A tiny glimpse of her foreignness

If you never see my kids at home, or with their dad, or grandparents, you could be forgiven for not realising they aren't your average Scottish weans. They've always lived here, there isn't even a hint of foreignness in their accents, and rarely in their turn of phrase. It's only if you hear them with their dad, that you realise they actually spend half of their time at home in another language...

But every so often something gives it away, whether that is referring to December 24 as Xmas, or having friends round to beat up piñatas for no apparent reason on the Sunday before Pancake day, or whatever. Today was one of those days. We're trying to eat our way through the kitchen so we're having strange dinner combos at the moment. Tonight we found Ikea meatball sauce but no meatballs, so Léon improvised with a links sausage and a square sausage each. I suspect most nine year old Scottish kids would know what that was called, so I had to laugh when Amaia came out with the throw-away line - 'I definitely prefer square sausages to cylinder sausages!' I don't tend to cook sausages, so she's probably only ever heard them discussed in Danish before, but today Daddy's not home, so she had to find a name for them in English.

Henceforth, I will always refer to them as cylinder sausages. 😁

Half birthday restored

In our family we celebrate 'half birthdays'... It's not my side that came up with it but Thomas's - I presume it dates back to their childhood. Both Thomas and his sister have winter birthdays (February and January, respectively), and given their parents used to take them off to their Italian summer house every year, the kids sneakily came up with the idea that if they had half birthdays, they'd have a great excuse to beg two Italian gelateria trips during their summer break.

Given five of the seven of us also have winter birthdays between December 19 and February 8, it didn't take too much arm twisting to continue this tradition into the next generation. Marcel was born on July 27, so his half birthday has never been much of a highlight to be honest, but his real birthday often involves ice cream, foreign climes and beaches so that's ok.

Léon is as European as a child can be. Genetically he's Scottish, a tiny bit English, and he's also a quarter French and German. He has been brought up since birth by a Dane, so is culturally Danish. He's top of his French class, he's a fluent Danish speaker, he can even get by in Italian and is about to start German and Spanish. His favourite place in the world is Italy, where he spends up to six weeks at a time, roaming the Italian mountains with his band of little Italian friends: Aurora, Viola and Alessia. He has aunts and uncles in Denmark and France, a sister who spends the most part of her free time in Spain. Léon started watching subtitled movies at about eight and spends his Saturday nights steeped in Icelandic thrillers, Spanish series and similar. He's even picked up a lot of Swedish from watching 'the Bridge', and often speaks to me in Swedish on the school run just for fun, driving both Anna and Amaia mad... But there's a problem: Léon was born on September 29. About 18 months ago the horror struck him in all its glory. Fucking Theresa May hadn't just triggered article 50, devastating the whole family, she'd triggered it to run out on March 29 - Léon's half birthday!!!

As we've been approaching the date, few families have been as affected by the whole thing, as ours. We've decided to emigrate because of it, so you don't get much steeper than that, but on top of that, celebrating in any shape or form on Brexit day would have been anathema to us.

Léon's face, last week when the EU stepped in and saved the day (even if only by two weeks) was truly something to behold. Looks like Friday's ice cream might just be back on after all!

Brexit - this week.

What the UK press says will happen:

• Tonight - May's vote will be defeated, mainly because remainers want a softer deal 
• Tomorrow - No Deal will be voted down
• Thursday - they will vote to ask for an extension to negotiate a whole new deal
• Friday - the EU will ask how many days, weeks or years they'd like and start the new negotiations
• Every group, from ERG to Remain think they will be able to get exactly what they want.

What the foreign press says will happen:

• Tonight - May's vote will be defeated, mainly because remainers want a softer deal
• Tomorrow - No Deal will be voted down
• Thursday - they will vote to ask for an extension to negotiate a whole new deal
• Friday - the EU will roll their eyes, say the UK has put no new ideas on the table and say their very max is a six week extension till the EU elections but they'd prefer no extension at all
• Remainers will wonder why they didn't vote for May's deal and then spend the transition period negotiating a softer Brexit. ERG will jump with joy as No Deal kicks in.

No-deal Brexit and language degree courses

We seem to have been going round and round on the same merry-go-round now for nearly a year. No-deal Brexit will mean troops on the streets, food shortages, the selling off of the NHS, pet passports being defunct, rationing, chlorinated chickens, Erasmus withdrawn, job losses, planes grounded, driving licences no longer being valid in the EU, medicine rationing, loss of citizens' rights, EHICs down the toilet and roaming charges back, currency collapse and price hikes... Almost every article mentions a subset of these, so I thought I'd look at an angle no one has yet mentioned, because it is potentially pertinent to my family.

When Charlotte signed up to study Economics and Spanish at Glasgow university in May of 2018, her course starting in September of the same year, she based that decision on the 2017-18 Glasgow University prospectus that described her five year course, with the third year spent in Spain as a language assistant. This isn't the same as an Erasmus scheme, where you study abroad at a university. I know this scheme well, having taken part in it myself in 1987-88, when I was the assistante d'anglais at Lycée Jean Lurçat in Bruyères, France. (How many times I had to correct them when they referred to me as the assistante anglaise!) Here's a photo of my flatmate (the German assistant) at our school from '88!

I asked her when she signed up what would happen to the compulsory year abroad after Brexit and she looked blank. 'I'm sure it'll all be fine' was her standard response for months. Now the lunatics are discussing a 'no deal' scenario, she's upgraded that reply to 'I guess if they don't sort it out, they'll need to cancel it for everyone'.

In Charlotte's case this would be really annoying given she is a French national so actually would still have the right to work abroad, but as she pointed out, if only five kids out of 1000 have dual nationality, they are just going to blanket-cancel it rather than sort it out for those who are still eligible.

I can see several major issues with this. A long term issue I can see is this: Kids up to and including the academic year 2018-19 will have taken part in this scheme. Presumably a year or two into Brexit, the government will have negotiated a reciprocal agreement again meaning this can resume, so there will be a group of language students, starting with the 2017 intake and spanning two to three years who will have missed out on this. As an employer, wouldn't you give those graduates a wide berth, if they are the only ones with lesser degrees and no real language experience? So not only will they miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime, they will also be seen as lesser graduates when they leave uni.

Secondly, and more urgently, not for Charlotte but for the 2017 intake... These kids are due to leave the UK for posts all over Europe this September. They will already have applied to schools in Spain, France, Germany etc and will be receiving their postings around Easter. If the UK goes 'no deal' at the end of this month and all of these places are revoked every uni offering modern languages in the UK is going to be faced with a year of students returning to class in September that they have not budgeted for. They'll need class space, they'll need tutors and lecturers, they'll need to book university accommodation for the 2019-20 session that they had not expected to need. Student accommodation tends to get booked around now, at the latest, so many of these kids are going to find their placement cancelled, they'll not have a room for next year and none will be available. They won't have filled out their forms for loans or tuition fees as they aren't expecting to return for that academic session. It's going to cause complete administrative chaos in universities across the country as well as panic and heartache in the kids themselves.

Is there anything left 'un-fucked-up' by this government?

A momentous decision

I'm wondering if there's much point in me blogging this given my other half already has, but I guess only having our communal friends knowing what's going on might result in a few strange looks a week/month or two down the line.
For anyone who knows me on Facebook, it'll come as no surprise to you that I am not the biggest fan of Brexit - unless of course you've missed my four ranty posts a day for the last two years.

When the UK voted Leave back in June of 2016, I wasn't as horrified, in retrospect, as I should have been. That isn't because I was lukewarm to EU membership, but more because I'm so European, I think of the EU as 'us' and the UK as 'them', so my initial assumption was - the UK will hang about the periphery, sulking for a few years while 'we' get on with business without 'them' sticking their oar in in their usual petty and annoying fashion all the time.

Given I had assumed Norway was the worst possible route a sane government could opt for, I didn't think it would have much of a negative impact on my life or family... Then came May's red-line speech declaring that we'd voted to leave the Customs Union and the Single Market and ditch free movement and a host of other crap, I for one didn't see on the ballot paper - maybe we got the abridged version up here in Scotland?

Within hours she'd scathingly branded me, my family, and most of our friends as 'citizens of nowhere', rather than as we tend to celebrate 'citizens of Europe'; citizens with family and friends everywhere. For thirty years I had celebrated our diversity, our mixed culture and the many languages we use at the dining table every day in life. I loved that all my kids could fluently speak two languages and had two passports each. But suddenly the person in charge of the country where I lived, a narrow and insular excuse for a person, was telling me the way I had lived my life since I'd met my first foreign boyfriend at sweet 16, was illegitimate and no longer tolerable. My type of family was to be stamped out going forward. Would a day come when instead of proudly teaching their classmates a few words of their other mother tongue, they'd have to hide their foreignness? Would they have to drop their foreign surname from their CV later in life to get an interview?

Alarmed doesn't come close to how I began to feel in the autumn of 2016. And still, I had fully underestimated the madness that would follow. Early on, we started to discuss our own red lines, Thomas and I. If freedom of movement was to go, then families like ours would also probably have to go, in our eyes. We figured the latest it would become obvious, what the government was actually working towards was December 2017, so that would give us fifteen months to come up with a workable plan. I'd lie awake in bed for hours every night analysing what the likelihoods were. December 2017 came and went, with our kids clued up enough to be asking all the right questions about what the UK was aiming for, but strangely though they knew the ins and outs, the government didn't seem to. Senior politicians embarrassed us by trying to negotiate with EU countries separately, not grasping the fundamentals of how the EU even works, after 40 years membership! They were completely blasé about any effect this could have on peace in Northern Ireland and downright outrageous in their complete disregard of the Scottish 62% (and rising ever since) pro-EU vote.

Every deadline was missed and EU families like ours waited and waited for clarity, pawns in their grotesque game. I got to the point where I had to turn the news off as it was making me feel physically sick.

By Christmas of 2018, I had been through my own rather huge trauma; a cancer scare. When finally I got the all clear, the only woman on my ward who did, I knew we had to take back our future. Not having to go through the chemo everyone else was faced with meant that other than trying to recover, I could move on. I had spent too many sleepless night worrying about whether we could stay together as a family, about the state the UK economy, the NHS and the Higher education system would be in by the time my three youngest hit adulthood.

I could see Brexit was going to be dire for my company. Thomas works as an IT and linguistics consultant, so his work would dry up quickly in a recession - why pay to make people redundant when you can simply drop the consultants who have no employment rights? My work had been a bit precarious as I'd been off sick (though unpaid) so I was clawing my way back up that hill. All my foreign work had been gained on the basis of my running an EU-based consultancy. By March 29, I would no longer be running an EU-based one, but rather one floating on the edge of the EU with no obvious guidelines to follow. That would make it close to impossible for our company to win any EU contracts we bid on going forward. And of course, given the falling value of the pound, the EU work I did was the most lucrative of all. We estimated at least half of our business would dry up because of Brexit and that wasn't the kind of hit we could take.

Out of the blue, Thomas saw a job ad for a senior IT linguistics post in Denmark - the equivalent of heading up the IT section of the Académie française, but in Denmark. We agreed it was a lifeboat worth applying for, just to have on standby in case the government was insane enough to let the country crash and burn. Of course, when he applied we assumed it would remain a parachute, tightly packed under our seat because no sane Prime Minister would take a country to the edge of the abyss just to stop her party falling apart...

So there we were with 28 days to go and an ultimatum - sign up for the Danish lifeboat or risk staying in the UK, where Thomas's rights to healthcare, his continued right to have a mortgage here, or his right to remain, should he lose his job had not been guaranteed by a government so openly hostile to foreigners that they were deporting Windrush grandparents who no longer remembered coming to the UK as toddlers. Had we been a fully EU couple, like many of Charlotte's uni lecturers, we could have waited to see how bad things got and then decided to leave after Brexit, but I am the sticking point... six members of my family can leave after Brexit, but I become landlocked in the UK once my freedom of movement is removed, be that at 11pm in 22 days time, or after transition in December 2020, should they sign some last minute version of May's catastrophic deal next week.

It's isn't what we would have chosen to do. Thomas moved to Scotland, learnt Scots and feels Scottish. We never expected to feel so insecure in our home that we'd feel our only option was to flee the country, but that is what we have decided to do.

I have good days where I am almost excited at the prospect of living on mainland Europe, (well on an island tethered to the mainland by a bridge at least) and being able to drive all sorts of cool places for the weekend. And I have other days where I shake and cry and hide under the duvet as it is all too big to contemplate. I'm old, too old to start my life again from scratch. Removal costs are so high we are having to give away most of what we own and start again, without so much as a bed or a couch. We're going to have to sell our cars and house and transfer the money abroad, potentially as sterling crashes to a point where we can't make enough to buy a home there. We're having to magically find £7000 from nowhere to cover forcing Charlotte into University halls for a year - we can't exactly put that on her shoulders when she didn't choose this fate. When I think how long it will be before we break even I'm terrified and that's before the sadness hits of dragging the three wee ones out of schools we know and love, away from their dear friends. Marcel and Charlotte both came top of their high school year at one of the top three state schools in Scotland, and the wee ones have that same potential. Is it fair to plunge the wee ones into a system they don't know, in a language, that of course they speak, but not to the same standard as they speak English? Hopefully they'll learn to fly.

But if the economists are right, we're taking them away from a recession that will overshadow the remainder of their childhood, to a country everyone always says is one of the happiest of all. The work life balance will be better, the houses cheaper, the higher education free... It's been a hard choice to make, but I feel our hands are tied, so Denmark, it'll have to be. And when you decide to do something, there is no point in feeling sorry for yourself or dragging your feet. I'm going to find a way to do this well and make the best of a situation I didn't choose. I'm going to come home as many weekends as possible to help Charlotte, mum and my brother cope with this change and I'm going to hope as many of our friends and our kids' friends feel like a visit over the next few years as possible - maybe just to visit us or maybe because we'll be close to the original and definitive Legoland. Some of you might decide to come so you can have a meal that doesn't contain chlorinated chicken and rat poo or just to feel European again... I genuinely mean you are welcome - or will be once we have somewhere to stay. I've lived abroad before so I know it isn't always the most obvious candidates who drop by for a visit - but what I do know is that it is always fun when they do!

With still no clarity of Remain/May's Deal/No deal and now only three weeks to go, all I know is I'm moving to Funen either some time in the next two weeks or some time before the kids finish this school year. It's shocking to still have no clarity when you're this close to the precipice.

But to a certain extent, it feels good to regain control of my future after 984 days with the clowns in charge of the circus.

Tenth wedding anniversary

Kids can get offended at the oddest things and one thing that has offended Amaia all her life is that she was not invited to her parents' wedding. The fact that she wasn't actually conceived until 5 weeks after we got married, is apparently not an acceptable get-out clause either! We had both our other daughters at the wedding and therefore we have offended her deeply by not waiting to see if we were going to have any more kids, then waiting till they were born and old enough to wear a pretty dress!

So today is apparently the day she's been waiting for all her life! Charlotte was 9 years and 8 weeks old when we got married. Amaia is 9 years and 7 weeks old today, which means she gets to try on Charlotte's bridesmaid's dress. (The fact that Lots was a tomboy back then and had to be bribed into that dress, kicking and screaming is of little interest to Amaia!) She assumes that because she thinks it is stunning, Charlotte must have thought the same, back in the day. She says she intends to keep it on all evening, then put it back into storage for her bridesmaid!

Here she is in all her glory!

Everything is Theresa May's fault!

Newton Mearns and Barrhead are currently taking part in Beat the Street. From being reluctant to go on our daily walks, Anna has become a demon walker, organising outings with friends and even walking the more than two miles from school to our house. The unusually lovely spring temperatures are helping too, so since the whole thing began a couple of weeks ago she has now clocked up more than 30 miles on foot!

It is also great for community spirit. People are out with their maps and even talking to each other, especially in times of adversity... The nearest beat box to my house is actually across the road and up a lane from where it appears on the Beat the street map, so there's a great sense of camaraderie in my street, as people join forces to hunt it down!

Every morning we are now walking 2000 steps to school so we can beep three boxes. This morning as we reached the last one in the spring sunshine Amaia came out with the cutest comment: 'I hate Theresa May, she just ruins everything!' Now, I don't disagree with the sentiment there, but I was curious to find out what exactly she was referring to. She elaborated 'So many things are being ruined by Brexit. It could break up my family, I don't know if my daddy will still be allowed to stay or work here, or if I can still go and see Farmor and Großvater, it affects jobs and food and medicine and everything and it's even gonna wreck Beat the street!' That had me stumped. How exactly was the Maybot wrecking Beat the street? 'Well, it finishes on Brexit day too, so it must be because of Brexit!' The competition does indeed finish on Brexit day - quite astute of a 9 year old to be clued up enough to have noticed that - but this is actually because it is the last day of the current academic term in East Ren, rather than because Brexit! Brexit is not going to be banning us from walking. In fact, you could even find yourself having to walk much more, Amaia!

Put in my place

Marcel has managed to secure himself a post-grad job in London/Singapore/Manhattan with an investment bank. It's only a two year contract, but he figures that will be enough to give him a taste and some experience of that sector so at the end, he can choose to apply to stay, move to a competitor, or run for the hills screaming that that wasn't for him. He starts in London in September.

He was discussing the fact that if he saves well, he could even decide to do some sort of post-grad or PhD after his two years, as he'd have the financial backing. Excited by all these possibilities, I made the mistake of saying out loud that he'd be welcome to stay with us while he was studying if that was any help. I hadn't really thought about it, I just mentioned it, because he is still my little boy after all. But as I said it I saw it in his eyes even before he let me down gently. There was a mixed look almost of pity and puzzlement, that I should even have thought it! 'Mum, I love you dearly and all but moving back to the gaff and living with the fam, seriously, at my age?'  

And then it hit me like a tonne of bricks. My wee boy grew up, so far up and away that he is a man now. He loves me, but he doesn't need me any more. He's self sufficient, both emotionally and financially. Parenting, when you do it right, means giving them the tools to make their own life, and the confidence to do so. Somehow, completely by fluke, I seem to have managed that. But how quickly did it happen? It's both wonderful and crushing in equal measures. My first little baby is unlikely to ever live with me again, unless ironically, I become so old and doddery, he takes me in!

One down, four to go...

The human life span really is immeasurably short, the further you get into it.

I wasn't expecting that

Thomas has been going on for years about wanting a record turntable he can hook up to his PC so he can digitise his remaining obscure records. To be honest, I couldn't really be bothered with it because I couldn't see why he'd want a digital copy of three kiddie records we no longer need and some weird Georgian stuff he hasn't listened to since the mid-90s.

But, his birthday came round last week and stressed to breaking point with all this Brexit nonsense, I couldn't really come up with something imaginative this year, so I opted for this. I figured he could digitise the stuff he had over a week then sell it second hand for almost the original price.

How wrong was I? Literally within five minutes of him putting it on, I was captivated. I never believed before that vinyl sounded better than cds or mp3s, but this felt like I was in the room with the orchestra, rather than just listening online to the flatter perfect sound of digital. Within a day, I'd been up to the loft and dragged down my old LPs and now instead of reselling it, I'm trawling through ebay for used vinyl.

This really has been an eye-opener.

Paesano pizza

We don't usually go out for birthday dinners - there's so many of us it ends up costing too much, and cooking is something even the little ones have mastered fairly well. This year, however, Thomas's birthday fell on the first day of the kids' February break, so he suggested that the biggies could meet us for lunch in town. It turned out Marcel had a fluey bug, so that just left Lots. As we were only meeting one uni student, finding somewhere near her uni then suited best. We opted for Paesano Pizza in the west end. At first I assumed it was a big chain but it turns out there are only two of them, both in Glasgow.

The menu had pizzas from only a fiver, you could have all the normal drinks or even just a glass of free tap water if that suited your budget better. They cooked the pizza in less than five minutes in a real wood-burning pizza oven like the ones we use ourselves whenever we are in Tuscany. I have to say I came away with the question - why does anyone in Glasgow ever go near Dominoes, if you can have this quality at this price?

The only thing that put a damper on the whole thing for me was the fact that I could hear, given the open kitchen, that all the pizza chefs and all the dish washers were young Italian men, speaking together in Italian. Given there is no way a single one of them is on £30K a year, I assume that the shelf-life of this wonderful and authentic Italian restaurant is unlikely to go beyond March 29 this year.

What goes through that mind?

Léon: Muuuuum! 
Me: What?
Léon: I'm just cutting my toenails - what bin do they go in? The black one or the recycling one?

What actually goes through his mind? What could a 13 year old's toenails possibly be recycled into that would be of use to the greater public? Drinks cups? Disposable cutlery? Packaging of some sort? My mind is boggled!

It's never dull...

Cultural misunderstandings

Cute comment from number 5 tonight: 'For goodness sake! Americans are ridiculous. There was this one guy on the TV moaning that it was 19 degrees and snowing! He should try Scotland where we manage to cope with zero degrees and snow!'
😂

Catching up

These two photos are taken 24 months apart. Going from eleven to thirteen makes so much bigger a difference to a boy child, than going from 19 to 21, it would seem. 

I can't help but think, looking at Friday's snap that I now have two grown-up-looking sons; the period of eight years and two months that separates their births seems to be shrinking by the day, and I can see that it'll be a few short years before they'll be out on the town together, hitting a pub or a club, looking like friends rather than brothers. 

It's so strange for me to see, as I still remember where it all began, and it feels like yesterday!

Polski Zakatek

We have this lovely little Polish shop not far from the house, in Thornliebank. We discovered it by accident when the kids were tiny. One Easter, we were looking for white eggs to paint and all the local supermarkets only had brown. We noticed that Poles love their white eggs.

Thereafter, we started going reasonably often. Léon loves their cold meat - they have a weird ham with mushroom and pickle slices in it, they have lovely lean ham and lots of great kabanos type sausages. I am a great lover of their great sałatka polska. They have unusual cream cakes, interesting beers and wonderfully exotic stock cubes - beetroot for making borscht and mushroom ones too, though I've no idea what they use them for! The kids like their fancy fruit lollipops and the older ones are fans of the garlic crouton chips and thin pretzels covered in sesame seeds. We often load up on different types of bulgur and dumplings too.

The two women who work there are always friendly and helpful and interested to hear Thomas wandering around talking to the kids in Danish - they give us that knowing smile that means you're foreign too, just different foreign.

Last week we decided to go down and stock up for the new year...

The shop wasn't open so we messaged them. They've gone into liquidation, presumably because of Brexit. 😡😡

I hate this country.

Settled status

I've been in a foul mood all day.

For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I find it offensive that my husband is being told he has to apply for 'settled status'. Thomas has lived here 17 years, he has a UK national as a wife and several UK national children. Thomas has been paying income tax to the UK government for 17 years, without missing a month, despite having no right to vote here. Thomas is nearly fourteen years into paying the mortgage for the home he owns here. Ten years ago Thomas opened a company in Scotland. We work with international clients, bringing money into the UK from abroad, but despite all of this the government wants him to apply for the right to remain in the country where his children were born and if he doesn't he will be deported by 31 December 2020 (if the government opts for no deal) or 30 June 2021 (if the government doesn't crash out of the EU).

Thomas didn't come here for a better life or for a job no UK national would do. Thomas actually earns less than he would in his home country of Denmark. He didn't steal anyone's job - well if you can find me a Glasgow resident with a computing degree, a Japanese degree, a Maths one and a linguistics one who happens to have a working knowledge of English, Danish, German, Spanish, Esperanto, Georgian, Russian, Czech, Basque, Japanese, Italian, French, Dutch, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Swedish, Schwäbisch, Sanskrit, Scottish Gaelic, Yiddish and Scots, then maybe he did, but I don't think too many folk in the Glasgow area fit that CV.

Until about 4pm, he was even getting charged to apply to remain in his home with his British citizen kids, but as of then, the Maybot seems to have withdrawn the charge for this at least, but what irks me is this idea of 'applying'. If this is something you are required to apply for, there is at least a chance you will be rejected... not everyone in this situation will have the required biometric passport - I know of many EU pensioners who have been here so long and are so old, they simply no longer have a passport from their original country. We've moved several times so don't have the required proofs of address from over the years - council tax bills, pay slips, utility bills and the likes. Thomas moved here in good faith nearly two decades ago, started a family and is now being threatened with deportation from his family if he can't meet the requirements brought in retrospectively as the result of a referendum he was denied a vote in. Moreover, I am being denied the right to follow him if he's deported as the gammon brigade have voted away my freedom of movement. You couldn't make it up!

Even if we survive this, how many EU families will be torn apart, lose their homes or similar? I am utterly disgusted by this government.

Léon and Charlotte

Léon is a mix of two kids - 85% of the time he is enthusiastic and exuberant, wandering from room to room whistling the latest concerto or ceilidh music he has been practising for his orchestra or folk group. He hums, he sings, he keeps the beat of some tune only he can hear in his head. He twitches and taps and never sits still. Music is everything. When he's not being musical, he spends hours googling what he refers to as 'fun facts' and comes out with the most incredible general knowledge any of my kids has ever mastered. I often find myself wondering what on earth he googled in the first place to learn the information on every subject under the sun. He sucks it all up like an oversized sponge. He's bouncy like a puppy, never walking but skipping everywhere. Where this approach was cute in our small house when he measured 1m25, it is a tad annoying now he's 1m70+ and lanky as a bean pole. The other 15% of the time he's 'gammoning' about some minor annoyance that no one else would have noticed but once he's got hold of that stick it's hard to fight it away from him.

Charlotte is the opposite of Léon. She's a quiet and passive sloth-like creature, never making a sound. Occasionally you hear her singing along to something in Spanish in the kitchen while cooking but only when she's alone and if you enter, she quickly falls silent. Charlotte sits still on the couch, earpods in, or just silent. She moves slowly and never bounces. She comes out with cutting, sarcastic remarks about Léon's nerdiness. Léon's music is often met with stares, huffs and calls for him to fall silent, until exasperated when he's forgotten for the third time in less than two minutes that she's asked him to stop whistling, she loses her temper and shouts at him to shut up!

Don't get me wrong - the two are inseparable and they adore each other. He was her first baby after all, but on a noise level, they are opposite ends of the spectrum.

So, when I saw this yesterday on Facebook and it made me laugh out loud... Definitely think it was written with them in mind!

When I forwarded it to Charlotte who was on the bus into town, she also laughed out loud, as did Léon when I showed him it after school.

Oops

Amaia, did you forget you were running yourself a bath, by any chance?
Ehhhhh, oops!

Not so Grinch, really

At the end of the Christmas season last year, I noticed someone on eBay had discounted their vinyl Christmas-themed table cloths. Given that was something we don't have, I went ahead and ordered one without mentioning it to the family.

Before I was due to go in for my operation, I went up to our loft and brought down all the old nappy boxes full of Xmas baubles and the likes, as I am the only one who knows exactly where in the loft everything is stored. Inside one, I had put this so I didn't forget about it.

When I pulled this out proudly to show the family, Charlotte knocked me down with the cutting comment: 'Good God, the Grinch has bought herself a Christmas tablecloth!'

That got me to thinking... Do my family consider me to a festive party pooper, and if so, why?

It is true that I find Xmas quite stressful. I want everyone to be happy and finding gifts to please everyone equally worries me as I don't want to let anyone down but don't feel confident that I have found the perfect present. Maybe that comes across as me being an unhappy gift-buyer, when in fact I am just a bit of a paranoid one. I want it to be so special for everyone that I apparently screw up by looking worried!

Then there's the tree. I like our tree but our house barely fits the seven of us so half the dining room being taken over by a Scandinavian pine forest stresses me because it makes me feel a bit claustrophobic. But where others interpret this as me being pissed off at having a tree kicking about my house, what is stressing me is in fact the size of my dining room and not my tree! I get quite S.A.D. in Scotland in winter so can't imagine how I'd cope without all the pretty lights and candles, but again, all people see is me being grumpy, once again.

I don't tend to decorate the tree itself, not because I am not interested in it, but more to give the kids pleasure. I know so many parents who won't let their kids near the tree for decorating purposes because they have a very fixed idea of how it should end up. I love the chaos we end up with every year, with sparkly shoes next to various birds and all sorts of home-made baubles from years gone by. I like that it looks like a kid decorated it because that means the kids had fun. But somehow me sitting taking photos of them putting it up comes across as me just not being very into it☹️ Who knew?

There's nothing I like better than listening to the Xmas CD on the school run all of December, but because I vetoed it once in November, I apparently don't like Xmas music either!

I happily participate in family evenings in front of Xmas movies but no one seems to notice. I even read Skipping Christmas, long before it hit the screens as Christmas with the Kranks...

I've never been a baker, that's true, but again I love to see the kids making their Danish biscuits and gingerbread houses. Thomas and Charlotte take over on that front leaving the Grinch out, as usual.

To me Christmas is more about seeing family, chatting and eating the lovely and traditional meals we serve up, both on Danish Xmas day and on the Scottish one. Everyone being together is much more important than anything else.

So somehow, I have become known as the family Grinch, even if I'm not the least bit green or evil. I'm not sure how to change their perception of that for the future.

That Fiat

You can't get very far on this blog without noticing my somewhat irrational adoration of all things Fiat 500, or all things 'Chuggy', if you're in on the lingo... so when I refer to my Chuggy today as 'that Fiat', you know it has done something major to get into my bad books!

It started the first week in November as far as I am aware. I was in hospital so I don't know. One day on the school run, Thomas turned on the radio and the touchscreen froze on the Fiat symbol (the screen before you get the option to change radio station, jump to CD or any of the Bluetooth or phone settings.) He'd been listening to Radio Scotland the previous day so that was now the only option available.

That state of affairs lasted two weeks until he was at the garage anyway and asked the mechanic to take a look. He told him it needed a software update and said it'd cost about £50 to fix... a bit steep but nonetheless... The update didn't work (and he refused to pay for it!) It stayed frozen. The mechanic decided to unfreeze it, he could always pull the battery connection for a minute to reset it. He did and it didn't. The radio was still frozen and now, as all the settings go through that panel, the car reset itself to midnight on January 1 2000, with no way to override it. Into the bargain, as I couldn't confirm that, it was flashing on and off waiting for confirmation. 

That must have been 28 days ago, as that Fiat is now insisting it is January 28 at some ungodly hour. 😡 So I have no CD player, no Bluetooth, no phone, a flashing dash and I'm stuck on radio Scotland. Things can't get any worse, or so I thought...

Last week I was driving the kids to Braehead when the radio suddenly switched itself on. Exactly three minutes later, it switched itself off. It went on to do this a further seventeen times between Nitshill and Braehead. This was annoying to say the least and also startled me each and every time.

Surely things were now as bad as they could get? 

On my next outing into town, it decided I wanted to listen to Thomas's Christmas CD - a mix of Danish, German and Spanish carols - a bit incongruous after Christmas, but why not? I had missed a month of driving this Christmas season so wasn't completely Christmas-musicked-out, for once. However, the switching on and off had tripled so I decided to combat it by turning off the volume. Mummy 1 - that Fiat 0! Until it reset the volume each and every time it turned it back on - bastard Fiat!

Surely things were now as bad as they could get?

Sigh... nope.

On Sunday I drove Charlotte and mum to Braehead to have their iPhone batteries updated. It played silly buggers all the way over and the volume button was no longer working so I couldn't shut it up at all. I parked and turned off the engine... the music continued. I took out the keys... the music continued. I locked the car and put my ear to the window... to my dismay, this is what I could hear.

Bastard Fiat! I needed some shopping in IKEA but was forced to sprint round the aisles in case the stupid thing ran my battery down to zero in the meantime. I would have expected better behaviour from my Chuggy. It was obviously possessed by some demonic radio system and needed exorcising immediately!

I made one stop on my way home at Aldi to buy dinner and we hit the final straw. The touchscreen that had been frozen on this picture for six weeks, suddenly went white, wavy black lines appeared and it started screaming, at full volume, some hideous noise that reminded me of the sound you used to hear when you loaded a program into a ZX Spectrum from a tape deck in the 80s! And the bloody keys were in my pocket at the time! I'm literally at the stage where earplugs are becoming a necessity to drive.

So on Hogmanay I rang my local Fiat dealer and explained the whole saga. They said they could have a look at that for me, no problem. They charge a standard £100 to diagnose the fault and if I need a new radio because their software fault has crippled it, it'll be £600!!! FFS, I've owned cars that I paid less for than that. You've got to be having a laugh! Needless to say, I'll be having Halfords fit me a new bog-standard radio as soon as they reopen and my local Fiat dealership can stick their diagnostics where the sun doesn't shine. 

Hopefully by this time next week my Chuggy will be back to its usual self, and no longer possessed by demons.

Amaia

Amaia decided to edit this photo I took of her so you could only see the blue shades around her. I really like the final effect so am bookmarking it here so I can find it in the future.

Eastenders

Today's posts are quite TV-oriented, for someone who rarely watches TV, and never watches terrestrial!

So after my week in the jungle, I developed an infection and was readmitted to the Royal, but this time, it was post-pathology so I was put in the non-oncology gynaecology ward for Glasgow's east end. My 'catchment' hospital (when I don't have suspected cancer) is the Queen Elizabeth, but given my consultant works out of the oncology unit, I was sent back there.

My first day was spent alone, but Marcel came through from Edinburgh to visit so that was nice.

Later that afternoon two young girls were admitted. One said she was 23, the other 19. They were typical salt-of-the-earth east end girls. 23 had three kids who were 1, 2 and 3. 19 had two kids who were 1 and 3. Both were in with suspected ectopic pregnancies.

23 looked shocked and asked the nurses not to mention to any of her visitors why she was in, 19 hadn't a clue what it meant and said she wasn't that bothered as long as she was still allowed out for a fag break!

After my fifth birthday, the only places I have lived (in Scotland at least) are Newton Mearns and Dowanhill (Glasgow's West end). Broad Scots was something my grandparents spoke, and to a lesser extent my parents, but it was entirely alive and going as strong as ever over there, just 9 miles from my sheltered existence. I definitely live in a strange and alien bubble down here. I've lived abroad, so know you need to tone down your Scottish accent for foreigners, these girls had obviously never experienced anything of the sort and spoke to a succession of foreign consultants without the slightest attempt to make themselves easier to understand. As someone who works with Scots from time to time, this was a fascinating opportunity to watch Scotland in action.

Visiting hour came. There was a strict two to a bed policy... or so it said on signs up everywhere. No one was coming in for me that night so again I was left people-watching. 19 had her boyfriend and three friends around her. 23 had her sister and a child. At that point a noticeably drunk man staggered in, stinking of booze and fags, he stood in front of my bed eyeing up both 23 and 19, who were similar medium-build brunettes. He sidled over to 23 and said 'hello, hen'. 19, raging, eyed him back and shouted at the top of her voice 'that's no me, ya daft cunt!' and he then staggered to her instead. There were hissed words in hushed tones for the next ten minutes then the drunk man left again. 'Thon fucker didnae even know his own wean!' she exclaimed. It transpired that he'd not seen his daughter in six years and had heard she was unwell so had dropped by to visit and accidentally sat down at the other girl's bed as he didn't recognize her! She ranted and raved for the next few hours about him being useless, other than the fact that he'd been so embarrassed he'd left her his pack of cigarettes.

We had some fun chats - when 23 told me she'd done all her Xmas shopping already in her local pub, where a guy sells stuff like Xboxes for £20. Hmmmm  And 19 told me she only ever got pregnant when she got high on cannabis, so she was going to stick to booze in the future!

Every morning, both were taken to be scanned as they needed the foetuses to grow to find where they were hiding. On day three, 19's was found and she was operated on and ended up in a fist fight with a nurse when she said she wasn't allowed out for a fag break until she could actually stand up after the anaesthetic. (She apologized later once she'd calmed down!) On day four, 23's was found too, but it wasn't ectopic after all! The pregnancy was completely normal so she was allowed home. As she was leaving, I wished her well. She replied that she was going home to tell her partner she was pregnant. She looked vaguely concerned. I asked if she thought he was going to find it daunting to have a fourth kid in four years and she laughed and said, 'it's no that that's worrying me, it's telling him it isnae his, it's his best pal's!' GULP!

It was a very entertaining week; they were lovely girls, in their own way, so refreshingly honest and transparent, just not very similar to the ones I come across in my usual day-to-day. I guessed I learned there's a bigger world out there, than I remembered.

I'm a celebrity (but in the east end, not the jungle)

I've never been in hospital before, not really. I had the five babies, but with the first two I had so little clue what I was doing I spent my hospital stay engrossed in them and didn't notice anyone else in the ward and for the last three I left hospital within 24 hours of the birth so had no time to befriend anyone. When the purpose of your hospital stay is childbirth, by definition you have a companion throughout your stay!

So, at the ripe old age of 50, I went in for my first operation. There were a number of stress factors: I'd never had surgery, I'd never had an anaesthetic, I'd never been in hospital, they had told me they weren't sure what they'd find but whatever was cut out would be sent to pathology for cancer screening, I'd been given high odds it was cancer (60%), my family were in pieces and I wasn't exactly looking forward to leaving them having to step up to doing all my jobs as well as their own and visiting me at the same time.

I was to come in for 7-30 on the day of the op, fasted and ready to go. Although I wasn't scheduled to be on the table till 14-30, they wanted a standby in case the 9-00 didn't show. I was shown into a ward and made to sit on a bed with the curtain drawn. There was someone else in the next bed, but I couldn't see her. A student nurse came to check us in. I was asked loads of questions - was I on any regular meds, had I ever had an anaesthetic, did I take drugs, was I an alcoholic, was I allergic to anything, did I know why I was there that day etc, etc.

Then they moved on to my neighbour. I worked out from the date of birth she gave that we were the same age. This put me at ease already as I had only been to one group meeting before the op, where the procedure and post-op physio was explained. In the group there were about fifteen women and even the youngest was old enough to be my mother. I had come home with the distinct impression that I didn't belong there and fate was taking the piss.

My neighbour was asked all the same questions and gave similar answers to me... similar until they asked if she knew what she was in for, when her reply was 'well, I'm hoping it's a boob job!', the student nurse sounded flustered, started leafing through her notes and trying to find the simplest way to explain it was actually a hysterectomy. She was so busy trying to do her job well, she hadn't noted the cheeky tone in my neighbour's voice. She burst out laughing and explained she was pulling her leg but added that if they could see a way to fix her boobs while she was under anaesthetic anyway, she'd slip her a cheque!

The nurse left and we sat behind our curtains, quiet for a few minutes. It was 8 in the morning, we were both hungry and thirsty (we weren't even allowed water) and we had at least six hours ahead of us. I went to the loo and keeked round her curtain to say hello. A beautiful, and much younger-looking than me Pakistani woman was sitting on the bed, her long hair in pigtails. We started to chat and the next six hours, that I had been dreading, passed too fast and in fits of laughter and camaraderie. She'd had operations before so could put my mind at ease, she told me she'd negotiated holding on to one of her ovaries (I couldn't as both had tumours on them) as she remembered her mum being so unhinged during menopause, she'd often thrown plates of curry at her dad and she'd had to try to scrape the turmeric stains off the walls! She told me her parents had arranged her marriage at 16 and she'd had three boys by 19. She told me her husband was a lovely friend but she didn't fancy him at all so she used to make up gynae issues and tell him her doc had told her to avoid sex for six months, when in reality he'd said a week! She told me the secret to her youthful looks was some dodgy Botox cream her sister bought on holiday in Turkey and since she'd started using it her wrinkles had all gone! She mentioned the boyfriend she had had since her divorce who asks her to marry him every year at the bells, so she's started avoiding him at New Year to save the embarrassment of saying no again cos she just wasn't into him enough for that! She had me in fits of laughter and I felt I'd known her my whole life. It's weird to think we were both there terrified we might be dying and having what felt like a ladies' spa day. I can honestly say I enjoyed that morning more than most social occasions I've had for years!

After the operation we came round to find ourselves in a ward of five. Interestingly, the ages were much better than at the pre-op - well, from a social point of view, at least. I am 50, so was my new friend. There was a 40, a 56 and a 76 too. It was the dreaded oncology post-op ward. We all knew that but a snooty older woman in the end bed hadn't quite sussed it. We were all post-operative and fairly helpless for the first twelve hours. A nurse came round carrying cloths and a basin and asked who'd like to be freshened up first. Mrs Snooty on the end actually came out with 'Well, I deserve to be washed first as I am having to deal with the fact I have cancer, unlike you young things!' The youngest of us all calmly replied 'This is the oncology ward, we are all waiting on pathology reports, so you're no different to the rest of us!' That was met by a tut and a 'Well, it's harder at my time of life, my husband is in a terrible state and so is my daughter and her kids' to which the youngest again replied, ever so calmly 'I realize, it's not what anyone wants at any age, but your child is fifty, mine is ten'. Silence fell and as my pre-op friend and I bonded with 40, and 56, 76 sat chewing a wasp in the end bed!

It really was a strange experience. I was thrown in with a group of people I would never normally have met - a teacher from Ayrshire, an NHS administrator, my pre-op friend who ran her own letting agency, and the grumpy granny on the end. We shared a highly intimate experience, both of post-op pain and of whiling away the waiting time till the pathology reports came in. We sat in hospital gowns and no make-up, showing our true selves in a way you never do with strangers and bonded in the best and worst of circumstances. We laughed our selves silly every night trying to identify what the food was, we cried together in fear for our futures. It was a truly incredible experience and one I'll never forget, obviously. We even got to the stage where we could hug grumpy gran as she left and genuinely wish her well.

When I came home, the kids were watching I'm a celebrity - a group of people who knew nothing of each other thrown into the jungle, make-up free and eating the oddest of meals and I thought to myself - I've actually just been through exactly the same experience - well, I didn't need to eat worms or spiders but the rest was fairly similar.

Since I've come home, I've heard from the others that I was the only one whose pathology came back negative so their stories will all continue, but we've kept in touch so I'll be there if they need a chat.

A real live Chuggy

I have found my Xmas present, if anyone is still looking...




This has been restored with so much love! I could definitely look after it well! 😏

Or even this one if you're feeling really adventurous...

Glasgow, Xmas 2018

Here's a pretty wee video of Glasgow this Xmas - probably worth archiving in case we have power shortages and feral children roaming the streets here by this time next year, given the current government...

Just a thought

For all the last nearly three months have been difficult, I have had access to care when I needed it and it has saved my life. Everything they cut out of me, they cut out of me on time, when it was still at the pre-cancerous stage. There are women, wives, mums, fifty year olds all around this world suffering from exactly the same issues as me, but they find themselves in Syria, in Gaza, or in the Yemen. They are displaced Rohingya people, or refugees fleeing other crises, of which there are too many to mention. Those women are the same as me, but their fate won't be, and that is not right. We need to be acutely aware that it is simply a fluke of birth that sees my situation end differently to theirs and we need to think of a way to start righting that wrong.

Day 75 takes the biscuit

It's been another interesting few days on my 'death bed' - I thought the latest update might give you all a laugh...

As I said last week, I spent most of the week waiting on a scan that never happened, and having no treatment in hospital other than the odd paracetamol so I got sent home to free up a bed. 

This morning the phone went and it was my GP. I have never actually met my GP, despite being with the practice more than four years. It's a big medical centre with nearly a dozen (lovely and helpful) doctors, but today my own GP decided to chase up my case... He seems very nice!

It was an interesting conversation. He said he'd seen on my notes that after my visit to the GP in a lot of pain last Thursday, they had sent me to hospital for a scan but couldn't see the scan results so was ringing to ask me what they found! I filled him in on that one and got a sigh or two. He then asked if they'd discharged me with a course of strong antibiotics. I said they had discharged me without so much as a paracetamol. I asked if the antibiotics he was suggesting were to treat the intra-abdominal abscess that I think I have and the GPs at my practice think I have but the QEUH registrar thinks I might not have. He replied that they might of course help with that but he meant them to deal with my wound infection. I wasn't aware I had a wound infection, especially given no one looked at it in the hospital other than to acknowledge I had a hole in my front and suggest I take a shower to keep it clean! Oh, he replied, shocked again - it's just that when you were here on Thursday, we swabbed it and you have three different infections going on in there, the most concerning of which is E. Coli.

Well, whoopdefuckingdoo. ♪♩♫♬♫All I want for Christmas is E.Coli...♪♩♫♬♫ Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? 

The doc hopes he hasn't wrecked my Xmas but he'll have to prescribe some antibiotics you can't drink alcohol with! Seriously, I'd happily forego my weekend glass of wine forever if they could just get me back on my feet!

The saga continues

So... They couldn't fit in a scan as an emergency outpatient on Tuesday, so they sent me home, they couldn't fit in a scan as an outpatient on Thursday so they admitted me to do it on Friday, they couldn't fit it in on Friday so they called over to the main building today to be told they can't do them at the weekend so I'm being discharged to come back for a scan next week as an outpatient. This is getting tedious 🙄

56 days, plus 13, plus 2

It looks like I might have spoken too soon on Tuesday. My attempt at an NHS-free week didn't even reach the 48 hour milestone.

The day had started stressfully as I had pre-booked a taxi to take the kids to school as Thomas wasn't home. The taxi had not turned up and when I rang to complain they'd blamed the O2 network outage. The upshot was that I paid over a tenner to have my kids delivered to school late. I was not amused.

By lunchtime eating had become a trial as sitting at a 90 degree angle was becoming increasingly difficult. Something was burning deep inside me on the left of my wound and something was making the surface of my skin so sensitive, I could barely brush the back of my hand against my abdomen. I googled again, desperate not to end up 'back inside'. I couldn't work out what it could be. An infection seemed unlikely given I was on my 12th straight day on antibiotics. Had they left the scalpel in there by mistake? 

I had been booked in with the nurse once again to change my dressing on the Thursday at 3. 

I found sitting in the car almost impossible so had to recline the seat on my trip to the medical centre. I couldn't sit in the waiting room because I basically couldn't sit. The nurse took one look at me and called the doctor in. She'd seen me on Tuesday and saw a difference. After a poke and a prod, he decided I needed admitted for a suspected abscess deep inside on my left hand side. The weans were dumped on Charlotte though asked to be in charge of making some sort of meal as she had a university economics exam the next day so was studying in her room. I texted Thomas who had braved going to his office in Edinburgh rather than working from home for the first time in weeks to say mum was driving me to hospital though this time the GP opted for QEUH, and I wasn't going to argue.

On arrival, I became aware myself of how taxing even walking was becoming. They brought the Registrar in who examined me and helpfully suggested that maybe during the original operation, they'd cut the supply to or from my left kidney and that was potentially the problem. My blood and urine tests were all fine and infection free but that could be explained by the fact that as a reasonably young (!) and healthy (till 11 weeks ago) person, my other kidney would simply have taken over all function.

To ascertain if this is the issue there are two problems. Firstly, I need transferred to the actual main 'Death Star' building for a renal CT scan (I'm currently in the maternity and gynaecology block) but no appointments have become free over there today. And secondly, my veins have all thrown in the towel after nearly a month of abuse and they can't CT scan me until they can get the dye into me through a cannula. All attempts at putting one in yesterday failed ☹️

So I'm stuck here thumb-twiddling once again, missing my normality and my family life. I have well and truly had enough now. And that's before anyone tells me how to fix my kidney, if it turns out to be that, or what hypothesis B is, if it isn't that. 

I feel autumn was only just beginning when my life spun off into some parallel and unpleasant universe. I missed all of autumn, the beginning of winter and the whole Christmas season. Santa still hasn't done any real shopping, I haven't heard a single Christmas record or seen any Christmas lights or markets and I'm missing the whole build-up with the kids. I've missed the school Christmas gala, the open classroom day, the p7 Christmas assembly. The Santa Dash on Sunday is out both as a participant and as a photographer 😭 And our annual trip to IKEA'S party has been cancelled too. Next week the girls are carol singing in Silverburn - is there any hope? 

I'm going to get to January bypassing Christmas altogether at this rate and that's not nice when you have a young family.

I'm sooooo feed up.

56 days, plus 13

So, let's update the saga.

I had psyched myself up to being fighting fit and running round the shops doing Xmas shopping by post-op day 20.

Ok, so I hadn't factored in that once they opened me up, they'd perform a sigmoid colectomy, on top of the full hysterectomy and the fix of the umbilical hernia. The fact that each of these three operations has a predicted minimum six week recovery time estimate didn't faze me. Surely it's like sticking three pies in the oven to cook at the same time instead of one - you just do your six weeks simultaneously, reducing the timings by half as I'm younger than the average person undergoing these procedures and I'm never ill. If I can go shopping within 24 hours of giving birth, how hard can it be?

Well, that doesn't seem to be exactly the path I'm travelling, strangely. Having got home on day four after the original op, everything went ok for the first two days. I checked the instructions on how to get well sooner and even went on the prescribed five minute walk twice a day. The others from my ward, who I'd kept in touch with, weren't even out their pyjamas yet so I was feeling well-smug.

The slight redness above my belly button only really started to worry me on day seven when I noticed my skin was becoming hard. By day eight it had crept across my stomach and by day nine I could no longer sit at the dining table. My entire stomach was red, hard and nipping like mad. I called NHS 24 who decided it sounded bad enough to send an out-of-hours GP to my house. I haven't had a GP come to me since I was four years old. Christ, I thought, I must be at death's door! I was told to ring back on day ten if it hadn't improved. It hadn't worsened, but it hadn't improved. A second GP came out to me in the middle of the night. (I'm definitely dead!) She looked at the wound, the red, my blood pressure and temperature and phoned me an ambulance. I was going to need IV antibiotics as I'd developed cellulitis...

At 4am I left for the Royal again. She almost sent me to the QEUH, my fingers were very much crossed as they have free parking and decentish food, but at the last moment she decided she wanted me back under my original consultant so off I went again to the Royal. By 10am I was on the ward with tubes in all my veins again.

In my seven days absence, ward 56 had put up two Christmas trees. The only positive moment for me that day was when they explained that I would be moved to the other half of the ward from last time. I'd been in 56B as it was the oncology gynaecology ward the previous week, but my pathology results meant I was now bumped down to 56A which is standard gynae for Glasgow's East end. And what a different experience that was, but that can be a post in its own right!

I was poked and prodded for another whole week till my veins actually started to nip with the amount of IV going in and blood coming out. The redness slowly subsided but the pus from the infection needed an outlet, so my beautiful and neat scar split to let pus, by the coffee-cup full ooze from my front. It looked not unlike that scene from Alien crossed with Vesuvius on 24/8/0079! They warned me that the three tiny holes that had opened along my scar might pop and merge to become one large grape-sized trough and what do you know, they were right! Apparently it'll heal over but it is un-sew-up-able! So having had my umbilical hernia fixed after 18 years to make my belly button look normal, I now appear to have two belly buttons! Joy! I'll spare you the photo (for now at least|).

I was finally told my infection levels were passable on Friday at 1pm so they were willing to discharge me with oral antibiotics and a nurse to care for Vesuvius. Thomas was working so mum drove in to get me. I hadn't factored in that the Royal pharmacy would actually take till 6-50pm to send up the antibiotics to let me out! FFS! They even tried to tell mum she couldn't wait as it wasn't visiting hour! I pointed out she wasn't a visitor but a taxi driver who'd been waiting five hours so we were given an uncomfortable little cupboard to wait in!

Home at last but I am actually feeling more run-over-by-a-truck than first time round. I've had to go to the GP every other day for my dressing and yesterday the pain had become so bad I was taken back into the QEUH for tests to see if I was developing a new infection, but apparently I am not, I just have a lot of bruising on the inside post-infection and post-op.

I'm still so foggy-headed I can't even do my Xmas shopping online. I was really sure I'd be fully recovered by now, other than my ability to lift things, so I'm not in the best of moods.

Hopefully I will manage a whole week without visiting the A&E department. I've manged 24 hours so far, fingers crossed.

The Barras

Léon is very European. There's nothing he loves better than sitting at an open-air café, then wandering aimlessly round a typical southern European market. Recently he was lamenting the fact that northern Europe is much less market-y. It suddenly struck me I hadn't been to the Barras since the older two were wee so I told Léon Glasgow had a market too and although it was maybe a little different to what he was used to, I'd take him along for a look...

Off to the Barras we went one Sunday just after lunch (note to self, go much earlier next time, as most things we starting to pack up when we arrived). However, Léon's reaction was wonderful! First we passed a guy selling bootleg cds from a camping table. Everything was on display of a sheet, the corners of tightly held, ready to leg it if the police came round the corner. Léon naively asked why the covers were just poor photocopies! Lol. Then it started to rain so we moved to the undercover bit. Every stall was more peculiar than the next; a mix of items, I'd tend to bin or give to charity: books, cds, ornaments that came out of the ark, odd mismatching wine glasses and assorted plates, used bras and slippers! We moved on to furniture, obviously from house clearouts, ranging from ornate, to chuck-outable tack. The traditional Scottish sweetie stall with jars of soor plooms and cinnamon balls drew in the girls, of course. Léon's mouth fell open when we rounded a corner to a stall selling only used miscellaneous cables; there were scarts, kettle cables and all sorts of transformers that seemed of little use to anyone piled a metre high like the biggest plate of black spaghetti you ever saw! To one side was a box containing, I'd reckon, over 500 old remotes for TVs, DVD players and satellite systems. Again, I can't imagine these were flying off the shelves! Lastly, a stall selling leather belts at £2 less than he'd recently paid on Amazon was the clincher. 'Oh mum, it is just like walking through eBay!' he smiled, 'When I'm older I'm going to get a stall here and make enough to buy my first Porsche!' Nothing if not an optimist, my boy! We came home with a quality German Bierstein and an ornate Aztec/Spanish chess set.

I must take him up again to experience the magic nearer to Xmas, health permitting.

Get-well flowers

I came home from hospital yesterday after my second week-long stay.

Waiting for me were these two beautiful bunches of flowers. Big thanks to Linda and Robin for one and to the mystery sender for the other as there was no card included! Much appreciated whoever you are! 🌝