The European Union, and why I’m unlikely to “Get Over It” any time soon

Written on Monday 27^th June, four days after the results came in.

My Facebook feed is divided into two groups of friends.  Friends who are bewildered and horrified that we have just voted ourselves out of Europe, and are trying to make sense of it and dig heels in to stop it from coming to pass  -  and friends who are fed up with the people who are still talking about it and want everyone to accept it and move on to making Britain great again.

I am beyond happy that my friend list doesn’t include one single person who wants anyone sent home or who advocates racism in any way, no matter which way they voted – and more of that, later.

It’s important to me to explain why this is so important to me, because I really value my friends and I am aware that some of them must be sick to the bloody back teeth of me.  I also want to try to articulate what it is that makes some of us feel so strongly about this.

In the run up to this referendum, right up until the day, I felt thoroughly nauseous at the possible ramifications but I worked hard to comment on the debate as calmly, informatively and in as non-partisan a manner as I could. 

This is hard for someone in my position, who believes with every fibre of her being in a unified Europe, but I really believed that not ramming my views down people’s throats, while explaining where general reporting and understanding was either deliberately or accidentally erroneous was the way forward.  I just really wanted to help.  Still do.

I think one of my mistakes in the way I approached debating this before the referendum was in being wholly logical, tackling the facts and deliberately trying not to get heated about it.  I didn’t want to scare anyone away from voting to remain in the EU with my sheer all-encompassing passion and belief in it.  I tackled the Big Lies which the Leave campaign employed, and which they are now having to admit were indeed whoppers, but I never addressed the emotional side.

So here it is.

In January 1974, my family moved to Brussels, where my dad was one of the first wave of Brits working out there.  We weren’t rich or privileged, we were just an ordinary working class family from the UK.  My Dad’s dad was a Kent coal miner and my Mum’s dad stoked coal into furnaces in a hospital, in eight hour shifts, morning, noon and night.  My dad, and all the people out there, had simply seen an ad in their local paper and sat a series of exams, followed by a grueling interview process.  In other words, ordinary people had applied for a job in an ordinary manner.

We, however, had a deep belief in the ethos of the EU from the start.   The mood in Europe at that time was one of hope.   A wholly optimistic belief in a bright future with a fundamental emphasis on no further wars within and between the countries of Europe.  No more young men would be sent to fight and die on the battlefields of France, Belgium, Holland – you get the idea. 

I, and my school friends, were bought up as genuine children of Europe.  We believe in it wholeheartedly. 

The implementers of this ideal were mostly young families from all over Europe.  Their parents had lived through and fought in the Second World War, and they wanted a better future for their children - and believe you me, they worked their arses off to ensure that neither they nor their compatriots, nor their opposite numbers from other member states (aka EU countries) would ever have to send their children, the children they had travelled across the continent to bring to Brussels with them, off to fight the children that they were meeting and befriending, going to school with, playing with.

I spent my entire school life, bar my very first term, in Brussels.  My school was set up by the EU to cater for the kids coming from all over Europe to build this bright new world. 

I don’t have much recollection of life in England – I was four when we moved to Brussels.  I clearly remember my first day at school in Brussels, however.  The school was enormous.   All on one site, the age went from kindergarten right up through primary through to the European Baccalaureat – A-level age.  There were at that time six language sections – English, Franco-Belge, Nederlando-Belge, German, Danish and Italian.  So take infant school, add primary and secondary school, put it all in one place then multiply by six and you’ve an idea of the size of the place.  Thirty to a class and more than one class per year group per language section, in some cases.  There were some 3,500 students there by the time I left – at which point we also had a Spanish and a Greek section.

Because philosophy is a compulsory subject in Italian schools, it was a compulsory subject at the European school.  All the language sections had to study it.  The same with economics.  The UK’s contribution to this was compulsory RE.  (My mum’s contribution was to add an Ethics option to the Religion thing.)

From the age of four, my playmates were chiefly British, as in primary school most of our lessons were conducted in our mother tongue, so we sat alongside our own countrymen for most of the day.  Playtime, however, we were all mixed.  Hundreds of kids of different nationalities, playing together in an enormous playground.  We really didn’t much notice whether someone was English, Italian, French, German, Danish, Belgian – we didn’t CARE!  We either liked them or we didn’t, and their nationality never once had anything to do with that. 

As we grew up together, the national distinctions became even less marked, as we all learned each others languages.  By the time we left school at 18, there was a definite European School lingo.  Because everyone spoke at least four languages, you would find the mot or phrase juste in whichever language first sprung to mind. 

When I first moved back to the UK – to London, to study Law at King’s College – I realized that it was going to be an effort to speak just one language at a time.  There were a few of us Eurobrats at King’s, and there was some resentment to begin with, as we appeared a little elitist, with our European manner and our peppering of our conversation with whole sentences in any old language we chose.  It wasn’t deliberate – we didn’t think we were better than anyone else – it was just how we spoke.  In fact, it now occurs to me that the only time in my life when I have felt awkward, alien and out of place was that first six months back in “my own country”.  Until now, that is.  Anyway.  Moving along!  This misunderstanding soon settled down and we integrated well enough – we were, after all, used to adapting to people.

The language thing is a microcosm of the whole thing, of course.  As much as we pinched words and phrases from one another, we pinched bits of culture that we liked, and, without realizing it, all sorts of other bits and pieces.  We became intermingled, European, unified.  However, we all still spoke our first language primarily, and we all knew that we were British Europeans or Italian Europeans or Belgian Europeans, and there was plenty of partisan banter.  We identified with both our home nations and our EU status.

The idea of going to war against our schoolmates, in the past, present or future, was wholly – wholly – argh!  There isn’t a big enough word.  Anathema.  Not strong enough.  Alien.  Nope.  Unthinkable is what it was - but really think about what unthinkable means.  It means it is so apart from your understanding that you can’t even think it.  Does not compute.  “Going to war with those guys – is that even a thing?”

By the way, in case you think the school sounds like a hotbed of elitism, I think I should at this point explain how it worked.  Anyone who worked for the EU, EC, EEC, whatever it was called at the time, was entitled to send their kids to the school, for free.  An enormous organization such as the EU doesn’t just employ Director Generals and highly paid boffins.  The cleaners, security guards and canteen workers had the same right to send their kids to our school as the Director General. 

I have always been immensely proud of this.  Very democratic – part of the ideal they are striving for.

I grew up knowing that I could work in any country in the EU.  As an adult, I could just up sticks and go and live wherever I chose.  Once I had a family, I could take my children and my husband, all of whom had that right as much as I did.  My children could choose to study art in Italy or engineering in Germany – or the other way around.  Or just go and live in Paris for a couple of years, working their way.

This right, which my dad worked almost his entire working life to create and nurture and protect, has just been taken away from me and from my kids, and I feel bereaved and very angry about this.

The belief that we are one united Europe, which was so deeply held in my very soul, has been destroyed.  I feel like someone reached in, ripped it out, tore it to shreds in front of my eyes, hurled it to the floor, dashed it with petrol and burnt it in front of my eyes, and I am reeling to my core at this.

It may sound overly dramatic to you, but I am not exaggerating my feelings.

And while they’re doing it, they’re cheerily telling me to stop moping, it will be fine.

I have tried a thousand analogies in my head, and I can’t make them work, but imagine that the village or borough, where you live and which you love, decided to take a vote as to whether you stay part Britain.  There’s 100 people in your village.  28 of them don’t vote, for any number of reasons – maybe one of them didn’t get home from work in time due to trains being totally effed up and major commuter stations actually closing (can’t even remember the last time that happened).  35 vote to stay part of Britain.  37 vote to go it alone. 

Going it alone means that your kids HAVE to go to the village school, and if the next village has a better degree course in something than yours does, it’s tough.  If they just fancy going and living in the next village because the view is nice from there and there’s a company there specializing in an area which particularly interests them and at which they are particularly skilled, they can’t.  As the votes have finished being counted, it transpires that the people who presented the case for leaving Britain lied.  Quite a lot.  They’re actually not going to look after the little cottage hospital in the village, for a start, and they didn’t expect to win so they don’t have a plan as to what to do next.  Despite the fact that they said they know there’s not a lot of houses left in the village and they’ll make sure they stop people from outside the village buying the ones that are available, or working in the village shop, they now admit that actually they are not going to be able to do this, and they never were. A few of those who voted to leave come out and say that they did so because they don’t like the parish councilor, and they thought this was a good way of showing that.  Some more say that they voted that way because they wanted their taxes to go to the cottage hospital, and they feel that they were lied to, and want to change their vote.  More yet say that they hadn’t realized that they were actually voting to leave Britain, and that they never thought it would happen, and that they want to change their vote.

Basically, that very small margin of two people (as you’ll have worked out, this is based on the percentage of turnout, then votes for and against) has potentially been heavily eroded.

But don’t worry, those of you who didn’t want to leave in the first place, we’re pretty sure it will work out in the end.  Probably. 

As it stands, in the UK, 28% didn’t vote.  37% voted to leave.  35% voted to stay.

Is it democratic to blindly stick with it and push on, forcing the view of 37% of the eligible voters on the other 63%? 

Or is it more democratic, before making this irreversible change – because make no mistake, there is no going back – to jussssst check one more time? 

If the result comes back the same, so be it.  If the people who want to leave still believe that it is right to do so, in the same numbers, the vote will stay the same, so where’s the harm? 

If it turns out that it goes the other way because people now realize that is NOT what they want – how is that undemocratic?

But on that tiny margin, with a lot of people now changing their minds, with the Sun and the Mail and the Express finally printing what will happen next with an unprecedented degree of accuracy, and their readers going “What? What? Why didn’t you tell us before?  We didn’t know!”, with the Leave campaign admitting that two of their three major platforms – increased spending on the NHS and reduced immigration– were just bollocks (the others are largely bollocks, too, by the way – they just haven’t admitted it quite yet), with this increase in racism which has fundamentally shocked all right thinking people whether they voted to leave or remain, I think the democratic and sensible thing is to re-examine this.

Is it not sheer pig-headedness to ignore the hundreds of thousands of people who are no longer sure they want what they voted for?  I think so.

Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people.  That’s all the people.  Not 37% of the people.

We have a very adversarial culture in the UK.  We are very black and white.  The very layout of the House of Commons is adversarial – face to face, head to head, us and them, rather than circular. 

First Past The Post sets up a system where everyone in the country is ruled by a parliament almost always elected by less than half the country, rather than by a parliament who represent the proportion of each party that people actually voted for.  Everyone therefore has to toe the party line.  Tories have to back Tory policies most of the time whether they like it or not.  Labour the same.

The deep rifts opening up in our society at the moment are a result of our view that you are either with us or against us – what’s it going to be? 

And so now we have US and THEM, and I don’t wonder that so many people just want the fighting to stop, but I also don’t wonder that so many others are desperate to make sure – really sure – that everyone knows what we’re doing and is not prepared to lie down and say die until we all know this is what we REALLY want.  It’s not inevitable.  It’s still fluid.  There is still, potentially, a little wiggle room.  Let’s make sure we know what we’re doing before we slam any doors and turn the lock.

Back to our adversarial nature - as a result of the fact that we tend to back a side and fight our arses off for it, nobody really questioned that there was a campaign for Leave and a campaign for Remain.

Question that! 

There should have been nobody pushing an agenda!  There should not have been a campaign for OR a campaign against, there should simply have been a campaign of information. 

As it was, virtually all of the independent information pointed towards remaining a member of the EU being a damned good idea.  But because we are used to this adversarial system, everyone believed that that independent information and analysis was part of the Remain campaign, and as such dismissed it as electioneering.

Meanwhile, Leave clearly had no intention of winning, or having to fulfill their insane promises, but they put on a good show and Boris, whose plan was almost certainly simply to use the campaign as a platform to raise his political profile, was dismayed to have won and has spent the entire time since he won looking shell-shocked and back-pedalling like the committed cyclist he is.

It was all jolly exciting and jolly good fun sticking it to the man, but now the party’s over and we’re left cleaning up the mess, suddenly a significant portion of people are questioning what they were told, they are angry that they were lied to, they are shocked that their protest vote is actually going to change their (and my) world, and they deserve to be heard.

I am as angry on behalf of those people as I am for myself.

There are some things that I would like to state categorically, and stand by.

I do not believe that everyone who voted to Leave is ignorant.  I know and have debated with some very intelligent and eloquent Leavers, and I respect their right to their view and their vote.

I do not believe that all Leave voters want to change their vote, but I believe that a significant and growing portion, in the light of new information, do.

I do believe that all of my friends, both for and against, did their very best to inform themselves and make what they absolutely believed would be the best choice for them and their children.

I do also believe that many Leavers based their vote on a dishonest campaign and now know that they were lied to on a large scale, but I know that is not the case for everyone, and I know that it is patronizing to suggest otherwise.

I do not believe that everyone who voted to Leave is a racist.  I know this not to be true, and I will stand up for that.  However, I must temper this with the statement that the Leave campaign was incontrovertibly fought on both overtly and subliminally racist platforms.  The tit Farage standing in front of the Breaking Point poster is a case in point.  That should have been a breaking point, indeed.  I’m surprised that it wasn’t the moment at which people became sickened by the campaign and decided not to ally themselves with racism, precisely because they themselves are not racists.  I don’t understand how that didn’t happen, but I still don’t believe that all, or even most, Leavers are racists.

As to the assertions that it will all be okay, because Britain is Great, nobody knows what will happen next, a country that won two world wars and one world cup is perfectly capable of standing on its own two feet and we should stop harping on about what happened last week and get on with this week etc etc – I do need to address my attitude to that.

First, I really, really, really hope that everyone who believes this scenario to be correct is right.  I have no desire to be proved right in this instance.  I want our economy to boom and our nation to thrive – of course I do!  I’m not an idiot.  I’m not optimistic at this stage that it will, but I will do everything in my power (which is very little – same for all of us average Joes) to ensure that it is.  It’s like your teenage daughter hitching a lift home from town despite the fact that you’ve told her there’s a chance that’s not going to pan out too well.  If she gets home in one piece, you’ll rejoice.  If she doesn’t, you’re not going to go “I told you so”.

I’m not being pessimistic – I just believe that when a bunch of people who study this stuff and who have no axe to grind tell you in overwhelming numbers that one course of events will almost certainly have a good outcome and one will almost certainly result in years of struggle, it’s sensible to pay attention to them, and to acknowledge that they know what they’re talking about.

If it’s a question of people saying “I realize that there’s a 99% chance that the economy is going to be in a dreadful state for the next 3-10 years (as virtually all sources predicted), and I’ve looked into the reasons for that and into what we will lose and gain, all of which I now broadly understand, but I think it’s a price worth paying” – fair enough.

 If it’s a blindly optimistic “ah, what do they know, anyway”, erm, well, sorry for not playing.  That is a huge gamble to impose on the 63% of eligible voters who did not vote for this

I agree, nobody knows what will happen next, and nobody has a crystal ball to tell us what would have happened if we hadn’t done whatever we choose to do next, so there will be no point in “I told you so”, either way.  It’s not something I intend to indulge in, should things go horribly wrong.

If I have accept being asked to stop harping on about how devastated I am about this, I really think we should also stop harping on about world wars and world cups, especially disallowed goals in world cups.  That was a bloody long time ago and people are still moaning.  All we lost then was a football match.  We have lost so much more, now – even if the economy does well. 

So, my loves, I will continue to harp on, I’m afraid.  I hope you will see that what I’m doing is not moaning, but posting relevant information. 

Where the Leave campaign is shown to have lied or been economic with the truth, I will be posting that.

Where there is hope for a way to address whether it is right, in a democratic society, for 37% of the population to be given a mandate to strip a whole shitload of actual rights from themselves and the other 63% (35% of whom actively voted to keep those rights, and 28% of whom didn’t vote at all but definitely didn’t vote their rights away), especially when an emergingly significant portion of that 37% has now come out and stated that now that it is in possession of the facts, it would like to change its vote, please, thank you very much, I am going to keep hoping that the dream of a unified Europe can continue, and because I am an open book, those hopes will continue to be expressed in social media.

Petitions will be shared and clear statements about the effect that this has had already on the food industry, banking, jobs and the £ - I’ll still be posting those as long as there is any hope that people will realize what is happening and demand not to be bound to this minority vote.

I believe in not blindly following the result of this referendum precisely because I do believe in democracy.  There is plenty of precedent for referenda on important matters, carrying slim slim margins, being set aside. 

I don’t think we can ignore the result of this referendum – that’s not what I’m suggesting.  I believe it would be downright dangerous to do so. 

The result has surprised a great many people (not least the Leave campaign) and it shows that people need a voice.  I don’t argue with that.  I fear that not triggering article 50 and taking us out of the EU will cause anger and unrest, but we appear to have those right now anyway. 

Addendum.

I forgot to address the “unelected, undemocratic” issue.  I will try to do it briefly.  Not my forte, clearly! :D

I also believe, for what it’s worth, that it is worth considering this. 

There is a very strong argument that fact that legislation can be proposed either by experts in a field, who work for the European Commission (like my Dad), or other EU bodies, or any citizen of the EU (like you or me) as is the case in the system we now have with the EU, is altogether a more democratic system than one in which legislation can only be proposed by a Member of Parliament who, while he WAS elected by the people, inevitably has his eye on being elected once again next time.  And is therefore not going to propose any legislation which may be unpopular in his constituency.

So you get that?  A massive point for Leave is that laws are proposed by the unelected European Commission.  They can also be proposed by YOU.  As you sit reading this – YOU.  Not a notional you, YOU!

Not some MP you almost certainly didn’t vote for (because you only voted for one out of the 651-odd of the buggers, after all) – YOU!

Sounds pretty fucking democratic to me, my loves.

£350,000,000 worth of Zumba Maths.

The £350m etc explained through the medium of Zumba, written during the week running up to the Referendum.

This is all an analogy – it’s not really my mum, the fee is not £35 etc etc.  It’s just a way of explaining something that seems to be confusing people.

I pay a monthly license fee to teach Zumba.  Let’s say, for the sake of clarity, that this is £35.

However, a few years back, my Mum went to see the Zumba head office and asked if I could just pay £25, instead.  They said yes, which was jolly nice of them, because there wasn't really a reason why I should, but I said I wouldn't play, otherwise.

I get a CD every month, with Zumba music on, for which the Zumba people have paid the Performing Rights – so I can use that music for free.  Every other month, I also get a DVD of choreography.  I don’t have to use these, but it probably works out at a value, for a CD and half a DVD every month, of – let’s call it £18. 

So I’m paying a £35 license fee (which is actually £25) but I’m getting an £18 value back.

There are other inherent outgoings, such as hall hire, insurance, footwear, exercise gear, physiotherapy etc etc.  When I add the costs up, they’re a lot.

However, I get the right to enter the Zumba market and teach my classes.  This earns me a considerable amount more than I pay in, even after the outgoings.  I know how much I earn from Zumba, and I reckon it’s a bloody good deal.  What I can’t put a figure on is all the other things I’ve gained.  Through meeting people I wouldn’t have met otherwise, my other businesses have also flourished, I have extremely good friends I’d never have met otherwise, I have learned styles of dance I didn’t know before and listen to music I would never have come across, and my life has been enriched beyond measure by all of these things.  But they are unquantifiable, and I don't want to muddy the water - I'm going to assume you understand that.

I could set up my own system of dance classes, where I don’t have to pay the license fee.  I would have to pay out for market research and marketing to make sure that I chose something that was going to work, and got it out there in front of people, making them want it more than something they already know about and know to be effective.  I would have to do a lot of research in terms of safety etc to ensure that I wasn’t teaching anything dangerous- BUT!  I would save myself that £35 (or rather £25) but I wouldn’t get that £18 CD and DVD.  I’d still be saving myself £7 a month, though.

I’m not sure I could do all that research and marketing for £7, but maybe I should give it a go.  And hope that people come along.

The daughters will squeal with delight and suggest we use the £35 (£25) to join a gym.  I will laugh and explain that it is not enough to join the gym, plus I haven’t earnt that £35 because I haven’t been teaching Zumba to earn it, and besides, I’d rather spend it on shoes.

Meanwhile, Zumba would still be going on, with other instructors, and people would be entitled to choose to go to them, of course.

As to that pesky old share of the Basingstoke Zumba market (AKA World Trade):

Five years ago, when I started teaching, 100 people a night attended a Zumba class in Basingstoke.  20 of them came to my class.  I had a 20% share of the market.

Now, 200 people a night come to Zumba.  30 of them come to my class.  I only have a 15% share of the total market.

And yet I have grown my business by 50%.

Get it?  Got it?  Good.

Eye eye.

On Friday morning as I drove Olivia up to school, we looked up to see the most glorious sunrise.  It was stunning.  Awe-inspiring.  The kind of thing which stirs you to your very soul.  I nearly burst into tears.

I'm sometimes a bit emotional about beauty, but there is a good reason for this particular bout of emotion.

This week, I nearly lost my vision in one eye.

I need to remember how it unfolded, and I want people to know the symptoms because it might help someone else not lose their sight, so for that reason, I'm writing it all up here.

There'll be a bit of anecdotal rambling first, because I'm incapable of avoiding that no matter how I try, so if you get bored, scroll down to the big asterisk below.

Background information, first.

Back in October, I had a routine eye test.  Being pretty fiercely myopic (-6 in both eyes), I don't think twice about eye tests.  In fact, I have them so regularly that I question how valid they are because I can actually reel off the letters on the chart with my eyes closed.  I have begged for a new chart, but no dice.

Anyhoo.  This particular eye test was a little different.  As I was casually reeling off such literary delights as VOTH and LPED, I realised that, with my right eye, as I looked directly at the letters, they disappeared.  I could see them if I looked around them but if I looked directly at them, they simply were not there.  The optician could not see any problems with my eye, but suggested that it was probably worth looking into.

The following week was half term and we headed over to Belgium to visit my parents.  My mother has had serious problems with her eyes, and as such is on first name terms with Belgium's premier eye doctor.  It's a two month wait for appointments, but he agreed to squeeze me in two days later.  His examination showed something odd and he said that I needed to be seen urgently by his mate who had a machine specific to the problem which he thought I had - a super-powerful HD imaging thing which would scan a slice of my eye and show us exactly what was going on.  Unfortunately, that wasn't going to be possible before we returned home the next day.  Once we were back home and back into a week, I rang Moorfields and was admitted the next day as an emergency.

Various machines wot go ping (and some wot actually ping physically ON your eyeball - bloody unnatural) came into play, including a super-powerful HD imaging thing which scanned a slice of my eye and showed us exactly what was going on, which, it turns out, is a touch of the old vitreo-macular traction, resulting in a blind spot and surrounding distortion right in the centre of my vision.

It looks like this:

Yeah, that's the inside of my actual eyeball.  Nice.  It's hard to see, but above the thick undulating layer, very close to the top of the image, there's a thin white line which follows the curve.  This is the macula.  Where the little dimple is in the middle, the white line actually pitches down sharply and attaches back to the main bit.  This is the traction.

And this is what it looks like from my side:

Somewhere between picture one and picture two, but much smaller - it hasn't affected that proportion of my eyesight.

Not ideal, but apparently no major drama, and it was a question of having a check-up 6 weeks or so later, as it's the kind of thing which can conceivably just sort itself out.  A letter was typed off and dispatched to my GP, asking him to arrange a referral, and a copy was handed to me for my own reference.  Nice touch.  We don't get enough of that. 

6 weeks or so later was Christmas, and as a result, it ended up being nearer to 8 weeks by the time I remembered that this should have happened, and chased my GP, who denied all knowledge - for one reason or another, he had never received a letter from Moorfields instructing him to arrange a referral for a follow-up.  

I would have chased this up straight away, but I was a little preoccupied, as the reason I was at the GP's in order to check this was that Olivia had a hacking cough, for which she had already been seen once, with a horrendously high temperature.  She was given antibiotics and I thought I'd go home and chase up Moorfields over the next couple of days.  Olivia, however, got worse, and on Friday last week I took her back to the Doctor where he checked her SATS (oxygen saturation levels in the blood) and asked me whether I was okay to drive her to hospital or would I rather he got us an ambulance.  I elected to drive, and while he was doing the paperwork, I mentioned that Maddy had had a collision in netball at school on Tuesday and was still complaining of a sore shoulder in the collarbone area.  He stated categorically that I should haul her out of school and down to A&E for an X-ray.

Potential logistical nightmare, but as fluke would have it, Simon was off work, so while I rang school to have Maddy sent out and drove Olivia to the hospital, Simon collected Maddy and drove her along, too.  So there we were.  Me on the 6th floor with Olivia.  Simon in A&E with Maddy.  

This seemed bad enough, then Maddy was diagnosed with a broken collarbone, and Olivia was put on oxygen and admitted for an undetermined stay in the hospital.  I can't really express how frightening that was.  If your children have ever been in hospital, you know, so let's not labour the point.

Four days later, late on Monday, we were discharged and Olivia was allowed home.  

Tuesday was a relatively normal day, with Maddy at school and Olivia having a final day off to recuperate.

Wednesday seemed like it was finally going to be the proper, real start to the year, with everything under control, work being possible, children learning stuff and not being critically ill.  Aces.  

Thoughts turned to myself, and I rang Moorfields, who found my notes and faxed a copy of the referral letter to my GP, for adding to notes, but told me meanwhile to come in as an outpatient in the next week or so and they would give me a follow-up appointment without needing the involvement of any other parties.  Pretty cool.

I had noticed over Christmas that I was getting some flashing lights, when I blinked at night.  By Wednesday, I was able to see these during daylight and for most of that day that I had a small floater (snurk snurk - sorry - I know - pathetic) in the corner of my eye, meaning that I spent a high portion of the day whipping my head around to look over my shoulder.  I kept thinking that something was creeping up on me.  Most distracting.

In the evening, I went out to teach Zumba, feeling perfectly fine.  In the middle of one of the tracks, and noticed that the floater had become far bigger and was beginning to move across my eye.  It looked like ornate, black ink, scroll-work or calligraphy flourishes.  Very attractive but scary as fuck.  Over the course of the next few seconds, it continued to move across my vision and suddenly exploded in slow motion across my vision.  It looked like when you drop marbling ink on water:

First this:


Then this:

I stopped the music and turned to my class to say that I had to stop and go home.  As I very seldom so much as take a day off sick, it was clearly a bit of an event.

My participants were very understanding and I left quickly, driving home (hmm) to ring Moorfields.  I described the symptoms to the very nice man on the end of the phone, who told me to come in.

Me:  First thing in the morning okay?
Him:  No.  You need to get here now.

With the girls newly out of hospital and with a broken collarbone respectively, we didn't feel we could offload them on someone while we both charged up to London - too scary for them - so, pausing only to whip out my lenses and sling both a book and kindle in my handbag (chronic fear of being somewhere with nothing to read *shudder*) Simon drove me to the station (still in my Zumba gear, thankfully not sweaty as it happened early in the class) and put me on a train to London.  

Of course, while on the train, there's nothing to do but worry, is there?  So from being calm, together and getting on with it, I turned into a gibbering, sobbing, snivelling wreck and did what all self-respecting gibbering, sobbing, snivelling wrecks do.  I rang my mum.  As she'd only just gone home having raced over to help us out over the weekend with the whole "being in two places at once" scenario, I forbade her from coming over again, and rang my brother to see if he was in London.  After a bit of panicking re non-answering of phones (he was a the theatre), I got through and my lovely brother met me at Waterloo and accompanied me throughout the rest of the night, doing a bloody good job of taking my mind off it all.

We got to Moorfields around 10.30pm, where we were efficiently checked in, triaged (possibly not a verb) and seen by a second nurse who did various preliminary tests.  Around midnight, I saw a doctor who began the consultation with what came across as an everso very slightly smirky "so what has prompted you to run all the way up from Basingstoke at this time of night?".  I guess he sees a few hypochondriacs.  Either that or I totally projected my own fear that I was being a drama queen onto his entirely innocent question.  He smirked a little less when I told him it was not my first time at Moorfields, and still less when he'd had a look in my eye.

"Ah, you have a bad tear in your retina.  We will need to operate first thing in the morning."

What?  What?!  A torn retina?  Hm.  Okay.  Kind of what I was expecting, if I'm honest.  How serious is it, Doc - will I lose my sight?

"If fluid leaks through the tear and lifts your retina away, you will get a detached retina and lose the vision in your eye."

"Do you mean go blind in that eye?"

"Yes."

"Okay, and the likelihood of that is?"

"There's no way of telling, but we will operate first thing in the morning.  It's a nice fresh tear" (oh good!!!) "so the chances are good that there will be no complications."

"Is there anything I can do to minimise the likelihood of fluid leaking through?"

"Not really, no.  Don't jump off anything high.  Or operate any pneumatic drills."

Thinks:  "Great."

"Just show up tomorrow morning at 8.30 in the retinal emergency unit, with this letter."

We returned to my brother's via a comedy cab ride - "you two had a lovely evening, have you?  You lawyers, are you?" - er, no and no, but so it went on.  Jon distracted him beautifully, allowing me to wake Simon up and tell him what had happened.  The cabbie managed somehow to find all the cobbled streets and speed bumps between the City and Kennington, so I spent most of the cab ride hovering above the seat trying not to jolt my eyeball about.  Great for the thighs.

At 8am, after four hours of not very efficient sleep and some pretty funky dreams, I was back in the hospital, clutching my letter, and feeling sick as a bloody pig, my loves.  In all the excitement, I hadn't asked enough questions.  I like to know what is going to happen.  I didn't even know if I would be okay to leave the hospital unaccompanied.  As Jon had had to go to work and I was on my own, this was a pretty stupid question not to have asked.  It turns out, yes - not a problem.  Which was kind of reassuring about the whole thing.

I was the first person called, which was nice, and the lovely nurse assessed me and put dilating drops in my eyes, with many jokes about how she likes doing this to young men as it makes them cry, but doesn't like doing it to ladies.  I'm sure she has a different line for all the different patients she has - one which would put anyone at their ease.  She was an Asian lady of indeterminate age - tiny and birdlike (such a cliché, but she was), beautiful and funny, efficient and charming.  

With pupils like a fully committed pill-popping maniac, I returned to the waiting room, assuming I'd be there for another hour or so, and was once again called almost immediately.

"Hi, I'm Miles, I'll be doing your retinoplexy today.  Let's have a bit of a look and see how it's presenting."

Miles, like everyone I have met at Moorfields, was an entirely charming person.  They are so quietly confident in their ability to save your sight, and so delightful in their self-deprecation, I felt that I was in the best of care throughout the whole horrible experience.  I cannot emphasise enough how frightened I was that my tear would prove inoperable and I would lose my sight.  I also cannot over-emphasise how little fear I had that the operation would go wrong.  Even as I signed the consent form confirming that I was aware that the operation could result in permanent loss of vision, not one iota of me brooked the possibility that Miles in particular, and Moorfields in general, would let this happen to me.  I hadn't really worked that out until I'm writing it now, and to be honest, it's made me totes emosh.  *dabs eyes, womans up, carries on*

Miles filled my eyes with numbing drops, which are absolutely amazing.  I don't have any squeamishness about things touching my eyes, as I've worn contact lenses since I was 12 years old (profoundly short-sighted and a fairly serious ballerina - couldn't wear glasses for dancing) but I can't say I relish it.  He had a good peer into my eyes and pronounced the tear thoroughly operable and fairly easy to reach apart from a couple of areas for which he would have to use a tool directly on my eyeball to depress it and deform it so that the edges of the tear were attainable.

Boak.

Yeah, I take it back.  I discovered a little squeamishness when he demonstrated the kind of thing and I worried that my eyeball would actually pop or pop OUT, but it was pretty much painless, just uncomfortable and icky.  Technical term.  Meanwhile my phone sprung to life and started pinging, ringing, vibrating, dan-dan-daaaaan-ing and general making its presence felt.  Miles patiently (and unnecessarily) suggested that I switched it off.  He explained that while he was firing the laser into my eyeball, it may be distracting.

At this point he told me that a not inconsiderable amount of fluid had begun to leak behind the retina.  If I hadn't rung straight away and come straight in, that leaking would have continued.  There is a very good chance that, as I'm sitting here two days after surgery, I would have been completely blind in my right eye.

The laser machine, it turned out, was in the other examination room, so we needed to wait for that to become free before he could perform the retinopexy, so it was back to the waiting room, this time with eyes which were not only junkified but numb, too.  Mental!  Again I expected a long wait, and again I was pleasantly surprised.  I was checking all the phone things which had happened, which included a call from School to ask if Olivia was allowed to stay for debating club, a message from Simon that Maddy had decided not to go to A&E after all (arm playing up following Olivia falling over and grabbing Maddy's arm for balance the night before) and FB messages from team members and customers - the life of a self-employed working mother.

I'd dealt with school and was ringing Simon to let him know that Olivia was staying late when I was called in - it couldn't have taken more than three minutes.

This was the big one.  It was finally happening.  I was a little nervous (ahahahahahahahaahah) about what was about to happen, so, as is my wont, I asked Miles to describe exactly what he was doing as he was doing it.  He was kind enough and patient enough to do so.

First thing was to lock the door.  Apparently you don't want people barging in while you're firing lasers into people's eyeballs, as it can cause complications.  If the door needs opening after the laser has been set, the whole process needs annulling and starting again from scratch.

So, we're locked in.  The chair made a dentist's chair look like a bit of an under-performer, and I was comfortably supine.  Meanwhile, Miles set a contraption on his head which looked like a combination of an optician's glasses:

And a miner's helmet:

The lamp bit being the laser.  Yoinks.

I'd read the Moorfields leaflet on the procedure (which a friend very kindly drew to my attention at 2am - thank heavens for friends who live on the other side of the world) and had half an idea what was going to happen.  One of the points in the leaflet about the actual treatment is that it can feel like electric shocks in the eyeball, sharp pain, burning etc.  So you'll forgive me for being a little trepidatious.

Miles asked me how the numbness was and if I wanted any more drops.  As I tend to morph into desperate comedy mode under stress, I responded that I've never knowingly turned down a drug in my life.  I know.  He's heard it all before, hasn't he?  But he laughed patiently, and further numbed my eyeballs.  I breathed deeply and tried to concentrate on keeping my heart rate nice and steady.

I should mention that there is no restraint whatsoever involved in this.  You hold yourself, your head and your gaze motionless.  The surgeon angles his head to point the laser where he is looking and activates it with a foot-switch.  Your eyeball is the size that your eyeball is and the laser enters it through your dilated pupil.  The margins for error here are tiny.  The chances of rupturing a blood vessel or slicing across the optic nerve are, presumably, considerable (I didn't ask, but unfortunately have always been quite interested in human anatomy etc and know just a little more about the inner workings of the eye than I wished, at that point, I knew).

This is what happens:

The dots on the wall of the eye are the small welds to reattach the retina where it belongs.

What amazed me is that there was very little sensation, let alone actual pain, involved in what ensued whatsoever.

I found it quite mentally disturbing, however, as it was almost exactly like a recurring dream which I have had for many years, and which has woken me into insomnia on many an occasion.

The laser, you see, completely dazzles you.  So your eye is open, you have to hold it as absolutely still as you can (or you'll end up with someone's tag graffitied on the inside of your eyeball), which in my case was looking up and left, but you can see nothing at all.  Your eye is numb, you're looking up, and you see nothing.  I don't know why this has been a recurring dream/nightmare for me, but it has.  If it were not for that, the experience would not have been in the least bit unpleasant.

 There were moments when I could feel the laser on the inside of my eye.  Not going to lie, that wasn't nice, caused me to go "argh" and Miles to say "Shall we stop for a minute?", which he did.  And then we'd proceed.

The bits when the depressor was on my eyeball weren't nice either - mostly when they were close to muscles which are not used to being prodded about.  But it was easily, easily bearable.

A couple of times, Miles called the head of department in to have a look at how it was going, and she suggested he could turn the laser up from 250somethings to 400somethings (at which I turned into tedious comedy patient again, and more or less told her to fuck off, because Miles was doing just fine - I need gagging, really, in these circumstances), which he did, and it was a little more obvious that something was going on in the eyeball, but still entirely bearable.

I ended up with two rings of welds around my tear, and three at a couple of points where it was tricky.  It was harder to get the retina to adhere where the fluid had crept through, so he had to pull back from the tear, leaving more of a space between tear and weld.

Every time we stopped, I was completely blind in my right eye - I checked that this was normal.  I like to know these things.  But my vision would slowly creep back.

Miles would tell me "we're about two-thirds of the way around, and you're doing very well", and generally keep me informed.  It felt very much like team-work, which clearly it wasn't.  He had years of experience and study and a huge amount of pressure on his shoulders, whereas I just had to keep my eye still.

I think the whole thing probably took about half an hour, but I'm not entirely sure.  What I do know is that 12 hours after I arrived at Moorfields with an undiagnosed eye problem, I walked out cured.

It didn't cost me a penny.

I am SO FUCKING LUCKY!!!

I came *this* close to losing my sight, and I know what to do if it happens again.

*
If you read all of that - well done.  If you've skipped down to avoid my rambling, that's fine, too.

What you need to know:

If you are very myopic (short-sighted), you are at an increased risk of having a torn retina.

It can happen at any time - it could happen while you are asleep so if you wake up with blurred or occluded vision, do not hesitate to have yourself checked out.

Indications that you are at risk of a torn retina are flashing lights and floaters across your vision.  These can be specs, lines, dots or larger areas.

If you see these, get checked out.

Find out where your nearest Opthalmic A&E department is.  It may be your local hospital or it may not, but if you're very short sighted, you ought to find out just in case.

If a large floater appears and does that marbling thing - sort it out!  Don't delay.  Don't feel like a twat for bothering t'doctor.  Just do it.

Delay marks the difference between saving and losing your sight.

Don't be afraid of the operation.  It's not bad at all.

False Friends and Not Having The Words

Nothing unpleasant here, chaps.  I am very happy to say that I have many true friends and no false ones.

What I'm talking about is those words in two different languages which SEEM to mean the same thing, but don't.

*Time-travel note*  That was what I STARTED intending to talk about, but I've gone down several alleys already - some of them blind and some of them intriguing, so, frankly, this could end up being about more or less anything.  You carry on reading, and I'll scroll back down to the bit I've got to so far, which is about Cardinal Richelieu, just so you know, when you get there.

We all know that Britain and America are famously separated by a common language - a phrase attributed to George Bernard Shaw - but then pretty much everything which wasn't attributed to Oscar Wilde around that time was attributed to GBS.  For all we know, it could have been my ol' great grandma who said that, but someone thought it sounded Shavian.  Anyway.  Meanwhile, Oscar Wilde was cleverly actually WRITING DOWN a similar sentiment - "We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language." 

I'm actually, possibly surprisingly, quite a supporter of the way the Americans speak English.  A lot of it is a more perfectly preserved version of the English we spoke back in the day.  Sidewalk is of course a far more logical (and original) word for a pavement - certainly before the advent of tar-penetration macadam - or tarmac, as we call it.  On a side note, I briefly dated a chap in my late teens whose surname was MacAdam, and who swore blind that his grandfather invented Tarmac.  As I did know that it's more proper name is tar-macadam, I accepted this blindly until just now, when I checked, and it was invented by a chap named Edgar Purnell Hooley.  Bloody swizz!  Cheeky bastard.  

Meanwhile cookie, once you know that the Dutch for biscuit is koekje, is far less irritating.  Lots of the words which are different between English and American are actually Dutch derivations.  Cupcakes still piss me off, though.  Whatever happened to fairy cakes?

Anyway, this is not meant to be about English and American, although I've got interested in it, now, so in a couple of years, next time I get around to sitting and having a bit of a blog, it might be.

But while I'm on English and American, I'll just give you two examples of false friends.  Bum.  And Fag.  Thanks.  Glad I got those off my chest.

What I WAS going to talk about was the English and French false friends.

The first time I came across these was when we all got in a fit of giggles when accompanying my mother to the dentist.  I should perhaps clarify at this point that I was about 9 at the time, although I'd still sooner my mum came to the dentist with me than go on my own.  Wimp.  Anyway.  The dentist had rather excellent English, and was therefore merrily chatting away to Mum about her teeth, while poking sharp things in her mouth.  She winced, and he informed her that oh dear oh dear, she has very sensible teeth.  The poor man had no idea why my brother and I were stuffing our hankies in our mouths and snorting inelegantly in the corner, because, in French, les dents sensibles are sensitive teeth.  

I've been on the lookout ever since and I'm delighted to report that there are many examples.

The thing is, you see, that the French just don't have the VOCABULARY that we do.  I have mentioned this so frequently that my children now spout this particular piece of wisdom with a world-weary air - "Sigh - they just don't have the WORDS, do they, Mummy?"

The words for like and love are the same.  For kiss and - pardon my French - fuck.  While in English someone can trick you or play a trick on you, or, heaven forfend cheat you, in French they can only tricher - a verb.  Il m'a tricher.  He cheated on me, he tricked me, he played a trick on me - you decide.  It's all in the context because they don't have the WORDS, do they, Mummy?  As we know, only something like 20% of communication is in the words, the rest is body language, intonation, facial expression etc - which is how you can get in so much damned trouble writing to people.  Hence the meteoric rise of the 'emoticon'.  

It is, of course, ridiculous to try to count the number of words in a language, and it always makes me think of the Samuel Johnson episode of Blackadder II.  However, it is a generally accepted almost-fact that the English language has approximately 250,000 words.  It is equally generally accepted that French has approximately 45,000.  Even those of us who had to spend maths lessons sitting in the corner in pointy hats can work out that this is less than a fifth of the number of words.  Extraordinary, no?

But then, you see, while we spot words and phrases in other languages and joyfully adopt, adapt and make them our own, showing savoir-faire, joie de vivre and a certain je ne sais quoi, the French have the Académie Française, devoted to retaining the purity of the French language.  

This idea has always made me laugh a lot, and finding out that it was started out by that bastard, Cardinal Richelieu (of course, I have only Dumas's word for him being a bastard, but I like Dumas, so I'm sticking with his version of events), suppressed during the revolution (VIVE LA REVOLUTION!) and revived by that dispeptic genius, Napoleon, has only made me laugh harder.  Honestly - who'd have thought that Richelieu would STILL be making the French do as he says!

Anyway, if you're not familiar with the Académie, briefly, it has 40 members, known as les Immortels (the Immortals - I mean REALLY!  The NERVE!) who are granted their posts for life.  Unless they do something really naughty.  The mind boggles.  Maybe using the subjunctive incorrectly, or referring to "le weekend".   

Actually, I just got interested in that, and rather pleasingly the most recent expulsions were for Academy members cohorting with the Nazis during WWII.  I actually feel a tiny degree of warmth towards them for the first time, ever.

Anyway (again - if you don't have to start at least 14 paragraphs in a chat with the word 'anyway', you've probably stuck to the point toooooo much), basically, it's their job to stick the French language down and approve or disprove any cheeky little words that try to sneak into the language from other places.  I can only imagine that this job has become more and more difficult as technology accelerates.  They had a great success with 'ordinateur' when computers first came in and people started off by saying 'le computer', but it's all moving so fast now, and I (possibly unfairly) assume that they are not the most technologically literate of croups of people, so it must be hellish hard to keep up with, m'loves.

Of course, there are two sides to every argument, and while the Academy's pinning down of the French language, which I always envisage as all the words being literally pinned down like butterflies in one of those Victorian cabinets, is the diametric opposite of our liberal "What's that you said?  Ooooh, good word!  We'll have that!" approach to language, it does give French writers a certain amount of fluff space which we don't have.

Hm.  I know what I'm trying to say here, but I'm not sure that fluff space is hacking it.  





Well, actually, let's take aimer and baiser, as they were the examples I gave above. There's room for a lot of double entendres (there's another adoption) with those two alone. When you try to translate from French to English, if it's not a technical document, it can sometimes be quite tricky for exactly this reason. The writer may well have deliberately left a wodge of ambiguity for the reader to play with, but the translator has to go in and PIN DOWN the author's meaning! Aha! That's strange, don't you think? That the limiting of words in a language can actually allow for more interpretations?
So while I think it's fabulous that we have five times as many words for funny as the French do, I RAIL at the English subtitles to French films because I almost always entirely disagree with them.
Cyrano de Bergerac is a CLASSIC example of this, and when I am an old, old lady, confined to bed and with nothing else to do, I am going to sit up and re-translate that film because that idiot Anthony Burgess made a proper bloody fist of it. The film is in verse and for some reason best known to himself, Burgess decided the put all the bloody subtitles in verse, too, thus, more often than not, absolutely KILLING the language. Why he wanted to do this is beyond me. Why someone actually let him do this is further beyond me. And how he managed to sleep at night after he'd put his name to this travesty of a translation is beyond me. While, in French, Gerard Depardieu is buckling his swash, swaggering, declaiming and roaring with wit and poetry, Burgess, down in the subtitles, is mincing around like a complete tit strangling - no, too strong - holding a pillow over the face of the film and slowly killing it. I have to put masking tape over the bottom half of the screen to even watch the film these days. TIT.
Well, I told you I'd gone down a blind alley, and I've given you almost no examples of false friends at all. The Nice Man From Asda has just delivered my groceries, and there's a bag of raw frozen prawns thawing out somewhere amongst it, so I must whoosh back to real life and get on with My Chores. I've got loads more to say about this, but if I don't post it, it will never happen. So publish and be damned, woman.
Please feel free to post your false friends in the comments section below. I would be most grateful if someone would haul this blog back towards something resembling its original title...
Cheers.

Temporary Luddite

From January 2014 - never finished, until now!
_________________

My computer died!

This.  Was a tragedy.

To be fair, it had warned me that it was on its way out.  It had shown me glossy estate agent details of farms it was considering buying, put up warning signs regarding buckets it was at risk of kicking, and indicated to me that if I could pass it its slippers in order to aid it in its shuffling off of this mortal coil, it would be most grateful.

As a result of all of this, I had actually made preparations.  I know.  Extraordinaire.  I had taken it to the McHospital (iHospital?) where the Nice Doctor (McGenius?) had a look and said it was basically terminal.  We needed a brain transplant.  Where, I asked in shock, would one get such a thing?  Was it frite-fly expensive?  And complex?  The Nice Doctor, whose bedside manner was entirely charming in a very trendily geeky way, explained to the Poor Old Lady that one would get such a thing online, it wasn't very expensive, and the surgery itself was sufficiently simple that even the Poor Old Lady would be able to perform it by the simple means of waving a screwfer at the back of the MacBook until its bum fell off.

Or something.

But, further, that if this was beyond the capabilities of the POL, the Nice Doctor and his friends would probably help, if the POL came in and wept a bit, although they're not really supposed to do that kind of thing.  Helping, not weeping.  And that once the brain was in, the Nice Doctor would be able to rehabilitate it, and that it would be such a special and wonderful brain that it would "see you out".  That's a quote.  I wondered at that point whether the Nice Doctor was quite as nice as I originally thought.

Anyway.  No matter how many things I tell the computer to remember in the future, it will apparently still be alive and able to pass me my slippers when it's my turn to shuffle off this mortal coil.  Hurrah!      

All this happened JUST before Christmas (*2013).  So I ordered the replacement brain.  It was easy!  It arrived ten days earlier than advertised, while we were away for Christmas.  It arrived the next day, too, and the next, and kept arriving daily until eventually I switched my phone on and found that The Yodel Man (in an appropriately echoey way, considering his company name) had been bouncing to and fro daily, trying to deliver.  Sigh.  So I rearranged delivery for when it was meant to arrive in the first place.

__________

So all of that was now so long ago that I barely remember it (although my feelings on The Yodel Man have, if anything, deteriorated), and the McDoctor put the new brain in the Poor Old Lady's computer, and the POL's MacBook Pro was once more ready to ROCK!

Until the POL invited her dear friends over, and Penningtons, Milligans and Parkins did imbibe of the gin.  In generous quantities.  And not just the gin of the Gordon's and the nice Bombay Sapphire people, but the actual home-made Hedge Gin (see elsewhere on blog if you wish to *spoiler alert* hurt yourself and kill your computer) which is largely based on Asda's own brand gin.  And Hedge.  There then ensued some playing of tunes in the kitchen, just like in the olden days, all gathered around the keyboard.  Although not THAT like the olden days, given that the keyboard was operating iTunes and not a piano.  At this point, tall glasses of prosecco, with generous measures of various home-made (but not home-distilled, as That Is Against The Law) spirits such as blackberry vodka and raspberry gin, very much à la Kir Royale, but a bit more Kir Pleb, seemed an inordinately good idea.  Well, it turns out that the combination of the playing of the music with the waving of the arms, the drinking of the spirits, the quaffing of the bubbles and most especially the placing of the very tall glass next to the laptop was actually an inordinately POOR idea.

Emergency action was immediately implemented, and the drinking and waving of arms resumed (although without the music - shame).  On rising, bleary-eyed the next morning, it transpired that the emergency action, with which we had been quite pleased, on the whole, at the time) had pretty much stopped at making the laptop into a little tent shape, tipping it up and placing a whole roll of Plenty, still on the roll, in its little cavity, as if for a nice night under the stars.

Needless to say, this cost a fucking FORTUNE to sort out, and took bloody weeks on end.  Initially, it was thought that it could probably be done for a couple of 'undred, and hence no need to bother the household insurance wallahs.  But once they'd got the bonnet off, there was much sucking of teeth and "werlllll, you've got liquid innit, 'aventcher?"ing from the McChaps.  Which was an extraordinarily astute diagnosis, given that I'd taken it in and said "I tried to make it drink spirits but it didn't like it".  And RAM was discussed.  And top - er - top hampers?  No, top - er - something boards.  Not washboards.  Something though.  And something expensive, natürlich, mein lieblings.  And some other bits which also didn't take kindly to having booze forced upon them.

At this point, I told them to just go ahead and fix the bloody thing, as I live my LIFE on the computer.  I write recipes on it, blog on it (occasionally, hem hem), sell jewellery on it, do all my Zumba paperwork on it, talk to friends far and wide on it - you get the idea.

Once I'd finished weeping and breaking the news to the kids that there would be no Christmas, I realised that - tadaaaaa!  It actually wasn't going to cost a bean more than the original £200 because this is (probably) what household insurance is for!  The nice man at Direct Line was very sympathetic, and once he'd finished tutting about the fact that I'd already sorted it out when he would have liked to have had a go himself (or get some of his friends to have a look or something - presumably for further sucking of teeth and "I couldn't possibly fit it in before a week Tuesday, guv, and that's pushing it"), the cash for the repair was in the account before you'd have had time to say "hang on, where's me cheque book, has the cat eaten it?".  Mental.

It's never been quite the same, though.  It keeps telling me it wants coffee.  Specifically Java.  But then, I suppose we all fancy a coffee after a night on the prosecco and spirits, don't we?

I know I do.

The Twattiness of the Short Distance Runner (me)

It seems that spring is when I'm moved to blog.  I'm not even going to insult you by pretending that I'll blog more frequently this year, or big myself up by pretending you've been desperate for another one in the last year and six days, so no apology either.

I did do a big thing, yesterday, though.

I Did Jogging!

I know.  Not a jogger, I.

However, whenever I have a week or so off from teaching Zumba, even if I don't go bonkers on Easter eggs (I can take 'em or leave 'em - thank god there isn't a worldwide cheese festival where people give each other whole Stiltons and Bries.  I'd fucking DIE), I seem to put on a good half a stone, which on my smaller-than-you'd-think-cos-I-usually-wear-heels frame is a whole chunk of lard.

Plus, if people are coming to you and paying you to help them get fit, you ought to make an effort to look the part.  Not drinking Belgium's stock of rosé over the Easter break may have helped with this extra tonnage.  Also not filling my Dad's fridge with more filet Américain (it's raw beef - I don't know why it's called filet Américain.  I don't think you can get it in America.  It's similar to steak tartare, though) than a woman should be allowed to eat in a month, and then accidentally having a forkful every time I filled the bottomless glass of rosé from the box in the fridge may have made some contribution, too.

However, whatever the reason, I got back from my long weekend feeling like a proper little Bunter, and resolved to Do Something About It.  Usually, it's a quick gain/quick loss, and I'm happy to let the extra half stone trickle off over the ensuing two weeks.  I don't know why this wasn't the case this time.  I'm getting old.  It's harder to shift extra pounds and I just wanted it off quickly, so I thought I'd give this running malarkey a bash.

Anyone who has ever discussed running with me will know my views on it.

In brief, most people who start running do so with no idea what they're doing.  They just grab a pair of trainers and hit the tarmac.  The trainers are probably also well past their run-by date.

Everyone thinks they can run.  Our bodies are designed to do it, right?  I mean, it's just running, right?  Wrong.  More people injure themselves running than almost any other sport, because they just go and do it.  They also stretch before they've warmed up, causing little tiny tears in cold, stiff muscles, and don't stretch afterwards.  And they whack all their impact through their heels, because their trainers allow them to do that, whereas our bodies are not actually designed to run like this.

Look, if you're hating me right now, don't.  If you know what you're doing and you enjoy it, keep at it.  I raise my hat at you.  If you're following a sensible programme, wearing good trainers and non-chaffing trousers, like a bit of barefoot running technique and have a sports bra which stops you from taking your own eye out crossing roads - go for it.  Plus, you know, swings and roundabouts, horses for courses, freedom of etceteras.

Yeah, I don't know what possessed me to give it a go, either.  But yesterday morning, off I set, with Sev in tow, for a gentle jog.  I figured I'd manage about three minutes and collapse in a heap, like I always did at school but I had forgotten that a) I smoked about 40 a day at school and b) my cardio-vascular fitness is a lot better than when I was a teenager, thanks to four years of teaching Zumba.  Although you'd think five-times-a-week ballet as a teenager would have helped, but it seems that was more endurance than... anyway - I digress.

To my somewhat smug pleasure, I managed four miles without pause, and, while sweaty at the end of it, wasn't unduly out of breath.  I wasn't very fast, but then that wasn't my aim.  And to my surprise, I quite enjoyed it - I certainly got a massive sense of achievement out of it.  I could have gone further, but I'd done a 'there and back' type walk, and run out of route.

This morning, I set out to jog again.  I managed half the distance of yesterday and pulled up with a small nagging ache in my sacroiliac area, which I suspect may be called something like Jogger's Arse.

I'd probably run though this if I didn't fear that I'd make it worse and put myself out of teaching altogether, for the foreseeable future, and we'd all die in penury on the streets.  I don't know if running through it would make it worse or better, and I will never know because that's IT!  I'm not running any more.  I was right.  It's not for me.

And it turns out I'm exactly the kind of git I always swore I wouldn't be.  TOTALLY inexperienced, hitting the tarmac, injured within 24 hours.

Twat.