What's Occuring?

I have no idea where I am going with this. It is likely to be in the favourite expression of my kids and their mates 'Random'. I always say to myself re blogging that if one has nothing to say one should say nothing at all. But it's my rule and rules are there to be broken (except grammatical rules obviously).

My friend Anne was recently 50 and we had a great night celebrating the occasion. She sent an e-mail to all of us who attended in which she particularly thanked the Thomas's who had travelled a significant distance to attend. Thomas senior replied thus "You have unwittingly stumbled into a small local dispute about how to spell the plural of Thomas. And I’m afraid, Anne, that your spelling is not helpful to my position on the matter. I shall have to alter your email before showing it to the children; doh!"

Anne's response was:
"OMG we're starting the new year with a Lynne Truss moment - now I know I am f**king 50................ "

Well there you go - I certainly didn't know I was going to mention that when I started this post.

Moving on:

This past few weeks I have been mainly ...watching Gavin and Stacey. Both series 1 and 2 plus the Christmas special. I have seen each episode so many times now that I know them verbatim and have inadvertently developed a Welsh accent alongside a recently acquired tendency to describe matters as 'Tidy' I also look at our toilet brush in an entirely different light - but enough about that particularly sordid hotel bathroom episode.

I have also in the past few weeks been mainly ...coughing. This is in fact how come I am sitting here now at home blogging, rather than earning my crust dealing with the whole range of the human condition. I try not to talk about my job here but if I just tell you that in the weeks leading up to Christmas I had to cope with amongst other things: the aftermath of a suicide; someone who was falling in love with his sister; a childhood story that was unremittingly awful from the day of his birth (born in a ditch- literally) to the moment he left the care system as a profoundly damaged young man; and I had to tell someone he was born as a result of his mother being raped by her father. It was all a right laugh as you may imagine. Actually, thinking back it is no wonder I have been ill. I fairly successfully ignored the fact that I was coughing my guts up all over the holiday, but at the weekend it got ridiculous and I saw the doctor yesterday. Diagnosis: chest infection as well as possible asthma. Instruction: take medication, use inhaler, come back and see me in a few days and stay at home. The silly thing is that I can't say I feel really ill. I had pleurisy 17 years ago and thought I was dying. Ever since then I have probably judged being ill as feeling like I did then. I never ever want to feel like THAT again.

The other thing I have been mainly doing is continuing with the on going struggle to get through 'War and Peace'. I am on page 545. Oh good - only another 813 to go. (The print is very small by the way.) I do like it...in fact it is positively 'lush'. I love the way Tolstoy paints portraits of the characters - he is often very funny. My main problem with it though, at the risk of sounding very thick, is that because the book is so huge, and because the names are (surprise, surprise) Russian - plus they often seem to be known by more than one name (not helpful Leo my old mucka) - that when they come back into the narrative, I can't remember who the hell they are and have to go back and find their previous appearance to refresh my memory.

Yesterday having been instructed by the doctor to stay at home I thought I would be able to have the day in peace and quiet reading W&P. In fact I had not been in five minutes before my two youngest returned home from school together with a gang of mates. The school's heating had failed and they had been sent home. You may imagine how devastated they were. Anyway - guess what they came in to watch? Would you believe series 1 and 2 of Gavin and Stacey plus the Christmas special. So I ended up watching them yet again. Oh well - fair play.