Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

Well, I thought I should at least put the title in Welsh as an acknowledgement of the fact that I have, shamefully, not opened a Welsh-related book for the last three weeks. With Keith, myself and Dad all being ill, other things have taken precedence and still are and when I am worried about things, I find it really difficult to focus on other things.

However, the three Musketeers that are Jayne, Simon and myself are hoping to meet up for our usual hour at the local Ramada today, drinking coffee and working frantically and committedly at our Welsh putting the world to rights. Well, you never know, one of these days, we may be able to put the world to rights in fluent Welsh at a pace slightly faster than our current two words a minute. Here's hoping!

In the meantime, the Christmas decorations have been put away, the stash of presents and Christmas food and drink has almost disappeared from the smallest bedroom, which can now be redesignated once again as my study.

This means, I am now completely without excuses for procrastination ....

Blwyddyn Newydd Dda i bawb! (Happy New Year, everyone.)

Back again

And here we are again, back in hospital!

 Dad hadn't been well over Christmas, unable to come up to our house, and eating very little. In addition, his bowels were not working as they should, probably due to him now being on Zapain, so Out of Hours doctor was called and dispatched him to hospital for blood tests etc.

(Sod's Law dictates that, in our family, the vast majority of our need for health care seems to happen during evenings, week-ends or bank holidays.)

The following day saw him catheterised, having a blood transfusion and intravenous antibiotics but looking a better colour already.

"He may be able to go home tomorrow," they said yesterday.

Today they are saying that they are not sure about his ability to cope with his catheter if they do send him home and can I talk to 'Karen' when I go in to visit.

Watch this space ...

It's a hard job but someone has to do it

I discovered this while cruising around the web this morning. It is a very witty answer to a member of the public concerned about police harassment in New Zealand. Too good not to share!

A North Island police station received this question from a resident through the feedback section of a local Police website:

“I would like to know how it is possible for police officers to continually harass people and get away with it?”

In response, a sergeant posted this reply:

First of all, let me tell you this ... it’s not easy. In the Palmerston North and rural area we average one cop for every 505 people. Only about 60 per cent of those cops are on general duty (or what you might refer to as “general patrols”) where we do most of our harassing.

The rest are in non-harassing units that do not allow them contact with the day to day innocents. At any given moment, only one-fifth of the 60 per cent of general patrols are on duty and available for harassing people while the rest are off duty. So, roughly, one cop is responsible for harassing about 6000 residents.

When you toss in the commercial business and tourist locations that attract people from other areas, sometimes you have a situation where a single cop is responsible for harassing 15,000 or more people a day.

Now, your average eight-hour shift runs 28,800 seconds long. This gives a cop two-thirds of a second to harass a person, and then only another third of a second to drink a Massey iced coffee AND then find a new person to harass. This is not an easy task. To be honest, most cops are not up to the challenge day in and day out. It is just too tiring. What we do is utilise some tools to help us narrow down those people we can realistically harass.

PHONE: People will call us up and point out things that cause us to focus on a person for special harassment. “My neighbour is beating his wife” is a code phrase used often. This means we’ll come out and give somebody some special harassment. Another popular one is, “There’s a guy breaking into a house.” The harassment team is then put into action.

CARS: We have special cops assigned to harass people who drive. They like to harass the drivers of fast cars, cars with no insurance or drivers with no licences and the like. It’s lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing more obvious than running a red light. Sometimes you get to really heap the harassment on when you find they have drugs in the car, they are drunk, or have an outstanding warrant on file.

LAWS: When we don’t have phone or cars, and have nothing better to do, there are actually books that give us ideas for reasons to harass folks. They are called “statutes”. These include the Crimes Act, Summary Offences Act, Land Transport Act and a whole bunch of others... They spell out all sorts of things for which you can really mess with people. After you read the law, you can just drive around for a while until you find someone violating one of these listed offences and harass them. Just last week I saw a guy trying to steal a car. Well, the book says that’s not allowed. That meant I had permission to harass this guy.

It is a really cool system that we have set up, and it works pretty well. We seem to have a never-ending supply of folks to harass. And we get away with it. Why? Because, for the good citizens who pay the tab, we try to keep the streets safe for them, and they pay us to “harass” some people.

Next time you are in Palmerston North, give me the old “single finger wave”. That’s another one of those codes. It means, “You can harass me.” It’s one of our favourites.

The run up to Christmas

Back in October, I promised myself that this year, I would be super-organised with my pre-Christmas preparations. And I was. I made a list of presents I was going to buy for everyone. Keith is always full of admiration for my lists - or maybe that should read, Keith is completely unable to see the point of all my lists, but then, he doesn’t need any. I’m the one who has to remember birthdays, buy cards and presents, send them at the right time. Being a man, he doesn’t have to concern himself with all that. As far as he’s concerned, it just magically happens.

And so it did this year. Every week, I added a few extra items to my regular shopping and before long, the little bedroom was filling up fast. How lucky that Keith had decided to build himself a new shed for all his ‘stuff’, leaving the little bedroom back in my control!

So, Christmas cards were bought, written and sent early in December, presents were wrapped and labelled with military precision and we even bought a new, bigger Christmas tree, which was up and decorated two weeks ago - a definite first for me.

But sadly, things don’t always go to plan. This week, Keith succumbed to the dreaded flu. He should have gone for his flu injection and was nagged several times by me to do so, but he didn’t, with the result that he ended up last Monday night in the back of an ambulance with a temperature of 41.1C. You will notice I said ‘in the back of an ambulance’ rather than in A&E or in hospital. After being there for three hours, his temperature was back to normal and the paramedics agreed that, with a probable further two hours wait in prospect, he might just as well go back home and at least get some sleep that night.

However, since then, his progress has been a bit on the slow side and, with an admirable show of solidarity, I decided to get my first cold in about seven years, so we have both been drooping around the house, feeling sorry for ourselves.

Toby has been surprisingly helpful though, as a very efficient hot water bottle/comfort blanket.

And there you have it. Everything bought that is going to be bought and here we are hoping that we will both undergo a miraculous recovery before Friday.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Life for Dad

Since Dad moved up here, nearly eighteen months ago, he has settled in really well and adjusted to new surroundings and people. Last November, he had his first cataract done, but two days later, he was in hospital with pneumonia. After three weeks, he was better and able to go home and resume his daily life. Unfortunately, the prostate cancer, diagnosed several years ago, has continued its relentless course and he has had further stays in hospital, in July and again in September, each time going home afterwards slightly weaker and more in need of support.

Now he has four visits a day from carers, who help him with preparing meals, as well as getting up and going to bed, and his short term memory is poorer. Once a keen user of computers and the internet, he has gradually forgotten how to use them and only uses an iPad for listening to audiobooks downloaded from the library or for watching railway-related videos.  Even so, I frequently get a phone call from him in the evening, asking how to turn off the iPad when he has finished listening. Part of his problem is the deterioration in his sight. He has had both cataracts operated on now, has drops to treat his glaucoma and has had the dreaded injections in one eye to arrest the ‘wet’ Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), which have worked very well, but nothing can be done about the ‘dry’ AMD which he has in both eyes and so he struggles increasingly to read for any length of time. He has various magnifiers and three pairs of glasses, but then comes the problem of remembering where they are and which he needs to be wearing for a particular task.

However, ask him anything at all about the days of steam railways, and he can recall every little detail and recount it all at length - a wealth of living and experiences.

Life in Crewe Works

Dad says he still wants to write his second book, but I sometimes get the impression that it's become a bit of a millstone round his neck as his energy levels are not what they were. However, making short videos on You Tube is easier, quicker and probably more fun as well.

 Two things are in his favour:

He has a lot of interesting experiences from his ninety two years to talk about.

He can talk for England (or Wales!)

In memory of Mum

Today would have been Mum's birthday and an extra special one,  as she would now have been one hundred years old. As it was, she died at the  age of 86, in 1991. I don't remember what was on the death certificate but with the help of Dad looking after her, plus some excellent carers and the rest of us doing what we could, we nursed her at home and when the time came, she was able to die there peacefully, rather than in some anonymous hospital bed.

Mum was the next to youngest of five, three girls and two boys, and grew up on a smallholding in Staffordshire. I have a photo of her at about five years of age, face framed in dark ringlets and dressed in a pinafore, with her eldest sister and their mother. Sadly her parents died within a few months of each other when she was about fifteen and she spent the next few years living with her sister.

Her family was not well off so, in spite of being an able student who loved school, she had to leave at the age of fourteen to start work in one of the pot banks in the Potteries but, determined not to be held back by a lack of education, she went to night school and  eventually she was accepted to train as a nurse.

Whenever I complained about school or homework, she would remind me of her experiences and tell me never to forget how lucky I was. As a moody teenager, this usually fell on deaf ears. These days, I am much more aware  and appreciative of her efforts. 

Today she has been very much in our thoughts, never forgotten, always missed.