Adieu, L'Europe!

 We're out!  As of 23:00 GMT tonight, we're officially no longer in the EU.  58 years after General de Gaulle declared he didn't want us in what was then the Common Market, because he didn't look upon us as 'properly committed' Europeans, we've more or less proved him right after all.  After the referendum result which proved to the the undoing of two Prime Ministers, BoJo pulled a deal off at the last minute and got us a result.  The butter mountain, the wine lake and associated other lunacies are now consigned to the dustbin of history, at least as far as the UK is concerned. I will confess to being a little wistful at the end of something which could have been a lot better than it was, and that, I can't help feeling, was a sentiment which enough people shared to produce the 52-48% majority vote - a result which took a number of people by surprise, so much so that the the politicians were largely unprepared for it!  But, for better or for worse, Brexit is now a reality, and I suspect quite a few eyes will be peeled looking to see what happens next in case any of the 27 others want to jump ship.  Interesting times ahead, perhaps.

I've been hearing sounds of intermittent fireworks this evening, although somewhat muted and distant, an indication perhaps that people will be observing the 'Stay at Home' edict this year.  When I was a teenager, living in Kenilwoth, we got some new Scottish next-door neighbours who invited us round for a drink with them at Hogmanay.  And it was actually at a New Year's Eve party in 1971 that Carol and I became an 'item' and started going out together.  Since then, we'd always stayed up to see the New Year in, drinking a toast as Big Ben struck midnight.   I gather they're intending to ring it as usual this year, although the renovation work is not fully finished yet.

I might even make a New Year's Resolution or two.  Some years I do, some years I don't but the result is the same both ways, I don't usually keep them.  This year I've got rather more incentive than usual, however, so I'm minded to at least try and make the effort. 

Happy New Year!

Jam tomorrow

The much-heralded official approval of the Oxford/Astra-Zeneca Covid-19 vaccine was announced today, and we were treated to the spectacle of that sanctimonious prat Matt Hancock all over our TV screens crowing about it.  Don't get me wrong, I hope for all our sakes it proves effective in stemming what looks like it's fast becoming an uncontrollable tide of infection threatening to swamp us all.  But given his abysmal track record of promising things he can't deliver, I can't help feeling that if it does prove to be the answer to all our prayers, it'll be in spite of his efforts rather than because of them.  Later on, our illustrious PM BoJo in a televised press conference did a passable imitation of a frightened rabbit caught in the headlights, trying to sell everyone the idea of an extended Tier 4 pseudo-lockdown  as a necessary evil (And don't even think of having a New Year party!).  It was left to the ever-sensible Jonathan Van-Tam to save the day in his inimitable 'tell it like it is' style - the only person who actually gives you the impression that he knows what he's talking about and isn't afraid to say it in words everyone can understand.

I have slightly more than a passing interest in all this, as for the last five or six months I've been suffering from what turned out to be a leg ulcer.  I know all about these (well, quite a bit, anyway) because Carol had developed some extensive ones on both legs and for a good couple of years I used to have the task of changing her dressings for her and re-bandaging them after she got cheesed off with the District Nurses and told them she wanted me to take over the job.  She put her foot down over this, and they were not happy bunnies!  Anyway, mine appeared following the development of some hard skin scales which started itching and then cracking apart and secreting lymph fluid.  

At first I did nothing, but it was becoming both unsightly and painful so I went to the walk-in centre where a very nice doctor  told me it was infected and gave me a course of antibiotics.  However a couple of friends who'd seen it suggested to me that I really ought to get it properly treated.  This proved easier said than done, given Carol's condition at the time, and I cancelled an appointment and possible two because I felt I couldn't leave her.  However, I bit the bullet after she died and arranged with our GP to get the Practice Nurse to have a proper look at it.  She's one of the old-school who don't really go in much for the concept of bedside manner: she'd make a good School Nurse if they still have such things.  If I could've gone somewhere else, I would have done: I went every week, but had no confidence in her knowledge or ability: she kept changing the dressing type without telling me why and progress was slow.  One of my friends even advised me to ask for a referral for a second opinion. 

However, it did eventually start to respond, and it's now shrunk to not much more than just a small epientre - the size of something you put an elastoplast on.  After washing it, applying emollient and a new dressing myself this morning, I emailed the surgery telling them that I felt it made no sense to expose myself to the risk of catching the virus by making a journey that wasn't essential and that if the pressure on the NHS was half as bad as it's being made out to be, I was sure they'd appreciate having the appointment time for another patient who needs it more than I do.  So I've basically signed myself off.  I'm just keeping my fingers crossed it doesn't come back and bite me! 

À la recherche du temps perdu

After my success in re-creating a Christmas Day to match the ones from the past, my attempt to do the same with Boxing Day was a failure. When we got married in 1972, we let it be known that henceforth we were going to spend Christmas Day by ourselves as a "family" in our own right.  My mother didn't take at all kindly to this but our minds were made up and we reached a compromise whereby my parents, my sister and her husband (they'd got married three months before us, in September) and us would take it in turns to host a Boxing Day get-together. 

We kept the tradition going  all through the 70s if I remember right, but my sister's marriage was soon heading for the rocks (it ended in divorce in the mid-80s) and it was that as much as anything which caused the arrangement to come to an end.  Now, of course, I've no-one left to share a family Boxing Day meal with.  I did wonder if any of the neighbours, who have all been extremely supportive and sympathetic, might invite me in for a drink or something, but I guess the spectre of Covid-19 and its associated restrictions made that an unlikely possibility and I'm not sure I'd have felt very comfortable about accepting, in fact.  I also briefly considered the idea of eating out at a pub or somewhere but I wasn't sure whether it was worth bothering to find out if anywhere would be open, it was something I don't think we'd ever done and eating alone to conceal the fact that you've got no-one to eat with may appeal to some but I can't say it does to me.  So without a leftover turkey to contend with, I had a roast lamb dinner instead.

For a number or years in the late 80s and early 90s, Carol and I used to go to the Boxing Day sale at Currys/PC World.  We didn't always buy anything and when we did it was often something we didn't actually need, so I decided to save my money and give that a miss.  I got a phone call from one of Carol's friends from Church who'd read the note I'd sent out with the cards.  I didn't know her well, but did remember her.  I was also conscious of the fact that Carol had  found her a bit odd, and I'd never been entirely sure why she was on the Christmas card list, but she was.

In the evening, I watched a film.  The one I chose (I came across it while I was looking for something else, in fact) was "Les Choristes"  Billed as a musical drama, it's the story set in a French boys' boarding school of a new music teacher who tries to improve the children's lot by forming a chorus or choir. It was something of an odd choice for me, as I don't as a rule like musicals much: they were always very much Carol's choice of genre.  It turned out somewhat to my surprise to be a bit of a "weepie" although I'm not sure whether it was really meant to be.  Some aspects of it reminded me a bit of my schooldays, although in all fairness, mine were nowhere near as unhappy as theirs were portrayed as being.  Nonetheless, the feeling of melancholy was something that got on top of me, resulting in that weird inconsolable feeling of loss which overwhelms you, when you're not even entirely sure what it is you've lost. It was just the cumulative effect of all sorts of pent-up emotions generated I daresay by the events of the last few weeks but it had me crying myself to sleep that night.  

New beginnings... or just a new era?

 It's been ten years since I started this diary-cum-blog-cum-whatever-you-want-to-call-it, and three years since I last wrote anything in it.  There's probably a reason for that but since I can't honestly think of what it might be, I don't see a whole lot of point in indulging in fruitless speculation.  I'm not sure I could explain it anyway... let's just say things happen, and not always the way we plan them to, and leave it that.  So why the sudden urge to write again?

 The catalyst for this is the fact that amid what for most people, I suspect, has been a pretty grisly year, my wife Carol died on 15th October.  I won't go into the details now, but I may do later: for the moment I'll just say that it wasn't unexpected and in some ways a blessing for her, but after 47 happy years together (it would've been 48 last week) a reality that's been difficult to adjust to, and I'm hoping that writing about it may help.  I don't see that it can do any harm, anyway. 

When I started this blog in the heady optimistic days of 2010, and indeed when I kept its predecessor, she asked me not to mention her in it, and I gave her my word that I wouldn't.  I'm not altogether sure why she didn't want to be in it, but at the time we had we had a more 'vanilla' now-defunct website which she compiled and maintained, and maybe she didn't want to be associated with some of my more 'eclectic' material?  Yeah, I think that was probably it.  Whatever the reason, I don't feel it's breaking the promise I made then to say that the situation has changed sufficiently unexpectedly for it to be unreasonable for me to be expected to keep it.

So... Christmas.  Traditionally a time of joy and thanksgiving, but tinged this year with sadness.  I tried to give it some veneer of normality by sticking to things I'd always done right from when I was a child, and that started with getting an Advent Calendar.  We were living out in Germany at the time and I remember as a small boy being enchanted with these magical things (and getting major grief off my mother for mischievously opening the little windows for a sneak peep before the appointed day).  Whether it's a particularly German tradition (I don't think it is) it was one which it was nice to revive.  I put a little tree up on the window-sill and decorated it and on Christmas Eve I put the cards up.  For some years we'd been accustomed to finding little notes to say that somebody we knew had died during the year, and this year it had been my turn to write one.  I got some nice messages of commiseration.

I'd have been in my teens, I think, when my father and sister decided one year they were going to go to Midnight Mass.  I remember being somewhat intrigued by this - not least because neither of them were churchgoers - but whether I didn't ask if I could go too, or whether I asked and they said no, I can't now remember.  However it's a custom which I eagerly adopted when we got engaged in 1971 and have been keeping up, with a few lapses in recent years, more or less ever since.  This year I couldn't discover whether there were any being held locally, so I settled for watching a televised one from Clifton Cathedral.  They put the words of the two carols up on the screen so people could sing along at home, and I amazed myself by being able to remember most of the words to "O come all ye faithful" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" pretty much from my schooldays.

Christmas Day, then.  I didn't bother with a turkey.  When there were the two of us we used to get a mini-roast which lasted through Boxing Day and the day after but I didn't fancy the idea of that dragging on through into the New Year!  One year quite recently I got us some turkey dinners-for-one which were really nice, much better than things like that usually are, but that was the one and only year I've ever seen them.  So it was a Duck in Plum sauce, preceded by Prawn Cocktail and a bottle of Asti to wash it down with.  There were no presents to open, of course, but an unexpected treat in the form of a phone call from, Paul, my best friend at school.  We'd kept in touch on and off for over fifty years: divorced with two grown-up daughters now living abroad, he like me was spending Christmas on his own.  And Christmas Day wouldn't be Christmas Day without the Queen's Speech.  There's been no Christmas Top of the Pops just before it for many years now, but at least we're spared the ghastly compendium of 'Christmas Special' episodes of top comedy shows that used to grace out TV screens on Christmas night at one time.  Ugh!

Process of ageing

It's my birthday!

No longer, admittedly, the occasion for celebration and excitement that it once was.  In fact I can only once remember when I was at Junior school my mother offering to do me a birthday party, when she gave me the chance of having a party or an extra-special (i.e. expensive) present, and I somewhat anti-socially chose the present!  Needless to say I've long since forgotten what it was.

One thing I do remember, doing a bit of reminiscing, is how apprehensive we all all were back in the year 2000 being at the mercy of the so-called 'millennium bug'.  Would it mark the end of life as we knew it?  It didn't: life carried on just the same despite all the prophets of doom.

I don't know about anyone else, but the last seventeen years haven't been particularly eventful ones for me, not compared, say, to the first seventeen years of my life.  I survived my childhood, and free of the pervasive creeping influence of the nanny-state, those years were by and large happy, carefree ones - although I'm pretty sure I didn't think so at the time.  On the other hand despite the intrinsic curiosity value I certainly wouldn't want to back and relive them, or at least certainly not in a modern setting.  There's a well-known natural tendency to remember things from long ago as being better than they actually were, of course.

And what of the last seventeen?  They've been marked by the major event of leaving work and while I'm tempted to say that my retirement hasn't been anything like I thought it was going to be, I don't honestly think I'd given that much thought to what it was going to be like.  I've always tended to go for the make-it-up-as-you-go-along  approach.

One thing which has marked the last 17 years was my decision in the year 2000 to start an online diary, of which this this blog is the latest incarnation.  I've only very occasionally trawled back to see what I was thinking about and writing about - and most of it I suspect was fairly trivial.  But it is/was an insight into how I was feeling at the time, and I've never deleted or altered anything.  And while I don't blog as frequently or consistently as I did when I first started, I keep it going because I want to.  It's just for me, and not, God forbid, for future generations of schoolboys à la Pepys!   

All looking good

Seven weeks on from my hip replacements, I went to the Hospital this morning to get them checked over.  The physio looked at the scars, got me to do a few test exercises, and then invited me to have a look at my X-Rays.  I'm not really a connoisseur of X-Rays, but the 'before' ones definitely looked to me like a mass of solid bone which had seized up virtually solid, in contrast to the one they took the following day, with the metal joints showing up just like they do in a medical textbook.  What also showed up quite clearly and distinctly, being metal, were my PA and foreskin piercings!

Being the exhibitionist that I am, I couldn't resist saying, "Ooh look..." simply because it hadn't occurred to me they would be visible, but how you could take an X-Ray of the pelvic area without something like that showing visibly is of course almost impossible if you think about it.  Perhaps a bit strange that nobody wondered what they were, but then again I daresay radiographers at least must have seen them before.

I asked how long it would be before I could bend and tie my bootlaces myself, and he said it was just a matter of time and practice, and that it was as much a muscular exercise as anything else.

Pleased as Punch, I left my crutches behind for use of the next patient, and made my way home on the bus, no longer having to sit in the seats at the front specially reserved for those with 'impaired mobility'.  Get as much exercise as you can, he'd said, so I even toyed briefly with the idea of getting another dog. 

And back for more!

Part One - last year...
Well, I survived the Hernia repair, and looking back on it now, and re-reading what I wrote in anticipation I have to say I worried totally unnecessarily: everything was fine.  The only hitch was that the surgeon couldn't do the laproscopy which he'd planned - he told me afterwards that when he put the little camera in, everything was so tightly compacted he couldn't see what he was doing and so had to go for for an open mesh job instead.

I had a slight panic a couple of days after the operation when an accumulation of fluid made my poor little boy equipment swell up to elephantine proportions, completely burying my PA and foreskin rings under a massive balloon.  I'd never seen anything like it and sat there wondering what was going to happen if it sealed up the urethra underneath this coccoon-like thing, blocking my ability to pee.  Fortunately I discovered it didn't, and in a couple of days it had subsided as suddenly as it had come: if only someone had forewarned me, as I found out afterwards it's not that uncommon as a side-effect.

The waterproof dressings came off after about twelve days, exposing two rows of stitches which were actually rows of metal staples called 'clips', looking a bit like teeth braces.  I wish now I'd taken a photo: thinking back to my body piercing days, my mates would surely have been insanely jealous of this pair of awesome metal contraptions adorning my pubic area!  But they had to come out, and a year on, I just have two faint scars as little souvenirs of it all.

Part two - this year...
But while that problem had been solved, another had developed in its place.  I was experiencing very troublesome arthritis in my hip joints culminating in my not being able to sit down to lace my boots up or pick anything up of the floor, and more significantly forcing me to give up my fortnightly trips to my Italian classes.  I was by this time walking painfully (or more accurately, hobbling) with the aid of a stick, and people who knew me were commenting on how much difficulty I was having: I was petrified of losing my balance and having a fall.  I really couldn't face the prospect of having to spend the rest of my life indoors, and so went on the waiting list for a hip replacement.  Despite hearing that something almost akin to rationing was in force in the NHS, I in fact got an appointment surprisingly quickly.  I was gobsmacked when the surgeon asked me, unusually, if I'd like to have both hips done at the same time, which I hadn't thought was actually technically possible, but I replied straightaway: "Yeah, I'd be up for that".

And so that's what I had done.  All pretty hardcore: everyone I've told about it has been amazed!  But it's gone like a dream and five weeks later I've almost dispensed with the crutches and with just a few residual aches (and plenty of rest), I'm otherwise recovering fast and will soon be up and running.

A very nice touch, incidentally, was the chance to pay for a private room for the duration of my hospital stay.  With a price tag of several grand, there's no way I could've afforded to have the whole operation done privately - and fortunately I didn't need to.  But it was a nice 'extra' touch of individual care and the staff couldn't have been more attentive - just like staying in a hotel, in fact.  So all in all,,props to Warwick Hospital for a grand job!