Our last Christmas in England

Today I was listening to radio 4 and a profile of David Hockney who was wandering round North Yorkshire with Andrew Marr. At one point he said that he had spent 30 years away from England because he couldn't stand the long dark nights and grey drabness of the English winters. Well the weather here has been decidedly unseasonal, no snow, just high winds and rain, drab. I know exactly what he means, all the colour is drained out of the days as people shuffle about saying musn't grumble.
Christmas is a way of forgetting about this drabness for a day at least and having a jolly good time, albeit under the influence of as much alcohol as is available. It makes for a jolly good time and yesterday was no exception in the Williams household. We had a full house with Jackies' son and daughter, Jackies' brother and his two daughters. We also had Cats new boyfriend Stuart and Naomi who popped by for an hour. The Christmas lunch was a vegan affair, as Jackies' daughter, Cat is of this persuasion and therefore it's nut roast with all the trimmings, not a bit of dead animal to be seen on our Christmas table. I'm happy to go along with this, well as if I had a choice, as I'm not a big fan of turkey, but I miss those little sausages wrapped in bacon.

 Strange thing though, when Jackie opened the fridge today to russle up something for tea she found a plastic container with some leftovers of beef, stuffing, and those little sausages wrapped in bacon. How they ended up in our fridge was a mystery, perhaps brought by one of our guests, and secreted away in our fridge to be taken on somewhere after our party, who knows. Anyway we decided to claim them as they were on our premises, in our fridge and so we had a good old fashioned fry up. With a touch of horse radish sauce it was quite delicious, and a welcome antidote to yesterdays vegan feast. Although, as tasty as Christmas dinner certainly was it's hard to call a vegan meal a feast. Somehow, and call me old fashioned, there's something to be said for exotic meats at feast time. They had it pinned down at those medieval banquets where they went in for quail stuffed inside fowl stuffed inside ducks stuffed inside turkeys covered in layers of bacon, but I digress.
We scoffed the food, drank the bubbly, and the wine, and the gin, and the malt whiskey, had a bit of a sing song and partied till midnight. No one threw up and nobody fell out with anybody, which maybe doesn't count as a real Christmas, perhaps, anyway, a jolly good time had by one and all.

If all goes to plan this could be our last Christmas in England for quite a while. By the end of next summer we hope to have bought ourselves a small yacht and be heading west to our little hideaway in the Dominican Republic. To get there though there is the little obstacle called the Atlantic ocean. The plan is to get ourselves signed up to this thing called the ARC, which stands for Atlantic rally for cruisers. This is an annual event where upwards of 200 boats set sail from the Canaries and head for St Lucia. All the boats are tracked by the organisers with some fancy hi-tech gizzmo stuff and it takes about 20-25 days to complete the crossing. We first spotted this about 4 years ago, before we knew the first thing about sailing and thought it sounded like an adventure. You could join one of the boats for about £3000 pounds, which had proper sailors who looked after stuff whilst we would just be crew and enjoy the ride. A bit of a steep price but what an adventure we thought.

Well, here we are now about to sign up for the 2012 trip in November, but with our own boat. We don't actually have the boat as yet, but hope to sort that out by the Spring this year. Then we have to sail it south to the start in the Canaries and this time next year we'll be celebrating Christmas in St Lucia, or somewhere in the Caribbean. Now won't that be an amazing thing, to sail your own little boat across 3000 miles of ocean,  just Jackie and me.

So that's the plan, to escape greyland and have a big adventure, I mean what else would you want to do when you get to 64, well I will be by the time we cast off, and you know what....... I can't wait. 

Gathering winter fuel

I spent the best part of Christmas eve trying to get Ewan unstuck from this muddy track up at Ford Park. I had asked Ewan if he could collect some bags of logs for our friend Juliet. I said to Ewan I would meet him at Ford Park late afternoon on Friday. See you there in five minutes, I said, the logs are in our small shed. When  I got there Ewan had already arrived and had parked halfway down the track leading to the shed. Oh dear, I thought, that may be a problem.  So we loaded the logs, and tried to back the van out. Lots of wheels spin, and a big problemo, as its now getting dark and on top of that it's starting to pour with rain. We decide to leave it till Christmas eve, Saturday morning. 

Now bearing in mind that I hadn't done any Christmas shopping this wasn't part of my plan for Christmas eve. We regrouped at 11am on Saturday morning and set about getting bits of wood and grit and old metal barriers but all we got was more stuck. Ewan decided to call a guy he'd met in the Hope and Anchor last night who had a 4x4. Nick arrived about half an hour later and we hooked up a couple of tow ropes. A big heave and the tow rope snapped. We tried a couple more times and snapped another couple of ropes.

So Nick drove around the van and tried pulling him forward. This worked, getting the van out of the hole but ended up with the 4x4 now trapped at the end of the track. Nick called a friend of his in Loppergarth who had another 4x4. He arrived twenty minutes later. 

After another couple of snapped ropes and much  slipping and sliding and flying of mud we eventually got the van out and on the road. It was almost 2.30 and not much time left for Christmas shopping. 

That's the last time I offer to gather winter fuel on Christmas eve. 

Anyway alls well that ends well and Juliet, in Coniston will have her logs for Christmas day.

Plumbing comes out

Today wasn't a day I was looking forward to except that I was,in a way. I was booked into Furness General for the day to have my tube removed. Now I've had this alien bit of pipe stuck in my bits for almost three weeks and  although it was not comfortable I'ld learned to live with it. However, here I am at 9am full of trepidation at the prospect of having it pulled out. Morning, said Sharon, I'm here to remove your catheter, we''ll do it now should we. I suppose now is as good as any other time. The ward in the day care unit has only me in it so I suppose it won't be too disturbing if I yell out, I thought. Have you done this before, I ask. About 10'000 times says Sharon. Oh well that's reassuring, says I. Ok, take a deep breath, relax, whoosh, that's it, it's out. Really, oh well not too bad, then the pain kicks in, but within seconds has subsided to a dull burning sensation, and its done. I'd been building this moment up to be so much worse than it was and within about a quarter of an hour I felt fine, pains gone and a cup of tea. They gave me a jug of water, and left me to my book, all was quiet still on the ward. I now had to drink and pee when the urge arrived into one of those funny shaped cardboard jug things and place it at the foot of the bed. The nurse arrived to collect, and took it away to measure my volume. The day went slow, but I had a good book to read and every hour or so I would present the nurses with another sample.Each time they came back to fill in my chart, and said good, very good, as my volumes increased, it was encouraging. The ward filled up with more blokes about lunch time getting ready for lots of unpleasant procedures, I'm sure, and the ward became a much more animated place. The bloke in the next bed to me came back from theatre with what sounded a gruesome ordeal. Seemingly, as I overheard the doctor telling him that they'd taken his eye out, put a plate in somewhere and sorted something out. The patient, who I couldn't see had a posh accent, landed gentry, but under the influence of the morphine that was still wearing off, he sounded a bit tipsy. Lucky me I was just tucking into my lunch as this conversation, 3ft away was being played out. Still, I managed to keep the apple crumble down.
At 4pm they came and scanned my bladder, directly after my last pee of the afternoon. Mmm, I've got 226 here and we're usually ok up to 300 but you will have to have another in an hour. Drat, I was sure I was managing ok and looking forward to being discharged. More water for you Mr Williams,  I think. I was on the last page of my book when the nurse popped her head around the curtain and said, you can go, you've got the all clear.
Such sweet words to my ear, I found my mobile, called Jackie and half an hour later we're on our way back home. The dreaded catheter now just a memory, although I'm going to have a bit of leakage and will have to have some discreet male pads to deal with this temporary embarrassing bodily function it should right itself in a short while, so they say. But it soooooooooooo good to be free of that plumbing, and I'm well on the road to recovery now I feel. Just another few weeks and it will all be just a memory of an adventure that was not at all pleasant but something that I had to endure. I will have to wait until Feb 28th to get the all clear but I'm sure the NHS has done a great job, thanks to all for my excellent care, and good humour throughout.     

Update on my recovery

Its been two weeks now since I had my operation, or procedure, as it's now called to remove my troublesome prostate gland so here's an update on my recovery progress. They reckon its quite a major operation so I'm happy that I haven't so far suffered any great pain, and I haven't needed any pain killers for well over a week. I eventually had a visit from the District nurse last Thursday, a week ago today, and she removed my staples. Yes, staples, I had been stapled back together, whatever happened to stitches. Anyway she had a look and said they're ready to come out, I'll do it now. I think I had about a dozen or so in three incisions, some came out easily, but others were a bit more stubborn. In the end it was no more painful than having the hairs on my nose plucked, a quick wince but in five minutes they were all gone.

Now one of the embarrassing bits about this operation is that in the aftermath your fitted with a catheter. It's a very alien thing at first and takes a bit of getting used to. Having a plastic bag strapped to your leg that fills up every couple of hours and needs decanting into the loo is at first a bit gross, but soon enough it just becomes something you've got to do. You can't leave it too long or it gets too heavy and is likely to drop down your leg which you really don't want because it will yank the tube coming out of your bits. Ouch! so you tend to only have that happen once, and after that you make sure you keep an eye on the contents of your bag and empty on a regular basis. At night is also a palava, having to connect up an additional night bag to your leg bag and of course somehow make sure you don't roll over in your sleep dragging the bag stand over for another ouch! moment in the middle of the night. You soon come to realise that plumbing is all about levels if you want stuff to flow the way it should flow.

So back to my district nurse who suggested that I may like to swap my bags for a much simpler go-flo job. She made an appointment for me that afternoon at the health centre to have a new system fitted. As I seemed quite able to get about I was given a much simpler bit of kit. This is simply a small plastic tube with a shut off valve worked by a little lever that slots into the end of my bit of rubber tubing and is strapped to my leg with a velcro band. So now instead of my wee just draining into a bag it stays in my bladder until I get the urge to pee. I then just go to the loo, open the valve and hey presto, it works a bit like normal. This is so much better and seemingly it will keep my bladder from getting lazy so that when they take the catheter out I'll get back to normality much quicker.
There's only one strange thing that happens with this system that seems weird and I don't know if it's normal. Just a second or so before I've completely emptied my bladder I get a sharp stinging sensation at the end of my bits. It's a bit like the sort of sensation you get when you test a battery with your tongue to see if it's dead. It only lasts an instant, and I don't have an explanation as to why it should happen, but it happens every single time I go to the loo. It's no big thing but the anticipation of it makes loo time an apprehensive affair. I don't know if urine is some sort of elecrolite, and the movement of it through the tubing causes some residual current to be set up or what, but it's very odd, and sometimes elicits a sharp intake of breath. Next tuesday I go in to Furness general to have this gubbins removed which I'm not looking forward too, but it will be good to get back to using my original body parts for doing what comes natural.

I'm still a bit uncomfortable around my midriff, where they went in, but that's slowly getting less and less noticeable. My main bit of discomfort is when I sit for a while in a hard chair, which puts pressure on the area where my prostate used to be. I suppose this will be the bit that takes the longest to heal up. But on the whole I'm doing alright, I've been out for a walk round Gill banks, and even went in to Ford Park for a morning on Tuesday so I'm on the mend. If the weather was better I'm sure I would be out and about more. As it is the weather has been pretty awful so I don't feel too bad about being stuck at home, although sometimes filling the days can take a slow turn, but on the whole I seem to fill them. Writing,  practicing my guitar, or reading the voyages of Capt. Cook has passed the time productively. This afternoon I think I will get out my watercolours a do a bit of painting whilst the storm blows over outside.