Smelly carpets and South Australia

Three weeks. I really thought I would have had something of note to say by now.

I meant to post, I really did. I meant to but somehow I just didn't. I got in from work night after night, flopped in front of the TV, spent meaningless hours in front of the TV or wasting time on the internet and just didn't get round to it.

Anyway, I'm here now. Nothing of note to say, mind you. The most interesting thing to happen to me was last Wednesday when I got home from work to find the bedroom had been flooded due to some interesting drain activity in the bathroom. This event was further complicated by me being due to get on a 'plane less than 24 hours later to fly to Adelaide. The short version - I still got on the 'plane, a man came to clean the carpet on Friday then a plumber came afterwards and flooded the bathroom again. I arrived back on Sunday to an incredibly stinky carpet and a filthy bathroom floor. I'll be sleeping on the settee until the letting agent either arranges to clean the carpet again or rips it up and replaces it.

Adelaide was lovely. The mornings and evenings were freezing but inbetween times the sun was warm and the air was clear. I stayed with an old friend who has a house on the edge of the hills. We drank wine, ate chocolate, laughed a lot and talked about times when we were younger, sillier, braver and relatively responsibility free. Three and a half days later and I'm back to rainy Sydney with a rotten head cold, I'm living in a stinky flat and I'm in a job I can't stand.

Ho hum. Still, there's always tomorrow.

Help

A serious post today.

Three of my workmates are currently undergoing treatment for cancer. Three different women, three different cancers. 'Sophia' is a young, vibrant, funny, intelligent, crazy, lovable, generous woman. She's also facing cancer for the second time in a year. Her only hope of a cure is a stem cell transplant. She has no siblings and only has a 25% chance of a match with a parent. That's bad news for most of us but even worse for Sophia as she only has one parent.

I can't tell you how devastated we all are for Sophia. Not that we've given up and I know she certainly hasn't. She now has to start the search for a compatible donor and hopefully start the life saving treatment which will give her back the full life she so richly deserves.

Why am I telling you all this? I want you to help Sophia and all the other Sophias out there who need to find that person who can save their life.

I can't help. I can't donate blood in Australia due to the threat of CJD so I can't be tested to see if I can help Sophia or anyone else for that matter.

Please give blood. Please ask about other ways to help. Please. You might be able to save someones life.

http://www.blood.co.uk/pages/b5simple.html

http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/default.asp?page=4852#choice

http://www.donateblood.com.au/

http://www.abmdr.org.au/dynamic_menus.php?id=1&subid=1&menuid=17&mainid=1&ssid=1

http://www.marrow.org/DONOR/When_You_re_Asked_to_Donate_fo/Donation_FAQs/index.html

Live long and prosper

Two posts in one week. You lucky people.

Why I am bothering you again so soon? I don't know, really. Probably because I've annoyed everyone at work by talking about Star Trek and Doctor Who for the last three days so it's your turn.

So - Star Trek. Don't worry, I'm not going to talk about the plot. I would ask commenters to refrain from doing so at the moment as one of our regular readers is going tomorrow night and I don't want to spoil it for her.
What I will say is that I thought it was spectacularly good. I was a bit apprehensive but it grabbed me within the first ten minutes and I was there till the very end. I cried, I laughed, I jumped up and down in my seat, I clapped (quietly), I watched through my fingers, I laughed again, nodded approvingly and jumped up and down a bit more. I don't think that prior Trek knowledge is required but there are plenty of nods for the fans. I'm going to watch it again at the weekend.

I wasn't always a Star Trek fan. My older brother used to watch it but to be honest I found it all a bit boring. Star Trek (or TOS as it's known by the obsessives) always seemed quite sexist to me. Yes, there were a couple of women but they didn't really seem to do much. Uhura picked up signals via that massive earring and told the boys about them and they went to a strange planet, had a fight, won and came back. It didn't really grab me.

Star Trek - The Next Generation (yes, TNG) was more my cup of tea. Here was a Star Trek I liked, more equal, more cerebral, more interesting. Whilst the series hasn't stood the test of time it certainly had me hooked in the 90s. I loved Picard, had a strange crush on Worf and wanted to be an empath like Deanna Troi, even though I knew it wasn't possible. TNG gave us the irrepressible Q and the Borg, the most fearsome sci-fi enemy since the sinister plunger wielding pepperpots themselves.

Deep Space Nine was less than interesting to me, I never liked the idea of a fixed station and couldn't warm to the Bajorans, no matter how hard I tried. They had a silly way of clapping for starters. The Kardassians were just plain ugly and that Latinum loving Ferenghi was like a big eared toad. Worf was introduced as a regular and it picked up slightly but to be perfectly honest if they'd all been sucked into the wormhole I wouldn't have cared one iota.

Voyager. Finally, a captain I could relate to. Janeway tried diplomacy then theatened to blow any enemies to smithereens. Well, not always. But you knew she had it in her. We had the enigmatic Tuvok, so beautifully Vulcan in every way.I so desperately wanted them to get home safely even though I knew that would be the end of the story.

Enterprise. No. Sorry. I watched two episodes and that was two too many.

So here we are again in 2009 and a new Trek. The future is bright, people.

A walk down Memory Lane

I really do seem to have slacked off here lately, don't I? I have no particular excuse. Work is annoying as always, I still work with a collection of psychopaths and lazy fuckers. Still, nothing will change short term so I continue to mutter darkly under my breath and plot their demise using the power of thought alone. I'll let you know how it goes.

I was thinking the other day about my old school. I had a great time at school, not so much at my second secondary (tricky, that) school but all the others were great.

I remember watching a TV programme once where a man had been held hostage for a prolonged period. He said he used to pass the time by retracing the route he used to take when walking to school as a boy. I've never forgotten this and from time to time I find myself picking one of my schools (I went to five in total) and walking there in my mind.

The least interesting of these trips is the one to my favourite primary school which basically involved leaving home, turning left and walking past three other dwellings before walking through the school gates. That one was particularly handy.

I suppose the longest one was to my first secondary school. The walk took just over 40 minutes at a brisk pace and slightly longer in winter due to the snow. I doubt todays schoolchildren would be able to accomplish such a feat without stopping for Coke and a Mars Bar at least twice along the way or calling their mothers on their fancy mobile 'phones and whining that their legs ached. Alas, a lift in a warm car was not an option for me and so after a bowl of Ready Brek I would set off, hoping that my face would not freeze and fall off before reaching my destination.

I can remember every step of that walk. Sometimes I lay in bed at night and walk to school in my mind. I pass the houses, cross the main road, pass a corner shop, walk down the 'cut' till I get to the Rec ground and walk over an unispiring field before reaching another main road. I plod down the main road before turning into a smaller street and see the school gates in front of me.

I went to the anal retentive lengths of digging out my A-Z and looking at my school route. It can't cover more than a mile. And yet surprisingly after all these years I was pretty spot on with a path that I only followed for just under a year over 30 years ago.

I don't 'walk to school' very often but when I do it always makes me feel melancholy. Sometimes I wish I didn't live so far away.

Intermission

I know, I know. I'm a slack tart.

I do have an idea for a post but I don't have the concentration span at present. Here's a joke instead. You need to read it out loud.

Ready?

A chicken goes into a library and approaches the librarian.

"Book book?" he asks.

The librarian gives the chicken two books. The chicken leaves.

An hour later the chicken comes back into the library and puts the two books on the desk.

"Book book? Book book?" he asks.

The librarian gives the chicken four books. The chicken leaves.

An hour later the chicken comes back and puts the four books on the desk.

"Book book? Book book? Book book? he asks.

The librarian gives the chicken six books. The chicken leaves.

The librarian is understandingly curious about how the chicken is managing to read the books so quickly so he decides to follow the chicken and see what he's up to. He follows the chicken across the road - oh yes, I went there - and further along the road until the chicken reaches a pond. The librarian watches as the chicken places the books in front of a frog. The frog looks at each book and says,

"Read it. Read it."


Did you like it? You did, didn't you? You liked it. I knew you would.

Not happy

I'm not happy, readers. Not one little bit.

The Devil has been using my handbag for his own defaecation lately and it's about time it stopped. I've had three episodes of bad luck recently and I'm hoping I've seen the end of it.

Episode one involved a rather nasty infection which saw me ending up spending 20 hours in hospital attached to a drip and being pumped full of antibiotics. I got no sleep, the food was atrocious (not that I had an appetite) and I was well and truly out of my comfort zone. All better now, though.

Episode two centres around a bizarre pain in my left foot. Don't expect to see me appearing in my own autobiographical film any time soon. It's been so painful that I've had to have time off work as I can't fully weight bear without swearing like a navvy. A scan result showed peroneal tendonosis (chronic degeneration) as well as a ganglion. I'm having an injection under Xray next week.

Episode three is the most painful. Without going into too much detail I have been successfully sued by a previous tenant of my spacious abode in sunny Leytonstone. It's all to do with damage caused, a deposit not refunded and some new law which means that the slack tart who caused the damage got not only her deposit returned but over £2000 to go with it. Yes, that's three zeros. The agent managed to fit himself out in a Teflon suit and got off Scott free. Needless to say I'm in the process of changing agents as I type.

A more minor irritation happened when I inadvertently wiped a couple of ring tones from my mobile. These included my TARDIS and 'exterminate' tones. I am not happy. Not.

Anyhoo. Let's end on a high. I leave you with Bizkit, the sleeping dog. He makes me happy.

"So, what have you been up to?"

I received a message on Facebook the other day from 'Beth'. It asked if I was the SSS who'd worked at a particular hospital in the 80s and asked me to email her.

Beth and I were friends during our nurse training. She was the year behind me and lived in the same corridor in the nurses home. We talked about the usual things; crappy shifts, evil ward sisters, politics, the NHS and unreliable boyfriends. We drank hot chocolate and ate biscuits. Beth was a great friend during difficult times.

I met 'David' at a section house party on the Lea Bridge Road one alcohol fuelled evening in the late eighties. I had the hots for David's friend and he had the hots for one of my friends. Both relationships lasted all of five minutes and David and I continued to see each other as friends. It was a very easy friendship and nothing more.

One evening David came to see me but told me that he wasn't stopping, he was actually visiting someone else in the nurses home. It turned out that David and Beth had met at a party and hit it off. The relationship went well and finally they married. We kept in touch for a several years, they moved to Norfolk and I visited them there a few times. They moved house again, I didn't get a forwarding address, I made a couple of attempts at contact but failed. That was that.

About two years ago I received a friend request from David. He was still married to Beth and they still lived in Norfolk. I asked him about Beth and he said he'd tell her to contact me. She never did. He set his profile to private after about six months and he only reappeared a few months ago. And then last week I got the message from Beth.

What do you say? What can you possibly say when someone asks you to condense almost 20 years in an email?

'Well, I moved to Australia as you can see. I still work as a nurse. No husband, no kids. Forget what they say about those hunky Aussie males, nudge nudge, wink wink! I come back to the UK occasionally but not often. I'm still in contact with Anna but I no longer see Jane/Sarah/Natalie/Donna. Do you?

How are the kids? They must be so grown up now. Are you still nursing? What about David? Is he still with the police? Write soon and tell me all your news.'

Quite frankly, readers, I'd rather eat brussel sprouts with a cinammon topping than send that email. The very thought of it depresses me beyond words. And yet what do I do?

Naturally I'm curious about what she's been up to, how her life has changed, whether or not she's the same Beth who I used to walk round to the chip shop with after a late shift and discuss how much we hated our training. But where do we go after that first email? It'll just peter out and we'll be out of each others lives again.

I'll answer the email, of course. It'll go very much along the lines of the reply I outlined. I'll try to make it funny and interesting but that won't stop it from boiling down to 'still nursing, live in Australia, no not married and no kids.'