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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.

Being exhaustedly tired didn’t seem to do much – if anything – for my ability to sleep as I once again lay awake until gone 3am.  Annoyingly, it was the kind of lack of sleep where you are so nicely chilled and relaxed that getting up is pretty out of the question, but somehow you can’t complete the transition from awake to asleep.  At least it was 3am tonight, not 7am like last night.

As promised, apart from waking for Tac at 10, I did manage to sleep myself through till midday, which was a lovely battery-recharger.

Many moons ago, soon after Emily got home from her transplant last year, she offered to pass on to me her smaller, more portable oxygen concentrator, which gave me the freedom to visit other people’s houses without worrying about when my O2 was going to run out – all I had to do was plug Claire in and I’d be sitting pretty for as long as I liked.  Since I’m now blessedly no longer in need of it, Em and I put our heads together and came up with a friend of ours who would benefit from Claire’s friendship and emailed her to see if she wanted her.

Since the initial email about 2 months has passed and I have forgotten no less than 3 times when I’ve seen Em to pass Claire on to her as Sam only lives about 15 minutes from her.  After my final act of stupidity last week when I was in London seeing Em and only about 15 minutes from Sam’s house myself, I decided that I couldn’t beat about the bush any longer or try to wait for or engineer meetings to hand stuff over and just bite the bullet and drive to South London (Sutton) and drop Claire off.

As it happens, there was almost no traffic at all on the roads yesterday, everyone travelling for Easter clearly having done so the day before or that morning.  So while everyone else in the country was playing happy or not-so-happy families, we trundled our way down the M1 and round the M25 through some of the craziest, mosy bizarre but brilliant weather I’ve ever seen.

We would go from bright sunshine to torrential rain through sleet, snow and hail all within the space of a few miles.  There was one amazing moment on the M25 when we were driving along in brilliant sun and ahead of us we could see what looked, totally honestly, like a piece of cloud had broken off and fallen down onto the road.  There was just a sheet of grey mist falling sideways across the carriageway and dumping itself onto the road in front of us.

Surprisingly, there were no crashes and no major hold-ups and the journey took precisely as long as the AA website told me it would, which I had thought pretty generous considering quite how far round the London-loop we were going.

On the way round, K spotted a signpost for Southampton, where my Dad’s family are from and near where his dad and sister still reside.  Once K had pointed it out and mentioned (in jest) that we could go, I got to thinking that I’d not seen any of my Aunt’s family since my op, apart from my eldest cousin who stopped in to the hospital the week after her mum had.  And from South London, it’s really not that far to their house.

So, once we’d dropped Claire safely at Sam’s to start a new life of independence-making (hopefully), we set off down towards the South coast to drop in and surprise my Aunt and her clan.

We eventually arrived (after a slightly longer journey than we anticipated…) around 6ish and everyone was duly surprised, luckily in a pleasant “great to see you” kind of way, not the usual “oh no, not them again” kind of way.

We stopped and stayed for a cuppa (or two) and my Uncle introduced me proudly to Jeeves, his pride-and-joy in the garage.  It’s an old… car that’s really very pretty and cool and as my cousin pointed out, means they can now play gangsters up and down their road properly, as they have the wheels to hang off with their Tommy guns and three-piece-suits with Trilbys.  Being that they live right out in the contryside not far from Winchester, there’s not a whole lot of people to gangster at, but I suppose they could always go rough up some sheep.

After persuading them that we really didn’t intend to impose ourselves on them for dinner and that they didn’t have to make it stretch (which they probably couldn’t have anyway, what with my appetite and three near six-foot teenager boys in the house), we headed off just before 8pm and rolled back up the A34 through Newbury and Oxford to MK, rocking up at home just before 9.30pm.

Having not been to the flicks for over a week, I couldn’t pass up the offer of catching The Cottage with Steve at 9.50, so I pretty much headed straight back out again, leaving K behind cooking fairy cakes as Easter presents for our little nieces and nephews tomorrow.

The Cottage is an absolutely hilarious horror-comedy with the always fantastic Andy Serkis (who made his name by not actually appearing on screen at all as the motion-capture performer for both Gollum in Lord of the Rings and Kong in King Kong – although he also played Lumpy the Cook in the latter) and Reece Shearsmith of League of Gentlemen Fame (not a show I’m a fan of, but he’s great in this).  Jennifer Ellison plays the kidnapee in what starts out as a fairly straight-forward ransom-thriller with deft comic touches, the quickly changes pace mid-way through and turns into the most hilarious stalk-and-slash horror movie I’ve seen in a long time.

As a Brit-flick, this was always destined to be compared to Shaun of the Dead, another comedy-horror which took the world by storm back in 2004, and it’s to its enormous credit that it actually stands up to the comparison.  It’s a very different film, not just in genre of horror, but in the way that while it manages to include pretty much all of the stalk-and-slash horror staples, it never directly references any specific film, whereas Shaun of the Dead was full of nods, quips and homages to the very best in Zombie horror.

There are some brilliantly nasty death scenes in The Cottage, but never have I laughed so hard at so many people’s unfortunate ends.  Makes you feel terrible at the time, but the sheer inventiveness with which they knock off one of the main characters is near-legendary.

It doesn’t pull its punches and it’s a pretty full-on gore fest at times, but if you like horror movies, especially the good, old-fashioned slasher pics with an iconic bad-guy, you’ll get a kick out of this.

I got home from it around midnight in time to catch the end of Devil Wears Prada, which K had settled into on the sofa – a slightly difference flick to my night’s other watching.  By the end, my eyes were closing and I dragged myself off to bed, where I get through a few pages of my book before conking out.

Without doubt this has been one of my best days post-transplant.  When I woke up, it felt like a real chore to be getting into the car and schlepping all the way down to Town and back, but when I took a second to realise how cool it was that I could actually even consider jumping in the car and heading South, it cheered me up.  Coupled with being able to exploit a random whim and scoot off to see a family with whom I share so many of my happiest memories and still having energy enough to go and catch a great film afterwards, I can’t imagine a better way of showing the fantastic difference a transplant makes to anyone’s life.

Last night turned out pretty exciting as I ended up on a late-night rescue mission after Dazz and Tinks managed to drain the battery of his car and strand themselves at a nearby lake.

I was busy introducing K to Ghost, a flick I love but haven’t seen in years and which she ended up kind of liking, I think, when Dazz buzzed me to see if I have any jump leads.  I don’t but managed to grill him enough to find out why he needed them, at which point I decided to go get them.  Dazz tried his hardest (ish) to protest, but when I pointed out he was sat in a car park in the cold at 10.30pm with a 7-month pregnant young lady he relented.

I swung by his parents’ house to grab some jump leads (which turned out to be his anyway) and then found them sat in a secluded car park (where they’d ended up after trying to push-start the car), in the pitch black, with heavily-steamed windows.  Too many jokes presented themselves for my brain to unscramble them all quick enough, so I ended up only managing “Hello” which kind of disappointed me.

Being the mechanic I am, I bravely stood and watched Dazz as he did all the things you need to do to jump start a car, which mostly involved a tangle of wires, untangled, connected to various pieces of his engine and mine.  I started my car, he tried his, but it didn’t work.  At this point we had spent about half-an-hour WAY past the level of my expertise with cars (push peddle, make go), so we relented and got on the blower to the AA.

Telling us they’d be up to an hour and given the obscurity of our location, the helpful call-centre man told us it’d be better if we went and waited in the nearby pub so he could find us easier.  We reluctantly agreed and set our stall out in the welcoming arms of the Something-Or-Other Pub on the lakeshore and got the drinks in.

In fact, Mr AA managed to turn up almost immediately, so we did what all good friends should and sent Dazz off to deal with it while we finished our drinks.  Once we were done, we piled in my car (which was still nice and warm from having had the heater on almost-full-blast to re-warm Tinks – and me once I’d been out in the cold) and headed back to the flat, where we met Dazz, who’d had his car fixed and put back on the road and been for a drive to charge the battery and got to the flat quicker than we had got through our drinks.  Oops.

Tea was ordered, and provided, and we spent a good hour talking through the relative merits of the various Flanimals, plus whether Keighley is too far away to drive to MK every night to read Baby Ebn Apple Pear Orange Bear or if Dazz should record it as a book-on-tape.  We eventually sacked out after they’d left around 2am.

I lay in bed and didn’t sleep for, well, the whole night really.  I think they last time I checked the clock was 6.30am before my Tac-alarm woke me at 10, just long enough to down my various morning pills before zonking out again.  Next thing I know, K’s waking me up and I’m moaning at her telling her I’ve set my alarm to wake me at 11am and she’s telling me it is 11am.

Reluctantly, I rouse myself and stand under a shower for long enough for my brain to realise it’s really not going to be allowed to go back to bed, then throw on some clothes and we head out the door for our lunch date with my Godson Little R and family.

After ever the warmest of welcomes, we are fed the most amazing roast of slow-cooked beef and trimmings, which does much to brighten my day.  Stomach happy, Oli happy, everyone else happy(er) that I’m no longer grumpy.

We spend some time with R looking through his life-story book he was given by the family workers when he was adopted and we chat for a while with his ‘rents about adoption and such.  He’s got such a healthy attitude towards and such a detailed knowledge of it it’s so far away from the classic ideas you get of kids being brought up thinking they’re “natural” children then suddenly finding out when they’re 30 that they were adopted.  The way R sees it, his Mum is his Mum, but because she was poorly he couldn’t come from her tummy, so he came from the other lady’s instead.

After a couple of great fun board games (neither of which used a board, come to think of it…) R headed off to play with a friend – which he’d been dying to do all day – and we sat and chatted with D&H for a while before my tiredness finally got the better of me and we headed back home where I immediately hit the sack and slept for an hour, waking up a whole lot more grouchy than I had been before I went to bed.

To keep the grouch away, we settled on the sofa to watch another of the pile of chick-flicks K’s been lent my a friend at work, opting this time for Mean Girls – a film I’ve seen before and don’t totally hate – followed almost immediately (after a tea-visit from S&S) by Three To Tango, a movie I was almost embarrassed to find myself enjoying.  It’s no Citizen Kane, but it manages to be both totally predictable while at the same time surprising and fun.

When that’s done my eyes have had enough of being open for the day and order me to bed where I can hopefully get a good night’s rest.  With nothing much to do tomorrow, at least I can sleep till noon if I need to (minus the 5 minute wake-up call for Tac at 10).

…is the way you accelerate away from them afterwards.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done today. Yesterday was rubbish, no doubt about it – I still can’t find anything worse in the whole recovery process than feeling sick. Tired I can deal with, pain I can put up with, but nausea is something I just can’t cope with – it totally bums me out and ruins any day it pokes its rubbish little head into.

Yesterday, however, was yesterday and today is very much today – a vast improvement and significant acceleration from my little speed bump.

Today I did two things I’ve not done for ages, never mind since my op. First of all, just after 12, the legendary (and I use that word with the most careful consideration) Dazz came over and collected K and I to take us out to the cinema. For those of you who don’t know, this is the most momentous of momentous occasions for me.

Before I was ill, I would go to the cinema maybe 4-5 times a week, frequently taking in up to 8 films in any given 7 day period, some weeks watching films multiple times, other weeks just ploughing through everything that was showing in the building. As I got worse, my trips became less and less frequent and once I moved on to oxygen, I was hardly going at all and certainly would never have dared going alone without backup. My last visit to the cinema was back in the summer to see The Simpsons Movie, along with K and my brother pushing me in a wheelchair. The humiliation I felt being somewhere so familiar in such a vulnerable position all but ruined the experience for me and until my op I never set foot nor wheel inside the building again.

So today I felt a wave of the most amazing relief wash over me as I strode up to the counter to purchase my ticket for I Am Legend (which is very good, by the way, although a little scary, so if that’s not your thing then steer clear). It felt a little like returning home after a long absence – everything familiar, if the tiniest bit different in the details.

I lapped it up – the adverts, the over-priced food which I’d normally never touch, the grand, sweeping trailers on the big screen, the sheer size of the wide-screen viewing space as the feature began to roll – the sense of excitement and anticipation that I feel sitting in front of the silver screen hasn’t gone away and my passion for movies in their natural environment was instantly rekindled.

After a mesmerizing 2 hours (come to think of it, maybe the film wasn’t as good as I thought it was, maybe it’s the experience I’m savouring…) we departed the flicks for the second first of the day: Borders.

Anyone who was with me way back in the early days of 2006 will remember this entry, so knowing that one of my first “independent” trips out would be to Borders. That and the fact that I had a goodly amount of dough to spend from Christmas on books and DVDs.

As is my usual policy with vouchers I get given, I always spend them on things that I would love to have but usually wouldn’t buy for myself because they’re a little pricey. So I came away with a Making of Sin City book which I’ve been lusting after for over 2 years now and a filmmaking book I should really have on my shelves. Added to which, rather dangerously, there was a DVD sale on, so I picked up Rocky Balboa, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Sunshine, The Good German, The Science of Sleep and War of the Worlds (mostly for the extras). Perfect.

On top of all this brilliant greatness of the day, I’ve also finally started putting into place the plans for the Tresco marathon mile I’ll be running with my bro and his section of marines in April, the first step of which is my Justgiving page, which can be found at www.justgiving.com/trescomile. I’m not looking for heaps of sponsorship (just 10p a yard, in fact), but I figured that if I put myself out there raising money for charity then it wouuld keep me honest and make sure I don’t duck out at the last minute. Not that I would anyway, but, you know…

If you’d feel like passing the address on to anyone, obviously feel free. Otherwise, keep an eye here for my progress towards my biggest post-op goal so far. I’m sure they’re going to get bigger with time, but a mile seems a really long way right now. Fingers crossed.

Well, someone was listening to me last night, because today has, indeed, been a better day so far. That’s not to say things are all fine and dandy, or that the picture is yet all rosy, but side-by-side with yesterday, today has been a Good Day.

I managed to get almost straight to sleep last night, sometime after 11pm, which is rare forr me these days. Not only that, but I managed to sleep quite solidly, too – no constant waking to switch position or readjust myself. It may have been thanks to having fiddled with Neve and pushed the pressures up ever-so-slightly, or a slightly improvement on the chest front, or simply thanks to complete exhaustion and my body not having any other choice but sleeping it off. My guess would be it was a healthy mix of the three.

Bizarrely, and somewhat annoyingly, I woke up bright-as-a-button(ish) around 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep, no matter how hard I tried. I had planned to lay in a bit today and do my morning dose a little later than usual, but given that I was awake anyway, I decided to switch the plans and get up early and get them out of the way, which would have the knock-on effect of allowing me an earlier night tonight.

I got up, got my dose running and sat myself a the computer to surf around and catch up on the over-night writers’ strike news, during which time my chest was doing all kinds of weird things, making me breathless one minute and fine the next, and I developed a bit of a killer headache.

By the time my drugs had finished, I decided it’d be a good idea to try to get some physio out of the way before I got myself back to bed, so I did another very uncomfortable session – very hard work again. Having said which, I definitely felt the benefit afterwards, even through it didn’t feel like I’d cleared a lot. I did my anti-biotic nebs and then took myself to bed around 9am.

Interestingly, for those who keep tabs on this sort of thing, 9am is also the time that the construction workers begin work on resurfacing the road outside the front of where we live. With the sun beating a nice, hot set of rays down on the bedroom window, keeping them shut was out of the question, so keeping the noise out was also not a part of the plan.

As it happened, noisy as they were, I needed sleep more, and I managed to doze on-and-off for another few hours till the early afternoon.

I rolled out of bed feeling much better for the physio and sleep, grabbed a cuppa with K and chatted for a bit, talked to my ‘rents to catch them up on over-night progress and then headed back for more physio. It was a much better session than this mornings, and much easier, too, making things look brighter already.

After physio, I got some calories down me and then headed back to bed to chill out with K and watch the first ep of the first season of 24 – a season I’ve seen but K hasn’t and is next on our TV-DVD marathon. I’m amazed at how much I don’t remember from the first time it aired, and also at how much of what I do remember they’ve crammed into the first ep – there must be a whole heap more that I don’t remember to come, which is promising.

After chilling in bed for a while, K gets up to do some more revision and I sit and read GQ for a while, before K heads off to college and I do my 3rd physio session of the day. I’m determined to crack the back of this while I can.

Physio out of the way, I jump online for a while and do a bit of Chrimbo shopping (have to bow to the inevitable eventually, I suppose) and look into a couple of other random bits and pieces while the Shepherd’s Pie Mum made me yesterday cooks.  I sit and eat it while watching the last episode of Extras from the DVD that I’d never got round to seeing, then wash up and get back to the study, going over a couple of old scripts till K gets home.

We watch some programmes from Sky+ and I do some more physio (a really good late-night session, actually), and before I know it my evening drugs are all done and it’s time to hit the sack.  Things are still very up-and-down, and I suspect they will be for a good few days yet, but today’s been a massive improvement on yesterday, and that’s a big step forward.  Well, at least a little one.