Marmalade does not count as a portion of fruit

Botanic Garden, Rio de Janeiro, April 2019

I suffered for 10 days with a cold I caught from a Doctor; that's the last time I help him out with a challenging patient. Not really, he's the Doctor I chose to keep when I reduced my working hours. But he could have kept his cold to himself.

Luckily illness didn't stop me from accompanying mum and dad to the last wedding I'm likely to be invited to - both nephews now done and the niece declaring she's not getting married. All involved seem to have escaped without catching anything from me. As weddings go it was a good one - a Humanist ceremony in a field out in the open, so a good thing the weather was fine. Afterwards there was a tent for food and dancing, but as the sun went down it got really cold, and obviously the main players were a generation younger than me so the music wasn't from my era. They had laid on a whole lot of attractions though - props for photographs, pick and mix sweets, a bar making burgers and bacon sandwiches, a fire pit with marshmallows to toast, the wedding cake, a mountain of cheese, more doughnuts than you can imagine and probably more that I've forgotten. It was nice. Mum and dad stayed for the ceremony and some nibbles afterwards but headed off in a taxi before the partying started.

The tax return is done! Also Eurostar booked for ski trip #2 after a whole lot of hassle with logging in and passwords. I'm not convinced the Eurostar website will ever work for me again so I've printed tickets and emailed them to myself just to be sure. Ski trip #1 is all arranged by someone else so I don't need to do anything much. Next job will be booking the bus to the resort from the train station and then it's ski hire and I'll be ready.

The planning and arrangements for all these ski trips and another visit to the Christmas Market in Munich and a week-long retreat in October have been disrupted by my changed working hours. Annual leave in the NHS is incredibly complicated: it is calculated on an hourly basis and you have to include Bank Holidays in the allowance. So if you work 10 hours on a Monday and 1 hour per day for the rest of the week, you have to book 10 hours off when a Bank Holiday falls on a Monday, but conversely if a Bank Holiday falls on a day that you don't work you can use those hours for leave on another day. Swings and roundabouts.

The hours allocated for leave are also calculated pro-rata for weekly hours worked, and the year for which leave is calculated runs from April to March. I halved my working hours at the end of July, which is only a third of the way through the year, so in the second two-thirds of the year I was given half as many leave hours compared with my allowance in the first third of the year. My problem was that I took an awful lot of my year's allowance in the first third of the year, what with the trip to Brazil and the music festivals. When the allowance was calculated for me (there was no chance of me being able to work it out for myself) in August I was presented with a remaining allowance of 1.75 hours up to the end of the year, whilst having committed to two ski holidays requiring 27 hours off. And I was fortunate that Christmas and New Year holidays are not on Monday or Tuesday this year, otherwise I would have ended up in negative balance. Luckily I've been allowed to juggle my working days and take the days off that I need by working extra days in December, January and February.

I have started to use my days off for leisure pursuits as well as all the admin and household tasks that are still needed. Last Friday I took myself off to Birmingham. One of the reasons was that I needed to exchange a defective pan at John Lewis, but then I had lunch at my favourite Cafe Soya, and afterwards I went to the Museum and Art Gallery for the first time in the nearly 20 years I've been living and working here. I didn't have time to see all that much, which leaves scope for another exciting visit, but I did see the Staffordshire Hoard, which is both more and less impressive than I was expecting. Less impressive because all the pieces on display were smaller than I expected, but more impressive due to the sheer quantity of tiny fragments that were retrieved from a ploughed field., totalling 5 kg of gold and 1.4 kg of silver. Now I have looked at the excellent website (link here) I have to say that the information provided at the exhibition itself isn't great.

Another new responsibility for me this year is to be Captain of the first mixed team for badminton club 2. The main tasks are to assemble a team for each match, collect match fees from each player, and register the score if we win. Which sounds straightforward but is usually quite a lot of hassle - I can't play in our first match, and all the men are proving remarkably unreliable so early in the season. But anyway, Mr M, I iz a Captain now, and therefore fully qualified to adjudicate on fruit portions in marmalade and other conserves.

"I love you this much"

Married

I have been quite exhausted. Everyday life has been taking its toll, plus assorted incompetencies and disorganisation, plus unnecessary enthusiasm for things that are just tiring but seem to be Worthy. Where to start?

Lola II and Mr M iz Married. This occurred at the end of a three-day period of celebration in which Mr A and I were given Too Many Things To Think About, which addled our brains to the extent that we were almost unable to remember our own names (even though we had multiple lists). In chronological order, Mr A left his suit at home and we had to go back and get it, we forgot two mackerels and a jumper at Lola II's house and had to go back and get them, I forgot my outfit at home and had to go back and get it (but we were a LOT further away than when we went back to get Mr A's suit), Mr A backed the car into a tree making a dent in the tailgate and breaking the rear window, we spent a BBQ variously phoning insurance and auto glass companies, I left my fleece at Lola II's house, we borrowed mum and dad's car while ours was being fixed, and Mr A and I were each entrusted with a secret thing from each of Lola II and Mr M that we were supposed to not tell the other until they were about to go off on honeymoon. Collecting wedding gift pledges was also my responsibility, but has been a trivial amount of effort compared to the rest of it.

But it was lovely really. There was a party for friends and family on the Saturday, we had a Dim Sum lunch before the ceremony and tea and cake afterwards, Sister D briefly played the piano in St Pancras station, there was a highly entertaining photographer, but the bit that made me laugh the most was the impossibly rude assistant Registrar who completely messed up the start of the ceremony itself by not being able to work the CD player. Mr M chose the music at the start, which was provided by a recording of some of Lola II's friends playing a string/piano piece, and Lola II chose the music at the end, which was 'Bring Me Sunshine' and we all had a little dance. Well, those of us with little or no dignity, anyway.

Enough wedding. The car survived. We survived. We got back a bit later than planned because of the car window repair, next day I had a diabetes meeting to go to in the evening (all about Insulin Pump Therapy), the next evening was the badminton association AGM, the next evening we had to go to meet friends that we're going on holiday with, and then it was Friday and I went to bed at 9 p.m. Which meant that when I woke up on Saturday it was early, and I could get to the start of the local Parkrun by 9 a.m. So I did, and it rained fairly hard throughout the event, but I only walked for about a minute on the steepest bit of hill and finished in 39 minutes and I wasn't last! Apparently, I came 11th in my category (Veteran Women aged 40-49 with dark curly hair wearing black socks). I haven't yet decided whether to nominate the primary endpoint as running 5 km, in which case I can stop now, or continue until I can do it in 30 minutes, or give up when I'm not improving my time any more. It was more fun running on a course with people about than in the park on my own. I'll probably do one more, especially if it isn't raining next week.

Which reminds me (how could I have forgotten) that my ipod has packed up, and it's the end of my world. I use that thing every single day, and I am feeling its loss acutely. My laptop has been pretty unwell for a while (its latest trick is to decide that it doesn't have a second monitor attached and just turn it off), and then the ipod started to skip tracks and parts of tracks so I tried to reset it, at which point it decided to successfully wipe its contents but refused to start up again. I have found a set of instructions to help me troubleshoot, but I might just go and get another one because I literally can't manage without it. Really, I might die.

At last

Les Deux Alpes, March 2014

I hope it's worth the wait, but just imagine my situation, each day knowing that there is no blog post waiting to be published. I have sinned, it's been a long month since my last confession. There has been a lot going on. I don't think there's ever been such a long gap between posts.

The last time I wrote was the week before my holiday. I went to the Snowdome to practise (what a good idea that was), dad went into hospital for his back operation, I went to work, badminton, the usual. Then it was off to France skiing for a week, home again and a lot of important admin stuff to catch up with, dad out of hospital, back to work, a Diabetes UK meeting. Last weekend was even more hectic: a friend over from Germany for a brief stay in order to sign paperwork so he could sell his house, and... The Hen Weekend.

Holiday

The holiday was great. It was a good group, almost everyone was congenial, and my biggest problems were a) the people who didn't look like their names, and b) breaking away to spend time on my own without appearing anti-social. In the end, I had to explain and apologise to the people who didn't look like their names because I kept calling them by the different names that I had conjured out of nowhere. I just resigned myself to appearing anti-social.

A vast amount of snow fell on our arrival day/night, which is heaven for experienced and skilful skiers. Since the instructor was an experienced and skilful skier, she took the group up where the snow was deep on our very first morning, when everyone was just getting the hang of skiing again after a long break. We were not experienced or skilful, and it was carnage. But nobody was hurt, and the rest of the week was fabulous. I am in two minds about repeating this type of holiday; I think on the whole I would prefer a less organised group and private lessons instead.

Work

The Structured Education sessions have been interesting. I missed week 2 because of skiing, which was a shame because it was the big one from the Dietetic point of view - focus on carb counting, weighing and measuring food. Week 3 involved talking about alcohol and eating out, and the nurses covered exercise. I am looking forward to when I start to lead sessions, which looks as though it won't be until June. Otherwise, consultations remain much the same, and I still find it fascinating to listen to people's stories about their lives, whether positive or negative. And the Diabetes department has already arranged its Christmas party.

Diabetes UK is dominating my thoughts at the moment, as I'm preparing my 30-minute talk for the weekend and attending another of their weird local meetings. My name is on the programme for Saturday's Diabetes Awareness Day, and at the meeting still nobody greets me with any glimmer of recognition. I did gain some understanding of the physiology of weight gain due to injecting insulin peripherally rather than having it released by the pancreas, so that was good. I left before the raffle. I really think I might not go to any more meetings.

Hens

Lola II decided to have a relatively low key hen weekend with just two of her friends and me. I was in charge of entertainments, although we agreed the basic agenda between us. Lola II put in some specific requests: Yorkshire puddings; a steamed chocolate and apricot pudding; sleeping in a tent; no veils, strippers or other tacky accoutrements of the vile and tasteless hen parties. With no time for blogging, I spent my weekday evenings making stew and puddings and cooking veg as well as preparing a guided tour of the delights of Leamington Spa based on the Discovering Britain website. Mr A put up the tent, which was christened the Hen House.

It went very well - we walked the walk, talked the talk, placed a bet on the Grand National, watched one of the worst movies I have ever seen (this was a mistake - it was well reviewed and featured quality actors like Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave), ate stew and Yorkshire puddings and chocolate and apricot pudding, Lola II slept in the Hen House, and we went kayaking on the river. The highlight for me was none of these things - it was the revelation that Lola II needs reading glasses! After more than forty years, at last she can experience the interminable nuisance of not being able to see properly. I'm not gloating - I will definitely need bifocals at my next visit to the optician, and I'm thinking of getting reading glasses myself for when I wear contact lenses.

In other news...

The 'Couch to 5k' running programme continues to go well, despite interruption from skiing. I've completed Week 4 and am about to start Week 5 of 9; I have progressed from 60 seconds to 90 seconds to 3 minutes and now to 5 minutes 'running' at a time. I run on the circular path around the park, and this week there were a couple of women chatting and walking in front of me - as an indication of the speed I have achieved, I completely failed to catch up with them. I am concentrating on stamina and technique, I tell myself, I can work on speed later.

Lastly, you should know that the only reason I'm managing to produce this post is because I went to badminton (club #2) and the hall was locked up with nobody there. My loss is your gain on this occasion. I have a journal article to write after the weekend, so there may be another lengthy pause after this...