An update at last!

I am determined that this will not be a "poor me" blog but I cannot write it without saying what I am going through. Over the last few weeks I have had several extremely painful flare ups. They are fairly typical of what you would expect with increased pain, reduced mobility and excessive tiredness. One of the other symptoms is weight loss, unfortunately I have not "suffered" this.

At the moment everything has settled down to pains in my knees and shoulders, and stiffness and pain in my hands - especially in my index fingers. (Note the use of the Oxford comma in the preceding sentence. Impressed?) I am using paracetamol to try to dampen the pain and, at the moment, the soreness is more or less what I can cope with. It also seems to ease off as the day wears on.

It is still difficult to walk any distance at a sensible speed though and it gets more painful after a while. This has led to an unexpected bonus though - I have access to field six at Cropredy. This field is right next to the main arena and means that I don't have to walk too far over uneven ground and also that we get in a day early so no getting up at stupid o'clock to get access to the best camping places.

Right - that's the end of the symptoms. What else have I been up to? Well I did sing again with Fairport - although I fear I cocked it up as I forgot the lyrics. I will eventually post the video on Facebook - possibly at four in the morning when nobody will notice it. The song was John Condon if anyone is interested! Massive thanks to Simon Nicol for helping me out!

I'm not sure exactly how many countries our bus journeys and Danube Cruise took us through - maybe one of my fellow travellers will be able to enlighten me. (edit - it was 10 countries - thanks Mark) One frustration was that the odd flare up prevented me from walking too far on our various stops. My thanks go to the passengers on the bus and ship for all the support that I was given.

Tuesday was my first visit to Pittodrie this season. The Dons won but possibly the biggest talking point was the number of gulls that were around the place - at times it seemed as if they were co-ordinating their attacks on the fans in the stands. Eat your heart out Alfred Hitchcock. I will be back to Pittodrie on Saturday but I am going to miss the first four home league games as I will be at one festival or another on the various Saturdays.

The festivals are, in order of appearance, Fairport Convention's Cropredy Festival, the Shrewsbury Folk Festival, the wonderful boutique festival that is Banterfest and, finally, Costa's Portugal Festival. I'm looking forward to them all but especially Cropredy. I will try and post after each one but I am not promising.

We had a whisky gathering on Wednesday which was excellent. My biggest problem was to decide which of the duty free bottles that I had bought to take with me. One annoying thing was that although I didn't have too far to walk it would have taken me forever to get there. Thank goodness for taxis! 

Friday brings the excitement of our grandson's nursery picnic which I am genuinely looking forward to. Let's hope that the rain holds off!

That's about it for now so I will sign off with the usual tribute for our wonderful NHS which I hope is in much safer hands after the General Election.

Finally a plea - please share this as not as many people are reading this as there were at the start. Don't get me wrong, I won't stop writing but it would be good if more people could see the blog. In the same vein please leave comments. I would love to know what people are thinking about this - I can take criticism as well as praise! If you do comment please leave your name. Thanks.

Take care of yourself.

Cheers

Rob