Dogs, Chickens and Vintage China

Although the terminator boot was turning me into an insomniac who was watching entire series on TV in one sitting and eventually falling asleep just as the sun was coming up, it did allow me to dispense with the crutches and and walk around a bit more.  Cooking became a non wheeled activity, being able to use both hands...at the same time...whilst standing up, makes everything easier. I may have mentioned in a previous post that we had a double glazing firm come round and in a fit of madness I decided to get a new window in the sitting room. I did this on my own whilst Helen was at the gym. When she went out we had just told the man very politely that we didn't need any new windows, when she came back I had spent £2000 on a new window.  To be fair it was a completely new window, as in, they had to cut a new hole in the wall to fit it. It's all very well ordering new windows, basically because you are bored, but it has unforeseen consequences, in my case it precipitated the...

Nobody tells you when you embark on the post surgery journey that sleep may become optional.  As I have alluded to before I am a strict 8 hours a night man, more if possible, 10 or even 12 hours have been known. Of course in the days after surgery you can expect sleep to be fairly erratic but then a hefty dose of opiate based pain killer nearly always sorts that nonsense out post haste. Another reason for erratic sleeping can be the aforementioned claustrophobia of the foot when encased immovably in a plaster cast and this certainly has been the case.  I couldn't wait to get Horris...the plaster cast, I've been very remiss in doing updates so you may have forgotten that for reasons best forgotten I called the plaster cast Horris...I couldn't wait to get him removed and consigned to whatever hell is reserved for evil plaster casts. I had luxuriated in a bath and spent a pleasurable half an hour or so removing dead skin and I was now back in the bed having eaten tea, watc...

All in all it was a very  unusual visit to the hospital . I have spent, what seems like several years of my life waiting in hospital waiting rooms to be poked, prodded and variously interfered with in the name of medical science. All of these occasions share something in common, the rooms outside the actual Doctors lair are named very accurately, waiting rooms,  rooms for waiting in. Hospitals thrive on making you wait...for interminable amounts of time...usually suffering a degree of low grade terror as you contemplate where they are going to stick the horse needle this time.  This visit was markedly different, I'm fairly sure that they had clocked that I was on my own and my method of travel was remarkably like a geriatric crab and about as fast.  Every time that I arrived somewhere I barely had time to sit down before some blasted health worker would hoick me out of my seat and send me off orienteering through the bowels of the hospital.  This even applied to...

Last night I cooked tea...oh alright for the posh among you, I cooked dinner...growing up in 70's suburban Bristol, 'dinner' was what you had in the middle of the day...what? of course it is, why do you think dinner ladies are called 'dinner' ladies, they don't come to your house at 6 o'clock in the evening do they?...however I yet again digress. Whatever it is called, last night I cooked it, and not from a perambulating office chair...what do you mean, you have no idea what I'm wittering on about?...I have to use the office chair because of the cast...not ringing any bells? OK, ok, I'll give you some back story, I've had an operation on my ankle that left me in a plaster cast for an unconscionable amount of time...for reasons known only to me the plaster cast was called Horris. In the past I have complained vociferously about Horris and his unreasoning hatred of my toes, well last Wednesday Horris got his comeuppance. Another visit to the plas...

There is nothing quite so frightening as a blank sheet of paper...or in these digitised days a blank Word document...I have the urge to write but nothing comes to mind whatsoever. I am surrounded by the detritus of pseudo illness, the scruffily unmade bed...inhabited by a sadly expanding fat man and an elderly off white, wheezing terrier...oh, alright, only the fat man, the terrier has now buggered off to investigate more interesting happenings in the kitchen. Oh hang on...the entire household has now buggered off...I am left in a ringing silence, punctuated by the ticking of the clock above my head and the incessant whirr of the fans in the two computer servers under the desk.  It's past 10 o'clock and I have not bothered to dress, I am lying clad only in a pair of elegant blue boxer shorts, a black tee shirt lightly dusted with beard dandruff...yeah I know, disgusting...and the ubiquitous orange cast...oh, come on, how can the cast be ubiquitous? Well, yes, I know it can...

As promised...only to Nic mind you... the recipe for mango pickle. I have adapted the original recipe slightly, you can view it here  https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/gujarati-mango-pickle-recipe-methia-keri/ , this is the most amazing site for authentic indian recipes and is well worth a visit. However...come on, you know I can't resist the lure of a good however...if you faithfully follow this recipe I can guarantee two things.  It will be hotter than the furthest reaches of hell and the amount of salt will instantly push your blood pressure to previously unseen heights, I reduced both of these somewhat. I can't get green mangoes either so I just use the least ripe ones I can get, you lucky Australians can do this properly. Ingredients: 3 large mangoes - not sure of the weight the original recipe calls for 1kg green mangoes cubed ¾ cup whole fenugreek seeds - these will need splitting in a grinder ½ cup split mustard seeds - I didn't have split mustard seed...

Forgive me world for I have sinned, it has been 5 days since my last confession...it has honest...I know for most of you it's not long enough but it is the longest I have gone since the foot butchery. I am still lying in bed...in the last week I have poured warm urine over myself twice...really, twice and I am, to all intents and purposes a proper adult, I've got a mortgage and a garden and everything. It's all down to having galloping insomnia, for instance yesterday, I finally managed to beat the foot into submission at around half past midnight with the aid of both codeine and eventually morphine after the codeine admitted defeat. I woke again at 0330 with an urgent desire to take a leak. Now, bear in mind I'm hardly in full possession of my faculties but I grab the pee bottle and manoeuvre into a sitting position to do the deed. Once I had finished I reached for the lid and completely forgot about the bottle, the neck of which, sank down just enough to pour warm...

Shamelessly stolen from Facebook, these aren't mine but they make me laugh, a lot! Enjoy A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly. A bar was walked into by the passive voice. An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening. Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.” A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite. Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything. A question mark walks into a bar? A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly. Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type." A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud. A comma splice walk...

Last night on Netflix I watched 'The 5th Wave'...it was quite stunningly dire...I am not going to precis it or even review it other than to say...don't, really don't. It's more the reasons behind watching the TV that is exercising my thoughts. Currently I am spending roughly 99% of my time in bed...I'm sure that this could be worked out somehow, so out of 24 hours in any given day I must spend...Jeez am I really going to do this...back in a sec, just timing how long a visit to the loo is...1.33 minutes and given my pea sized bladder we are talking at least 10 trips a day so that's 13.3 minutes, One trip to have a shit which has to be at least 4 minutes and another miscellaneous 10 minutes spent doing things like investigating the fridge and generally wandering around aimlessly. So that is 27.3 minutes spent out of my bed per day and 27.3 is...how do you work out percentages?... 24 times 60 is 1440 minutes, 1440 divided by 27.3 is 0.0189583333333 and times ...

Help...seriously I need rescue...I can't sleep and as usual I have been joined by Henry, who likes to be close to Horris of an evening. He has swapped snoring for farting...yes, really...and in his usual manner he has made sure his arse is almost nestled against my nose if I lie down to sleep...I'm not, I hasten to add, well obviously 'cos I'm writing this. I've just watched a documentary about doping in sport on Netflix and I can thoroughly recommend it...no, I'm not going to tell you what it is, look it up like a normal person. Ah yes, and right on cue Horris is starting up his nightly chorus of toe twinging to accompany the farting dog, I think I may have been right in a previous post and the universe really does hate me. I refuse to say goodnight, it will only jinx me some more See you in the morning Charlie

I am finding myself with less and less to write about. Whilst being tortured by a fiendishly painful foot is not much fun it does provide a break from the routine and a whole bunch of stuff to write about. Unfortunately...that's another one I use all the time...my life has settled into a routine and it has become less easy to find things to write about. The most exciting thing at the moment is that Henry has almost permanently taken up residence on my bed and spends most of his time snoring at me. I find myself interested in the most uninteresting things, why does Henry cough every time I lift him down from the bed, where is the most optimal place to put my phone so I always know where it is. How to organise my bedside trolley in the most efficient manner. More disturbingly most of my days are now spent actually working, either trying to fix things or  ...mostly...endlessly talking to people on the phone trying to get them to fix things. The point is that none of this is stuff ...

Once upon a time...all the best stories begin with 'once upon a time...there was a fat man who lived in a bed with a small white dog and an orange plaster cast. The dog was called Henry but I am not sure the plaster cast was called anything at all...for the purposes of this story we shall call him Horris...which was once the name of a frog but that was a long time ago.   Henry spent most of his time sleeping, and when he wasn't sleeping he spent most of his time eating, and when he wasn't eating he spent most of his time snuffling at this and that in the garden and then peeing on it. It was very important to pee on as many things as possible because then they belonged to him. In this way he had claimed most of the garden as his own and a good proportion of the road around the village where he lived. Horris on the other hand had never pee'd on anything...being a plaster cast was quite a boring existence...he spent most of his time being aggressively orange and ann...

I am not completely satisfied with some of my previous missives... Crutch Twirling Psychopath being the exception. The snow may be affecting my brain somewhat...however exciting events are afoot. Ocean has decided to brave the lane, mainly due to the fact that we have 'fucking great drifts of snow'...I am not joking...she is making her way down the hill right now and has sent us some pictures of what she is trying to negotiate...   This is not good for a crippled father's nerves, Helen has set out with Henry to meet her...what good a six inch high dog is going to be in 7 foot drifts of snow I don't know. So now I have lost contact with both of them. There is no phone signal in the lane and Ocean is now out of range.  All I can do is lie here fretting slightly. I am no longer fretting, I have contacted daughter number one and she is safe in the company of her mother and a small shivering fifteen year old West Highland White terrier...no doubt he is wondering w...

I am not a happy member of the oryctolagus cuniculus family...and no, I'm not telling you what that is because I am feeling particularly petulant. There is snow...not small amounts of snow, not a mere 'coverlet for a hobbits toes'..., great fucking drifts of the stuff, and I am stuck in bed. The last time I played out in the snow I was barely out of my thirties...alright I was 45, but as far as I am concerned that counts as barely out of my thirties. But we've had snow since 2010 I hear you exclaim, and indeed we have, in fact we had 'great fucking drifts of the stuff' in 2013 and guess what...they'd just taken the plaster cast off my leg and I was in the middle of doing my impression of a ballerina as they'd fused my foot at the wrong angle. The garden in January 2013  When it comes to snow...at least for the last 10 years...I suffer from the 'barrel of tits' syndrome...you haven't heard of it, I will explain. 'I am so unlucky that...

Gratuitous Picture of a Manky Foot Today involved yet another visit to the plaster room at Southmead Hospital...or for those of you in the know, the Land of Mordor...as usual there are no parking spaces. Helen is quite keen to drop me off by the door and she'd like me to just hop in and wait for her. But I have been scooting around on the crutches like a veritable Long John Silver...now there's something I don't understand, he only used one crutch and I've tried it and it is pretty much impossible...anyhow, I persuade Helen that she can drop me off in the multi storey whilst she finds a parking space. In hindsight this was not a good idea. I leapt out of the car and set off at a fair lick, this however, did not last. By the time I'd gone about 30ft I realised that I was less Long John Silver and more...more...ooh, this isn't easy, I can't think of anyone that is not violently offensive... more a fat middle aged one legged man from Somerset...will that do...