Archives: Friends

That’s the sound made by me hitting yet another low after a nice 48 hours of high.

I’ve been um-ing and ah-ing over whether or not to drag down the recent positivity of my posts by indulging in my slight rearward step, but on reflection of the last two days I realised that what this blog started out as was a way for me to keep track of the course of my progress up to and hopefully beyond the point I receive my new lungs.  It seems entirely counter-productive to gloss-over the bad bits in order to spare what few regular readers I do “entertain” on here from being exposed to more difficulties.

Yesterday was actually a really good day – spent largely in bed/on the sofa doing very little indeed recovering from Friday’s grand night in, then sharing a lovely meal with K’s ‘rents which saw us pass over her Dad’s 60th birthday pressie (which is only 6 (and a bit…) months late).  Was worth the wait, though – we got a photograph he had taken in Central Park blown up and printed on to canvas for him and it looks amazing.

It wasn’t until after they had left that the day slid away from me.  Every night I sit at my computer in the study and do my nebs and casually surf around the ‘net for the 15-20 minutes it takes, most often taking in other people’s blogs and catching up on friends’ news.

On Saturday night, I made the mistake (it would appear) of clicking through into Facebook while I was browsing.  It was there that I found a new batch of photos a friend had put up of the festivities at another friend’s wedding.  The happy couple (God bless them, in the most sincere way possible) are friends I used to work with at MK Theatre and have enjoyed many a night out with over the years, both at work and outside.

Clicking through the newly-created photo album (put up by someone who clearly left the party too early if they were awake and/or sober enough to be able to connect their camera to a computer and upload the pics), I was met by face after face of happy, smiling people with whom I’ve enjoyed countless brilliant nights out over the years I worked at the Theatre and, indeed, since I left.

It struck me suddenly – in that sort of round-house punch/kick in the crotch kind of way these things tend to occur to you – that it’s been a very, very long time since I was out with all of them.  In fact, it’s been a very, very long time since any of them would even have thought to bother to ask me to go out with them.  Not through any fault or malice on their part, but simply because they know I wouldn’t be able to join them.

Sitting looking at happy face after happy face, smiling friend after smiling friend, it slowly dawned on me just how long it’s been since I’ve done anything remotely “normal” for a 25 year-old who claims to work in the Theatre industry.  I’ve not been to the Theatre, I’ve not been to the cinema, I’ve not been out for a drink, I’ve not even been out for a latte or “done lunch” – it’s not just “normal” that I’ve missed, I’ve even managed to lose “pretentious” too.

I suppose it’s a positive reflection on my state of body/state of mind at the moment that I can sit here after the fact and see inject some humour into it, but it really did hit me quite hard as I flicked through the album.  Some kind of intense sense-memory came washing over me and I could hear the voices, the laughter, the banter, the music; I could see the suits, the dresses, the dancing, the staggering, the pretty, the happiness and everything else.  I wanted so badly to be back there, to be laughing, singing, drinking, dancing – just being.

When I first started this weblog almost exactly 12 months ago, I truly never would have believed that without my transplant I would still be writing it today, so it is with no little understatement that I suggest it’s not a bad thing to be here – sitting comfortably in my desk chair, living with my wonderful girlfriend, having spent an amazing weekend enjoying the company of my friends and both sides of my family – complaining about not “getting out” enough.   If there was ever a “meaning” to this blog – a reason, plan or intent behind it – it was to remind myself of the good things in the face of the bad things.

So it is with a deep breath in and a sigh of appreciation that I thank Last Year’s Me once again for providing me with a place to come to remind myself that no matter what’s going on in my life, my body or my head, things are never as bad as they seem, that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel and that the most important thing in life is to keep on keeping on – Smile Through It.

It’s been a while since I had such a straight-up, unabashed, pure-and-simple really good night in with friends.  Last night I had one and it was one of the most simplistically wonderful things that I’ve experienced for a while.

Having decided rather last minute that the best way to combat our household’s fear and loathing of fireworks, K and I set about recruiting the usual gang of easily-entertained appendages to join in our frivolities.  We also took the opportunity to finally go out and splash a bit of cash on the Scene It board game I’ve wanted for a while.

The whole evening was really terribly refined, in a loud and rambunctious kind of way – no alcohol, no TV, just a group of friends laughing, chatting and playing games, sometimes all at once, sometimes in a strange mish-mash of the three.

Whatever we were doing, though, it was just lovely to have the guys round and to be enjoying myself without feeling totally exhausted.  I’d had quite a quiet day, keeping myself in check and not getting too over-excited about things so that I had the strength to make the most of the evening and it really paid off.  The all eventually left around 1am and I was still feeling really good – a bit of a rarity for me.

We got through games of Scene It, Scattegories and Simpson’s Monopoly, the last of which having the bizarre novelty of now being a cash-less game.  Each player gets a credit-card, which is inserted into a little electronic calculator to add or remove money from the account.  It’s a great idea, but sadly doesn’t really work in practice.  The novelty wears off after about 5 minutes, by which point you’ve realised that every transaction takes 5 times as long as it did with cash and that it’s now impossible to a) know how much you’ve got in the bank without having to ask for the machine to check and b) know how much everyone else is stock-piling to help make those cash-rich deals to the hard-up players.

It was just such a great night and we all had a great time.  I honestly don’t think any of us noticed the lack of alcohol, which goes a long way to proving my long-held belief about having more fun without it than with it.  I won’t lose myself in an anti-alcohol diatribe here (because you don’t want to hear it anyway), but suffice it to say that it wasn’t until K pointed out the party’s dryness the next day that it even crossed my mind.

I’m not really sure at the moment, if I’m honest.

My body and my mind are all over the place and I can’t decide what to do with myself from hour-to-hour, let alone day-to-day.

Frustration is playing a key role in whatever I am doing at the moment, though, driving me to distraction.

For the last week or so I’ve been sleeping incredibly badly – not being able to get off to sleep and then waking every hour or so until the early hours when it tends to increase to to a whopping 20mins of sleep at a time.  It’s been driving me bonkers.  Also, of course, it’s left me with very little energy to do anything with myself all day.

Once I’m tired, I’m also absolutely horrible to be around.  I’m sure most of us aren’t at our best when we’re lacking a bit of shut-eye, but I know that when I’m sleepless I’m at my very, very worst.  For all the days K’s spent laughing at me and with me when we both get the giggles when we’re tired, I’m sure she’s now found out that when I’m really tired giggles are nowhere to be found.

Lack of sleep also causes more and more worries as well.  I’m well aware of the fact that it’s when our bodies are at rest that they repair themselves and set themselves up for another day.  As you’ll know from the more recent blogs, I’m also increasingly aware of the frailty of my body and the desperate need it has to keep itself ticking over.  Missing out on crucial rest time bothers me big-time because I know how precious a resource it is.

More than all of that, though, the more tired I am the more frustrated I get with myself and with the things around me.  My energy levels are so low that doing anything other than sitting and surfing the ‘net causes me to feel like I’ve been running around a football pitch for hours.  Without the rest it needs, my chest will start to moan and complain if I do much more than make a cup of tea and I can really feel my auxiliary muscles working overtime just to keep the oxygen flow going through what’s left of my lungs.

I’ve been struggling for the last couple of months with pain in my back and neck where the over-worked auxiliary respiratory muscles are tensing up and causing all kinds of different, unpleasant aches and pains, which in turn makes it harder to sit properly or carry myself as I should, which only then serves to exacerbate the problem with my back and neck muscles.  It’s the very worst of vicious circles that no one seems to have identified a way out of yet.

There are so many things I’d like to be doing with myself at the moment, projects I’d like to be working on, writing I’d like to be doing, but it’s the most I can do to get through a day without going mad at the moment.  My brain certainly doesn’t feel switched-on enough to achieve much beyond the occasional email.  I don’t think I’ve had a creative thought-thread for a couple of weeks now, which really gets me down.

Still, it can’t all be doom and gloom – there’s good things in the world. (Best not get on to last weekend’s sport if I’m looking for sunshine, eh?).

My bro was back for a couple of days over the weekend, which was really nice – he’s away so much doing this, that and the other that it’s been really good to see him and catch up a bit.  He seems really happy in what he’s doing, which is so good to see.  I get a real kick out of seeing my family and my friends doing things they really enjoy – I suppose it’s a kind of vicarious pleasure that I’ve lived with for a while now and I have always felt it most strongly for the things my bro gets up to.  If he’s happy, I’m happy for him.  And he’s always happy, because he’s that kind of bloke.

I know I could be doing a lot worse, too.  My chest isn’t 100% – an understatement, I suppose, of rather dramatic proportions, but then everything is relative – but it’s holding on there for the most part.  It could be much worse and I could be properly laid-up, which I’m not, so I should really not be complaining too hard.

I suppose that when frustration bubbles up it’s often hard to see the good for the bad – the wood for the proverbial trees, as it were – and it’s all too easy when tiredness attacks to let it drag everything down with it.  Positivity is a precious resource in and of itself, so I suppose what I really need is just the energy to go and mine some more of it.

The good news is, I don’t have a cold. The news-that-isn’t-really-good-but-considering-
how-bad-“bad”-could-have-been-really-can’t-be-counted-as-being-bad (phew!) is that my body is keen to make me perfectly well aware of the fact that’s it’s been working very hard thank you very much and has decided to tell my legs, head, arms, neck and just about everything that’s not a vital organ to stop working for the time being. Essentially, my body is currently the French rail system.

Still, compared to dealing with a cold, I can definitely put up with feeling a bit tired and finding tea-making a chore. If I had to spend the next week in bed doing nothing and seeing no one, I would happily accept it for not having a cold. As it is, I am hoping to be able to make it over to my ‘rents tomorrow night for the Rugby, although there is the slight hitch that I may expend so much energy on screaming at the telly (judging by the semi-final), I may not be able to drive myself home.

(I’m acutely aware that the end of the last paragraph will have been hopelessly lost on my American cousins who look in here, so for translation’s sake: there’s a World Cup (think “world series” which actually involves other countries) going on in the sport of Rugby (“Football” without the nancy-boy pads and tea-breaks every 30-seconds) and England (that’s us) have made it to the (Grand) Final, which is somewhere akin to the Texans making the Superbowl (ie, so outlandish at the start of the competition that if you’d suggested they might do it, people would have either laughed in your face or had you committed).)

I’ve made a deal with my body – limbs and all – that I won’t do anything at all during the day tomorrow besides rest and refuel so that I can enjoy the game in the evening, and that I will do the same on Sunday so I can enjoy a meal in the evening with my bro, who’s deigned to reappear from the far side of the world where he was “working”. I use the term “working” very loosely, as he mostly seemed to spend his time sitting up a mountain finding it hard to breath. Heck, I do that in my own living room – I don’t try to call it work.

The only possible barrier to the deal on Sunday is that the Saints are live on TV, but judging from our performances so far this season they aren’t likely to be causing me a great deal of excitement or giving me much cause to scream at the telly. More likely I’ll be slumped in resigned resignation (it’s doubly bad, you see) as they let another 2-goal lead slip away and wave good-bye to another 3 points at the hands of some woeful defending while George Burley makes excuses about us “playing well”.

Still compared to spending the weekend lying in bed with snot dribbling out my nose, my throat closing up in protest, my chest kicking off in a major way and the beginnings of the mother of all chest infections, I think I can handle any sporting disasters coming my way.

It’s all about perspective, see.

Today, I have felt good ALL DAY.

It’s a mystery where it’s come from, and I don’t harbour much hope of it lasting into the weekend, such is the nature of my up-and-down life at the moment, but damned if I haven’t enjoyed it today.

I woke up this morning after a good night’s sleep (which is rare enough) not feeling horrible.  As I plodded around the flat after rousing myself from the bedroom, I waited for the inevitable on-set of hideousness which usually hits about 20-30 minutes after I get up, but it never seemed to materialise.

I had the smallest glimmer of a headache after doing my morning physio session, but I hurriedly popped some paracetamol and ibuprofen and by the time I’d done my nebs it had passed, never to return.

We were joined, late morning, by our little niece and nephew on a spur of the moment visit with their mum.  There’s really no better way to start your day than with the fun and laughter of a pair of adorable children.  I even had enough energy to police the tiny terror as he rampaged his way around the flat – a job that’s normally delegated to K or his mum.

In fact, he didn’t cause too much chaos being mostly occupied as he was with emptying the fruit bowl and putting it all back again, before deciding to re-home most of its contents around the living room.  We’re still finding oranges in the most unlikely of places and I’m sure we had a lime earlier, too.  His main occupation after fruit picking was wall-drawing, but we managed to get away with just the mildest hint of blue in the hallway, largely down to the grown-up party-poopers who kept spoiling the fun.

Once they’d gone – with the elder of the two climbing backwards down the stairs (all 18 of them) on the way back down the car park, cheered on by her little bro who would doubtless have been counting them down if he had any concept of numbers – we had time to chill a bit and grab some lunch before I ran K to the docs for a quick hello.  From there, since it’s just down the road from her ‘rents, we stopped in for a quick cuppa, which is lovely because it’s a good 20 minutes from our place and we don’t get to do it very often.

When we got home, another of our friends popped over, enjoying his day off, and while K busied herself baking in the kitchen, we sat through Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.  It was awful.  Not just not very good.  It was abominable.  Like the snowman, but with less fur.

Mr S, who brought it over, had refused to see it at the cinema on the basis that he was sure he wasn’t going to like it, so thought it would be amusing for the two of us to sit through the DVD together on the basis that we’d both spend most of the film shouting obscenities at it for being so rubbish.  We, unfortunately, share a few friends who suffer under the delusion that it’s actually quite good and would be very upset to hear us bad-mouthing it all the way through, so this afternoon proved very useful for both of us.

Seriously, though, it’s AWFUL.  Don’t touch it.  Not even for the kids.

Since then, I’ve managed my neb and second physio session and nebs (lots of those, these days) and am still – touch wood – seemingly going strong.  Dinner shortly, then a catch up on last night’s telly, methinks, before hitting the sack for what I hope will be another bonza night of sleep.

You never know these days how long the ups are going to last, but I seem to have perfected the art of making the most of them when they are around.  It’s good to feel good.

Nothing really changes in my life these days – it’s getting harder and harder to find something new to write about that’s not just droning on and on about how hard things can be, or what minute fluctuations my chest is taking at the moment. So I figured that if I’m not up to making sweeping changes in everyday life, the least I could do was to give the blog a bit of TLC.

So here we have it – the all-new SmileThroughIt, courtesy of the lovely people at WordPress (forr all your blogging needs!). Hopefully, it makes the whole thing a bit easier to read – I was surfing the other day and saw the page for the first time in ages and noticed just how SMALL the font size looked on the front (I only see the “back end” of the page, which is all fresh, clean and white, totally different to the published version). It also, I hope, makes it easier to navigate the old posts, or the most recent posts, as well as seeing when I’ve published.

Anyway, as far as the “me” update goes… well, nothing’s changed really.

I say that, of course, but there have been things going on. It amused me last week actually, when I was catching up via text with a friend of mine who’s got himself couped up in the Big House (read: hospital) and he was asking what I’m up to at the moment. I said I’m not doing anything these days, not really up to much. Apart from still doing CF Talk. And the work I’ve got going with Live Life Then Give Life. And talking to the campaigners behind My Friend Oli. And the odd bit of writing.

I suddenly found myself looking back over my text wondering what, indeed, the Roman’s had ever done for us. (Apologies to Monty Python). In fact, said friend said as much in his reply. Told me I clearly didn’t have time to work, even if I was up to it physically.

So yes, I think to myself, nothing ever changes around here, but I’m still finding myself pretty busy. Saturday was a blessed day of nothingness, somewhat of an oasis after a busy week, which had been draining not just physcially, but not helped my the mood swings and negativity flying about.

Sunday we popped over to K’s ‘rents to say hi and for K to raid their loft to try to find some old books of hers to help with her college course. K being K she’s decided not to do the simple, middle-of-the-road, easy-as-the-proverbial-pie kind of project that they expect their students to do, but rather to launch into a semi-professional study which, all things being well, she is hoping to then go on and get published if we can find the right journal for it. The only thing is, it means she needs to wrap her brain back around the statistics info she learned way back when. I am, naturally, completely useless for this as I can’t really count much higher than 10 and ask me to do division and I’m stuck beyond halving something.

While we were there we were, I think it’s fair to say, attacked by our tiniest niece and nephew. I think it’s also fair to say that they’re not going to be the tiniest for long. The little one is nearly as big as his sister now, despite being 13 months younger. In a reversed nod to Animal Farm, he’s just discovered Two Legs Good, Four Legs Bad – it’s so much easier to cause havoc when you have your hands free to grab, hold and throw things while you move. His sister, meanwhile, is mostly contented jumping on me and her Auntie K.

Today I even managed to venture across town to pick up my own prescription, something which I’ve been relying on Mum and Dad for for a while now, although when I told Mum I’d done it tonight she told me off for not asking her to do it (you can’t win sometimes).

Just writing all this down, I’m starting to realise not only that my life is still pretty full and varied, albeit in a different manner to that which I was used to, but also why I started this blog in the first place. More than just a place to air my frustrations, or my minor triumphs, I began writing these posts nearly a year ago in the hope that putting it down in words might help remind me that life’s not as bad as all that and if I only take the time to look around, I’ll see all the wonderful things I have in my life: my family, K and her family (my second family, really), my friends: a network of people who never let me forget myself. More than anything, maybe I’ve reminded myself to Smile Through It.

I’ve taken a real step back over the last week or so, not so much physically (thank goodness), but mentally.

I’m all too aware that moods change on a regular basis and that it’s more than possible to be up one minute and down the next – that changes in the tone of life are rarely long-held and that normality will be restored with time.  But right now things just seem more difficult than they have been for a while.

I’m not entirely sure what kicked it off, although I suspect it was accelerated last Monday when I didn’t go to the cinema.  It seems like a strange non-event to become a catalyst for a wave of negativity, but it seems to have encapsulated a lot of hang-ups all in one go.

I was supposed to be going to see a flick I’ve wanted to see for a while with a friend of mine who had the week off, who then had to cancel as he’d promised himself to another mate for his birthday all day and couldn’t swing the time for the movie.  It wouldn’t have been much of an issue in the past, I’d have just gone along on my own.  But I realised that I had neither the strength nor the confidence to face going to the cinema by myself any more.

From there, things descended down what I suppose is a fairly inevitable path of reassessment of what’s going on in my life and unpleasant realities creeping into my consciousness again.

All of a sudden my inner-eye has switched focus from what I am still able to do with myself from day-to-day to what is now beyond me.  All I seem to be able to focus on is what I can’t do rather than what I can.  And there’s a lot more things that I’m unable to do than things I can still do.

Everyone has these periodic reassessments of life – where you find yourself taking stock of where you are and how it compares to last year, how it compares to where you thought you’d be, how it compares to where you want to be.  And everyone inevitably faces battles against what they expected and what they find – it’s the way life works that we almost never find ourselves in precisely the position we would like to be in.

Still, I can’t seem to shake the dark cloud that’s descended on me again, dragging everything around me into a mire of misinterpretation and moping.  I don’t like this me, I don’t like being so downbeat about everything and struggling to appreciate all of the wonderful things I’ve got in my life.  But try as I might, I can’t see the light through the dense forest of overwhelming bleakness.

Even the simple joys of spending time with K’s nieces and nephews has been taken away this week as they’re all coming through the early-autumn cough and cold season.

I’m trying so hard not to let myself get beaten down by the hard stuff and to enjoy the good stuff that’s still around but I just feel so bitter and resentful and angry with the world sometimes, but I’ve got no outlet for it.  I don’t have the energy to shout and rant and rave and let it all out.  I don’t have the energy to take myself off for a cathartic drive around the back roads like I used to.  I don’t have the energy or the inclination to do anything to help myself out of my funk and it makes me even more angry – with myself and with my situation.

It’s a vicious circle and I know that I’m helping to perpetuate it by allowing myself to wallow in my unhappiness.  I just don’t know how to take myself out of it at the moment – I can’t see the proverbial wood for the trees and I can’t remember what cleared my head of this fog last time.

The one hope I do cling to is that I know I’ve been here before – I know I’ve felt this bleak, dark blackness and I know it’s gone away, so I know it’s beatable.  I just can’t remember how.  And I hope like hell I’ll find the trump card soon.

PS – I’ve mixed so many metaphors here you could make a cake, so I apologise.  It’s not the kind of post I feel like re-reading to spell-check or clean up, though, so we’ll just have to live with it.

Hurrah!  I finished the first cut of the Live Life Then Give Life ad last night and I’m really pleased with it.

Ironically, after spending a couple of weeks picking and piecing things together (on and off), the actual picture edit didn’t take me that long, once I’d got to grips with the tools.  What actually took the time was the 15 seconds of titles at the end, which required 3 separate, fully-rendered images created in a separate program and imported into the editing software.

You always know you’re in trouble with a piece of software when you open it’s electronic user manual (it’s another one of those which doesn’t come with a hard-copy version as it would, presumably, take up a whole book shelf) and it says,

“Because LiveType is a creative tool, documentation can only go so far in describing its
potential…In the end, you are limited only by our own creative vision, and the way to push the limits of LiveType is to jump in and start creating”

Or, to paraphrase in more precise language: we’ll tell you what the buttons do, but then you’re on your own.

And in case no one reading this blog has noted it in the past – I’m not very good at being on my own…

Still, soldier on I did and churn out something fairly brilliantly acceptable I did, too, if I do say so myself.

Seriously, I’m actually really happy with this as a first cut and I’m keen to show it to the rest of the gang at Live Life Then Give Life to see what they make of it.  Once I’ve got their feedback, I’ll have to pull my socks up and launch myself into another cut of it, no doubt killing some of my creative babies on the way, but such is the world of film – it doesn’t pay to be precious.

I’ve taken a bit of a leap in second-guessing people’s level of understanding and how quickly they’ll marry the intentions and the images, so it’ll be interesting to see whether or not it works of if I, having been so close to the material for so long, have made some major assumptions which stretch things too far.

We’ll wait and see and I’ll report back, no doubt.  Watch this space.

I’ve spent most of my day today sat in front of my shiney mac edit suite working on cutting together a pilot ad for Live Life Then Give Life.  I’ve been working on it, on and off like most things, for the last few months and we finally got all the footage in the can last week, with thanks to the wonderful Rheya who shot all the video for me.

This is the first time I’ve used my Final Cut Pro system to edit anything with a purpose, beyond toying around with it.  And boy, is it a steep learning curve.

The whole thing comes with bundles of documentation to go with it, ostensibly a guide-book, but it’s the kind of program where reading the book actually doesn’t do a whole lot to help you get to know the software – the only way to learn it is to just throw yourself into it and see what happens.

Patient as I am with technology(…), it’s managed to make even my cool-headed, even-tempered approach a little fraught at times.  It’s hardly surprising, though, since the whole edit suite is a package of 6 different programs, with an instruction manual 4 VOLUMES long – and that’s just for the video editing program.  All the other programs, like the soundtrack, titling and colouring software don’t have hard-copy manuals, only electronic copies within the software installation.

So I’ve been bumbling and fumbling my way through the most basic of practices, quickly establishing that everything I do has a) at least 3 other ways of achieving the same thing and b) they’re all quicker and easier than the one I tried first.

I’ve also discovered that a) I don’t know as much about this software as I thought I did at first and b) my brain isn’t big enough to learn all the things I need to learn in a single day just to keep up with the pace of the work I’m trying to do.

Similarly, it has emerged that a) everything in the instruction books is written into progressive lists of steps from A-X and b) it’s really hard to shake the habit of working through a whole day in list form.  And c) my brain is still at overload point.

Still, the ad is looking pretty good.  I had a bit of a mad one this afternoon, when I frantically text a bundle of friends for suggestions as to what music track I could put underneath it, which yielded some interesting results – anyone else keen on hearing ANOTHER inspirational clip backed by M People’s Search for the Hero?  Didn’t think so.  Nor me.

My music knowledge is pitiful, so I always fall back on asking the people I know who know their music and they all came up trumps.  The annoying thing about it is that I know all of the tracks (or almost all of the tracks) that they came up with, it’s just that my brain doesn’t work musically, so none of them occurred to me.  It’s an interesting side-note, that: if anyone wanted to think of a film-clip or quotation to fit something, I’d be right there, but asked to find some music to fit something, my brain draws a blank.

Amusingly enough, I had been cutting the piece to Mika’s Grace Kelly as a temporary fill-in with the right mood, and as I was getting my replies in, I finally managed to make the piece work with Grace Kelly underneath it, so as it happens I may not have needed the musical SOS anyway.  Still, it’s nice to know I’ve got people who still reply to my text messages, I suppose…

Tomorrow I’m off to Oxford in the morning for a quick once-over (nothing dramatic, I hope) and I’m hoping I’m not too tired to get back on with things in the afternoon.  That said, I’m not sure my brain can take 2 straight days of new information – it might over-heat slightly.

Full to the brim with new software knowledge I’m off to a) grab myself a cuppa and b) take myself to bed, where c) I hope to stop thinking in lists.

I know that, technically, the tense of the title is wrong, since it was yesterday and not next week, but it was such a fantastic pun which came to me in my half-dead stupor in bed last night that I just couldn’t let it go, grammatically-challenged although it may be.

Anyway, to the point – I had the most amazing day yesterday, flying down to Ipswich to see my Godfather and his family. Yes – flying. To Ipswich. The only thing more remarkable than taking a helicopter down to visit friends and family in Ipswich is that someone who can afford to own a helicopter and fly his friends and family around would choose to live in Ipswich.

I love flying – I’ve done it a few times at school when I was a cadet in the RAF. The only reason I signed up, in fact, was that I heard you got to go for a buzz in a Bulldog – which, for those of you out of the loop on these things, is flying in a type of small, 2-man aeroplane, not unnaturally interfering with a canine.

Helicopters are so much more fun than planes, though, since they are infinitely more manoeuverable than their winged cousins. The float serenely up into the sky – well, as serenely as you can with two engines and four blades shuddering around above your head – and whisk you much quicker than you’d imagine to wherever you want to go.

My Godfather lives in the middle of Nowhere-outside-Ipswich, which is a very quaint little village which does, in fact, have a proper name, but navigation is much easier when you just fly straight into his garden. Road names are rather arbitrary.

They have recently been redoing their house – and by “redo” I mean gut and rebuild, basically – and I could go into immense detail about the 6 bedrooms, 5 en suite, chill-out room, grand staircases, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, televisions behind pictures on the wall and double-pool spa-complex with gym hidden behind a wall of mirrors at one end, but actually I think all you need to know to create a picture in your mind is the fact that you can land a helicopter in his back yard.

There are 2 things you notice about the East of England when you fly over it from anything ranging between 500 and 1,200 feet (we yo-yo’d a little bit, for fun and frolics): 1) East Anglia and Suffolk in particular, is incredibly flat and boring to look at, endless miles of monotonous fields and the odd semi-major road and 2) there are more stately homes or Very Big Houses than you can shake a big stick at. Mind you, your chances of finding anything as interest as a big stick in the landscape of Suffolk is close to zero.

Monotony aside, it’s a wonderful experience flying over everyone’s heads, seeing your shadow chasing across the fields below, spotting the rich areas by counting the number of swimming pools and tennis courts per x number of houses. Helicopter is way to travel. Even a comparatively boring 40 minute ride like ours was about 100 times more interesting than spending 40 minutes on the M1.

I could fly all day – even over Suffolk. I do it a disservice by knocking its dull flatness, because anything is fascinating from the air – watching the roads wind around the countryside, spotting the big houses, fields being ploughed, small country airstrips (of which there are far, far more than you would imagine).

Although we weren’t quite high enough to see things properly, there were times when you could even make out an interesting lie of land that would appear to indicate the presence of an old fort or similar – like being in a live episode of Time Team.

All of which is a very long-winded way of telling you that we spent the day with my Godfather and his family in Ipswich, which I completely and dearly loved every minute of. The fact is, without the convenience of flying pretty much door-to-door (we did have to drive 15 minutes to an airfield at our end), I’d never have been able to go.

It was a really, really wonderful day and it left me completely drained and shattered. Today’s been spent almost entirely in bed and tomorrow will probably largely be, too, but it was totally worth it. I’ve not spent time with them for absolutely ages and K’s never met my Godfather before, although she had met his wife, who’s one of the world’s greatest people when her scathing eye is trained on someone other than me. Luckily yesterday, her husband was around to deflect most of the attention, and I had K there so I didn’t have to endure the “when are you going to find yourself a decent woman” conversation, either.

In fact all she had to complain about was my lack of visits recently, which I assured her I’d make up post-transplant by using her house as my rehab centre. For one thing, it’s got a better-equipped gym than any NHS hospital and a good deal of private city-gyms too, I suspect.

It was great to get away for a bit and catch up with people I love to pieces and see far too infrequently. And to have the luxury of flying there and back, well, that just takes the biscuit.

Ooooh, photos!!