Battersea Power Station

A few weeks ago, I had a hospital appointment in central London, so Kay and I decided to make a day of it and visit the new Battersea Power station complex. I say "new" but it has been open since October 2022. I just hadn't had a chance to go along and see it before now, although I often pass it on the train.

Work began on the power station in 1929 and was designed by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. By 1935 the first turbine hall A was completed and put into operation. Work on a second turbine hall was halted because of the Second World War. RAF pilots used the smoke from the chimneys to guide them home, as did the Luftwaffe to bomb London. In 1955, the second turbine hall B was completed. In 1980 the Art Deco building was awarded Grade II listed status, but sadly in 1983 the power station ceased to generate electricity and was decommissioned. It lay idle for many years while various investors looked at it but decided against it. Finally, in 2012, Malaysian property investors bought it  to create a new community of homes, shops, cafes, restaurants, cultural venues and open space for London.

Many of the high-rise flats, which have been built around the power station, with rents of up to £5,000 per month, overlook the Thames, others overlook the adjacent railway lines and many overlook the rooftops of South London. There are offices in the complex too, but can only obviously be accessed by those who work there. The shops inside the actual power station are not the usual High Street chains, but upmarket ones like Cartier, Rolex, Apple, Chanel, Lego, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and too many many more to mention. There is even a Polestar car showroom. The shops are arranged on three levels around what was the original two turbine halls and the bit in the middle is where the boiler hall would have been. There is a food arcade on one of the levels with very many different world cuisines on offer, as well as street food outside on the riverbank.

I rather liked the juxtaposition of the old Art Deco brick building with modern steel and glass. 

The most exciting bit of all is Lift 109 which is a lift that ascends one of the tall chimneys and gives the most amazing 360 degree views of London. It is pricey at £23 per person but well worth the information display beforehand and then the views from the top. We stayed up there for 8 minutes before the lift descended giving ample opportunity to pick out landmarks and take photos.

the lift inside the chimney

the view from above

Happy Centenary

My mum was born on 16 August 1923, so today she would have been 100, if she had survived. Sadly, she died in 2017 at the age of 94.

She was born in London as the middle of three children. In January 1925, when she was about 18 months old, she, her 3-year-old sister and 6-week-old sister all contracted whooping cough and double pneumonia and ended up in hospital. The two little sisters died in the same week, but my mother thankfully pulled through, although her health was always frail from then on.  

Her father had got a job as a junior in a French bank in the City of London as a teenager, but was called up soon after to fight in the 1914-18 war. He was badly injured in 1917 at Passchendaele, the most life-changing injury being to lose an eye, although other injuries to his head and leg caused shrapnel to give him life-long bad headaches. Although he was able to return to his bank job after the war, he found adding up long columns of figures a strain on his good eye.  There were no calculators, so it was an arduous task. He therefore had little choice but to resign once he could no longer see properly, just at at time when the world was going through a massive economic recession in the 1920s. Mum said they moved after that to a rented shack in the countryside and kept chickens and goats, but, although my grandfather tried to sell the eggs at market, he came up against market cartels who excluded him and it paid very little. Her memory of childhood was eating mashed potato with gravy, day after day, and her only toys being a box of buttons and playing leapfrog with the goats. People on benefits today, just don't know how lucky they are!

Mum's mother was understandably suffering from stress, having lost two children in the same week, and could not settle. Nowadays there would be counselling and it would be labelled Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, but there was nothing like that then. Because she could not settle in any one home, they moved location many times between the wars,  back and forth between London and the Essex countryside, so much so that my mother's education suffered. Always having to change school and make new friends did not help her confidence. By the age of 14, she was made to leave school and get a job. She loved doing people's hair and wanted to train as a hairdresser, but her mother said that was a filthy job, handling people's nits, so put her in a factory instead, operating big Heidelberg printing presses!! My mother was very shy and hated having to walk through the gangways where the men whistled at her and made lewd comments. As soon as she could, she got out of there and applied to an advertisement in the window of a ladies' fashion shop, as they wanted a junior assistant. She very much enjoyed that, modelling clothes for customers, and after a few years was trusted to add up the takings and take them to the bank. 

In 1942, at the age of 19, she was called up for war work and she opted for the Women's Land Army. She was posted to Hertfordshire and a hostel in Barnet. Still painfully shy, she found it hard to mix with some of the more loud and experienced London girls in the hostel, who only wanted to go to dances and meet men.  The foreman would send them off to work at local farms, clearing the land or tending to the farm animals. 

Mum  as a Land Girl (centre) meeting the Duchess of Gloucester

One day, she was sent to a farm where there were a lot of men working on the land. They were conscientious objectors or refugees who could not join the forces. The men were tying chains round the trees and connecting the chains to their tractors, then dragging the trees, roots and all, to clear the land. The Land girls were cutting the twigs and branches off the trees and putting them in a pile to be taken away or burnt on a bonfire. My mum tripped over one of the tractor chains and went flying. The handsome young tractor driver, a German refugee called Kurt, climbed down from his tractor and scooped her up. He asked her out, but she was so shy she declined. Kurt was very persistent and over the weeks that followed he kept inviting her on a date until she finally relented. He loved opera, about which she knew so little, so he would take her to watch operas or dine out in London. Considering how shy and reserved she was, introducing a German into the family as her boyfriend, when her father had lost an eye from German gunfire, was quite a bold thing to do!

They married in 1947 and I came along in 1950. They were married nearly 54 years and remained madly in love as ever until the day my father died on 1 February 2001. Because of health problems, she never really had a career, but was a housewife all the time I was growing up, but did have an office job in later years, which she thoroughly enjoyed. They retired to the South coast, but, after Dad died, her arthritis got worse and worse, so she couldn't cope on her own and I moved her closer to me in 2013 to a retirement flat in London, so I could visit her daily and help her.

Enjoying life on the South coast

She died in November 2017 and I miss her so much. It therefore seems right to spend today visiting the South coast resort, where her ashes remain with my Dad's, to spend the day with her.

Happy 100th, Mum. No birthday card from the Queen (or King, as we now have to say, although Mum would have something to say about that, I am sure), but at least I'll be with you in spirit.

Little things please little minds

Every day I try to do the Wordle puzzle on my phone. I kid myself it keeps my mind sharp and hopefully stops me falling into old age with dementia. I am also rather fond of cryptic crosswords for the same reason. If I can I usually do Wordle while having breakfast, but if busy, I sometimes do it later in the day.  On difficult words, it has sometimes stretched me to six attempts and on a rare occasion I have failed altogether, but my average is about three or four attempts. 

Today I did it first time! Look away, if you don't want to know the answer below.

This and that

The days seem to fly by these days and suddenly I see it is 15 days since I last posted. I have been busy since my return from Salisbury, partly in my own house and partly in Kay's, partly at the charity shop and partly at choirs, but also with hospital appointments.

To get to the bottom of why my acid reflux is so bad, I have had various hospital tests lined up. First a CT scan which thankfully revealed no major problems and certainly no regrowth of the tumour they removed in 2016. Then an endoscopy ten days ago, which revealed a hiatus hernia (a by-product of the operation which has made my stomach a crescent shape which now pokes through my diaphragm). I also have polyps caused by over-use of omeprazole (I have been on that for 7 years continuously since the operation) and the pyloric sphincter, which allows food to pass from the stomach into the intestines, is very narrow. Despite fasting for 7 hours before the procedure, I still had food in my stomach, so the consultant concluded that my stomach was not evacuating food fast enough. (It would therefore explain why, even when I eat as late as 7 pm, I may still have food in my stomach at 2am, which, when I am horizontal in bed,  is when I wake up choking with acid in my throat.) The plan is to do a second endoscopy in a few weeks' time and stretch the pyloric sphincter to allow food to evacuate faster. I also have an ultrasound planned to rule out gall stones. So it's all happening.

Meanwhile the weeds in Kay's garden have been a challenge. I removed them about 6 weeks ago and already they are the height of triffids. Kay had some friends coming to stay last weekend, see the house for the first time and celebrate her 32nd birthday, so I went over to de-weed yet again. Bindweed had also taken up residence and was wrapping itself around every bush and plant, growing in some cases up to about 4 feet. Trying to disentangle that lot was like doing brain surgery, trying to remove the problem but keeping the plant intact. While I was working in her garden close to the enormous pond there, I was aware of eyes watching me and saw two little frogs with their heads above water watching my every move intensely. 

I have become obsessed with helping out at the foodbank charity shop and think I have missed my vocation as a shop girl! I have enjoyed sorting clothes, pricing them and hanging them up in colour and then size order, as the manager likes, and pottering around to ensure they stay like that, when customers have mixed them all up!

I've got a quieter week this week, so time to devote to other things and my own garden. And blogs. 

Away days

Last week I had a much-awaited break away from London.  I rarely get the chance to go on holiday these days as I don't have anyone to go with. Kay understandably wants to spend holidays with her fiance and most of my friends go away with their husbands or are too poorly to travel, so I decided, if I wanted a holiday at all, I would need to try to travel alone.  If I could manage that, then I might venture further afield, I thought to myself. 

The first attempt about 7 weeks ago was aborted, because the hotel I was booked into had a massive power cut which rendered them closed for business for a whole week, starting with the date of my departure.  I was thwarted with an attempt to book alternative accommodation and had to abandon the idea. Then I got sick with a flare-up of my old acid reflux trouble and was only able to resume the Salisbury trip last week, but this time I chose a different hotel. 

Why Salisbury? Because V, an old schoolfriend of mine, lives on the outskirts there and as I haven't seen her in over 40+ years, I decided it was high time to correct that. We kept threatening in Christmas cards to visit one another, but life just got in the way and then in 2020 Covid did, putting paid to any visits anywhere because of lockdowns. Finally this year, I decided it was now or never.

G, the husband of another schoolfriend, who sadly passed away 6 years ago,  has also kept in touch and agreed to meet up too, so it was lovely to see them both. The day flew by as we caught up on those missing 40+ years. There were no awkward silences and it was as if we had met regularly. 

While in Salisbury I covered a lot of ground sightseeing. I stayed in a lovely 800-year-old hotel (although it was fortunate enough to have running water, WiFi and TV facilities!) I was also lucky to be the only person on a walking tour of the town so had my own one-to-one guide. A tour of the Cathedral was also a must and the three days just zoomed past. 

The beautiful cathedral built 1220-1258

cathedral cloisters

Tomb of Edward Heath in the Cathedral

An amazing specimen of wattle and daub inside a Cotwolds camping shop

The 800-year-old hotel

The contraption in the hotel reception used for steaming the ruffs used by choristers

Food for thought

I regularly volunteer at our local foodbank and have been doing so since 2018. Our local foodbank hands out food on a Tuesday, Friday and Saturday as well as providing a sit-down cooked meal to over a hundred people on Fridays. It also offers a cafe, sewing repairs, advice on benefits and help with reading and writing. The numbers of users have swelled over the years but more so in the last year - probably a lot to do with Ukrainian immigrants and the cost of living crisis. My role has been mainly to bag up a selection of food and hand it out but have also sat many times at the sewing machine and done all sorts of repairs to unravelling seams, torn material, missing buttons and changing the size to fit better where people have lost weight.

The church that runs it has acquired two huge shipping containers in its grounds to fill with donated tins and packets. We regularly collect from the supermarkets that donate food close to use-by dates and of course passers-by drop off bags of food. We also get a lot donated by schools at harvest festival time. However, with more users and less donors because of the cost of living crisis (and the fact that our foodbank has become well-known for being generous), the stocks have dwindled and the church has had to dig deep into its pockets to buy food to supplement the supply.

As a result, it was decided to open a local charity shop to augment the foodbank purse. We secured a shop in one of the neighbouring High Streets and have been kitting it out for the last two weeks - the usual charity shop type of thing selling clothes, shoes, toys, ornaments, books, CDs and DVDs. I have dipped in on several occasions to sort clothes, make sure they were suitable for sale, and sort them into colour and size order in the shop. On Friday, I was busy pricing a lot of items up with tags.   The shop was officially opened on Saturday by the local MP, who has always taken an interest in the foodbank. I shall help out in the future on an ad hoc basis to work in the shop and that will give me something else to do that is worthwhile, whilst still helping at the foodbank itself. On the opening day last Saturday, we took over £1600, so that will help the foodbank, although with over 250 users that will provide no more than £6 per person and of course, rent and services have to be paid on the shop. 

Hopefully the initial euphoria of a new shop on the High Street will not wane and we will keep up this kind of sale on a regular basis. If not, the service we hope to provide to our users will fall into question of its future.

Opening day of the new shop

I can't stomach this

Well the run of bad luck continues.

Following an operation in 2016 to remove a stomach tumour, I am prone to episodes of acid reflux. This is where acid comes up from the stomach into the throat and, I can tell you, it burns! It is most distressing as it usually happens at night when I am in a deep sleep and I rear up choking. I can best describe it as vomiting in my sleep. I always try to grab a glass of water to neutralise the acid and usually any damage soon passes within a few days.

However, this time, I have been suffering for about 5 weeks. My throat and oesophagus are very sore and ulcerated, which makes talking and swallowing difficult. My stomach behind my breast bone feels as if it has been punched and aches. I generally feel one degree under and listless. No amount of my usual medication or bland diet has soothed it. The good news is I have lost 6 pounds in the last few weeks, but I don't want to lose much more. 

I finally managed to get a telephone consultation with my GP about 2 weeks ago and he fast-tracked me to my old consultant (from 2016) at St Thomas' Hospital whom I saw last week. She is organising an endoscopy (not looking forward to that), a CT scan and an ultrasound scan in the next few weeks to see what is going on. 

Bad luck

My run of bad luck (sprained ankle in November, Covid in December, washing machine flood in January, ongoing continuing saga of bed delivery) has now been increased by another incident. This week I was due to go on holiday for a few days, but the trip was unexpectedly cancelled at the very last minute.

As I am a widow, an only child with no cousins or wider family and, as my two best friends live at least 60 miles away from me with busy lives of their own, I have nobody really to go away on holiday with. (Sound of violins in the distance.) Before the pandemic I had therefore decided the only way to get a holiday was to go away on my own, but the pandemic soon put a stop to any thoughts on that. 

Over the past few months however, I had decided to resume my courage to go away solo and had decided to start with Salisbury. Not only was that a reasonable train distance from London, but I have an old schoolfriend, with whom I still keep in touch, who lives in an outlying village to Salisbury. We still write to one another at Christmas and usually threaten to visit one another, but life and the years have passed so quickly and suddenly forty-seven years on, we have not seen one another since 1976. We agreed to meet for lunch last Wednesday. I meanwhile had booked into a Wetherspoons hotel for two nights in Salisbury - I thought it fitted the bill as it was closest to the station and the town centre -so that I could travel down by train and sightsee on the Tuesday and Thursday either side of seeing my friend on Wednesday.

On Tuesday morning, I was all packed and had just finished my breakfast. My first train connection within London was due to leave within the hour. I was just thinking of checking all the things you check before you leave home, when an email pinged in on my phone. "Reservation Cancellation". In horror I read that my reservation at the hotel had been cancelled. The email was not even from the hotel I had booked but from one in Henley. At first I thought it was a joke but when I tried to ring the hotel, I was getting unobtainable and the Henley hotel was not answering either. In frantic desperation with only half an hour to go before my train, I tried online to find an alternative hotel in Salisbury, but none had availability at such short notice. I had no choice but to abandon the trip altogether. I was so disappointed. To add insult to injury, when I went down to the station to get a refund on my train ticket (which I had bought weeks ago) I was told it was non-refundable.

I have been trying all week to get in touch with the hotel for an explanation but still get the unobtainable tone. Then I found this online. It helps to explain why, but still hasn't sadly pacified my disappointment. What were the chances of that happening on the day I was due to get there?

Goodnight, sleep tight

You would think buying a bed would be simple. You go into a shop, try out a few, find the one you want, pay for it, have it delivered and "goodnight, sleep tight". That's the theory. In practice I have had the most awful experience.

Back in November, when Kay and her fiance bought a house, I decided to give them my bed to put in their guest bedroom. My bed was nudging 30 years old and I decided maybe it was time for a new one. They say that you should change your bed every 8-10 years. I don't know whether that is just the bed manufacturers' way of getting you to buy new, otherwise they would never make a sale once everybody had one, or whether there is some science in the need to change it that often, but I had deliberately ignored it until now. I had donated my bed on the spur of the moment while Kay had the removal van handy and intended to go looking for a replacement the very next day, except I sprained my ankle (see here) and was virtually housebound for three months, so couldn't go looking until late January. 

Come January, I decided to go to a small shop not far away that I had used in the past for Kay's bed and wanted to give the small shopkeeper some business. These days, there are so many options - single, queen, double, king and super king, not to mention natural fibres, memory foam, latex foam, gel-top, as well as firm/medium/soft tensions. After careful deliberation, I chose a lovely oak frame bed with headboard and footboard and bounced up and down on a few beds until I found the mattress I liked. Easy peasy. Or so I thought. 

I had to wait 4 weeks for the mattress to come over from Ireland (apparently) before the bed and frame were delivered, so by the end of February, having slept on a camping bed since November, I was getting very excited. The day of the bed delivery arrived, two men carried the mattress up to the bedroom and it was then that I noticed...... a dent in the headboard and fingerprint-like stains on the mattress. I rang the shop and took photos and they agreed without any fuss on receipt of photos that they would replace everything. 

some of the stains on the mattress

In the meantime, I had noticed that the mattress I had chosen had no handles (I had mistakenly thought they all did) and, given that I live on my own, turning it periodically (as is advised) would not have been easy, so I took the opportunity to change my order for a more expensive mattress (double the price) with handles. 

I waited another 4 weeks for the replacements to arrive, but finally in  early April mattress number 2 and headboard number 2 arrived. That bedhead was also damaged and I was promised yet another replacement in due course. After several nights it became clear to me that the mattress was far too soft and causing lower backache. It's one thing to try it out in the shop for 30 seconds and quite another to spend a whole night on it. I asked if they could swap it back for the original model but obviously one without stains! I would just have to cope without mattress handles. I also asked if they could get their warehouse to check the wooden headboard for damages before putting it on the delivery van to save a wasted visit. This was promised. The shop had gone to great pains to tell me that they can return a damaged mattress to the manufacturer, but as mattress number 2 was not damaged and merely uncomfortable, they would charge me £290 extra as "scrappage" in other words the only way they could make some money out of my return as they do not have a licence to sell second-hand beds and they would literally have to destroy it.

Another long wait began until the mattress number 3 could be delivered from the manufacturer, but finally this week I was promised it would be delivered. The headboards had however all been checked in the warehouse and none were damage-free, so they were going to speak to the manufacturer with whom they were having some problems anyway. The wait for that would continue. 

Mattress number 3 arrived yesterday. As the delivery men unwrapped it from its packaging and laid it on the bed I noticed the same familiar fingerprint stains on it and pointed them out to the men. They had delivered the very mattress (number 1) that I had returned in February. I rang the shop, but had to leave a detailed message as there is only ever one salesperson in the shop and they cannot answer the phone if dealing with a customer. Shortly thereafter, I got a phone call from the shop's customer service manager located in deepest Surrey somewhere. He was  overflowing with apologies, saying there had been a monumental mix-up. First of all mattress number 1 with stains should never have gone back to be stored in the warehouse as it would cause "contamination" with the rest of their new stock, but somehow or other it had been returned to the warehouse as "stock". Secondly, the message that I wanted the original choice of model  back had somehow been relayed that I wanted the original complete with stains (as if) and that is why it had been delivered yesterday. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I rarely lose my rag with people, but I let fly and said this was disgraceful service. Not only that but I had paid the £290 scrappage fee because I was told they would never resell a used mattress and yet, here I was getting a used mattress (I know, as I had used it previously!) The customer service man assured me this was a very unusual mix-up and should not have happened and there was going to be an Inquiry.  He could not have grovelled more if he had tried. Meanwhile he told me I have another 4-week wait to get mattress number 4.

So here I sit 4 months on still waiting for the perfect mattress and bedhead to materialise.  The customer service man said I was a one-in-a-million for this to happen to. Just my luck!

Blooming lovely

Just a few yards down the road from where I live is a guerrilla garden - a local resident has taken it upon himself to plant a flower and herb bed on the common grass verge that lines the road. There are little signs up inviting passers by to help themselves to herbs. I have blogged about it here before, as recent strong winds had played havoc with the tree that stood in the middle of the patch and council workers had shown scant regard for the plants, when felling the tree. The colourful plants always cheer me up when I walk past. This is how it looks this week. It's amazing what a few cheerful plants and the goodwill of one person can do for a neighbourhood.

Incensed

Following my recent post (see here), I am getting more and more cross at the way the media is presenting the junior doctors' strike. As we go into the next round of strikes this week, it is being portrayed, as if the junior doctors are greedy wanting a 35% pay rise. All I keep hearing is "pay rise" and the "havoc" they will create by going on strike, but nowhere is the real situation being reported.

It is NOT a pay rise. Their pay has been falling over the last fifteen years and has certainly not kept up with inflation. As a result they are earning less in real terms than they were 15 years ago. They are seeking pay restoration not a pay rise. As my daughter put it, imagine you have £4 and over the years that £4 is worth £3. In order to get back to that £4 you need £1. But that £1 is a third of the £3 you now have, so you need 33% to get it up to what you originally had. Add on a bit more for current inflation (which is more than that 2% but let's not be greedy) and there you have your 35%.

Forget the unsociable hours and long shifts they work. They're not sat behind a till in a shop, (although they earn just as little), but making stressful life or death decisions, often so understaffed that the patients are seriously at risk. The Covid pandemic has exhausted them and they feel, justifiably, undervalued and overlooked. Kay has worked all over the Easter weekend and is exhausted. She didn't have time to sit down once during her 12-hour shifts. 

If the media won't explain that, then please pass this on to whoever moans about the strike being a pain in the wotsit. It needs to be told.

Buzzing

I sing in two different choirs on two separate evenings every week.  I have been lucky that the concerts they produce each term are never on the same day, but this term was different. Not only were they on the same evening but at the same venue at a festival of music! I was worried how logistically it was going to work, as one choir wears white tops and black bottoms and the other is all in black. I had heard we were going to be on stage together and I was having sleepless nights working out how I was going to carry this out without doing a striptease in front of a full audience and darting across the stage like a mad thing from one choir to another. We were also to be joined by a third choir and there were four songs the three choirs were also going to sing together in the finale.

Last night was THE NIGHT.  It was made easier by the fact that each choir took the stage by themselves while the others watched from the wings, so it made a dress-change possible, as I darted round backstage. I was actually on stage for over an hour (with each of the two individual choirs and with all three for the common songs). I was hoarse by the end but I'm still buzzing with excitement as everyone in the audience said one of the choirs I'm in was THE BEST. Here are two extracts of us singing from the musical Wicked - all sung off by heart with no music in front of us.

Part 1

Part 2

Once I got home, I was too excited to go to sleep so sat up long past midnight, which of course meant it was past 1 am, as the clocks went forward an hour today for summertime. We have William Willett to thank for that as he came from an area not far from where I live - in fact where I grew up as a teenager - in Petts Wood. There is a memorial to him in the woods for his daylight saving measures and the local pub is called The Daylight Inn. I did not thank William Willett for the hour's sleep I subsequently lost as today I am feeling definitely sleepy.

Daylight Inn, Petts Wood

Strike while the iron is hot

Kay is on strike today, tomorrow and Wednesday. For those who don't know, she is a junior NHS doctor employed at a busy London hospital. She will be striking  this week together with thousands of other doctors. From conversations I have had with people and from some coverage on the media, it is not altogether clear what the reasoning behind the strike is and why doctors should have an almost 100% walk-out for three solid days  and why they are asking for a 35% pay-rise. So I hope I can explain here. But before people worry about who will cover their work while they strike, it will done by consultants, who are fully behind their juniors striking.

First, who are the junior doctors?   A "junior doctor" is anyone from someone who has only just got their medical degree from university right up to just below Consultant level. It takes at least 11 years or more to get to consultant level so the junior doctors are typically aged from about 25 to 40 years old. Some are older if they have taken alternative routes or started later. By then most will have partners, children and mortgage commitments.  Despite being called "junior", from the moment they leave university they are thrown into the deep end and when they do on-call shifts -at weekends or at night - they can be the only doctor in the whole hospital dealing with hundreds of patients who might suddenly get worse. So although  termed "junior" they are expected to step up to the plate and work hard making stressful life-and-death decisions on their own.  

During those 11 years or so, they are told (not given a choice) where they will be posted and move around  each year from hospital to hospital and from rotation to rotation until they gain more experience in different specialities. This can mean they cannot put down roots anywhere nor take out mortgages if, say, they are expected to move every year to somewhere fifty miles or more away. Their children may have to be moved to another school, or couples live apart. It doesn't make for an easy home life.

Home life is not easy anyway. In their spare time they regularly have to study for even more exams that will qualify them to move up the career ladder. They don't get study leave - it is done in their spare time. They have to pay for these exams too, some of them averagely costing about £600 - £800 which they don't get reimbursed. If they fail the exam, they pay again. Studying on top of an often 60-hour week doesn't come easy and means less relaxation time after a stressful working week.  Not only exams, but also having to write and present papers, do the odd bit of teaching to those more junior than them - it all hacks away at less time to de-stress.

It is always expected by NHS management that the staff will shut up and put up with their conditions. A conscientious doctor cannot walk away from a patient just because their shift technically finishes at a certain time. If a patient is really sick and needs reviewing or, in the extreme, resuscitation, a doctor will stay sometimes one or two hours beyond their shift to deal with it.  If they have already done a 12-hour shift, that is a big ask.  Covid saw a demoralised workforce, mentally shattered and with no respect for what they had done. Agreed, the public clapped for them at the beginning, but now moan that there are long waiting lists. The general praise was short-lived and the government support pushed under the carpet. Many of the workforce have  left either to retrain away from medicine or emigrate to places like Australia or America, where doctors are held in higher regard and paid accordingly. This has left existing staff under even more pressure and feeling burnt out.  Not to mention undervalued. 

The money is just the last straw. The fact is that they have not had pay rises since 2008 and so with inflation have actually taken a 35% pay cut.  As one recent poster put it, they get paid less than someone who serves coffee in Pret a Manger. Why would you study at university for six years, be faced with endless stressful life-and-death decisions, have to give up free time to study even more and get paid the same as a coffee barista with shorter working hours and more free time? It's a no brainer. 

So please support the strike. The junior doctors are not being greedy, they just want to be valued for their hard work and the difficult conditions they have worked under, especially during and since Covid. 

Lace

Today it is thirteen years since Greg died. I still remember those last 24 hours vividly as we sat around his Intensive Care bed and watched him fade away.  I have said before that I should stop counting the years, but it is hard to do. Like any anniversary or important date, it is hard to stop the mind from remembering and wanting to somehow mark it. If it were a wedding anniversary it would be called a Lace one. I feel as if I am looking through the gossamer fine threads to recall a time when all was well in our marriage and we were a normal couple, a normal family living in a normal household. Alcohol shot all that to pieces - to the fine gossamer thread I look through now. 

His death has in some ways left me strong enough to cope with living alone and dealing alone with everything that most couples share. Although friends sympathise, I am sure they don't realise that household chores, gardening, DIY - everything - are solely my domain now and not things that can be shared with a partner. If I don't do it, it doesn't get done. For the last week, I have been decorating one of the bedrooms, up to my eyes in paint and dustsheets, heaving furniture about, but still having to cook a dinner, wash-up, put the bins (trash) out and deal with all the minutiae of everyday life. Meanwhile the garden needs tidying and I need to get someone in to check an electrical problem. The list is never-ending, but I have no choice but to do it all alone. 

A few people have suggested I am young enough to look for another partner. For sure I spend far too many days alone and far too many a long evening watching far too much television to pass the dark evenings, but I am nervous to go down a route that might cause more problems than it solves. "Once bitten, twice shy" springs to mind.   Also, part of me now feels that after 13 years of making decisions for myself, I might find it hard to share decision making with someone else, over even the simplest of things. I'm reading a novel at the moment, where it mentions "women mourn, men replace". In other words men remarry faster than women. Whether I have mourned enough remains to be seen, but it is hard to shrug off a lifetime of memories and habits.  I also feel I would somehow be betraying Greg to move on.  

I admit freely that I miss the company and going for a spontaneous walk with someone, or sharing a thought, sharing a meal. It is not even as if I have any siblings or cousins I might spend some time with - I am the only child of an only child.  I have thrown myself into choir rehearsals and volunteering at the local foodbank to keep me busy and distracted, so as not to spend a day without talking to a soul.  Thank goodness, since November,  I have my daughter Kay, now living a fifteen-minute walk from me, although she is very busy with her career and has limited time to herself, let alone with me. I have spent the last couple of months helping her with her much-needed garden makeover, which has helped distract me and pass many an hour. I know it could be far worse, as you do hear of widowed people who are completely cut-off and don't see a soul from one end of the month to the next.

It is even harder in some ways for Kay at the moment. As part of her work, she is now working in the very Intensive Care ward where Greg died and sees his bed with someone else now lying in it. How hard must that be? She was just starting a Medicine course at university, when he died. She could have gone off the rails, turned to drugs or drink, and slipped through the net herself. To her credit, she fought hard against her emotions, studied hard, became the excellent doctor she now is and carved a bright future with a partner and home of her own. 

Meanwhile, today sees Kay and me visiting the crematorium to place flowers and look at the Book of Remembrance where Greg's death is listed. Proof it happened. Proof he existed. Something that, in reality, looking through the lace, seems to be slipping further and further into history.  

On the tiles

I have been having some work done on my guest bedroom. Having had painters in to strip some woodchip off the walls, replaster and then paint, I still have one alcove unfinished. It is a small alcove with a wash basin in it. I want it tiled round the three surrounding walls and round the basin itself.  It is not a massive job and the tiling is only 2.65 square metres.

Finding a tiler to do that work has been like looking for the Loch Ness monster. They're either too busy, or don't bother to answer my approach to them or, in one case, quote an exorbitant price in the hope I'll go away. Bear in mind, I will provide and already have the tiles, one quote just for labour was £800.  Seriously? At this rate, I may end up attempting to tile it myself. 

Taming the Wilderness

My daughter Kay and her fiance Darcy (not real names obviously) have been living in their first owned home for three months now. They both have extremely busy, tiring and arduous jobs which take up most of their time and energy, so have little time for anything else. 

The house is an Edwardian terrace in a quiet road just off the  High Street. The previous owner was an elderly lady who has gone into a care home.  The house is in a bit of state, which is why Kay and Darcy were able to afford it, as London property prices are easily three times and often seven times those in other English cities and towns. Despite the high price tag, it needs a hell of a lot of work on it. Not a lot has been done to it in the last 50 years I reckon. There is only one electrical socket in each room, so badly needs rewiring. The plumbing is in a state and the antiquated central heating needs replacing. There is a downstairs bathroom and a miniscule bathroom upstairs which is little more than a toilet cubicle with a shower squashed in, so there are plans to make the upstairs bathroom bigger and move the boiler on the landing downstairs to make room for it.

So far, Kay and Darcy have painted the kitchen cupboard doors to make the kitchen brighter. Originally it had very dark hand-made mahogany cupboards, but now is a peaceful light blue which has cheered the kitchen up no end. No other major work has started yet, because they are both so busy with their careers. 

The front garden, tiny as it is, was so overgrown, that the internet provider could not get in to put his ladder up to connect them to the internet and went away, cursing that they would need to address the garden before he would return. I managed to hire a gardener to prune a tree, dig a trench of earth away from the house that was blocking vital air vents  and remove a tiny pond (yes, there was one in the front garden and the garden is only about 10 feet by five feet!!). The internet man returned and wifi was finally installed in early January.

Over three separate days, Kay and I have tackled the back garden together.  It too was badly in need of some tender loving care and looked like a wilderness.  I could picture the prince hacking his way through the forest to get to the sleeping beauty. You get the idea. Virginia Creeper had grown up the back of the house as high as the roof and spread across the upstairs windows so you could not see out. It had even spread across to the neighbour's windows upstairs. Ivy bushes lined both borders to the left and right and had grown to a height of about 12 feet, so badly needed chopping back. There were all manner of dead bushes and two fruit trees ( a pear and an apple) that were so shallowly planted, they rocked from side to side. Brambles had soared 15 feet high and tangled into trees, ivy and bushes, so it needed a brain surgeon to painstakingly pick through what branch belonged to what. We filled bag upon bag of garden waste and made many trips to the local tip. There is still a lot to do. 

There is a pond that takes up most of the back garden. There is no lawn at all but a tiny path that meanders through the wilderness and around the pond.  I almost fell in it the first time I visited, as the brambles and ivy had completely covered the pond, so i did not know it was there! But it is stagnant and full of brown rotting apples that float across its surface. That's a job for another day. We keep discovering all sorts of metal objects - two rusting cockerels, a lobster, dragonfly and a flowerpot man to name a few. I'm  sure we'll find more.

There's still a quarter of the garden to tackle, but that involves more brambles, more ivy, a dilapidated shed and what looks like a fox or badger hole that burrows diagonally down into the centre of the earth. We have seen two foxes brazenly stroll across the back fence during daytime, so we assume that is their home, but hopefully for not much longer, as we have barricaded the hole up with bramble cuttings. They'll have to use an alternative exit in future.

a corner of the garden before

A few hours later

Accident-prone

I don't know why, but this last 12 months I have been accident-prone. I think it's because I am always in a rush to do things and overtake myself on the way back, if you see what I mean. In the last 12 months I have broken two toes (one on each foot) and badly sprained my ankle. The toes were injured in two separate incidents - one when a tin can fell off a high shelf while I was volunteering at our local foodbank, the other when I slipped on a wet floor. I posted about the recent ankle injury in November.

To add to this list of accidents, I now have a bruise and a bump on my forehead. I had gone at the weekend to collect a friend who was doing a shift with me at our park information centre. Her car had broken down en route to the shift and I agreed to fetch her but was unsure where exactly she was. I parked up, got out of the car to see if I could find her on foot, but then at the last minute decided to dive back into my car to look up my exact location on a street map. The sun was in my eyes and I ended up head-butting my car roof, as I missed the doorway! Boy, did that hurt!

Fortunately the ankle is healing nicely. As one thing heals, I seem to injure another. Meanwhile I am still waiting for my new bed to be delivered.  I ordered it two weeks ago and was told delivery would be in 2-4 weeks. I am now in my 11th week of sleeping on a narrow (2-foot-wide) camp bed. I shan't know myself when the new one finally arrives. I shall sleep for a week.

Someone up there definitely does not like me

Well, the new year has not been good so far. First I had a flood. Because of a blocked drain somewhere, my washing machine could not empty out and water pumped up the outflow drain pipe all over my garage floor (where the washing machine is situated). Worse, many decades ago, Greg had laid lino down on the garage floor to make it look more like a utility area - where my tall freezer also stands - and also to deaden the sound of the concrete below and the flood had trickled under the lino too. This was all unbeknown to me for a few wash loads until the lino could hold the water beneath no longer and made itself more visible. 

I had to call a plumbing company out to unblock the drain, but then I began the mammoth task of pulling up the lino, now badly stained and smelling badly too! I have since ordered some rubber jigsaw-like tiles to lay down in the garage instead. This is a work in progress but I am already pleased with the new look.

The next thing to go wrong was that my laptop suddenly refused to turn on and the whole thing felt so hot as if it was going to burst into flames. I normally keep it permanently plugged in on my desk, so maybe the battery was overheating. On Kay's advice, I unplugged it and let it cool down after which it turned on, but not before I'd checked with the laptop manufacturer whether it was covered by the warranty (it is!) Panic over, but I wasted a whole day worrying I would have to get a new one when this one is only 18 months old.

I am also looking for a new new bed. When Kay and Darcy moved to their first house on 12 November, I offered them my bed as a guest bed. I had intended to buy a new bed anyway, as mine was over 30 years old and they advise you to change mattresses more often than that. If truth be told, I was of the "if it aint bust, don't fix it mentality" but my conscience told me it was maybe time, hence the offer to  give it to Kay as a spare bed. My bed disappeared in the moving van on 12 November and, as those of you who read my blog regularly know, I injured my ankle then and subsequently caught Covid, meaning I was marooned at home for 7 weeks and couldn't get out to choose a bed.  Instead I have been sleeping since 12 November on a 2-foot-wide camp bed which is the most uncomfortable thing on this planet. I have only just this week started to look around at what is available and I am wracked with indecision as there are so many variants on the market. Pocket springs, memory foam toppers, latex foam toppers, medium or firm tension, ottmans, drawers underneath, wooden frames or divans. One minute I have decided, the next I am undecided again, so I can't see me escaping the camp bed for another week or two and that's assuming I can get a quick delivery.  

First World problems, I know, but already I hate 2023.

Happy New Year

It took two weeks. Fourteen days from the day symptoms started to appear and twelve days from the day I tested positive for Covid, I finally tested negative on the 27 December. I thought I would never leave the house again. What with being incarcerated with a badly sprained ankle for five weeks and then Covid for a further two weeks, I was beginning to feel like a pit pony. 

All my hopes to get one or two things sorted in the week before Christmas fell by the wayside and I had to resort to a lot of online shopping to get organised at all for Christmas. Having been in fear for the last two years of catching Covid and how I would survive with an underlying lung condition I have, it turned out to be little more than a very bad cold and I am pleased to say the worst symptom at the time (and still) was dizziness so negotiating moving across a room or up and down my many flights of stairs was challenging to say the least and made me feel I was on board the Titanic as it was going down!

Kay also caught Covid well after me, but, as it was the second time for her, she seemed to get over it quicker and tested negative well before me, so much so that she was able to go back to work on Boxing Day.  We were at least able to spend Christmas Day together.  As of yesterday, I got in my car for the first time in 6 weeks and found my ankle allowed me to drive perfectly well, so I felt FREEDOM. 

Hopefully now things can only go upwards and 2023 will prove to start better than 2022 ended. Happy New Year to you.

Double jinxed

I thought things were going too well. My ankle has taken five weeks to feel anything resembling normal. First it took over two weeks for the bruising to go, then a further week for the worst of the swelling to subside - I say "worst" as there is still a residue of swelling compared with my good ankle. The pain has lingered the whole time but has been getting less so that my mobility was coming back slowly to the point that each week I noticed a subtle difference. I could go upstairs like a greyhound, but coming down was more like a snail, one stair at a time. My neighbour gave me a very good mantra to use to ensure I put the weight on the good foot whether going up or down..... "good foot to heaven, bad foot to hell." It worked!

Friends have collected me to ferry me to choir rehearsals, but otherwise I have been a hermit. Then of course came the bad weather and we have had snow and ice lingering for days. Five weeks on, I was just getting the courage to try driving again and get organised for Christmas.

There were two choir concerts I took part in - one last Saturday and one on Tuesday. It must have been at one of them when I was jinxed again. I HAVE COVID!! I have been lucky to avoid it all these years, but I have finally been struck down with it. At the moment it is little more than a bad cold and I hope it remains so. But i am stuck at home, on my own, with a temperature of 99.2F, icy conditions outside my windows and feeling annoyed that I still cannot get out. They say bad things come in threes. I sincerely hope there is no third thing lurking in the wings.

Jinxed.

My last post reported that my daughter Kay and her fiance Darcy have now finally acquired their first property near me  - a modest Edwardian terraced house needing a hell of a lot of modernisation and yet still costing an arm and a leg.  The joys of living in London with London prices! There is indeed a lot that needs doing to the house - nothing requiring urgent attention, but nevertheless needing doing over time. It was occupied for many decades by quite an eccentric old lady, who has now at the age of 96 gone into a care home. There are three ponds in the gardens - two at the rear and one in the front garden. Considering the front garden measures 10 feet by 4 feet, the pond takes up most of the garden!

rainwater harvesting

There is a rainwater harvesting system on the side of the house comprising three tiers of plastic water tanks. More on a roof terrace and more in the back garden. The rainwater harvesting tank is connected to a sump pump in the cellar which requires more tanks and pipes running through the house. There is a paucity of electric sockets - one in the dining room, two in the lounge (one of which is under a radiator which in turn is under the window!), two in the kitchen. Far too few for modern appliances these days.  There is no TV aerial socket or indeed no TV aerial on the roof- the old lady seems to have existed happily with radios - many of which were left behind for our "enjoyment".  Everything needs replacing from wiring to plumbing, floorboards to radiators. We knew this from the outset but now looking at the house in detail, it is hard to know where to start first, as many jobs are connected to another being done first. The house has been uninhabited for two years and is being sold by the old lady's equally elderly sister who was unable to answer many of the solicitor's questions about the property, as she lives in the North of England somewhere. 

The garden is an absolute wilderness - so much so, the larger pond in the back garden was only discovered when some creeper and brambles were cut back to get down the garden. We have also discovered a huge resident fox the size of a Labrador dog! He has obviously enjoyed uninterrupted peace for the last two years and now has to share his domain with Kay and Darcy. We don't know for how long! Virginia Creeper has taken a stronghold in the whole of the garden and is growing up the back walls of the house to roof height and is spreading across to the neighbour's house too. It has completely obliterated the view from the back bedroom and bathroom windows.

Kay and Darcy obtained the keys to the house last Wednesday. Kay had some leave for the move, but sadly Darcy could not get any, so on Thursday Kay and I set to, cleaning. We spent 10 hours that day, dusting, washing and vacuuming every surface on the ground floor. On Friday we continued with the upper storey spending another 8 hours of hard work. During that time a fridge/freezer was delivered, a locksmith came to change the locks and a central heating service was done.

The plan was to move the furniture and belongings in on the Saturday from their rental apartment. Darcy's parents and brother would help load up the rental van in the morning, reaching the house some time after midday. I would be at this end ready to receive them (Kay having given me a house key) and provide a picnic lunch for them all from Lidl, which is a mere 50 yards from their house. Everyone would then help unpack the van and arrange the contents in the house. That was the plan.

At midday, I left home in the car and parked several streets from their house. Their street has residential parking permits only, so I could not park in their road. I left my car, carrying a heavy bag full of bits and pieces that might be useful for the first day, plus I was hugging  some huge serving dishes for the picnic and a roll of wallpaper to line the kitchen drawers. I was walking along a road I had never walked along before  and failed to see a huge tree root which had pushed up the paving stones. Suddenly my right ankle rolled over and I went flying to the ground, hitting the paving with quite a force on my left knee, the contents of my arms and bag spewing all over the pavement. Feeling a right idiot, I quickly stood up and tried to continue, realising that my right ankle was killing me and my left knee was very sore. I hobbled some 200 yards or more along a couple of roads and let myself into the house, feeling very shaky. When I examined my ankle, I had a swelling the size of an egg coming up on it and could not weight-bear. My left knee was dripping with blood -despite wearing trousers, my knee was badly grazed. 

The clock was however ticking and I knew that five hungry people were about to arrive any minute wanting feeding. I had no choice but to limp along to Lidl and buy items for the picnic lunch. I added paracetamol and a bag of frozen peas to the list as necessary components to soothe my injuries. By the time everyone arrived with the van, I was sitting like a princess with the bag of frozen peas on my ankle, the swelling now growing in size to a grapefruit. I remained thus for the rest of the day, joking that I would do anything to get out of helping move the furniture!

I had made so many plans and promises to help with Kay's move and to help cut back the wilderness in the garden, but unfortunately my ankle has other plans. In the last week, it has got progressively worse and Kay has insisted on me visiting our local urgent care centre to get it xrayed to make sure it wasn't broken.  The good news is that it ISN'T broken, but is badly sprained. The swelling, bruising and pain is out of this world and the received wisdom is that it may take up to 6 weeks to mend. I have to rest it as best I can, ice it and elevate it. It has meant cancelling all my gym classes and foodbank shifts and I am relying on friends to ferry me to choir sessions and other engagements, as driving is out of the question too.  Resting it is a joke, as I live in a 6 half-storey modern townhouse with 5 staircases. I have three sets of stairs to get my meals each day and at least one to get to a toilet at any time of the day.

It also means any plans to help Kay in her house and garden will have to be shelved until further notice. To say I am cross is an understatement.  My dainty foot and leg looks like it's been transplanted from an elephant! We knew the house would cost an arm and a leg, but I didn't realise it would be mine!

elephantitis

Calmer Days

The last few weeks (if not months) have been a bit chaotic here in Alcoholic Daze Towers. My organised routine has been somewhat overturned by events, resulting in disorganised chaos. I have tried to keep my head above water, but it has not been easy, but calmer waters are on the horizon.

My daughter Kay changed jobs in August. She is still a doctor, but has moved to the London region from Surrey. As a registrar doctor,  she has at least a four or five-year climb to get to consultant level. It involves working in a different hospital every year to gain experience of different regions and different types of hospital, such as a big teaching hospital or a small district general.  If she had stayed in Surrey, it is part of the Kent, Surrey, Sussex deanery and would have involved changing EACH YEAR to anywhere in that region - perhaps Brighton one year, Guildford the next, Dover another, Dartford another and so on. That makes commuting from home a challenge and impossible to buy property if you are not rooted in one place. So she decided to move to the London region instead, where commuting is much easier to and from most hospitals in that region, be they North, South , East or West London. 

Fortunately her first posting in London was to a district general not far from me, so she has been living with me during the week to help her commute and spending weekends at her rented flat in Surrey. Her boyfriend Darcy has also been living with us during the week over the last five weeks, as his work has brought him to London too. They are in the process of buying a house close to me but the purchase has dragged on longer than anticipated, as the solicitors (ours and the vendors) thrash it out between themselves. Kay and Darcy are first time buyers and the house they are buying belongs to an old lady now in a care home, so you would think the transaction would have been relatively easy, but, oh no.

As if that was not bad enough, some painter/decorators whom I had hired last November to  plaster Kay's bedroom ceiling and walls, paint them and also paint the top landing and sheer drop down the stairs, have been slow to get to me (it was originally planned for April) and could only start at the beginning of October.  The timing could not have been worse. It has meant Kay and Darcy have had to decamp from Kay's bedroom to a tiny box bedroom, hardly big enough for the bed, let alone anything else. Because my crazy 6-storey house has so many stairs, it has involved moving the rest of the bedroom furniture down a flight of stairs and storing in the study/bedroom. Nothing is where it should be and we have been very cramped. Add to that the fact that Kay was on nightshifts last week so the painters could not work while she was sleeping during the day and that has added to the timescale. Finally at the end of October we moved everything back into the newly decorated bedroom and Kay and Darcy had more room to spread out. Additionally I gained back my study! Just in time for them to move out altogether. Completion was on Tuesday and moving day is today!

Kay and I spent the last few days in her new house, trying to clean it. More of that later......