HOSPITAL UPDATES W/C 230613 (PART TWO)

Wednesday, June 26th, 2013

At 12.20 I receive a phone call at work telling me that "flowers are allowed on this ward" and that my sister had told mum that "I was going to order them today...", although God only knows where she got that idea from, and asking me whether I'd done it yet and whether I had the details and oh-for-f***'s-sake-will-you-just-shut-up-about-it-woman??? (Which I think, but don't actually say...)

She signs off with a cheery "Well, it's important to me and I want it doing! Bye!" [CLUNK!!!] which led to a lot of internal swearing and an almost pathological desire to dig in my heels and not do it.

Ever.

Two further messages await me as I stagger through the door in the late evening after crossing half the county to get the beloved to and from another urgent appointment with her osteopath.

The first concerns mum's former work colleague who mother suggests I should meet up with if we're going to Tatton this weekend (we aren't) because she's exhibiting some cacti. The fact that I wouldn't recognise this woman if I fell over her is, of course, neither here nor there.

The second is to tell me that she's now been put back on the main ward next to her friend the anorexic and that they're now talking about sending mum home again... "So that's all good news..."

Full of absolutely no joy whatsoever, I finally get to do the washing up that's built up since the weekend before staggering off to bed.

Thursday, June 27th, 2013

After lying awake half the night with a mind full of anxiety and worry, I finally just get up at 4.30am to face another working day almost belligerently determined to tell anyone from social services who might ring up about my mother to go and take a running jump, whilst pondering upon the "Flowers" situation and the further complexities it triggers when I think about online accounts, passwords and the legality or otherwise of using "third party" debit cards...

I ponder long and hard this morning upon whether being old and ill gives anyone the right to be rude to people, although I suspect that it's just me, because I couldn't imagine mum ever speaking to her other visitors (including the Minister) in quite the same brusque tones as she uses to address me. The prospect of her being at home again fills me with utter dread, to be perfectly honest with you, even though it ought to be our ultimate goal. Ah well, at least the washing is now in the car so I can't forget to take it next time I go.

The working morning gets interrupted by another lengthy "flower ordering" based chat, this time with my sister, and, as that conversation ends, the thought of driving to the coast and just drifting off to the soft chugging of Carbon Monoxide poisoning suddenly seems ever so appealing.

A brief (1' 50") call from my mother implies that the plan is that she's going to be sent home soon, that she doesn't want to go somewhere where she's going to be waited on hand and foot, but that will encourage her to fend for herself, that she's still on the magnesium every other day and they had three attempts to put in a cannula, and that "I might want to enquire" when I visit tonight, although she knows that I'm "not too fond" of the staff...

Mercifully, there's no mention of flowers...

Of course, after all of that build up, the Thursday visit passes almost without incident and is generally remarkably civilised. After I walked from the supermarket in the rain, carrying the washing in a bag, including her slippers which the staff, at least, were very pleased to see, and I arrived just as mum disappeared into the loo, after which she snapped at me quite loudly enough to draw the attention of the rest of the ward as she tried to get herself back into bed.

It's about her difficulty in moving her leg, of course, and comes from frustration, but it's still the same old problem that we're supposed to be telepathic when it comes to her immediate needs so instead of telling me what the problem is and asking for help, we end up in this pitiful situation.

After that shocking moment, things calm down and she tells me of the suggestion that she goes into rehabilitation for a while upon release, despite the fact that her "brain doesn't work" and about her visit from the now "lovely" other minister (she used to say that she didn't like him...) who she didn't even recognise at first, she said, and who (once she worked out who he was) then told her all about his adventures in both Amsterdam and Scarborough, and which led to mum's tales of visiting Italy both as a child and later on with an architect friend which was "the best way to visit Venice" apparently, so, the next time you go, be sure to grab hold of a passing architect...

I countered with stories of being shown some holiday snaps by the beloved's parents, although she just stated that "other people's photographs aren't really interesting" and so we moved on. I then tried to get her to explain the cacti show message which she left me, because she sees that as an opportunity for me to get to know one of her friends. I'm also cross-examined about why I don't go to Cornwall more often because "they'll be the only family you've got after I'm gone" to which my explanation of only having a limited number of annual holidays, many of which get chewed up by running around about family matters, doesn't seem to be an adequate reply.

I manage to discuss in more civil tones the wretched flower order, getting the missing addresses and whatever online password requirements there might be and promise to do it on Saturday... "I might be home by then!" she suggests, but I really don't think so...

In the meanwhile I read her a card she'd received, and was able to head back into the rain to meet the beloved who was waiting patiently back in the supermarket car park and report that "she's been worse..." in response to the question "how was she tonight...?"

Friday, June 28th, 2013

Nothing...

Instead, I have another busy day all to myself, although I do call in at mum's flat and pick up the post, I'm far too tired to actually run through it and add it to my planned "Do mum's admin on Saturday" pile...

It does appear, however, that mum was not sent home.

Saturday, June 29th, 2013

I struggle to get around to all the admin. It just stares accusingly at me and I stare back, like we're having a Mexican stand-off in one of those old westerns.

In the end, when I finally summoned up the energy to do it, writing the covering letter for the hospital and ordering the flowers only took fifty minutes, so it's just as well that I didn't try doing it at work, eh, boys and girls?

With that out of the way, I looked at the pile of mail, which includes another "overdue payment" notice from that wretched online card company who's bill I thought I'd cleared two weeks ago, which leads to another long and frustrating telephone call which I could have done without.

Later on, I drive in on a sunny afternoon, stopping to pick up the promised local paper on the way. She's asleep when I arrive but, unfortunately, someone wakes her up, and so forty minutes or so of unpleasantness was not avoided.

Mum feels "not bad" today after having had low blood pressure yesterday and this morning, and she's been told that she should drink more fluids, despite her now being on food supplements again. I hand over the newspaper alongside some other free sheets that were in her mailbox but she doesn't want those because they take up far too much space. I then get asked whether I happen to have any crisps on me because I'm obviously a walking supermarket, and then get the inevitable "You never bring me anything" which leads to another great cheese debate, prompted by a patient in a bed opposite who I'd rather not bring myself to even look at.

Meanwhile mum "doesn't suppose" that I know whether they're sending her home because "they'll only tell you if you show an interest" or, indeed, when they want to send her. I do get her to read the letter that I was trying to sort out this morning, but this doesn't prompt her to take any action about it. Finally, I try to describe - in "light-hearted terms - the problems I had putting through the flower order, but that just turns into a long list of criticisms about my lack of common sense, and when I try to describe the flowers that I actually ordered, it seems that I've done everything wrong with that, too.

She decides she needs the toilet, so I take the opportunity to head off early and go home, part of me going to that place where I really think that I'd rather not ever go and visit her again...

HOSPITAL UPDATES W/C 230613 (PART ONE)

Sunday, June 23rd, 2013

Yet another week has gone by and another Sunday afternoon rolls by. My decision about quite when to visit remains a little vague right up until the moment of departure. The weather is lousy so a midsummer day in the garden becomes increasingly unlikely; The start of the cricket final I want to listen to is delayed and delayed again so that I run the risk of missing the finish if I visit during the evening; The film we think we might like to see isn't quite tempting enough. Eventually the clincher is needing to get to a supermarket to buy something for our evening meal, so I head off into the dreadful afternoon traffic and arrive at the bedside a few minutes late.

Mum is asleep but immediately wakes as I arrive to ask about the flowers she wants ordering. This is the latest obsession and my various objections about flowers on wards, and it being too early to mark the anniversary of the gentleman friend's demise, are invalid it appears, as well as my excuse that it's proved a tad difficult to get hold of my sister this weekend.

Other than that, mother is "feeling a lot better today" and ate both her breakfast and her lunch, and even managed to wash herself this morning, whilst her stomach appears to be behaving itself a little more. She is being advised to "walk more" but as she is being kept in isolation, this seems to be proving difficult.

The chat today is about how wonderful "Bijou" the nurse is, and how mum talks in French with him, the fact that she wants to buy herself a mobile telephone whenever she gets home, the difference between "worrying" and "caring", me forgetting to bring the washing back and having had to put the heating on two days after midsummer's day in order to have the vaguest hope of drying it, the fact that I have "no interests" (because cinema and theatre don't count as interests in comparison to taking the kids to the beach apparently), and about my fateful history of not being married or having children, despite my life having "gone wrong" at all of the moments when that might once have been an option.

I'm such a disappointment I suspect...

Still, before I leave, she does ask me to bring a local paper with me some time which is, again, a step in the right direction and further evidence of taking more interest in the world which is probably a good sign.

Monday, June 24th, 2013

A rare day on which I hear nothing and have no contact whatsoever with the hospital, my sister, my mother or any of her friends, although a chirruping bird that happens to make a sound almost exactly like a slightly muffled and distant telephone ringing did rather fox me after I'd headed off to bed early.

Tuesday, June 25th, 2013

Halfway to Christmas... Although, after five-and-a-half-months of this, I'm still waiting for 2013 to get properly started...

A mid-morning call from my sister fills in the gap of yesterday but adds to the complexities of trying to make a complaint to a hospital where six different emails go to six different people, all of whom insist on being filled in on all of the information they've already had so that they cam "make a start" on their investigations. Investigations that they have claimed to have made a start on on each previous occasion, too, by the way.

I'm now confused because I don't know quite where certain paperwork might actually be after the intervening weeks, and so that's something else to have to deal with when I get home, although, when I do it' is actually found eventually after a bit of a hunt.

Meanwhile the "flowers" debate has also caused ructions in Cornwall... so, it is with a certain amount of trepidation that I head towards the hospital for the latest of my evening visits. As I arrive, the first thing I hear is the nurse who got everything wrong when talking to me a few weeks ago giving her name out over the telephone, so that goes into the notebook.

I'm feeling rather exhausted today and possibly not in the most receptive of moods, but the subsequent fifty minutes or so won't ever go down as the finest hour in my relationship with my mother. It wasn't that it was awful or anything, just utterly depressing and debilitating. It starts with her telling me that she felt much better than she had been, that she had eaten more, and started listening to her radio, all of which are positive signs, and that she had slept for most of Monday, and that her stomach was behaving itself a lot more. The Doctor had told her this morning that there had been a bug in her system but it had cleared up and, if the latest sample is clear, they might put her back on the main ward.

So far, so good...

Mum then starts to tell me that my sister is out on a National Trust visit but I don't hear her properly which triggers a raised voice of the "I SAID..." variety which implied that I wasn't actually bothering to listen to her words in the first place.

This is how an avalanche begins...

Tales of visits from the Chaplain and mum's Minister trigger a row about the infection risk and whether or not I should report to the nurse and get myself bagged up in plastic before I venture into the room, like the sainted Minister and "all of the nurses" do, (even though they don't...). As if to prove my point, a nurse then pops in with the lunch options for tomorrow without gloves or plastic apron, so I begin to think that my mother either just wants me to look even more ridiculous or that this dreaded obsession with "the rules" is resurfacing. Of course the fact that I did ask at the desk on the first day she was returned to the side ward and they said it was fine to go in as I was is irrelevant, of course, because she has to know best and "they put up these signs for a good reason, you know..."

With that fractious moment behind us, the talk returns to her wanting "a block of cheese" to keep in the fridge for the nurses to bring her the occasional slice of (not going to happen), the fact that a camera still hasn't been put up her bottom (for which I thought that she'd be grateful, to be honest with you), the use of the commode (such a joyful topic), how much more she "reckons" the beloved's family ought to be doing to help us because "if it was the other way around she'd be helping us out a lot more" (Yeah, right...! No wonder the beloved is getting impatient with my "wanting a quiet life" approach to my mother...), how "bloody useless" she feels not being able to wash herself (although she did on Sunday), or walk very far because she's "restricted" to this tiny room, although later on she says that she's not looking forward to being on the main ward again either, despite her complaints when she was moved away from her "friends"previously, because you really can't win with this woman. I also note that her instructions to me to draw the curtains and switch on the lights before I leave are things that she could have done herself in an effort to be more mobile, but instead she chooses to get me to do them for her instead.

I then realise that I've forgotten to bring back her washing. A genuine moment of forgetfulness which triggers a rant of the "These things are IMPORTANT! You don't UNDERSTAND!" variety and which then reminds her about the f***ing flowers all over again...

Bah!

Interestingly enough, just before I leave, because she's worried about me and worried about my lack of sleep, she suggest that I take a "week off" from visiting her and whilst I feel like that wouldn't be the worst idea, I still find myself wondering "But who else is there?" and assume that she might just go stark staring mad if she felt quite so forgotten by the world.

And so I drove home feeling thoroughly depressed and like I just couldn't bear it any longer because it's simply wearing me out. I drive along the road and all of the people that I see seem to be allowed to have lives of their own and I don't feel as if I have any more.

I arrive home and ring my sister for a long and weary chat, interspersed by the occasional "tut" from the beloved whose patience with me is wearing a bit thin as she worries about what it's doing to me. My sister is promising to come up for a couple of weeks to shift the burden for a while, but that's still a month away, and God only knows what state I'm going to be in by then...

THE ELSIE TENNER

As I sometimes will, I ill-advisedly weighed into the debate on bank notes the other day by pointing out to someone who was complaining about the lack of female representation upon them that "the Queen is on all of them, of course" a smug comment for which I was quite rightly slapped down, but which I felt was a point worth making because in all of the articles that have been written about these matters over the past few days, that one point is seldom made.

For good reason, of course, because she's not actually there on merit but because of a tradition dating back through thousands of years and a fair few empires.

Anyway, the good-natured banter continued and the person I was e-chatting (actually the representative of the "Lass O'Gowrie" pub in Manchester) to mentioned that they were quite keen for the strong female characters from "Coronation Street" to appear on the notes, from Ena Sharples on the fiver right on through to Annie Walker on the fifty.

I "wittily" retorted "An Elsie Tenner...?" which was enthusiastically received with a hearty "someone should mock one of those up" and, with the aid of a handy ten-minute coffee break and a couple of Photoshop filters, ten minutes later, in my own lazy and slightly incompetent way, I had, because I couldn't imagine anyone else being bothered to...

Obviously, someone more committed to the "joke" might have spent an entire evening mocking up something far more elaborate and convincing but sometimes it's just about throwing stuff together to get the point across, and I hope that the two-hundred-plus people who went and had a look, and the debate that was started later on that evening about what people might spend it on gave them all a few seconds of fun as they travelled on through this bleak grey world of ours.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the chances of the powers that be putting either Emmeline pankhurst or Jane Austen on the fiver seems to be a pretty safe bet at the moment, considering that there seems to have been quite a backlash since it was announced that Elizabeth Fry was going to be replaced by Sir Winston Churchill.

Emmeline Pankhurst makes the most sense, I suppose, given that her efforts did far more to change the ordinary lives of so many women than a lot of people have, although Mary Seacole, Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bronte also have their supporters.

But this is the problem isn't it?

As "Horrible Histories" have also found, it's actually quite difficult to trawl through the pages of history and find many strong female role models to get the girls to also feel connected to our history because for so much of our history women were either not allowed to be in positions of power or simply not recognised by the patriarchal culture in which they existed.

So it might seem rather strange then that so many of that short list are writers, as if that was one of the very few ways that you could make any impact as a woman in those pre-twentieth century days. Unless you were a goddess of course, or an empress, or a queen, or a freedom fighter, or a saint, or a mistress, or a whore... The occasional scientist gets remembered, of course, and the odd economist, nurse, or engineer, but all-in-all, it's not the longest of lists.

Interestingly enough that anonymous person from the "Lass O'Gowrie" might have stumbled upon the interesting point that it is in television drama, and most especially the soaps, that the strongest female role models have been considered to be more universally acceptable and have been allowed to shine and dominate their environments.

It's also quite fascinating to see how poorly Australia treated its first female Prime Minister and not just this week, but over the entire duration of her tenure.

The world, it seems, still has an awful long way to go.

35 YEARS WOMBLING ON

I was appalled with myself it took possibly more than 35 years to notice the double meaning in that line in "The Wombling Song..."

Perhaps you know the line... it's the one that goes like this:

"Uncle Bulgaria, he can remember the days when he wasn't behind the times..."

Or was it  "Behind 'The Times'...?"

Because that's how he was most often seen, sitting reading a copy of today's 'Times" newspaper... and I simply cannot believe that it took me so many years to pick up on that, perhaps totally unintentional (but I doubt it) double meaning...

Hold on...

You know...

I think that I may have mentioned this before...

Some time ago in another blog posting somewhere hereabouts...

Hmmm...

Perhaps my little daily literary offerings are starting to repeat themselves... Perhaps I'm becoming repetitive.

Perhaps my thought processes have finally completed the loop and gone full circle...

Perhaps that's what they mean by "going loopy"...?

Well, if I am beginning to cover the same ground, perhaps it is time for a long break after all, although it is, of course, the pinnacle of arrogance to expect anyone else to have even remembered a vague and obscure f=reference which I may (or may not) have made in these pages at some point in the none-too distant past...

Still, whilst we are thinking about covering ground (Do you see what I did there...? With links like that I really ought to have been working in local radio for all of these years...), let's all take a leaf from the Wombles' own book and pick up that litter as we go, eh...?

SMALL TOWN BLUES

It is possible for a "nice little place" to be far too little for your own good. If you're not the sort of person who likes to "join in" with things, living in such a place can become quite ghastly for you, especially when everyone knows your name, your business and, more terrifyingly, where you live and they can take it upon themselves to try and "involve" you in things because they think that "it's for your own good" or something.

Big cities can, of course, be lonely and anonymous places where a timid soul can get lost and forgotten in the busy bustle and the mayhem and the anger and the fury, and can spend years not knowing who it is who's living upstairs and what they're getting up to. Entire lives can pass by without even registering as the important business of just surviving goes on all around you and can leave some people behind to fend for themselves or simply drown in the gutters.

So there has to be a "Goldilocks" size for a town to be. Not too big that you get lost in the melee, but not too small that you get no sense of privacy. After all, whilst many of us might need some sense of belonging, it really doesn't suit everyone, and some people really need the space to be left alone if they choose to, whilst still having the option to emerge into the daylight and exchange a few pleasantries over the garden fence if the need should arise.

Small town America has had its fair share of problems in this regard. Sometimes, a you drive across those vast open spaces, you quite suddenly happen upon an entire town which seems to have sprung up out of nowhere and jet, with just a couple more miles on the clock, the place is behind you and your back in the wide open spaces again and it's as if the whole place was never even there.

And yet, within those communities, entire lifetimes are being lived and shaped in those few square miles that they have to call "home..."

But with small town living come small town problems.

When everyone knows everyone else, it's rather difficult to feel "free" at all, especially if you feel that everything you see or do, or everyplace you go and everyone you talk to is being scrutinised and dissected by any and all of your neighbours, who might have already mapped out your entire life, from where you're going to work, to who you're going to end up living with, almost before you've even learned to walk.

Never can the phrase "I know who you are" be quite so constraining and stifling.

This can, quite naturally, lead to the kind of disaffected youth that causes all sorts of little rebellions which can grow into bigger rebellions and which will find those self-satisfied know-it-alls who decided that they knew all about you when you were eight to congratulate themselves and tell themselves that they "always knew they were a wrong 'un..." which can, of course, become a self-fulfilling prophecy whilst those same sanctimonious types would never be able to see the part they played in shaping this poor unfortunate creature.

When everyone you know lives within eight square miles and the next town can be over fifty miles away in any direction, getting out can be a problem, too. Even if it's only for one night. Otherwise all of your socialising and other leisure activities are spent in the glaring spotlight of the neighbourhood and nothing that you do will do unreported or unremembered.

Such societies sometimes find it difficult to evolve and change, too, and getting people to embrace new thoughts and philosophies can prove almost impossible in an environment where the answer is "we don't do things like that around these parts..."

There are other, more "harmless" seeming, insidious dangers, too. The horrors committed in the name of "having a laugh" or "just a bit of fun", or when you find that so much of the local culture orbits around in that circle of hell known as the "High School Prom" and those who end up being "Kings and Queens" of such a ghastly event can also end up being your civic leaders for the rest of your life, being the person who can't get a date from within that limited gene pool can immediately set you out as a loner, or an outsider...

And we all know how that can go.

God! I dislike with such intensity the fact that Britain has started to embrace the "prom culture" in recent years. It's just such a ghastly and tacky idea, and yet we've bought into it with such enthusiasm that the roads are clogged with stretch limousines full of over-dressed, screeching teenagers throughout the summer evenings.

Just another in our long list of not-so-cheap and tacky imports that do so very little to improve our lives.

BLOWN IT

A well-known sporting pundit (and former performer), a fellow who nowadays is more likely to be selling the virtues of a packet of crisps asked a question the other day which went along the lines of "I wonder if non-sports fans know what they're missing?" to which my immediate reaction was to think "Well, yes we do, crisp boy, but we just find it hard to give a damn..." remembering those terrifying days in the Student Union Bar when a load of huge Welshmen would strip naked and sing at each other from table tops after playing in a game of rugby whilst wondering what some of us found so fascinating about the books we were trying to read.

Different strokes, fellas, and all that. I wonder if they knew what they were missing, other than a head full of braincells the next day...

Despite many attempts over the years, football continues to baffle me, as indeed does rugby and tennis, and the Olympics all but passed me by last year, so much so that I still don't recognise many of the Joe Farriers, the Bradley Hardacres, and the Jennifer Ennistons who are paraded in front of me as beacons of something or other by the various advertisers. On one brief morning I did get sucked in by the rowing finals, much as I had during the Greece event eight years before, but I couldn't tell you now who actually won what.

I do, of course, appreciate that a lot of people get very passionate about their team, or a particular individual when they're playing well, and some might even say that this is because they just admire watching someone else reach a pinnacle of human achievement that they themselves never could (although I expect some admire their wealth a little more), so you can't say that we don't know what we're missing because it's there, being paraded before us constantly by the media whether we're have any interest in the tournament in question or, perhaps more importantly, don't.

And it would be very easy to complain at the wall-to-wall blanket coverage of any of these "minority interests" but generally we don't, seeing that it makes a lot of people very happy, although, if you turned it all around and, for example, replaced an evening's programming with a ballet or an opera, I suspect the outcry would be phenomenal.

Which brings us, not very neatly, to Sunday afternoon's Champion's League Cricket Final which was much curtailed by rain but which did eventually get played in the early hours of Sunday evening.

It seems very strange to me that the mere mention of the game of cricket can bring the almost immediate response of "it's SOOO boring" from people who seem quite keen on those 11-a-side kickabouts that I find so tedious, because I found it fascinating, and, judging by the bellowing I was doing at my portable long-wave radio (for I have no sports-based TV channels available to me, obviously) at 8.30 on Sunday evening as the whole thing came down to the last ball after another typical display of ineptitude by the home side in managing to once again snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory, did remind me of that salt and fat peddling pundit and what he had said.

Yes, I do sometimes know what you're missing, but it seems that almost everyone else does too, and the focus of each one of us on our own particular passions is not to be sneered at...

SHORT AND TWEET

I don't think that I'm going to have much to talk to you about this week. My brain's still a bit fried, to be honest, from all the long days and bright nights and the consequent insomnia, so things might get a little "patchy" for a while, especially as my "focus" (such as it is) has been otherwhere lately...

Last week, for example, I got a Tweet from someone who has a lot more faith in my abilities than I do (and bless you for that...), suggesting that I enter another of those short story competitions that  occasionally run in TwitWorld where writers and other idiots attempt to tell a complete story in 140 characters or less if you deduct the competition's own hashtag.

"I think you'd be good at this..." Ah, a momentary beam of starlight in my otherwise unimpressive existence...

Still, because one or two of you are still lucky enough to not have been dragged into Twitworld, you probably won't have seen any of my own crude attempts at literature which I word-wrangled for that, so I thought I'd share my entries with you here, ("you lacky, lacky peeple...") appearing, quite naturally, in the reverse order of their creation... because, yep, I did seven of the bloody things (well, there are, supposed to be only seven stories that can be told...), as, once again, my enthusiasm outstripped my reason...

Seeming to be trapped forever in the corridor of eternity, they happened upon a loophole, & then the whole of reality shifted again.

Over the years, the old oak tree thought it had seen it all, but even it was taken by surprise when the axe finally fell.

+LESTRADE+STOP+
+BODY+IN+LOCKED+ROOM+KILLED+BY+ICICLE+IN+THERMOS+STOP+
+AFFECTIONATELY+YOURS+STOP+SHERLOCK+E.O.M.+

Pick a minority group. Tell people they are their enemy. Light the blue touchpaper. Retire to a safe distance. Watch the world burn.

Tragically, it was only when I found out that I was dying, that I began to discover anything about really living. Life sucks.

Born in a sewer, he lived & died in the dark, but, for one glorious moment, he was the most important man on Earth when he saved her

As they sifted the ruins of her home, the fact that the crib wasn’t there was a sign of hope, but their reunion took over 50 years.

Not a sure-fire winner amongst them, I'm sure, but it's nice to share. Do feel free to tell me what you think...

HOSPITAL UPDATES W/C 160613

Sunday, June 16th, 2013

A day off.

I hear nothing from the hospital or from the family for a day. Instead I head off to Manchester so the beloved can have a haircut and we have a spontaneous breakfast in the extra hour we find ourselves having due to being given duff information about what time things open, and the planned lunch which we had booked.

We arrive home hot and sticky from the exertion of trudging around town on a hot old day and just in time for the rain-affected cricket match to begin, which keeps me entertained until well into the early evening.

Monday, June 17th, 2013

Some early morning bill paying for the emergency call button which is, of course, still not actually being used, but them's the breaks. Then I rang the family for a swift weekly update chat before getting on with my own life for a few hours.

By the time I arrive for the evening visit, and had managed to extract a chair from the locked room they were stored in, mum tells me that she's feeling a lot better than she did yesterday, and that she's had another Get Well card, and visitors both on Sunday evening and during the afternoon. The afternoon's visitor was her church minister who made a point of putting on plastic gown and gloves because of a perceived infection risk. Mum asked me if there was a notice outside instructing visitors to do this, but there wasn't, and it would have been too late for me by then anyway, even if there had. Not unsurprisingly, the idea of this immediately made me feel queasy and slightly headachy, such is the power of suggestion.

The biopsy has been brought forward to tomorrow rather than Thursday, which I think is more because of the availability of a slot than because of any other sinister sense of urgency. For reasons I have explained before, I tell her that I don't think that they suspect any "urgent" need to do so, even though it's what she now believes and is currently worrying about, perhaps needlessly. Of course, I have been known to be wrong before, so perhaps there's good reason to.

This leads to a mildly tetchy and all-too-familiar exchange about me "not asking" what's going on, ground that we've covered many, many times before, but, to be perfectly honest, I'm far too tired to argue.

Being in the side ward seems to have its advantages. She got her pills early and consequently went to sleep earlier the night before, but the "shouting" staff woke her three times, despite the fact that she claims to have slept well. She was also able to make "about a dozen" telephone calls to various friends of hers the previous day, which is a lot easier to do in relative privacy.

However, sometimes, she thinks, that they forget she's in there and so she misses out on her cup of tea, and it was her obsession about that which was filling her mind as I took the chair back, returned to say my farewells and drifted off into the hot evening air.

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

Biopsy day. I hear nothing and make no calls but later on I'm told that "the procedure went well..."

Wednesday, June 19th, 2013

After an anxiety attack or twelve, I am determined to sort out this ongoing bill with the greetings card company and am, after a family conference call, at least, able to pay off a chunk of it without, sadly, being allowed to shut down the wretched account, so I guess that's just yet another piece of paperwork that I'll need to keep an eye on.

The day plods on and, eventually, after a brief visit to the supermarket, I trudge my weary way along the corridors once more to make yet another visit to my mother's bedside.

I immediately ask how it went yesterday, to which the answers are "Dreadful" followed swiftly by "It's just one thing after another" but we are able to have a lengthy discussion about mum's ailments after this prompt, and more details are gleaned from this. Like the fact that there is some fluid around her old operation scars, and that there have been no results from the Bone Marrow tests yet, which is, of course, only to be expected.

Mum is, of course, convinced that there is something "seriously" wrong, despite a lack of tangible evidence being available yet, but this leads to yet another recap of the events of that long, dark week in April. The "troubled" lady from the main ward has died since mum was moved to the side ward, so that's slightly unsettling of course, but mum seems most concerned about her anorexic friend who hasn't dropped by for a couple of days now, possibly (mum thinks) because of the bad news about the other patient.

Meanwhile, mum claims to be"not eating" (but, it transpires, will eat desserts, so her sweet tooth is still going strong...) and also claims to have "no energy" which I put down to the hot, muggy weather and the fact that her muscles are not exactly being over-used as she has been lying in hospital beds for months at a time. That is the point at which she announces that she is "too tall" for the bed she's in (which hasn't changed) not that I can do much about that...

She also tells me that there have been more visitors from church, although "sometimes" she's really not in the mood for visitors, which is an interesting thing for her to say, he thought, as he sat there visiting. She was also having some problems with feeling itchy but was frustrated because she has to wait 24 hours for a prescription for cream to deal with it to be dispensed. The wheels move very slowly, it seems. Meanwhile, she seems to want to sleep all of the time which is either significant or not, depending upon your point of view.

Still, all-in-all, we had a nice enough chat, and the hour passed swiftly enough and without too much in the way of irritation, even when I mentioned that I might be without transport over the weekend, depending upon how the car gets on at the garage. The occasional nurse popped in to drop off menu options or to ask about urine, which is all part of the day-to-day institutional routine that mum seems to have slipped so very easily into.

I arrived home and got an immediate telephone call from my mother, irritated that she had forgotten to give me the washing. Another call, this time from her former work colleague informed me that she intended to visit again tomorrow to give me another night off...

Thursday, June 20th, 2013

A favourite actor, James Gandolfini, has died at 51. Sometimes life feels really unfair for other people, too.

I don't hear much from the hospital today, although the telephone does ring almost as soon as I walk through the door anticipating a quiet evening at home watching (perhaps appropriately) "Despicable Me".

It's mother. She's on the brink of having her evening meal delivered to her, but has taken a moment to ring to tell me how she's feeling much better now having been "dreadful" that morning, about which I was, of course, oblivious. She's had visitors and made a few telephone calls but her meal arrives before she can elaborate, but she does want me to get cards and stamps so that she can write a few notes to people, even though I point out that I might not have any transport this weekend if the garage run true to form.

Friday, June 21st, 2013

Midsummer's day.

Nearly half a year of this... HALF A YEAR...! (and now the nights are drawing in...)

Still, after a mildly complicated day of working from home and dealing with an ultimately mild car problem, I stir myself and head to the hospital for yet another evening visit. I stop on the way at the supermarket for the only pack of note cards they sell, one which is, unfortunately, rather disappointingly in its design, and a pack of what will be described as "far too many" stamps when I deliver them.

It's an odd visit. Her leg hurts a lot, but that might be due to having spent most of the last three months in bed, I suppose. There have been no biopsy results that she can remember, but then her memory is showing signs of slipping away, especially at times when I ask awkward questions like "Why don't you   write it down?" to which the answer is that she "can't be bothered..." In the end, it's far easier to say that she "doesn't remember" because that then becomes a stick to beat me with for "not taking any interest" unlike my "saintly" sister who "will ask these questions" and, more importantly, "understands..."

The gossip is that mum's doctor has gone on holiday back home in Romania after telling her that he suspected that the antibiotics that she's on might be what's causing the unfortunate side effects in her digestive system. Nevertheless, she remains on the side ward to avoid the spread of infection and this isolation and the sense that she gets "forgotten about" and, perhaps, the worry that  she is "always going to be like this" and her growing depression is beginning to cause her curmudgeonly unpleasantness to resurface.

Luckily, for once it's not directed at me (except for the bit about switching on the main light which I suspect is unnecessary at that time and dare to say so), but the laser beams were honing in on me at about the time I chose to depart, so I escaped the worst of it, perhaps because her incessant itching was focussing her rage more towards the staff who were unfortunate enough to have other thing to do that meant that they couldn't "snap to it" immediately and apply the soothing cream.

I ponder that my mother might have enjoyed working in the old days of the British Empire with that attitude, but then she surprises me by telling me that she wishes she'd been a nurse, but that her mother wouldn't let her...

Now that would have been interesting...

Today's "obsession" was about ordering flowers. An ordert for her late, lamented gentleman friend's family in August, and, more alarmingly, another order for the ward staff...

"Don't people normally do that after they've gone home?" I asked, unwisely.

"Well, I don't want to do it like everyone else..."

In other words, it's that old familiar family habit of trying to buy your affection, and hoping to be told how wonderful you are and bolster a sense of your own self-importance...

Well, that's what I grew up thinking... Perhaps it's just a nice thing to do...?

Other chat involves a familiar agenda involving a lack of visitors, a lot of sleep, a missed phone call (the doctor was in so she didn't answer it), an "exhausting" trek around the bed to put a toiletry bag away, the fact that she's not eating (unless it's a pudding) but that she's not prepared to mention to the staff that she might eat the food supplements they could provide.

Most annoying seems to be the fact that the staff haven't taken away her food plate and her obsession with order ("It drives me mad things being in the wrong place...") does make me suspect a little O.C.D. might be surfacing which I accept is about "control" but only triggers more irritation about the modern tendency towards acronyms.

Ah well... Things were starting to get a little tetchy, so I bid my farewells and headed home brooding and had received a long, long night of insomnia for my trouble.

Saturday, June 22nd, 2013

A day at home, thankfully.

I tried last night to ring my sister about this "flowers" thing, but got no answer, so that was still on my "stuff to do" list as I staggered wearily into Saturday, as was the washing up, and sorting out mum's washing, both of which I'm doing as the phone rings at 8.15.

It's mum, calling as she waits for her breakfast to be delivered. She's "feeling a lot better" than yesterday, apparently, but had forgotten that I was working from home today, which also meant that she'd forgotten that it was a Saturday.

Still, at least she didn't wake me up, eh...? Fat chance of that...

EASY LIKE SUNDAY MORNING...

One of the advantages of getting into town early is that you get to see all of the places that are usually packed to the twelves with busy, busy people looking a lot more quiet and sedate than they might otherwise be, but with the advantage of daylight making them seem far less scary.

Not that just looking less scary can guarantee anything.

Anyway, I thought that it might be nice to share what that busiest shopping thoroughfare of the city of Manchester looks like whilst pretty much everything is still closed and most of the people are still coming round and facing their Sunday mornings, or battling our way through the traffic to get there and filling up those quiet streets with the hustle and bustle of thousands and thousands of busy, busy people filled with purpose and spending power...

Peaceful looking, isn't it...? Almost pleasant...

Although, if it was like that all of the time, pretty soon there wouldn't be any shops left for anyone to go to... but I suspect that that's another rant for another time. Instead we should just take a moment to enjoy the serenity of the moment and try not to think about the poor guy and his dog who were sleeping in a doorway just out of the edge of the frame.

Sorry that it's just a quick bit of nonsense today but I'm in a bit of a hurry...

BREAKFAST ACCOMPLISHED

After much procrastination and distraction during the intervening three and a bit years, I can finally and happily report that “continental breakfast out has finally been achieved!” Now, I’ll grant you that, as achievements go, it’s hardly up there with climbing Everest or setting foot on the moon, nor does it plumb the very depths of “touching bottom” in the Marianas Trench, but, in comparison to just switching on the TV and watching the news, or pouring out a bowl of Corn Flakes, it’s got to be something…

To be fair, however, by the time we get all of the other weekend morning nonsense out of the way, the appointments, battling our way around the supermarket, delivering foodstuffs to the elderly and ungracious, and then rattling around trying to find parking spaces, the idea of heading to the preferred café we wanted to go to usually feels far too exhausting, and, because time has usually marched on a bit, it would probably be something more like a “continental brunch” by the time we actually sat down to eat it.

By then we still feeling pretty famished, too and have our lunch…

But, once upon a long ago, we had planned to sit down in Gatwick airport and have a leisurely and civilized breakfast after our overnight stay as we travelled back from Egypt but, due to various unpleasant circumstances, we had little in the way of collective appetites and I had ended up eating Corn Flakes and toast all alone in a corporate hotel whilst we fretted about whether the one hour flight to our final destination was even possible under the present personal conditions.

Anyway, we had planned to make up for it on another day, but somehow life kept on getting in the way of that, until last weekend when the jigsaw pieces finally came together in our favour.

Sort of...

Obviously we had to drag ourselves out of bed at a ridiculously early hour, and we had already grabbed a swift slice of toast or two when we dashed off to the station and headed into the big city only to find that we’d been misinformed about certain opening times, so the jigsaw pieces weren’t looking too promising as we mooched around with an hour to kill.

But then, we spotted it.

Conveniently placed right across the road from where the establishment that the appointment that was our main reason for being in the city at all was booked. A café from the very same chain as the one at Gatwick Airport that we had planned to call in at all those years ago.

Moments later we were sitting down and ordering fresh coffee and fruit juice and baguettes and jam and pastries, and when it came it was all rather lovely and filled that unexpected spare hour, and our bellies, almost to perfection, and was so successful that we readily agreed that we ought to do t again some time.

Presumably in a decade or so when the fates decree that it is the right time for us to do so.

Still, in the meantime, I have to report...

Breakfast accomplished.

POMPEII LIVE

On Tuesday, June the 18th, I was fortunate enough to attend the first of the British Museum's "Live" events which were being beamed to various cinemas around the country in much the same way as certain theatrical events I have attended recently have also been.

A few weeks earlier, when we had first seen the advertisements for this event, I had, of course, got completely the wrong end of the stick about what sort of event it was going to be. I had visions of a camera crew walking around the Pompeii site and showing us around as if we were on a tourist visit which, of course, might be a very interesting thing to do one day, but sadly, for now it was not to be, even though that's how I described it to a few people before we got our tickets.

I became far wiser when it got mentioned on the BBC Website on the Thursday before the event and, having assumed that it would have sold out long ago, we found that "70%" of the tickets had been sold which rather implied that 30% would still be available and one swift kick-up of the laptop later and the deal was done and Tuesday evening would be spent in consideration of life and death in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum on that fateful day in AD49.

The British Museum are terribly good at this sort of thing, and the exhibition in London itself is a sure-fire hit, so this event, bringing the exhibition to a far wider audience than was previously thought possible, does seem like it might turn out to be another winner, and it is a good thing that these old institutions are embracing new forms of communication to get out into the big wide world and pique our interest. The museum staff even put out Tweets throughout the day adding links to help tell the story and build up the anticipation for the evening, which all helped to make it seem like an "event" in itself.

So, when the allotted hour came around, we shuffled into our seats punctually for a prompt seven o'clock start, noting with some trepidation that the front two rows were reserved for Manchester Grammar School and there was the prospect of a load of schoolkids turning up to spoil our fun, not that we needed to have worried, as not all that many of them actually showed up, perhaps preferring the "schools version" of the show which was planned for the following morning.

Still, as soon as Peter Snow bounded across the courtyard we knew that we were in pretty safe hands and, whilst it would never be quite the same as actually being in the building itself and looking at the artefacts "in the charcoal" as it were, I don't imagine that I would get personal tours from expert historians like Bettany Hughes and Mary Beard if I did that either.

The exhibition itself seems to be based around a set up in the form of a house, so that each room, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the sewers, the courtyards, the gardens and so on are allowed to tell the story of what day-to-day life was like in a society that was so instantly smothered upon that fateful day that ironically it can tell us more about what living there was really like, from the loaves of bread to the linen cabinets once tragically transformed instantly into charcoal, than a couple of towns which would probably have been otherwise almost completely forgotten by the march of time might have done.

Several uncomfortable topics were touched upon, from the mostly brutal lives of the slaves, and about how some of the freed slaves were able to rise to the top of society, to the rather frank representations of sex in Pompeii, which seemed to be everywhere, but which were most startlingly displayed by a statue of the god Pan in flagrante delicto with a live goat...

In the beautiful garden room some rather beautiful garden frescoes were discussed with Rachel de Thame as our guide to the birds and the flowers painted upon the walls. I was initially wary of having this kind of "celebrity opinion" piece, but it worked really well and you do have to accept that having recognised experts in their fields chatting about such things does make the whole thing rather more accessible to the general public.

After all, it was a baker who was able to show us all what the ridge around the instantaneously carbonised loaf of bread most probably meant; A piece of string with a built-in carrying handle, which few of the rest of us might have thought of.

Obviously the most moving aspect was perhaps, of the people. The things that they grabbed as they fled, only to die on the beach. The family baked alive whilst hiding under the stairs, so that the imprints of their bodies could be preserved in the ash and reconstructed by pouring in plaster to fill the voids left behind by their bodies. The fact that someone wealthy enough to have a gold bracelet that weighs half a kilogram could do nothing to save themselves or their children.

An hour and a half passed incredibly swiftly and whilst, at times, I felt initially slightly disappointed by lack of sense of where I was within the museum, and got the nagging feeling that if I was actually there I might be stopping and looking just a little bit longer at each of the pieces, when I thought about it afterwards, I realised that it was actually very well done and, even if I didn't get to virtually walk the streets of Pompeii, this was probably about as close as I was likely to get without leaving the Manchester area.

That sense of the timeline to imminent destruction, and the "room by room" structure works very well at getting the story across and relating it to us in our modern lives, which is, I suppose, what history needs to do if it is to engage us. Later on, the debates and arguments for and against further excavation of the sites also proved very interesting and show that some things are not as simple as they might at first appear, although you can sense the craving to know what else there is to find out there.

On occasions, the whole event felt a little bit like a TV show that hadn't yet found a broadcaster, but I suppose that they could only do it this way otherwise they'd have had to close the place to the public for weeks. But then again, this was the first time that they had attempted to do anything like this, so there may very well maybe be a few tweaks to the format next time...

But, as an experiment in opening things up to new audiences, it was something of a minor triumph and I'm very glad we went...

1001

So...

Just when you think that you've run out of ideas and things to say, and decided to pack your blogging bags and slink away for a while, somebody suggests something that they think you might want to write about and, before you know it, there's another piece that can be written, and your keyboard fingers get twitching and you're back on the treadmill.

On our way back home from a day out in Manchester, the beloved turned to me and, quite out of the blue, said "You should start a blog about the bits and pieces of unmitigated tat you pointlessly buy whenever we go into town..."

Well, considering that she seldom shows much interest in my unliterary outpourings, this seemed almost like some kind of an endorsement, so, ignoring the obvious criticisms of my profligacy, and looking (for once) at the bigger picture, I seized upon the notion and here I find myself once again word-wrangling for no better reason than I actually have something to write about, however banal it might actually be...

Notice that I didn't write "something worth saying" because that would probably be a leap too far... After all, I am a man of not-very-well hidden shallows...

So anyway, what had happened was this:

We had gone into town early on a Sunday morning because of a hair appointment coupled with some dodgy information that the beloved could try for another "walk-in" appointment for another procedure at 10.00am when the shops supposedly opened.

We duly got up early and made our way to the station for the rather lovely and comparatively peaceful early train and arrived in Manchester at 9.30am only to discover that most of the shops (including the one which offered the "walk-in") don't actually open until 11.30am...

There was, basically, time that needed killing, and not just the time which I had already known that I would be spending trudging the streets and looking in the shops whilst the hair appointment was going on.

Happily we found a place that did breakfasts and we had a languid "second breakfast" which we allowed to land on top of the swiftly grabbed bit of toast we'd had before leaving home, before I walked the beloved to her hairdressing emporium and then I set off and walked around town waiting for the shops that I wanted to go in to actually open.

You see, I had a "mission..."

A magazine (or "comic..." depending upon your point of view about such things) which I had thought was covered by my subscription but, as it turned out, wasn't, had come and gone at some point during the last month whilst I was distracted by hospital stuff, and I wanted to track down a copy after having spectacularly failed to do so in various other outlets for a week or more. So, in that hour, I trudged backwards and forwards between my last two retail hopes, and found that both were remaining steadfastly closed until a time that at least one of them refused to display in their windows.

Between them both was a remainder bookshop which was open, and I popped in and spotted two "bargains" which I resisted in my haste to get from one shop to the other for opening time, but which I returned to when I found there was still fifteen minutes to wait in both cases.

Well, it was something to do.

And so, to cut a short story even shorter, reader, I bought the tat...

One was a normally vastly overpriced "Star Trek" book that I thought looked far more interesting than it ultimately turned out to be, but at a price that I at least considered "tolerable" rather than the "ridiculous" full price might have been.

The second was an audiobook version of "Dr No" read by Hugh Quarshie across 8 CDs and is more difficult to justify the purchase of. I had been considering getting another book from the same range but was resisting it until I saw it at a more reasonable price. Naturally, that title was not available in the shop that I had foolishly ventured into, but my mind decided that getting another one from the same series cheap would help me to decide whether the expensive ones might be actually worth bothering with.

If you see what I mean...?

"Dr No" is a strange beast. The blatant colonial racism and casual sexism of the 1950s is very difficult to listen to (and I wonder about how Hugh Quarshie felt about having to read some of it, to be honest...) but the descriptive writing is actually far better than I remember it being, and it's been blaring away in the car for a few mornings now and I'll have to admit that I am rather enjoying it, once you get beyond those strange, old-fashioned ideas.

I suppose that modern readers just have to accept that these things are "of their time" and, perhaps, be slightly amazed at how attitudes have changed in just over half a century. After all, we might squirm at one or two of the lines in Shakespeare's plays, but we don't generally go around changing them just because they're unpalatable to modern ears, do we...?

Interestingly enough, I was convinced that I'd read the paperback when I was a teenager, but listening to it now, I'm not sure that I ever actually did.

I don't half buy some rubbish, though... Especially if I think it's a "bargain..." but, in my (rather pitiful) defence, I had resigned myself to not finding my "comic" and felt like cheering myself with a smidgen of "retail therapy" which is seldom all that wise a thing to be doing, I know.

I also successfully tracked down my "comic" so that was a bit of a result, too... From a particular point of view...

THE 1000 BLOGS OF MARTIN

Not that you’d have actually noticed it because in terms of “published works” and so forth, the numbers really didn’t add up, but nevertheless, I was rather looking for something “momentous” to write about for my 1000th blog posting (which, incidentally, I still suspected might be the last) after a number of days of not really having anything much to say about anything.

And then, rather out of the blue (as it were), former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died and I found that I had something to say about something after all, and, as none of you will probably even remember, I went off and said it, and the “all” list clicked over into four digits (even though the “published” number didn’t) and I then kind of forgot all about that all-unimportant 1000th, which seems to have finally caught up with us today.

[Insert a short and rather disappointing toot on a cardboard cone here]

Of course, that Margaret Thatcher story was weeks ago now and it’s taken the physical day-to-day numbers a while to catch up, because the ever-growing list of unpublished drafts tends to mean that I’ve got more words in the bank than I’ve ever really felt the need to share with the great big wide world.

Thoughts that I half-started, or ones that I put down in a fit of rage or anger but which might just have seemed a little harsh or cruel or ill-thought out in the cold light of the morning after. Things I might be embarrassed to think that you might think I think, and thoughts that I might have once thought but about which I also can find myself thinking amost the exact opposite on occasions.

Then, of course, there is the slight problem that the figure of 1000 is a fairly arbitrary one anyway when it comes to the festering nonsense that I’ve churned out over these past three years. After all, as we travelled this rookie rocky road, there was the blog misfire of the “Tabloid”, the strange month of the “Alternative” and, of course, the surreal world of the “Writers’ Group”, all of which have had their contributions and which, in their own way, add up along with those unseen drafts to a far larger tally than a mere 1000 would suggest.

Still, here we now find ourselves, and I really can’t help wondering whether 1000 blogs (or whatever) is probably enough to be going on with...

Don’t you think that, in life, we all ought to realise sometimes that it’s just time to give up on some things and, perhaps, such things as this? The time comes to us all when we ought to accept that whatever creative spark we might once of thought we might have possessed has blown out, and that things specifically like this colossal waste of time need to finally be allowed to splutter and die so that the real writers of the world can be allowed to get on with their proper work without such idle distractions muddying the waters for everyone...?

To be honest I have had a sense of “coming to the end of term” for this past couple of weeks. On more and more mornings, I’ve found that I have got up and found that I couldn’t think of anything new to write, and so I haven’t, and instead I’ve been happy enough to trawl through one or two of the old and half-forgotten ideas and finally put them out there, simply to help make up the numbers because the current version of my brain is struggling to come up with anything new to say...

I have also begun to wonder whether maybe things have been getting rather too “intimate” lately and the dreary insights into the complexities of certain situations have been as boring to read as they are to endure, and perhaps there’s nothing in them that anyone else would really want to know more about...

However, they do make up a small part of what we might think of as the bigger picture and offer another bit of insight into another facet of a personality which perhaps isn’t so much a diamond but more of a piece of cut glass and, in trawling your way through those thousand or more postings, you’d probably learn all that you would ever need to know about me and my strange little ways as I trudge my way along though this veil of tears...

So there we are then... 1000 blog postings done... Consisting of maybe getting on for a million words when you add them all up... although I'm sure I've wasted a few and the vast majority are probably abject nonsense, but they’re there and they’re done and dusted and I’m unlikely to start tinkering with any of them now even if the march of time makes them, if possible, even more unpalatable than they originally were...

I may return to this from time-to-time of course. You know that I will. Even after that enormous sense of relief which comes from a weight being lifted. After all, I’ve threaten to pull the plug on several occasions along this long and whining road and always been drawn back into it by events or, as is more often the case, my own obsessive compulsion with the keeping the viewing numbers up or hitting that need to publish daily. According to those statistics, some of these pages remain completely unread, even after all this time, and some of my closest intimates still could never be persuaded to read a single word before then complaining that I never tell them anything any more.

So, if you have ventured into Lesser Blogfordshire by accident today, or if you are a regular visitor, how do I persuade people to read the other 999 postings that you’ve well not exactly missed as such because they’re all still there… Waiting... but probably wouldn’t be really interesting in trawling through on the off-chance of finding a nugget amidst all of the dross...?

After all May lost more than 25% of readers when compared month-on-month with April, he said, momentarily sliding into some unfortunate parody of a “sales talk...” and those numbers have been on the slide ever since, so perhaps the great self-levelling market forces really are trying to tell me something and it really is time to fade into blogging oblivion leaving nothing behind but a fond memory or two and the best part of a million words of nonsense for the world to ponder upon - or choose not to - at its leisure.

Meanwhile, in as far as it is possible, I do also sometimes consider pulling the plug entirely on my web presence with the words “end this cruelty” rattling through my brain. It’s not my own cruelty that I’m worrying about, of course, but the inherent cruelty I read time and again in the vapid world of social networking which remains both a force for good and bad in almost equal measure, but which I tire of very quickly, especially if I’m feeling vulnerable... so if the whole lot does suddenly vanish, I wouldn’t be at all surprised and you can’t say I didn’t warn you (assuming, naturally, that you’ve actually bothered to read this far...)

So, I guess there’s nothing left but to finish on a song. Happy 1000th, everyone...

It is time for you to stop all of your blogging,

Yes it’s time for you to stop all of your blogging

Whoa-oh...

There’s one thing you’ve gotta do,

To make me still want you...

Gotta stop blogging now.