Favourite TV programs as a child

 My parents got a TV circa 1956, after my uncle had got one for all the family to watch the royal wedding. Our TV could get BBC and ITV. Nanna's got only BBC. 

There was Watch with Mother that I watched with my mother and smaller siblings. It varied every day, sometimes being Andy Pandy, sometimes Bill & Ben the flower pot men. I liked the Wooden Tops. Picture book was a bit boring - I think the reader talked down a bit to us.

We were allowed to watch children's television, which was before six o'clock, so I'd be sure not to dawdle back from school (then I was a big girl and didn't need collecting and an escort, and Mum had three smaller siblings to mind so wouldn't have come to fetch me). The offerings I remember were Ivanhoe, or The Lone Ranger, or Robin Hood, or Lassie. And Crackerjack. Crackerjack had a presenter with a name I'd not come across before - Eamonn - and he had a lovely velvety voice. When I was older, Blue Peter was fun.

Getting into teenage years, I heard at school what my friends were watching and came home to ask to watch them. Dr Who was on after six o'clock so that required a bit of discussion to persuade Mum we be allowed to watch it. It had William Hartnell as the Doctor and an unmemorable female minion - the culture of the time. And then the Daleks were so scary! I pretended not to be scared but smallest brother would hide behind the sofa and peek out. 

When we got nearer taking GCEs, Mum cut TV watching down, particularly worriying about its propensity to distract my brother as he also approached his exams. We couldn't watch on weekdays.  I never watched regularly again.

Christmas: Father Xmas and God

 Do you teach your small children that Father Christmas is coming, and he'll bring presents for good children? 

And do you teach your children about God?

When I was six, at a Catholic school, someone in class told us that Father Christmas didn't exist, that it was your parents leaving stockings at the end of your bed. I accepted that because it made sense. But then I wondered, "if  Father Christmas isn't true, when are they going to tell me that God isn't true either?"

They never did. I observed that my family had too much invested in the idea of God for them not to believe it. Grandparents, aunts and uncles went to church on Sunday mornings, parents had photos of a church wedding. I was been trained to make my first communion, with church plans for a big event and fancy white dresses for the girls. They'd look as pretty as princesses.

Still being enamoured of fairy stories, I looked for a prince to marry, telling my mother I'd marry Prince Charles. Reality struck. "You can't, dear, because you're a Catholic, and if you marry him, he couldn't be king."

Ambition dashed at the age of six!

Happy birthday me

Having a special birthday this month, it seemed worth having a bit more of a celebration than just ignoring it. After all, who knows what state I'll be in for my next big 0 birthday?

There's a local tea shop that does yummy cakes, decent tea, and an elegant espresso, with a separate couple of rooms upstairs. I talked to its propiator, Nicki. She was happy to cater for up to 18 people up there, and would bake me chocolate gluten free birthday cake with candles. 

I invited about a score of local women friends. Not all could come; we ended up with around a dozen. But some had never met any other friends of mine before and some were going to know only each other, like the choir sops. How to get them to mingle?

Now the thing about getting older is that you've done lots of interesting things, so I got a quiz together, contacting each friend beforehand to ask for fun and interesting facts about them. Then I put the facts together as a quiz for them to ask each other and find out about each other. 

Here are some of the facts.

• Who appeared on the BBC milking a cow?
• Who fell into the sorting machine at the council rubbish tip! 
• Who has a model village with a hamster buried in a mahogany coffin under the parish church?
• Who was asked out by Vice President Johnson of the United States?
• Who fed hamburgers to lions at Tampa?
• Who went to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party in 2012?  
• Who completed a 2100m x 8 zip wire challenge in Split, Croatia!
• Who lived on a farm in Norway, also in a cabin in the woods?
• Who walked into the Louvre when it was shut because the security guard thought she was staff?
• Who trespassed in the Karnak temple in Luxor, Egypt, after closing time?
• Who is studying an OU law degree?
• Who did a masters at Oxford at 57? 
• Who got married to Davey Jones from The Monkees twice a day for two months?
• Which mad, irresponsible mum (and dad) took toddlers to an uninhabited island off the coast of Malaysia where there were no people or electricity or phones but large monitor lizards!
• Who's done at least 25 amateur musicals including playing Annie in Annie get your gun, and Roxie Hart in Chicago? 
• Whose first serious full-time job was as a milk woman and was taught by a milkman called Ernie?
• Which woman here has pulled a car?
• Who is a Morris musician and dancer?
• Who's got a 16.2hh chestnut sports horse?
• Who's been sky diving?
• Who was a games maker working at Greenwich at the equestrian event for 2012 Olympics?
• Who overcame extreme fear on canopy walkways in Malaysia, Sydney Harbour Bridge, the cathedral in Milan and Sigiriya Rock in Sri Lanka?
• Who caught a 7-foot-long sail fish?
• Who's met the Queen?
• Who collects mechanical clocks?
• Who's bathed on a beach in Goa?
• Who's flown a glider round a preplanned 100km route?
• Who's got a black belt in a martial art?

Aren't my friends interesting?! You recognise the facts about me? After about an hour and a half, we had a plenary, and matched every fact to someone in the room, which elicited more stories, like why she was on a zip wire in the first place, and what answer she gave VP Johnson. It was a fun couple of hours. Thank you my friends.

Happy birthday, Mum

My mother recorded in her family history

On the morning of October 22nd 1923, in Bootle on Merseyside, two little girls were going to school. They were cousins, eight years old and good friends. Their route to school took them down Linacre Lane, across Stanley Road, and on through side streets to St. James' Select Catholic School. It was on one of these side streets, Balfour Road, skipping and playing as they went, that one of them, named Edith, but at this stage of her life known in the family as Girlie, looked behind them and said, 'Look Gracie, isn't that your Dada?'

Grace turned round and saw her father on his bike, head down, pedalling rapidly towards them. Before he reached them however he crossed the road, parked his bicycle and hammered urgently on a house door. Grace and Edith called and waved but he neither saw nor heard them. The door opened and he vanished inside. The two little girls went on their way wondering what it was all about. Grace found out when she went home for dinner. As she went up the entry which  led to the back door of the house she passed her Aunty Sally, Edith's mother, who smiled at her and said, 'Hurry up, there's a real live doll for you at home!' In her mother's bedroom a minute baby sister lay in the cradle, and the midwife, so suddenly and urgently called for had just left. Willie, her younger brother, had been called in from play to see his baby sister but had been more interested in enquiring of Nurse Scott why his mama was in bed in the middle of the day. Five weeks early, a not really wanted fourth child, born nearly five years after the family had, hopefully, been completed, I lay in the cradle and cried lustily. The midwife,calling a few days later when my mother was downstairs again and busy in the kitchen, listened and said with satisfaction and some surprise, 'Well, that's not a premature cry!'

I was small though, and weighed only four pounds when weighed for the first time, fully clothed, at four weeks. My father held me easily in one, admittedly rather large, hand and used to tell me that my head was no bigger than an orange. "No bigger than that!" he would say, picking one out of the fruit bowl to show me. But I thrived, and was showered with love and attention by parents and siblings. My mother had born the other three closely, one after the other, during and just after the first world war. With her husband away at sea and in danger, she, alone and pregnant, must often have been too weary and too worried to enjoy her family. And our father, having missed much of his children's babyhood became a rather strict Victorian style parent on his return. For both of my parents this new 'unwanted' baby was a new shared experience.

Mum thrived indeed, living into her nineties. Happy birthday, Mum. Remembering you.

An autumn wedding

 What a week last week was, when we were in Canada! 

At Monday's thanks giving meal, half way through, daughter's partner announces that there'll be one other at the meal the follwing evening. "Who?" we enquire. "Pastor Brian" and "we're getting married tomorrow".

They gave us less than 23 hours notice! And it was a lovely ceremony with just the six of us: the couple, the pastor, his mother, my DH and me, out on their deck in the fall light. They made their vows, his mother and I signed as witnesses, then sang them "Sunrise, Sunset" from "The Fiddler on the Roof". Glen, who's grown up hearing it, refrained from joining in. They had no cake, or confetti, no speeches, and only a few photos taken. DH happened to have bought a bottle of bubbly from the local shop. The wedding meal was in a private room at a local hotel. 

Other than that excitement, we had coffee from Tim Hortons, and visited a few shops, but didn't buy flowers for the wedding because we didn't know about it. On Monday morning, his mother prepared the thanks giving meal while we drove over to Pinery Provinical Park at Lake Huron, and got bitten by a thousand sand flies. Poor daughter had a bite on her face. Fortunately, it had gone down by the time she donned her wedding dress the next day. She sewed it in six weeks, because they only planned the wedding from when my email arrived stating our dates and flights. In six weeks, they'd organised the pastor, made the dress, ordered wedding rings, and booked the hotel meal.

We arrived home last Friday morning, and jet lag like oversleeping is nearly sorted. Now to distribute some maple syrup to family and hen minder.

Meeting family again

Pleased that restrictions are lifting and we can travel. Husband and I plan to travel to Canada soon to see our youngest. Daughter is settled there with a good job, and a home. Last summer, she and her partner bought a house together and I've not yet seen it. 

But travelling can be costly and stressful enough without Covid, and this time we have to get PCR tests, costing nearly £100 each. We have to have negative PCR results before we're allowed on the plane. That means we'll need similar tests from Canada before we can fly back too. That adds nearly £400 to the cost of the trip. Bit of a pain.

But the five of us are looking forward to the visit. Husband has dug out his passport, and checked my booking for our PCR tests 72 hours or fewer before our flat. Daughter is telling me something of what they've planned, like to take something nice to wear cos we'll have a meal out one evening. The woman-who-should-be-daughter's-MiL is preparing the turkey cos it'll thanksgiving Canadian happens when we're there. That's so exciting - if you just go on holiday you don't get such experiences, only when you've got friends and family in the company. 

La Motte

Light and activities promises a stonking day at La Motte du Caire  

You can see so many people, crew and pilots preparing their gliders. 

It looks as if today's weather will be easier soaring than it was this day 25 years ago.

I read in the club's newsletter that an old friend RC had died in 2020, and I was so out of touch that I didn't know. 

A month of life, started with death, continuing with birth

We celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary this month. Both having been widowed, we have more than 50 years of wedded life between us, which is something to celebate. We cherish each other and subscribe to the "till death us do part" bit. 

Death came to his brother at the end of June, and his funeral is now, three weeks later. Funerals are family events. The first funeral I went to was my grandmother's in 1973. As her coffin was lowered into the grave, I choked. Remembering how hard I found that, when I came to another funeral in the 1980s, a lad of about 18 years old, killed in a glider collision during a competition, I stood well back from the main funeral party. I watched his family go to the grave, his parents, and his sister, the only sibling, who would never have nephews and nieces. 

I've been to other funerals since: my late husband, my cousin, parents, aunts and uncles. Today, was the funeral of someone of another of my now older generation. At the meal after, they had a photo album of his life, as a toddler with his mother, as a young man with both his parents, as a university student with his brother, his wedding day, his own little boy, now a grown man who wrote his eulogy.

Yet two days ago a child was born into our family. That day was I showed his toddler brother photos of when their father was a toddler, and his baby sister was born.  Life goes on. 

Improved singing

Our F2F choir (Next Stage Choir) that has been rehearsing in groups of no more than 30 and outdoors, met this week, indoors, all of us (about 40). But there were only four sopranos. Before lockdown, we were eight or more, but at least three have dropped out, and this week two were away. So only four nervous sops. 

We were singing Sondheim. Do you know how difficult Sondheim is? But beautiful harmonies, amazing suspensions. BTW, I didn't know about suspensions until I joined the Self Isolation Choir. I've learned a lot. Our F2F director, Russell, decided to start the rehearsal with a fast piece, "Putting it together". Sondheim is so so challenging. And the sopranos are first in that piece. 

We also rehearsed "Into the Woods". At last we could hear each other together, not on Zoom, or the poor accoustics of outside. It was fascinating to hear the minor tones of the second sopranos and altos underlying the brightness of the first sopranos. Sondheim writes dark pieces. 

Finally, we finished off with Sunday - I hadn't got my music for that but almost know it anyhow. It's a lovely piece. Russell grumbled that we should all be off book for that by now, and he wants us off book next week for "Into the woods." 

The best bit was right at the end, as we finished, one of the tenors came up to the four of us, and said, "Ladies, you were great tonight! There were only four of you sopranos and you sounded wonderful!" Wow. <blush of pleasure>.

Father's day is this weekend

 And yesterday was a father's birthday. Who remembers?

https://ejh2.blogspot.com/2018/06/another-fathers-day.html

To reconstruct or not? to be or to do?

A fellow BC sufferer/ survivor in a FB group asked if she was mad to have no reconstruction. Like me she's having/had a one side mastectomy. Like me she's opted for no recon. Like mine, her surgeon says she can change her mind later  "Did any of you do the same as me and then change your mind later?"

When I had my right mastectomy in March 2020, I reasoned it would be risky to have more surgery and it was for looks on, not for function. S. daughter #2 advised me that her daddy could manage me having only one boob!  

S. daughter #3 advised me that losing the boob meant I became an Amazonian woman (proverbially they thought they could fight better without the R one!).  

My tae kwon teacher admired my ability to get back to training within weeks. I could still kick, punch, block, squat, do sit-ups, press-ups, see, hear. Having had a boob job would mean I couldn’t do press-ups for months.

A year on, I’m ok with my looks. What I can do matters more than how I look. Looks make me feminine, but action makes me feminist.

Wall repair under lockdown

Total lockdown has been lifted in England and today we can meet in groups of six, or meet family of five plus two grandparents equals seven and in our garden today, we plan to meet family. That'll make it a busy place because we also have three builders fixing our old wall that fell down last year. 

This garden is enclosed by a wall, a hundreds year old brick wall with lime mortar, two bricks thick with capping stones - beautiful. But it is a lot of wall, and the previous owner who replaced a lot of the wall made it only one brick thick, thus halving the cost. Unfortunately, he also used cement not lime mortar to repoint some of the old bricks. That doesn't work because the cement is harder than the brick, and water has to get out through the brick thereby dissolving it. So we have patches where the brick is eroded. 

You can see the capping stones on the wonky piece of wall in this photo, and the crack where it's leaning into our garden, though there's a buttress on the other side. 

When the gardeners took the ivy off last year,  it was obviously unsafely wobbly, so we got our builder, GP, to take it down safely. Unfortunately, because the cement mortar stuck to them, the bricks were not salvageable and we're having to source old bricks to rebuild. 

This afternoon then, when our lunch time guests arrive there could be ten of us in the garden. What sociability after lockdown!

Lockdown memories in space

Fascinating podcast "All in the Mind" from BBC Radio 4 this week on the pandemic's impact on memory, with an interview with Professor Catherine Loveday from the University of Westminster. It seems people are not remembering as well during lockdown, though once they're out and about again, their memories get better again. It's something to do with having different physical places for different activities. 

That's one reason I've set up my work and play computers in different rooms. I've taken advantage of still having all the space we needed for our combined family, but they've all gone, leaving us rattling around in this mansion. I can do online tae kwon do in the dining room - no one's come to dine with us for months so I've pushed the table to one side and stuck my little laptop on it. And I can do online choir in there cos it's next to the piano.

There're memory techniques. A technique that memory champions use to memorise a load of things like a sequence of 52 cards (why would you want to?) is called memory palace. They visualise a space and place that they associate with each number and apparently the technique works. 

That sounds similar to the BBC's report - get out and about, meet people and you remember better.  I must get out more.

Singing in isolation, and singing in choirs

Tweeted 23 October: Ben England BEM

Having now received 1000s of recordings from singers there’s a common theme: “Here’s my awful submission, please don’t listen to it. My voice is terrible, you’ll need whisky just to endure it”. Dear friends thank you for your hard work. Please relax, you are all wonderful x Smiling face with smiling eyes

Choirs were banned. Church choirs, community choirs, choral societies, all were banned. We might give ourselves corona virus. 

Indeed we might. I'd been in the local Next Stage Choir only just over a year when a choir member gave me a divil of a cold. She turned up for a performance, standing next to me, with her nose dripping and her tissues dropping as she sang. She had to come she said. Humph. Please don't.

So no choirs since March. But the Self Isolation Choir started rehearsing Messiah on YouTube live, and it was wonderful. The warm ups worked, and the director, Ben England explained to clear your throat in a way I hadn't known, and it works. And he encouraged his choristers even though he couldn't hear them. Instead of a one hour rehearsal shared between sops, altos, tenors and basses, we got an hour each. And he had this lovely group of professional singers to demonstrate each part. It was fun chatting to others across the world in the YouTube chat box. It was glorious music to learn. 

And then he told us to record it.

No. 

Recording is a technical pain, and when you hear your own voice by itself, you notice all the mistakes you made, mistakes that you'd have avoided if singing next to someone else, or that would have blended in the full voice of a choir. I recorded two. I uploaded one. 

Then the SIC ran a summer school with more beautiful music to learn, so I joined that, and recorded and uploaded two pieces. In the meantime, NSC carried on using Zoom three or four times a week so I learned those musicals, pop, and folk as well. When choirs were allowed together again, we met in September all suitably spaced and safe. To the surprise and pleasure of our NSC director, we knew the music and could sing well together. We just have to relearn to watch him conducting.  At the last same space rehearsal, our NSC director commented on choir members' increased confidence. 

Ben England tweeted:

Further to yesterday, it’s amazing how recordings of isolated voices blend together like coats of paint. With 3 or 4 voices, the sound “coverage” is big, with 80+ it’s huge! Everyone can contribute (just like a choir!) & of course this way any happy accidents can be edited out... https://pic.twitter.com/dATu8zdo4V

Lock down SIC training from Ben England has increased confidence, friendships and musical ability. 

Foxes

Last night, both husband and lodger were awakened by a loud bark. A fox must have been in our back garden to wake them. I've heard and seen the foxes in the street; only a couple of weeks ago a couple of them stopped in the road to bark at each other one evening. 

Foxes look pretty. I don't mind them out in the country and they provide some value by keeping the rat population down. But I do wish there weren't foxes in Aylesbury town centre.  They're bold. Last summer I met one in our garden when I went down to open the hen run and found a fox sitting sunning itself a metre away. Foxes trot up the street, on the way into town, even at nine in the morning, only diverting if people get too close to them. They've taken a neighbour's pet rabbit and several of my hens. 

In January, two foxes jumped into our garden, snaffled two of my three hens, leaving the third, Custard, traumatised, sad and lonely. I suspect that a vixen was pregnant last summer and has raised cubs, and that's what's caused the extra movement and barking. Pests.

A stonking day promises

 Looking at today's weather at La Motte du Caire, a stonking day promises.

The light is right, and the pilots know it because they've already rigged so many gliders and are milling for the briefing.

Would that I were there

Am I a difficult woman?

Am I a difficult woman? Helen Lewis has recently published a book, "Difficult women" that explores the history of women labelled difficult. Difficult  doesn't mean being horrid, just complicated, and possibly not nice. Lewis writes about a host of complicated women, not all of whom are feminists, just awkward women, as Helen Lewis herself can be!
Recently to be a plethora of books about "Difficult Women", "Invisible Women" (Caroline Criado Perez), Bloody Brilliant Women"(Cathy Newman) have been published. And there's Yvette Cooper's "She speaks", Karen Brady's "Strong Woman" and Deborah Frances-White's "The Guilty Feminist". They cover the usual themes of power, getting to the top, trail blazing, being recognised despite being the second sex, the aberrant body of a male. These are good writers, expressing well ideas that many woman have but don't have the skill or the power to express.
Usually I don't identify myself with the women being written about, like I'm not at the top of my tree, or any tree! I don't trail blaze, am recognised for nothing. But, Lewis has picked on one thing I've done and when I did it, it raised a few eyebrows, caused a few comments. Lewis refers to Anna Coote and Tess Gill, and they influenced me. In the seventies, they wrote a small book that argued why women needn't change their name when they married. In the seventies, eighties, even the nineties women changed their surname. HR departments sometimes did it without permission - it was just assumed.
But when I married, I didn't change my name, but kept my father's. Yes, it's still the name of a male, but it was part of the identity I'd grown up with. When my mother and then my cousin asked if I was changing my name, I realised that some people important to me thought it was no longer absolutely essential to take your husband's. My less advanced-thinking to-be-MiL wailed, "But there'll be no second Mrs C!" "What nonsense!" I thought, and politely pointed out that her other son had already married, so she did have a second Mrs C. When I walked into the unemployment benefit office to tell them I was getting married (I thought they'd change or stop my benefit), they said they only needed my married name. Well why would they need that information?! I stated, "I'm not changing it!" and walked out - they hadn't been kind or helpful in there. I was happy to be awkward (difficult?) for that UBO. I guess it was trail blazing because no one else was keeping their maiden name in those days. So yes, sometimes I can be a difficult woman.

The Messiah

"Oh we, like sheep" The Messiah is a Handel's choral work that my dead husband used to play of an evening. We'd stop work, studying OU courses or stop marking, fixing the house, paying bills, whatever, and at nine thirty sit down together for a while in our sitting room on a comfy sofa. It was a time to chat, chat about nothing in particular, just whatever came up. Just time together. And he'd put on a record or a CD. Mostly he put on Bach, but The Messiah was definitely one of his favourites. Being more comfortable with modern pop, I was a bit fazed initially by some of his choices. "Oh we like sheep...." really threw me as I couldn't hear the next bit several bars later "have turned". So I'd sing in the gap, "And I like lamb". I was mocking it, and DH would smile. After he died, I played his music to keep me company. I had a few dates, and the best one was to a performance of Handel's Messiah. I married that date.
In January this year, a neighbour told me that the local choral society was learning to sing The Messiah. I've never sung it, heard it lots but never thought of singing it. No - when I joined the Next Stage Choir, a partnering choir suggested we sing The Hallelujah Chorus, so I'd learned that, or tried to learn to sing it and assessed myself as pants, but still enjoyed it.
I joined the local choral society intending to learn, not perform on March 25th. The choir master is great at teaching us to sing emotion. For example, singing "Unto us a child is born" he told each part to think of themselves as parents or grandparents. This child is born - the mother and father are the sopranos and tenors, the grandparents are the altos and basses. And of course I could think of my newly born grandson.
In the event, the concert was cancelled because of lock down, and I still couldn't sing most of it very well. I was getting better at the Hallelujah chorus. However, a self isolation choir sprang up: The Self Isolation Choir. Thousands of us  from all over the word, England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, US, log into a YouTube live recording several days a week for the director, Ben England to teach us to sing and we're singing The Messiah. We had pdf copies of the music and access to Choraline. We had to video ourselves singing in time to a click track, then upload each piece. So we've had to learn some new technical skills too. It's come together into a decent performance, so good that it got publicity on BBC radio and TV yesterday. Our live performance will be on https://www.theselfisolationchoir.com/ this Sunday evening. I shall stop marking at 7.30 and sit down in our sitting room on a comfy sofa for the evening to listen, watch and join The Messiah. This time I'll sing more than "We like sheep"

Tae kwon do under lock down

Are you keeping fit during lock down? Or too miserable to be bothered?
 "CV won’t worry you - axe kick it! "said my tkd friend
Bytomic tae kwon do has kept me and other students fit by presenting classes despite the lock down on Facebook Live, but has done even better now by offering us feedback via Zoom classes. Last weekend, I took part in an interim grading for black belt practising in our dining room. Hurrah!
This is so much better than this time last year. You're supposed to do an interim grading at least once a year once you get to black belt, but last year I couldn't cos my retinas fell off and the medics told me not to do any jumping (probably would have been better telling me to sort my infected tooth). So it was extra special that I had the chance to do the interim this way. It's not that I did well or badly; it's that I could do it, last the hour of high intensity exercise and sequences of movements at a high standard.
After an operation, you're vulnerable to infections because the anesthetic reduces your immune response. If we hadn't had lock down, after my op I would have followed medical advice and not gone to tae kwon do classes for two months. The lock down however gave me opportunities to watch on line, and realised that I can still do squats, and lunges and kicks and punch and block with my left arm, so I could keep doing a lot.
Our neighbours shop for us, and I have some online shopping. One neighbour saw on FB my need for tonic to go with my gin and passed a bottle over the wall. Otherwise things are as normal because my work, at a distance for 30 years, carries on as normal.
Enjoying the solitude like Georges Moustaki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9-OzSzCDWo 

Ten days ago

It's been a difficult six or seven weeks. Ten days ago I was just out of hospital after an operation for cancer. I had to have a mastectomy after I was diagnosed with recurrence of breast cancer, in February. The hospital was a bit quiet, almost empty. I got in under the wire, before all other operations were stopped. The surgeon rang the week before to prevent me having to go in for a F2F and she offered me a choice:

• Increase my risk of catching the virus by coming in for the op.
• Wait  six months.

She said that she was delaying all the BCs she'd diagnosed in March, but she was prepared to go ahead with mine. But I had to understand the risks. Then she repeated the discussion at my bedside on the day of the operation to ensure I was fully aware of the risks. One woman decided to not have her op and left. Thank you to those 11-12 medics that treated me on Wednesday: physiotherapist, radiologist, anesthetist, surgeon, unaesthetic nurse, trainee nurse, nurse practitioner, staff nurse and other nurses.
I had to make difficult choices that week.
Now it's ten days ago. I don't yet have symptoms of CV19. I hope those medics also are still healthy.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” (Julian of Norwich)