Add A Little Ginger To Your Day…

Think back to when you were a child: did, at some point or other, a teacher or a parent try to get you to learn to play a musical instrument? It’s one of those things that you either grabbed hold of emphatically or grasped half-heartedly – there was no outright No chance, I’m not doing that, I’ve more important things to deal with like The Mysteries of Girls or What The Hell Do You Mean My Amiga 500 Games Won’t Work In Your Atari ST?

The Emphatics either went with what their parents or teacher favoured, usually what they played or wanted to play but never got around to it, or an instrument that they were already accomplished at and felt that their child should have followed suit. The Half-hearteds mostly ended up picking an instrument that would make their elders happy, wasn’t too difficult to practice and would get them out of as many French lessons as possible. Guess which category I fell into?

For about two years in my mid-teens I struggled to grasp the basics of playing the flute. I have zero recollection as to why my parents picked the flute and also why I agreed to go along with it. My neighbour’s son was all of one, one & a half, years older than me and therefore the purveyor of contraband video games and “late night German television”. When the time came, he requested, and surprisingly received, a drum-kit to pour all his teenaged angst into, when he wasn’t making fun of my braces or my gangly frame that is. I don’t think I ever made him, or any other of my few & far between peers, aware of the lack of rock ‘n’ roll that I got up to come practice time in my bedroom.

The flute slowly, but very surely, began to be replaced with other efforts such as digging ramps in the woods to throw ourselves and our bikes off of or learning the basics of manipulating a personal computer through command line interface* – kids, go ask your parents what MS-DOS was** – or even, and this is controversial here, trying to figure out how to take GIRLS to the CINEMA so you could try to KISS THEM. I was exceptional at two of those. All I’m going to say is, I was hot stuff with a floppy.

The very idea of learning a musical instrument as an adult should rightly so fill most people with disbelief and fear. As a child, learning pretty much anything be it an instrument, language, sport, cooking or any number of other things that I’ve discovered I should have started figuring out about twenty years ago, is a doddle compared to retaining the same amount of information in your thirties. Kids soak these things up like sponges; my own has gone from muttering the words Dada and Poopoo to arguing with me on why she would rather sit on the sofa and watch television than finish her dinner. She knows how to unlock my iPhone. Even my mother can’t figure that much out.

So it was with slight trepidation that I went out and bought a cello. It’s an instrument that captured my ear and imagination at my wedding when we asked Tania’s very good friend, and all-round super awesome lady, Polly to play her own cello as Tania walked down the aisle, so it’s got a fairly strong association with feeling…well, terrified but also awe-inspired and thrilled. My good friend Pete is a bit of a dark horse as he only recently revealed to us that he achieved Grade 4 in cello in school. He received one as a 30th birthday present from his wife and that started me thinking again. So I’ve lined up a teacher, I’ve got myself ample practice space down in my cellar and I’m trying to familiarise myself with the instrument to see how to hold it, how to tune it, while checking out some instructional videos on YouTube. Here’s hoping I’ve got some teenaged angst left over to throw at it.

* MS-DOS is THIRTY YEARS OLD today. Beautiful timing whilst simultaneously making me feel that little bit closer to death

** My local shop sells boxes of 3.5″ floppy disks; they’re held behind the counter and you’d have to ask the proprietor for them, like dirty little secret purchases. And rightly so.

A quick update for those of you who read my last post and were saddened by it; all 7 of you.

There is always hope, no matter how slim, and even though I had almost reached the point where it seemed there was no help coming from anywhere, despite people’s best wishes, a miracle landed on me.

I had decided to increase the dosage of my pain medication (for about the twelfth time) when the doctor suggested trying a treatment normally reserved for epilepsy which was occasionally used to treat chronic pain. It had immediate effect. Within 24 hours i was able to get out of bed normally, pick up my daughter, get on & off the sofa with ease, tie my shoelaces and, though I think I was pushing it here, running up a flight of stairs.

The stick went flying and so did I; right back into my life, my work ,my family, my friends. EVERYTHING was different. The way I felt about my job, my commute, being asked to get something from the bottom of the fridge. Nothing seemed to matter any more, nothing was too strenuous or too dreadful to contemplate.

The long and the short of it is I’m on a neuropathic painkiller rather than an opioid – this having had an immediate effect clearly points to my back problems being nothing to do with my musculoskeletal system (three years going out with a physiotherapist, thanks Jen!) and all the MRIs and bone scans and discograms in the world mean, as we’ve seen, nothing. As soon as this honeymoon period wears off I’m heading straight back to the hospital and demanding to see a neurologist – like I’d asked for about a year ago when the though occurred to me it could be my Guinness soaked brain misfiring.

In the meantime I’m off to run around the park after my little girl, which I’ve never been able to do before.

Pain is something that every living being on the planet attempts to avoid throughout its existence. It is one of the main driving forces, the others being fear and shock, that instigates the reactionary mechanism of adrenaline and it has become an all too-familiar companion to me.  It’s been some time since I last wrote..well, anything really.  The main culprit has been the enormous lack of motivation to be creative; no blog entries, no photography, even fixing problems at work I’ve noticed I do with considerably less flair than I used to.  Sadly this all stems from the one source – my back pain.

I’m not sure who may read this, whether there are long-time subscribers to my writing on here or Twitter or if you’ve wandered in off a search engine by mistake, but I want to try and explain to you what constant, unremitting physical pain is like to experience, and it’s really not going to be pretty so I suggest you steel yourself for the frankness I’m about to demonstrate.  I’ve not written about this before (though I did have a bit of a moan in this previous post) simply because I’m sure that people don’t want to hear about suffering and unhappiness. In fact I KNOW you don’t want to listen to a guy go on about how uncomfortable and sore he is, you more than likely want a bit of a giggle at a joke or a funny picture or link I’ve found recently.  Trouble is, there is now one ruling force in my life and that’s not my wife or my baby girl or a hobby or my job; it’s pain.  

Pain has become the closest thing to me.  That’s an incredible thing to admit when you think about it.  I love my family very much, and would endure all manner of nasty things to keep them safe and be with them always but they are one stage removed from me at present due to the fact that nothing, no amount of love or sympathy in the world can touch the pain I feel on a daily basis.  An extraordinary statement I feel, but until you’ve experienced total chronic pain on a daily basis I’m sure you would only be able to try and take my word for it.

By daily and by total I mean all the time.  When I sit, when i stand, when i walk, lie down, roll over, bend, stretch, lean, cough, sneeze.  When I stand or sit or lie perfectly still, it’s there.  This is all-encompassing, brutally constant pain I’m trying to describe and it’s a hard thing to do.  Painkillers can take the edge off, as can tremendous heat.  But on an average day I need to commute for almost 4 hours on 6 separate trains.  Then there’s desk jockeying with constant interruptions to stand and do something, fetch something, plug something in, pick something up.  At home even lying still on the sofa presents a continuous low, droning ache that spreads across the small of my back.  Picking up the baby or, god forbid this one, tying a loosened shoelace.  All these everyday, seemingly meaningless actions can combine to create a waking hell that blots out everything else in its wake.

The pain centres on a very localised area in the spine but radiates across the small of my back, down one side of my pelvis, through my right buttock.  Occasionally it will spasm great thunderbolts into my right side.  Usually the relentless throbbing will peak at intervals throughout the day, creating a tide, an ebbing and flowing that continuously eats at the mind and the soul.

The distraction is incredible.  I find tasks at work taking me three times as long as they used too.  I find I’m becoming more forgetful and careless.  Easy solutions pass me by sometimes and i can frustrate myself looking too hard for an answer that wouldn’t need to be forced.  Again, the painkillers can focus me but only to a point; they in turn function as a distraction from the distraction.  And these little saviours are poison in themselves – the addiction to opiates is a separate battle that I’m faced with, as is my body’s slow-growing tolerance leading to higher and higher doses.

It’s a crappy situation, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially if you’ve read this far.  And at this point most magazine articles or TV shows would conclude with “the answer to it all was discovered and medical science was wowed”.  This isn’t House, sadly.  Two years of thorough investigation and treatments including MRIs, bone scintigraphies, x-rays, acupuncture, chiropractors, shiatsu, discograms, deep tissue massage and two painful epidurals have produced not one single corroborative diagnosis or prognosis.  The outlook is bleak in other words.  Some further words came from the orthopaedic surgeon last time I had a consult with him: on asking what other than a futile vertebrae fusion could be done, he shrugged and replied “live with it, it might get better on its own”.

Unspecified back pain is one of the most common afflictions known to mankind.  In most cases it can be attributed to core muscle strength, or lack of it, posture, gait and lifestyle.  Perhaps, for me, the time will come when the unexplained becomes clear and life can go back to normal. Where I can walk without the aid of a cane.  Even though I have no reason to, I live in hope.  I hope like hell.

I recently fell in love with my Xbox again.  I’ve been off work for a couple of weeks preparing to deal with some major spinal interference by coming off all my pain medication and I could think of no better way to combat opiate withdrawal than with a good hard session of gaming.

I decided to root around on the Internet to see if any of my old game titles were still worth anything and attempt to trade them in for something brand spanking new.  Turns out 6 old, grubby games netted me 30 quids worth of credit with an online games retailer.  So the decision had to be made; was there going to be anything even close to beating Fallout: New Vegas off the number one spot on my wish list?  Turns out there was, and I’ve no regrets having plumped for the second option.

Codemasters’ Formula One 2010 has eaten almost three full days of gaming time over the past week alone.  Don’t worry, I’ve not been neglecting the family – unfortunately I’ve been getting extreme tremors at night which render sleeping fairly useless (fun fun) and this has given me a lot of opportunity to explore the tricky chicane of the final two turns at Catalunya; the ecstasy of out braking Fernando Alonso heading into a slow left hander at Bahrain; the fist pumping exhilaration of reaching the podium in two races flat after trouncing the field at Kuala Lumpur.

This is no ordinary computer game, this driving simulation let’s the true F1 fan experience every twist and shunt and rev and puncture from the most revered race tracks in the world.  I for one was astonished at just how difficult a prospect it is keeping one of these motors running, occasionally on the racing line, throughout lap after lap of sometimes labyrinthine circuitry.  Drive too slow, find your brakes and engine overheating; drive too fast and watch yourself spiral off into a mist of gravel and metal, ruining the past hours hard work in one badly timed manoeuvre.

It’s all too easy to watch every other weekend from the comfort of your sofa and belittle Jarno or Bruno or Vitaly or Kamui for twitching slightly to early or too late and ending up surrounded by the most expensive scrap metal you’ve ever seen (well maybe not Kamui..), but when you consider that it’s fairly difficult to hold it together for a few hours waving a controller around and pressing a few buttons whilst trying to squeeze those elusive few tenths out of an unforgiving track try to imagine what these drivers accomplish throughout the year.

It makes me sad when I think of the fact that I will never physically be able to fit my 6’5″ frame into a single seated racing car, let alone drive one as a racing amateur or professional – my head waggling out of the top would almost certainly not produce much downforce – but now in addition to seating myself with a cup of tea in front of the dulcet tones of Jake Humphrey 19 times a season to watch those glorious individuals, every last one of them (yes even you Fernando) battle for the glory of world motorsport domination, I can however briefly seat myself in the RB6 or MP4-25, turn up the volume and listen to the sound of V8 magnificence roar.      

Just because I was born in London and enjoy a healthy diet of fish & chips and bad teeth*, that doesn’t necessarily mean I have an obsession with discussing all things meteorological.

(*really, come on, our teeth are fine, STFU already.)

Having said that, I think that summer has well and truly passed us by already this year. It started raining this morning – it’s not stopped yet and it’s now 1:30am the next day. In fact it’s raining so hard at the moment that a small sea has formed outside the front door and stretches all the way to the end of my road. This evening it has cacked it down so hard that at one point it sounded like a lake was falling out of the sky.

Seriously, I want my fucking money back: where the piss did my summer go? Or was it here over those 5 days we were away in France for? I wouldn’t be surprised. I know I’m not supposed to go out in strong heat, y’know pale skin, sparkling, all that, but I love hot sunshine. Love the heat. I went to Tunisia a few years back and the day we arrived it was 52 degrees. FIFTY TWO. And that’s in celsius. It was so hot for the entire two weeks that I could barely stomach a whole beer per day. Now that to me is frightening- if I’m not putting away at least a six pack by the pool then something is clearly wrong with my holiday.

So this, this…abomination that we’ve called a summer is pretty piss-poor in my opinion. I know it’s a far cry from the Hoth like environment at the beginning of the year where we all struggled to get into work because no one could be arsed to go outside in minus 10 conditions (admit it, it wasn’t the transport, it was your duvet) but still when Boots is packed to the pharmacy with Ambre Solaire you kind of expect to be able to wear a pair of shorts, don’t you?

Don’t worry, it’s a Bank Holiday weekend coming up. It can’t get much worse.

Can it?

Hmm. I’m working on it alright, bear with me.

It’s been quite some time since the last overhaul of this website so I figured it was time to brush all the crap off the part of my brain that knows which bit of PHP goes where and polish FOTN up a little. Fortunately CSS no longer seems to be the utter mystery it used to all those years ago so it doesn’t take hours of frustration when something ends up right at the bottom of the page and I end up emailing Marty to fix it.

I’m hoping to remove this stupid left sidebar and add the date to the post title above – the lines are bugging me, I don’t mess around with categories or tags and you don’t need to know that “Rich” posted this cause unless Tania figures out how to get in here no one else is going to bother (come to think of it she’s not going to bother either…). (Done)

I’d like to add a Gallery link to the menu bar at the top which displays a live feed from veryfishy’s archives page – full of thumbnails that link back to their images. (Done…sort of)

One thing at a time eh, let’s sort a fabulous picture of me to go on here first.

Mm? Oh it’s you guys! Hang on, just finishing shaving. Think I’ve got about a month and a half’s growth on here. That’s metaphorically AND physically; I’ve literally just had a shave and I’m also trying to wake my writer’s mind at the same time. You get the picture.

A lot of writers say that their best inspiration comes when they’re in the shower or the bath. Or shitfaced on opium. My inspiration hasn’t come from dozing in hot water but a mental kick in the arse to actually WRITE something has. I do get a little complacent, apologies. Long time readers will already know this of course.

The good news is that my head is clear to use the keyboard, the better news is that I didn’t have to suffer too long without my beloved iPhone before the time came to queue for two hours to get my grubby hands on the new iPhone 4. Yes it was worth every second of the wait and no I won’t bore you with minute details of how I almost got a semi peeling back the protective plastic film from the screen. What I am still waiting for is a viable, stable jailbreak option to become available so I can upload all of my third-party goodness back onto my pocket lifesaver. Especially so I can re-tether the thing to my iPad, which is getting lonely without it’s wifi on the train in the mornings.

Hmm? Bad news? Oh right, yeah, you get that to balance the good don’t you. Hmpf. Well the crappy news is that my back is totally banjaxed. MRIs have been done, consultancies have been sat in on and the next step to talk to Mr Surgeon will be in September. Bit of a wait but when you consider is country’s health service it’s actually borderline speedy. The possibility of Lumbar Spinal Fusion looms before me. I am not going to provide you with links. You can Google that shit until you’re disgusted, I’m not hunting for it again. For example, if they decide to do ‘anterior’ then the go in to fix my spine THROUGH MY TUMMY. Gah! Then there’s the meds I’m on at present; no more pills, no more rattling or dry swallowing, oh no. Now I look like a reformed smoker when I take my shirt off with big old patches on my chest and arms. It’s good stuff but it’s not quite getting through to the core of the pain. I guess it never will, it’s sort of like an old, old bully following me around now. I guess i just have to learn to ignore him.

People say I whine a lot in real life (& I know I do!) so that’s all the whining for this entry, lest my online presence become bitter through my voice.

The brighter note at the end of this entry will be my new YouTube channel, which at the moment is reserved mostly for Beatriz. After discovering the incredible resolution of the video camera in my new phone I figured it’s finally time to get some footage online. So you can find her online here and if you fancy following the Twitterings of a one year old then make friends with her @theqweenbee. Careful though, she does bite.

On Monday I had the AWESOME idea of packing up my iPhone 3G and sending it off to O2 in exchange for Some Pounds. I thought I’d send the little guy off in style so I scrounged a little box and some packing foam to secure him in. Yes it’s a little nerdy but I thought I’d cut out exact shapes for the UK plug and power adapter:

Godawful photos, my apologies, they’re from my Crapberry (more on that in a bit). Having gotten my accessories nice & snug, time to wrap up that little fella:

And finally, waving goodbye at the Post Office *sniff*:

Done. Gone. I sort of wished the phone had been left on so I could track it online as it found its way to its new home.

I’ve bitched and moaned about my 3G since 3.1 was installed on it; it’s been nothing but trouble – clogged memory, crashing apps, a keyboard that just could not keep up with my typing and a signal that drops off in a train tunnel and needs putting into Airplane Mode to get back again. But boy do I miss it already. I’ve been using my work Blackberry Bold since Monday afternoon and can’t so much as ping a Twitter update from it. It does phone calls, it does text messages. That’s pretty much it. I can’t be doing with reconfiguring the thing to work with O2′s network instead of Vodafone’s so that’s mostly my fault, but frankly even if I had a data connection I’d be moved to tears at how shitty the interface is.

There’s a lot of people out there who have no idea how lucky they are to have an iPhone. I’m not saying it’s a life changer and an essential accessory, but once it’s in your life you’d better pray it stays there.

Having been home and back at work for a whole week since we drove all the way to and from fracking Cape Town a damned long way, I rather fancy taking another holiday..

I’ve got some pics from the trip to show off but I’ll try not to bore you with all of them, you know what I’m like with a camera (4 gig CF card? PAH!). First up, our awesome villa:

Big enough to sleep 8 people, we pretty much rattled around in here with our choice of bedrooms – B got the master suite I believe, with adjoining shower, awful singing voice though. She also got her taste of the swimming pool, eventually. Screamed her head off every time she got near the thing, so we were more than satisfied when she got in for 10 minutes on the last day:

Actually even I wasn’t brave enough to get into what felt like sub-zero water – Tania was loving it but I managed about 3 minutes less than B did. She looks on here in despair and wrapped up in a nice fluffy towel:

As for my two girls they had tons of fun together:

Whilst I consumed enormous packs of cheap French lager and bags of snacks.

As the weather wasn’t fantastic we did have to spend a bit of time indoors. Some of us got cabin fever more than the others:

When the sun did make an appearance all three of us would rush out to the deck and scrabble onto our sun loungers before Ze Germans showed up. Which was totally unnecessary as we had our own private loungers around our own private pool – but you never know; they’re sneaky those Europeans with their towels.

Not having to lug a whole bag full of books around was another bonus to this trip, the first with my iPad which was loaded with almost the complete works of Stephen King and Bill Bryson thanks to the awesomeness that is Dropbox combined with GoodReader. I’ve named my iPad MJOLNIR by the way..so nerdy. Anyone not use Dropbox? Be ashamed of yourselves – it’s a free chunk of 2 gig of online storage with accompanying iPhone/iPod/iPad/iToaster apps that all sync with your computer’s desktop. Of course there are other cloud storage solutions, such as Microsoft’s new SkyDrive system which features a whopping 25 gig of space to play with (that I’ll certainly be looking into) but none with as slick iOS applications as this.

Of course you can’t go on holiday without hitting the beach a couple of times. A path wound its way through the immense pine forest for a couple of kilometres until it reached huge sand dunes and, finally, the broad expanse of the Atlantic. Tania and I took advantage of some fabulous weather to make the hike with little B up on my back pulling at my ears and shouting encouragement. Here’s the reward at the end of a hard walk:

And the day we finally made it right onto the beach was, well a little windy would be an understatement. Someone decided to crawl inside my hoody for protection:

Ok, enough cuteness. The drive home was oddly a little easier than we expected. No messing around looking for supermarkets and we even shunned most of the toll roads in hope of saving a few Euros and seeing some of the gorgeous countryside. an 0500 start got us to Calais five minutes ahead of our ETA of 1900; that’s 14 hours and still 5 minutes early…well I was impressed.

I think it’s safe to say that while we would love to return in the future to handsome log cabins in the pine woods beside a bracing sea, I think Tania and I agree on getting a plane and a hire car – if only to cut down on the amount of Red Bull consumed.

IN WHICH OUR EPONYMOUS HERO IS DRIVEN TO NEAR MADNESS.

*may contain scenes of violence and unusually heavy petting*

I must say the one person I would have expected to be pretty whingy and moany after 7 or 8 hours driving with only a couple of food and poop stops wasn’t at all…and neither was B. Little Miss behaved so, so well throughout the entire journey that at some points we thought she’d actually escaped and was hitchhiking her way to a life of absinthe, poetry and expressionism. Tania on the other hand gets très grumpy if she doesn’t eat at regular intervals. Then again I just get grumpy and she has to deal with that constantly so I doff my hat to her.

By the way you can’t write that many words while the coffee’s on, I’ve had two pots (FRESHPOTTTTTTS) and am now on the cheap bière – yes it’s past midday and even if it weren’t (like yesterday) I don’t care, I’m on holiday.

Also I’ve just been assaulted by my wife, reading this over my shoulder and assuming because she saw her name and the word grumpy in proximity to each other that I am being mean. Told you she gets grumpy.

So 7 or 8 hours in (I forget precisely how much because we were having SO much fun..) little did we know that we had almost as much again left to go. Fortunately a fair chunk of this was uneventful; I managed to sleep for A WHOLE FORTY MINUTES while riding shotgun but the damned tolls kept appearing. Now as a British driver I am used to two types of tolls: one where you pay to go over a massive bridge or under a tunnel and one where you pay to get into “another country”. What i am unaccustomed to, since we pay our annual road tax, is stopping every few hundred kilometres to fork over a shed load of Euros. To be fair to the French, their motorways are awesome; not as good as Ze Germans but far, FAR better than our embarrassment of a road network. Nonetheless, it’s still a little galling (heh, see what I did there) to have to dump roughly €50 of our holiday cash on the “luxury” of driving your own car across a country.

Tolls and service stations aside the motorways of France are gleaming jewels. Far from the station in Belgium where my good friend Tom once stepped in a human poo. A HUMAN POO. Told you the Belgians were animals.

Not taking into account the two hour jam we’d encountered,, the half hour detour for a supermarket, another half hour once we found a Lidl (mmm Lidl) and a few unscheduled stops for nappy changes, snacking and beveraging, we found ourselves not arriving at 2000 as we’d envisaged but rather by 2000 we were still hours away and it was threatening to get dark. Add to this the fact that we had decided to do a little scenic route driving away from the toll road – a grand idea in theory as we were kind of sick of staring at armco and overtaking trucks, in practice not so much as it was adding at least an hour onto our ETA – and suddenly we were experiencing a glorious sunset from the middle of open fields. This, whilst stunning, was a little unnerving seeing as we really only had the France atlas to go on and were fast running out of real directions. Once out of Bordeaux we had one road to go before reaching the Landes region in Aquitaine where we would have to navigate through hundreds of acres of forest to reach our villa. Bordeaux was where we finally lost the sunlight..and where we spotted the first flashes of the approaching storm.

Tania was driving, as per her instructions that I navigate the final chunk owing to our not having any goddamn directions. I was doing my best to estimate which way was South and what towns would appear in which order to ensure we were heading in the right direction. Suddenly the road signs inexplicably change from Bayonne, our current heading, to Paris…definitely NOT the direction we wanted.

“crap it CRAPIT”.

15 or 20 minutes later we find our way back to the south road and count our blessings that nothing can stop us now. Cue the lightning. Now I wasn’t entirely aware that my wife has issues with thunderstorms. The very presence of them unnerves her. The flashing simulates migraines, which she suffers from infrequently yet badly. So while I’m staring at the sky in utter joy as it lights up every few seconds my darling wife is gripping the wheel (leather bound, one up from the entry level model thank you) almost hard enough to leave John Candy sized indentations in. You can FURTHER add to this the sight of thousands of 50 ft tall trees silhouetting around us every time a flash goes off. We made it to the villa at just before midnight and i swear if we’d had a bottle of vodka she would have necked it BEFORE changing B and putting her to bed, which she almost never does.

Now all we have to do is try and relax before the journey back home. Hopefully not too difficult with all this bière. The problem is, as I mentioned before, the weather isn’t exactly Saharan. It’s fairly overcast today but it’s also fairly changeable – I’m just ecstatic that I’m not at my desk pounding on a Blackberry. Villa photos and more to come when I edit this from home – we’ve been Internet free for almost 5 days now; I hope apes haven’t taken over Britain yet – Lib-Con coalition excepted.