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We are Family
Our choir concert was yesterday at our local performing arts centre. The theme was FAMILY. We sang a medley from Mamma Mia plus songs such as Dance with My Father, Chosen Family, Sister Song, In My Daughter's Eyes and We are Family. The youth choir also sang songs and there were poetry readings and dance acts too. Our usual choir mistress had taken this academic year off to spend more time with her family but is reported to be returning in September. We had been led this past year by a stand-in who has been quite amusing, even when she tells us off for doing something wrong. Her style and approach has been quite different but nevertheless likeable. Of course yesterday was baking hot and we are not allowed to bring water bottles onto the stage, so under the lighting and smoke effects, we were boiling. There are about 80 of us in the choir altogether. Four of them are from the same family - father, mother with their son and daughter in their early twenties. Sadly the father died tw
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Old Age
I seem to be caught in a plethora of medical appointments at the moment. Apart from the ongoing saga of my stomach and the recent dental work which requires follow-up, I had made an appointment with my usual dentist for an annual check-up in July. However, I have been experiencing palpitations during the night, so an ECG was called for and now a follow-up with the GP to discuss what they have found. I also have an upcoming appointment with my consultant gastroenterologist in a couple of weeks. It seems my diary is full of appointments. Getting old sucks. I've not been firing on all cylinders and have suspended my gym membership for the month of July to have a bit of a restful few weeks. I hope to be back to my normal self by August. I had to laugh the other day. I was doing a shift on the till at the foodbank charity shop and was chatting to the Assistant Manageress. She told me her cat is 16 and has dementia. She said it wanders round in the night miaowing, presumably beca
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Alcoholic Daze - Chapter 4
The continuing saga of Alcoholic Daze.... Over the coming years, we repeated our August booze cruises to France or Germany, taking Snoopy with us. It was a great way of holidaying abroad with the dog , getting the satisfaction of being somewhere foreign and enjoying life under canvas. Snoopy used to hate the return part of the journey as it involved visiting an extremely tall, dark and handsome young vet near Calais who produced awfully thick hypodermic needles to inject the anti-worming preparation necessary for the pet passport paperwork at Dover. As before, we used a nearby camp-site to Cite Europe on our return journey and, as before, stocked up with a years' supply of wine. Again, as before, we were always lucky if we had a single bottle left to celebrate at Christmas, but very little of it was consumed by me. I was beginning to see a pattern forming. By the time we were nudging our fifties, Greg suddenly became ill. He first had a series of small heart attacks
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Pouques and Teeth
While I was in Guernsey I learned a lot about the local folklore in the main museum. Guernsey folk seem to have been a very superstitious lot over the centuries and believed in all sorts of gremlins and nasties, fairies, ghosts and ghouls. One example was that a lot of old houses on the island have ledges up near the apex of their roof to allow witches to rest when flying about. It was believed that supplying this kind offer of rest kept the witches on their side and avoided having something nasty happen to them. Another such superstition was about Pouques. See here all about them. I'm not sure if this word was of French origin, but this is an explanation about them. It got me wondering whether we get our word "spooky" from it. In other news, I went for the follow-up appointment to have a dental bridge fitted. It started here . It was supposed to be three weeks between the dentist fitting the temporary bridge and the permanent one. Halfway into the first appointment to fit
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Guernsey, Channel Islands
As I mentioned last week, I had a week away from home. As a widow, I have not been brave enough yet to do singles holidays (although I am slowly coming round to the idea). I do once a year grab a few days away with my best friend from university days, but she does not like the idea of flying, so holidays abroad are ruled out. It was therefore with some surprise when she suggested this year's trip might be to Guernsey in the Channel Islands via the ferry from Poole. It is off the cost of France and has its own currency and health system, so I could at least pretend it was "abroad". I met my friend in Poole on Friday 8th May and we stayed one night at the Travelodge there. She had driven from Hertfordshire and I had got the train to Poole from London. Unfortunately my room had been sprayed with some very strong air freshener which gave me a headache within 5 minutes of being in the room. I had to get out of there and go for a walk in Poole to clear my head. I think the maid m
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Summer holiday
I have not long returned from a week's holiday and so have had no time to write up my weekly Sunday blog post. Watch out for it next Sunday.... I've meanwhile got mountains of laundry and admin to deal with first. Wish me luck.
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A staggering statistic
About once every two months, I meet up for lunch with a group of friends I name The Birthday Girls. As that suggests, we meet up around the time when one of us has a birthday. Not necessarily the same week as the birthday even, but close enough that we all have a common date free in our diary. There are ten of us altogether, although not all of us can manage all of the dates. On average there are about 7 or 8 of us at any one time. We know one another going back decades and first met when our children were at nursery age. A few weeks ago saw such a meeting to celebrate L's birthday. She dropped the bombshell that she and her husband of over 30 years have just separated. About a month ago, another one announced she was separated from her long-term partner. It got me thinking that in our group: 3 are married still 3 of us are widows 4 are divorced or separated So in other words only 3 out of 10 are still in a relationship. That is quite a staggering statistic for such a small group
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Alcoholic Daze - Chapter 3
The continuing saga..... How dare she? The leaflet, which my neighbour had given me, incensed me - and my husband was pretty cross too, to put it mildly. This woman did not even know us. How on earth had she got the idea that he was an alcoholic and, even worse to contemplate, was she spreading malicious gossip about us, based on an untruth? The next day, I gathered up all my courage and went over the road to confront her about it. I am not normally one to stick my head above the parapet, but this could not be left unchallenged. If it was to do with seeing him on early mornings out on our forecourt doing DIY with a drink in his hand, I explained that Greg often worked night shifts and that other people's breakfast times were his supper time. Therefore to see him with an alcoholic drink in his hand at breakfast time was not as odd as it seemed. It was his nightcap. She still insisted we were in need of the advice she had presented me with. She had seen the signs in her own
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Fly cemetery and lilac
A few months ago some of my houseplant spider plants had babies and I potted the baby cuttings in some new compost I had bought in a local garden centre. The soil did not look particularly nutritious, but I know there have been bans in recent years in using peat, so I just guessed this was what I had to now deal with. A few weeks later, I noticed tiny little flies ducking and diving all over the house. I also noticed that whenever I watered the spider plant babies, the flies seemed to appear in abundance. I can only assume the fly larvae had been buried in the new compost when I bought it. I decided to buy some fly-catchers and stick them in the pots I was suspicious of. I then gave the pots a good watering and waited. I then discovered the most horrific sight. There were loads of fly bodies stuck to the catchers. Over the months, the number has increased and occasionally when I am sitting still - such as watching TV or eating, a rogue fly will flutter past me. They are so tiny, you do
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Sweet Sixteen
I'm thinking of suing the National Health Service (NHS). I had a hospital procedure on Friday in which I was injected with Botox. I had hoped to emerge looking less like a 75-year-old and more like a young Sweet Sixteen. Looking in the mirror, I look exactly the same, so I want to make a complaint. The fact that the Botox injection was into my stomach valve via a gastroscopy ( which I mentioned here ) is neither here nor there. Botox is Botox, right? Seriously though, the procedure at St Thomas' Hospital went well and I always love seeing my consultant as she is just a lovely human. As she injected the sedative (I won't have a gastroscopy without a sedative), she said "here comes your gin and tonic". I was out for the count for the rest of it, but knew there were five people in the room, four of them nurses and one consultant, looking after me, monitoring my blood pressure, oxygen levels and making sure I was in the right position for the gastroscopes to go down. A prerequis
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Rochester, Kent
Over Easter, Kay and Darcy came to stay with me a couple of nights. On Good Friday we went out to my favourite Italian restaurant where I always order the same thing - Razza or, as we English say, skate wing. You never see that fish in supermarkets and can only get it in fishmongers. Few restaurants ever have it on their menu either, so it is real treat for me to have it in that restaurant. On Easter Saturday, we took the train to Rochester in Kent. Although not far from where I live in South London (about 25 miles) I have never actually been there, so decided it was now or never. I was quite surprised by how quaint the High Street is. I suppose I was expecting a modern drab sort of city centre like any other, but the High Street was full of old buildings dating back to the Victorian, Georgian and even Elizabethan times. It was home to Charles Dickens for many years and featured in his novels. There wasn't a chain store in sight, but many coffee houses, charity shops a
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Alcoholic Daze - Chapter 2
The continuation of the alcoholic saga which was first written in 2008 with some minor amendments..... He has not always been an alcoholic. We were married in 1976 and knew one another for 5 years before we married, so we were together in total for 39 years when he died in 2010 . We met as students studying German at university and we married in the very hot and humid summer of 1976. I should have known the omens were not boding well when we picked our honeymoon in Cornwall - the only two torrential rainy weeks of that summer. Some people joke that for a honeymoon it shouldn't matter what the weather is doing. Then, it didn't!! In retrospect, that was a sign I should have heeded! Until 4 years ago, the majority of our 39 years together had been fine. It had had its ups and downs, like I suspect most marriages, but we never doubted we would stay together forever. We had so much in common, both before we met and afterwards. Too much to lose if we drifted apart. It would be like losing a
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April Fool
I couldn't let April Fool's Day (admittedly yesterday) go by without posting this clip from a television programme back in 1957. It was aired on a programme called Panorama - which still exists today - and covers all manner of topics but always serious and political. This particular item was broadcast on 1 April 1957. The date should have given a clue to its authenticity, but so many people believed it was true. I suppose in those days, pasta was a relatively new concept to us Britons and the BBC was a highly revered institution that couldn't possibly be telling untruths.
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Happy Easter
This week, I am starting gruelling dental treatment to fill a gap where a tooth was removed during the Covid pandemic. I find it hard to chew on that side and sought out a local specialist dentist who does implants. He has glowing reviews on his website. He took a CT scan of my mouth and did measurements and declared that he didn't feel confident doing an implant, as there is not enough bone density to insert an implant that would otherwise come into contact with a nerve within millimetres of it. Even if he injected artificial bone to augment the bone density, he still feels the implant would fail and cause me 18-months of painful treatment that would fail. He is THE MAN to do implants and even lectures on the subject at University College London, so, if he says it is not possible, then I believe him. He could have just taken my money and done a bad job, but was at least honest. He suggested a bridge would solve the problem more than adequately, so I am starting that treatment on
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Beside the seaside
This week saw me taking myself off to Eastbourne for a few days. I booked into my favourite hotel on the seafront. I just fancied a change of scene from rainy London and to be fair, I swapped it for the very sunny seaside town on the South coast. I know Eastbourne like the back of my hand, as my parents moved there, once they retired, and I used to visit regularly. When my father died, I used to travel down there at least once a month to spend a week with my mother, doing a big shop for her, taking her to appointments, doing her garden or whatever else needed doing. So it's like a second home to me. On the drive down this week, I called in to see Nellie. Now 97, she and her husband were neighbours of my parents about 35 years ago and stayed firm friends even when each couple moved on to different locations. Sadly her husband died 2 years ago and Nellie has somewhat declined since. She has no children or other relatives and her current neighbour has been caring f
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Survival of the fittest
I'm not a very sporty person. I hated sport at school, always tried to be goalkeeper in hockey so I wouldn't have too much running around to do and loathed gym with a passion. I mean, what is the point of climbing up ropes or springing over a horse? I was mediocre in tennis and netball and didn't mind a bit of trampolining, but that was the extent of my sportiness. I can't even swim or ride a bike, not having been taught to as a child. As an adult, I avoided sport like the plague. I avoided doing it AND watching it. Whereas most people go mad over Wimbledon fortnight (which takes place a short tram-ride from where I Iive), I cannot bear it and get annoyed with the endless coverage on TV. I might watch the occasional football match if it has some historic significance, but even that leaves me with half an eye on the TV doing something else. I hate the Olympic coverage and, as to why footballers earn vast sums of money just to kick a ball about, escapes me (and not always perfectly
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Why Alcoholic Daze? Chapter 1
In connection with my last post and for those who are new to my blog or for those who came here, hoping to seek some nuggets about alcoholism, I thought it might make sense to post once a month some repeat posts of my blog and how it all came about. So starting with today and then continuing with the first Sunday of every month, I shall focus on that. This is how my blog began nearly 18 years ago in 2008...... Alcoholic Daze – it seemed such a good name for my blog – a play on words of daze and days – because alcohol features quite a lot in my days, and weeks, and months, and years. But before you go leaping to conclusions, I am stone cold sober. All the time. My husband Greg on the other hand is not. I am watching him slowly kill himself and our love with it. He is an alcoholic. There, I have said it, spoken it out loud and now I believe it myself. HE IS AN ALCOHOLIC. Up to now, not many people knew he was, including me. At first I did not see it creeping
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Sixteen years
In a few days' time it will be the sixteenth anniversary of Greg's death. Sixteen years. That is almost half of the time we were married together. On the day he died, I wondered how I would cope without him and couldn't envisage getting to a stage where I would have ever coped through sixteen years. So much has happened since, either that he has missed himself or I have had to deal with. Just the general upkeep of the house and garden alone with major decisions to make on my own about what to get repaired or renovated and when, dealing with the finances and hiring tradesmen. Being able to discuss it with someone and share the problems made it so much easier when there was the two of us, although to be fair in his latter years he was so drunk, he left it all to me anyway. He missed out on our daughter leaving school, going to university, graduating, becoming a doctor, getting married. I was the one supporting her, financing her, visiting her. I even got the job of doing the Father
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Hospital tests
Earlier this week I had to have a hospital test that was new to me. In order to find out why food stays in my stomach more than the normal 3 to 5 hours (gastroscopies and ultrasound have shown it to be there for over 16 hours after I have fasted), I was urged to have a Delayed Gastric Emptying Study (DGES). I am pretty sure the culprit will be the pyloric valve damaged at the base of my stomach by the operation I had ten years ago ( see here ), but this test was just to make sure there was no other reason for the hold-up. So last week, I made my way to the Nuclear Medicine Department of Guy's Hospital near London Bridge for my appointment there. The word "Nuclear" is scary enough. Would I glow in the dark afterwards? I had to present myself fasting and that included drinking no water either. Having to negotiate the hour-long journey from home to London Bridge - in morning rush-hour on busy trains without breakfast and not even a sip of water - was hard. On arriving at the Nuclear
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(S)NO(W) JOKE
This week, Kay has been in France skiing with her husband and in-laws. They had return flights to Geneva and hired a car to drive over the border to France. There were six of them - Kay, Darcy, Darcy's parents, Darcy's sister and her boyfriend. The boyfriend is an excellent skier and has been teaching everyone else, first on the nursery slopes and then graduating to the steeper more complicated ones. Kay did some skiing in France with her school when she was about 14, but to be fair that was a long time ago, so she needed some refreshing. To start with it was good news coming in and an amazing video of Kay doing a ten-minute ski down a very steep slope. Unfortunately it coincided with the news that the US Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn had had a terrible accident doing her Olympic downhill ski-racing and was airlifted to hospital with multiple leg fractures. The next day Kay texted me to say she was having a coffee in a cafe as she had taken a few tumbles
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Clash of antlers
This week, I had a very unusual encounter with a stranger. I had popped into our local hypermarket to buy something for Kay's birthday, which is not until July, but we had visited this store together recently and she had shown an interest in something that gave me an idea for a present. It is very difficult nowadays to gauge presents for her. Living apart and rarely seeing her means I no longer know what her taste in clothes or homeware is, so to be given a strong clue was an advantage I couldn't miss. I had taken a trolley so I could also buy some food as well, but had one of those trolleys where the wheels have a mind of their own and steering it was difficult. I had grabbed the present for Kay and a few food items and had just rounded the corner from one aisle and was about to turn into the next aisle, when a woman coming in the opposite direction did the same. We literally came face to face. She didn't have a trolley, just a carry basket, and of course my trolley was difficul
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Dance with my Father
I make no apologies for repeating this post, as 1 February is a date I can never ever forget. This year sees the 25th anniversary. In some ways it seems like yesterday - how can it be 25 years? We are singing Dance with My Father for our choir summer concert and that is difficult to sing especially with a day like today. I suspect, should I ever die and they need to perform a post-mortem on me, they'll find the First of February 2001 etched in my brain like a stick of Brighton rock. It is a date I shall never ever forget. In mid December 2000, I had been told I needed an urgent hysterectomy operation. I had developed a large mass in my womb. If I lay face-down on a hard floor playing a board game or doing a jigsaw with Kay, I could feel it digging in to me. The consultant gynaecologist I went to see was fairly hopeful it was a benign fibroid but because of its large size, could not rule out it was something malignant. He nee
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Greenland is within grasp.
I have mentioned before that during Covid and in total isolation, I busied myself with knitting dementia mitts. It had a threefold use - first it gave me something to do in my solitude. Secondly it passed the hours whilst not feeling guilty about watching too much television at the same time. Thirdly it stopped the temptation to nibble on calorie-rich snacks when I was bored. I have made hundreds of these mitts over the last few years and donated them free of charge to charity shops, care homes and friends, whose relatives needed them. We have even recently been selling them in our local park information centre, as a lot of park visitors have dementia. As soon as I have made a few, I get requests for more. Recently a volunteer I work with at our local foodbank asked if she could have some. She also volunteers at our local hospice and knew they would be useful there. I have in fact donated to this hospice before. So since Christmas I have been knitting like an a
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Keeping a straight face
Our choir rehearsals started again this week and we are going to start preparing for our big sell-out summer concert with the broad title of 'Family'. One of the songs we started on this week is Mamma Mia. We sang it with gusto and it sounded just like a karaoke night at the pub! I'm sure with some refinement we'll sound better by the summer. Another of the songs in our repertoire is going to be 'We are Family' by Sister Sledge. I don't know how I am going to be able to sing this with a straight face as I always have Peter Kay's version of it in my head. Here it is for those who don't know it....