And I’m having my two lovely refugees to my place for Christmas.
They will of course be arriving by rubber dinghy on the canal next to me, as is traditional.

Word got out … and it seems their mates are coming too .. 🤷

I may have to send out for some more turkeys.

I swear I’ve got some super fast recovery from being ill gene.
Today’s ‘ ailment’ was over even faster than normal.
At 11am i started shivering… put a coat on and sat in front of a fan heater on full, for 4 hours.
Then I went to bed and was really cold until 4 o’clock.. at which point i suddenly felt ridiculously hot… for an hour.
Now I’m fine.

Even by my standards that was quick. Usually it’d be a good 12 hours of feeling rough.

About 5 years before my injury, i went to Africa to do a kayak race. About 3 days after I got back i started to feel really strange at work.
Two hours later and I felt really unwell.
I could tell it was serious and so I drove to the local hospital ( Ashford ). I was shivering really badly when I saw the doctor and he asked if I’d been abroad recently. I said yes, Africa, and did I have malaria?
He did some tests and said he thought not, but that i should go straight to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Chelsea.

I think I drove home, put a thick winter coat on ( it was July ) and then got a tube train into town, all the while feeling worse.
I found the department and went there. I didn’t have an appointment obviously.
By the time I got there, all I could do was give my name and that I was sent there, and I’d just been to Africa.
Then I put my hood up and lay on a row of seats.

Not sure how long I was there, but eventually a doctor called me in, took a history and took some blood. I stayed in his room while they did some blood analysis.
I remember him saying ‘ your blood protein tells is a measure of how much inflammation is in your body. I asked if it was ok, and he said no Its not, it’s off the scale. Normal was under 10 on their measure and mine was closer to a thousand.
He looked at me and said ‘ we don’t know how you are still conscious?’
He asked how I’d got to the hospital and I said on a tube, and walked the last half a mile. He said, you shouldn’t have been able to do that….

I asked what it was, and he said lots of people that come home from Africa come back with ‘ unspecified viruses’ and are really ill.
I looked it up some time later and it said loads of people get home and are dead shortly after.
We don’t have any resistance to exotic insect bites or water borne diseases, and there’s no treatment, so people just die.

I asked what would happen next and he said ‘ well there’s not anything we can do other than observe you and see what happens.
Given I wouldn’t have been at my most rational, I just said ‘ well I may as well just go home then?’
He said ‘ well if you want to, we can’t stop you’
Then he added’ but get a taxi, don’t walk ‘.

So go home I did, and was shivering for 2 days ( despite actually being extremely hot, before suddenly feeling hot and not long after being ok.

So I’m good at not dying of things that should quite possibly kill me.

My cycle crash should have killed me. I was supposed to die in Toulon Hospital… or at the very best become ‘ un vegetable’. Yes they still use those words in France, along with ‘ invalid parking ‘. Fair enough, I say.

And so even paralysis hasn’t stripped me of that resilience to ailments. Not sure if I’d manage a tropical virus anymore, but who knows.
Maybe i should go and get one.

Two basal cell carcinomas and a Bowman’s Carcinoma.
That’ll teach me for not using sun cream.
All those years on the water without a shirt.

Think I’ll see Christmas, anyway.

I imagine I’ll be run over before cancer gets me, tbh.

Great production of A Christmas Carol last night at The Old Vic.
Thanks to Ysabel for coming along with me.. 😊

I swear I’ve almost been blown over in my wheelchair this week. You’re a lot more stable on legs, let me tell you. And soaked, twice.

On Saturday Hobbit Rob came to Brentford, from wherever Hobbit Land is. His train was stopped by a tree falling in front of it, on the line, so the Hobbit Express had to reverse back down the line and then he had to get off altogether…. and catch a bus. Then another bus…. so he got to me no less than 5 hours late.
He’d never been to a football match ( well neither had I until recently ) but he got to Fortress G Tech stadium for just after half time.
I wasn’t allowed to leave the stadium and then re- enter so the next challenge was ‘ would Rob find the right door and then find me?’
To my amazement, he did though, and then he witnessed the ( joyful ) demolition of Newcastle.
They came to West London expecting a win ( and tbh i imagine everyone in Brentford thought that might happen.. ) but NO ! 4-2 to us. Result.

Then, slightly bizarrely, Robbit and I had ticket s to see Starlight Express in Wembley. It was his choice, not mine, I hasten to add.
I’d carefully explain to Robbit how to get to Westminster tube station from Brentford, as he isn’t that familiar with things like trains that go underground, through tunnels.
I had to go a different way because lots of stations aren’t accessible to me.
Sharing live location is always very useful to me, so i know where someone is as they approach, particularly as we are often obliged to go by different routes. We did that as we left Brentford stadium.
40 minutes later I was in Westminster.
Robbit however was still somewhere near Brentford, not really having moved at all.
I think I was in Westminster station for an hour, whilst Robbit got on the wrong train, went the wrong direction altogether, realised, got off, went back to where he started, missed another few trains etc etc.
🤦‍♂️
🤷🙄
It’s ever so often the case that the fella in the wheelchair gets to the destination way before the person without the ‘ challenges’. Go me.

Anyway we got to Wembley eventually, where everyone was being blown all over the place.

The show was very camp, a bit short on a plot, but good skating skills… having a lot of red wine made up for everything that wasn’t as good as it might have been.

All in all a good day, and lovely to have my hobbit with me, no matter that he did make me wait hours by getting lost etc. Bless him.

I’ve just been to see a play called Barcelona, in the Duke of York’s theatre.
It was very good; a cast of just two. No moving screen behind them ( for a change ).
The interaction between 2 people only. Funny and sad in turn.

What was so striking to me though were the parallels between both of the characters and my own life.
They met on her Hen night. He happened to be In the same bar as she was, on the night.. in Barcelona. She was American, he was Spanish.

She went back ( well, followed him back ) to his flat. It transpired that he had got divorced and they had a daughter.
In the terrorist activity of 2017, his daughter had died. He’d lost what he loved most.

Over the course of the night in his flat, the American lady realised that she really was about to marry the wrong man, and called the wedding off in a phone conversation. Probably unlike most people who acknowledge that, prior to marriage, they don’t call it off.
There are many people who marry because ‘ it’s just the right thing to do in the circumstances’.
In my case, there was absolutely no way I should have married who I did. I always knew that of course. It was just ‘ the sensible thing to do at the time’. I do realise now that that that sounds a little cold, but Christ I wish I had been true to myself ( as they say on every reality television show now ) back in 1995.
For a man that’s hardly got a track record for doing anything sensible, it was definitely out of character. Yet it lasted fairly/ very well for decades.
Countless arranged marriages last the course until death do them part, which adds value to ‘proven compatibility not being necessary’ in a marriage.
Marriage is a lottery. Loads that seem destined to work, fail, and loads that seem destined to fail, work.
If you are going to get married though, you should ( in my opinion, with hindsight ) do it to someone you really love and want to be with forever, with no misgivings apparent to you, having given all consideration to all the likely consequences.
It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make, as well. It’ll influence where and how you live, how well off or how poor you are, whether you have children and how they turn out. Really you should do it in a very scientific way. We don’t though, do we? Some must do, of course. Those that marry specifically for money, for example. Wealth doesn’t guarantee happiness, of course.

The man in the play had lost his daughter, and he was In the flat that night specifically because it was destined to be demolished in the morning. No one was supposed to be inside the apartment block, but he was, and had now been followed home by his American lady.
His devastation at the loss of his daughter was total ( though he was cheerful enough around the girl… she’d chased him back to his apartment, rather than him having lured her back to a death by demolition )
He didn’t hide that he wanted her to get out, but he was staying to die, surrounded by his daughter’s possessions. He wasn’t morose about anything at all, just sanguine. I know how that is, having committed the act quite coolly and mechanically in July 2017 – though of course resuscitated 🤦‍♂️ 🙄 )

Clearly, my daughters aren’t dead – they’re alive and I imagine they are well. I’m dead to them though, that i know. The Dad that went on a bike trip on June 13th of 2013 died the following day.
The person that eventually came back, wasn’t their Dad, he was someone else. The dead guy was fit and able and capable, would chase them around the house for hours and laugh and pick them up and do all kinds of fun stuff with them. He had a job and could drive cars and go up ladders etc etc. The person who replaced him was in a wheelchair, very sad, was very thin, was changed mentally by his head injury and his coma…. and unable to do most things the other fella did. For years he was just very, very down and had frequent mind altering infections. This guy just wanted the life that the other fella had had, with the same relationship with his children… and not being able to have it, could see little or no point in being here.

Not much of a replacement then. And not worth having. Someone told me that he’d seen them quite recently and they were both reminiscing really joyfully about their childhood memories with their old Dad. Clearly they are very attached to him, yet completely DEtached from the next incarnation.
It was better for the daughters to hold onto the happy memories of the dead Dad, and move on, which is what happened.

I only understood and accepted that my daughters were gone… about 5 months ago. Once I’d got it, it was like a huge weight was lifted from me. The replacement ( wheelchair) fella stopped thinking about his daughters, other than fleetingly and objectively occasionally, and cracked on with it. Outwardly he’d been cracking on with life for some years, but inside he was very much stuck in the lost life of the first Dad. It was only last night though that I realised how my daughters see it – that their Dad died in 2013.

You didn’t see what actually became of the Spanish man and the American lady at the end.
The inference was that he had altered/ saved her life by somehow making her realise that she was marrying completely the wrong person, and that she ‘ saved ‘ the Spanish guy by coming back with him and somehow making him leave the building when she did.
I don’t even remember how I got back, whether it was by tube or on the road, and it wasn’t because I was drunk. I was deep in thought, and it seems got home on autopilot. It’s midday now, and whilst I remember leaving the theatre and saying goodbye to Kerry, and then being at home and in my flat, I don’t remember the hour in between. Kerry phoned me just now, and said that I seemed to have become really ‘ spaced out ‘ in the latter part of the play.

I’m glad I went to the play. The realisation hasn’t made me emotional, but it has been a significant thing.