Journal Entries
NaJoPoMo Day 28: What was I saying?
Posted Nov 28, 2012
So anyway, I'd just finished off my journal for yesterday. Then I scribbled away at my submission for this week's post in a failed attempt to have it ready before deadline day. Then I turned of my netbook and packed it away and headed downstairs to the toilet before returning to the shopfloor. I was halfway down the stairs when the phone rang and my boss called to say it was for me. It was a paramedic to tell me my wife had fallen over in iceland and cut her head. They were going to take her to the hospital in about ten minutes and could I tell them her address because she couldn't remember it at the moment.
I told my boss. I looked at him, he looked at me, finally he spoke first and asked me if I wanted to go. I wanted to go. He said that was fine by him, and the nice new chap who was here doing lunch cover was available for the rest of the day so I was able to dash off with conciense clear. Fortunately R had fallen just round the corner from me, so I was able to get to the ambulance with a couple of minutes to spare. The two ladies were very kind and sat me down in a chair at the back. R was still somewhat confused so I filled in details here and there and helped her remember what she'd been doing this morning by prompting her with things I knew she'd done or been going to do.
It didn't take long to get to the hospital although I was slightly surprised to discover a queue of paramedics with their charges waiting in a corridor. One elerly lady struggling to breath and looking quite grey arrived after us but was fairly promptly rushed through to resus. In due course a lady arrived and dispatched all the patients off in various directions. We ended up in a cubicle where a sister (they have sisters in hospitals again!) came and looked at Raven and scribbled some notes. It is on these occasions that I am required to remember ALL of her medications. Other than that I am afraid I wasn't much use. I felt a bit tired and was consious that I had little to say that could help or reassure her. Everyone was very nice. One lady came in and cleaned our cubicle, another came and offered Raven food (which she declined) and brought us both cups of tea. An orderly attended to Raven whenever she needed anything and answered our questions as best he could.
Aftee a long while (during which, it turned out, they had been keeping an eye on R to see if she developed signs of concussion or any other head injury- no danger of brain damage) a very pleasant doctor came to see her. He listened to her heart and washed all of the gunk and blood out of her hair with bottles of pure water. He glue her wound and told her that he was going to write to her doctor for follow-up treatment regarding why she fell in the first place. To her considerable relief he was happy to let her go home with some advice about how to procede with her care.
He told her not to have any alcohol that evening. Still, at least he didn't keep her in. Hey ho.
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Latest reply: Nov 28, 2012
NaJoPoMo Day 27: Random Restaurant
Posted Nov 27, 2012
Hello people. Today I thought I would tell you about my restaurant idea. Don't ask me where the hell this came from, because I can't remember. And please consider this to be a patent.
Here is how it works: on the face of it you walk in to a normal restaurant and are seated by a waiter, who brings you a menu, from which you order. In due course you will be served but you will not necessarily recieve what you ordered. So you could order a steak sandwhich and be presented with a prawn cocktail. And you will have no cause for complaint, this is how the restaurant (and I spelling that right?) works. Anyway, you pay for what you ordered, rather than what you are served, so you might end up getting a bargain, or you might end up paying over the odds for something less than you wanted. Them's the breaks. Actually, that's now what we're calling the restaurant.
Don't worry, your health has been taken in to consideration. If you request vegetarianm or vegan, or dairy free, or whatever, our highly trained chimps will ensure that you are not fed anything unsuitable. And you can also reduce your risks if you're dull and happy to pay a bit extra. You can either except the random throw of the dice for any item on the menu at regular cost, or if you wish to pay an extra 10% on your price you can limit your options so that you will definitely get something from sweets, or starters, or light bites, or whatever. There are other rules. You have to pay double if you fail to finish the item you have been served, unless you can provide a doctor's note. If the thing we were going to give you in place of the thing you actually ordered is off the menu for any reason you will informed and will have to order again. There is also a specials board, but you can't see it. It is just a list of additional items that you might get served with over and above the viewable menu.
There are many other permuntations to consider, obviously, but that's what I've got so far.
What do we think?
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Latest reply: Nov 27, 2012
NaJoPoMo Day 26: My most boring journal yet
Posted Nov 26, 2012
Well today I have ages to write my journal. It's nearly quarter to three in the afternoon.
Having said that, I genuinely haven't been free that much today. I've been experiencing odd periods of being extremely overheated and a bit dizzy recently, so, after my wife pretty much bullying me in to it, I followed my own sage advice from The Post and went to the doctor. She has diagnosed a nasty sinus infection (again) and prescribed antibiotics. SO I went over the road to get the antibiotics (that's where the pharmacist is, you understand) and then trudged home in the pouring rain. Now for some reason by the time I got home I was feeling hot a drowsy again. I might have been the rain, or the fact that the doctor applied careful but disruptive pressure to my sinuses, or it might have been the antibiotic.
Either way, my wife returned shortly after I did. we settled down to listen to the radio. I suddenly found myself feeling sick, dizzy and tired, so I announced that I was off to lie down for a bit. About an hour and a half later, I woke up. Feeling refreshed and much better I made us both sausage sandwiches. After that, my wife headed off to The Blind Society, where she helps out with the art group on a monday afternoon, leaving me to answer her mobile for her as she went. Then I made another phone call. Then I made a drink. Now I am here, typing this.
Okay?
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Latest reply: Nov 26, 2012
NaJoPoMo Day 25: Done it again
Posted Nov 25, 2012
Yes, that's right, I've left myself 25 minutes to spare to write a journal entry of some sort of merit. And it's my day off today. Well, I had to (sort of had to) slog out in the rain so that Raven and I could visit and elderly ex-neighbour of ours who is now in a residential care home owing to his diabetes and advancing senility. Other than that, I've not been overly pressed for stuff to do.
The trouble is that, like a lot of people, I guard my free time jealously. A day off means a lie-in, a chance to sit and listen to some of radio favourites on i-player, and chance to spend with the animals and a chance to generally relax.
So why I am doing this if I don't want to? Well I do, I love this, I love writing, and if I'm honest I quite like this ridiculous business of writing against the clock. That's why I'm still writing now, rather than having given up two paragraphs ago and called it a day. That's why my hastily typed prose is so littered with typos, I've very little interest in the technicalites in the moment (they will drive me mad later) I just have words floating around in my head that I want to get out. So hear I am, at a quarter to midnight, not so much trying to get a job done as trying to prolong the process of doing it. Trying to think of things to say so that I can keep on talking, stringing the words together and maybe chancing on a neat little turn of phrase that I can be quietly pleased with later.
It's the writing, for me, that is one of the features that makes this place special. The writing, the knowledge and the thought. No coincidence, I guess, since many of us must have been inspired to come here by a very fine writer who's ability to craft simple facts into masterly prose through his deleight of them and his skill with words is so constantly reflected in this site and it's content. I read a Dan Brown novel once. I hated it. Really. I read it because it was a birthday gift from my cousin and I thought I might as well try and read one of the most talked about of modern writers. But he can't write, he has the natural lingustic fluidity of a man who speaks english as a second language. I know many of you guys on this site for whom English *is* a second language, and you all write better than Dan Brown.
So you can keep wikipedia, google and all these other sites that indriminantly churn out facts and pseudo facts without love or joy or skill. I'd sling them all in a skip over a place that does what it does well, because we just can't help it. It's in our DNA.
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Latest reply: Nov 25, 2012
NaJoPoMo Day 24: Dr When?
Posted Nov 24, 2012
Did you know it was Dr Who's birthday yesterday? The first episode was broadcast 49 years ago yesterday, to be precise. So the twitter feed were asking people for their favourite episodes. I plumped immediately for The Christmas Invasion.
It's a regeneration episode. For people who don't know The Doctor (that's what he calls himself, Doctor Who is just the name of the program, so that bloody knock, knock joke doesn't work) is an alien who is capable of engaging in a process called regeneration, wherein every cell in his body rebuilds itself. This way he can survive death and the annoying business of actors quitting the show. The regeneration episode, therefore, introduces us to a new doctor. In this case, David Tennant.
I'll try to give you a brief synopsis. The Doctor has just regenerated and, as is often the case, he needs to sleep. This opens the field for the classic danger-strikes-but-the-hero-is-incapacitated plot on which popeye was largely built. So much of the meat of the story is Billie Piper's Rose, coming to terms with the fact that The Doctor has 'abadonned' her and she is quite bereft. It really does put you through the wringer if you're prepared to invest. Meanwhile, the prime minister, who the previous Doctor met when she was just a lowly MP, is trying to cope with the crisis. Penelope Wilton is equally marvellous and finds herself, at the crisis point, in the Alien spaceship, with two of her companions killed by a guy with an eletric whip, a third of the world controlled by their blood and the decision between them being killed or half the world enslaved.
Rose and her boyfriend Mickey have been dragged up with the tardis (still prone doctor inside it) by now. Rose has valiantly tried to 'be the Doctor' but fails. It looks pretty bleak. Then the tardis doors open. There stands our hero, in a pair of pyjamas and a dressing gown, with a cheery grin. 'Did you miss me?'
Now it's David Tennant's turn to show us what he can do with this classic tv character. He catches the electric whip on his arm (how?), disarms the blood control ('and what is this? A great big threating button that must never ever ever be touched- am I right?) and challenges the aliens leader to a fight to the death. He gets his hand cut off, regenerates it and wins the fight, He spares the leader's life and then punishes his betrayal by knocking off the spaceship ina complex move involving a satsuma. Then he tells the aliens to run away and tell others that this planet is defended.
Back on earth, the prime minister, in a Margaret Thatcher-esque move, blasts the retreating aliens out of the sky. Enraged, the wrathfull Doctor responds by bringing down her government with six words.
I'm shattered just writing about it.
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Latest reply: Nov 24, 2012
benjaminpmoore
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