Sorry I didn’t make a Monday blog but I was feeling particularly ill after sharing a bottle of elderflower wine with Jonathan on Sunday night.
Sunday night and Picko rushes in too late for the first bingo session but he catches Jonathan with his bingo tickets. I asked him if he dropped a couple of stitches rorm his knitting and that is why he was late.
The singer is a classical tenor who explains that he will be doing a lot of modern stuff but in his other life he does a Pavarotti tribute. He is a very good singer and for his encore he does Nessun Dorma without a microphone which reminds me a lot of my father and his love of opera. When he got his possessions out of storage including his radiogram he used to subject me to his Caruso and Lanzo record collection where he would play them and stand with tears running down his cheeks. It brought back a lot of memories about our early years in Aberdeen where he had his first heart attack at 37 and my mother had tuberculosis of the bowel. Consider this. From the age of eight and when my brother was four we used to be put on the night train in Aberdeen to go to London on our own to be met in London by either Uncle Tim or our grandfather. No telephone, computer or mobile to find out whether we arrived safely. He used to bribe the sleeping car attendant to make sure we behaved but there was very little sleep as we were on our own adventure. The train was hauled by steam in those days and we were up at every stop to see what was going on – especially at Carlisle where there was a lot of activity with mail and freight being transferred. Was my father pragmatic or irresponsible? All I know is aside from the adventure it gave us six weeks holiday in Herne Bay with our grandparents where we had sea warm enough to swim in and a huge amount of things to do. Imagine the outcry if he did it today?
One time we left Aberdeen for the summer holidays and never went back. The old man got a job in Hove and they went back to Aberdeen to pack the house up and that was the end of our Scots accents which my grandmother was fascinated by. From Hove we then moved to Addlestone in Surrey followed by a return to Brighton, finally ending up in Herne Bay.
I have got over my illness from Sunday night and actually feel rather good. I have decided to go on a health kick and try and get myself ready for surgery – whenever that happens. I am well aware that my lung function is not what it should be and a good lung function is part of the recovery process. So in spite of my bad back I am going to try a few gentle exercises to get fitter.
My GP phoned yesterday – my last urine sample showed a high protein count which can indicate kidney malfunction so this morning I have despatched another phial of my golden nectar for the laboratory to play with. My diabetic review is on Monday. Delivering the aforementioned golden liquid I met Tom in the car park – he is a very ethnic Jamaican who wears a baseball cap with “retired and loving it” embroidered on it. I told him that you have to start work to retire. Irene has got a bad back which has given her a limp and he calls her “Cassidy” after Hopalong. Anyway Tom has got prostrate cancer and has done the chemo and radiotherapy but he has now had a biopsy in his groin and they have found something in his stomach when he had a scan. I hope he goes on OK – he is quite a character and was one of the first Jamaicans to come over in the fifties as a bus driver in London.
I had to take Irene to deliver another one of her sponge cakes to Bash’s house (real name Alice – who the f**k is Alice?) after she made one for Eamonn at the weekend. She also made one for Jonathan’s birthday. She could get a job as a cake maker and I could be in gainful employment as a delivery driver!
