David Gillon

 We took a ride up the dale yesterday as my mother hadn't been anywhere since before Christmas. Lots of bits of snow still lying in sheltered spots up around Tow Law, a good week after it had melted at lower altitudes - some of the really protected spots out on the moors may well retain pockets of snow into summer.

Our putative destination was a garden centre, though at this point of the year everyone seemed much more interested in having something to eat at its attached restaurant than in buying plants - in fact the restaurant was popular enough we had to park in the overflow carpark and  they were handing out pagers to summon you when a table became available.

"I had the all day breakfast, it was beautiful" someone told us coming out as we were going in.
"Order something nice" my sister ordered as we were seated, "We haven't had the chance to take you anywhere since you got here."
"I'll have the all-day breakfast, then."
"Mam and I are having scones, order something that won't mean we're sitting around waiting for yours to be cooked!"

That's me told, then.

Waitress appears, "I'll have the tiramisu"
"Sorry, that's sold out."

*headdesk*

"Uhh, <rapid flick through menu> I'll have the cheesecake."
 

Service wasn't especially fast, but the cheesecake was pretty as a picture when it appeared - a round serving, topped with some thin stripes of chocolate, half a strawberry, a raspberry and a blueberry.

My initial thought was it was a bit on the small size, but it was so rich it was actually the perfect serving. The cake melted in the mouth and if the blueberry was a bit blah, the raspberry was superbly tart and the strawberry so sweet it was like biting into crystallized sugar.

I'd ordered a mocha with it, which was also really nice, but possibly not the ideal companion - black coffee might have made a better match to counterpoint the richness of the cheesecake.

So the moral of the story is sometimes you have to forget what you think you want and let the universe order the nice things for you.

Started the day (almost) in Weardale, where my mother's drive was completely covered in black ice even at 10:45AM, passed through York at noon(ish) where the sun was momentarily blinding, even if snow was glistening on the tops of the dales in the distance, finished it in Kent at twilight, where it's grey and miserable.

My conclusion, having experienced a significant sample of the country today, is that it's bloody cold.

But my house is warm.

My original plan was to be away for two or three weeks: go up the week before my brother-in-law's funeral to help with organising, then stay a week or two depending on what I could help my sister or mother with.

The funeral went fine,these things are never great, but we had a polished set of undertakers (same ones we used for my dad) and our parish priest is so good at his job he lectures at the Vatican. He was perfectly happy to do a Catholic-lite ceremony, Alan wasn't Catholic, but my sister said she needed to feel it had been 'done properly' and he wouldn't have objected. The barman at the local club was one of his drinking buddies, so afterwards almost organised itself.

Post-ceremony it was obvious that my mother's household admin (which my sister normally handles) was far enough behind I'd better stay the full fortnight to help get it caught up. Then my sister pointed out that if that meant I was planning on travelling on the 30th, then I'd be leaving the day before my mother's birthday, so I shifted my plan back a couple of days, then realised that put it pretty much into the last round of train strikes, so three weeks became four and travelling last Tuesday.

And then I woke up on Tuesday, and wondered "Why is the room spinning?" And while the dizziness wasn't so bad that I couldn't get up, I really didn't think five hours on a train while dizzy was a fun way to spend my day. So my sister had to dash down to the station for me and re-book my tickets (plus assistance)  - £10 admin fee, but on their most restrictive (aka cheapest) fare that didn't seem too bad. Annoyingly I'd probably have been okay to travel by late afternoon, though admittedly I did sleep an extra six hours or so during the day. As inner-ear bugs go it was a fairly mild one, though I was still vaguely feeling it right through until Sunday.

So I ended up coming back last Thursday, for 29 days away in total.

Which is a lot.

 So of course yesterday's rain eventually melted all the snow, but only after I had slogged up and down hill to collect my ticket from the station. At least it makes getting to the station in the morning simpler. Fingers and everything crossed I get my train and my seat.

Which makes this probably my last post of the year, so season's greeting to everyone in whichever way makes personal sense to you and I'll catch you in '23.

And on a completely unrelated tangent, Elon Musk's antics over the past few days have reminded me of the apocryphal Officer Efficiency Report : "His men will follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity to see what happens next."
 

So problems on my trip North started even before I set off when I woke up and found I'd broken a tooth (molar) in the night. I'd actually lost about three-quarters of it during lockdown when I couldn't do anything about it and by the time we were out of lockdown it was completely healed and there didn't seem any point in doing anything about it, but now the remainer had been reduced to something uncomfortably like an upright chisel blade. As I was already committed to chasing about after other medical stuff that day and don't currently have a local dentist (previous dentist kept sending me to the top floor of their four storey steep stairs-only building and just no) I didn't have a chance to do anything about it before the journey. And while the tooth wasn't  causing any pain, that chisel blade kept slashing the underside of my tongue when I tried to eat or speak. Which was less than ideal.

The journey itself went smooth enough, at least until I got to Darlington. I have a forty minute wait for the local train to Bishop Auckland, so at one point I swapped out of the chair onto a bench in order to dig into my bag for my drink. Which is when I noticed the zip of my bag (rucksack hung over the back of the chair) was completely open down one side. One frantic check of my rucksack contents later I concluded that my toiletries bag had conveniently stuck in the gap and stopped anything else falling out. 

That was until I came to set up my laptop after getting to my mother's, which was when I realised that half of my laptop charger was missing. And of course it was the bit with the transformer, not the bit with the plug. *Headdesk* 

(I suspect the rucksack zip came open right at the start of the journey when I had a momentary fear of 'Did I forget X?' and had to stop and check it halfway to the station).

So on the Friday morning my sister rang around all the local dentists - she was definitely out to a 10 mile radius, possibly even 20, and no one could take on a non-local emergency patient, half of them didn't even have a dentist in*. This was a pain because by this time the underside of my tongue was pretty thoroughly raw and for some reason people (family) kept talking to me and expecting me to hold up my side of the conversation.

On the plus side I did manage to order a replacement charger, (kudos to Laptop Chargers Online who had it waiting for Royal Mail pick-up about 30 minutes after I pressed send on the order). I think it took longer to work out the precise model of my laptop (turns out it's inside the battery compartment) than to find and order the charger (£30 plus an extra £3 for 2-3 day delivery rather than 3-5).

No point in trying to ring dentists at the weekend, so I tried NHS 111** on Saturday afternoon and was told a dental nurse would call me back, but that they were 'very busy'. The call back was about four hours later and the nurse quickly ran me through an assessment, then decided I didn't meet their criteria for hospital emergency dentistry, mostly it seems because I wasn't taking over-the-counter painkillers. Pointing out that I was taking an opioid painkiller strong enough I might not even notice the kind of pain someone might use an OTC painkiller for didn't get me anywhere. And telling me "Even if you did fit the criteria we don't actually have any appointments" didn't really help. Not entirely impressed there.

On Monday my sister tried again, and this time she got one dentist who said "We don't have anything, but try our other branch after 9:30"*** And they did have a slot. So that was a 20 minute drive to a village the other side of the next town over. And I have to say they had a very slick operation - quarter of an hour filling in forms on my phone, then through to see the dentist, who agreed with my feeling that what was left had been wrapped around a now missing filling, and in fact what was slashing open my tongue turned out to be a pin left over from the filling rather than actual tooth. Five minutes with the glorified dremel**** and a touch of dental putty stuff over the remnant and it was at least temporarily fixed. 

And we were amazed they took me on as an NHS out-of-area patient, meaning I was only charged the NHS dental emergency figure of £23.40, we'd fully expected I'd have to pay private prices. (UK dentistry's an unholy amalgam of NHS and private, with fixed charges for NHS patients, some dentists are NHS only, some are private only, and some are both).

And when I got back to my mother's my charger had arrived - ordered 2:30PM Friday, arrived Monday AM - can't argue with that!

Which was when I discovered I'd left the dongle for my wireless mouse at home. *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

And that was it for problems.

The other end of the holiday was more about finding things. First I found my copies of Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and Cryoburn, which I've been looking for for at least six months and which it turns out were in the Calibre library on my laptop (I hadn't used Calibre in ages), so it looks like I didn't buy them from Amazon after all, and no wonder I couldn't find them on my Kindle. And there were a bunch of other ebooks I've bought or downloaded from various venues over the years buried in odd folders here and there that are now similarly in Calibre. Then when I came to pack I reached into my rucksack and noticed there was a very faint bulge in the padding. It took me a few minutes to work out which pocket it was in, but yes, there was the missing charger. *Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*.

There's a thin pocket the full size of the main body of the rucksack, which I never, ever use, because why? And of course it was in there. But why would I put half the charger in the main body, and half in a different pocket? Ah well, at least I can now leave one at my mother's and not have to worry about carrying it there and back.

Mostly smooth journey back, though I did get deposited at the diagonally opposite corner of Darlington station to where I needed to be (even the driver didn't know why we were there) with 8 minutes to make my connection and a guard who needed to lie down on the floor to work out how to get the ramp in place. When the on-station passenger assistance guy caught up with me he explained what was happening - they'd just had a freight train break in two (eek!) on the line my local service was continuing onto, and it would probably be turning around and heading back to Bishop, rather than continuing on to the coast. I suspect the trains were probably disrupted for hours afterwards, so just as well I wasn't on a later service (or headed to the seaside with a pack of screaming kids).
 

* The UK's having a post-Covid dental crisis, two years worth of deferred treatment and loads of dentists leaving the profession.

** The NHS advice/triage/referral line, by contrast my sister rang 111 at 11pm a few days later and got a doctor's appointment in the middle of the night for her husband without any drama.

*** No idea of the significance of 9:30.

**** While the dentist was working he told me that he'd visited his father in the South of England between lockdowns only to find his dad had just come down with an almost identical problem to me and him without any tools, which ended with him down in the cellar among dad's model railway layout fixing it using an actual dremel!

And it's pointed out down-thread that it's the specific Totenkopf variant that was the unit badge of 1st SS Panzer Division "Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler" (Adolf Hitler's Bodyguard). You seriously couldn't make it up.

In more local news, I spoke to my sister tonight and my brother-in-law hasn't kicked his case of covid yet (day 8 - he's not doing bad, but he's still testing positive) so I've cancelled plans to head to Durham for Easter and I'll reschedule for Whit. I hope he's over it in a day or two, but I was planning to travel next Tuesday-ish and I absolutely hate organising things in a rush.

Sticking with my sister, I popped out in the car today to post her birthday card, and the weather was decent enough that when I came back I thought I'd take a very short walk. And damn, I thought my SI joint was settling down. I did the length of my street, which is about 200m, and despite taking it slowly, on crutches, and putting a lot more weight through them than I normally would, my pelvis was still killing me hours later (did the walk about 4:30PM, finally noticed the pain had settled down about 9PM).  There are times that hypermobility is quite literally a pain in the backside!

I'm home after three weeks, the house is still standing and it's warm, that'll do to be going on with.

I had intended to post once or twice over Christmas, while popping down the road from my mother's to visit my sister, but that turned out to be an exercise in futility. No problems getting on the net, the problem was 11 kilos of hyperactive cocker spaniel worming her way into your lap to help! At 11kg Poppy's pretty much fully grown, but still definitely an adolescent in her behaviour. OTOH it's nice to be greeted by someone wagging her tail so hard it starts at her nose.

It snowed lightly the day after I got up to Durham, enough to last overnight, then was ridiculously mild until this week, with a touch of snow on Monday that's still on the ground in places, and then the last couple of nights were down to -4C. And of course it started to snow heavily just as we started to load the car to take me to the station. We were unexpectedly entertained while waiting at the station, there's a piano in the waiting room, and one of the three young lads who work at the station was playing a medley of Abba tunes, and was surprisingly good. There was a somewhat alarming announcement on the train south "Sorry for the delayed departure from Doncaster there, that was due to having to wait for some assistance from the British Transport Police" Eek! The snow petered out somewhere south of York though, so I got home in drizzly rain just as the light was fading. Not exactly the way to see Chatham at its best. (Not that Chatham's best amounts to much at the best of times).

It was a quiet Christmas as we mostly weren't going out - Omicron! - and Christmas dinner courtesy of my sister and brother-in-law had to count as non-traditional - no turkey! I wasn't consulted on this, but I think I'm the only one in the family who really likes turkey, so I can't complain too hard. OTOH beef instead of turkey is very much a first world problem. The exception to the mostly not going out was my brother-in-law, who was popping down the local pub regularly. As he wanted to see his brother last Sunday we popped over to Hartlepool, kicked him out at his brother's local, and the rest of us went on to Seaton Carew, where Poppy took my sister for a walk on the beach and my mother and I spent an hour in an amusement arcade. We'd expected there not to be many people about, but apparently everyone else had had the same idea so it was packed like it was Midsummer.

The three of us being the only people I saw wearing masks on the street may explain why the North East's Omicron figures are rapidly catching up with the rest of the country, though it was a bit better in the arcade. And then of course the inevitable happened. Not only did my brother-in-law's brother test positive on Monday, but so did whoever he'd sat next to when he popped out to the pub on New Year's Eve, So breakfast on Tuesday morning was lateral flow tests all round. Fortunately we all tested negative and have stayed that way. (Covid also worked its way through my brother-in-law's son, daughter-in-law, both grandkids, and his daughter's husband over the holidays).

Anyway, I hope everyone else had a happy and covid-free Christmas and New Year, and that we can get (mostly) shot of the bloody thing this year!
 

So the whole point of going to visit my folks at the end of the month was to overlap my sister being off-work due to half-term. And I've delayed sorting out Planning Fail until I could speak to her in order to figure out if there is anything we definitely need to do together when I'm up.

Only for her to turn around today and tell me "when I was giving you a hard time about not having bought your train ticket yet, I was talking about Christmas. I'd completely forgotten you saying you were coming at half-term."

*headdesk*
 

Made it to my mother's without incident, though sadly I wasn't upgraded as I'd thought I would be - 225s had 1st class wheely seats at the end of the train, standard in the middle, turns out the new Azumas have both at the ends, so I was reading to much into Coach A. OTOH I did get a free (mini)coffee and (mini)danish at Kings Cross - a promotion for reopening their concourse shops, so I can't complain too much. The announcements claimed the Azuma service was busy, but I'd have said it was no more than a quarter full. Masks required on the East Coast Main Line, advised on the trip from Kent into London, not even mentioned on my Northern connection to Bishop. Guess which area has the worst Covid stats.

It's definitely a relief to see everyone in the flesh after 18 months of phone-calls and video-calls via Alexa. They keep you in touch but face to face has an extra layer of something. And I got to meet the newest member of the family for the first time, Poppy the puppy, who at 3 months old is all paws and ears and hyperactive greetings. She was so excited to see me on Sunday she wrapped her lead tight enough around my legs she popped herself out of her harness.

I've had several dreams in the last week, including at least one micro-dream in a micro-sleep, where I've been doing things like get on the train to head up to Durham for Christmas.

Sorry, dream-brain, but that ain't happening this year, get with the programme.