Scars

I haven't been to Al-Anon for about six weeks now, what with Kay at home over the summer, or visits to my mother, or last week's trip up north. I thought I'd better put in an appearance this week. It struck me for the first time, that at the moment I am really in a better place than most of the others there. Although, naturally, I would give the world to have Greg still here with me, the nightmare of my situation has gone. I can relax at last. The hamster wheel is turning much more slowly, I can breathe easily, turn the light off at night knowing all is calm in the house and buy what frugal things I need for myself without filling up the supermarket trolley with bottles and more bottles. I am my own master. I now make the decisions what to do or not, what to spend or save, without having to pass it by another person. (Not that Greg was dictatorial about those things, but in an equal partnership, we always chose to agree on things first rather than insist on our own way.)



The majority of others at Al-Anon are still in the midst of their nightmares, with their partners or parents or children still doing the drinking or at best undergoing yet another detox, which for now will bring sobriety but only for as long as the patient is physically locked up for ten days and on medication. Once the key is turned and the patient is out on the street again, they will more than likely be looking for their next drink yet again. When depends on how long their willpower will last out - a few hours, a few days, a few weeks.


Most at the Al-anon meetings are weary, crushed, even numb. That was me a year ago. Thankfully, my nightmare is over, although at a price. The alcoholism has gone, but so has Greg. I am a victim of the alcohol, although I did not drink it and it did not kill me. Although I am in a relatively good place at the moment, Greg's absence is a glaring big hole in my life, ever reminding me of that nightmare.


Whether I shall ever totally recover worries me. There are some people I have met at Al-Anon who have been parted from their alcoholic loved ones for decades, either through divorce, separation, death (or in the case of adult childen, marriage and moves away from home). But they still need the crutch of Al-Anon as they feel they are "damaged goods" or victims. Their confidence or self-esteem has been battered by long years of being in the alcoholic's shadow, of being physically or mentally worn away until only the outer shell of them now exists. They still weep at the memories that never go away. Years of having to pretend to the outside world that everything was fine, yet coming home to violence or aggression or arguments and shouting. Whatever the severity of the drinking, it takes its toll on other family members emotionally and sometimes sadly physically.



I have tried my utmost to be strong - both before Greg died and since. Goodness knows where I get it from, because up to now I have always been timid, shy, socially-anxious and withdrawing. Maybe that comes from being an only-child. But I am damned if I am going to let this beat me. That is why I have been so determined to keep busy and get on with life, to draw up decorating projects and to oscillate between my home and my mother's home to get all the chores done. But sometimes in the wee small hours of the morning, when I lie awake in an empty house and hear nothing but the clock ticking, I am worried. I worry about the slow-developing scar this alcoholic experience is leaving and will leave on Kay and me, long after the alcoholism has passed through our lives and gone.

All's well that ends well (I think)

I'm back from the North having deposited daughter there for the start of her second year at uni. After all the problems relayed in my last post, we did manage to move in to the house (the German girls true to their word let us in) and we met up with my sister-in-law and her partner who had come up from Lincolnshire in a van with Kay's belongings which they had collected earlier in the week from us. We plodded up and down stairs taking said stuff up to Kay's room which is three floors up in an attic room. The house is in an area of town which is predominantly inhabited by students or immigrants. Streets and streets of back to back terraced houses. The housing is all right although hardly the luxury end of the market. I think once upon time the house may have been built for millworkers and their families. But by gum they must have had small feet in those days. The staircases are little more than glorified ladders! They are very very steep, very narrow and won't take a foot-tread front on. You sort of have to go up or down sideways like a crab, or risk falling down head over heels. Carrying heavy boxes and suitcases up the two steep flights was an acquired art. Afterwards, we were all in need of a stiff lunchtime drink and a sit-down in a local pub to recover.



Once my sister-in-law and her family had gone home, Kay unpacked her things and we started to make the room a little more like home, taking note of what little extras still needed to be bought. The three German girls (staying on for yet another week) were very friendly, apologised for the state of the kitchen, as they had been working hard to get their dissertation finished and had therefore had scant time to worry about washing up. I reckoned there must have been at least five days of washing-up in the sink alone, not to mention the piles of plates attracting flies on the work surfaces. True to typical German behaviour, instead of leaving towels on deckchairs, they had left jackets on backs of dining chairs and all their china/pans and food in the cupboards, so Kay could not put any of her food or china/pans away, but we managed to eat out a lot or bring sandwiches home, so that was no great problem.



Kay and I had a great last few days together, buying more household items for the room, doing a bit of sightseeing and having some nice meals out. The week was only marred by the not altogether unexpected news that the fifth girl (Danielle in my last post) had pulled out altogether. It meant that a fifth housemate needed to be found urgently or else the four other girls would need to cover the outstanding rent. Abigail, now back from Thailand, felt partially responsible for choosing Danielle in the first place and took it up herself to advertise the room in all the appropriate places. It paid off as about 8 people have responded to the ad, mainly Americans, Australians and a Spaniard, all of whom have just arrived in the UK this week as international freshers. Kay, as the only housemate to have arrived, had to show them the room and common areas of the house, while I made myself scarce. Hopefully one of them will be suitable.

With heavy heart, I hugged Kay goodbye on Friday evening and made the long train journey back to London, arriving home to an empty house (except for a very relieved Snoopy and cat). I am really happy Kay is settled with nice friends in a nice house. It'll be a long time until I see her at Christmas and a bit daunting on my own, if I am honest, but I have lots of decorating to do, new double-glazing arriving in a week and the same at my mother's house, so I am sure the time will go quickly. I might even sneak in another visit north, if I get the chance! A new chapter begins in both our lives.

The joys of student accommodation

By the time this is published, I shall be speeding my way up North with Kay on the train to settle her into her new accommodation for the next year - a shared house with 4 other girls. I plan to stay up there for four days and return on Friday. Meanwhile, a dog-sitter is staying in my house to look after Snoopy and the cat.

We are half-expecting we might have to sleep on the pavement tonight. The house-let has not been without its problems. Kay and three of her friends (let's call them Abigail, Beth,and Chloe) saw the house last December and told the agent (let's call them Disorganised Properties) they wanted to rent the house from July 2010 , the time that First Years come out of university acommodation in Halls of Residence and when the majority of private student house contracts run from. In actual fact, friend Abigail was already living in the house, sharing it with some German girls. The German girls however, wanted to keep the contract on until 31 August, so Kay, Beth and Choe were told they could not move in until 1 September. That seemed fine, as it would mean Kay did not have to pay rent over the summer, when her room would be unoccupied anyway and lectures do not in any case start until 20 September.

Disorganised Properties asked Kay for a £300 desposit (returnable when she moves out again, unless she wrecks the joint) and the first instalment of £280 to cover September's rent. In addition she had to pay £60 (in cash!!!?) for agents' fees. There are five bedrooms in the house, so the girls advertised for a fifth housemate and eventually Abigail (already in the house, remember) said she knew someone, unknown to the others (let's call her Danielle) and it seemed simpler for the others to agree to this, even though, there were other candidates in the offering. So far so good.

The summer vacation started, the girls all went their separate ways and some to far-flung places. Kay met up with Abigail for the exam a few weeks ago and Abigail let slip that the Germans wanted to stay a bit longer than 31 August and she had said that would be fine, as the other housemates would not want to move in to their rooms until 18 September. She had said this of course, without consulting the others. Had she have done so, she would have found out that one girl wanted to move her stuff in at the beginning of September and Kay wanted to move in around 12th September. However, Abigail, as I said already resident in the house, has taken it upon herself to agree to these and other things without consulting the others and without really thinking things through.

A few weeks ago, in my organised, ticking-off-list-of-what-to-do mode, I rang Disorganised Properties to enquire how and when we should pick up Kay's key when we arrive in town. The answer was not what I was expecting. It seemed only Kay and one other girl had completed and returned all their paperwork and paid their £640 up front, the other 3 girls had still not done so and until all the paperwork and money was finalised, nobody could move in at all. I needed to book train tickets for us well in advance, organise for a dog-sitter, plan for Kay's stuff to be collected and taken up by road etc and the agent would not accept my pleas that we had done our bit and paid up, therefore we should be entitled to move in on the 12th. Disorganised Properties then said Kay should chase everyone up, if she wanted to move in. Quite why Disorganised Properties had not already done this or intended to do it, escaped me. Beth was in Greece, but in any case was paid up and paperwork was done. Chloe was in Dubai and said she had not received any paperwork in the first place to return, but did return it quickly once another set had been sent to her. Abigail was in Thailand for a month and not responding to email or facebook or mobile messages; also she was the only one who could get in touch with the fifth girl Danielle, as none of the others personally knew her. To cut an even longer story short, Kay finally got through to Abigail and got Danielle's number and texted her about the problem, but Danielle was not responding to her mobile calls or texts. The agent just wiped his hands of the whole thing every time we phoned up and said we needed to get it sorted. It did cross my mind to ask why on earth were they charging £60 per girl for agent's fees if we were the ones doing all the administrative running around, but I decided to keep quiet for now and raise it some time later (mental note to contact Trading Standards). To cap it all, the agent then said they did not know the German girls were staying on beyond the 31st August and started to charge them, so they are getting rent from us AND the German girls for the same period (another mental note to Trading Standards).

Finally last week, after a long silence, Danielle got in touch and said she had been in hospital but would sort her paperwork out with the agent. Whoppeee. I made my plans, booked train reservations (although for 14th and not the date we originally wanted), arranged dog-sitter etc. Then a few days later Danielle dropped the bombshell that she cannot afford the rent and if the others would like to look for another fifth housemate she won't mind! Seven days before term starts!!!

As if that was not enough, there is another mess to sort out...when we should read gas and electricity meters, as strictly speaking it should be when the new tenancy starts (1 September ?) but the German girls will be using gas and electricity afte that date and before our arrival and are not moving out until 22 Sept. So when do they stop paying for utilities and the English girls start? Such a tangle...

So Kay and I are travelling up today, the German girls are letting us in (hopefully) and if anyone asks anything, we'll just claim squatters' rights. But I'm taking my sleeping bag and camping mattress just in case! Those pavements can be quite hard to sleep on.

copyright First Baptist Orlando from Google library

Great news

When Kay first went up to uni last year, she was told about the marking system. If you got grade E or F, you had failed by varying degrees. If you got a D you had just passed and it was OK. If you got a C, you could be very very pleased with yourself and so were the university pleased with you. If you got B, it was absolutely fantastic. Grade As were almost non-existent, as they were only awarded for truly exceptional work.

Yesterday Kay got the results of her exam that she did two weeks ago (the one she missed when Greg died in March.) She got a B. Of course I have been going around like a pigeon with a puffed up chest, proud as punch. Although she has missed out on the summer holidays because she has been revising so much, she can now rest assured that she is through to the second year of her course. (Sighs of relief). We now have just under a week to relax and pack for her return north early next week. I do so wish Greg could be here to share this good news.

Waste not, want not

Following on from my post about the staircases, it does not strike me as at all odd that I have reached the ripe old age I am, without having achieved the perfect house. I was born in a post-war London (just inside the 1950s) when rationing was still very much de rigeur. My mother recently produced my ration book from the caverns of her wardrobe, although it is hard to think that at the time as a six-month-old I demanded my ration of whale meat or parachute lining!


I do remember as a small child that there was nowhere near the choice of shops on offer today. If you needed a dress, there were only one or two shops to choose from - and that was in a very busy quarter of London; not the overload of boutiques and chain stores there are now. Not only that but everything was still in short supply. What you needed, let alone wanted, was just not available. Furniture was bought on hire purchase- a sort of forerunner of credit cards - where you paid weekly instalments at the shop where the item was purchased. There was not much choice in furniture either, apart from can I afford it or not? To this day, my mother still has her utility sideboard in her dining room. Fridges or washing machines were relatively unheard of; there was only one channel on the television (BBC1), although ITV was just coming in and I used to go to a neighbour's house,whenever I wanted to watch Noddy on ITV, as we only had BBC; and phones and cars were for the very wealthy. Housing was in short supply too - the bombing had seen to that. My grandparents had moved about 6 times in the space of 4 years during the war, as each house was blown to smithereens. I remember bombed-out houses and gaping holes here and there in the terraced streets, where I played. (That was another thing - then, I played on the streets. Shock, horror, nowadays.)


People's expectations of life were a lot less and they were more accepting of their lot . My parents had lived apart for the first two years of their post-war marriage, as they had nowhere to live together and the only hope of getting somewhere was to get on the council housing list - and for that you had to be married!!! So they married and then lived with their respective parents on opposite sides of London about an hour's bus and undergound journey apart. They never did get that Council flat, by the way, although an offer did come in about 8 years' later by which time they had already put a deposit on their first mortgaged house.


Used to these wartime shortages, I grew up in a family where everything was kept and recycled if possible. Nothing was thown away - just in case. Certainly not furniture. That has definitely rubbed off onto me. Being a student helped too, having to live frugally in the late 1960s/ early 70s. Greg came from a similar background too. He and I were both horders. I wouldn't throw so much as a piece of string away, as it might come in handy and Greg would reuse nails or screws. Over the years we have squirreled away quite lot of stuff - just in case - until every drawer, cupboard or cellar space is now groaning. Last week, I replaced our fridge/freezer which had reached the grand old age of 22 years. It was a bit battered, but it still worked and I did not see the point of throwing it out. The salad drawers were held together with duct tape where they had cracked many years ago, the handles had come off and I could not find replacements, but the fridge still kept things cold. It was only because the seal on the door had recently gone, that I felt forced (yes, forced) to replace it. And I tell you, the new fridge-freezer is bigger in size than the old one, but it doesn't store as much. How I miss that old one, already.


I recall some years ago when I was at work, that a young single twenty-something was buying a flat for herself and she wanted it freshly-decorated, furnished with all the mod cons (washing machine, dishwasher, TV, telephone, fridge, the lot) all BEFORE she moved in. My parents' generation would have saved for years even decades, for such things, had they been available. My generation had to gradually amass them too, as and when we could afford them. The young generation of today take so much for granted.


There currently is a must-have culture that buys now and worries later. I am sure that's why there are so many house repossessions , as people just do not think beyond the present and cannot contemplate that interest rates might rise. When Greg and I first bought our current house in 1988, we started on 16% interest rates!!! It is a throw-away culture too. Watches and computers are past-it when they are only three years old. As for mobile phones - they HAVE to be replaced each year - so that you can flash the lastest gimmick around in the train. My Nokia 3410 is still going some three hundred years since I first got it. I get funny looks when I use it in public, as if I have just exposed myself. But it works beautifully. Why do I need to replace it? I managed before without photographing everything in sight or ruining my hearing with i-tunes. Why do I need to upgrade it (that wonderful little word which suggests you are missing out, if you don't!) People even seem to replace their furniture every five minutes too to match the wallpaper. What happens to the old stuff? Does it go to some big warehouse in the sky, get dumped on a rubbish tip or get handed down to some lesser mortal?


Times are changing:sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. I am not sure if all this hyperconsumerism is necessarily a good thing. Yes, we have more choices, but we are in danger of becoming greedy and complacent, particularly when half of the world has very little, including a roof over their head and something to eat. As I start to tackle some of the decorating projects, I shall naturally brighten and clean the house up, but I doubt whether I'll manage to upgrade furniture or de-clutter to the extent that it has that minamalist unlived-in look. It will pain me to throw things out - just in case. Anyway the cat and the dog won't stand for that either, I know.

Reading between the lines

Kay has spent the last 5 days at the Reading Festival. Having got all her horrible exams and revision out of the way, she is at last able to let her hair down. I was more than happy to see her off with her friends at the crack of dawn on Thursday (5am) to get to Reading in time to get a good spot for the tent. I was only a tad worried - the day before, it had been raining cats and dogs, in fact, no, it had been sloshing lions and whatever the bigger version of dogs are. All day Wednesday the South of England had seen a monsoon. I could almost believe that a whole year's rainfall had come down in one day. So by Thursday morning, any normal grass was looking a bit waterlogged. Add to that 87,000 pairs of feet trekking across it with rucksacks and wellies and you had a swamp. Did anyone see those pictures of it on the national news? If not, here they are again.... Lots and lots of squelchy mud. But still, I didn't worry. After all, Kay and her friends are sensible.

I had told her not to bother ringing me frequently but to enjoy herself. Just the one call a day perhaps to let me know she was alive, which she dutifuly did on Thursday and Friday. I felt pleased she was having a good time. However, Saturday's late-night call alarmed me a lot. Earlier on, she and her friends had bagged a spot at the front centre stage at the main arena to watch some of the big groups including the Maccabes, the Cribs and the Libertines . But 87,000 teenagers and youngsters were all trying to do the same, pushin' shovin' and swayin' to the music. After some six hours in the same spot, Kay knew the crowd was growing, the pushing increasing and she was becoming trapped against the front metal barrier. There was no room to put a pin. She tried to fight the force by pushing back, but her arms had fallen below the level of the barrier and there was literally no room to lift them and place them on the barrier to push hard, such was the crush. She was stooped forward, arms down,with her ribs being crushed more and more against the metal bar. She said she could feel her last breath being squeezed out of her. It was then that she alerted a security guard to lift her over the barrier to safety. He was able to lift her free, she put her arms round his neck and was whisked into the air over the barrier, leaving the person behind her to take her place in the crush. In fact, she was not the first to be lifted over and her friends eventually followed her some 40 minutes later,when they too felt the life being squeezed out of them. Kay reasssured me she was fine, although definitely bruised. I did not sleep easy that night.

She has returned this morning safe, although definitely not sound. She still has big bruises on her ribcage to prove it and she was sick twice on the return journey. She said that the toilet facilities were pretty crude,stank to high heaven and there was nowhere to wash hands. What with all the mud sloshing about, hygiene was very difficult to maintain, even with the use of bacterial hand gel which the girls had been sensible enough to pack. Whether she has a gastric virus or has picked up food poisoning is up for debate, but from the symptoms and the probability, our money is on the virus! When kids are small, you worry they are going to fall over and hurt their knee. When they are bigger, you don't stop worrying. But apparently a great time was had by all.

A house is not a home

Greg and I moved into our present house in January 1988. That was 22 and a half years ago. Although, it is a fairly modern house, it was in quite a delapidated state when we moved in. An old lady with Alzheimers had been the previous occupant and she had thrown things at the walls, was doubly- incontinent and had a string of carers living in, who had neither the time nor the inclination to do anything to the house. Greg and I were still relatively young, when we first moved in, mortgaged up to the hilt and keen to do some DIY ourselves, so we bought the house with much enthusiasm and many ideas about what we wanted to do with it. It was a blank canvas.



Initially, we quickly slapped fresh paint over all the walls and woodwork, just to clean it up, ripped out disgusting carpets and replaced them with new ones and decided that, after that, we would tackle all the rooms slowly one by one with more attention to detail and quality. But life got in the way. For a start we were busy building our careers, as we had recently returned to the UK after living abroad. Commuting in and out of London was tiring enough without stressful work during the day (Greg was often working night shifts too) and it left us shattered when we got home. Then I (elatedly) discovered I was pregnant and Kay came along. Our lives changed forever, as any parent will tell you, and DIY projects got put on hold.


Another teensy weensy problem was that Greg and I had different tastes on things and he had quite strong views on what he didn't want, which meant we could not always agree on the colour of walls and furnishings. Definitely nothing with a hint of floral and only certain colours. The conclusion was often to leave things alone and move on to something else. Greg was also a great procrastinator and would make all manner of excuses to avoid doing things - ie the weather was too hot or too cold; the time too late or too soon; the timing not right altogether; he was too tired or too busy; too this or too that.

After a while money was also a problem, as we paid for Kay to go to a private secondary school at the age of 11, so any savings after that were gobbled up. (Private education was not something we would have originally considered, but realistically our choice of secondary school was limited to one poorly-performing inner-city state comprehensive school half a mile away where much less than a quarter of pupils attained any qualifications of any significance and some even had police records; or the alternative was biting our lips and paying through the nose for a private school with excellent achievements. Kay was very bright and it was well worth the investment in the end, considering what she has achieved today.)

The long and the short of it was that the house ended up being neglected for a number of years. We lived like perpetual students with make-do mismatches of furniture, either hand-me downs or crudely-made by Greg to tide us over, with the occasional bought bargain piece, when we could afford it or agree on it. If I am honest, we were never ones for having an ostentatious lifestyle anyway. As long as we had something to sit on, eat off, the house was warm and the car got us from A to B, we were happy and did not hanker after 4x4s, Mercs, Audis, swish bathrooms and expensive holidays, like some people do. We placed greater importance on other things. However, we had high hopes that when Greg took early retirement and Kay was finished with school, we would at long last start to tackle those jobs together, buy decent furniture and for the first time have a house we could be proud of and enjoy in old age. Again, life got in the way. Greg became an alcoholic.

Apart from the money that Greg poured in the form of amber liquid down his throat or cigarettes he smoked, he was now too ill to do anything. I effectively became his carer and dashed between home and my mother, caring for them both, struggling to keep both houses and gardens vaguely ticking along, as well as bringing up Kay, walking the dog and generally keeping some semblance of normality for all concerned, between the dashes to Acccident and Emergency each time Greg's alcoholism peaked. The house once more got relegated to the back burner. After twenty years or so, since its christening, it was begining to look in desperate need of a coat of paint and some tender loving care.

Now roll forward to the present day....Greg's death has put me in a new, unusual but rather strangely welcoming position. I am now sole decision-maker/finance-juggler/action-planner. I do not have to clear my thoughts first with someone else. With alcohol and cigarettes no longer in the equation and with use of websites such as the one advertised by that delightful little meerkat, I am able to make some small financial savings and at last go ahead with what plans I have for bringing the house up to date. Nothing too dramatic, as I still have to watch the pennies, but neverthess for the first time, having a home (I hope) I shall be proud of.

Some jobs will involve getting experts in - there is no way, for example, I can tackle plumbing or electrics, although I guess, if I had more time, I would be willing to learn for the sheer satisfaction of saying I did it myself. I have also engaged a firm to put in some new double-glazed windows for me before the winter sets in, as some wooden windows badly need replacing. But otherwise I am more than happy to have a go myself in most other things. So far, I have ordered a (matching) flat-pack bedroom suite and assembled it on my own. One unit had 8 drawers in it, so I felt that was quite an achievement. I have recently put up three new fire alarms on the ceilings on various levels of the house. I have had a major tidy-up of the garage which was a complete mess and systematically put things into categories and ordered them accordingly or disposed of them.

Two weeks ago saw my biggest coup yet. Our banisters are horizontal, but when Kay was a baby, one of her baby-club toddler friends came to visit with his mother and promptly tried to abseil through the gaps between the horizontal planks. Greg decided that quick action was needed before Kay started to crawl and did the same, so he banged some rather crude wooden uprights all the way up our 6 flights of stairs. They were a bit of an eyesore but they did the trick. Once the danger was past (and certainly once Kay was a teenager) I was all for removing the uprights and returning the banisters to their former horizontal glory, but Greg opposed this idea - maybe because it would involve too much work. He suggested we paint them instead and they might look less hideous. However, he neither removed them nor painted them and so they stayed as they were for nigh on 18 years.


Two weeks ago, I equipped myself with hammer, screwdriver and crowbar and got rid of every one of those 70 or more uprights. It was hard work - each upright was fixed in three places either with three-inch screws (which took some unscrewing) or 3-inch nails (which were even more difficult to remove, hence the crowbar). The difficulty often arose because the uprights were wedged between the flight of stairs going up and the ones going down so there was little space to manoeuvre prising the nails out. Why Greg used nails in some places instead of screws I am not sure, but they were sure harder to get out. I got a great kick out of finishing the job (using brute force at times) and filling in all the holes with filler. It was very therapeutic. You can just see from the second picture where the uprights were and where I filled in holes. Painting them will be the next phase.

Before

After

Over the winter I am going to be doing lots of painting, including the staircases, and more clearing out. Slowly but surely the house will begin to take shape and meanwhile it's keeping me busy as well as distracting me from too many painful memories.

LAND GIRL

My dear old mum is 87 today. I am off to visit her for the week while Kay heads off to do her delayed exam at uni. My mum is not in the best of health these days - one of her main problems is severe osteo-arthritis which has caused her spine to curve to one side (scoliosis - see here), and also damaged her knees and ankles. Because of this she can barely walk unaided, but even with a stick her balance is not good and she has in the past had several serious falls which landed her up in hospital with a broken nose and broken teeth! She is the sort of woman, however, who never complains about anything and even seems to apologise for her own shadow when in the presence of other people. She will put up with no end of pain without even saying anything, yet always wants to know how everyone else is doing.

She grew up in the Depression of the 1920s, living quite a poor childhood after her father was made redundant from his job at a bank. He had been at the bank before the First World War, subsequently lost an eye in the war and on his return to the bank could no longer see well enough with the one remaining eye to add up huge long columns of figures (in his head - no calculators then). There were no welfare benefits in those days and mum remembers eating nothing but mashed potato for days on end, as that is all they could afford.

When World War 2 broke out she was still a teenager, but was recruited at the age of 18 in 1941 into the Women's Land Army (WLA). It was designed for women to work the land and feed the nation, while the men were away fighting and particulalrly once merchant navy supplies could not get though enemy lines. Recent portrayal of the WLA in films either glamourises it or the girls are made to look as if they were oversexed. That really annoys mum. The reality was that the life was quite hard for most. A lot of young girls (like my mother coming from London) had never been up close to a farm animal before or had to dig trenches in fields. The physically demanding work made them too tired for much else!

In my mother's case, she was responsible for getting the cows from the fields to their stalls in the milking sheds, tying chains around their necks to hold them steady and feeling their hot breath on her face as they gazed at her through navy blue eyes with long lashes. She then milked them (by hand) and got them back out into the fields again. Returning to the sheds, she washed the walls down with lime, a job which made her hand red raw. How many 18-year-old city girls would cope with that these days?

When she wasn't doing that, she would work out on the fields in all inclement weathers, helping to pull down trees with tractors and chains and digging up the land to plant such things as potatoes and cabbages. In the autumn, they would pull up the potatoes or thresh corn. It was back-breaking work and she reckons that has contributed to the scoliosis she suffers from now. But it was not all bad. It was while she was doing this sort of work that she met my father, in her shyness tripping over his tractor chain. He was a German refugee sent to work on the land too (see here). When she actually got a weekend off, she would run down the dark London streets avoiding air raids to get home to the Anderson shelter, where her parents were waiting for her. She still finds the sound of an air-aid siren sends shivers down her spine. The only recognition or thanks she got for it all was a badge which she had to wait over 60 years for and finally got through the post last year from DEFRA. For some strange reason, the WLA are rarely if ever mentioned alongside the other Forces at Remembrance Sunday or other special days and yet their contribution to the war effort - to supply food to the nation and especially the army - were arguably what won the war, as the UK would have not been able to keep going against Hitler for as long as it did.

Here is a picture of my mum (the one in the centre) meeting the late Duchess of Gloucester who visited them on one of her official tours.

Happy Birthday Mum x

Another reason to be angry

As if Greg did not do enough damage when he was alive, he is still wreaking it after he has died. I try not to let it get to me too much, but when it concerns Kay, I adopt my mad mother cow mode and bellow.

Back in March when Greg was rushed into hospital , Kay hurried the two hundred miles or so down from university to be there. Things were looking grim and Greg did in fact die a week later. Not only did Kay miss two weeks of lectures at that time (including the week following Greg's death) but she also missed a very important exam. She did this with the university's permission and they were good enough to say that she could take the exam in August instead, when those who had meanwhile failed it did their re-sits. The exam is next week.

So instead of having a nice long summer vacation to get over what has been a strenuous academic year (let nobody say medicine is an easy course to study) as well as a very difficult year on an emotional level, Kay has had to stick her nose in a book and study hard. The fact that one-third of her fellow course students failed that March exam and are having to do re-sits does not fill her with confidence as to its simplicity: she is worried sick she will fail too. Her old school friends in London have been inviting her out for days out here or there, or suggesting all-night clubbing or trips to the cinema. Kay has gone out to some, just to keep sane, but has also had to decline a lot for fear she will not get all her revision done in time. What is also worrying is that, if she fails the exam, there will not be enough time for her to resit the exam before start of the next academic year in September and she will therefore have to repeat the whole of the first year again instead. A whole lot rests on this exam. So no pressure then.

I feel so sorry for her and wish I could wave a magic wand. She is physically and mentally exhausted, seems to be getting one cold or ear infection after the other and is very run down. If Greg had not died, when he did and the way he did, she would have taken the exam in March and would be having a whale of a rest now. And once again, my anger is slowly rising. He's done it again.

All's well that ends well

I am pleased to say Snoopy recovered and Kay and I managed to get to the party in Northumberland after all..........

The drip to replace Snoopy's lost fluids did the trick and when we collected him on Saturday morning from the vet, he was a different dog, apart from a hole in his leg where the drip had been. He could walk again and his rear end had stopped exploding! Unfortunately my bank balance is slightly wobbly now instead as the vet's bill came to £587. Now I am hoping the pet insurance will kindly pay for most of it. The claim form goes off today. Wish me luck.

Kay and I did all our packing for the big trip North late on Saturday, after we were reassured that Snoopy was better and had started to digest the prescription food we had been given by the vet. We felt confident the live-in dog-sitter we had hired for three days would be able to cope and would not be saddled with a leaking dog! (I wouldn't have been happy leaving him in that state either - in fact I had prepared myself for the fact I would have to stay behind.)

Thus on Sunday Kay and I left for Northumberland on an early train and were met at lunchtime at Newcastle station by Greg's sister Jill and her family, who had themselves travelled up from Lincolnshire the day before and were renting a cottage for the week. A lot of Greg's family originally come from that area (many are still there) and, on the way out of Newcastle, we first set off in search of Kirkheaton where one deceased aunt used to live. We found her old cottage, chatted to some inquisitive neighbours and found her gravestone in the village churchyard. Kay and her cousin Rhianna had a day of piecing together the family history and we made further trips to Belsay to discover other houses and cottages in the family folklore. Inbetween that we managed to walk Jill's dog (which made me miss Snoopy even more) along bits of Hadrian's Wall.


I finally saw the rented cottage near the village of Wark late on Sunday. It was at the end of a very long dirt-track off a fairly small road and just what the doctor ordered. It was so remote, it did not even have a mobile phone signal (so I could not ring the dog-sitter for reassurance until we were out of the cottage and amongst larger habitable areas). It was in need of modernisation but it had charm (meathooks hung in the ceiling so we guessed it had been an outhouse for a nearby farm) and we were warm and comfortable, even if the shower was not up to the 21st century.

The 90th birthday party for Greg's elderly aunt was held at Whitley Bay on Monday. The clan all gathered there at lunchtime to celebrate and it was good to catch up with so many relatives- some I had not seen since the aunt's 80th birthday ten years before. Inevitably the conversation turned to Greg and it was at times difficult thinking Greg would have so enjoyed seeing his family again and yet was missing all this. I was there to represent him, but nevertheless his absence left a big hole.

We came home yesterday after a day touring the gorgeous countryside along the A69. We lunched in Corbridge and explored the the quaint shops and buildings around, before walking along the river. Then we only had time to drive quickly through Hexham (Greg's father's home town) before catching a late afternoon train for London at Newcastle. Snoopy was fine on our very late evening return and was so pleased to see us again. The dog-sitter had been very reliable.

It was a very relaxing/entertaining/ happy few days away. It did Kay and me some good to get away and breathe country air. I leave you with the view from the cottage bathroom window. Imagine sitting on the throne and seeing this..........

Pawly

Snoopy is poorly or pawly to be precise. It started yesterday when (the world fell out of his bottom) the bottom of his world fell out, if you get my drift. After several hours of pure runny brown liquid ejecting from his rear end, I decided not to let him sleep in my bedroom, as is his wont (I have beige carpets - enough said), but to settle him down on the kitchen tile floor. I slept near him all night on the floor too. How's that for (stupidity) total dedication?

By this morning, he was still producing enough brown liquid to sink the Titanic let alone the bed he was sleeping on and was now unable to use his back legs to support himself. He just lay in his mess too weak to roll over. I rang the vet and we were in the surgery by 8am. The vet's verdict was that Snoopy was very dehydrated and needed painkillers to ease his gut and antibiotics as a precaution. We were instructed to try to get him to drink fluids - not easy when a dog does not want to drink. On getting home, Snoopy did not want to leave the car and could not use his legs at all. So Kay and I had to carry him out into the house on a makeshift stretcher made from a blanket. As the day progressed the antibiotics and painkillers made some difference, but he was still passing copious amounts of brown liquid all over every fresh bit of bedding I could muster. Our washing machine was working flat out and as soon as I had hung one load up, I was washing/disinfecting another, not to mention floors carpets and all. I was exhausted! The vet had told me to ring him back at 4pm to see how he was doing and, when I told him he was still reluctant to use his legs, he told me to bring him in again.

Kay I managed to get him into the car, but when we arrived at the vet's, we could not get him out of the car. He had no strength to stand up. Again Kay and I resorted to the blanket to carry him out, taking two corners each. We struggled to manoevre him out of the car and onto the pavement and, as I slammed the car door shut, I realised a split-second later that I had locked my car keys and handbag inside!! Not only that, but I had parked on double yellow lines. To add insult to injury, Snoopy took one look at our pathetic situation and strolled nonchalently from the confines of the blanket to the surgery. It was rapidly turning into a farce. With no time to dally, we decided to get Snoopy inside and deal with the car later.

To cut a very long story short, the vet has kept Snoopy in overnight to put on a drip to replace lost fluids. Snoopy hates to be parted from me so the vet will sedate him too. I think I'll need some sedation too after a day like today. The Automobile Association came to the rescue and got my car unlocked again (I have a spare car key - in the house - but my house keys were .... inside the car in my bag and Kay had not brought hers.) My neighbour has my spare house keys - but they are away on holiday! A lesson is to be learned from all this and I think it is that I shall leave a spare set of house and car keys with a local friend who never goes away anywhere.

We await to see how Snoopy will be in the morning, but it is all very worrying as Kay and I have been invited to Greg's aunt's 90th birthday party which is being held in Northumberland (north of Newcastle) on Monday and we are travelling up by train early on Sunday morning. All Greg's wider family will be there and we have been arranging it for months. I had organised for someone to dog-sit Snoopy in the house for three days, while we are away. So you can imagine how I am panicking, if he does not make a full recovery by tomorrow, I shall not want to leave him, yet I do not want to miss the party either. I shall definitely need that sedation tonight. A nice bottle of wine would not go amiss, methinks.

Forgiving

Kay turned 19 last week. For the first time in 19 years, I did not have to arrange a party and pay for it agonising for weeks on what food to get, where to hold the party etc etc.. She just went up to the town centre with her friends to a club, just turned up at the venue and they all paid for themselves, got themselves home again on the night bus etc. Easy peasy! I stayed at home and put my feet up, watching my favourite soaps on TV.

She and I had gone out for a celebratory meal together the night before on her actual birthday. There is an old Italian restaurant, she ,Greg and I always used to go to, when we were celebrating something special. This time, Kay and I felt we would change the venue and go to a new Italian restaurant that has just opened, but as luck would have it (or not) the new place was so crowded and they were queuing out the door waiting for tables. Kay declared it was in any case tradition to go to the old place and we decided to head for that after all, but we ended up queuing to get in there too. For a Wednesday night, all our local restaurants seemed very busy!

I found it hard. Being in our special restaurant without Greg. Looking at the menu and just knowing what he would have chosen, as he always chose the same thing when we went there. It was hard too that I was the one doing the ordering, when he always ordered. It was hard that I paid the bill, when he always paid. The table was set for two, when it was always set for three. When Kay was very little, Greg would order chocolate fudge cake for dessert and ask them to cut it into one third for Kay and two-thirds for him, as she could not eat a whole piece by herself. Kay ordered a whole piece for herself this time. A year ago, Greg had celebrated with us, although admittedly he was so drunk before we even got there, that it was embarrassing. He kept standing up to go out for a cigarette and his trousers kept falling down. He was also uncharacteristically very rude to the waiters. So many memories sparked by every stage of the meal. At times, I felt as if Greg was watching over us from above.

Up to now I have been consumed by such anger about what Greg did over the last five years: the money he wasted on alcohol and cigarettes (about £600 a month, making quite a hole in our already reduced income); the mental stress he caused Kay and me; the damage he did to his own health and ultimately his life; the ruined plans for retirement together. In many ways, my anger and the events of the last five years had blocked out any feelings I had for him. But for the first time since Greg died, since the funeral and since scattering the ashes last week, I actually felt sorry for him for missing out on Kay's birthday. Just like he'll miss out on every other milestone from now on - her graduation, her marriage, the grandchildren, every birthday and Christmas, not to mention other milestones in my life and those of his sister and her family. And in his. He's missed out already on things like the general election and the Lib/Con Coalition, the World Cup and there'll be more things to come.

I went to one of my local Al-Anon meetings last week. We were talking about Forgiveness. Someone said "Forgiving does not mean you have to forget; it just means you get rid of the hurt, because storing up resentment doesn't help you to move forward." Another spoke of alcoholism being like a mental illness and not something the alcoholic can help. Suddenly it all made sense. Greg's drinking was like a form of mental illness. He could not help it. It was too big for him to deal with - like anorexia or depression can be. Being angry with him was pointless, inasmuch as telling someone who is depressed to pull themselves together is pointless. Being angry does not help me move on either. I can't forget what happened; I can't pretend it never happened; but Kay and I have to forgive him to find peace of mind and move on.

How to Celebrate a Wedding Anniversary

Although Greg died and was cremated in March, we had not yet scattered his ashes. It was his wish to return to his home town in Lincolnshire and end up there. He never considered London to be his real home and certainly not his final resting place. The reason for the delay is that I had been waiting for his niece, Rhianna, to return from a year's stay in New Zealand. She was so upset she could not be there for the funeral, despite trying her might to get back. The expense and tortuous journey involved in getting back to the UK at short notice from the other side of the world proved all too impossible and Rhianna was distraught. I therefore promised her we would hold off scattering the ashes until her return.

But life is never that simple. Trying to find a date that would be suitable for several parties involved started to be worse than trying to fit in a meeting between the Queen and Barack Obama. Rhianna was dotting about here and there meeting up with her German boyfriend; then her brother also wanted to be at the scattering and he had meanwhile gone abroad; we were trying to avoid a time that clashed with Kay's exams and her forthcoming birthday; Greg's best friend from schooldays also wanted to be there too; and it had to be at the weekend, because Greg' sister would otherwise have to take time off work (and she had already taken quite a bit off to help me when Greg was dying, so I wanted to avoid that at all costs).



There were in fact very few dates that fitted the bill this side of doomsday and eventually someone suggested that Saturday 10 July might be the best date for everyone concerned. I pondered long and hard over this. It was not that I had anything else pressing to do, but the tenth of July is our wedding anniversary... thirty-four years to the day since we married. Did I want to spend it scattering Greg's ashes? Then I thought about it and I smiled. It was rather symbolic really. The day we officially got hitched would be the day we would technically part. It would be perfect.



That day was yesterday. I had collected Greg' ashes from the undertakers the day before. A strange bundle to show for a life - ashes in a sealed plastic bag inside a plastic urn, inside a plastic carrier bag inside a cardboard bag. Yesterday, as Kay and I left home, I patted the bag and told Greg we were leaving the house to go back to his home town. Every step of the journey, I was telling him where we were. I joked that it was the first time he had been on the Underground for years. At Kings Cross we caught an early train up to Lincolnshire, where Greg's sister Jill met us and drove us to the spot we had chosen. We met up with Jill's family and Greg's best friend Ross and his wife.
It was an idyllic scene The sun was beating down from a clear blue sky, the air was very warm, the river sparkled and the townsfolk wandered slowly in the heat to their destinations. The town skyline looked magnificent, the spires and towers of the many churches reaching for the sky and the crumpled uneven rooftops of the ancient houses settling down for a nap in the heat. The town Greg loved and never left mentally. There were eight of us all together. All there for one purpose - to find Greg his final resting place. We walked away from the town into the quiet of the surounding countryside across the land Greg had walked as a boy with a dog as his companion. It is common public land, where other people now walk their dogs or rest to admire the beautiful view of the town.
We found the ideal spot, under the shade of a spreading tree. I read a poem and then a few of us took turns to scatter the ashes. It was an emotional moment. We took photos to record the spot. Later we ended up at a cafe for a refreshing drink and headed back to Jill's for lunch.
A while ago, I had lent Ross Greg's old cine films as he knows how to transfer them to DVD and edit them with music and titles etc. He had transfered to DVD and edited a 30-minute film of our wedding and honeymoon,which we viewed after lunch. It was strangely comforting to see Greg as a young man again and so happy and free from the struggles of recent years.
All in all it was a wonderful day and when Kay and I got back to London in the extremely humid evening, we were exhausted but happy. Greg was now at rest in his favourite place. Happy Anniversary!

Bugs, Football and Rattles

Well, I'm back in London after a rather manic ten days, dropping off the dog at my mother's, racing up north to visit Kay, sightseeing, then helping her pack up and come back to London, collecting the dog etc. Then for some extra punishment I went down with a gastric bug - I'll spare the gory details, except to say I had a temperature and spent several days rushing into a small room! The good news is that with that and the sweltering weather we have been having, I have lost twelve pounds and don't even remotely fancy food at the moment, so may resemble a stick insect by the end of the week (well, there's ALWAYS hope!)

Greg's sister, Jill, brought Kay's stuff down from Lincolnshire on Saturday. She had to come as far as Stansted anyway to drop her daughter (Rhianna) off at the airport. Rhianna was flying off to meet up with her German boyfriend. She ended up on Sunday watching the England match in Nuremberg of all places! I would imagine she had to keep her own nationality a bit of a secret!! Anyway, Jill carried on down the motorway to me, bless her, and brought all Kay' stuff safely home. She spent the weekend with us, though I was miserable company as I was still hatching my gastric bug and Kay was brewing a cold.

We three women watched the football on Sunday. The result was to be expected. Even I (with absolutely no experience in football) could see our boys weren't up to it. It beats me why we pay so much money to keep these football primmadonnas and their hangers-on (WAGS, managers and coaches) in a manner to which they have become accustomed. Why not just pay them a modest wage like the rest of us have to survive on and only give them hefty bonuses if they actually win a game? That should apply to all the national as well as European or World Cup games. That would give them an incentive to try to win at least. As it is, they earn ridiculously big money for doing badly. And can someone please explain to me why we have non-English managers,who apparently can barely speak English, managing British clubs when there must be plenty of indigenous folk up for the job? After all, surely an England team should be managed by, errrr, an Englishman; a German team by a German, a Russian team by a Russian. Or am I being too simplistic? Who's to say they are not spying on the team they're manging and giving the trade secrets away to their own country's team? How can they remain unbiased? Anyway, the best team won and that is what the World Cup is ultimately about. A shame, but England was so obviously not the best team. While we were watching, Kay came up with a great name for the German WAGS. HUFS = Hausfrauen und Freundinnen. Maybe it'll catch on.

Before Jill left, we rounded up a few things for her to take back with her. They were old items belonging to her mother, which had been given to Greg some years ago, but he had never used and which I thought now rightfully belonged with Jill. One was an old music centre (turntable/cassette/radio deck) which comes complete with loudspeakers. Greg had kept his mum's music centre in his bedroom alongside his bed, although, as I say, he never used it. Or so I thought. As Kay was carrying one of the speakers and I carried the other downstairs, Kay's one made a funny rattling sound. We thought it was about to fall apart and that its innards had come loose. Whatever was wrong with it? Once at the foot of the stairs, Kay found her speaker's front side came apart and inside she found the amplifier......... and two small empty bottles of whisky! Are we never going to stop finding them.. and in the strangest of places?

Driving me crazy.

I'm dropping off Snoopy at my mother's tomorrow ( a mere 120-mile round trip), the neighbours are briefed to look after the cat,then I am heading up North to spend a long weekend with Kay. This will be a new experience for Snoopy as Greg always used to look after him when I had to go away from home. The reason I am going away? Kay did her last exam of the season last week and so I am going up to see her, have a wander around her new environment, and help her pack up for the summer vacation. She now has to move out of the Hall of Residence, as the rooms are for first year students only, but she cannot move into the rented house she is going to share with her medic friends next term, until September. On Sunday we shall therefore have to bring all her clothes, bedding and kitchen equipment back to London for the summer.

I may have mentioned before that I HATE motorways and will not drive on them myself . My fear comes from an accident Greg and I came upon many years ago when we were driving along a motorway one dark foggy November night in Germany at the start of our marriage. We saw a dark space ahead of us and cars stopped on all lanes far in the distance with lights flashing. What we did not realise, as we slowed down to join the queue of cars ahead, was that in the dark void between us was a dead horse minus its head. We managed to avoid it at the last minute and swerved onto the hard shoulder of the motorway. Greg then proceeded to run up the motorway the way we had come along, carrying a warning triangle and a lit torch to try to get the traffic we had long overtaken to slow down and stop. He was worried they might not see the horse in time and there would be a multiple pile-up of mangled metal and bodies. I was left in the car with the body of the headless horse close by. It was like something out of The Godfather and of course I was worried sick Greg would get run over in the dark. All ended well (apart from the poor horse)and I later discovered the horse had run out of a field after its foal who had strayed onto the motorway. We later saw the foal alive further on down the motorway, being restrained by the motorists of the cars with flashing lights. But this scene has never left me and now makes me a nervous wreck on the motorway. I hate the speed and the way lorry drivers suddenly pull out in front of you or other cars dart and weave. Even as a passenger I hate motorways. I dread going on them. I certainly would never attempt to drive on them myself. I'd sooner do a thousand-mile detour!!

Greg's sister is kindly coming up from Lincolnshire to meet us on Sunday, bring Kay's stuff back as far as Lincolnshire and then on to London the following weekend. I am so grateful to her and apologise a thousand times for being such a wimp. I did not start to drive until I was 45, so I admit defeat on this one. It is a miracle I drive at all. Thank goodness for Greg's sister though. Kay informs me she is going to take driving lessons this summer and may be able to do the drive in future. Think I am going to lie down in a dark room with some smelling salts!!!!!!

The maybe's and perhaps'es

I suppose I should have remembered that my blog had its second anniversary a couple of weeks ago. Maybe, because the whole reason for starting this blog has now disappeared, my temporary memory lapse is a sign that the blog is going nowhere right now and doesn't need to be remembered.



When I nervously published that first post on 22 May 2008, I had no idea that two years down the line, I would be a widow. I knew things were not well, I knew Greg had a lot of health problems and I knew that death was distinctly on the cards if he carried on drinking. But just as you also know lung cancer is on the cards if you carry on smoking, you always think you are going to be the lucky one. So with Greg, I hoped he might see the error of his ways, manage to come off the drink permanently and we'd both sail into the golden sunset of retirement together. After all, it was not as if he had been a heavy drinker all his life, only in the last five years. I imagined he could stop as easily as he had started. I suppose I was in denial. The brutal facts are that only 1 in 10 alcoholics ever recover totally from their addiction and even then it is a tortured existence when faced with invites to family occasions, boys' or girls' nights out, or a walk past a pub on a bad day, at a vulnerable moment. So why I thought Greg would be the one in ten to survive and rise above this awful disease, I don't know. After all, that would be the same Greg, who spent most of his whole life trying to stop smoking even when he knew it was causing vascular problems in his legs and together with his diabetes making walking more difficult. So I guess addiction was in his veins.



Still, there was always a part of me that hoped (or maybe fantasised or just wasn't thinking realistically) that he would get over this. He certainly wanted to lick alcoholism into submission, but somehow the faint determination to do it got arm-wrestled into defeat by the enormous big bully cravings to carry on. Even a few days before he ended up on what was to be the final stay in hospital he was talking about getting help...... again. The trouble is that detox alone is not enough. He had had plenty of those either in a detox clinic or on numerous occasions when he was in a hospital bed and enforced not to drink . Detoxes just get the alcohol out of your system in a reduced slow way with the help of prescription drugs so that you don't experience the withdrawal symptoms. What you then need after that is rehab - a (usually) six-month-long stay in an institution to get to the bottom of WHY you drink and how best you can avoid it.... I suppose with a lot of soul-searching. Greg always refused to go to rehab. He did not like the idea of being away from home at all, let alone sharing a room with a stranger for six months (rooms are inevitably shared to help the process), nor the idea of possibly mixing with drug addicts and hard criminals. He always turned down that lifeline. Whether ultimately rehab might have kept him on the straight and narrow I do not know, but in turning it down, simply because he did not want to be away from home, he ended up in the situation of not coming home at all - ever - except in a wooden casket.

When he was admitted to hospital, bleeding internally in several places, his last words to me, before he fell unconscious, were that he hoped they could do something to help him "if I ever get out of here." I had to leave him at that point, as the hospital were barring visitors to contain the winter vomiting bug that was doing its rounds and I was only there to visit in the first place, because Greg was on the critical list. He must have realised how low his health had sunk. Did he perhaps know this was the last chance? "If I ever get out of here" keeps going through my mind over and over again. Perhaps he already knew then he had lost the battle.

Exam stress

Just back from a week at my mother's, so have not had a chance to catch up with other blogs and continue mine. Meanwhile as it is the exam season here in the UK at the moment, I thought I would publish this list of genuine errors which have appeared in past papers.....

Monotony means being married to the same person for all your life.

Use the word "judicious" in a sentence to show you understand its meaning..
Hands that judicious can be as soft as your face...

How important are elections to a democratic society?
Sex can only happen when a male gets an election.

What is a turbine?
Something an Arab wears on his head.

What is Britain's highest award for valour in war?
Nelson's Column.

Who was it that didn't like the return of the prodigal son?
The fatted calf.

What's a Hindu?
It lays eggs.

Name the four seasons.
Salt, mustard, pepper and vinegar.

What changes happen to your body as you age?
When you get old, so do your bowels and you get inter-continental.

What guarantees may a mortgage company insist on?
They'll insist you're well endowed if you are buying a house.

What is a co-operative?
It's a kind of shop that is not as dear as places like Marks and Spencer.

What are steroids?
Things for keeping the carpet on the stairs.

A major disease associated with smoking is premature death.

The equator is a menagerie lion running around the earth through Africa.

Christians go on a pilgrimage to Lord's.

I've said goodbye to boyhood, now I'm looking forward to adultery.

Artificial insemination is when the farmer does it to the cow instead of the bull.

The process of flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.

Cows produce large amounts of methane, so the problem could be solved by fitting them with catalytic converters.

The moon is a planet just like the earth, only it is even deader.

Dew is formed on the leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire.

A super-saturated solution is one that holds more than it can hold.

Mushrooms always grow in damp places and so they always look like umbrellas.

Rhubarb: a sort of celery gone bloodshot.

The body consists of three parts - the brainium, the borax and the abominable cavity. The brainium contains the brain, the borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abominable cavity contains the bowels of which there are five - a,e,i,o,and u.

To remove dust from the eye: pull the eye down over the nose.

For a nosebleed: put the nose much lower than the body until the heart stops.

For drowning: climb on top of the person and move up and down to make artificial perspiration.

For dog bite: put the dog away for several days. If he has not recovered, then kill it.

To prevent conception, wear a condominium.

For head cold: use an agonizer to spray the nose until it drops in your throat.

The pistol of the flower is its only protection against insects.

To keep milk from turning sour, keep it in the cow.

Wild for the city

I live in London and, despite the fact that it is one of the biggest cities in the world,there is a lot of wild-life here, that you might not expect to see. Foxes are quite common - we have a family living at the foot of our garden and they often come out to play on our lawn, much to Snoopy's annoyance. I can recall our niece coming down from her home in the Lincolnshire countryside to stay with us and being surprised at seeing her first fox close up.... in London of all places. She said she never sees them in the countryside. People around here often deliberately leave food out for them and they become quite tame. One used to come to our garden gate every night, when I put out dogfood for it, but we stopped doing it as it seemed unfair to mess with their natural routine of hunting. It's quite usual to see them trotting across the road at night, or standing on the pavements, watching and listening. We have seen a badger walking across the road late at night - only one, mind, but nevertheless, proof that they live here. We are inundated with grey squirrels, so that we don't even look up if one comes into the garden. Snoopy has great fun in the park chasing them back up the tree trunks,if they dare to come down foraging for food. They often sit on our garden fence and taunt him, daring him to chase them, which of course he can't, because a patio window divides them.

Over the last ten years or so, we have had an ever-growing population of exotic parakeets. It is said they escaped during filming of the African Queen here in 1951. They hang out in our local park and can be seen squawking in the treetops or flying around in search of food. They often visit my neighbour's garden to peck at wild cherries on their tree or snatch a nut or two from the bird-feeder. There is a down-side to all this in that a lot of familiar species like sparrows and blackbirds seem to have disappeared from our gardens, where once they were in flocks, but it is lovely to see the colourful parakeets in the heart of the big city. In warm weather, you can almost imagine you are somewhere exotic. They, for their part, don't seem to mind the cold and snow in the winter!

When Greg was quite ill towards the end, he used to sit in the kitchen/diner (bottom level right - see my previous post) and watch the wild-life as it came to our garden. It was the only distraction he really had, apart from the television or looking into the bottom of his whisky glass. He always used to sit on the same dining chair from morning till night - sometimes all through the night. It was HIS chair - close to the television, close to the garden, so that he could go out for a cigarette. Kay and I have not felt like sitting in that chair since he has gone. There is not a day that has gone past when I don't come into the kitchen and half expect him to be still sitting in that chair. I sometimes pat it when I walk past and ask him why he became an alcoholic and why he left us.

About a week after Greg died, I came down one morning to the kitchen and lying on Greg's chair was a green parakeet feather. It had not been there the night before and we had not even had one in the house anywhere. I tried to rationalise that maybe the cat somehow had brought it in, but she has never even brought in so much as a mouse or dead bird before, let alone a feather and why leave it on that chair? Furthermore, I have NEVER seen a green feather lying about outside for as long as the parakeets have been here. The cat would surely be unable to wrestle killing such a large bird and if so, where was the rest of the bird? I am not a believer in the paranormal, so I tried to dismiss it with logic, but it did spook me a little. I kept the feather - it is rather pretty - and put it on a shelf in the kitchen.Then, after the funeral, Kay and I took my mother home at Easter. When Kay and I got back home again, the feather was back on the chair. Now, I don't know about you, but I have absolutely no explanation for that.

Home sweet home

From what I have said in the past about living in a six-storey house, I can imagine some of you think I either live in a lighthouse or a windmill or a huge mansion or am just telling lies. Just to reassure you on all those points, my house is in a terrace of modern houses right in the suburbs of London. It's what is commonly known here as a townhouse. From the back or front it looks like a three-storey house, but the bottom level of the back and front are not aligned, so there are six half-levels. The staircase zigzags through the middle of the house. It looks a bit like this from the side.


The bottom right is the kitchen
The bottom left is the entrance hall, WC and garage.

The middle right is the lounge.
The middle left is the main bedroom and bathroom.

The top right are two smaller bedrooms, one of which is the study.
The top left is Kay's bedroom and another bathroom.


If you forget to take something to the top of the house with you, you have a long way to go to fetch it and vice versa if you forget to take something down with you. It certainly keeps me fit. Now imagine just how much more exercise I get clearing out the chaos in the study on level 5 to take things down to the garage on level 2. Up/down/up/down/up/down. Today I have been working like a navvy, breaking up some old furniture to arrange a different lay-out in the study and hopefully make more room. I've also taken several crates of old magazines, waste paper and general rubbish to the local dump. The study is beginning to change from Cinderella to the beautiful princess. Moreover, I'll sleep well tonight after all that hard work.