Category Archives: Family

Off radar

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My folks, sister, her boyfriend and my niece returned from their Italian adventure today.  I was so looking forward to having them back, selfishly, because it meant returning Otto to his mum and dad so I could start to clear up the mess of having an additional animal in the house prior to my guests arriving at the weekend.  I got a text from Mum this morning, telling me they were getting on the flight at Bologna and were due to take off on time.  This was an invitation for me to enter full “people like me” mode and get onto my Flightradar24 iPhone app and follow their journey back home.

Once I’d found their flight number, I keyed in the details into the website to find that they’d already taken off and were ascending at 26,000ft.  Ten minutes later, tracking on the iPhone app showed they had reached cruising altitude of 38,000ft.

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The information provided for each flight is incredible and you can even have a “flight eye view” by selecting the 3D option of the app.  Amazing.  People are so fucking clever.

Anyway, I checked on them throughout their flight and, as they entered UK airspace, Flight FR2241 began its descent.

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And then… it disappeared.

What the fuck?  WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?  

I checked the website… nope, wasn’t there.  Checked the iPhone app… nope, not there either.  I checked the BBC News website for the red “BREAKING: Passenger jet disappears over Derbyshire” banner.  Nothing. Nooooo, planes do NOT crash over the UK and the ash cloud from Iceland isn’t due until the weekend.  I was going to have to look after Otto forever.  I’d have to deal with cat litter and dried Felix on my desk FOREVER.  And what about Skippy?  And what about clearing out my parents’ house?  Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!

I checked the Manchester Airport website for arrivals.  “On approach”  Yeah, they always say that when planes crash until it suddenly changes to “Phone Ryanair emergency help desk”.  

One final check of the iPhone app and I noticed this:

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An unknown Ryanair 737 had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, landed at Manchester and was now pootling along, without a care in the world, to the gate.  The absolute fucker! Why would a plane change its radar on its approach to landing?  Why on earth would it do that?  And why did it have to be the one that I happened to be tracking with my anxieties?

Blimey.  

Anyway, they’re back.  The purry one is back with his dad and all is good with the world.

Needless to say, I’ll be using the Flightradar app to track April as she comes into Manchester on Saturday.  That’s if her dodgy airline is even registered with radars and stuff.  Icelandic volcanic ash clouds permitting.  I can’t believe they’d name a volcano after Tony Soprano’s strip club.  Bardarbunga!

 

Late detention

I’m running late.  It’s 10.42pm, but I can’t go to bed yet because there’s a load still quite a way off final spin in the Whirpool (shit washing machine, never buy one).  I’ve had a large glass of red and I think I’m snack food-depleted.  Pffft.  I could run the vacuum around, but I’m not sure the neighbours would appreciate it.  Then again, they’re all STILL off for the summer.  Not that I’m bitter or anything.  But teachers, seriously? For a so-called profession that’s hardly ever in work, they don’t half fucking whinge about it.  And you can get paid an absolute stack for teaching lies.  

There are actual things called religious education teachers, I seem to remember having one myself. People who get paid three times the national average salary for teaching fairytales shrouded as truth to impressionable youngsters. I could be an RE teacher.  I’d be more than happy to teach kids about religion. When are they going to ditch this shit from the syllabus and teach kids about world cultural history, philosophy, morals and ethics instead?  Only when I’m in charge, I fear.

There’s rosemary

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This little iPad keyboard is perfect, absolutely perfect. Everything about it is beautiful; from its shiny piano-black surface, the pressure required to register a keystroke, to the satisfying clickiness of the keys. I love it.

And because of this, I shall now continue to type something.

One week on from her dramatic entrance into the Big Brother Hospital, Big Con still hasn’t been evicted, despite a morphine-induced fight with a couple of the night staff who decided to put her on a commode without waking her first. Things are very serious. She’s well, but has a severe infection in a knee joint that was replaced eighteen months ago. For eighteen months, she’s been voicing her concern that the joint was painful and inflamed, but nobody seemed to take these concerns seriously enough to fully investigate where the problem lay. Essentially, the joint was full of pus and bugs and she’s having to stay in hospital until the worst of the infection has cleared. These things happen. They shouldn’t, but they do, and all you can do is hope for the best while being aware that drastic measures may need to be taken if things can’t be resolved through the use of antibiotics.

Anyway, the daily trips to the hospital are slightly draining, but it’s good to witness her improving in health and humour. Unfortunately, hospital visiting also exposes you to:

  • Hospitals
  • Hospital patients
  • Hospital visitors

    • Not being known for my tolerance of rule breakers, I found myself constantly distracted by the six visitors at the bedside of the woman opposite my mum. They were noisy, but worse than that, there were more than the “maximum of 2 visitors” at a time. “Stop being so numerous! And you, woman, yes you! Stop looking like something from Big Fat Gipsy Weddings!!” Perfectly nice enough people, but THEY WERE BREAKING THE RULES.

    They keep moving my mum too. I don’t understand this. One day her bed is in one position, go to visit her the following day and, before you’ve realised it’s not her, you’re sat down next to a complete stranger. Luckily a lovely stranger who my mum, once I’d found her, wasn’t at all subtle in telling me that “Sylvia has dementia, but she’s lovely”. Sylvia seems perfectly fine to me, it’s Rose on the other side of you who I’d be worried about. Rose seems to think that I’m a volunteer hospital visitor and wants to hijack me. Rose is very pleasant, but she speaks very quickly in an Irish accent and is a little hard to understand. But I don’t want to understand her, I don’t want her speaking to me and interrupting my time with my mum.

    One of the most disturbing thing about visiting my mum is seeing her feet: both are deformed by bunions; one has had a toe amputated; and let’s just say, she can’t reach down to attend to her toenails or dry skin. As soon as she gets out, I’m paying for a pedicure for her.

    All being well, and I’m confident it will be, I’ve decide to have the family round at my house for Christmas Day this year. This will be the first time in history that we’ve not spent the day at my parents’, so I’d better not fuck it up. To ensure success, I’ve decided to let Mum and Dad do the prep for the dinner as some traditions simply can’t be broken and my dad loves peeling the veg, which is great because I can’t abide this task. It’s an exciting and slightly daunting prospect, but I’ve been given the idea of producing a spreadsheet to help me plan and I’ll get my folks smartphones so they can have calendar reminders of what to do and when.

    For me, last Christmas was lost in a haze of despair, anxiety, prescription drugs and booze. I am determined for the festive season of 2012 to be a metaphorical door slamming on twelve difficult months and an advent calendar window opening on a new and happier phase of my life. If not, there’s always sherry… and turkey curry.

    It hurts

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    Christmas Day is probably the only day of the year where you graze from getting up in the morning until going to bed at night. The grazing is only interrupted for a huge meal smack bang in the middle of the day. A huge meal with about three puddings and lots of fizzy drinks.

    Needless to say, after consuming about half a kilo of salty snacks, 400g turkey, 200g bacon, 100g sausage, 250g sprouts, plus roast potatoes and parsnips and then two helpings of Christmas pudding and a generous slice of panettone… oh, and not forgetting an orange and a satsuma, just so as I could kid myself that I’d had something slightly health today… after all that food, I’m bloated like a blimp, I’m doing the most toxic farts imaginable, and everything hurts. It hurts to breathe.

    I’m in bed now, as another Christmas Day draws to a close, looking forward to the morning in the sure hope that relief from my pain will come after a cup of coffee and the thought of a cigarette – of all the things that I have admitted to my parents, smoking cigarettes is one secret that I’m keeping to myself because, even though telling them I’m gay was quite traumatic, they will definitely kill me if they ever find out I smoke.

    My brother is a lovely man, but he really gets on my tits and I hate the way he dominates the telly when he’s here. He insisted on watching some shite on Zone Horror instead of proper Christmas TV, and then he fell asleep during it. I went off and occupied myself by burning a DVD of a film I’d downloaded from the internet this afternoon. The Night of the Demon (or Curse of the Demon in the US) was made in 1957 and starred Dana Andrews as an American Psychologist who comes to the UK to debunk the claims of the leader of a devil-worshipping sect.  He is cursed by the said leader and tries avoid the same fate that befell a colleague – a big demon came out of the woods (“It’s in the trees, it’s coming!”) and forced him to drive into some live power lines.  Anyway, since TV was so utterly shocking tonight, we watched that and thoroughly enjoyed it.

    Tomorrow is the Boxing Day running buffet.  Hurrah!  It’s quite good that the shower here at my folks’ is absolutely useless as it gives me an excuse to go home and have loads of fags to build up my nicotine levels before the noise in the afternoon starts again.  There will be my sister and Little Con, Alan (who always shouts) and Jane (who puts up with him for some god unknown reason, love I think), Jackie (cousin) and her husband Dave.  All talking over each other, with Mum not paying attention and demanding that things are repeated at least twice each time they’re said.  Me and Dad just keep ourselves to ourselves.

    At least we won’t be joined by Jackie’s brother and his wife, who has been on a diet since the day I met her in 1984 and who won’t touch a thing to eat because “Oh no, I don’t like that, it’s hangin’.  I can’t stand that, it’s mingin'” and then insisting that their son won’t eat anything either “Oh no, he won’t eat that, he doesn’t like it”, which I think is the most rude behaviour imaginable when somebody has gone to the effort of preparing a load of stuff.  She never takes her coat off either and just sits huddled (usually over the buffet, whinging) with a face so sour that I’m sure it’s begging to be punched really hard… repeatedly.  I’ve never punched anybody and I don’t think I ever will.  I wonder if I  could pay somebody to do it.

    I think there’s a half-chewed sprout blocking my colon.  I am in lots of pain.