17 May 2008

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This is an arty picture of my cousin Ann, taken through a Celtic cross in Cringleford graveyard, where I had taken her to see Frank’s grave. All being well, she is now back in Liverpool after a fairly busy week here – most of it in beautiful warm weather.

I am radioactive at the moment, having just had an injection at hospital in preparation for a body skeleton x-ray in about an hour’s time. This is the second of two tests to see if my prostate cancer has spread. Unfortunately it means we have had to delay our trip to Caddington. We had meant to go straight there from the hospital, but I discovered that I shouldn’t be close to children today. I can imagine what Oliver might think of being asked to stay two metres away from me, so we’ve decided to travel down after they’re in bed, which is a pity, but the best solution, I think.

I was thinking of travelling over to Coventry “on the way” to pick up my jacket and glasses, which I foolishly left there yesterday, when Phil and I went to a case conference for Andrew and shifted a bit of his stuff from Gareth’s. (I was feeling a bit off because of a swelling in my groin which is a bit mysterious, so didn’t have my mind on what I was doing.) I didn’t realise I’d left them until I got home. But Halina is going to post the glasses to me on Monday, and in the meantime I’ve bought a pair of reading glasses from Boots, which I haven’t quite got used to yet…

Yesterday’s journey wasn’t too bad, though the good weather had ended with a vengeance and there was quite a bit of rain, as there is today. Traffic was heavy on the way back, and we went across the Fens, which worked out well. We got back about 7pm.

Bit of a break there. I have now had my bone skeleton x-ray, which consisted of lying under a camera for about 20 minutes, then having to have a re-x-ray of my pelvis area because it hadn’t come out quite right. All totally silent, and not an unpleasant experience. They aren’t allowed to tell me the results, but I got a positive feel from the nurse (if you see what I mean). I could be completely wrong about that, needless to say. They may be trained to give positive feels.

While Ann and Jim were here, and while the weather was still summery, we did a bit of driving around. On Wednesday we all went to Reepham, where Ann and Jim went for a walk while Dot and I had our hair cut. Afterwards we all had lunch in Kerri’s, then, while Dot drove to North Walsham to see her aunt, the rest of us went home (those paying close attention will have spotted we must have taken two cars to Reepham). At home Paul came round to see his niece, then I went to the hospital with Dot for my MRI scan. Again, not an unpleasant experience, but very noisy. I was given an injection to relax my muscles, and then laid on a table that went into a huge tube. The scan is by magnets and is very loud – almost as if someone is outside trying to get in. I had to wear earphones, and there was supposed to be music, but it was practically inaudible. It lasted about 35 minutes and, strangely, I actually felt very peaceful in there.

On the Thursday it was still sunny but the wind turned very chilly. In the morning I took Ann and Jim on a tour of some spots which might have been familiar or interesting or both. We took in our grandmother’s house in Hall Road, and the ones on Caistor Lane and in Poringland. It turned out that Ann didn’t know the Poringland one. Her family had left for Africa in 1948, bef0re my grandparents moved there. We also looked at Tuckswood, and the two houses in Brian Avenue where I had grown up. We called at Venta Icenorum and had a short stroll, then had coffee at Dunston Hall Hotel before going to Cringleford and visiting Frank’s grave (and taking a quick look at his bungalow there).

Home for lunch, then we all – with Dot – went to Yelverton to look at our old house and on to Woodbastwick, where we parked by the river and walked to Cockshoot Broad: the boardwalk has been extended rather nicely. Also called at Ranworth and bought some ice cream before heading home in time to pick up Ann’s pictures from the chemist. In the evening Dave Hall came round to beat me at chess: I made a mess of the late opening. Had quite a long conversation with him.

While Phil and I were travelling to Coventry yesterday, Ann and Jim visited a cousin at North Walsham – whose parents coincidentally lived next door to Dot’s parents in Northfield Road – then another relative (I think) at Eckling Grange, Dereham. We had given them the option of staying an extra night, but they called to say they were on their way home and had reached Sleaford.

13 May 2008

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This my cousin Ann and her husband Jim, who are staying with us for a few days. The weather has turned slightly cooler today, though it’s still pleasant enough, and dry. Jim and Ann (Rumsby), who are from Liverpool, are in the city at the moment. Ann is my father’s eldest brother’s second daughter. The family left England for Africa in 1948, when I was three.

Jim and Ann arrived on Sunday, and yesterday we went to see a mutual aunt – not entirely successful as a visit, but successfully completed. I also got some more information about my grandfather and grandmother, though I’m not sure how accurate it was. In the evening I was supposed to play chess, but the guy I was playing had double-booked, so I returned home and we all watched Out of Africa, which Dot had bought on DVD partly because Jim and Ann had spent many years in Africa. We’d all seen it before but forgotten most of it. I’d certainly forgotten what an excellent film it is. In the morning I had given Jim and Ann a walking tout of the city, during which the picture above was taken – on Riverside. Have already sent several pictures to her youngest daughter, Dawn, who is very interested in family history.

This morning Phil and Joy came round for tea / coffee, and the man has just been to service the alarm.

David was very ill over the weekend with a painful kidney stone but is now much better. This morning he went for a CT scan and was told the stone was just above the bladder, and he will probably have more pain before it goes through. But at least he’s sure what it is and knows what’s happening. Still not at all nice, though. He’s relatively pain-free at the moment.

I have a date with my consultant on Friday week, after he gets the results of my two tests. On Sunday I was prayed for in church using oil, which felt very good. Nice Pentecost service, well led by Howard.

9 May 2008

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Just back from a couple of restful days with Audrey at Bury St Edmunds. This morning we went for a walk around Thurston – about three miles – with Dot and Audrey clearly in charge. Beautiful warm weather and a welcome breeze, much as it’s been all week. We had lunch at a garden centre. Yesterday we went to Lavenham, then had an evening meal at the pub down the road from Audrey’s house – Moreton Hall. Excellent steak and chips, and the others were very complimentary about their curries.

Dot needed a rest because she’d had an Exclusion Panel on Tuesday, which is always a bit wearing. Also our son is in a lot of pain from what seems to be a kidney stone – it’s just recurred, and he went to the doctor’s today. Much more concerned about him than about me. I feel more or less OK, though I haven’t been sleeping too well, and have got dates for my MRI scan and my x-ray – both next week. Vicky’s birthday tomorrow, and David has baked her a cake despite his pain – well-known Lenton stubbornness coming to the fore. She insisted he went to the doctor today.

Meanwhile my sister-in-law’s brother has died suddenly of a heart attack, I have to go to Coventry next Friday for a case meeting about my brother Andrew, and my cousin Anne and her husband Jim are arriving on Sunday for a few days. I also need to arrange meals with several friends – one of whom has just been bereaved. You know what they say: time is what prevents everything happening at once – lately it doesn’t seem to be working.

While at Audrey’s I did manage to write three poems – one to go with Lucy’s proposed film for Paston, one to go with Annette’s picture, and the other a fairly random one based loosely on Lavenham and the nature of reality, whatever that is.

4 May 2008

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This is Dot sitting under the clematis in our back garden: a really beautiful sight when it’s out, which unfortunately is only for a week or two a year. The picture was taken yesterday: a pretty acceptable day as far as the weather went. Today was also warm and dry, so maybe summer is nearly here.

On Friday evening we went to the cinema to see The Oxford Murders, which is a challenging and compelling film – quite intellectual in a way, but very satisfying. Lots of maths in it, which I always enjoy. Realised today that 55 is not only a fibonacci number but also the sum of numbers 1-10 inclusive. That’s got to be significant, hasn’t it?!

On Saturday we went to Park Farm for lunch, then on to Aylsham to a private view for Lucy Edwards (and others) at St Jude’s gallery. We parked in the church grounds and had a look inside the large and lovely church. I was feeling pretty groggy in the gallery, but it may have been because I had a mouthful of crab and shrimp pate at Park Farm, and I am slightly allergic to crab on occasion. Before going to Philip and Anne’s for a Chinese meal in the evening I took some acidophilus, which is brilliant for putting your stomach right, plus some paracetamol, after which I felt a lot better, and we had a nice evening. Caught a glimpse of their eldest daughter Louise, who may be moving back to Norfolk.

Today the music group did really well at church. We did one of my songs that I hadn’t played in public before, and I was very pleased with it – but the music generally went well. Followed by church lunch, which was fun as always. Afterwards gave Phyllis a lift home, someone else a lift to the station and then filled the car up with petrol.

Suzanne has been accepted for ordination training, which is great news for her. Sadly it does mean she’ll be away in Cambridge for a while. Norwich City’s last match of the season today: apparently they were all over Sheffield Wednesday, and lost 4-1. It’s not just Spurs who can do that. At least they’ve avoided relegation.

2 May 2008

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Another photo from our day out in Walcott with Oliver: here Dot and grandson face the awesome prospect of excavating some water from the sea without getting wet. As I remember, discretion triumphed.

This has been a very odd week, especially since receiving the news about my prostate. It’s as if reality has slipped off to the side somewhere and I’m only remotely attached to it. However, my energy is returning, and I am sleeping well. Got lots of support from everyone who knows and am feeling very positive. Most of the time. Yesterday I went up to the city to meet Dot after she went to the dentist’s, and we had lunch in John Lewis’ cafe, which is nicer than the full-blown restaurant and rarely very full. Afterwards she tried on a dress while I chatted to someone whose daughter was trying to find a dress for a wedding, then I left her to go to Marks and Spencer while I wondered home via Ottaker’s / Waterstone’s, where I bought an Explorer map of Norwich which I discovered later I already owned. So that’s one for each reality, then.

Dot arrived later with several items of clothing that she had bought at Marks, and we watched a couple of episodes of Battlestar Galactica, making a total of six this week. No wonder reality is seeming strange. Is Dot a Cylon? Am I? The Greens, who are almost certainly Cylons, got in at Thorpe Hamlet in yesterday’s elections and won two or three other seats, so reality is certainly not going to get any less strange.

I have a couple of poems in the latest Norwich Writers’ Circle anthology: about 840 were entered and fewer than 70 chosen, so I guess that has to be good. But I didn’t win anything with my Fish entries this year, although I got on the long list with my pre-biopsy short short story, Three-Minute Child:

THREE-MINUTE CHILD

“Do you read books?”

The old Norfolk boy looked at the paperback in my hand as if it were an alien artefact. He had come in from Dereham by bus, and clearly spent all his spare time ploughing, digging out ditches or dealing with cows.

“What else is there to do in bed?” I riposted.

“Aren’t you married?” he chortled – a Norfolk joke. His wife, a substantial pensioner spread out next to him, laughed sportingly.

Every three minutes (yes, I was counting) a man propelled a screaming child in a pushchair the length of the hospital waiting room. I guess he was trying to keep her quiet. It didn’t help.

Personally, I was feeling great. I had just lost a stone and felt full of life. The blood test, however, said I was full of death. My blood and the rest of my body disagreed at a pretty basic level. Reality was falling apart, and the child on wheels kept screaming.

I do read books. The doctor was running way behind, the nurses would not look at me, and time was distorted, spiralling down. Reading kept my mind off the black hole that was surely waiting. But there was another reason. Someone said the difference between fiction and real life was that fiction had to make sense. It was good that something made sense; so I carried a book everywhere.

The nurse looked at me hard and called my name. I felt good. The blood must be lying. But the three-minute child was still screaming, refusing to be soothed.

30 April 2008

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Another picture taken at Salthouse last Friday. This is Dot and Fred, though not necessarily in that order. Fred actually introduced me to Dot after meeting her at a residential weekend for Sunday school teachers some time in the very early 60s. We all became part of a group that hung out together and had occasional parties in Norwich and North Walsham. One thing led to another, and eventually Dot went to teacher training college near Watford while I was living in north London. One weekend she came down to visit me, and we saw Dr Zhivago at Leicester Square – a late-night showing. I think we got back to my flat at Stoke Newington somewhere around dawn. She returned to Norwich to teach, there was a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing, and then I proposed under a tree in a layby on the North Walsham Road: the evening of Boxing Day 1967. We married the following July. Fred married Sue and had four children.

I’m feeling a bit better now – rather more energy, though still an annoying cough. Yesterday I went up to the dentist to have the hygienist look at my teeth, and I quite enjoyed the walk home, though I was a little tired when I got back. Last night Dot and I went to the annual dinner at St Luke’s, which was very pleasant and quite good for me, I think. Lots of nice people.

On the minus side, I have prostate cancer. The results showed 17 of the tests negative, three positive. I now have to have a bone x-ray and an MRI scan to see if it has spread anywhere. If not, they can do something to get rid of it. If it has, we are down to drugs and all sorts of nasty things that I don’t really want to think about.

Very wet day today: not nice at all.

28 April 2008

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And this is the meal Dot had at Cookies – rather reminiscent of one we had at Langabaan in South Africa, though it lacked the exotic surroundings (no weaver bird nests or ostriches).

It’s been quiet: I’m taking a time to recover and still have a lot of cattarh and fuzziness. Tired, too. Nevertheless went to church yesterday and played guitar. I have an interesting lump on my lower right side which has been there for years, but is now much more prominent – sometimes. The Greens came round early evening with some white wine, and Dot cooked some excellent rock cakes. Had a really good conversation with them. The Greens, not the rock cakes.

The weather is not at all bad, and today Dot has gone to Metfield to see Barbara and maybe get a bit further with their Philosophy for Children project. I am still waiting for the hospital to ring about my biopsy, but I think I will go into the city later and pay in a cheque.

26 April 2008

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Still feeling pretty down: tubes clogged up and hardly any energy. However, yesterday we did manage to get out to West Runton to visit Fred and Sue in their caravan. Fred was our best man 40 years ago. We had a very pleasant time with them and drove to where the picture was taken – Cookies restaurant at Salthouse, where we had a large lunch: a “royal” salad consisting mainly of fish and other seafood. I skipped the crab because I have a slight allergy sometimes, but it was all very impressive. We took our own bottle of wine, so the whole thing cost us only about £25 for four. Afterwards we wandered around near the caravan, saw the cliff edge falling away (the steps down to the beach now end in mid air) and noted the kind of price you could pay for a log cabin on a caravan site – a mere £140,000.

We took the MX5, so Dot was driving, and we navigated home across the wilds of North Norfolk, through places like Sustead, Calthorpe, Ingham and Banningham. Almost a straight line, actually, but narrow roads in many places. Lovely scenery, though.

I cancelled the chess tournament I was supposed to be playing in this weekend, and donated my entry fee to the prize fund. Pity, but the right decision: I would probably have lost all my games and been even more depressed. Elsewhere my aunt in South Africa is not at all well, and a friend at church – Anne – is in hospital with a blood disorder. So things could be sunnier.

23 April 2008

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The theme continues. This is the all-conquering, or “quite good”, Surrey Chapel squad of which my son and brother were both members. Son David is in the front row, second from the right, and brother Phil is far right on the back row with the, ahem, beard. Again the time must have been around 1990. The team – indeed the entire church league – had its roots in a radical twice-yearly game I helped organise in the early 60s with my friend David Green. We played Park Church, whose team contained my uncle and two cousins. After I moved to London in 1966, the Easter Monday and Boxing Day games developed into a proper league with teams containing almost no relations at all, but all this came too late for me, and I never played as much football as I would have liked. And in case you were wondering how radical it was, this all stemmed from a time and place where sport was regarded as a not sufficiently spiritual activity. David Green is now a deacon, so it must have been all right.

Back to my medical condition: I’m still feeling rather divorced from reality and generally fuzzy, as if my head hasn’t been tuned in properly. I slept quite well last night, and the pain in my head has gone, but I still have a clogged-up feeling and a bit of a cough, as well as dryness in the mouth. Just not really connecting, somehow. A generally achy feeling.

I’m not looking for sympathy. Well, maybe a little. My grandson sent me a lovely card and Dot is being very solicitous and lovely. I’ve just walked up to the post office to post some letters and got the feeling people were looking at me rather nervously, as if I was ill or something. I realised it was the first time I’d been out of the house for a week.

22 April 2008

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Still on the football theme, this is a five-a-side team made up of members of the Eastern Counties Newspapers trainee course in spring 1991. This would probably have been taken in May or June. I am on the left, of course, and continuing left to right we have Tim Miller, Darren Kemp, Robert Liddle, Mike Randall and Siobhan Hand. In the background at the right is my son David, then about 19, who played as a guest (against the regular reporters, I think). No idea what the score was, but I think we did reasonably well. In case anyone is wondering, I was teaching on the course: local and central government and techniques of journalism. David Paull ran the course and was law lecturer: Frances Burrows taught shorthand. We’re all now retired, of course. Except the trainees. And David.

Since my last entry here I have been feeling pretty awful, with a bad upper respiratory tract infection apparently stemming from the biopsy. I suspect this is the sort of thing doctors are not interested in because it isn’t life-threatening, but It makes you feel so wretched that having prostate cancer seems like a minor issue (at the time). A combination of high temperature, inflammation in your breathing tubes and coughing means you can’t get comfortable enough to sleep or even relax. It really is a nightmare, and what makes it worse is that you think it’s getting a bit better and then it gets worse again.

So I don’t know whether I’m actually over the worst or if I’m just well enough for now to write this. I feel very, very tired, but the pain in my head has eased off. I was given Ciprofloxacin (an antibiotic) in case I got an infection, but to say I was unimpressed by it is a major understatement. I only started to feel a bit better when I stopped taking it. Of course if I hadn’t taken it I might have died, but these things are relative.

We have cancelled our break in York, which was due to start tomorrow. I don’t think we’ll be charged for the hotel, and the theatre is very kindly refunding the tickets (though they have no need to), so when it is all sorted out, I think it will just cost us the £10 rail tickets cancellation fee. Very disappointing, though, especially as the weather is no nice at the moment. Makes you want to go out – and Dot has just walked to the shops – but I daren’t go far in case of the other side-effect of this whole mess: having to rush to the loo.

Seems ridiculous to have gone through all this when I was fine to start with. Now they want Dot to take cholesterol pills because she has a high count on a recent test. Both she and I are against it: she’s already taking blood pressure pills for no good reason (and is told she can’t come off them), so why add more pointless medication when she feels fine? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I wish I’d said that.