Archives: Charity

So today was the culmination of months of work from on of the LLTGL advocates, Holly Shaw, who’s been taking part in the Channel 4 young people’s campaign show Battlefront pushing Organ Donation. Her campaign – Be A 2 Minute Hero – based on the idea that it takes 2 minutes to sign the organ donor register, the same time it takes to make a decent cup of tea, has really captured the attention of many, many people.

Today alone the online registrations for the organ donor register have increased from the usual average of 200 a day to 3,200! That’s simply insane. It’s one of the biggest jumps the ODR has ever seen online. Not only that but since 1st April, the average sign up rate has risen from 200 per day to nearly 600 per day, another astonishing figure. Of course, the average number increase may be coincidence as it’s not 100% provable, but it’s a pretty staggering coincidence if it is.

Holly has been working incredibly hard for us since before we were a charity so to see her a) well enough, post-tx, to carry out such a massive campaign and undertake such massive amounts of work and b) brave enough to do it all on live TV and recorded for a Channel 4 doc when she wouldn’t even do pre-recorded media when she joined us is absolutely fantastic.

I went down to London after my day on the Easter Project at the Grove (more of which later in the week when I get chance to draw breath) to join the team for a celebratory drinks event to round out the day.

I arrived at 7.30 after a mamouth journey thanks to the frankly apalling service on London Midland, which I won’t get into here because this is a post about Holly and not some total failure of a train company who are staffed by incompetants and provide the worst customer service since Basil Fawlty but without the humour. When I got there the lady in question wasn’t actually there, having been whisked off to the Sky News studios to do a live interview about the day.

This was far from her first media coup for the day, having convinced the Metro to replace the “O” in their masthead with a heart and include a major organ donation story with photo to promote the day, as well as sitting on the sofa with Ben Shepard on this morning’s GM:TV and seeing articles either in or headed for both the Guardian and the Mirror.

When she got back, she also revealed that she’d had a phone call suggesting she look on the PM’s website where, sat at the top of the front page was a headline leading to this article on his support for her campaign. If that’s not a coup, what is?

It was a great evening for mixing, networking and general back-slapping for Holly and her Battlefront team, including Emily from LLTGL who provided invaluable support both in kicking the campaign off just after Holly had her transplant and latterly in seeing the Donor Day through with her all day in Canary Warf.

Holly’s Helpers all over the country set up Donor Desks in their local areas and the numbers from NHS Blood & Transplant go to show just what a difference they all made. It’s an astonishing achievement and I for one am hugely proud.

So, if you’re not already, stop reading this and be a 2 Minute Hero – put the kettle on and sign the organ donor register. Now.

Today I finally finished my run of 4 talks in 3 weeks with an address to the CF Trust’s regional conference in Oxford.

Rosie, the Chief Exec of the Trust, originally asked my consultant to come along and talk about the adult service, but she couldn’t make it so the baton was passed to me. I love doing talks and things in general, but especially for the Trust. And even more extra-specially when it’s to talk up the amazing team at Oxford who helped keep me alive long enough to reach transplant.

I would pop the text up on here, but it was a 30 minute speech and the text is close-on 3000 words, which is quite a good deal mroe than anyone really wants to read on a blog, but if you really, totally desperately want to read a copy of it, let me know and I can mail it to you.

It went really well – by all accounts so did the entire day – and it seemed to strike the right notes I was trying to hit. It’s always hard to pitch a speech to parents of people with CF, particularly some very young children. You need to make sure you’re not belittling the task that lies ahead, the enormity of dealing with all the crap that life with CF throws at you, but at the same time it’s important to let them know that CF doesn’t strip your life away of all meaning or ability to have fun and it certainly doens’t mean you’re going not going to be able to make something of your life.

I think – I hope – that I managed to pitch it right this time. Certainly all the feedback I received from the day was positive, but then it’s got to be a pretty awful and borderline insulting speech that will make anyone come up to you afterwards and tell you it was rubbish, so it’s good not to get too carried away.

It was nice, though, to have a chance to catch up with the team who came along. Clinic time is so precious I’m always reluctant to stay and chat too long, but today I got there at lunch time with a chance to sit down with them (and my parents, who decided to come along for the day) and have a really good catch up and chat about things – medical and non.

On the way home I developed a killer headache and was running much later than I’d planned, so I had to pull out of a rehearsal visit in Northampton for the project I’m working on with the Royal and instead couldn’t do much more than veg on the sofa and eat a bowl of soup. Really bizarre, hard-core headache, it was, but it doesn’t seem to have recurred as badly since, so it must have been a one off and probably thanks to dyhdration more than anything else. Was a sucky end to the day, but it had been a good one for most of it, so no real complaints.

The third speech in my 3 week, 4 talk period went down really well at the CF Trust fundraiser 1 in 25 Ball at Wokefield Park near Reading.

The full text of my speech, as delivered, is below.

It’s an amazing place, Wokefield Park. You arrive on a long driveway through the golf course, which is lovely but somewhat reliant on them only allowing 10-handicappers on the course, I’d hope. As you approach the hotel, the first thing you come across is the big conference/exectutive centre, which presumably doubles as the club house, too. It’s an odd looking building that’s not unattractive but doesn’t exactly wow you upon arrival. Instead, it’s more of a run-of-the-mill hotel and conference venue in really, really nice grounds.

Having been inside to check in, I’m told we’re actually staying in the other section of the hotel, the Mansion House, where the ball itself is taking place. So we jump in the (new) car and head over to the other part of the grounds, where we round a copse of trees to discover the most beatiful period mansion I think I’ve ever stayed in. With a newly-refurbished and stylishly modern interior, it’s a perfect marriage of old architecture with 21st century functionality.

The bedrooms are something else – huge beds, loads of room and, best of all, a proper rainfall-head shower that I could have stayed in all weekend it was so gorgeous and refreshing.

The ball itself went exceptionally well – we were kindly put on a table of hugely friendly people who made us feel welcome in a room full of 120+ total strangers (save for Jenny, the CF Trust Regional Fundraising Manager who had invited us down). After a slightly cocked-up (time-wise) but delicious dinner, I was given a really quite lovely introduction, cribbed mostly from this blog and the CF Trust’s website and delivered my short speech.

After dinner there was the usual auction and raffle, followed by a brilliantly organised casino of Blackjack and Roulette, where guests could make a donation of £10 to the Trust in return for $100 in play money. Then when all was said and done at the end of the night, the chips were cashed in and the top 5 walked away with a prize.

I spent a little time teaching K how to play Blackjack and nearing the end she spent a lot of time trying to lose all her chips so she could go to bed and ending up actually winning more back. Riding our luck (and knowing that we were far from chip leaders, so seeing no point in diligently saving our meager stack up), we decided to switch to Roulette, which I usually dismiss as a mug’s game.

As it happens, through a careful system of hedging my bets I was a fair bit up coming into the last 5 minutes. Soon, though, it started to dwindle as I got over-confident and bet stupidly, although I suppose that betting in general is an intelligent thing to do, which is a concept many may struggle with. With one spin left, I had eight chips, so to make it exciting I put half on Number 11 (the hottest number of the night) and one on 25 (a number I’d bet near or around several times and lost out on) and with the final spin of the night, the ball dropped in 25!

Much to my amazement, after cashing out, I found myself landed up as the 3rd place chip holder and the happy winner of a lovely case of Spanish wine from the oldest vineyard in Spain. Not bad for a random guess. It’s quite easy to see how addictive gambling could get in those situations, though, so I’m not dashing off to Vegas to get stuck in for real just yet.

After the casino packed up and as the band were hitting their final numbers, we both called it a night and headed to bed, exhausted from the day’s activities.

Here’s the full text of the speech I delivered to the ball guests:

“Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. Thanks for having me here tonight. I’d like to thank the organising committee for what has been a great night so far and I’m sure is only about to get better. I’d also like to thank the sponsors of tonight’s event. I wanted to mention you all by name but so many people have been so generous in support us tonight that it would take me all of my speaking slot to go through you one by one, so instead I’ll just offer up a very big and – sorry – generic thank you to everyone who’s helped us to make sure we’re in profit already before we even tackle the auction, raffle or casino. So thank you.

I do this kind of thing quite a lot for the CF Trust. It used to be really easy. Before I had my transplant, I’d turn up at these events dragging an oxygen cylinder behind me – I was on 24-hour oxygen – and looking terrible. I was incredibly skinny, I had really pale skin and horrible, dark rings around my eyes. I’d just stand at the front of the room and say “Look – it’s rubbish” and people would feel sorry for me and pledge loads of money.

Now I’ve had my transplant it’s a whole different ball game. I stand in front of people and say “it’s rubbish” and they think, “It can’t be that bad, he looks great.” At least, I hope they think I look great. But I feel great, I feel better than I’ve ever felt and it means that when I do these events now I actually have to think of something to say!

The CF Trust is very important to me, as you may know. They’ve helped me through some of the toughest times – in fact, the very toughest times – of my life and been there for me throughout. Which is why I like to do things like this. Because apart from getting all dressed up and enjoying a lovely meal, I get a chance to give something back to them for all they’ve given me.

And the work that CF Trust is doing – the gene therapy work that tonight is helping to fund – is vital to helping make sure that people don’t have to go through what I’ve been through. If gene therapy works the way we all hope it’s going to work, it will remove the need for transplants by stopping the lung damage that proves fatal to so many people with CF. It will – hopefully – help to ensure that children being born with CF today have a much better chance of a much longer life than I will ever have.

I consider myself very lucky to have received the gift I did. When I do events like this and I start talking about luck, I always come back to the same story – the story of my friend Claire. Claire was a slightly odd friend in that she was, in fact, an oxygen concentrator. A portable oxygen concentrator. And she was something of a good luck charm. She originally belonged to a friend of mine called Emily, who had a successful double-lung transplant in January 2007. Once she’d recovered, she realised she had no need for Claire any more, so she passed her on to me and, six months later, I received my transplant. Once I’d recovered I, in turn, passed her on to a friend of mine called Sam.

Now, the thing about luck – as I’m sure you’ll all find out later when you hit the casino – is that it runs out. Last year, when I was celebrating my 26th birthday – a birthday I never through I’d see – Sam lost her fight. She died. And no matter how many times I tell this story, I still find it really emotional. Because it’s hard. The reality of the transplant list is that if you’re waiting for double-lungs you’ve got a 50% chance of getting them. Which means 50% of people die while they wait. I realised just last week that I’ve actually known more people who’ve died on the list than who’ve had a successful transplant.

And 50% is quite a good statistic to look at. Take a look around your table now – 50% equates to every other person on your table dying. That’s too many.

And that’s why the work of the CF Trust is so important. The gene therapy research that they’re doing will remove that element of luck from the lives of everyone who has CF. It’s not a cure, but it will work to prevent the lung damage that puts people in a situation where they face such bold statistics.

We all want you to enjoy yourself this evening, we want you to have fun. But we also want you to remember that you’re hear for a reason. You can help the CF Trust remove that element of luck from peoples lives by digging deep and bidding big in the auction and enjoying the casino.

Have a great night, thank you.”

This is about the first time I’ve had to sit and blog for over a week now (well, in fact, since I last updated). What with my bro jetting off to scarier climbs, K going back to Uni after a fitful snow-induced break right after getting back to Uni after an enormous Christmas break and my attempts to get not one but two new companies off the ground, it’s been a pretty busy time.

It’s been a great time, though – although I’ve been busy I’ve also had time to enjoy myself and have a lot of fun. Last weekend, for example, I took my more local Godson to Wendover Woods to do the high-ropes course which will remain nameless for my lack of desire to see them get any random, free, Google-based publicity.

After booking well in advance for one of the only days they’re open during winter, especially as a b’day pressie for li’l R, we hiked a mile up the hill into the woods only to discover that not only were they not open, they’d not even finished putting the course back together after the winter.

Not wanting to be deterred from the idea of a day of fun, we half-walked, half-skated around the woods for a while before drowning our sorrows in a big pile of chocolate at Rumsey’s, the awesome little Chocolaterie in Wendover village itself. In the evening, we carried on the frivolities at the Old Green Man in one of the Brickhills (I never know which one I’m in apart from Bow, but that’s just because a had a friend who lived there).

I’ve also been hard at work preparing a website for the new companies. LLTGL‘s resident IT-guru and website ubermeister Tom (of nowhereland fame) has been full of expertly-helpful ubertips to make it look shiny and cool, although now I have the problem of writing the copy to sell myself to people, which presents more of a challenge.

We also had a hugely successful tranche of Valentine’s Cake Bakes for LLTGL, which has been a great way to see all our supporters get truly energised about helping us out. Plus, let’s face it, everyone loves a bit of cake.

I’m now so tired from the early-starts and busy days that I’m struggling to recall all the things that I’ve done, but suffice it to say it’s been manic. And fun.

Oooh, and I finally – after over a decade of dreaming, hoping and wishing – got hold of my Equity card. I’m now a fully paid-up member of the only union that’s ever appealed to me. Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be the pass-card to fame and fortune on the world stage like I used to believe it was, but hey – it’s a life goal realised.

After over a week of editing, re-cutting, designing and burning DVDs I finally finish the Creative Partnerships project I’ve been working on for the best part of 4 months now (not constantly, you understand…), spending almost all of Monday printing and sticking DVD labels onto the discs. Note to self: must get DVD-printer.

I’m immensely proud of the DVD, even if it’s not what the original intention was at the start of the project. Due to the nature of drama projects and the unpredictability of working with 5- and 6-year-old children, the whole project changed and shape-shifted into something entirely different. I’d love to put it up here to show people but since, technically, it’s not mine to show and also – more importantly – given the fact that it’s got minors in whose parents haven’t consented to internet exploitation, I can’t. You’ll just have to imagine it being brilliant or come over to my place and watch it.

It’s been an interesting test for me to make my first own-steam short documentary that I’d have to piece together into a coherent whole for other people to see and take home. Up to now all my filmmaking has been for Live Life then Give Life which is great and brilliant experience, but it’s a very simple, single-camera interview set-up which doesn’t take a huge amount of skill. So to be responsible for something from opening image to final cut is really something special.

What made it all the more worth it was the reaction of the kids when we screened it for them in their classroom. They all loved it and were even air-guitaring along to the montage soundtrack and pointing each other out all the way through it, which was lovely to see. From what I gathered the staff liked it, too, which is always nice.

After the school meet and an evaluation Mocha with Suze, I got back to the office to discover a message from a media-man from a very well known film company looking to partner with LLTGL on a DVD campaign coming up shortly. I can’t go into too much detail as it’s still being discussed, but it is potentially a very exciting development for LLTGL.

In what’s turning out to be a great week for LLTGL, we have also had an offer of a major advertising deal which we need to address but could see us putting the word out to over 700,000 at one time if all the pieces fall into place. We’ll see.

To top it all off, it would be remiss of me not to plug the LLTGL Valentine’s Day Cake Bake, which we’re holding to raise some funds to continue all the work we’ve been doing and expand our operations in line with our current business plan. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you want to help us out and you’re a fan of cake (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) then head straight here to find out about it. Or you can find us on Facebook, too.

I apologise for the lack of updates after my not-too-rubbish start to the year with regular updates etc. I have, however, been somewhat preoccupied over the last couple of weeks with various mentally-busy work-related things, including producing a DVD of a project I worked on last year and completing a First aid course for work at the Grove.

Most excitingly of all, though, is the fact that I’ve been settling in to my new role as Chairman of Live Life Then Give Life, something of which I’m very proud. Our former Chairman, Emma, has felt it necessary to stand down, although she will, thankfully, be staying on as a much-valued trustee. At a meeting two weeks ago, the rest of the board of trustees saw fit to elect me into post as Chairman and I’ve been pretty much rushed off my feet ever since.

I clearly chose precisely the wrong two weeks to step up into the new role, having spent my first week in post working 10-4 on First Aid every day and my second week locked in my home editing suite to cut, design and finalise the DVD for the schools project I worked on with Suze last term. There’s a showing of the vid at the school on Tuesday morning, so it’s the usual deadline-getting-your-butt-into-gear deal as I rush to make sure it all looks tip-top.

Despite the fact that it’s taken me a lot longer than I expected, I’m really proud of the result – it’s going to be a great representation of the project and a great show real for both my work and for Suze’s Catalyst Theatre Arts, the company she runs with her sister, who throw a lot of work my way so it’s nice to be able to give them some marketing material out of it, too.

So it’s not been the best of weeks to try to get to grips with all the extra bits and bobs that go with being a Chairman as opposed to a trustee, but I’ve already seen a whole new side to the charity and what we do. I’m also delighted to see the way our two new trustees have slotted in to the team. The problem with having a team that’s as close-knit as the Live Life Then Give Life team are is that when you introduce new people to the equation it can be difficult for them to find their place and not feel out-of-the-loop or left out. But the current board of trustees have really taken to the new guys and have been working brilliantly with them from Day One, which is such a great feeling not just for me but for eveyone.

Hopefully now things are on a slightly more even keel, I’ll be keeping the updates coming through on a more regular basis. Unless work gets manic again, I guess…

The alarm goes off at a frankly unconscionable 5am and I drag myself up and into the shower. K and I hurriedly dress and K bolts some cereal while I head down with Dazz, scrape the car off and bring it round the front. Strangely, we’re not as overly concerned about getting parking tickets as we were when we parked here to unload last night. Wonder why?

We’re on the road by 6am, heading South as rapidly as we safely can, making good time until we have to make a stop for petrol, delaying us just a touch. We get back to Mum and Dad’s around 8.30, where I drop K as it’s closer to the M1 than our place, then pretty much turn straight around, heading again for fuel (I wasn’t going to fill my whole tank at service-station prices when I knew I could top up in MK for about 5p per litre cheaper), grabbing something for breakfast and a large cup of coffee at the same time.

I get back on the road and fly down the M1 and round the M25 to Surrey to Emily’s place for the Live Life Then Give Life meeting. To my surprise, even after turning off the wrong junction (I blame my crap-covered windscreen, not my memory), I still arrive in plenty of time.

We have a meeting, which all goes very well and we sort everything from the week out, which is a blessing, plus move forward with our planning for the next 12 months or so. I leave around 2.30, dropping Jen at the station before hitting the M1 home and getting in around 4ish after making really good time home – and not even speeding crazily.

I get to Mum and Dad’s and, since I’m earlier than I’d thought, I head upstairs and pass out on the bed for an hour. After my nap I wander downstairs and sit flicking through the paper and the book I bought at Blackwell’s yesterday, which somehow seems a very, very long time ago.

Dad rustles us up some steaks, which are lovely but still have to be disappointly over-cooked due to my strict dietary-controls post-transplant. I have them less-than-well done, which is technically against the rules, but I don’t see the point in steak if you cremate it before eating it. And it’s not blue, or even rare, so that’s OK I figure.

After dinner we head back to the flat, where we veg in front of the telly and catch up on some Sky+’d stuff before calling it a night early, where I hit the pillow and pass out completely.

The alarm arouses us both at 7am and we roll somewhat lazily out of bed, showering, dressing and packing an over-night bag to take with us.

I run K down to the hospital for an acupuncture appointment and head back to the flat to collect the bits and pieces we’d realised we’d forgotten on the way down there, most notably the iPod, which would have lead to some 5 hours of driving forcing Radio 1 on us.

I get back to the hosp just as K is coming out – impeccable timing – and we head straight off for Oxford. We get there surprisingly quickly after a near-miss with a mini-coach which decided to pull across my path while I was trundling along the country road at 60. We park up at St Giles and walk down the freezing cold street round the corner to Blackwells, the awesome pre-Borders Borders at the heart of the student world of the town. K’s never been there, so I delighted in showing her the wonderful underground cavern that disappears beneath the house-front of the shop on the main street.

We spend half-an-hour wandering aimlessly around and I grow slightly disappointed at the absence of a lot of the books that got me excited last time, although knowing how much I could have spent if they were all still there, it’s probably a good thing they weren’t. On our way out, we head up a staircase that I’ve never ventured up and we find ourselves in a whole new part of the shop with modern fiction (classed as anything from 1950-odd) and a brimming children’s section.

K finds a whole load of her new-favourite Jasper Fforde books – a necessary since I’d been nice and picked some up for her without realising they were an official series and so needed to come in a specific order. Order restored to her collection and a bizarre comedy book bought for our host this evening, we departed across the street so I could wander through their Art & Film shop, where I am torn between two books and end up getting one which will hopefully positively impact the production levels of the Live Life Then Give Life docs that we’re shooting through the year.

We wander back to the car through the positively freezing winter’s air and pick up a copy of the Big Issue from a poor guy who looks like he’s on the verge of frostbite but still has a cheery smile on his face and is genuinely grateful when we pick one up. We’d passed him on the way in to the town, but not had change and I think he recognised it as the classic excuse for not buying – he seemed really surprised that we’d actually gone back and got one.

We headed up to the Nuffield to get my bone-density scan done, just a precautionary scan to keep a check on how my calcium levels are doing and how brittle my bones may be as it’s pretty common with CF to develop osteoporosis and can be exacerbated by some of the transplant drugs I’m on.

Post-scan we head across the road (and round the corner a bit) to the Churchill to catch up with my CF team, who now I don’t have my port in anymore, I have little reason to see apart from the odd check-up or annual review. It’s great to see them all and catch up with the gossip including flicking through the slideshow of one of the physio’s weddings which was being planned when I was last incarcerated in the Churchill – it seems like such a long time ago now, it really is like another life.

Catch-up out of the way, we leave them to treat the patients who need them more than me and get on the road up to Bradford. The motorways are pretty clear, barring a little bit of late-afternoon traffic around Sheffield and we hit the M62/606 around 5ish, then whack the Sat-Nav on and hunt out Dazz’s place of work, where we drive straight past him in the street. The man collected, we head over to Shipley to his new flat and commence the warming of said homestead both literally (given the chill-factor) and metaphorically (it being a new pad).

We chill and chat and eat and watch DVDs and generally have a giggle, while I spend half-an-hour sorting some Live Life stuff for tomorrow in the middle of it. Dazz has also brought all his retro gaming North with him, which includes an ancient Game Gear with Lemmings on it, which keeps us all entertained for a large part of the evening as the conversations are punctuated with outbursts of swearing at misbehaving creatures hurling themselves to their deaths.

Around midnight, we all decide to call it a night and then spend an hour trying desperately to inflate Dazz’s new air-bed, which has to stand in for the sofa-bed which is due to arrive next week.

Eventually we flop into bed around 1am and near-enough pass out.

I wake up at some point in the morning, fairly late if I remember rightly, seeing as I’ll be hardly getting any sleep over the next few days, and I lounge around for what’s left of the morning before a friend pops over from to fill me in on her current term at uni. It sounds spectacularly unimpressive and, since she’s doing a film course and is both talented and passionate, I do my best to convince her without saying it explicitly that she should jack it in and come work with me. (OK, maybe saying it straight-out…).

In my defence (if it is one), I would love to work with her and I really don’t see any value in degrees in Film anyway, but she knows that already so it’s hardly a clincher. I think she’ll stick it out, which is probably the grown-up, sensible thing to do, so I’m not too disappointed.

As she leaves, I head out with her and jump in my car across Keynes to meet Dad in a pub half-way between him and me for a spot of lunch and friendly (free) legal advice. In fact, considering he paid for lunch, I think it must be the first time a lawyer has technically paid to be able to dispense advice. Families, eh? They turn everything on it’s head.

Once we’re done, I head back home and chill with K for a while, then jump on my email to catch up with things and square away the few bits and pieces of LLTGL stuff I need to deal with, since I won’t be back at my desk before the meeting on Saturday.

That dealt with, I sort out some dinner for us both and we eat and chill in front of the TV to some Sky+’d something or other and then hit the sack relatively early, although we end up reading and talking until nearly midnight. Given the few days I’ve got coming up, I should have slept earlier, but it’s fun when you get chatty in bed, so I tend to be terribly ill-disciplined about it.

My alarm wakes me just after 7am, so I tell it to go away for a while and eventually rouse myself around 7.30ish, where upon I take my Monday morning tablet (the weekly not-so-nice one) and head into work.

The great thing about being a freelancer and working for yourself is that “going back to work” entails turning the computer on and checking emails. It’s a hard life.

I sit at my desk and I rapidly fly through 6 pages of my new script and, today’s quota reached, I put it away for now – silly as it sounds, it’s important not to over-stretch yourself when writing. Meet your quota, whatever you set for yourself, but if it’s not flowing, don’t force it just to get more pages done.

With that out the way, I get on with catching up on the world outside by checking my usual list of industry websites to get the skinny on all the Christmas/New Year deals and rumours.

Once I’m all caught up, I hit my Live Life Then Give Life email account and immediately log in to sad news. Luckily, no one has died (as this is the kind of sad news we get all too often at LLTGL), but I can’t really go into detail about it at the moment as it’s still being resolved.

Once I’m caught up on the not-as-many emails as I’d expected, I set about the rest of my day, although it’s now so long ago, I’m struggling to remember what I did, so suffice it to say I was busy for nearly all of the day on various bits and pieces of work-related gumf.