Mothering Sunday titles

Step-daughter #2 earns a smile and brownie points for addressing a mother's day card to me like this. She appreciates how much work it is to stop people calling you Ms, or Mrs when your husband's surname isn't the same as the one you use and you've never told them to use Ms or Mrs so why do they think they should change your title to something they've not been told.

Maybe SD#2 'll get a doctorate too one day.

Hyaluronic Acid

Wandering round the local health food shop the assistants, whom I know because I'm often in there, asked me how I was. I had a little moan about the side effects of the aromatase inhibitor drug I have to take and then commented that my skin was also losing its elasticity, which it would do anyway at my age, but seems to have lost more quickly recently. The assistant recommended hyaluronic acid. This sounds wonderful - an anti-aging drug. But being as it's expensive, I thought I'd go and do some research on it first.

Googling just for hyaluronic acid tends to tell you about what it is, how it might work and some of its side effects but it wasn't until I searched for 'hyaluronic acid' and 'breast cancer' together that I got the scariest warning. Don't take hyaluronic acid if you have any cancer, but particularly if you have breast cancer. Hyalonic acid (HA) is recommended for creaky bones as well as for ageing skin - it seems to rejuvenate. BUT its ability to counter-act the side effects of Arimedix may be because it supports/ encourages breast cancer. There appears to be correlation between high HA and breast cancer - though cause is not yet proven. So I repeat:  

Don't take hyaluronic acid if you have any cancer, but particularly if you have breast cancer.

Crumbs and buns

Aged auntie has a support plan. Adult social care services review an old person's needs and sets up support to enable them to carry on living independently. Five years ago, I had nine octogenarian relatives but now only five of them stagger on. Those who died, died still living in their own homes, their own lives into their nineties, but aged auntie can't control her own life any more she forgets - like you all forget "what did I come in this room for?" but she forgets more and more often - like whether she's eaten today, or that she came into this room for her food, that anyone visited her this morning and even how to get home from the shops, and that is scary for her. She's not got Alzheimer's and she can still do the Telegraph cryptic cross word, so you can see how frustrating, demeaning and maddening it is for her to forget every day. If she forgets to eat, she dizzy. If she forgets her medicine, she's in trouble.

Recently, AA sat down with ASC, mental health services, two friends from the Saint Vincent de Paul Society and me and we all her eating, shopping, and other things. The SVP is an interesting organisation. Years ago, AA was an active member, visiting old people in their homes, care homes, sheltered housing or community centres, chatting with them, keeping them company, she threw them crumbs of company and solace, thus making a loved and respected member of her community.

Now her turn has come, and those who watched her as a role model, now watch for her and hence came the SVP members to her review meeting. These are people who deal practically with AA - what I can't do living 200 miles away, people who observe AA getting thinner, and when AA tells ASC that she does her own shopping, shake their heads, so ASC know the real story.
AA built up her relationship with these people years ago; now they respect and even love her. I cannot sing their praises enough. AA's breadcrumbs are floating back to her as currant buns.

Memories are made of stuff

This head scarf is the first present my father gave my mother circa 1947. Eventually she passed it to me with admonishments to look after it, that it was important.

These other photos are of stuff I found in Aged Auntie's flat.

'Stuff' sounds so deprecatory, as if of no importance. But to AA these things are what remind her. Her iron is a professional tailor's iron and extremely heavy and AA was a professional tailor. When I insisted that it had to go because having too much meant that stuff hid important things, she asked me where I'd be taking it. I ventured, 'an antique shop?' to be told that it wasn't an antique and that it was still used professionally and AA had a certain intelligent glint in her eye, so I remembered the Moroccan tailor in our town and said that I'd take it there.

Then AA looked at the old tools I'd pulled out. They were her father's tools. "Chop-chop", she remarked as she looked at his axe - another memory.

Memories are contained in stuff, stuff that brings back memories of other people, other times, lives lived and passed. Memories keep alive, and that's why you don't want to take away old people's stuff, because you take away their memories.

Two men and a car

Yesterday was an interesting day, not only because I spent most of it with two rather nice young men. What is a middle aged woman doing hanging out with two men in their twenties?

My son was searching for his first car and I was taken along as support and potential adviser - he flatters me because I've only once bought a car. Son's friend thought he knew something about cars, and indeed I was impressed that he turned up equipped for the adventure. His kit included:

• magna light
• plastic gloves
• i-phone

He used the light to peer at the car's dark places, under the bonnet, behind the boot, beneath the wheels. And his gloves kept his hands clean when he poked the wheels to find the brakes. This poking the brakes was helpful on the first car we looked at, a Ford Focus in Milton Keynes because he found a lip and suggested that the brakes might soon need to be replaced, and that comment initiated a conversation with the salesman who assured us that the cars his organisation sold did MOTs before they put them up for sale, so the brakes should be safe enough to pass the MOT - you assume. But the Ford Focus was a tad expensive, so we drove home to have some lunch and further perusal of car selling web sites before venturing out again to Luton, via Dunstable.

The Dunstable car site looked a bit dicey being a temporary office on an unmade up lot and the end of a very quiet road on a quiet industrial estate - we only found it because of the hand painted words on the gate-post "Car sales". We turned round and headed off for Luton.

Son's friend now used his smart phone to access Google map to get us to the Luton. Unfortunately, it wasn't a GPS that might have told us about the closed road and the detour and the detour took us down and up a local road with yellow lines each side and cars parked each side and on coming buses so driving life became a bit fraught. My car is on the small side, and if I see a space to pull in, I'll fit, but if on-coming bus decides to carry on on-coming then my car can't reach the space to pull in. I had to reverse down the main road until I reached a junction full of traffic and still no room for on-coming bully-bus. At this point, another driver suggested I reversed into a side-road on the right, which would have meant only two other cars would have to reverse. Fortunately, I realised that if I pulled onto the kerb on the right, then bus could squeeze between me and other parked cars - not sure why bus couldn't pull over more. Doing this meant that I couldn't get back out into the traffic stream until son's friend turned up sterling. He jumped out of the car, stopped the traffic to let me back into the flow and jumped back in. We decided that we weren't going to come home that route.

The delay meant it was nearly dusk by the time we arrived at the next car sales, a muddy lot tended by a bearded Muslim, with some others collecting and tipping barrels of sand into the muddy ruts. The car was a Nissan Almera and S'sF immediately noticed some damage to the rear bumper and a check revealed the car had been rear shunted. He peered at its engine - his torch now being essential as the light went, but every thing else seemed acceptable. Son, S'sF and Muslim salesman started negotiations over MOT, documents, price, means of payment, when to pay.

Suffice it to say, son has bought his first car and I expect to see more of him now he can drive over here without the hassle of a long slow bus journey at inconvenient hours. So maybe I won't have to drive him places again, but neither will I get the chance to drive his friends around too. End of another era, start of a new.

Learning when you're 60

It's a bit disturbing to a newly turned 60 year old to read that Brain function can start declining 'as early as age 45'

My first reaction was that they would get that result if they tested only on civil servants, British civil servants - which is a bit rude of me to imagine that civil servants might start losing brain function earlier than other working people. But then seriously, when I looked at the age cohort - 45-70 over ten years - I had to wonder if perhaps these people were stuck in the same job, still employed after ten years, so had no reason to use their brains, never learned anything new. If you're 55 say, and have secure employment and a pension to retire on at sixty, then what motivation do you have to learn new skills, memorise new material, practise something new, when you can carry on doing what you've been doing for perhaps thirty years. And if you don't use it, then you lose it.

If you haven't played netball for years, then do you imagine that you can still run around like you used to? If you haven't spoken French for years, then can you remember all the vocabulary you used to have? Is it then surprising that the muscles you used to use to play games no longer work? Is it surprising that you've forgotten how to learn a language? NO!

Five years ago I struggled to learn new moves in tae kwon do. Five years ago I struggled to understand new theories and concepts in business and social science. I struggled to write academic papers, and I struggled to make new physical patterns. I still struggle. BUT, I know that I can learn them. I realised this when I started to dance and found that some of the movements I'd practised at tae kwon do were transferable to dancing. Ergo, since I've done a lot of learning in the last five years, some of the academic skills I've learned must transfer to other contexts.

I recommend life-long learning.

New years' travelling plans

You don't want to spend a fortune on air tickets to another continent and then not stay for more than a couple of weeks. I have such a dilemma in that I haven't been to see my brother in the States for 16 years. I last went to visit brother and his wife in 1996 when they paid for us to spend Christmas with them after my husband had died in August. Christmas promised to be very bleak that year, and I was devastated, deep in mourning. Since brother & wife hadn't been able to fly over for the funeral, which would have been an utter waste of money to fly so far for a couple of days for the sake of someone dead, brother paid for daughter, son and me to fly to Vegas and to stay with them for three weeks. Son had three weeks holiday from his new school, and I just took daughter off for the last week of her school term without even asking permission.

I remember those weeks well, brother's very sensitive care for all of us, sister-in-law's welcome and companionship, and they kept us busy. They took us to visit the Vegas casinos (keep within the paths because we were with children), see the white lion, and the first time I saw Cirque du Soleil. I'd never heard of it then, but it was the most amazing circus, with no words, just acrobats, and clowns. They weren't nice clowns though. SiL told us that we weren't going to have seats near the front in case the clowns picked on us. And we watched one poor man following a clown who had his tickets and was showing him to his seat, along the aisle, along a row, over the back of some seats, along another row, over the back of some seats, then the clown tore up the tickets! The poor man was stranded.

But I haven't been to see brother & SiL since. They've come here several times, and
my son has visited them twice, but I've not been there. Mainly I've been engrossed in bringing up my children, first on my own, then I remarried, and have been building relationships with my new family, and husband had paid work too and didn't retire until 2008, by which time I was well into my PhD, so couldn't travel too much - except for that trip to India for the Navjote. I could travel to academic conferences for my studies, and even got the expenses covered, so I managed to get to a very eminent conference in Canada in 2010. This year I presented at a conference slightly closer to home, in Amsterdam. Now I have no academic affiliation that will support me at conferences, so I'll probably only go to a couple in Oxford, and might even gate-crash those, depending on how much they cost.

So I want to go and see brother & SiL in 2012. I've arranged my Open University tutoring so that I am free in September for two or three weeks, and husband's agreed to it, though he hasn't yet agreed to more than two weeks and we haven't yet booked our tickets. I expect we can do more than just stay with brother & SiL like I did last time, because now we don't have lots of children to look after. In 1996, SiL had three children and I had my two. I visited them earlier in 1988 when between us we had five children under school age, and we went nowhere but the supermarket, which was my excitement of the holiday - I'd never been in an American supermarket or anywhere in America for that matter. So my previous two trips to the States haven't been very good, and I've had little to entice me back, but this time husband and I might hire a car and go some other places too, like the Grand Canyon, or Zion National Park, and if we go in September, SiL says the temperature is good and we could go alpine hiking up Mt Charleston or visit their holiday hut.

Maybe husband and I will visit India in 2013, or I wonder when I could visit with daughter. When I was in India in 2008, I watched all those young women, and I missed my 17 year old daughter, and I watched them together and thought that she would get on with them. But daughter is finishing her first degree this year and may have a job without much leave in 2013, so she won't have the time to come with me. On the other hand, she loves linguistics, and has just spent a year studying maths in French in France before returning to Bristol to finish her maths degree, and is considering taking a masters in linguistics. At the moment she's looking at studying in Dublin or Wales, and she's job hunting. I wonder if she could study languages of India or linguistics in India. Then spending money to visit India with her in 2013 wouldn't seem like a waste of a fortune.

A Navjote in New Zealand

Brilliant! a Navjote in New Zealand.

My Indian girlfriend emailed me that her grandson had had his Navjote in New Zealand where his parents live because his father couldn't get long enough time off work to travel to India. So IGF and her husband have gone to New Zealand until next July. IGF's son posted the photos of the Navjote on Facebook.

The photos I like best are where there are lots and lots of children and my IGF looks like a matriarch there, happy and proud. I looked at how she'd arranged her sari because I'd just been explaining saris at Toastmasters, so I wanted to know how she was wearing it.

Enjoy New Zealand - how nice to be able to stay for several months, and watch and be involved in her grandsons' every day life so that she gets to know them and they know her.

Wearing a sari

Last week, my always exquisitely dressed girl friend, AEDGF, said that she was going to a party, that she wanted to wear some Indian dancing clothes and produced a sari. I don't think sarees are very easy to dance in, particularly when it's a western woman dancing, and then I discovered that she didn't know how to put one on. So I showed her, and then got her to practise. It wasn't an easy sari because it was nylon and kept slipping.

In 1976 my Indian girl friend (IGF) first showed my Australia nursing girl friend and me how to pleat the folds. Most English women don't know how to do that. I have the photos of us in the saree shop surrounded by the most beautiful colours, hues, sheens. I bought two sarees, a turquoise one and a pink one with oil painted decorations, and there's a photo of me wearing the pink one.

AEDGF rang me over the weekend because we were going to meet at Toastmasters on Monday evening. Toastmasters is a speech making club, where we practise making speeches, and it is very interesting because you hear 4 or 5 short speeches, around 7 minutes, in an evening, and they could be on all sorts of different topics. Yesterday, one chap wanted to practise vocal variety, and told us a tantalising tale of Jack Landon's, then my coaching girl friend wanted to practise a presentation she was going to give to some sports coaches, and someone else spoke about her holiday in Cuba, showing us a photo of her being kissed by a dolphin.

AEDGF hasn't got a long slip to wear under her sari and wanted me to bring her one that she could borrow. And then I had the idea that I could do a demonstration speech on 'How to put on a sari'. I dressed for the part in my turquoise sari, struggling into the choli, eventually managing to breathe because it's a bit tight. I put on rather a lot of makeup, packed the pink sari, its slip and choli and went to Toastmasters. You must imagine the looks when I arrived because although it is Christmas and we'd said that we'd dress up, the 'dressing up' was a bit quiet. AEDGF had a Christmasy hat on her head, and a gold shiny polo necked jumper, and chief toastmaster had a tie with Father Christmas faces on it, but I was the most dressed. A couple of the women said I looked stunning, so that was a good start for my speech.

I started by saying 'Namaste', and what I was going to do, which slightly worried the men because they thought they were going to be subject to a bit of a strip tease, but then I pulled out the pink saree, spread it over the floor so that they could see how long it was, and while I was doing that, AEDGF was pulling the pink underskirt on over her trousers. I didn't give her the choli. Then I put the pink sari on her, made her turn round to show everyone, showed people how the pallu at the back of my sari was a different pattern and how far it hung, and that I could pull it over my shoulders or head. I put it over AEDGF's head, told everyone how a sari made you look and feel beautiful, and finished with another 'Namaste'.

I hope my IGF'd have been proud that I remembered her lessons from so long ago. I got husband to take some photos of me in the turquoise sari, and perhaps I'll put them on Facebook, or even here. I realise there are different ways of wearing a sari, and I could look some up on youtube, but I'll stick to the way IGF showed me. Thank you. It's good to have her as a friend.

Your favourite colours

Someone recently asked me what my favourite colours are. But it depends where you are and what you're doing, if you're wearing the colours, or sitting in a room of colours for example.

Wearing colours - I wear blues, all shades of blues, and other colours only if they are blue tones. I wear turquoise, navy blue, royal blue, sky blue, lilac blue, lilac and purple. But is grape a blue grape or a red grape? I'll wear reds with a touch of blue, so crimson red works but not scarlet red. Some pinks work, but not peach or apricot because they've got too much yellow in them, and I'll never, ever wear orange.

Rooms of colour - I love the colour yellow. I may not wear it but I'd decorate every room in my house in yellow because it's so cheerful and bright. When I was a little girl, I knew blue was for Mary, and brown was for Saint Joseph, or that blue was for boys and pink was for girls. But I had a yellow mug and said that I liked yellow because it was the colour of the sun.

I like deep browns, but now I understand that brown is a colour of the seventies so I'm not allowed to have it. Well, I wouldn't wear it (not to mention that one of my school uniforms was a light brown), but I could have a yellow room, with a few dark brown oak pieces of furniture, couldn't I?

What are your favourite colours, and why?

Breast cancer women 'stop drugs'

** Breast cancer women 'stop drugs' **

"About a third of breast cancer patients stop taking medication because side-effects are more severe than they expect, researchers suggest"

says the BBC here.

I'm not surprised. Last time I saw a specialist doctor, he listened only to the first side effect that I mentioned, then he launched off into a spiel about the side-effects only being in the first three months, while I went through another side effect that minute. I watched him and thought perhaps after three months you just get so used to the side effects that you think them normal. But after reading this BBC article, I realise that you just don't bother telling the doctors because they aren't going to listen anyhow. If the doctors aren't going to listen, then you have to do your own thing to deal with the side-effects, and if that means stopping taking the drugs, then so be it.

I had an interesting email from Cancer Research UK about the causes of cancer that you can control, with a wonderful graphic that I recommend downloading and printing. In breast cancer, the fifth most important cause is inactivity, not something you might have accused me of. However, since I last saw that doctor, a new side effect has attacked me - creaky achy joints. I need supple joints so I can kick at tae kwon do, so a side effect that prevents me being active in order to prevent cancer is a very unhelpful side effect, to the point of being contradictory, and therefore the cause of the side effect should be avoided. The cause is the drugs so stop taking the drugs.

I'm a jam sandwich

Step daughter #3 gave me a hug, and her partner joined in. I felt like I was the jam in the sandwich and just as sweet.

Bowling together

Bowling together [1], not alone, demonstrates friendship, networks, and links.

My girlfriends, together with their partners or child in some cases, along with some very close members of my family went ten-pin bowling for my birthday. Some friends came from very close, being neighbours, and others from miles away, people I knew when our children were small, friends from the Open University, and friends from tae kwon do.

Unfortunately friends from belly dancing and toastmasters couldn't make it or we could have had some performances and speeches.

Husband made a wonderful cake - the best tasting he's made yet, and he bakes good cakes. He iced it with numbers

00111100

People gave me wine, flowers, smellies, chocolates and books, so I'm having a week of luxuriating in the bathroom. There's sparkling Saumur left to share if you have the time to come and visit me.

I don't know who gave me a dozen pink scented roses - they're beautiful. Thank you, friend.

---

[1] Putnam, R. D. (2000) Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, New York ; London.

Sixty reasons to cheer

Sixty soon and sixty friends and sixty things to do - what a long list compared to that of a six-year old - did I have a birthday party when I was six? I might have had. I know I didn't have a party when I was seven, because instead my baby brother was born, and they told us (my bigger little brother and me) in the playground at school that we had a new brother, and we went home and saw him in bed with our mother.

Following the example of a colleague who was fifty recently, here are my sixty reasons to cheer in my sixtieth birthday.

Successes!

Today has been a good day

1. Step daughter #2 had a mortgage offer
2. Son earned his Masters degree with distinction

Cancer statistics

Did I have cancer? Am I a survivor because that routine mammogram in February found the tiniest lump, diagnosed it as cancer and I had local treatment (operation & radiotherapy), followed by systemic treatment (these nasty anti-hormone tablets). I reasoned that it was such a small lump that it wouldn't have been feel-able for at least a year, and then some. So with treatment at that stage I'd certainly have lived longer than five years from last February. Now I've had the diagnosis and the treatment, of course I'm told I'm likely to survive five years and the survival statistics would look good, but I would have survived those five years anyhow!

Now there's a debate about routine mammograms resulting in over-diagnosis, consequent over-treatment and survivor stories that encourage greater take-up of mammograms. Here's the original research from America, in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Note that the authors, Welch & Frankel conclude:
"Most women with screen-detected breast cancer have not had their life saved by screening. They are instead either diagnosed early (with no effect on their mortality) or overdiagnosed."

Perhaps I don't need to keep taking these horrid tablets. I shall certainly argue this point with the oncologist at the next meeting in January. Perhaps it would be reasonable to stay on them only until the next mammogram in March shows that there are no more lumps. Last time I saw an oncologist, he said that if new lumps appear, it tends to be within the year or eighteen months after initial diagnosis. So perhaps I can come off the tablets after a clear year to eighteen months, instead of staying on them for five years.

BIG birthday

I have a big birthday coming up and I would like to celebrate it. I'd like to celebrate:

1. with sixty girlfriends,
   
2. take them to a spa for a day,
   
3. with a nice lunch and
   
4. lots of bubbly.
   

Realising that around a dozen girlfriends had commented supportively on my Facebook page when I talked about my radiotherapy, I wondered if I had sixty girlfriends, so I counted them up and reached over seventy. Seventy girlfriends collected over the years from school, college, work, hobbies, and neighbours, and my lovely female relatives.

But, first I couldn't find a suitable spa for us all, although daughter and I did go and test run a couple. ;) And secondly, some of my friends live too far away, maybe only in another county, but some live in the States, or Australia or Spain or New Zealand or somewhere in Asia.

So I'm planning a smaller get together of my local girlfriends with a few important men friends as well for luck.

I've asked Husband to bake me a big fruit cake, and last night the kitchen smelled of spices and fruit, so that's promising. I've found a venue, and started to invite a few people.

Now, I need to organise the nibbles and fizz. How shall I decorate the room? Any suggestions?

Young nuns

The BBC recently had a production on young women contemplating becoming nuns. I knew it was on having seen a review of it in The Tablet, but I hadn't realised until son pointed it out that one of the young women was someone I have known. Though I haven't seen her for more than ten years, I've talked on the phone with her mother nownthen, and son has been in touch with her more recently and has time and respect for her.

It's good to know how the youngsters have grown up.

Bureaucratic messes

I sent off my tax return a month ago, to town A, as tax man asked. Now, a month later, I get a letter from tax man at town B, saying he wants my return! So I've sent him a copy of the return I sent the first tax man, together with a covering letter. Friend who's an expert on tax says that all HMRC post now goes to a central system that allocates it round the country to offices that have capacity. So the fact that I sent something to town A doesn't mean it actually went there - it may well have gone to town Z! It should however have reached them and been recorded so the implication is that they have managed to lose it. Typical!

Daughter's university accommodation wants to be paid on a card, and with direct debit but the account needs two signatures so it doesn't have a card, and the accommodation organisation has mislaid or lost the direct debit we set up in April. They've agreed, reluctantly to accept a cheque. So I've written a cheque, and a covering letter.

Messes come in threes. I've managed those two but I can't manage the pension letters I get from Barclays. I can't make head nor tail of their jargon, their numbers, their variation on dates, annuities, instructions and policies. I wish I'd never bought the bloomin' policy because the effort is just not worth it.

Versailles kir

Nice trip to Versailles with nearest and dearest to finish off my PhD with a celebratory glass of kir at the Open University degree ceremony.

That's my third trip to France this year.