I hadn’t actually realised it’s been nearly a week since my last post.  In fact, I was just sitting at my desk doing work-y things when it occurred to me that I hadn’t done anything for a bit and wondering when it was that I did.  Anyway, if you haven’t read the Duck Race entry, do it now then go and sponsor a duck then come back here.  I promise I’ll still be here.

I’ve had one of those weird weeks where I can’t remember what on earth I’ve been doing other than the fact that I seem to remember being quite busy.

My main occupation over the last two days (that’s Monday and Tuesday) has been attending Business Link’s free courses on how to start your own business.  They come in 3 flavours, as well as a general introduction session that I did late last month.  So on Monday afternoon I did a three-hour session on planning a business, writing a business plan and doing market research to be able to justify the idea in the first place, swiftly followed by a three hour evening session on Marketing and Sales, which was unbelievably helpful and taught me a huge amount of stuff I didn’t know before and has really helped me with some techniques and strategies to follow should I decide to go down this route.

Then after a day of rest and brain-recovery, I did another three hours on Tuesday night on Managing Money – all the financial aspects of running a business including book-keeping, tax and national insurance and other important financy-things.

What surprised me the most about the whole thing was that I actually really enjoyed being in a learning environment again – being taught things, learning things, using my brain to try to grasp things I’d not fully understood before.  It really was great fun and really, really helpful.

As a side note, any of you who think you’d like to start a business or similar, I can thoroughly recommend Business Link and their services and courses.  Everything they do is 100% free and you can do the open workshops like I did as well as talking to a Business Link Adviser, who are all bona-fide business people who really know what they’re doing.  I’ve been really impressed by them and would definitely use them again.

Beyond my courses the only other thing of note I think I’ve done is attend a show produced by my old MKT boss at the Grove Theatre in Dunstable.

I’m not one for hyperbole – ok, I am, but I’m not one for giving undue praise, so it should be noted that the Grove’s Wizard of Oz is without doubt the best Youth Theatre production I’ve ever seen.  It was utterly remarkable and even more so for the fact that it was put together as part of a two-week summer school.  That’s just 2 weeks spent working with a professional director that got the kids involved up to a standard superior to some professional productions I’ve seen (no names mentioned, Yellow Wallpaper).

I was thrilled that TJ invited me to come and see it and gobsmacked at the standard of performance from the entire cast, but particularly by the four leads, who blew me away with their voices and their physicality.  I really can’t congratulate the cast or the guys at the Grove for such a spectacular show.

I’ve got a busy weekend of fun coming up this weekend and I promise to blog in full detail about the whole thing on Monday, provided I don’t forget again…

Everyone at Live Life Then Give Life is bouncing with excitement at the moment as we’re going to be taking part in this year’s Great British Duck Race along with hundreds of other UK charities – and you can, too.

The idea is a bit mental, but brilliant at the same time.  People (that’s you) can adopt a small rubber duck for £3 each (£2 going to the Duck Race and it’s official charities and £1 to Live Life Then Give Life), which is then set free down the Thames on Sunday 31 August over a 1km course from Molesey Dock near Hampton Court Palace.  The first duck to complete the course wins £10,000 for its adoptive parent, with another 30 top prizes to pick up if you lead the field home.

It’s a great, fun way of supporting us as a charity as well as running a chance of winning big.  This year the duck race is aiming to beat it’s own world record of 180,000 ducks floated on the Thames by hitting the 250,000 mark – a quarter of a million ducks all swimming at once.

Supporting us couldn’t be easier – simply go here (http://www.thegreatbritishduckrace.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=543) and click through to our purchase page.

We’d love to have your support and love it even more if you managed to win the race and raise our profile.  Go get a duck and have some fun!

Today’s been an awesome day, celebrating K turning 25 – quarter of a century old and heading off to Uni to do the thing she’s most wanted to do all her life.  People seem to see me as somehow admirable, but as far as I can see it, I just survived – K is doing something altogether bravery and more worthy of admiration than anything I’ve done (with the possible exception of the time I went on that Pirate Ship ride even though I was terrified because my Godson wanted to…).

One of the (many) things I love about K is how amazingly special she makes special days for all those around her.  She works tirelessly to make sure that her friends and family have a great time on their days – be it birthdays, anniversaries or celebrations.  Because of her unending dedication to others’ enjoyment, I wanted to make sure that this time, just for once, she had an amazing day of her own to lodge in her memory bank.

I didn’t tell her anything about what we were doing all day – perfectly aware that she doesn’t like surprises (they scare her slightly) but knowing that 1) it would be good for her and 2) it would make the day that much more special (or so I hoped).

So I started with a lie in for her and an early morning for me.  As it happens, I didn’t actually sleep all night anyway, so the early morning part wasn’t too hard.  I got up and sorted out her big bag of presents, laying them all out nicely on the coffee table in front of the sofa with all of her cards.  That done, I headed down to Tesco to pick up some fresh pain au chocolat for breakfast, one of K’s faves.  Then I watched the Olympics until she got up.

As soon as she was up and about, I made tea (always a requirement) and she got stuck in to opening her small mountain of gifts.  She received some really wonderful things – very pretty, very individual and very K – and then we broke off for a bit of breakkie after she’d spoken to her sister on the phone.

After breakfast she got back to the unwrapping and got to her Wii.  She’s been lusting after the Nintendo Wii almost ever since it came out, but certainly since last year when the two of us played on her brother’s.  Now she’s got one of her very own (which she’s actually playing on right this very second) and loves it to pieces – a good choice, it appears.

Once we’d unpacked it all and set it up, in between showering and me doing the washing up, we played a few rounds of various Wii sports before heading to the flicks.  This was the only part of the day in which she had any say – 27 Dresses was showing for one showing today, which is one that she missed when it was first out and I know she was keen to see it, so I gave her the option of catching it while it was on the big-screen today.

Post-flick, we headed over to Deanshanger to stop in on our sis and niece and nephew, who’d managed to fall over hard yesterday and give everyone a fright that he may have broken his leg.  Seeing him today, it looks like the hospital were right when they said it was just badly bruised/sprained, but he certainly wasn’t himself – he’s normally running around like something that runs around really a lot, but today he was much more subdued and only wandered about the house to find one of us and plead, “More horrid.”  (That’s his way of asking for another episode of Horrid Henry from the Sky+, not a request for us to treat him badly, just in case any child protection officers happen to be reading…).

After checking in on them (and picking up the birthday card from K’s ‘rents that we’d (sorry, I) left there on Saturday, we headed up the road to stop in on K’s ‘rents, the most important part of said visit being, of course, the birthday cake.  With a fairy on it and everything.

After munching cake, drinking fizzy pink stuff and waking her dad up from his nap, K opened up her various presents that had been dropped at her ‘rents, including the one which had originated from there – a mini (and I mean mini) dictation machine that she has wanted to get for Uni, as it’s apparently a great way to revise the day’s lectures, by listening back to them and typing them up as an aide memoire.  It’s a great little thingy, which records very clearly from quite a distance and then downloads directly to a computer.  Fab.

Once we’d had a cuppa and some fizz and opened all the extra pressies, we popped round to another family friend to say hello and thank her for the present she’d left for K.  After a quick stop, we carried on out and went back into town for dinner at Brasserie Blanc (or brassiere blank as we’ve heard it called recently).  K’s wanted to go there since it opened, so it seemed like the perfect treat.

As you may guess from the name (unless you think it means White Cafe), it’s a part of the Raymond Blanc empire, recently arrived in the newer, upmarket area of MK known as The Hub.  Rubbish name, yes, lovely place, though – full of really nice eateries with a wonderful European open-plaza style to it and much more of a communal atmosphere than many places in the UK today.  Brasserie Blanc is on the outer side of the square (away from the main hustle and bustle) and it has to be said it is absolutely exquisite.

It’s expensive there, but it’s one of the few restaurants where I really don’t begrudge the prices they charge.  The food was absolutely beautiful.  It was hands down one of the best meals I have ever eaten in my life and certainly in the running for the best meal I’ve ever had in a restaurant.  I had a rack of lamb so succulent and juicy that chewing was optional.  K had a fillet steak, which was similarly top-quality and we finished it with two heavenly desserts which I couldn’t finish (although K polished hers off).

It’s not just the food in there that makes it worth it (although I’d have eaten off the floor in a flea-pit for food that good), it’s the whole experience.  The setting is lovely – clearly catering for an up-market crowd, but without the stuffiness or coldness of many places along similar lines.  It’s warm, friendly and very comfortable.  The whole evening is topped off by, I think, the best service I’ve ever had in a restaurant.  A waitress who isn’t just there to take an order and shove it at the chef, but rather to help enhance the whole experience for the diners – chatty, polite, helpful and informative.  As I signed the cheque, I made sure to check which was the best way to pay the tip to make sure it went to her and wasn’t shared out.

(As a side note, tipping is very important to me.  I object massively to the accepted wisdom of a straight 10% tip for any waitress.  If I get good service, I’ll tip well, if I get average service, I’ll tip averagely and if I get poor service, I won’t tip.  But beyond that, I don’t agree with pooling tips and splitting them.  If someone gives me exceptional service, as was the case tonight, I want to reward them for it – not to find myself giving a tip to the not-so-good waitress who happens to be sharing the shift with my one.  If they’re good enough, they’ll earn their own tips, if not, they’ll learn they need to work harder.  The point is, if you want to make sure you’re tipping the right person, you need to check.  For instance, had I placed the gratuity on the card I was paying with, by typing it into the machine, then it would have been split.  Leave it in cash on the table, however, and it all goes to the waitress.  This is usually the case, but it’s always worth checking – and making sure you ask the right questions.  Asking where the gratuity goes if it’s put on the card, the waitress is obliged to explain the sharing policy.  She is forbidden, however, to inform you of the cash policy.  Only if you specifically ask can you find out where the tips go.)

Coming away well satisfied after a fine meal, we headed back home where we were met again by friends to help us Christen the Wii.  Two hours of constant game-play between the four of us later and we turfed the guys out to take ourselves off to bed and our much-needed beauty sleep for the return to the grind tomorrow.

I’m generally not one to get excited about birthdays – mine or anyone elses – but for the first time with K’s birthday today, I was genuinely excited about it and I’ve had an absolutely brilliant time.  I’m still buzzing from it and from the look of pure happiness on her face that hasn’t moved for the entirety of the day.  It just goes to prove, it truly is better to give than to receive.

On the Men’s synchronised diving:

“That’s a 3.8 degree of difficulty and the reason it’s such a high degre of difficulty on that dive is because it’s so hard.”

With K’s birthday mere hours away, she chose this evening to have a small gathering of friends to help her celebrate it before my rather secret plans for tomorrow become clear. (It’s not that exciting, don’t get lost in anticipation).

Rather than the usual pub or club night, or a trip to the flicks or similar, K opted instead for going down the old-school route of playing Quazar in the MK Megabowl.  Slightly run down, very “retro” – athough uninentionally so, it’s smply that it’s never been updated since it was first opened in the 80’s, complete with ancient BBC-stye computer scoring systems – it’s still actually a fun place to go largely on account of it being quieter both in terms of capacity and noise, allowing you to hold a proper conversation with everyone your playing with, not just th person next to you.  But more than that – it still has Quazar.

For the uninitiated, or the un-retro, Quazar is a form of warfare playe out with lazar guns in a darkened, UV-enhanced room within the bowling alley, including all manner of maze-like walls and passages.  It was one of my favourite pass-times when I was in my early teens and I would get incredibly excited whenever a friend chose to have a birthday party there.

The great news is, it’s lost none of it’s fun, nor frolics, and the six of us who made up the minimum number for the game had a cracking time runing around shooting each other and making our luminous lime-green and orange packs vibrate and shout warnings at us.

It would be remiss of me – particularly approaching her birthday – not to point out that K’s team won and my team lost, mostly thanks to one of our guys manage to score a phenominal -19,000 points.  To give you an idea of just what an achievement that is, the two best shooters on each team scored just over 12,000 each.  He managed to score a stonking 150% of our total against himself.  Not even he knows how.

After emerging from the Quazar depths sweating and giggling like small children, we set about bowling in the same teams we’d lazared in.  Sad to say, once again, that the Green team stole the win, after I managed to choke on the pressure of needing 9 pins in my last turn and managing only a paltry 4.  Truth be told, though, the game was lost in the middle section when I seemed to have trouble finding anything other than the gutter for the majority of he game.

An extra game later, we were all heading home and chilling out in the flat with two of the guys, who hung about till late before I quit for the night and hit the sack.

This week, so far, I’ve seen 3 movies at the cinema, two of which provided the perfect lesson in contrast between special effects handled well and believably and, well, not.

First off, though, I feel obliged to encourage all of you to go check out Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging – or at least all those of you who can remember what it’s like to be a teenager.  I have to admit I didn’t have high hopes going into this one, but K wanted to see it and so we decided to take our niece along to check it out (having a nearly-teen niece is a great excuse for watching flicks you feel like you shouldn’t be seen at).  To my complete surprise, I absolutely loved it.

It’s incredibly honest and true, with just the right amount of whimsy without making itself over-the-top of unbelievable.  If you remember what life was like when you were struggling for the guts to ask out that girl you fancied, or struggling to make that gorgeous guy realise you existed, this is totally a movie for you.  But it goes beyond simple teen-dom to encompass the battles that parent’s fight, too.  Being stuck in a weird age-group that’s no longer teenager, but not yet a parent, I found myself more than able to sympathise with both sides of the arguments.

As opposed to the majority of teen movies where controlling, embarrassing parents are the clear-cut bad guys of Teen freedom, this paints a much more subtle picture, showing the adults as they really are – just people who used to be kids trying their hardest to do what they think is right and make sure that they bring their children up properly.  Yes, their embarrassing and occasionally misguided and hurtful, but you can see that it’s all with the best of parental intentions and never just to spite the kids.

It must be said that the film is helped massively by a fantastic cast.  Some of the girls can be a little drama-school-y, very well spoken and enunciating carefully all the time, but nonetheless convincing in the majority of what they do.  Alan Davies proves that he’s more than just a comedian who did Jonathan Creek and the rest of the adult cast round out the film nicely.

The two effects-heavy films of the week provided a stark contrast not just to Angus, Thongs, but also to each other.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a fantastic, fantastical sequel to the original Hellboy.  Directed again by Guillermo Del Toro, this time feels very different as, off the back of the inimitable and remarkable Spanish-language Pan’s Labyrinth, he’s been given a much more free-role to create the monsters and the world he wants to create.

The effects work in this film is stunning.  The majority of the creatures are created with a combination of practical (ie – man in suit or puppet) effects and the more common and oft-overused (see below) CGI effects.  What’s remarkable, especially to someone like me, for whom CGI and effects in general are often such a bug-bear they ruin the movie (see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), is that it is almost impossible to see the joins.

So photo-real are the CGI effects that, similarly to The Dark Knight, it is hardly possible to spot the when they are using practical on-set effects and when they’ve resorted to CGI.

On the other hand, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is very much the other end of the scale: stacked full of CGI which looks, funnily enough, just like CGI.  How the producers haven’t learned their lesson from the execrable effects at the end of The Mummy Returns is beyond me.  The first Mummy movie made a real effort towards photo-realism and although it looks slightly dated now, was something of a bench-mark and a wonder at it’s time.

This time round we have to contend with an almost 100% CGI Jet Li doing all kinds of craziness.  I understand that most of what they did they couldn’t do practically in terms of shape-shifting and such, but there are much simpler things they could have done to help sustain the audiences suspension of disbelief at least a little longer than the first shot of a sequence.

Practical make-up effects are undoubtedly making a come back as producers and studios realise that audiences are growing tired of the artificiality of CGI that is being churned out at speed in a lot of movies, but there are still a large amount of films using poor-quality CGI thanks to rushed post-production periods enforced upon them to hit their release dates, which are often set before the film even starts shooting.

What frustrates me about the current crop of CGI-heavy, story-poor movies is that the effects houses that are working on them are very, very good at what they do.  But the truth is that they can’t work miracles.  They are artists and you have to give them sufficient time to finesse their artwork before you put it on display.  Like all art, if it’s rushed, it shows.  While that may be fine for a Jackson Pollack, it doesn’t work when you’re dealing with supposedly photo-realistic bad guys who are supposed to be able to scare you by making you believe they exist.

And don’t even get me started on the Yetis…

Today has been a pretty impressively brilliant day.

It was another Harefield appointment, my first in six weeks after MC told me that it was a bit pointless coming back until they had clear data on whether my CMV had retreated for good or not.  So he had sent me away with instructions to send in bloods every 2 weeks to keep a check on things and that if I hit the 3 month mark with no adverse effects or without showing anything above a zero on my CMV then he’d take me off the Valganciclovir I’ve been on since May and see if my body will cope without it without submitting to CMV again.

Seeing him today with a month-and-a-half of clear results, he was suitable pleased and happy for me to drop my Valgan and continue with everything else, albeit being very much more aware and careful about the first signs of CMV infection, necessitated by the fact that CMV can very rapidly kick-start rejection of the not-very-good kind, which could do my serious damage.

That said, though, he came out with something I wasn’t expecting to hear at all.  Although I may feel like I’ve had a fair number of blips, he thinks I’m doing incredibly well and – going by his experience of CF patients post-transplant – thinks I now stand a better-than-average chance of 5-year survival.

At the time of my transplant, I was quoted statistics saying that 73% of people make it through the first year, and within that 27% that don’t are included people who may die on the table or suffer serious post-operative complications.  Once you stretch the survival period to 5-years, the odds stand at 50/50, but MC now believes that for me the benchmark can be shifted from 50/50 at 5 years to 50/50 to make 10 years.

Another decade of life is better than I think many of us dared to hope.  I said before my transplant if I’m given just six months of a new life I’d be happy.  Time enough to play with my Godsons, experience the things I’d not been able to do for breathlessness and lack of energy, learn to do things on a whim again.  Having slipped past that stage back in May, albeit in the middle of a CMV/EBV attack, I’ve felt contented with my lot, whatever is thrown at me next.  To know now that there’s a very real possibility of a future worth planning for is too incomparable for words.

I’m aware every day that someone, somewhere has lost someone they loved very dearly.  I just hope I can make enough use of the extra time I’ve been given to show them what a truly wonderful gift they have given not just me, but my family, too.

Today we spent another brilliant day in the company of K’s cousins Agi and Tibi, over from Hungary for the week for a break fomr their competely hectic work lives.

Last weekend we had taken them off on a tour around MK, taking in the sites of the snowdome, Borders, bowling at the MegaBowl and dinner in the Hub.  Today we went off to be proper tourists and see Shakespeare’s birth place.

We arrived in the late morning and immediately set about seeing what there was to see.  I’ve only been to Stratford one before, when I was in my early teens and probably not all that interested in tatty mementos and old buildings – certainly not interested enough to remember it at all.

This time, though, I was much more aware of what I was there to see, which was largely old buildings and tacky, tatty mementos.  Not to mention the world’s largest collection of shops, pubs, clubs, amusements and activities with “Shakespeare” in their name.  There is a serious lack of originality to Stratford, which is ironic (or fitting, depending on your perspective) considering it’s place in the story of Britain’s Bard.

Rather than pay through the nose to stand in an enormous queue through some fairly attractive gardens before spending 5 minutes being herded through an old house that’s only claim to fame was having a playwright born there, we instead opted to jump on the hop on, hop off bus tour of Stratford, which would take us outside the city limits and off to Anne Hathaway’s cottage.  And yes, we were looked at strangely for jumping on a bus whose intention is for hopping, but we like to be different.

The Hathaway’s cottage, quite apart from being a lovely old building in a beautiful countryside setting, is fantastic entertainment.

The “tour” of the cottage (which actually has, I think, 6 bedrooms and lots of other things too (you can tell I was listening hard, can’t you?)) consists mostly of one man standing in the parlour explaining the history of the time and about a dozen English phrases which were coined from habits of the time, including “cold shoulder”, “stop-gap” and “turning the tables”.  This lead, rather unwittingly, to a running joke between us for the rest of the day about how certain phrases came about.  Hence the phrase “running joke”. (well, it was funny at the time).

The majority of the “tour” – and it really does have to be placed in inverted commas – is taken up with the guide explaining that, essentially, Shakespeare would never have lived there and may have visited while they were courting, although it’s not certain, just a decent supposition.

Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare, his slim volume on the life of England’s greatest poet (again, depending on your views), is esstially a collection of all the published wisdom on Shakespeare through his life and amounts to a slim non-fiction novel explaining that we actually know absolutely nothing about Shakespeare whatsoever.  In fact, there are only three point in Shakespeare’s life when we know with 100% certainty where he was – the day he was born, the day he got married and the day he died.  The rest is all pure specualtion and guess-work.

Hopping back on the bus (doing it the proper way this time), the heavens had opened and forced us onto the lower deck.  After five minutes riding down there, though, I decided it was too much like a normal bus ride, missing as we were our knowledgeable and informative personal guide from the first bus and reliant instead as we were on a pre-recorded, barely-audible audio description which semed to mostly cover sheep, the most enlightening section of which anounced that Warwickshire in Shakespeares time was a farming county, as opposed, we surmised, to the now infamous Buckinghamshire pole dancing county.  Unimpressed as I was and seeing that the rain had stopped, I shepherded us on the the open-top upper deck where we all coated our butts in fresh rainwater from the seats, whilst giggling like schoolgirls all the way back into town.

Following a late luch at a pub surprisingly not named after anything Shakespearean, we crossed the road to a large carousel K had spotted on our way past.  After spending 5 minutes larking around on pogo-horse which disappointingly failed to pull a Mary Poppins and leap from their confines off into a fun, colourful world of animated penguins, we all began to get somewhat bored and spent the follow 5 minutes of the seemingly endless merry-go-round wishing we could just jump off.  Tibi did manage to switch horses mid-stream though, which was pretty impressive and not unentertaining.

Strolling back through Stratford towards the car, we stopped in at various little shops and authentic-looking buildings which have now been turned into banks, coffee bars and Woolworths.  Sad, but sadly not uncommon.

After getting home and dining with K’s ‘rents we had jsut enough time to have a gander through Agi and Tibi’s pictures of the week (including todays) before we shot off home and clambered into bed for an early night before busy days tomorrow, K at work and me back down at Harefield.

I’m not having much luck, artistically, at the moment. Not personally, but in my viewing choice. Following last week’s Mama Mia debacle, I was in London tonight to catch an Edinburgh Preview of The White Space’s Yellow Wallpaper show.

Back in the olden days, the days of rubbish lungs and MK Theatre, Suze picked up The Yellow Wallpaper, a 19th Century Gothic horror about a women suffering from traumatic post-natal depression in the days before women were “allowed” to have depression of any kind, let alone post-natal. Locked away for her own safety in a nursery she slowly starts to see shapes in the wall and a woman emerges, taking her place in the outside world during the day and then torturing her mind at night.

All the basis, one would have thought, for a fantastic piece of Theatre.

Sadly, not the case. The whole show was prety disastrous from start to finish – the acting was soul-less and devoid of all emotion, the staging and lighting were, frankly, beyond amateurish and the less said about the sound the better.

Suze and I went along, with K and Suze’s friend G, thinking we might catch a gem, but well aware that this sort of thing can turn into a stinker. Which it did.

Still, as Suze put it on the way home, it makes you even more determined to do your own stuff, safe in the (cocky?) knowledge that you can do better.

Sorry all.  Having been chastised for not updating the blog, I have just posted a couple of film reviews for you, but will endevour to fill the gaps on the past couple of weeks as soon as I get a decent chance.  I’ve been a trifle busy.  In a good way.

Sorry if I scared anyone!