Archives: Annoyances

If you’re reading this, you probably already know that I’m currently residing in Harefield Hospital following a ruptured cerebral aneurism on Sunday. Here’s the lowdown:

Sunday night, around 8pm, just as I was returning from my dinner break to put the final touches to the project that was due in on Monday, I developed a sudden, severe headache at the top of my neck where the spine meets my skull. Within minutes, it had spread right around my head, which alternated between feeling like someone was drilling into it and my brain trying to explode out of it.

By 8.30 I couldn’t function and was laid on the bed in pain, feeling sick. By 9.30 I’d started vomiting and wouldn’t stop for the next 24 hours.

After failing to keep down one dose of immunosuppression and knowing the morning dose wouldn’t stay down, either, I headed in to Harefield where they rapidly took a CT of my head and found nothing.  To be on the safe side, they then opted for a lumbar puncture (or spinal tap) to see if I had signs of blood in my cerebro-spinal fluid1.

Although clear to the naked eye, tests that returned on Tuesday confirmed the presence of blood and, hence, a probably bleed on the brain.

Since Tuesday, I have been improving progressively and now feel right as rain and ready for action. The doctors, however, disagree.

It’s extremely unusual to have any kind of bleed like this at my age2 and the obvious concern is that a small aneurism (pocket of blood) had a small bleed that caused the initial headache, but could fully rupture at any time and cause more life-threatening consequences.

Personally, I’m not worried about that at all. Harefield have been trying for the last 3 days to get me transferred to a specialist neuro unit with little success, which indicates to me that none of the neurosurgeons who have looked at my file are overly concerned.

That said, it’s obviously far too big a gamble to ignore it all together, so my current state of limbo is being sat in Harefield whiling away the hours and days until a bed becomes available for me at either Charing Cross or, more likely, the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford3.

Without going into more medical and boring detail, that’s pretty much the skinny for now. No idea if/when I’ll have access to my laptop again when I’m moved, so there may not be updates as regularly as you may like, but the latest news will be posted on my Twitter feed as it comes in.

Finally, many thanks for all the love and support you’ve all shown over the last couple of days since we first made the news public, it means a lot to me and to K as well, who’s obviously had quite the time of it over the last week and is coping with her typical strength and humour.

1. NB – blood in the CSF is NOT a good thing [↩]
2. a tender 28 until next Wednesday [↩]
3. also my preferred choice [↩]

Right, first off I should offer my apologies for my mini (or maxi) rant in my last post. I really was annoyed though. For the record – if anyone from the STUDENT LOANS COMPANY or SLC happens to be reading this – I still don’t have the stuff I need to be able to square away my loans and actually get some money. Thanks to to lovely Bank of Mum & Dad, however, I’ve been able to settle myself with a computer in my room to allow me to actually, you know, work. That loan’s being called in as soon as the real one comes through.

But let’s move on as that’s not what you want to read/hear about anyway, is it? You want to hear about LIPA and – specifically – how awesome it is. And boy is it.

I’ve now been living in Liverpool for 16 days, which already feels like months. I know Liverpool pretty well now, although I’m still finding decent little short-cuts and cut-throughs to get me places even quicker. I’ve got my walk to uni down to a steady 15 minutes at a sensible pace and I can find just about every shop I want to or need to in town now, too. I’ve also learned that I’m never going to have a problem finding a Tesco. There’s at least 5 within a 15 minute walk of me, either at LIPA or my apartment.

The course is brilliant – a great mix of general knowledge technical and design stuff and more detailed, specific tasks. It is hard work though. All our days begin at 9.30am – because that’s the time professional theatre workers come in, usually – and if we have all day lectures, as I now do on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, we are timetabled to be there until between 4.30 (usually) and 7pm (on occasion).

In addition to the timetabled stuff I already have 5 assignments from my 6 modules, the first of which is due in just three weeks and happens to be the very, very hardest of them all. It’s called the Slice of LIPA project and it’s part of our design and construction course. We all have to choose a part of LIPA to accurately recreate in a 1:25 scale model.

I’ve chosen this area, the entrance to the Institute’s studio theatre venue in the atrium:

The Sennheiser Studio Theatre at LIPA

I have to say I thought it was a good compromise between tricky detailing and large sections of block colour, but as I began to measure for and – on Tuesday – to make the model, I discovered I was wrong. Apart from anything else I spent nearly 2 hours on Tuesday morning measuring out, cutting and carving all 12 individual paving slabs, after my initial plan to make it work, well, didn’t.

Across the other modules I’ve also been on a tour of the whole theatre, including the grid – the part of a theatre where all the wires holding up the flying scenery are gathered and other technical stuff happens that I either don’t know or is too complicated to get into here (mostly the former, granted). From the grid you can also get to the roof, which is where this photo is from:

The sunset over Liverpool from the LIPA roof

Not bad for a view, eh?

I have also started a stage management module, a lighting and electrics module, a context and professional development combined module and a fundamental skills module. These include climbing ladders, health & safety, soldering, reading scripts, breaking scripts down, knowing what DMX means and a variety of other things.

And on top of all this academicness (which may or may not be a real word), I’ve also been assigned my first show as an ASM (Assistant Stage Manager – get used to the abbreviation because I’m not clarifying it every time I write it on here!). I’m going to be working on the first big show of the year in the Paul McCartney Auditorium, which is to be Wind in the Willows. And when I say big, I mean big with a capital “B”. And, from the model box I saw yesterday, with a capital “I” and “G” too, I suspect.

In fact, I must excuse myself from this missive to go and wade my way through the script again and then tackle the 18 page (yes, EIGHTEEN page) props list. Wish me luck.

This week has been great and I’ve learned a lot and I’ve a lot to blog about, but right now I can’t actually take my focus off the bloody Student Loans Company – or, for that matter, the striking postal workers.

Between them, they are making my life an absolute hell, resolutely working together to mean I have no student finance, until today no student bank account and all together too much stress for the first week at uni.

In order for me to be able to claim my student grants and loans (and pay my tuition fees), LIPA have to log on to the SLC website and register me using my student number. My student number was sent to me in the post before I came, but I unfortunately left it at home. No problem, though, because the day after I arrived, K posted it up to me.

Of course, she posted it in the middle of the postal strike and, over a week later, it still hasn’t reached me. I think laterally and get K instead to go through my home emails and dig up the number that the SLC emailed me. I take that to the finance office at uni, who tell me it’s the wrong number. This is my customer reference number, not the student number – starting in a series of 3 letters – that they need.

Not a problem, I think to myself, and shuffle off to the uni computers to log on to the SLC website (with my customer reference number) and find my student number, which will of course be on there because that’s where all the details of my claim are.

But no. They don’t have the student number on their websites. They also don’t answer the phone when you call, instead leaving a very polite message saying we’re busy and then disconnecting.

So I have no student number and therefore the SLC don’t believe I’m at uni and therefore they won’t pay my money.

What this means is that the £900 grant I should already have had paid to me to kick start me off of benefits – which I’d been on up to now – isn’t being paid into my account. It also means that the £1000+ first semester’s student loan that was due into my account on Monday won’t go it. It also means that if I don’t get the letter and the number through from the SLC before the end of next week (end of September) I’m also going to find myself liable for paying the full £3,200 tuition fees for the years.

You may now, I hope, begin to appreciate why the joys of this week’s learning have paled somewhat into the background while I have to spend the whole weekend trying to work out how the **** I’m supposed to get my student number before Thursday.

I’m not a happy bunny.

For the record, though – the course is awesome. I’m off to measure up a piece of wall and convert it to 1:25 scale.

The Top 20 things I’ve learned this week, in no particular order:

1) Liverpool has lots of pubs and lot of shops.
2) Drinking as a student is really cheap
3) Cheap drinks are remarkably dangerous.
4) Having a friend who works in a £1-a-shot tequila bar is good
5) Asking her to choose your shot of tequila isn’t
6) Chilli tequila is bad.
7) Banksy graffitti’d Liverpool and – remakrably – didn’t get in as much trouble as the bloke I saw doing it in the town centre the other night.
8) There’s a statue of Billy Fury by the docks.
9) The locals for some reason think he’s called Billy Furry.
10) I don’t look very good in a dress.
11) Cold showers are quite rubbish after 6 straight days of them.
12) LIPA is the coolest school in the whole entire world ever and I have no idea why anyone would go anywhere else.
13) School-leavers this year think “retro” is something from the late 90’s.
14) 3rd Years think that Steps, Five and Cotton Eye Joe are all from the 80’s.
15) All my friends live together 20 minutes away from where I live by myself.
16) My timetable is really, really harsh.
17) It’s not as bad as it would have been if I was a designer.
18) Postal workers suck.
19) Pot Noodles taste much worse than Super Noodles.

and finally and probably most importantly:

20) I’m going to LOVE IT here.

I’ve managed to grab half an hour before my day starts today to rap out a bit of a blog about getting here and what it’s all like.

The first think I have to say is that I’m sitting at a computer in LIPA’s Learning Resource Centre (essentially the library and computer room) and there’s a big plaque on the wall listing the sponsors of the room. Amoung a few well-known corporate clients, it also lists Jane Fonda, Billy Joel, David Hockney and Elton John. Reading those names on the wall of the place I’m going to be studying theatre for the next 3 years gave me such a boost this morning – this place matters.

The first few days have been crazy. I left home – as you may have seen on my Twitter feed – at almost 6am on Monday morning to get up here for my enrollment at 10. We managed to do the trip in almost precisely 3 hours, which was pretty awesome at that time in the morning, and got my keys for the flat straight away, which gave us time to unload all the stuff from the car (all 7 boxes, 1 suitcase and 1 holdall) before I had to be at uni.

I got enrolled and then filtered into the Paul McCartney Auditorium (how cool!) for intorductory talks about the place and what’s expected of all the freshers. In the afternoon, after grabbing a quick bite of lunch and then waving Dad off, I met with my course group, the TPDT guys (Theatre Performance Design and Theatre Performance Technology – essentially the same course but with slightly different focus between designing and practical tech-ing). The tutors intorduced themselves and outlined the course, then we had a couple of hours to kill before a group social in the evening, which turned out to be great fun.

Tuesday was in at 10am again for more talks and safety briefings, then a fairly free afternoon which I spent shopping for bits and pieces I’d not managed to get before hand or had left at home. In the evening I popped over to a friend’s house and we chilled and drank vodka and cokes (made with the roughest vodka in the world – the joyous life of studenthood) before her flatmate and I hit the town for a couple of hours to make the most of £1.50 Jaegerbombs (Jaegermeister and Red Bull for the uninitiated) before calling it a night around 1am.

Wednesday was, blessedly, a day off, although I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep so I ended up walking down to the Albert Dock at 7am, which was actually beautiful. Got back to the flat around 8.30 and proceeded to sleep til 2pm. Nice.

I pootled in town in the afternoon and grabbed an iPod dock – my room currently has no TV, no internet, no computer or anything, so I needed something to break the silence of the room that didn’t involve me walking around with my headphones in 24/7.

Last night was Blind Date in the LIPA Bar, which was sadly compered and played out by third years who spent the whole evening drunkenly making in-jokes about their mates, leaving most of the freshers feel pretty confused and stupid – not the best was for the Student Board to welcome the newbies in the middle of freshers week, it has to be said.

And now, once I finish this I’m off to grab a chocolate bar from Julie and Julie in the canteen downstairs (they’re great – the ladies, not the chocolate bars) to give me enough energy for the next 4 hours of the TPDT Treasure Hunt! How cool!

Once I’ve sorted myself with a laptop and internet connection at the flat, these blogs will hopefully get a little a) shorter and b) more regular, but until then you’ll have to make do with the Twitter feed on the left of the page and random updates on here as and when I get chance to jump on a comp here.

I really should learn to keep my mouth shut. Less than 24 hours after confidently blogging that I was on the mend I find myself on the ward at Harefield stuck in my own private episode of House.

I woke on Friday with a much chestier cough and weakness in my legs and – after chatting to my GP and after he chatted to the registrar at Harefield they decided that the best bet was for me to go to Harefield and get properly examined and worked up by the pros.

The biggest down point appeared to be that it was looking less and less like something that is fixable by the time we’re due to leave for Hawaii. We’re fully insured for it, but to be honest the money was the last of our worries.

Arriving at Harefield I was popped in a room and prodded and poked about a bit before sitting down with AP the reg to go over the options.

K and I, being big fans of Hugh Laurie in House, almost burst put laughing when AP actually said, “differential diagnosis”.

There seem to be 3 viable options did everything this week and the condition I’m in now: 1) Swine ‘flu, plain and simple, for which they can send me home with Tamiflu and let us go to Hawaii. 2) A recurrance of the CMV I was admitted with last year, for which they can send me home with a course of Valganciclovir and let us go to Hawaii. 3) A chest infection, either as a result of, independent of or additional too some kind of ‘flu or virus, which would be game over for Hawaii

So I’ve now been bled dry and X-rayed, but the blood results won’t be back until later this morning/afternoon and I’m down for a CT scan at some point today after the X-ray was inconclusive.

It’s a pretty horrible feeling sitting around waiting for test results that will dictate whether I can go on my guest holiday in 6 years or if, like May 2008, my body has conspired to stop me having ant foreign fun at all.

Keep your fingers crossed – I’ll update the blog & Twitter once I know the score. Suddenly “Smile Through It” seems ever so appropriate again.

Today was both an emminently enjoyable day and a massively frsutrating one.

A while back, as you’ll no doubt have noticed from the banner on the right of the page here (unless you’re reading this through in the archives in the middle of 2011), I signed myself up to take on this years doitforcharity.com Santa Run through Greenwich park.

At the time – about 7 weeks before the run – I thought that a small, fun 5k could be just the right way to ease myself into the physical challenges I’ve set myself for the next couple of years.  I’ve developed a bit of a master plan that I’m not going to la out on here because I’ll only fall foul of it at some point and feel lousy, but suffice to say that a 5k before Christmas seemed to be a good way of easing myself in.

Then came my port op at the end of last month and truly knocked me back.  Not physically – or at least not in my chest – but the pain in my shoulder and the general disablement it brought caused me to have to stop running.  I figured that even having missed a week’s training I’d still be good for the run, but it appears that my shoulder protests too much.

Any kind of movement of the shoulder, particularly harsh, juddering, running-style movement, has been really painful and – mindful of the fact that I’d have to operate a car all the way home after the event – I had to take the disappointing decision to “drop out” of the run.  I say drop out, but that’s really not true, I just ended up walking it instead of running it.

I was, frankly, really bummed about it the week leading up to it – the whole point of the exercise had been to give myself a physical challenge to round of what’s been an amazing twelve months – but as people kept pointing out to me, it’s a big step forward.  I just wasn’t so sure it was, after all, I’ve done a lot of walking since my op, not least back in October when I not only walked 5k, but did it with a video camera on my shoulder to shoot Nelly’s World’s Biggest Walk.

It was only once I was actually walking around the park, breathing in the freezing cold but deliciously crisp winter morning’s air that I realised what a difference the last year has made.  At this point 12 months ago, I was just learning to wobble around the ward on two very over-sized legs in between bouts of dialysis to keep everything under control and on course for a Christmas release, a date which seemed to be looming without signs of improvement.  To be wandering freely through the park today, holding conversations and pushing Nelly up a really steep hill (until her family came to a perfectly-timed rescue) is a miracle beyond words.

I feel like I spend every post on here at the moment in a moment of thanks to my donor and their family, but if it wasn’t for them I’d never have had the chance to do all of that.  And I’d never have seen my Great Cousin born last night, either – so thank you all, whoever you are.

This week we have been rudely invaded by the real world.  After 10 months of existing in a perfect little post-transplant bubble, the time has come to look at things that people out in the big wide beyond have to spend time looking at.

With K off to uni in 3 weeks and counting, she is, naturally, going to have to give up work.  The full-time commitment of the course, coupled with the 3-hour daily commute is going to sap every last bit of energy she has, making weekends a time for rest and recovery and not for the usual kind of student money-making that normally earns the bookworms a crust.

So it falls on me to start winning the bread for the house hold.  It’s a very strange position to be in, seeing as I haven’t been in paid employment since I left Northampton Theatres in April 2005, nearly three-and-a-half years ago.

One thing I’ve learned from friend-of-the-blog Emily is that returning straight into a ful-time job post-transplant is a bit of a no-no.  Although I now have more energy than I think I’ve ever had in my life (barring, maybe, my early years), that doesn’t automatically equate to being able to put up with the stamina required for a full-time job and the stresses and strains that go along with that.

Instead, I’m going to be looking for something smaller and more part-time, but then I hit the thorny issue of benefits.

At the moment, I’m still covered by incapacity benefits because I’ve been under doctor’s orders not to work.  The idea of incap is that in order to help you return to work, you are allowed to do a certain number of hours of paid work per week without incurring penalties on your benefits.  The trouble with incap is that once you pass the 16-hours-per-week threshold, you lose everything – there is no middle ground.

And it’s not just the incap that you lose.  Incap comes tied in with an entitlement to various other benefits including Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit, which basically means my rent and council tax are paid for me as my income isn’t high enough to cover them.

So, all-in-all, the loss of benefit will cost us in the region of £800 per month.  That’s an enormous gap to try to cover between working 16 hours per week on benefits and finding the rest of the money once you cross that line.  In effect, it means that you are forced to jump rom 16 hours per-week all the way up to a full-time 30-40 hour week with no middle ground and no safety net, beyond returning to incapacity benefit.

It sounds easy enough to try out full-time work and use the Incap as a fall-back option if you can’t cope, but that’s forgetting the psychological impact of going back to “illness”.  Everyone I know post-transplant has faught an incredible battle to get themselves back on their feat and rebuild new lives in the wake of a truly life-changing blessing.  What all that effort means, however, is that none of us want to return to the perception of “illness” that dogged us for years both before and initially post-transplant.

So the search for so-called “gainful” employment begins.  Where am I going to end up, who knows?  As long as it pays the bills, I have to be happy with it, but I would much rather have an opportunity to do the things I want to do with writing, filmmaking and educating than have to sit in a call-centre 37-hours a week.  Hopefully, the 16 hours I need to start off with will enable me to carry on with my personal projects and find a way to make them pay.

Watch this space!

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 was supposed to be spent with my legsa astride a throbbing machine, but sadly they don’t let you learn to ride motorbikes in the snow.

I woke up bright and early (and surprisingly alert) at 7am, cooked myself a nice, filiing fuelling breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast, then – having glanced outside and taken stock of the conditions (light snow, which wasn’t settling, and cold, dark skies) I stuck on a multitude of layers of clothing including nice warm thermals and set off for the CBT (Compulsory Basic Training) centre on the other side of town.

15 minutes later I pulled up to find the instructor warming the bikes up while sheltering in a large shipping container from the elements.  Seeing the bikes out gave me hope that he might have decided it was OK, but when I approached him it was fairly obvious that he’d already made up his mind about it all.  We had a quick chit chat and went over the weather situation and even though it wasn’t supposed to persist, he pointed out that any sort of snow technically disqualifies him from teaching, which means if the DSA were to turn up for a random inspection (a not-unlikely possibility), he’d have been in the doo-doo.

Sufficiently disappointed, I toddled myself back home and made with the productivity.  Knowing that I had a good 3 hours before her ladyship was likely to be roused, I set about ploughing through a whole stack of work that had been slowly piling up over the last couple of weeks, waiting for my attention when I finally stopped running around the country like a lunatic for half a day.

Satisfied with my morning’s work and with a finally awake K, we were joined by Dazz, who popped up to use our ‘net for some bits and bobs he wanted to do (mostly to do with adding photos to Facebook, I think).  After lunch had settled, K and I decided to be good little Easter bunnies and take ourselves off down the gym for an hour, me completing another mile on the treadmill, K doing circuit set of cardio and weights.

We got back and chilled for a bit before having to head over to my ‘rents to get our weeks’ washing done – having a kaput washing machine is starting to get ever so slightly annoying, now.  Luckily, this weeks’ laundry duty happened to coincide with my ‘rents getting back form their skiing holiday in Italy, which meant we had chance to catch up with them, peep out their photos from the week  and hear all their stories about the Fawlty Towers hotel they stayed in.

In the grand scheme of things it may not seem like much, but this holiday for my mum and dad marks almost as big a landmark as anything I’ve been up to of late.  For the last two-and-a-half years my parents have been as UK-bound as I have, having to remain accessible just in case that call finally came.  For two-and-a-half years they’ve had to put their usual holiday plans on hold and stop their preferred overseas holidays so that they can be around for me.  Last weeks’ trip to the Italian Alps, just by the Mont Blanc tunnel, is the first time they’ve been able to book, take and enjoy a holiday abroad for any extended period since I was listed back in 2005.

So it was great to hear of their adventures and even though it sounds like they got what they paid for in their bargain-basement last-minute hotel-and-flight deal, they really enjoyed themselves.  I can’t describe how happy it makes me to see my mum and dad finally able to do the things they want to do and to enjoy themselves without having to worry about me or what sort of state I’d be in when they got home.  I only spoke to them once while they were away, whereas in the past it would have required almost daily updates of how I was doing.  Transplant affects so many more lives than just mine and it feel amazing to be able to enjoy it from a whole new perspective.

After we’d got through all of our washing and I’d stolent the left-overs from the ‘rents roast lamb, we headed back home to find Dazz stranded in boredom at the flat.  Turns out when we left him, telling him to feel free to use the ‘net and that the keys were on the side in the kitchen for him to use to lock up then post through the lettter box, he’d not heard the latter part of the sentence, so had been sat in waiting for us to come back for close on 2 hours.  In the meantime he’d been joined by Cliff, who came to occupy him with a game of Simpsons Operation.  I’m not sure how interesting it is, though, because they both looked pretty bored when we got there.  Mind you, they had a whole WALL of DVDs to choose from, so I’ don’t have that much sympathy.

We sat down to cups of tea and K threw on Curse of the Were-Rabbit, while I jumped on my computer to write/update my CV in the vague thought that I might apply for a job I’d seen in the paper today.  I’d forgotten how long and dull CV writing is, getting through most of the film before I’d done with that and also caught up with the various bits of charity stuff which needed my attention before I ran away for a few days tomorrow.

By 11 I was finished and so was the flick, Dazz and Cliff had departed and K was in bed.  I hastily rushed through my ablutions before hitting the sack and vanishing into the world of sleep within minutes.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been up at 7am, done a full day’s work including a gym session and not had a nap.  Feels good, though.