Bradford Royal Infirmary air pipe insertion

Last minute change of plan before surgery last Thursday meant I had to be given a general, as opposed to local, anaesthetic. 

I've had general anaesthetic before but the anaesthetist did warn me that the air pipe might make my throat sore.

I don't know who did the actual insertion, but four days on and swallowing is agony, looks like soup for Christmas and my throat feels a third of its normal size.

That pipe must have been inserted with all the care and attention of a plumber suction plunging a khazi.

Like a knife through...

Brand new knife, straight out of the wrapping earlier on Tuesday, washed and into the knife block. I go into the kitchen around 10.00 to make a cheese and pickle sandwich (red leicester, by chance).

I don't skimp on the cheese in a cheese and pickle, so I'm about 4 slices in when I become aware that the blade on this Arthur Price stainless steel job is loose in the handle. Not to put too fine a point on it (which the knife soon proved it certainly had), there was a definite wobble.

I took the knife in my left hand and felt the 'wobble' by moving the blade with my right. And ended up putting it straight into my palm. Knife through butter, knife through palm.

Now it wasn't just the cheese that was red by name and nature. Add the floor, kitchen cupboard sink and worktop. The caring person at 111 and her nurse colleague urged me to go to A&E. Arrived at midnight, left at 4.00 am, then back to another clinic at 8.00. Told to come back at 11.00 the next day, so home at last after surgery at 10.00pm on Thursday night. A long drawn out affair for a moment's idiocy.

Stitches out day after Boxing Day and a course of antiobiotics to add a further dampener to the festive fun. Having a shower with your right arm in cling film is a fetish kick too far for me.

Choking a porpoise

On my GP's advice, I bought some Vitamin D supplement the other day.
As befits something vaguely medicinal, the tablets come in a sturdy plastic container with a strong 'pull off' seal strap.
The pack is 3 inches tall, that's 78 mm for us remainers.
On opening it, however, the tablets barely cover the base.
There's a lot of fresh air and plastic left over. Probably enough of the latter to choke a porpoise

An aortic regurgitator laughs

Once a year, as someone with aortic regurgitation, leaky heart valve to you, squire, I have an echocardiogram to see how the leak's going.

This involves lying on my left side while a gel coated probe is pushed around my chest by the machine operator. Part way through the proc8this morning, there was a knock on the door and another operator said that one of the two other machines wasn't working correctly. Rachel, my echocardiogrammer, asked if they'd tried 'turning it off and back on again'. Naked from the waist up, with my chest smeared with KY jelly, it was hard to suppress a giggle. Maurice, Roy and now Rachel - it's a killer line, everytime.

Cactus splinting a speciality

The proofreading job ad that REALLY needs a proofreader...

Sable & Proctor need a reader as well as their client.

How much is that Sophist in the window?

I got a quote for replacing the fascias and soffits on my house this week. The man who taught me - very straightforwardly - the difference between the two, emailed me a quote of 4 grand for a 'sophist'. I'm taking the price stoically.

Self-shooting Editor

According to LinkedIn, SharkNinja (who?) want an editor to shoot themself. In my humble, yet long, editorial experience, you don't get that luxury - there are always plenty of others ready, willing and able to do it for you, usually in the back!

Pharrell sees the light

Embarrassed by the lyrics to Blurred Lines, Pharrell Williams says he came from a 'different time'. He's 12 years younger than me and I heard the warning bells on the song's release back in 2013 - it was and is 'rapey' in parts.

This is a much better alternative, a lesson from the then Law Revue members as Auckland University - where Defined Lines are appropriately re-drawn. Who says lawyers don't have a sense of humour.

Santa's little helpers

So I asked them how Santa gets down our chimney when there's a gas fire in the way!

Criminal act in the library

Called into Huddersfield Library to collect a book I'd ordered. They have an impressive turnround on internet requests. But reputations can be easily tarnished in the cut throat world  of librarianship...
The guy at the desk directed me to a shelf lined with books, each with a piece of paper bearing the name of the borrower who'd ordered it held to the spine by a rubber band. But, horror of horrors, the books weren't arranged in alphabetical order of borrower surname!
My eyes swam and my breathing became laboured. I retrieved my book and went to the self service checkout but I could hardly see to operate it through tears of silent rage.
And it was then that I heard a rapid fluttering of card issuing from some celestial plane - it must have been John Dewey spinning in his indexing system.

Belloc reworked - for paternalistic employers

The great man wrote: 'Always keep ahold of nurse For fear of finding something worse', to which I'd like to add, for those faced with the overbearing attitude of a 'paternalistic' employer: 'If letting go makes nursey glower, that's because she hates the thought of losing power'.

Taking the cure at Fountains Abbey

River Skell seen from Surprise View, quite a climb but worth the effort for the view of the Abbey in the background

The Lake, with Fishing Tabernacles either side of the bridge - the Valley of the Seven Bridges is away
 to the bottom left of the picture

The Watergarden.

 

 The place is so very special because my Dad took me there as a child. He used to go on holiday to Ripon, where his grandad was a gentlemen's hairdresser (he didn't like the term 'barber'). At one time his three sons - my grandad, his two brothers Arthur and Albert, along with his half-brother Edgar, all worked in the business. Albert was killed at the end of  October 1917 near Ypres, while Arthur was badly wounded in a mine explosion on the Western Front.
He was rescued from the carnage by a German patrol. Taken prisoner, he had to have extensive surgery, which led to him losing over half his stomach. Arthur, who never married, returned home to Ripon, where he took to wandering late in the evening and during the night - Studley and Fountains were his favourite stamping grounds, and I like to think that here he found peace after the horror, loss and suffering of war.


             Cure of Fountains

In the Chapel of the Nine Altars by moonlight

And in the Valley of the Seven Bridges at dusk

Arthur, a man scarred by war and captivity

Chooses to walk alone and in peace

Under the ruins of the great tower

And by the fishing tabernacles

His cares and pain are eased by

The beauty of ancient tranquillity

Here gods and Greeks and Aislabie’s folly temples

Wrestle for attention in the moonlight and cool

Of evening shade

And the curse of war is banished

By Arthur’s nocturnal wanderings.

 
For more of my family history, the life story of Ripon's oldest Barber and a 100-year-old mystery, read Heirloom.

It can be murder in Argos...

Called into our local Sainsbury's yesterday to pick up a pair of long-handled shears I'd ordered online from the instore Argos operation. I gave the order details to the guy behind the counter, who disappeared into the back. He returned a couple of minutes later with the shears and hefted them by both handles before putting them on the counter, saying 'they're heavy - you could cut up a body with them'. Feeling the need to reduce the mood of pending homicide that I sensed after his comment, I said I'd bear that in mind but was only planning to use them to trim my lawn edges, at least for the time being. I know retail can be a stressful environment, but left the store wondering if this was some new HR initiative to cut out the need for those signs reminding the more out of control shopper not to be abusive to the staff?

Change for a Fifty?

Welcome as it is that Alan Turing's face is soon to adorn the £50 note, can't help if this is going to prove a 'hidden' honour not at all worthy of the man. After all, when did you last hold a £50? Many shops and pubs refuse to take them: is it just an empty gesture - and one that's far too late? Turing's work is credited as shortening WWII. Think about that for a moment - especially if your dad, grandad or great grandad came back safe. There's countless thousands of us - myself very gratefully included - who a possibly alive today thanks to Alan Turing. Putting his face on a fifty seems rather unambitious. His birthday should be a national holiday; Whitehall should be renamed; and the anniversary of his prosecution should be marked with at least a minute's silence so we can collectively recognise the hero who was persecuted, when he should have been honoured.

Three questions for our time

OK, so these probably just serve to confirm my decent into old fartery, but I have to ask: 1. What's the point of blueberries? They don't taste of anything except sugar and when baked turn into a purple stain; 2. Why do deodorants need a 'safety catch' all of a sudden? When was the last time you accidentally shot yourself in the armpit? 3. Why can't new cars have proper handbrakes? Flipping a little switch doesn't give the same sense of secufryt and driving away with the brake still ostensibly 'on' just feels weird.

Breakfast in the garden

And someone nearby is doing the same. But his phone's on speaker and I'm getting one side of his lifestory over my fruit and fibre. Arghghhh.

Europe's liberation, in dates and song.

Started with the landings in Sicily on 10 July, 1943. Or if you want to be pedantic about mainland Europe, 3 September 1943 at Reggio in Calabria, southern Italy. My father took part in both. And after D-Day, when Lady Nancy Astor castigated the Allied forces in Italy, who'd been sent by Churchill with the understatement of the war in that they were going to attack 'the soft underbelly of the Axis crocodile', saying they should be sent to the real war in Normandy, revelled ever more in the self-deprecating soubriquet of the D-Day Dodgers. It was a long and bloody campaign; doesn't detract from the bravery and sacrifices of D-Day and the long push east to Germany, but Normandy 1944 wasn't the first step in Europe's liberation.

Freedom Anniversaries and the Shadow of Tyranny

75th anniversary of D-Day and the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square falling in the same week make me think of that guy and the tank. At work back then, we mocked up a poster, with a speech balloon borrowing the Viz Parkie's slogan, so that it had the bloke with the shopping bag shouting 'right, now fuck off' at the tank. I also vividly remember sitting up most of the night the Berlin Wall came down on October 3, 1990 with friends, including a German student who was sharing the house in Bradford. She was in tears as the crowds streamed both east and west as the VoPos stood meekly to the side of the gaping holes hammered into the concrete blocks. After a lot of drink and emotion, the night ended with a drunken karaoke session to the WolfeTones' rendition of A Nation Once Again. Different country; longer and continuing separation; but the sentiment seemed fit for the occasion. As indeed did the end-of-Iron-Curtain 'classic', Winds of Change by the German band Scorpions. German rockers with dodgy English pronunciation (maagik??) capturing the zeitgeist - would've of thunk it? And who indeed would've have thunk that - just under 30 years on - we'd be faced with the divisions of populism and nationalism, instead of the glories of freedom that were promised. Defeat snatched from a promised victory of peace by the old emnities, distrusts and hatreds from the past. Liberation and freedom have been stolen and used contorted to justify selfish isolationism and bolster the Xenophobe. It all seems a long way indeed from the hope and promise of D-Day and a betrayal of the lives lost in the fight for freedom from Nazi tyranny.

West Yorkshire places of interest on the Peninne Way

Lumbutts and Mankinholes: two real places that sound like sadomasochistic practices only to be attempted between consenting adults with a recognised safeword.