Alfresco Sky

If you were paying attention when reading my last post you'll know that's the new colour of our bedroom walls.

Alfresco sky....isn't sky always al fresco? I suppose Dulux is running out of ways of saying "It's a pale blue".

I take a lot of random photos...most of them I never use....but I was looking through my camera files tonight and realised that I've recently been taking a lot of photos of the sky (al fresco) or at least photos that include a lot of the sky.

Here's a selection.....

Hot air balloon going over our house

Old tree in field

Fields of gold (well, wheat)

Crossing the QE2 bridge

A Lighter Shade of Blue

We've just finished redecorating our bedroom. When we first moved into the house, it looked like this....

Walls - note "grid effect" and picture rail

"Shower cubicle" and cupboard frames

Eeeeekkks!!!

We quickly stripped the pointless (and crooked) picture rails, trashed that dodgy blind, got my dad to make some cupboard doors (the previous owner just had some half-arsed bamboo rollerblinds acting as doors on the frame) and obliterated the walls (coated with some weird varnish-on-paint effort no doubt inspired by "10 Minute Makeover") and everything else with emulsion.

The room was liveable after all that....but we were never really happy with the colour and the finish. It was a couple of shades darker than we'd planned, plus the previous owner had used some weird stain (I suspect kreosote) on the cupboard frames, that soon leeched through the paint we'd used and stained the surrounding areas a nasty, dirty-yellow. Unwisely, we'd painted all the cupboards and doors and well as skirtings with the same emulsion we'd used on the walls....not a good idea, as emulsion is not tough enough to stand the abuse these areas of the room tend to experience, and the paint was soon chipped and damaged. Then earlier this year, we replaced all the radiators in the house, which left the front wall of the bedroom looking patchy and in desperate need of redecoration.

We decided to remove the shower cubicle as we never use the shower (it's piddling and badly plumbed and most likely the source of the stain in the lounge ceiling below that took a lot of paint to hide)...and converted the space into a much-needed storage cupboard.

The walls have been repainted with "Alfresco Sky" silk, with gloss white for the cupboards, doors and skirting.

One Woman's Medicine...

I haven’t had much spare time to blog recently....apart from spending loads of time investigating the October holiday, I’ve also had to complete some assignments from the Slovenian conference workshops (back in May)to achieve accreditation towards a qualification awarded by the European Medical Writers' Association.

Medical writing is a slightly strange profession...it’s not particularly glamorous, but it can be quite rewarding. Sometimes you get to write about new advances in medicine that are really quite exciting and hold the promise of one day putting an end to some of the suffering that illness brings. You also get to see a lot of morbid details...about drugs that don’t work, patients that don’t make it and all about the nasty symptoms and side effects. It’s possible to get quite depressed by this sometimes, but you just have to work through the data and present the evidence.

Some days, I even find humour in things that are not really amusing at all. Recently, I was writing about a study in patients who have suffered a stroke.....the patients were assessed on hospital admission for predicted outcome using a scale of 0 to 6, with 0 being showing no loss of function and 6 being death. How, then, did some patients have a rating of 7? If 6 is death....what is 7....vaporised? Or perhaps reincarnated?

Loads of studies I’ve worked on involve conditions “below the belt”. One, in particular, stands up in my memory....it was for hormone replacement therapy in men with low testosterone levels. Patients frequently complained of “multiple erections” when using the medicine...funny, other men are willing to pay good money for a little blue pill that achieves the same effect.

I also get to read some...er... stimulating articles from very specialised (and highly respectable) medical journals. Who needs ‘Heat’ or ‘Cosmo’, when you could be reading ‘Cough’ or ‘Chest’.... or even ‘Bone’..... and no, I’m not just being "humerus".....

Holiday Plans

My favourite topic....holidays!

B and I had booked a fortnight at Christmas in the Maldives....but with my dad being unwell, we've decided we'd rather be home over the festive season. I'm not too keen on being a 12-hour flight (plus seaplane/speed boat transfer) away from the UK or out of the country with limited communication for 2 weeks. So we'd reached the decision to cancel, and had resigned ourselves to writing off the deposit we'd paid back in January....then realised we could transfer it towards another trip, somewhere closer to home and for just a week.

Ooooooh....where to go? Obviously, we were limited by the destinations offered by our tour operator, who tend to specialise in the sun-n-sea package type of holiday. Still, it was a very enjoyable way to spend quite a few hours, searching their website and deciding where we wanted to go. We considered Greece (Crete or Rhodes), Spain (Menorca, Madeira or the Canaries) and Croatia....but somehow, none held huge appeal. We decided Italy would be a nicer option....having spent a week in Tuscany last July we were keen to explore more of this wonderful country, preferably out of the hectic summer season.

After much deliberation and more time spent reading hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, we reached a decision.......

We will be spending a week in October based in Sorrento...the hotel promises "stunning views" from every room of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius and is apparently well-placed for exploring the Amalfi Coast and for day trips to the Island of Capri and the preserved towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Something lovely to look forward to.....

Stuck In A Moment...

The past few days have been a bit surreal. Across the UK, temperatures are soaring under fierce sunshine, with thunderstorms in the late afternoons...and there are Michael Jackson songs playing almost constantly on the radio. It's almost as if I've somehow been transported back to my childhood in southern Africa in the 1970s/80s.

Music has always evoked very strong memories and emotions... some songs will immediately remind me of a time, place or event in my life. One of my earliest recollections is provoked by The Carpenters "We've Only Just Begun". I was about 4 years old and was in a car with my parents driving from the then Salisbury to Bulawayo to visit my dad's brother. This song was playing on the car tape deck when we came upon the scene of a horrific accident involving a train and a car at a level crossing. My mom told me to close my eyes tightly and not look out the window...but curiosity got the better of me and I sneaked a naughty peak as we drove past. Really wish I had obeyed my mom as that horrific scene burned into my memory forever that day...

On a less morbid note, the upbeat sounds of "I Like To Move It", famously revamped in "Madagscar" will always take me back to our Caribbean holiday in the summer of 2005. The film was about the only decent thing showing on our in-flight entertainment system outbound and inbound....think I watched it 5 times in total...but still loved it enough to buy the DVD later.

Speaking of holidays....some plans are afoot.
Will let you know more soon....

"Grumpy Legs"

I have two nieces - J aged 9 and M who's 4. My brother and his family live down in East Sussex, so as we were going down that way for the Christening last weekend we'd arranged to have lunch with them en route. I hadn't seen J and M for months, and was quite suprised to find how much they'd changed.

J has become quite the young lady ("madam" some may say!)... when we arrived she was busy "doing her hair", which seemed to entail introducing lots of tiny plaits and ribbons into her poker straight, curtain of hair. She was quite shy at first, but after a few minutes asked B (who she relates to well) if he would teach her some more chess moves...the last time they'd been over at our house we'd brought out the board games to try and keep them occupied on a dismally wet day, and she'd shown a suprising interest in learning chess.

M latched onto me, insisting on showing me her bedroom, her books, her cut-out cardboard pirate ship covered in stickers of all sorts of things, including mermaids and cacti (desert island anyone?)...and 'her' Barbies. Turned out they are her sister's and she was not supposed to be playing with them...but "Grumpy Legs" took them from J's room and put them in hers. So, not her fault then...

I soon realised that "Grumpy Legs" (also known as "Grumpylex") is M's imaginary friend....he'd just turned up one day and has been making mischief ever since...

Did you eat the last biscuit, M? No...that was Grumpy Legs.

M, did you spill your water over the floor? Nope, Grumpy Legs was playing with the taps.

Who made a bad smell? Grumpy Legs farted! [Said with the great glee that all children dedicate to toilet humour... and followed up with the "belly-button does a fart trick" her not-always-so-ladylike older sister taught her]

Made me think I could sometimes do with a "Grumpy Legs" of my own, a kind of alter ego that could say the things I really want to say or do, but I know I have to bite my tongue and clench my fists close to my side....because I'm supposed to be a mature and responsible adult.

Take for example a little scenario that arose later that evening. B and I had decided to treat ourselves to a hotel for the night before the Christening. We'd ended up booking a beachfront hotel in Hastings...not our first choice but there was not a room left in Eastbourne as the pre-Wimbledon tennis tournament was underway.


After a good walk along the seafront and through the Old Town, we decided we'd go back to the hotel for a relaxing drink and dinner in their restaurant/bar. The other patrons seemed predominantly French...indeed we'd encountered quite a few in the town already and wondered why the place was so popular with our cross-Channel comrades. We'd speculated they must like Hastings, as it was the setting for former conquests (1066, The Normans and all that). Turned out most of the staff on duty were also partial to les escargots.

Not long after we'd settled down with a glass of red wine, we heard a slight altercation at the table close to ours. It transpired that Le Garcon had served his compatriots' wine....not in a wine glass....quelle horreur!...but in a tumbler! Turns out the staff had had a bit of an early run on wine orders and the dishwasher was on overtime. Not one to let such a gastronomic crime go unrebuked, the outraged Frenchman stormed up to the bar to protest...loudly..."I am French...and to serve me wine like that is an offense!"

Of course it would have been fine to serve it to a 'rosbif'(Brit)....hell, we're happy with a straw in a bottle... or even a trough on the floor!

All right mate, keep your hair on...

Quite a bit later we realised that we'd been waiting an awfully long time for our food...and that there was a plate of something that looked suspiciously like one of our meals rapidly cooling on the side of the bar. Even later, after finally managing to lock eyes with Le Garcon (who was scurrying about no doubt looking for more wine glasses) said plate was brought to our table...but without cutlery and without my food order. The darn dude made a rapid retreat before we could even query the absence of either. I was itching to go up to the bar and say loudly (purely for the benefit of Les Francais)....."Excuse me old bean, hate to bother you and all that...but I have a slight problem....you see, I am English and I eat with cutlery...and typically, I enjoy my meal at the same time as my husband!"

But of course, I didn't....instead B went up to the bar and discreetly queried what had happened to my meal and whether cutlery was supplied. Apparently there had been a mix-up with the order (they'd assumed I wasn't eating....wonder if that's a subtle hint I need to go on a diet)... and I only got my food well after B had devoured his (I did tell him not to wait!).

Did we cause a fuss? Course not....we're English! Stiff upper lip and all that.....

Where's Grumpy Legs when you need him though?

On Godmothers (Fairy And Otherwise)

My dad has started his second cycle of chemo...so far so good again and he's feeling OK. Cross fingers, hold thumbs, knock on wood, hope, pray...and wish.... that it continues to be so and that the treatment makes a difference.

Do fairy godmothers still grant wishes?


As a small child, I used to confuse my real godmother with the benevolent fairy of some of my favourite, made-for-Disney stories. The two were not that different really...she lived very far away (Cape Town) and sent me lovely presents for my birthdays and Christmas. I didn't really get to know my godmother until I was an adult. She was a spinster, who'd dedicated much of her adult life to looking after her aging parents. I later found out she'd passed up the chance to marry the love of her life because he was divorced and her parents did not approve of the match. Shortly after that, she'd had her heart broken by a cad who stole loads of her money and did a runner.

When I moved to Cape Town to study, my godmother became more a part of my life and it was kind of cool having her around. At least once a month she would pick me up from my halls of residence and take me back to her comfy flat for lunch or supper...always a treat to eat non-mass-produced food. When B came on the scene, she warmed to him almost immediately and extended her lunch invitations to him. For some reason we always seemed to end up having Sunday lunch with her the day after a heavy night of drinking and clubbing. Green about the gills, we'd both politely refuse the customary glass of sherry on offer, hoping we didn't still reek of cheap booze. A bit straight-laced by nature, my godmother did not completely approve of my student lifestyle (and she got to hear the edited version). She was also not too impressed when B and I decided to "live in sin" but did offer us some much needed pots and pans for our sparsely furnished flat. Needless to say she was overjoyed when we finally decided to make honest persons of ourselves and get married.

Now that I'm living in the UK, I keep in touch with my godmother by the odd phone call - she phones me on my birthday, I phone her on hers, and she's become quite deft at sending text messages. It's now my turn to send her gifts... she's a suduko fanatic, but refuses to pay the greatly inflated prices of puzzle books in South Africa...so it's easy to pop a book in the post to her.

On Sunday I'm becoming a godmother myself for the second time round.....something I am quite excited about. Wonder if I'm qualified?

B and I have decided to remain childfree....simply because we do not want children of our own. I like children, and enjoy those of others...but have no desire to have them around 24-7. I knew in my early 20s that motherhood was not for me, but everyone said that I would change my mind, my biological clock would start ticking and I would start wanting a baby....well, either I'm deaf or my clock needs a new battery, as in my mid 30s I feel even less inclined. Luckily, I'm from a generation and culture where it is acceptable for a woman to remain childless, and more importantly, I'm married to a man of the same opinion....well, we wouldn't have gotten married if we differed over something so fundamental.

I am alway very happy when friends or family who really want children start a family, and it's great to see the joy they get from their children. It's flattering to be asked to be a godparent by your friends...I hope that I will be a good one and make some positive contribution to my goddaughters' lives.