2013

21 April 2013
So, OH managed a spectacular resolution to his coughing problems.

Having endured a weekend of coughing spasms lasting anything up to twenty minutes and taken an hour to just pop down to the village in the car for a newspaper, he reluctantly agreed with me that he should re-visit the GP who had not really taken his cough too seriously and accordingly made an appointment for the Monday morning.

When Monday morning came it became abundantly clear that I would not even be able to get him into the car let alone drive him to the surgery so I had no alternative but to call an ambulance. This took over half an hour to arrive as apparently Monday mornings are busy and it had been despatched from some twenty miles away as all the local ambulances were in service. This did not help my nerves at all. However, once the paramedics took charge they were wonderfully caring and reassuring and after supplying oxygen, drugs and injections we were all set to shoot off to the local hospital.

Being taken straight through to triage and then to the resuscitation room did nothing for my apprehensions and the ensuing twelve hours did not calm my fears any further. OH had i/v lines in both arms, two lots of antibiotics, oxygen, x-rays and all sorts - all administered by an Irish doctor with a strangely pedantic manner, repeating all his ruminations at least twice and sometimes three times culminating in a "disappointing" comment when OH's attempts at a peak-flow resulted in a reading "lower than I have ever seen in someone still alive"!

I can chuckle now but wasn't at the time!

OH was in an isolation ward for the next couple of days and then moved to the general ward and was there for a total of five days in all. Five very long days as because our family is quite scattered it was down to me to do the visiting twice a day up and down the dreaded main road and it's dreadful traffic jams. I would not have it any other way - just wished I had a helicopter rather than my lovely car. It was lovely to have him home but getting used to the idea that he has had bronchial pneumonia and is now asthmatic will take some time. Thankfully, the dreadful cough is on the wane but he is very tired and still wobbly so I am chauffeur and nurse for the moment and am thankful that the outcome was not worse.

13 May 2013
Well, OH has managed a full week in work although only short days and is looking much better and he tells me he is feeling better.

As a result of his illness there has been a great deal of re-arrangement in the Songsinger household. Over the years we have amassed a huge amount of "stuff" and OH has a penchant for knick - knacks which I really do not share but he has realised that keeping the house dust-free would be a great deal easier if only there were not so many objects lying around.

With this in mind, we made a trip to the dreaded Ikea one Friday morning which was not nearly as bad as it could have been. Cabinets were selected and efficiently delivered for a modest charge the next day. So, the knights in armour lots of cats, little cottages, dragons and model aircraft have all been safely ensconced in these glass cabinets which are lovely - just that every time you walk past there is a rattling noise which is a little bit disconcerting but is simply the frame moving and knocking against the glass. A solution will no doubt be found and OH has resigned himself to the re-arrangement of the objects into a more artistic view, courtesy of myself!

15 July 2013
Taking a frail 93 year old gentleman with dementia to a hospital some miles away is not my idea of fun. OH's father is terrifically well looked-after at his care home (at vast cost of course) and I am always apprehensive at the responsibility of transporting him to the hospital where he has to have regular check-ups on his pace-maker to ensure that the battery will not suddenly give out.

This is not helped by the fact that the hospital in question is on the route of the new tram link to Manchester and the road-works started about three years ago and will continue until 2016 which means that quite a lot of the tracks already laid are distinctly rusty! There is always a difficult question of which road will be the best to take - shall we do motorway or the ordinary roads - and the last time we took him in January he flatly refused to come out of the home.

Thankfully, that did not happen this time although he will not wear shoes so he travels in his carpet slippers. The whole thing was accomplished without trauma on the driving/parking side but, Oh!, getting him in and out of the car was a nightmare. He has lost the ability to understand how to get in and out of the car and at one point I thought we were actually going to have to carry him - or at least OH was! It is now quite obvious that this cannot continue and the next appointment, which will be in six months time, will have to be dealt with by the care home and an ambulance - otherwise they will be bringing the monitoring machine out to the car park!

21 July 2013
The garden goes from bad to worse and I actually think the Council have absolutely no idea how to put it right. They had a fancy designer who came to do her lovely drawings of how it would be and as soon as it went out to tender the contractors who are the actual, practical re-builders sucked in their teeth and said "no that's not practical" and such-like so we are no further forward.

I was a bit startled on Friday morning when a contractor rang to say he was coming to have a look at the site as although they were fairly certain to get the contract he had not actually been to the site before and wanted to see how much room he would have to get his vehicles in!! I simply thought that would have been a pre-requisite of tendering for the project but what do I know?

2 August 2013
Well, we have a contractor appointed! Yipee! However, the work will start on 26th August (Bank Holiday but don't tell anyone!) and is scheduled to finish on 9 December.

I shall have to find bolt-holes to escape the noise and the disruption but at least something is being done at last and my lovely friend A reassures me that her flat will be available, whether she is there or not as I have keys, when it all gets too much which is just splendid.

One of the chaps involved came to see us on Thursday morning and he is a really proper person (a Liverpudlian!) and lives next door to the chap who was the President of the rugby club in which ex-OH played. He has reassured us about a great many things and seems to take on board just how horrible it has all been for us.

He has even said that they will allocate a lock-up for us for decorative stones, plant pots etc., which cannot be found a place in the rest of the garden as the biggest slice of it is what has been demolished.

I am not getting too excited as there is many a slip 'twixt cup and lip but at least by Christmas it will be completed - I am assured of that by this chap as he has no intention of letting the project overrun - not only would that cost him money but he has no intention of doing anything in the Christmas season.

I actually believe that is his intention but we shall see.

7 September 2013

The last couple of weeks have been full of incident to say the least.

Thankfully, the anniversary date of Si's death and the subsequent horror of the days following when we were notified and then had to journey to and from the flat to clear it and all that was entailed has passed as indeed I knew it would but it has been enormously difficult.

I am so grateful that OH gives me such support and there is no occasion which passes which he does not give me all the time and care that I need. On the day itself he took holiday and treated me and my good friend A to lunch and we had told the contractors that I wanted no interaction with them until at least Monday and they respected that.

I have pondered on the nature of remembering as I have one of those memories which seem never to rest as far as dates go which is a very mixed blessing as it really doesn't make any difference what the actual dates are when my lovely son left us - I think of him every day so what does a date really matter?

He is at peace and was much loved which is not a bad epitaph.

20 September 2013
OH and I went off shopping today and at the big supermarket some 12 miles away the Grand Theft Auto game was advertised as being some £43. OH tells me that this is the current price for such games which seemed an enormous amount to me but apparently PC games do not cost so much.

This had come to mind because Si had bought Skyrim for about £28 and I was thinking that was only a year ago - and then I remembered that a year ago he was no longer with us and that what I was remembering was at least 2 years ago.

Where does the time go?

3 November 2013
A bit of an up and down week in the Songsinger household.

On Tuesday we had to cross the Pennines to Leeds for the funeral of my niece's long-time partner who has been undergoing constant treatment and has now lost his life. It was a horrible day with torrential rain and wisely, owing to the nature of the M62 in decent weather never mind storms, OH decided to go over the tops which involves the Woodhead Pass, Holme Moss and Holmfirth which on a good day is pretty bleak but in these conditions was pretty awful! Also, I have been travel-sick since I was a child and although it is rare, there are times when it can happen again and the rate of swinging round the twisty road on this journey brought it to the fore. Just what you need to arrive at a funeral with vomit down your front!

Thankfully, we were not the only ones who arrived somewhat flustered and only just in time as others who had used the motorway had a worse time than us and so the service was delayed by a few minutes. An idiosyncratic service which was planned by the man himself, was fairly short and there was time afterwards to catch up with the extended family whom we really do not see often enough.

It was a real joy to see not only my niece and nephew but also my great-niece and great-nephew and partners and my little great, great-niece who is only two and behaved so well that you would scarcely have known she was there. On the way back, with no time constraint, I was in need of a coffee so we stopped in Huddersfield at a Sainsburys for a drink and a bun - in my case a lovely lemon and poppy-seed muffin - and relaxed a bit.

Huddersfield was in the news also this week as the company running the student halls has forbidden the Gideon Society to leave their bibles in the halls as they want the accommodation to be "ethically neutral". Rightly in my opinion, some Christian leaders have seen this as an anti-Christian move and it reinforces my worries that there is an undercurrent in society which wants to actively promote anti-Christian propaganda which I find not only sinister but also very sad. I don't care what particular God anyone wants to believe in but I cannot see what is wrong with the basic Christian principles of doing no man harm, loving your neighbour and all the other strong-holds of living a decent life. It is very sad.

19 October 2013

The second anniversary of Si's birthday is now safely passed and I am finding this second year of grieving to be more difficult than the first. The numbness is wearing off and all the other traumatic events of the wall collapse and OH's brush with death probably helped to keep a distance which is now receding but I am so grateful for the support of friends and particularly A who made sure that we went out for a lovely lunch and enjoyed the day. Sadly, my niece's partner died the day before and that is a sadness which, although expected, was a shock and the aftermath of that will be difficult for her.

The long-awaited drilling-rig finally appeared on Thursday and it is not impressive at all! I had expected that work would begin sharpish on the drilling but in true British fashion, that did not happen. Firstly, the delay in getting the drill to the site had caused much annoyance to the site-manager and his thoughts when it was discovered that it had not been correctly checked before leaving to be installed on-site and that it was damaged and had to have a part driven from some 45 miles away had to be heard to be believed!

The good news is that they are only going to drill nine holes as opposed to the thirty which we were originally told and that the construction is completely different as well, leads me to hope that it will all be finished for Christmas although one of the workers did say that in addition to turkey at Christmas they would not be averse to Easter eggs either so I do wonder!

1 July 2013
When the lovely Council chap who came to do his weekly inspection of the rubble - a largely irrelevant and useless operation which was probably started simply to shut us up and give the illusion that something is being done - we, as often happens, had a chat.

Imagine our surprise when R said - "look you've got a mouse!" and I said "yes, I know" when we saw the said mouse foraging whilst we were continuing our conversation with R on the broken footpath and me on my back-door step. I was really glad that the mouse seems to like the sunflower seeds which I bought in large quantities as the RSPB told me that the birds would love them.

Not round here they don't.

4 October 2013
OH was not working today and what with one thing and another it has not been a particularly good week. So OH decided to go out for lunch and mentioned the pub in a nearby village where the wake was held for his ex-wife a couple of years ago.

It all looked fairly deserted when we parked although there was a fruit and vegetable van doing a delivery so we went ahead and ventured inside. There was one man at the bar and no evidence of menus or cutlery so he asked the girl behind the bar if they were serving food. "I don't know, I will go and find out" - bearing in mind it was nearly 12.30 this seemed a bit baffling. However she came back and said "no, not now - could be tonight or possibly tomorrow."

She just looked at us and we had difficulty stifling our giggles as we left. I don't think we will be going back in a hurry!

The contractors are not happy either as a specialist firm has been brought in to drill an exploratory bore-hole so that they can be sure that we are not sitting on a coal-mine and this should have been starting work last Thursday. However, it was stuck on another job so did not actually arrive until Monday lunch-time and although our drilling should have taken two days, the drill is still there this afternoon. I asked the site foreman how things were going as he was driving his digger down the drive and he said, gloomily, "not too well". So I asked when the main drilling job would be starting - it should have been on 24 September - and he was not sanguine about any time soon. I asked what the problem had been, apart from them having broken a drill-bit (how? it was a big drill) and he answered lugubriously "a lot of hard rock".

Oh dear!