have no intention of ever fingering Gandalf’s ring! But a quest is a quest is a quest I suppose and I spit in the face of adversity.

Consultants have an impenetrable barrier around them, arranged in rings of ever increasing strength, starting with the reception staff that fends the majority of invasions with a few well-placed “approach at your peril” signs, totems and shrunken heads on sticks to ward off casual enquiries. Next there are the senior receptionists, amour-clad, wielding bows and arrows in case you got through the first defense. Should you have the cunning, agility and stamina to beat your way through this phalanx, next comes the consultant’s secretary. She’s the one who holds the keys to the drawbridge and has soldiers staged all along the fortifications with catapults, Trebuchets and casks of molten tar. Now, if she is particularly good at her job, she will know that to have come this far you must be a pretty strong opponent and she will call upon her reserve team, the gaggle of inferior and expendable student doctors currently being trained up by the consultant. She’ll try to deflect your attack onto one or more of these individuals, knowing them to be cannon-fodder with but three purposes in life:

1. To follow consultant with notepad so he doesn’t have to take any notes.
2. To be there so that if ever consultant does not know the answer to a question he can throw it at one of his ‘team’, thus either making them look stupid instead of him, or finding the information he wanted in a way that makes it look like he hadn’t forgotten it himself.
3. To be there to deflect annoying patients who want contact without following the 6-week appointment cycle.

You know, instead of using the main deflector shields, Captain Kirk would have been far better advised to “deploy medical fortification measures”, and thus protect the Enterprise with an impenetrable barrier of red tape.

I’ll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little ditty I wrote while shackled to a hospital bed with a choice between Loose Women and Cash In The Attic on the TV and the threat of more hospital food on the not too distant horizon. It’s just a bit of fun, but I needed to try to keep my mind off of being ill. The rhythm, I suspect, reflects the pattern of noises made by the controlled IV infusion machine which clicked away at a steady pace, 24/7!

Veronica Johnson kissed me (Part 1)

Veronica Johnson kissed me
I had no choice at all
It was over by the bike sheds
Where she pinned me to the wall

Veronica Johnson’s a big girl
Stocky and strong and mean
When Veronica Johnson kissed me
It was really quite a scene!

Veronica wasn’t so pretty
Her face all freckles and spots
On the end of her nose, a bogie
And her hair was all tangled with knots

Veronica Johnson wore braces
Which I’d not really noticed before
But when she leant even closer
I saw the horror of what was in store

She opened her mouth even wider
Not a smile, or a grin or a pout
My heart was beating double
As I tried to squirm my way out

Veronica’s lips were enormous
They had a life of their own
Saliva drooled from the corners
On her top lip some stubble had grown

Veronica Johnson Kissed me
Squarely on my face
But as I tried to pull away
My lip caught in her brace

Veronica didn’t much notice
And started in with her tongue
It prodded and probed for my tonsils
And filled up my mouth like a bung

To breathe it was getting much harder
But Veronica didn’t much care
Her concern was her ‘skill’ at French Kissing
And not that I might need some air!

My whole life flashed before me
Everything turned dark and cold
I didn’t want to die like that
I was only six years old!

My lip was getting quite swollen
Trapped between brace and tooth
So I tried with my tongue to free it
But I couldn’t get it to move

Veronica thought that my actions
Meant I was kissing her back
So she doubled her efforts at snogging
Then suddenly something went ‘crack’

The sprung-loaded brace became looser
As one of the hinges had popped
Veronica Johnson let out a scream
But at least the kissing had stopped

Veronica Johnson then hit me
“Bloody ‘ell, do you know what you’ve done?
Those things cost a small fortune
And you’ll pay if I need a new one!”

I very quickly retreated
To where the other boys play
‘Cos if that’s what kissing girls is like
I’d rather be a gay!

Veronica Johnson kissed me (Part 2)

Veronica Johnson kissed me
That was many years ago
But the memory still haunts me
I just cannot let it go

She left school before she was meant to
Something about having a kid
I never saw her with her baby
I guess her social worker did

She was given a flat near McDonalds
On a street that was really a slum
But nobody paid much attention
To the men who started to come

Veronica took any client
Regardless of age, looks or weight
But one day she landed a good one
The local magistrate

Veronica started the blackmail
She said she had plenty of proof
Some uncompromising photos
From a camera in the roof

She’d take them to the papers
Or show them to his wife
Unless he paid her money
For the rest of his natural life

Veronica used his money
To better herself by far
She moved to a nicer location
And bought herself a new car

Often I would see her
As she drove by our front door
Dressed in the latest fashion
In her brand new four-by-four

The next I heard she had married;
The man three times her age
A broker in the city
With a very large family estate

She wanted to be an ‘it girl’
To be known around the town
But her features, not pretty, more macho
Were what really let her down

The surgery took forever
But no expense was spared
And when the dressings came off her
Well, everybody stared

Veronica Johnson was gorgeous
A wonder to behold
The talk of the top social circles
Dull rock turned to pure gold

She was there at every big party
And every gala review
She brought out her own brand of makeup
And an exclusive perfume too

But still she wasn’t happy
And became a complete recluse
Searching for some answers
Looking for some truths

After many months of torment
The solution one day hit her
And with yet more operations
Veronica turned into Victor

I met him in a club in town
Where gay men go to meet
Eyes across the dance floor
He swept me off my feet

We’ve been together three years now
And the rest is history
I thank the stars and luck and love
That Veronica Johnson kissed me.

Life is a rollercoaster (either that or I just turned into Ronan Keating), as I pick my way through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune along the rocky, up-hill, road of life, trying to spot the potholes, but more often than not ending tit-deep in a bottomless puddle, Dawn French style.

Yesterday was just one of those days. Didn’t sleep well – I think I clocked up about 30 minutes (taken in 5-minute chunks), so the day started with major league grumpiness and a general hatred for anything that slept better than me. Not aided of course by two cats of differing temperaments – one lying fast asleep on the sofa, legs open and brandishing his pussy bits (now THAT is a contradiction in terms) and actually snoring. The sort of snoring that says to a knackered person, “ha, bloody ha! You didn’t sleep last night and now I’m going to make you suffer”. The second cat I think had been secretly snorting lines of Iams and was hyper, demanding attention in the way cats do best – giving you the saddest look possible then sticking their bum in your face!  He just wouldn’t leave me alone. We’re talking here about demented prancing on keyboard, sitting on hand that uses mouse, jostling arm whilst typing and head-banging the monitor. “Pick him up and put him on the floor” becomes a game – to see how many times he could make me do it. After about 20 repetitions and with no energy left to play Mr Nice Guy I resorted to the only guaranteed method of ensuring cats give me a good 10 yard exclusion zone – reach for the wormer SpotOn!  Usually a drop of that on their necks and I’m excommunicated for at least a few hours. I think this bought about 20 minutes respite. Oh well!  Some days exist only to take the piss out of you and you know you should have stayed in bed!  But Struggled on and at least the day started bright and Sunny  – good washing day.  Several loads in overflowing basket and a chance to bash on with them. Pegged out second lot of clothes. Forecast said hot; sky said “Ohhh fresh washing, let’s have some fun”. So, ups and downs of the day became ins and outs – same shit, different gearing!

On the plus side, there was a sparkle of good in the morning as David escaped unscathed from the Dentists following a checkup plus a clean and polish, so he came home with a Colgate ring of confidence glowing like a fallen halo.

The afternoon though heralded my second hospital excursion of the week and because David was already off work it was an ideal chance to turn it into a family outing, so that at least he could ask the doctor any questions he has from a carers point of view. I know that following the chemo and because of all the damage that has been done to my body, I still have a few things that need sorting.  Many of these things are on hold until my blood returns to normal. In simple terms, the lymphoma was also widely spread in my bone marrow. It is the marrow which produces blood cells. The chemo killed off not only the cancer but also a lot of the bone marrow’s ability to produce more blood. Of greatest importance are the white cells, which form part of the immune system. So with each chemo session my immune system was destroyed and then had to re-grow in a process similar to burning moorland – raze everything to the ground, and allow the healthy shoots to grow back. (Of course in the ‘dips’ of the treatment you go through periods where you are extremely susceptible to infection and feel very ill, but then things start to grow again and you get a bit of immunity back.) All this means that I am now being monitored to check the proportions of white cells in my blood as the system kicks back in and grows in strength. These are steadily rising, but it will be a while before I’m fit enough to tackle some of the residue problems.

As you’ll know, I’ve been having problems with nausea and the ultrasounds and gastroscopy a few weeks ago gave us some clues – no signs of any ulcers etc but evidence of slow digestion probably caused by some of the pills I’m taking. What is happening is that food is staying in my stomach longer than expected, so when I come to eat a meal I’m already partially full and reach a point where there is no room, so a vomit reaction is triggered.  Change the pills, speed the digestion, stop the nausea, save the cheerleader, save the world – or something like that.

So I was actually really excited yesterday about finally moving this forward and starting to be able to enjoy food again, instead of having to have a bucket or barf-bag close at hand all the time which isn’t a good look if you have guests round or want to eat out anywhere.  Maybe I should live on an aeroplane where barf bags are always provided anyway! Just to be able to eat a meal without fear of an encore would be such a huge thing for me. And simple to resolve if it just needs a tweak to my medication – and that’s better than anything that may need surgery, no nasty lumps or ulcers or tumours or even men called Jonah, stuck in my tummy, left over from the days when I wasn’t the streamlined person you see today. I like to say I’m feeling summary – not Summery, in the context of shorts, shades and sunscreen, but summary, meaning “a small, succinct version”.

We got parked, eventually, and made it to the ward in good time. They took my weight, as they do, which was slightly increased from last time and is a good sign. So things looking up, positive vibes. It’s going to be a good day! Let’s put the past behind us, sort these pills out and start feeling human again! These milestone days are few and far between!

People keep telling me to be optimistic, and that really infuriates me. For me you see, optimism is just a blind faith that everything will be alright. That sort of thinking does not prepare you for the fact that some things DON’T go according to plan. My way of dealing with things is to try to understand what is happening to me and what the various outcomes may be. If I know a treatment will make me feel nauseous then I can prepare myself for it. An example: When I was in hospital one night my vision went very weird. I started to get a point directly in front where I couldn’t focus, like someone had inserted a contact lens with a smudge in the middle. Then I started to not be able to pull the images from my two eyes together, so I saw double of everything. Now this happened on a night when the ward was under a lot of pressure with an emergency admission of someone who was very poorly and quite rightly the nurses needed to give that patient the lion’s share of their attention, and when I called a nurse I was told they would get to me as soon as possible – I was non-critical in terms of my care at the time, so clearly and rightly a lower priority. BUT I was lying in bed scared beyond belief that I was going blind. Bright lights were agony, everything started to spin (like I’d downed three bottles of Scotch and sat up too fast) and I was terrified. I remember it well enough – I’d been watching “Muriel’s Wedding” and deciding that adding a couple of ABBA songs is just simply not enough to turn a turd into a tiara! I’ll not rush to watch it again – that was in fact my second time because I convinced myself that I must have missed something on my first viewing! It was the best part of three hours before I got to speak to someone properly and I defy even the most balanced mind to not start working up worst-case scenarios when left with so much time in such a situation. When I WAS seen I was told in a very off-hand way that. “oh yes, that’s a side effect of the steroids. It is only temporary and you’ll be fine in the morning. Just sleep it off.” If I had know that I’d have been prepared and nowhere nearly as scared. When I asked the consultant the next day why I hadn’t been told about this he said that it was a side effect that not everyone experienced and they tend to not tell people because they don’t want to scare them!

So back to my point – being realistic. What is better: “You’ll be fine, everything will be ok”, or “It isn’t an easy ride and you’ll have some difficulties along the way, but if you know about them you can be prepared for them and face them head-on”? I know my body by now. I know when things are not right. I knew I was very ill a year before I was diagnosed with cancer but all my idiot GP managed to come up with was that I was suffering from stress and sitting badly at work!  Now I think that my approach IS optimistic. I acknowledge that there are still things not right, I tell the doctors about them, I go for tests to understand what is happening with the intention of resolving the cause of the problem. Is that not entirely optimistic? Is that not all about wanting to be better? Surely that is more positive than sticking my head in the sand and hoping things will just sort themselves out in time?

So I went to my appointment yesterday with this optimism, knowing that I’d had a plethora of tests and that the gastrologer had a clear understanding of what was causing my nausea. Except MY doctor, the nice one, the helpful one, the one who gets things done, wasn’t there. He’s off ill. So I was landed with a supply teacher – the medical equivalent of a Hobby Bobby. I knew more about my tests and their results than he did. I’m convinced that he was briefed to just keep things in a holding pattern, don’t make any radical changes, don’t do anything clever. You see, MY doctor would have said, “your tests came back clear, so here are the next things to try…” Whereas the stooge pretty much said, “your tests came back fine so I’m not going to do anything…”  Do you see the difference? So I asked if there was anything I could do in terms of diet to speed up digestion.  His answer was to increase my fibre intake, and at that point a shiver went down my spine because he clearly had not understood the problem at all! I need the food in my stomach to digest more quickly. Fibre is slow to digest, produces roughage, which helps the passage of waste out of the body when it has left the stomach. It is exactly OPPOSITE of what I need. He’s prescribed me some anti nausea pills though which I suppose is something, although I kinda feel this is paining over the crack and not fixing the problem.

Simple analogy: Think of my stomach as a swimming pool. Adults (or food) swim in the pool and it all functions perfectly. Introduce some children (pills) who have a tendency to wee in the water, and things become unbalanced.  So you have three options to restore the balance:

1. Remove the children (pills) entirely. We tried this for 5 days and at the end of that period I was feeling much less sick. The day I started the pills again I felt poorly! But this is not a long-term solution – I need the pills like the pool needs the revenue the kids generate.
2. Add chlorine to the water to mask the effects of the children’s pee. (Or in this case, give me anti-sickness pills)
3. Get some better children who have been taught to not piss in the pool.

I was hoping for option 3, but came away with option 2. Although, knowing the lack of understanding the guy had for my actual system and where the problem lies I suspect that rather than giving me chlorine he’s probably misdiagnosed completely and has given me a note to get the dressing rooms redecorated, thus attracting more pissing kids and turning me into a toxic cess pit! Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…!

Addendum to the above:

Forgot to say, Dr Quack wasn’t able to prescribe the new pills from the hospital pharmacy so we had to run a note from him down to my idiot GP’s practice yesterday so that Dr Diabolical could prescribe the pills. Dr Quack made big mutterings about these tablets and how they were expensive (have some guilt along with your pills), so I guess the truth is that he wanted the GP to foot the bill and not the hospital.

Turned up at the GPs today and was told they are only giving me 5 days of the pills in case I get side effects! Oh THIS bodes well! I ALWAYS get side effects! What they mean is they are expensive pills so they HOPE I get side effects and then they don’t have to foot the bill!  But my position between rock and hard place is firmly established and I poodled off the the attached pharmacy to pick up pills. “Sorry, we don’t have these in”! Joy! Drive to other pharmacy in reasonable distance: Closed for lunch.

When I checked the prescription though something clicked. Dr Quack had called the pills by a technical name, not the trade name, Ondaznetron. Had them before, during the Chemo. Little yellow tablets, taste of banana. Didn’t help my sickness. I have some upstairs still – let me check the patient information sheet… Oh yes, those are the ones that fucked up my vision that time in hospital. Well, I should have known!