GOING INTO THE BIG CITY

A soggy scene in the Big City

I ventured into the Big City on Saturday. This might not appear at first to be much of a revelation, but I realised last week that it’s actually been a very long time since I’d last been in to have a day just mooching around the shops. To be honest because I’ve kind of got out of the habit in recent years after the changes in my professional lifestyle, and I have the kind of unsettling feeling that it may be as long as three years since I trudged those bright pavements.

As I skulk in my shared hermitage (if that’s not too oxymoronic) out here on the rim, there are very few people who just pass by and suggest a couple of drinks in town and it’s become such an ordeal and upheaval to get myself there from here, even for the most exciting sounding events, that I can rarely be bothered with it nowadays, preferring to flit out rather unlike a ninja when I need a pint or two of milk and flit stealthily up to the keyboard to obtain anything more specialized which then gets the actual lugging by the stout fellows from Her Majesty’s Postal Services.

No wonder they hate me.

So, why did I have this sudden change of heart? Why was this grey old carcass suddenly inspired to slither its weary self into the very heart of the throbbing Metropolis on a soggy Saturday at the tail end of February? Well, t’beloved had to go in to attend a seminar and recently I’ve started to find that whenever I’m left alone in our castle-ette, I tend to get a little bit twitchy and find that those precious hours get frittered away either at the keyboard (which I already spend most of my week doing, so that’s not all that healthy) or parked in front of the TV watching my old tat and waiting for her to come home whilst giving myself a hard time for wasting all that time, without actually doing anything about it.

This is how whole lifetimes just slip away.

So, I thought it might be fun to go in to the city with her. Perhaps we could have a little breakfast on the way, Coffee and a Danish, after which I could see her safely to her mysteriously located destination and then head off alone to potter around for the intervening few hours and see what shops had survived the great cull caused by the recent recession.

Sadly our planning was slightly off because we’d not checked the weekend rail timetables the night before and so the relaxing Coffee and Danish option kind of got scratched even before we set off into the continuous bucketing rain of a typical Blogfordshire day. Having parked the car at the station and done my usual ritual of getting rained on a lot whilst I skittered back and forth a few times to check that I’ve actually locked it and set the handbrake, we stood for a while in the diluted urine puddles of the railway station rain shelter and, only minutes after it was due, hopped on a battered old piece of rolling stock which was only leaking slightly, and within 40 minutes we arrived at the shopping centre that the main railway terminus has now disguised itself as.

We passed unmolested through its shiny, glittery display of wares and headed out once again, into the rain, hoping to catch one of the three free bus services across the city to the other major rail terminus, the old Victorian one that still resembles a railway station and hasn’t yet had its own massive makeover as a retail hub. It took us a moment to realise that the No 2 route which went where we wanted to go didn’t actually start from here, and so, with only a slight pause for me to acquire the soggy foot which would stay with me throughout the rest of my day out, when I stood on a loosely fitting paving slab, we boarded bus No 1, whilst I continued to mull over whether it is possible to get trench foot from a paving slab.

Some might ask why we failed to take advantage of the gleaming newish Metro system to make our journey across town? Well, of course, we were wondering that ourselves, but had been unreliably informed that all services on that particular branch had been suspended, and it was only once I had bid my farewells to t’beloved later on that I noticed one of the metrocities merrily chugging its way out of the station we had achieved by our more convoluted methodology.

Coffee Shop ceiling

For after the free bus No 1 had deposited us at the extremes of its circular route, I boldy suggested that we didn’t wait for the now mythical No 2 bus to come along as we had a line of sight to our destination and it wouldn’t be too far to walk. Several lifetimes later, after negotiating the rabbit warren of pedestrian routes designed to snag the unwary foot warrior into false hope, we arrived at the Victorian gothic pile with a good half hour to spare before the seminar, and had a kind of diluted variation on our planned exciting breakfast by sitting in “Pumpkins” and having a Coffee. It was an impressive space to put a coffee shop in, to be honest, with all the old Victorian trimmings like the glass dome still intact. I sipped at my Victorian coffee and mulled over which part of the Empire it might have originated from whilst grey-haired gentlemen carrying strangely shaped bags which spoke of long-planned Saturday missions and outings mulled around us, and another group of gentlemen discussed their opinions upon the source of the finest Fish & Chips in the North-West of England, which boiled down to either Ramsbottom or New Mills, apparently.

So t’beloved and I went our separate ways for the day. There was one shop I really wanted to visit despite it’s slightly scary position in one of the scruffier neighbourhoods because I’d been considering an online purchase of something that qualified as proper tat, and I thought that the High Street version of the stores might just have it in stock to save me the postal charges. They didn’t, of course, and so my morning was already spiraling into failure. I trudged sulkily around the music and book stores that I remembered and which still survived (sadly very few) but by about 10.30 I’d been to pretty much everywhere I’d wanted to go and realised that I still had about three and a half hours to fill before my planned rendezvous with t’beloved and our planned lunch.

I guess part of the problem was that I wasn’t looking for clothes or pong or household tat but I ventured on, spotting things that I thought t’beloved might be interested in to tell her later, like the four day offer on crockery in a favourite tea shop chain and the details of a book-signing that she might be keen to attend. Then I went back and forth between the bookshops I’d already visited, comparing the prices of some republished Dashiel Hammetts (which rather excitingly - I'm hoping you're getting the irony here - varied from £3.00 to £7.99) and realising that price comparison is so much easier online. I also spotted some enticing books that I’d previously been unaware of but which I’ll probably buy much cheaper online later.

Sigh!

Olde Worlde charm

I needed a coffee. “It’s people like me who are killing the High Street” I thought as I sat down in a bookshop later to drink my Cappuccino, and the thought quite ruined the taste. I did spot a rather lovely run-down looking building from out of the window but had to wait a while for the mother and daughter sitting in front of it to go away before I pointed my phone to take a less than impressive picture, lest I be thought of as being a freakish stalker type.

The times we live in, eh?

So what did I achieve after my morning alone in the big city? Well, I bought some cards I needed to have in, rediscovered a cheap music shop that I’d half forgotten about and bought some DVDs at a bargain price that even the Internet had so far not been able to match, and pondered a lot about the people I’d seen. From the obnoxious, insufferably smug, self-obsessed clotheshorses in the department stores to those other people wearing the scariest looking clothes I've ever seen on a person. I did occasionally wonder whether they had access to actual mirrors in their homes, because I couldn't imagine anyone actually choosing to be seen out and about dressed like that. Then there were the ‘broken’ people who seemed to be everywhere. I saw a man struggling along, carrying his new “Vax” and a girl carrying an incongruous wooden shoe rack, and somehow the time passed. Eventually I met t’beloved for lunch and after venturing around more shops (and starting to feel a touch ill – perhaps my lunchtime pizza was a bit dodgy...) we headed home.

I get told from time-to-time that I need to get out more and it does me good to see people.

Now I’m not so sure…

TOBY THE DALEK

Today, I’d like to introduce you to my pet, Toby. Now, Toby might not be much of a looker, nor indeed does he say very much, and you probably wouldn’t really consider him to be a pet as such, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve never taken him for a walk, but we’ve been together for rather a number of years now, and it’s only fair that he finally gets the recognition he deserves, after his years of loyal service guarding the other bits and pieces that proudly adorn and clutter the various surfaces hereabouts.

Toby was fashioned by my own clumsy hands from a model kit created by the mail order firm of “Sevans Models” (set up, I seem to remember, by a young entrepreneur called Stuart Evans) way back in the time of the Thatcher administration when “Youth Enterprise” was quite the thing, and when all a young cove had to do during the long summer months between grant cheques was to idle away his time trying to find ways to fritter away his allowance on small objects of desire that had become available at a point way too much later in his life than was decent for a young man of his age, but proved irresistible to his inner geek.

For Toby dates from simpler times, times when the only memorabilia you could get for many TV shows was a vague approximation in plastic of things that actually managed to look much better on a TV screen. Yes, I know… but back then we could still believe that those images looked pretty good. We were occasionally even impressed by them. Nowadays, with hindsight, we can now see how shoddy some of those props actually were and recognise them to be possibly the objets d’tat that they truly turned out to be, but then, well… it takes true genius to fashion household utensils and old mini parts into the stuff of nightmares.

When it came to TV-Tie-ins and merchandise, those were the days when your Tom Baker doll (they were yet to be termed “action figures”) could be sold with a smiling head that could probably have served similar duties upon a “Starsky” doll, and where blank faced, evil automatons like Cybermen could be given anachronistic cute little button noses so as not to frighten the grandparents come Christmas morning, or a Warrior of the Sevateem like Leela the savage would be fashioned with massive Barbie-style hair so that little girls could play with them ‘properly’ instead of finding wicked uses for her miniature knife to get their own back after many years of  their previous dolls suffering at the hands of “Action Man”.

When I was a tiny Wholet, I was terribly envious of my friend the future airline pilot who had in his toybox the battered remnants of an object given to an earlier generation of  toy-wranglers, a silver “Louis Marks” Dalek toy. Now anyone who had an eye for these things could clearly see that this object did very little to replicate the versions that glided and bounced across our television screens and stimulated our imaginations. These versions had windows and a completely different shape, as well as the hooped middles that had been superceded by the slatted version in an early sixties “pimping”.

Strangely, and if only we’d known it back then, these variations were indeed 100% accurate as they had been used on screen to bulk up the numbers in some mid-sixties episodes that, even as we thought about such things, were probably being cast into the BBC furnaces to protect future generations from harm. Now, of course, I can wonder what kind of brave little soul it was who went around and sold a faction of the Dalek hordes some double glazing to keep the draughts out of their bonded polycarbide casings, and mull over the fact that this particular section of Dalek-kind were probably the ones that the “celebrity”, in-your-face, front-line Daleks that managed to hog all the close-ups never talked about, a bit like the “smoothie” Klingons that aren’t ever mentioned by their chunky-faced cousins. Later on, these objects of desire would be re-released in bright, garish colours for a new generation, but I never saw one fashioned in the silver body with gold trim of the one that my friend so casually owned, and probably blithely and thoughtlessly tipped into a dustbin when he finally ‘grew up’ (whatever that might mean…).

So a company like Sevans came as a godsend to me. My kit-building skills were never that impressive to be honest, as I always got terribly impatient with them. Model-making magazines I acquired at around that time would talk of such things as filler and custom-making certain parts, and spraying with airbrushes and only using liquid adhesive, and none of these mystical items were available around the Humbrol racks of Pennington’s the Newsagents just next door to the Spar, where much of my model kit purchasing was done.

The Sevans kit came with exhaustively researched notes telling of the many variations of props that had occurred over the then twenty two years that the TV show had then been on, telling of each and every colour scheme change, blob movement and eyeball variation, and telling you how to adapt the basic kit for every eventuality. There are websites dedicated to much the same sort of thing nowadays, but back then, the attention to detail seemed both impressive and a tad terrifying. Later generations of Toymakers would of course latch onto this obsession with completism and variation and produce ready-made versions in every possible option for the kids-who-don’t-know-they’re-born to fill their own bedrooms with, but back then, such fantastic possibilities were far, far in the future.

Knowing my own limits, Toby was lovingly fashioned on one of the more recent, anything goes, tattier TV incarnations with the best approximations of colour I could get from Mr Pennington. For quite a few years he stood on the windowsill of my bedroom, in the opposite corner to my space rocket, telling anyone who should pass by the back of our house that within there lurked a “fan”. Occasionally he would be sent flying by a thoughtlessly passing cat who thought that he looked more solid and weighty than he truly was, but, with the occasional application of a bit of glue and the odd bit of insulation tape, he has survived such perils.

In later years, and with a slight sense of irony that attempted unsuccessfully to hide my inner geek, I went to a pet shop and bought him the collar you see him wearing, and had a name-tag inscribed for him at the same time. For years afterwards he sat proudly on the top of the very first Television set I ever bought, a TV/VCR combi, until such villains that used to raid the homes in that particular part of outer Manchester (and were once rumoured to be the same charming fellows who would go on to make up a hefty chunk of what became an internationally famous rock and roll combo…) snaffled it away one dismal day.

Thankfully, they left Toby behind, but his glory days were behind him. Perhaps I had been disappointed that he had failed to strike appropriate terror into these mysterious interlopers and protect my few prized valuables, or maybe it was just that I was still trying not to look too rubbish to the then girlfriend, but Toby got confined to a box in a dark cupboard and spent a few years in his own version of a Metaltron Vault which was transported from home to home as I moved about in the world.

Lately he has emerged back into the sunlight and proudly stands once more, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrade and modern day equivalent, the remote controlled, all singing, all dancing Black Dalek, the kind of thing that the tiny Wholet I once was could only have dreamed of ever having. Ironically this toy for a new generation was built to a very similar scale in a completely new century and, whilst it may very well totally eclipse him in terms of style and substance, it can never take away his value.

ROCKETS TO THE MOON & ROCKETS IN MY ROOM

Way, way back when I was a spudlet (or a new potato if you will…), men were landing on the moon (and before you start, yes, they were…) and this was something that excited many young tubers of about my age. Knowing that this subject did indeed fascinate me, and although I was far too young for it really, someone once upon a long ago, had the rather bright idea of buying for me a rather splendid Airfix model kit of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the very vessel that had transported men to the moon, so that I could have one of my very own to stimulate my imagination and inspire me to fulfil whatever dreams I may have had back then.

For various reasons, not least my relative youthfulness, the actual construction of this delightful project fell into the hands of my sister who built the whole thing for me and painted it. Nowadays, of course, I know that the paint scheme didn’t actually match any of the actual rockets that took off on the moon missions, but that never really mattered. She was young, it was the 1970s and she rather happily never got over-burdened with my pernickety obsessions for detail. Never the less, the fine results of her labours stood tall and proud in the various bedrooms I inhabited as I grew up into the jacketed potato that I became, before eventually being dismantled and placed into one of the various cardboard boxes that it languished in throughout my sophisticated “adult” years.

It’s ironic really that she did this for me, because the real Saturn V, the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever brought to operational status, was also a project that was undertaken by other people than those who ended up using it, although the many people who worked on the Apollo programme probably hoped that their work was for the good of all mankind even if, in practical terms, it ended up being used only by three people who did little of the actual construction work themselves (although they were heavily involved with a lot of the technical consultation), but benefited greatly from the work the others put in.

I’ve read that 400,000 people were involved in some small way with the Apollo programme and the construction of the original rockets (as opposed to just my sister with some glue and a bit of paint…) every little part of which had to work perfectly just once. A fully operational Saturn V rocket came in at 363 feet tall and weighed over six and a half million pounds and the one that sent men to the moon ended up costing approximately 185 million dollars which would work out at about 1.1 billion dollars nowadays. It contained over 3 million parts which made up 700,000 components and remains one of the greatest engineering accomplishments that humanity has ever achieved.

I still hear people say every now and again that space exploration is a waste of time and money and we’d be better off spending the money on other things, but that is to ignore all the benefits that humanity got from the things that had to be developed for the space programme from computer technology, to better trainers and from solar energy to ultrasound scanners, not forgetting all those satellites that make all our mobile phones and web activity just a tad more possible. In fact there are so many that I’d be boring you for weeks if I decided to write about all of them.

Sadly many of the “space age” dreams that people of my kind of age had came crashing down in the brutal inflationary years that the 1970s became, although from the ruins of the Apollo programme came the Shuttle programme which is even now approaching its last hurrah. ‘Discovery’ took off on its final flight a couple of days ago, and there are only two more planned launchings of the Space Shuttle, so I really don’t think I’m going to realise one of my ambitions which was to attend one of the launches. Still, one day I’d like to go to Florida and look at any of the Saturn Fives that they have on display there and see one of them for myself and get up close and personal with that little bit of history that took my breath away when I was still young enough to be simply impressed by such things.

I still have most of that Airfix model in a box in the room I’m currently writing this in. For a while recently, around the time of the 40th anniversary of that historic first moon landing, I put all the remaining bits I still had together and they stood for a few weeks on a shelf behind me. Sadly, and inexplicably, some of the parts have been misplaced, although I’m sure they’ll turn up one day. One of the lower fins and one of the five main engines are gone, as is everything for the very top of the model, above the service module (the cylindrical bit below the pointy bit where the astronauts actually sat) including the heatshield and the escape tower.

I had to dismantle it because, every so often the breeze would get up and it would all come crashing down, not least due to the wobbly foundations caused by that missing engine. I eventually realised that this was probably doing the remaining pieces more harm than good, so I reluctantly put all the bits back into a box, where they remain, hoping for the glorious day when the missing parts show up and I can perhaps glue the whole thing together into a more robust, complete and satisfactory facsimile of the transport that made one of mankind’s greatest adventures possible.

If anyone reading this should happen to have any spare bits of their own old kit lying around in a box or a drawer somewhere which might help restore that battered old relic from the childhood of this battered old relic and are willing to part with them, well, I’d love to hear from you, and you’d be making me (relatively) happy. As to whether you’d want to make me happy, well, that’s a different topic for a different day, but such an offer would be very gratefully received.

ONE WAY, NOSE-TO-NOSE & OTHER MOTORING RANTS

I’ve been struggling rather a lot with car parks lately. Once outside the relative sanctuary that is our tiny ramshackle hovel deep in the dark heart of Lesser Blogfordshire, most of my time recently has been spent either in supermarkets or hospitals, and that has meant leaving “Blinky - The Wonder Car” on a variety of car parks whilst I venture indoors and pay my respects, do my duty, or fritter away my hard-earned on ready meals and mood-lifting treats.

Modern car parks, especially supermarket ones, are a maze of “No Entry” signs and one way systems and I do my level best to follow their guidance, but it has become increasingly clear to me that nobody else seems to bother any more. The number of cars I see haring off down what are clearly marked as one-way avenues as if there were no huge arrows painted on the floors at all and pointing in completely the opposite direction to the way they are traveling beggars belief, as do the many I see boldly turning into openings painted with three foot white letters announcing that they are categorically not to be entered. Yet more can be seen pulling out of side openings clearly painted with the words “No Exit”. I’m genuinely surprised there aren’t more accidents with cars appearing from places that they simply shouldn’t be and from where you really wouldn’t expect them to appear. You have to have the reflexes and senses of a bird of prey to get out of there alive, especially if there’s an offer on. Sometimes it’s a relief to get back into the rush hour traffic for a bit of a rest.

But then again…

It’s almost as if the collective road sense of the nation, or our awareness of ourselves and the space we take up, stops approximately 6 inches beyond the perimeter of the vehicle we are driving (and often less than that). Instead of reading the road ahead of us, what’s happening on it, and how it relates to us, we are all blindly pushing forward as if nobody else is there, and this is despite the fact that our roads are reportedly more packed than ever they were. However, I seem to recall that the number of cars is allegedly down a bit due to the recession, so maybe that’s why we all think we’ve got a bit more breathing space.

Sadly, it’s not true. There are still thirty-one million little bubbles of self-importance paying no more attention to the other bubbles than they would to a sparrow dropping from the sky half a world away. Strangely, many who drive to the supermarket seem to have a similar obliviousness to the presence of other human beings when they take over the steering of a supermarket shopping trolley mere moments later, after chasing down that vital spot with little regard to anyone else’s life and limb. You know who you are, parking in those family spots despite a lack of any children within thirty yards of you (they’ve all been scattered as you thundered across the tarmac) or perhaps sneaking into a disabled parking space. I’ve seen you practicing your amazing leg-swapping half limp as you head towards the cashpoint. Mark my words, if I’ve seen you scattering your fellow shoppers like ninepins, or blocking an aisle as you mull over quite which washing powder will wash your whites the whitest, I shall have marked your card and will keep well clear if I notice you loading up your carrier bags in the car park later.

Strangely, in the hospital it seemed to be much, much worse. You’d think that an environment in which many people have to deal with the after effects of accidents, people might just approach their activities with a little more caution. Sadly not. I mean, I’m fully aware of the statistics of how many health workers seem to smoke and drink to excess with all caution thrown to the wind, so I guess that I shouldn’t really be all that surprised that they have the same laissez faire approach when it comes to their motoring. I suppose it’s because parking there is usually so awkward anyway, that the spotting and utilization of any space becomes a race against the other fellow that must be won at all costs and to hell with things like road markings and one way systems. I wonder how many actual head-on collisions there are as someone cheekily nips in through the exit to blag that last spot, and I wonder how many of them are still convinced that it was the other driver’s fault?

There’s a huge car park in one of Blogfordshire’s bigger nearby towns, near to where the much-missed “Borders” used to be and where an “Argos” still plies its trade. Here drivers used to just boldly drive in through one of the exits as if they always had been able to because it saved them all of thirty seconds to not drive around the correct bit of concrete. They entered as if it never would even cross their mind that someone might just possibly, for the sake of argument, be leaving through it. Happily there have been developments that now prevent this, but I do wonder if one of the “regulars” careered into the new posts on the day they were installed.

What's the point? Where's the point?

Then there’s my nearby station car park. It’s basically a big loop with parking around the perimeter and a central island which is also made up of parking spots. For many years it functioned perfectly adequately with an anti-clockwise flow as indicated by an enormous white arrow on the ground (not unlike those so blatantly ignored by the shoppers) but sadly, lately the arrow has faded and crumbled away to a shadow of its former prominence and so a more random 50/50 approach seems to be the norm for the motorists of Lesser Blogfordshire. So far I’ve not witnessed any collisions, although there have been a fair few near misses and brake screeches in the early mornings.

Now, the whole world, to the more environmentally minded, may very well seem to be now designed for the convenience of the motorist, although from behind the wheel and standing next to a petrol pump, it really doesn’t feel like it. Still, if a society puts all its shopping centres in places so far out of town that you’ve little choice but to drive to them, it can hardly quibble when the roads get clogged up. Sadly, cyclists and the pedestrians – many of whom were drivers mere moments before - who have to share these car parks with the cars really need to have swivel-top heads because the cars will be coming at you from all angles nowadays. Now, I’ve had my run-ins over the years with some of the more radical amongst the cycling community. Once I was berated in print for my selfishness because I dared to live in a place from where I had to commute to work (oh, let’s not go there…), but they really do have my sympathy these days. For one thing they’ve got to deal with people like me and my momentary distractions. Yes, even I will admit to having had one or two near misses myself despite all my fretting and angst about these matters. Luckily there was no harm done, but I’ll bet whoever it was spent the day telling everyone what an idiot they thought I was, and, for that moment, they probably had a point.

The problem seems to be that, like in a lot of things, many people seem only capable of seeing the world in their own image. I still worry that when I take “Blinky” into the big city that someone will wish it some harm due to its chunky nature, despite knowing little of my life and where I live it. When Westminster tried to impose its traffic plans on a certain northern city a few years ago they seemed to forget that that city was nothing like London, and that little out of the way places like Lesser Blogfordshire are nothing like any of the big cities. If I was unlucky enough to live in the city of London, it would seem like madness to own a car when there are so many convenient alternatives, but many other cities have no tubeway systems, nor do their tram networks reach out into all of the suburbs. Out here on the rim, where the buses refuse to roam, the taxis are booked up for weeks in advance for the schoolchildren and some of the pavements and roads resemble the north face of the Eiger, the options are far fewer still, and at my great age and with my blood pressure, I rather suspect that hopping upon a bicycle on these dark country lanes might be more likely to find me being sectioned on the legitimate grounds that I was trying to do myself some harm.

Meanwhile as I was loading up “Blinky” a few evenings ago, I witnessed the kind of altercation that gives all car drivers a bad name. Because there are a number of cars parked at the side of the road, “Blinky” included, there is only enough room for one car to travel along the road in any direction at any given time. Much give and take and use of the passing places is required. Anyway, as I carried my bags down to my car, I noticed two cars sitting nose-to-nose and bumper-to-bumper clearly each waiting for the other to back up. Neither moved for the good five minutes it took me to fold out the seats and load up my bags into the car. Eventually after a seemingly endless stalemate, one of the drivers got out to speak to the other and thankfully, before I had to join the melee in order to turn my own car around and head out, a squealing, screeching compromise was reached and both cars headed angrily on their way. Strangely enough, they could both have been on their way a lot sooner if one or the other had just backed up a few yards, but rationality sometimes escapes us when we feel that we are in the right.

At least this time there wasn’t any shouting. Quite a few quiet summer’s evenings have been shattered by the shouting of motorists bellowing “It’s my right of way” and suchlike at each other in similar situations. Neither was there the screaming of brakes (followed by the occasional thud) that also accompanies our serenity, so all-in-all, sanity did prevail and peace did return once more to the wild lawless lanes of Lesser Blogfordshire.

Now I know my driving’s not perfect, and my current obsession with obeying speed limits has more than infuriated one or two people who happen to have ended up behind me in traffic on occasion, so I’m setting myself up for a huge fall by sharing this rather lengthier than planned rant with you. Feel free to mutter an irritated “Tssk” at me as you gratefully approach the end of this meandering set of motoring-themed musings today. I really wouldn't blame you.

Just try to keep in mind what my grandfather was always telling me, long before I was even old enough to think about the merest possibility of becoming a motorist: “Try to remember that a car is a lethal weapon and everyone else is an idiot and you won’t go far wrong.”

Hmmm… I wonder where I get it from…?

IDEAS INACTION

Today’s little contribution to the increasingly tangled, wibbly-wobbly world wide web is about many things and yet about nothing at all. Some will say it’s about 800 words too long or about 150 submissions too many, but I digress, as I always seem to when the sleepy dust still crackles at the corners of my eyes and the brain hasn’t yet had time to be jump-started by the first caffeine hit of the day.

By this time most mornings, my mind has already usually been beaten into submission by the banalities of Breakfast news, which arrives via the steam-powered goggle-box that somehow still manages to deliver its cathode ray tube of dubious delights into the darkened living room of our ramshackle hovel sitting in our rather chilly corner of Lesser Blogfordshire. My consciousness lies quivering in the corner hoping not to be noticed as I grind the smoothed down gears of my brain into what I still optimistically still regard as “action” and prepare to face up to whatever the day might have in store for me, having already railed against the stick-thin roving reporters who somehow manage to remain in vision as they leap across the screen from pixel to pixel, sometimes vanishing as they jump from one to the next, whilst  they harangue yet another “real person” into telling the nation the blindingly obvious, usually about how bloody awful it is to be a “family” these days, or into confessing something so intimate that you’d normally not dare to share it with your priest or urologist.

Ah well, that part of the day is behind me now, and the terrible lottery of the journey to the station has also been negotiated without too much peril to life and limb, although today there was a near miss which I just know I’m going to fret about, and I find myself, as on most recent mornings, sitting in my possibly mildly exciting and relatively recently purchased office chair, swiveling away as I try to think, and wondering quite what thoughts I should try to string together into vaguely coherent sentences and share with you as we venture on our journey through this jolly new day.

I have a list, you see, of half-formed thoughts and half-baked ideas of things that I thought that maybe I’d like to write about. Some days, when the eyes are very crusted and the caffeine isn’t working hard enough, and my braincells are mashed from the day-to-day, sheer awfulness of just enduring the process of being me, I will have a little look at the list and wonder whether today is the day to share this, or that, but certainly not that, with you from the relative obscurity and safety of my keyboard. Sadly, sometimes when I consult the list I find that the original thought has fluttered away and I am just left with a short sentence that seemed so urgent at the time that I had to fly up and get it written before I forgot it, but which is now a meaningless string of syllables that lead to nowhere. Still, I should be grateful that I took the time to kick up the hard-drive and type it on a keyboard, because my handwriting has deteriorated so much over the years, I think because of a fundamental laziness or a ridiculous lack of patience, that anything I scribbled down on one of the many Post-It notes (other self-adhesive notepads….) is likely to be indecipherable even to me within 24 hours. Occasionally, of course, I will consult the list and think, “That’s it! That’s the one!” but then I simply can’t think of anything to say about it, and have to file it away for use on some other day when the ideas might just come.

So I might very well try and think back to that morning’s latest news for inspiration, or dig through the few memories that I have of yesterday’s happenings for the slightest crumb of originality that might just have been eked out of my unfolding history of terribly similar days. If none of these provide me with any stimulation or inspiration, I may well fall back on a tale from long ago times when a younger, sprightlier, fitter me used to venture out, wide-eyed into the world and approach it with a sense of awe, wonder and possibility.

It was a Friday, I think.

I was twelve.

As you’ve probably already guessed, today is proving to be one of those more awkward mornings. Nothing of substance has popped in and so I’m left here floundering (I used to play a game called “Floundering” when I was younger… but... No...) and wondering whether I have anything to say at all today. I could tell you all about my not-very-new office chair of course, but I suspect that, if the day should ever dawn when I feel the need to do that, maybe the time might be upon us to give up on this pitiful charade and accept that it’s time to go. But not yet, not today, not when I can share my thoughts on…

But actually, I think I’ll save that for another day.

FALSE MEMORIES, OLD BOOKS, FONTS & “THE BRIG”

A few evenings ago, here in the heart of Lesser Blogfordshire, we were discussing books (as you do) and the story got around to Umberto Eco and what a cracking book I remember “Foucoult’s Pendulum” as having been. This led me to a vague memory that we’d bought a later book of his, but I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was. In fact I was utterly convinced that it wasn’t me that even bought it, but, in the end it turns out that I was wrong about that. These “false memories” they do start to come back and bite you. I think it’s the long ago dreams and worries you had blurring with reality as they get further away. I’ve got enough real bad memories to have to deal with without my wretched subconscious making up new ones for me to fret over. I have vivid memories of returning to a previous job long after I’d left for a few Saturdays just to help them out, although I know I never went back there (although there’s still the slight nagging irritation whenever I run into anyone from that place that I never actually got paid for the work...).

Completely vivid.

Never happened.

So when my mother told me that my clear memories of one of her previous cleaners losing one of her keys to the flat never happened, maybe she was right after all. I’ve claimed for years that I don’t actually dream – I certainly don’t have any that I remember – but maybe this is how they manifest themselves.

Anyway, returning to Umberto Eco, the title of whose book of essays “Travels in Hyper-reality” suddenly seems quite appropriate for these ramblings today, I did track down my pristine and unread copy of his novel “Baudelino” and, judging by the receipt tucked inside its pages (yes, I am that kind of a guy…) it turned out that I did indeed buy it, alongside a book about “The Sweeney” (of all things) way, way back in October 2003, getting on for eight years ago. A very long time to be in possession of a book that I was desperate to read when I bought it, and then to not actually read it.

Sometimes I think I buy too many books.

Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of talk recently, since the coming of the iPad and the Kindle (other e-readers are of course available) about the death of the book. The news media would have us believe that the book is a dying format, but then they’re always so very eager to jump onto the bandwagon of the “next big thing” (probably because they want to justify the fact that they’ve all bought all the latest gadgets themselves) and I do rather believe that the book will survive as a format long after we’ve filled our landfill with our discarded e-readers when the next thing comes along.

I love buying books, although I buy rather fewer than I used to because I don’t find the time to read quite as often as I once did, and there’s nothing to compare with finding a crisp new book about a subject that I’m keen on and which I didn’t even know had been published sitting on a pile of perfect and unsullied copies in a bookshop. I love having my books around me, too, even though it means that the house suffers from the kind of clutter that would make Estate Agents and Interior Designers weep. I find it hard to get rid of them, suffering as I do from a need occasionally to track down some piece of prose or other that I know that I read somewhere. I can lose whole weekends to that particular quirk. A love of books can change your life, and not just because a bit of learning can change it. I was briefly involved with someone who didn’t like the smell of old books. It didn’t last, but I know that the books will.

I wasn’t really convinced by the “save the trees” environmental arguments that I read in favour of the e-reader, because, like battery operated cars, one advantage seems to be countered by the manufacture of the product itself. Nor do I believe that the technology won’t  continue to progress leaving these devices to be thrown onto the scrapheap of history when the next development arrives. Someone did mention the e-reader “app” on their particular mobile telephonic device, but when I looked into the details of such a thing, I couldn’t imagine reading a book on such a tiny screen is quite the same thing at all, and I don’t really feel that the argument that you can carry a whole library of books around with you is a valid one as well. I’ve seldom wanted to read more than two books at a time in my life, and, unless you’re doing research, I can’t imagine why anyone else would need to, either. If the book itself is gripping enough, surely you’d want to finish it rather than read a page or two of this and that every so often? They're just not the same kind of things as magazines, are they? But I know that anything that actually gets people reading again is probably a good thing, although I wish we were fighting harder to save our libraries.

Then there is the “reading in the bath” argument in favour of the battered old paperback, although personally, I tend to read my books very carefully, in less perilous environments, and sometimes after I've finished them, they sit on the shelves looking as if they’ve never been touched at all, which is why I’ll probably turn into a nervous wreck if I ever lend you one. Nonetheless, books might very well be lo-tech and comparatively bulky but I could lend them to people, or donate them to charity without too much trouble, which I think might not turn out to be so simple on an electronic device.

And of course we should never forget that most of what we know about the history of humanity is because it was written in books, on those lovely pages of vellum and parchment that have survived from the medieval times, and on the papyrus scrolls from even earlier than that. If we transfer the sum of all human knowledge onto systems more vulnerable to things like electromagnetic pulses and so forth, we may lose a lot more than just knowledge. we may lose our entire sense of history. I still remember that scene in one of the “Mad Max” films where the child is able to use a lo-tech needle to hear the voices captured on a vinyl LP. If the barbarians do finally storm the gates and we descend into a new dark age, we’re going to need to relearn a heck of a lot of knowledge to knock ourselves up a laser beam just to be able to read something. Especially if it’s something like the manual for knocking up a laser beam...

But a book?

Why, any child can pick up a book and find a world within just waiting for them to explore it.

Meanwhile, although only loosely related to matters of the page, I think I’ve finally finished my tinkering with the layouts of my Lesser Blogfordshire pages, and I hope that they are now much simpler to navigate around. This is probably all due to my (still) current reading about fonts, “Just my Type” (a book which is rapidly becoming an all-time favourite of mine). I think I might have erroneously described it before as being about typography, but it is mostly about fonts. I’ve finally, after a brief dalliance with Times New Roman, settled upon Georgia for the body copy, which Matthew Carter designed for Microsoft as a serif companion to the sans-serif Verdana to create a crisp and clear font for reading on screen, and, despite my usual resistance to all things overtly corporate, I have to grudgingly admit to what a beautiful font it is.

Enjoy.

Finally, my morning took a turn for the positively miserable when I found out that another of the cornerstones of my childhood, the rather wonderful Mr. Nicholas Courtney who played the rather magnificent Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart  in “Doctor Who” throughout the days when Jon Pertwee played the Time Lord, but for many years before and afterwards too, had passed from this mortal realm. Once again, I must raise my metaphorical glass (I seem to be doing this an awful lot of late), probably this time containing a pint of real ale, to his fond memory…

(Transfers pint to other hand, and salutes).

SMALL SURPRISES (BOTH NASTY & NICE)

I spent a lot of Monday feeling quite angry, and it was all my fault, because I took my eyes off the ball for a moment and dropped it and then got a unpleasant surprise. Now, I’ve never been a big fan of surprises, and I’m more likely than anything to try and skip the country if there is even the most unlikely chance of having to attend a surprise party because that sort of thing just makes me feel uncomfortable for the recipient and just plain awkward in myself. This would become even more likely if I was the person getting the surprise, but even the small surprises that life can sometimes throw at you are not something I enjoy, probably because, in general, I tend to find they are of the “nasty” kind.

Without going into too much detail, during my mother’s recent three month hospitalisation, I paid little attention to her finances because I knew that they were all being paid by Direct Debit and so they were nothing to worry about. What loose bills that I did find got paid, and, to be honest, I genuinely thought everything was “hunky-dory”. However, when mum finally got home this weekend, she and my sister went through all her accumulated post and emails and found, to everyone’s surprise, that there had been an unpaid bill for some clothing which amounted to about £25 and, not to put too fine a point to it, there were some rather stroppy follow-up communications that mentioned legal action and brought to mind (not without reason) images of leg-breaking burly men standing upon doorsteps and making threatening noises towards a rather befuddled 78 year-old woman. Hopefully, it has been sorted now, and such things will not become necessary (if they ever were…) but the thing that got me annoyed wasn’t that aspect of it, they are after all just people doing a job, but the lack of opportunity that was given to my sister to explain when she tried to ring up and sort it out.

Maybe you’ve had one of these conversations before, but they are rather a new experience to me, even though I didn’t do the actual “experiencing” myself (which was probably for the best). According to what I was told later (“Objection! Hearsay!” as Jack McCoy would undoubtedly have bellowed...), it went something along these lines…

“It’s about my mother and this unpaid bill…”

“If you are not the actual customer, then I cannot talk to you about it!”

“Yes, but she had a stroke three months ago…”

“I cannot talk to you!”

“She’s been in hospital for the last three months…”

“I cannot talk to you!” and so on…

You get the picture…

So, when faced with someone being totally bloody-minded, I suspect that it was just as well that it was my sister making that particular call, because I think I might very well have burst a blood vessel if it had been me. Now, believe it or not, I am prepared to see things from the company’s point of view, and I’m sure they spend all day having to listen to hard-luck stories, especially during the current economic climate, and I’m sure that it’s a very frustrating job to have to do, but that sense that someone isn’t even prepared to listen to what you’re trying to say to them must eventually bring even the most mild-mannered of customers to the brink of a meltdown if they try to ring up with the most reasonable of explanations and get faced with that kind of response... (“Mr. Magee, don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry!”)

I’m told that this person really shouldn’t have made it a “data protection” issue and it was quite within their powers to give general advice but instead they chose to make an already difficult situation into a very, very stressful one. I suppose my sister could have asked to be transferred to a supervisor or something, but when you’re up against such an immovable object, even the unstoppable force that my sister is capable of being is sometimes left holding on to a telephone in disbelief.

There does also seem to be a slight modern corporate sense that just because they've sent out a letter or email, then the matter has been sufficiently dealt with, despite the fact that they have not got any way of knowing whether the intended recipient ever actually got it. Their large hammers go crashing about to crack such tiny nuts as we all seem to be when faced with all their might, but might isn’t always right in much the same way as the customer can sometimes be wrong, too.

Hopefully the matter has now resolved itself, although the bank were equally tricky when it became obvious that my mum had also, over the course of three months and a stroke, rather naturally forgotten all her various banking PIN codes, and, because she had wisely not written any of them down for security reasons, had no access to her own money. Again, I can’t really blame them for not just handing them out to anyone who rang up to ask for them, after all, the security of our money should be their primary concern (Hah!), but it’s these tiny little unpleasant surprises that make life just that little bit more infuriating for everyone as they try to get on with their own lives.

Then, sometimes, it’s the little things that take you nicely by surprise. Those little details that you’ve forgotten all about. A couple of years ago, before I found this blog as an outlet for what, for the sake of argument, we’ll still refer to as my “creativity”, I used to write Amazon reviews. I mentioned those here once before and my favourite example (“Morse Lives!”) still lurks over on The Writers’ Blog pages. What I’d forgotten, however, is the Amazon “comments” section, where, much like in Blogland, the great unknown masses of customers are invited to tell you, in no uncertain terms, what they think of your humble thoughts. Luckily for me, the comments on that particular timeless piece of prose were generally favourable and I was able to add my own reply to one of them, which went like this:-

Thank you for your kind words, and for finally confirming to me something that I'd hoped - that such an 'offbeat' style of review might (at the very least) just amuse somebody somewhere and still fulfill its purpose. I'm so glad you "got" it and hope that things have now warmed up in your part of the world.

Morse purists might, of course, question the whole "urn scenario" given his ultimate fate, but I hope my little joke still works*. After watching all 33 films in fairly rapid succession, the voices seemed very vivid to me, which I think is testament to their sheer quality.

*"Kit, tell me joy" (anag) (2,6,4)

So, imagine my surprise when someone, on this damp weekend we’ve just endured, eighteen months after the review was posted and long, long after the product itself had become unavailable added:-

Anagram answer - my little joke - Morse would be proud of you!

I try to play my little games with the world, and for most of the time, the world simply isn’t at all interested, but, just occasionally, my faith is restored.

You throw your little pebbles out into the pond of life and you never know where the ripples are going to end up, and, despite what I might choose to believe, some surprises can occasionally turn out to be pleasant ones.

SOUNDING THE RETWEET

As I mentioned last week, I have dipped my reluctant toe into the murky “World of Twit” as I’m going to annoyingly continue to refer to it. This move was much to the chagrin of those that know me, as well as myself to be honest. What on Earth, pray, was I thinking? I am not, after all, the most sociable of creatures and most of my friendships and acquaintanceships across my life have stuck to me like I was coated in Teflon, so the whole point of signing up for this bizarre world does seem to be rather a pointless move, especially as it smacks of the kind of hypocrisy you only get in politics these days after all my rantings and railings against the phenomenon over the past couple of years.

"Publicity is everything"
A classic "Peanuts" image
from the pen of the late, great
Charles M. Schulz

Well, it all began when things here in Lesser Blogfordshire no longer seemed to be engaging the admittedly few visitors to our dark little world any more. It started to bother me, especially after a sequence of not exactly “dangerous” postings, but ones that were very introspective and gloomy. This, I believed, was not the fluffy stuff that was to be more usually found in the crazy, fun-filled world of FizzBok, and I thought that I needed to find another place to park the notifications of my humble offerings, so that the world might just spot it as they passed along by. Not unlike Lucy’s Psychiatry stall in “Peanuts”, I believed. Just a little sign to let you know I was here, and then leave the rest up to you. I am not, after all, one of the great self publicists of life. Someone once said that I should call any business I ever set up “Light Under A Bushel Enterprises” and I think they knew me better then than I even know myself now.

So, the problem remained. What to do? When, as the “author” (if that doesn't sound too pompous), you choose to view your outpourings, there are little buttons underneath the piece tempting you to “share” with the big wide world by 5 various means: Email This (too presumptive on your good natures), Blog This (thought that I already was), Share to Twit, FizzBok or GoggleBuzz (Hmmm… Not sure, but it sounds as if I use that, people might think I think this is worthwhile or something…). Well, FizzBok obviously wasn’t working (due to the Teflon coating) so I thought I’d give the Twits a go.

Of course, I know that some of you are “following” these ravings, but “following” is such a strange word to put an absolute definition to. I mean I know what it means, but certainly here in “Blogger” “followers” (and I really do dislike the messianistic connotations of the term) don’t seem to be told when one of us has added to our pile of bile, so short of relying on you to make regular visits (and why should you…? You’re all busy people with lives to lead and stuff that needs attending to…) there are few ways to let you know I’m still here to be actually “followed” as I spout off about my latest thoughts and deeds. If I don’t let you know via FizzBok, how on Earth are you to know that I’ve not just faded away and given up on my mad ravings and just finally fallen into the foaming mass of lunacy that so obviously awaits me?

So I joined the Twits and spent a bewildering couple of days trying to get my head around the subtleties of how it works, looked at a few things and people of interest, got a tiny bit of insight into the lives of the great and the good of this world of ours, decided that, whilst it is obviously a genuinely much enjoyed place by a large number of people, it probably really wasn’t for me. So I deleted a number of my pointless tentative 140 character (or less) mutterings in the whirlwind of words and got the hell out of there, vowing only to post the blog links there in future and not hang around any longer than I had to, for that way, for me at least, madness might truly lie.

So what did I learn in my few days in Twitworld? Not a lot really, with the exception that I wasn’t a snug fit within it. Other than finding out that Robert Llewellyn was stuck in a massive traffic jam last Friday, and that Stephen Fry had flown to San Francisco (lucky devil!), I also discovered that Mark Gatiss was writing about Dartmoor for “Sherlock” (which can only mean one thing, surely… “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” – Excited now…) and Steven Moffat’s 9 year old son had a new nose hair (I rather embarrassingly replied to that before I realised quite who it was who’d written it…). Oh yes, and Simon Pegg was busy playing an interesting game of “three word movies”, but I was too shy to contribute my own humble effort (“Unsinkable ship sinks”) before I ran away and hid.

It did, however, serve one useful purpose for me as it turned into a kind of repository to track my thoughts from the previous day as I came to compose these postings of a morning, but I suppose I only really needed a good notebook (and better handwriting) to achieve much the same thing.

I suppose for the sake of compounding my own embarrassment, and with a view to putting some of my thoughts down for posterity, I should share one or two of my Twittish observations with you here, just to prove, if anything, that it was wise of me to leave. I was after all, playing in the big leagues when it came to pithiness, and felt that I would be found wanting. Still, it wouldn’t be fair of me if I didn’t confess to at least a few of my shortcomings back here in the genial and comfortable surroundings of Lesser Blogfordshire. Perhaps you should think of them as “trailers” for some of my future witterings…

How can Photoshop keep telling me it's "unexpectedly quit" when it does it so often that I'm fully "expecting" it to...?

Stupidly, stupidly happy that the TV series version of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" is getting a DVD release this year...

Every time I try to listen to the radio serial "The Slide" on CD, the phone rings. Maybe I should give up and just make it my ring tone...

and this “classic” where I ended up replying to myself:

I do wish politicians would stop trying the "snappy" one-liners or the "witty" sound-bites. They're really SO bad at delivering them...

@MAW_H Hang on... Why should I expect politicians to deliver anything? The clue's in the job title...

You can see now why the world really wouldn’t be moved and why I have decided that I may well be a twit, but I’m one that doesn’t Twit…

THE WHOLE SORRY SAGA (PART SIXTEEN)

Have we reached the final part? We left off part way through the twelfth week, with my sister having left her faraway home and firmly ensconced in mum’s flat, waiting to assist her with adjusting to the world outside the hospital again. Mum’s release is supposedly “imminent”. Will there be one final twist in the tale of our sorry saga before it reaches it’s inevitable conclusion?

FEB 15 2011

Day 80. Sis rings 9.20AM. Mum and the GMF have been pestering her for hours already to try to get her to persuade me to ring the Social Services. I explain that I think this is pointless because we are only just into office hours and people need to be allowed to do their jobs. Mum leaves 2 messages in similar vein whilst I’m talking to sis, and rings me again two minutes later and seems less than chuffed when I explain my position. All-in-all this is not an encouraging start to the day.

Then it all goes very quiet and I’m left to stew in my own juices and hover next to the phone in the expectation that it will ring at any moment which doesn’t help me to focus on my work. I imagine that sis is doing an afternoon visit as the GMF is reportedly unwell, but I sit at home quietly getting annoyed about the sense I’m getting that my mother and the GMF seems to be of the collective opinion that the continuance of her hospital stay is somehow all down to me and my less than proactive nature, and that she would have been home weeks ago if only I’d made a phone call or two. Nothing to do with her health or any doctors at all then…?

Strangely today the NHS is getting a mauling in the news for how it cares for the elderly, but I’m starting to think that that’s going to turn out to be my fault as well. I feel like I’m unravelling.

Meanwhile, from the tone of her post-visiting phone call, sis seems to be getting frustrated by it all, but it’s not as if I didn’t warn her. I think I might have said this before but, welcome, as the saying goes, to my world. She’s had a frustrating day getting nowhere and things have taken a darker turn. It seems that because sis failed to appear with any cheese for mum a small riot started to brew up and was only avoided when a nurse mentioned that there was some in the fridge left over from the latest meal service. I noticed for the first time only a couple of days ago mum’s missing or broken tooth because it’s taken that long for her to smile, but sis hadn’t seen it during her stay after New Year either, so this is obviously a recent thing that neither of us knew about. Mum has also been accosted/molested by her new neighbour in the next bed today which has led to altercations and remonstrations. Hell really can be other people.

FEB 16 2011

Sis rings 9.30AM(ish) after having been talked into calling Social Services and now knows that mum is “on the list” for release and due a visit today. This would seem to represent a step forward in the “imminent departure” stakes, but, as ever, the cynic in me refuses to believe it until she’s actually sitting inside the car. We have, after all, been here before.

A later call, which turns into a lengthy chat about many issues, some of them which don’t show the better sides of my nature, tells me that the Social Worker has been to see mum this morning and that she will “definitely” be home before the weekend (although she was “definitely” going to be home before Christmas, so I’m still not holding my breath… Maybe I should start digging a trench? They never actually said which Christmas, of course…).

Mum rings and tells me that she’s had 3 visits this morning. Firstly the Social Worker (which I knew about), then the Care Team Nurse who says that she will see her “at home” next week, and finally from the Intermediate Care Worker who has given her prescription for a bathroom stool which will need collecting sometime. Things actually do seem to be in motion at last…

The afternoon brings the less than gratefully received (by mum anyway, as she hates change) news that she is to be relocated to a rehabilitation ward, presumably ready to be let back into an unsuspecting world, and a more positive call later tells me to check that she’s actually been moved before leaving for my visit, how wonderful the GMF is for doing her packing, and that she felt more comfortable with the frame rather than the pair of sticks – someone came from the destination ward to check this apparently - and so the sticks are gone.

Dashing around before it was time to go for the evening visit so I didn't get a chance to call first, and optimistically went to the “wrong” ward, but, as I met my sister by the lift, it wasn’t just me. Just under an hour with mum waiting in limbo to be relocated and none too pleased about it. The Social Services still think it might be “a few days” due to it being a ward where people are assessed on their ability to cope alone. There may be exams… Still, the GMF has packed her bags for her (with only a few slight omissions), and there was some chat about planning life at home and we kept trying to distract her from the subject of the “unfortunate” neighbour. I did also get an acknowledgement that my now regular observation that we really must let things unfold at their own pace was probably right.

A latish call informs me that the move to the new ward is complete and that this latest ward is very nice. As ever, it’s fear of the unknown that makes her awkward, I feel.

FEB 17 2011

A morning call from mum tells me that she’s had a good night’s sleep and has managed to transfer her TV across by herself. You are expected to do more for yourself on that ward, apparently. We discuss the fact that I might not see her today to take advantage of my sister’s presence to take the pressure off, unless of course the decision is made for her to go home, which, of course, would be another matter entirely.

Sis rings at 4.00PM to tell me she’s collected the prescribed stool (from a different supplier I knew nothing of) and tells me of the many calls that she has received today (including an elderly lady ringing her as a wrong number at 5.00AM and then pressing redial a further 4 times… Sigh!), and that she has made arrangements to stay up north a little longer if necessary due to all the continuing delays in mum’s release. Other matters are discussed, and we have a moment of fiscal panic when it dawns on me that the TV will run out tonight and I wasn’t planning on visiting and, for a second, it looks as if I will have to go after all, but sis finds enough coins in the dark depths of her purse to save the day. The cost of failure would be more than we could bear…

After my evening in, a phone call from sis to discuss yet more issues and worries about mum’s future home life, mostly about whether mum’s prepared to put the effort in with things like improved diet and so forth, but both of us are still none the wiser and befuddled when we sign off. All I know at the moment is that if mum really doesn’t make any effort to help herself and ends up in hospital for the third time, I genuinely, genuinely don’t know if I can cope with it again.

FEB 18 2011

Day 83. A Friday. A social worker rings me and tells me that mum can be sent home early afternoon tomorrow if they’ve got the meds and the ambulance sorted. The carers are in place for 8.45AM, 11.45AM, 4.30PM and 8.15PM. The thing that’s delaying it until tomorrow is the ambulance availability issue, and so, when I suggest that either sis or myself can collect her in a car, enquiries need to be made to look into the possibility of the release happening today, possibly around 6.30PM. The Social Worker rings off so that she can call the ward to check. I briefly ring sis to put her on standby and try to keep the line clear, but then mum rings and I have to tell her to go away as I’m waiting for a call. The care package is for transfers, meals, commode hygiene, catheter care and mobility issues, so that all seems fine and dandy. Ten minutes later and it seems we’re good to go for this evening and we’ll need to ring the ward before we set off, just to check everything is in place and possibly arrange for a wheelchair to be available. I then (of course) forget to ask one vital question, “Has the care package also been brought forward?” and so have to wait for another call back, which, when it comes, gives me some further useful information like contact numbers for the carers. In the meanwhile, sis has gone out for one “final afternoon of peace” and tells me that mum had complained at me cutting short her call; “He says he’s waiting for Social Services to ring!” “That’s because he’s waiting for Social Services to ring…” sis replied. Mum has also cancelled the GMF from doing his afternoon visit, as usual jumping the gun as she hadn’t been told at that point that her release wasn’t due until at least 6.30PM, and, despite not actually being dressed yet, she’s packed her bags. Will she never learn? Later on she changes her mind and the GMF visits after all...

It all goes very quiet during the afternoon. Too quiet. Still, I’m able to get on with my work (despite sudden power outages really not helping), so it’s probably a good thing. Sis rings me after she returns from her peaceful afternoon and the situation remains at “go” and so we formulate a plan of action and exchange the various details we’ve individually accrued. There needs to be a call made before we leave just to check that everything’s still on track and sis volunteers to do that and indeed, at about 5 o’clock she does, and we are still at “go, go, go!”. Surely, it's too late now for things to change...?

I load up the car with all mum’s valuables that I’d removed from the flat for safety (and witness one of those two cars nose-to-nose with neither of them willing to back up moments which goes on for five minutes – but that’s another story…) before heading to the supermarket for a swift shopping session to get mum bread, milk, cheese and other perishables to see her through the weekend. Oh, and in a moment of inspiration, one of those plug night-lights for the flat. I also grab sis and I some sandwiches as we’re unlikely to get much chance to eat in the coming hours. Sis and I meet in the car park and transfer mum’s things (including her Christmas presents) safely to the more secure boot of her car and, after a brief moment to reflect on matters, we take a deep breath and head inside.

Mum is sitting in her chair, fed, dressed and just about ready to go. Sis delivers the socks she was asked to bring and mum’s outdoor shoes are then slowly (and with difficulty as mum’s feet have swollen from underuse) added to complete the ensemble. After a few ‘I’s are dotted and ‘T’s crossed, mum is placed into a wheelchair and, bidding farewell to some of the rather excellent staff on that particular ward, with a hope that they won’t be seeing her back there any time soon (which I think was meant in the best possible way…) we head back out into a corridor to anticipate going into the great outdoors. Sis fetches her silver car (“Thunderbird 1”) and we transfer mum into it and I load up my green car (“Thunderbird 2”) with the luggage and her walker, and follow along behind them (after having returned the wheelchair). Strangely, memories of that same road ten weeks ago, heading in the opposite direction after the ambulance was called, come flooding back to me as I drive along. It’s funny, that. I’ve driven that way many times in between, but it was only tonight that it all came back to me.

I arrive at the flat in time to hand mum her walker for her to attempt the epic walk up the corridor to her home, and an evening of readjusting her to the ways of the world and her old/new environment. After an hour or so, I leave sis and mum to it as they anticipate the arrival of the first of the carers, and head home and back to relative normality. I make a swift call as I arrive as I’d forgotten to mention a couple of things, and sis tells me that the carer has just arrived. Later on, as I doze in front of the telly, there’s another call. This time it’s mum, happy enough and safely tucked up in her own bed at last.

So, after all that I’ve told you about, mum is finally home.

Now the fun really begins…

But that’s another story! I’m rather hoping that this is the end of our sorry little saga for a while, although, as regular readers will know, mum has been home before during these events, so nothing is certain. This has been a very personal journey that I’ve been sharing with you, and I know that one or two people felt that they were being a little intrusive as they read it, but I hope you haven’t been too appalled at my indiscretions. I tried to keep it honest, and, perhaps at times I was rather TOO honest, but I’m hoping that these diaries will prove to be a useful document for me (and hopefully for my sister as well) to refer to over the coming months and years to help keep a sense of proportion and reality as the memory of a rather difficult time begins to fade. For those of you who have joined me along the way, thank you for your interest, and I hope, truly I do, that we won’t need to be adding any further chapters any time soon.