Well, that was a bit of a gap...

So, where have I been, briefly:

Since I last wrote I've nearly died three times.  On one occasion my blood pressure dropped to  68 over 38, I collapsed on my stairs, upside down; the district nurse who found me after 23 hours, called the ambulance.  She thought she wouldn't see me again. Another occasion after a three month patch in hospital, my hands went blue - that was a kidney infection too, but complicated by Raynaud's disease - a beautiful pastel blue, whilst it was sealing the capillaries and destroying the nerves in my finger ends. And to cap it all, I had to sleep on a special bed (a Nimbus 3) which they put together wrong and gave me a monster pressure sore, which has lead to severe contact dermatitis.. I dropped 97 lbs in weight...  I am the lightest I've been since I was 12 years old.

So not only am I recovering these, but also from the leg ulcers with periodic infections [at one point I had to fight to get the consultant not to cut my left leg off), kidney problems.  Please ignore any typos... I  have to use a wireless keyboard, holding it in my left hand while pecking at it with the other as I can't sit down.  It's going to be a very long time before I'm entirely better, but given that I was in hospital for the best part of 9 months, and nearly died...  The  cause of the repeated, deadly kidney infections was a nearly undetectable layer of infected tissue in a thigh which appeared perfectly OK on the outside.

As you can guess I've been concentrating on staying alive and looking after myself.  No council help for moi....  a real catch 22 situation, but it has forced me into being active and getting around the house which is improving my muscle tone. 


Bless the majority of those working in the NHS, which is under immense pressure.  I may resume my rants, but the very few rotten apples, and the occasional honest mistake should not hide the honest effort that health professionals put into the job.  So thank you to the staff of 4 hospitals and 9 wards!  But there are major dysfunctional aspects caused by managerial and administrative staff making decisions that impact on the core aspects of the clinical role.  However, the biggest culprit have been successive governments, whose inability to realise that constantly reorganising demotivates and confuses  staff


So that's where I've been!

An Alien Encounter of the Green Coated Kind

If you are offended by swearing, please do not read any further!

I was going to tell you about my MRI scan, wasn't I?  And I'm only 6N *whimper*...  At first I thought it was aliens, subjecting me to this strange ritual... they had all dressed up in green uniforms...  but they had sent me to a different building, leaving me to find out that I was 15 minutes early needing to get to a building 1200 yards away on bandaged feet in slippers and hobbling along on a walking stick.

Oh how we laughed!  I met an old friend, a chap who has LOVE on one set of knuckles and HATE on the other.  We passed the time of day while my feet complained... eventually I made it into the antechamber to the Alien spacecraft.  There was one person who directed me, a la Star Trek, to follow the green arrows [And yes I was thinking there was simply too much green in all this].. to an antechamber... where I was told I would wait for the .... examination.

I sat my by now spent carcase on the biggest and most imposing chair I could find.... did they not know this was Chumbles of the Internet....  a legend in his own lynchtime?  They told me they would be a short while, because the consultant had f****d off for a quick ciggy break (my words not theirs).  Aeons passed; I need not have crucified myself hurbling and hurpling along that 1200 yards.  But!  I am not without resource, I had brought a small bottle of water: I finished that.  A book with 3 chapters to go: I finished that.  My patience: I'd almost finished that when an orderly (ho ho ho) arrived and took me through a group of supplicants.  A lot of these had appendages of the artificial kind and plastic tubes...  a strange pulsing noise and flashing lights came from a room...  I was swiftly lead past into the second antechamber, and told to take off my garments with metal in them...  Aliens, witches and MRIs are a bit similar, iron f***s 'em up, but they were wise to this.

They made sure my mobile phone was also with my garments and stowed in a lead lined safe ('Screws up our antennae chief, we bump into each other in the dark and get all horny')  But I knew it was to keep me from calling for help on my handy.

They then wheeled out some poor bastard who looked just liked the poor s*d who'd preceded me in the queue for the colonoscopy in December.  You know, the utterly zonked out one, with blue skin who leaked pain in psychic waves....  I was starting to wonder whether I could out-hobble them down the corridor when they grabbed me, chucked me on a trolley cart, stuck a f***ing great plastic widget between my legs, strapped me in and then....

... stuck a needle in my arm.  This is for the cannula.  So they can pump you full of stuff...  One of the greencoats looked at me and clearly thought: dirty old b*gg*r, I'll fix him, but her fellow alien spotted that I was leaking red fluid all over the place....

At this point, they mopped up, simulating concern (but with that certain edge of stress that says: you s*d, why are you bleeding?)  They then fled the room...  They threw over their shoulders "Don't worry, it won't hurt, but in Scotty's name stay still."  There was a low hum and the platform I was on moved into the enclosed chamber, my fat upper arms constricted against the sides with me staring at an old fashioned video screen with measurements and flashing numbers and.... a countdown!

Kind of them to tell me when I was going to be inseminated with one of their green coat wearing kind.... And then, lights flashed and

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM

...

Strangely I felt nothing; more numbers, more distances, more lights flashed and

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM

...

And then I was told that it was all done and don't worry about the blood on my clothes: lucky I was wearing black, piss off and I would hear from the Alien gynaecology unit in due course.  By now I was certain they were.  Aliens that is...

Well.  That went well didn't it?

And onwards to BT Infinity!

Don't get me  wrong, BT isn't a bad service and the speed of connection in this area is streets ahead of the competition, but..

I have spent too much of today, reviving a Thinkpad T40... this was because I rang the BT broadband helpdesk in Utter Pradesh (by name and by nature) to be asked to do all the things I had just done, in my underwear, in the cold last night, simply to play my games and read my regulars.  I mean, how much am I meant to suffer before I lose my latest Chess game.

So I'd turned the hub off, and the router, made myself a small libation, got the torch back out, replugged the stuff into their sockets in an artfully hidden corner of the room... several decads of minutes, having found the carefully filed number which doesn't simply route you through to a message telling you to go to wibbly-wobbly-woo and look it up on the interweb thingie. Just how am I supposed to do that when you fools at BT have poked my virtual eyes and ears out?

And I get through to the only human interface that BT still have. Some poor so and so even further into the night with a degree manning a help desk responding mostly to people who forget to plug their laptops in when their batteries run out. No wonder they sound tired, knackered and fed up... at 3 in the morning, watching the cockroaches run around the wiring in the basement of some sweatshop with 96 degrees of both humidity and temperature trying to speak patiently to some well-fed English idiot... and I am not overtelling this, their conditions are horrible...

But that's not my problem! I have a seige coming to completion on two cities and need to pull my troops if my attack isn't going well and this bozo is telling me to check stuff I've already checked, run tests I've already RUN AND I'M GETTING VERY ANGRY! So I tell him to hold the line, take more BP tablets and tell him I used to do his job, but now it's been outsourced to monkeys who get paid peanuts. I think my faux sympathy might earn me some consideration... in spite of the phone harpies recording the conversation and even though English is his second or third language, he hangs the phone up...

Well, I go swinging from one telephone menu to another until I reach the same call centre in Utter Pradesh... must be a quiet night... it's the same bloke! So I faux apologise and say that I've now done all he asked me to. And repeat it when he repeats back to me all the steps. Trouble is, now he remembers the phone harpies and is going to get me to do every. damned. step. and. tell. him. once. I've done that. I bite the inside of my cheek (eating the remains of pork scratchings, I tell him this so I get some of my own back). I get through all this...

Do you have a laptop Mr Chumbles. It's late, it's an unguarded moment. Now I have both and stupidly tell him this. He tells me I need to connect it to the hub with a lan cable. The laptop was last connected to the net in November 2012. It will take forever to boot up, update Widows*, update the AntiVenom software and recharge the battery sufficiently to do what he asks (5 hours to be precise - I've done this whilst writing my memoirs),

I give up. I go to bed. I know perfectly well it's a screw up at their end, I just want someone there to admit it. But every so often I wake up in the night and thank my lucky stars I am not an outsourced help desk guy in Utter Pradesh.

*Widows TM: the code name for Windows 9

A serious thought to start the year...

I was reading an article in the Guardian.... Vicky Coren is unquestionably the woman with the combination of looks and mind I most lust after and fear talking to. A honey with a mind like a steel trap. She was writing in Comment is Free in the Guardian about the expansion of the original hunt for hidden crimes by Jimmy Savile. I guess I'm born near enough to remember the witch hunts for communists in the mighty US of paranoid A to see the parallels... the witch hunts have begun, and because the actual crimes are undeniably abhorrent, this appears to give licence to all kinds of activities that would otherwise be castigated as either disproportionate or inappropriate.

I am going to get some flack here. Since thinking about the VileSa [Jimmy Savile] I have seem trying to put my instinctive revulsion for the man from when he was a DJ behind me (bad taste joke - ignore) and try to see the situation from a balanced perspective. Very, very difficult. I have an astonishingly violent reaction to people who hurt other people. Cannot abide bullies at any price.
 
But the thing is this. Stoke Mandeville Spinal Injuries centre as part of the fallout from this has been forced into giving the monies given by SaVile to other charities. The unit has been absolutely key to providing a new approach, a new capability to many, many thousands of people crippled by horrid injuries, including our War Heroes as the Sun would say. And SaVile's contribution to the funding this was critical.

This is why mob rule does not work. Why the will of the majority has to be tempered by people we trust to make balanced decisions. For all he was a monster on an individual level, some part of me wonders whether there wasn't some part of him trying to find redemption through good works.  If there is a hell, he is probably in it, but I have no personal evidence.  And that is the point.  All of what we hear is via the same broken media that covered it up in the first place.  Like a state's evidence guy they're all assiduously hunting around for anything to conceal their own incapacity.  The moral bankruptcy of most of the media never fails to live down to my expectations.

One of the most telling and emotional comparisons for me is from the wonderful To Kill a Mockingbird - the film which in my mind made Gregory Peck one of the finest actors of his generation. The lynch mobs represent the majority... those who react to the moment and who only after a long period of consideration can come to the long, the better view. 

And how to eat an artichoke!

Artichoke has much more to it than shown by chefs; it's one of the great messy starters.  The whole thing should have the whiskers removed from the bottom of the beast and the outermost leaves removed; boiled in salted water and then served with a small bowl or ramikin of Normandy salted butter; the dinner then peels the leaves one by one from the beast, dipping the base of the leave into the butter and stripping the gorgeous titbit of flesh away.  When you have used up the leaves which repay their dividend, then remove the rest of the useless flaccid small leaves and the wretched and aptly named choke, poor the remainder of the butter over the exposed and delectable heart and scoff!   You will end up with butter all over your chops and a huge pile of discarded, stripped leaves in the middle of the table/

As for Jerusalem artichokes... if you've ever had to spend a couple of days digging them out of someone's garden then you would not regard them with anything other than horror.  Double-digging in a wet and cold Spring to a depth of 2' over an entire garden and I'm pretty sure I did not get all of them; but after two days I was so tired and cold, I couldn't dig any further down. Ifor, the bloke whose garden it was kept saying what good topsoil it was...

Another light has gone out, and yet another

Just recently almost my last remaining really  close friend has died.  For the blog let's call him RJW. 

RJW as he was popularly known in the UK Diplomacy hobby was one of the founding fathers of the UK hobby, His 'zine, Mad Policy was one of the foundation and seminal zines of Diplomacy, first published in August 1972, he went on to publish more than 150 issues with a circulation which was international.

Mad Policy was also home of the Zine Poll for a lot of the time, eventually winning it, after a controversial change of rules in the eighties, which then resulted in RJW passing it on to John Piggott in 1986*. 

RJW was also one of the organisers for many years of Manorcon, which was an eminently successful games convention in the UK started in 1983 and still running. 

Richard was also instrumental in formulating the idea of the formation of the IDA/UK.  As Stephen Agar says: "...interest in Britain was focused on the Calhamer Awards which were organized by the IDA in the States. Thanks to some electioneering, British zines were nominated in 9 of the 11 categories and duly went on to win all 9 awards. This feat was accomplished by the fact that 75 of the 400 or so active UK players had voted in the poll, as opposed to a mere 50 votes from the 2,000 or so active US players. The US promptly changed the rules."  This coup was deliberately plotted it has to be said as a slightly nationalistic response to being patronised by some US players!  However, RJW remained good friends with people like Edi Birsan and Conrad von Metzke, in spite of some opprobrium.  It's worth saying that Richard loved to cock a snook at any kind of pomposity or pretension.

RJW also hated any kind of mawkish sentimentality, which rather showed itself in his spare, dry wit and prose.  He absolutely loved to puncture my innate tendency to pomposity.  Now, I shall have to resort to listening to what he would have said, like an additional internal critic.

His Imrryr by-line in Mad Policy was from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone series, RJW was a very avid collector of Moorcock and read a lot of Science Fiction.  He was also a great fan of Star Trek, Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 and also particularly loved the film Excalibur.  Besides this he was a very great fan of early 60s UK female pop singers like Susan Maughan and Sandie Shore and collected rare songs and records by such until he died.  His collections, besides a mountain of SF, also included cigarette cards, which he turned into a semi-profitable hobby in his retirement.

On a personal level, Richard was my best friend.  His qualities were those of a true Englishman as both he and I saw them: honourable, decent, honest and loyal.  His passion as a one-time resident of Essex was for the county and England cricket teams, the latter which I shared with him, and he did so love to crow over the success of his team over mine in the county championship.  But Richard's real passion was for the football (soccer) team closest to him in his youth and to his heart throughout his life, which was West Ham.

One of the reasons why Richard became and was such a close friend of mine was that we both shared a passion for strategy board games that took a long time... Britannia, Civilization (the Hartland Trefoil game) were just two of these.  If you don’t get on with someone very well, spending many hours staring at each other over a board would have been intolerable.  He played to win and was a very careful strategist, hugely capable when it came to assessing probabilities.  Which was understandable as he had a gift for figures.  He started his working life as a statistician with British Aerospace before progressing on to a very senior position for BAe.  This involved supporting negotiations with the UK government providing statistical and financial information for BAe during these.  He said that his experience in playing Diplomacy was invaluable in achieving results at these meetings!

But I would not wish to give the idea of an earnest man, as those who have read Richard's press saga in this august zine, you will know or guess that RJW was witty, charming, creative and highly intelligent in print as well as in person.  A great conversationalist, some of our joint flights of fantasy and extemporisation got us into some strange situations!  You will have (or can) read of the spoof which he and I perpetrated on the UK hobby in launching my zine Gallimaufry under a pseudonym, as part of which he created Selena King, a femme fatale for the hobby, and then proceeded to torment Pete Birks with her for a while, by getting people to send cards from her from all over the world!

Let me finish with my recollection of one such piece of insanity, which occurred back in the late 1970s.  In those days there was an annual holiday get-together called Eurocon, typically taking place in France.  That year Richard and Claire had agreed to give me a lift down and back.  In France in those days, there was nearly always spare capacity in hotels so getting a couple of rooms was not too much of a problem.  Until on the way back we found one which, to our horror, only had one last room left above the kitchen.  So I said that I would sleep in the car, but Richard and Claire being lovely people, because the room had a cot bed, wouldn't hear of it.  So we went downstairs, Claire went out for a walk and left Richard and I to secure the room.  This caused some whispered conversations which we realised was caused by them thinking that Claire was une Belle de la Nuit and that we were going to enjoy a bit more than just the meal and a sleep.  Madame's son, who was our waiter, was terrified by the thoughts of what we might do later on and so we regaled him with little winks and whispered "Ménage a trois!".  We could not resist.  Needless to say we had a fitful night as the room was above the kitchen with all the pots and pans, but eventually we got to sleep!

He was my friend: decent, honest, charming, witty, loyal and funny besides being a great gamesplayer!  After 40 years of friendship I will very much miss him.

*I have just heard that John has also passed away, a couple of weekends ago, Sic Transit Gloria Rana...

A trip to remember

My father made us 'do' Copenhagen on the cheap by buying a Dormobile and a second-hand 2 man pup tent for 'the boys' (as if you could use a collective term for a sadistic thug of an acquisitive, amoral elder brother and an introverted, bookish younger sibling - both over 6' - constantly at war).  "It will be educational..."

2 weeks of driving in a battered old camper van at never more than 45 mph through the Low Countries (so named because slow, long-distance travel on endless flat autobahns is horrible). Nights spent rolling up to campsites putting up a ropy old tent in the near dark with your mortal enemy before squeezing back into the van to eat warmed through tinned rubbish*, before the pair of us increasingly feral siblings were shoe-horned into the leaky old tent.

Mile after mile of boredom; across the N German plain and up into Jutland... Dutch fields, German fields, Danish fucking fields ... we stopped for a day in Copenhagen - my mother insisting we saw the Tivoli Gardens, but we had no money for the rides etc. then up the coast to the Helsingborg ferry, down the Scanian coast to catch the Lübeck ferry.

By this stage my father confessed that money was a 'bit tight' so we weren't to go near the hot buffet ...  I was so, so hungry i started silently weeping, shoulders shaking; folk at other tables started to turn and stare at us so I was allowed to get 2 bangers, mash and baked beans as my parents reckoned that would be cheapest ... Back to the table with 5 minutes to boarding giving my father his wallet back... "How much?" "s'free - part of the fare" I engulfed this heavenly, properly cooked food in 2 minutes. It was the highlight of the holiday for me... we had to grind our way back, penniless, ravenous ... I'm amazed they let us back into the country ...  2,700 miles in a fortnight at an average of 28 mph... 😢

*I've mentioned before just how abysmal a cook my mother was? Well on this trip she managed to plumb new depths of culinary disaster... the exploding steak and kidney pie trick she left at home... but boiled spuds with no salt, burnt baked beans, boil in a tin frankfurters came with us because "We can't trust that foreign muck"  Jesus, the rest of us were so fucking hungry we used to bless the late arrivals because on the few occasions we were early my brother and I used to go and stand near where others were cooking whimpering and salivating away, tears in our eyes hoping they would take pity on us and feed us a few scraps.  My father would come and haul us back lying through his teeth that "Food was ready"