baroque_mongoose

The cold is still present, and it's causing high-frequency deafness. Normally my hearing is very good across the entire spectrum. On Friday I had my headphones on because I was waiting for my sister to join a Zoom call; I could still hear the low-frequency sound of the air fryer without difficulty, so I could tell when it stopped, but unusually I was almost unable to hear the beep. This morning I've had the washing machine on, and that has a much quieter beep than the air fryer; even so, I can normally hear it just fine. Not today. I have heard no beep at all. My sister, who got the cold four or five days before I did, also still has it, so it is a particularly long-lasting one - which, we are both agreed, is most irksome.

Anyway, today I want to talk about Bob the Lodger deciding to lose weight. I was quite used to people at work saying they needed to lose weight when they didn't, but it had to be said that Bob did. He was, let us say, a podgy lodger; and he decided he didn't want to be, so he came to me for advice.

"Well," I said, "you could make a really good start by not absent-mindedly nomming your way through an entire 400 g block of Cadbury's Dairy Milk most afternoons while you're coding. I'm not going to tell you to stop eating chocolate altogether, because then you'll just crave it; I don't believe in forbidden foods. But I think if you ate better quality chocolate, you would be able to eat a lot less, because it wouldn't take so much to feel satisfied." This, I might add, was something I knew from experience; when I was extremely poor, I used to buy these rather doubtful chocolate drops from the local covered market because they were dirt cheap. They weren't that nice, but nonetheless I found myself eating more of them than if they had been better quality, because I was trying to get enough "chocolateness" out of them. I'd have been better off spending a little more on my chocolate; it would probably have saved me money, as I'd have eaten less of it.

I didn't have to explain all that to Bob because he immediately saw the logic of it. So he asked me, "Do you have any better quality chocolate in the house?"

And I said, "Is the Pope Catholic?"

What I had, as it happened, was Lindt chilli chocolate. Dark chocolate, so quite a full-on chocolate hit as well as a spice hit. I also knew very well that Bob the Lodger was not especially spice-tolerant; he thought a Sainsbury's prawn curry ready meal was very hot (most other people will tell you it only just barely qualifies as a curry). And so, because I am not cruel, I warned him. I explained that this was good chocolate, but it also had chilli in it and he'd get quite a kick. He listened, and decided to try it anyway.

"Mmm," he said. "I see what you mean. This is very good chocolate... ah... er... ???!!!"

I have to say, the progression of expressions on his face as the chilli revved from 0 to "decent madras" over the next thirty seconds or so was pure comedy gold. To be fair to him, though, he did recover himself masterfully.

"You're quite right," he said, still blinking. "I wouldn't want to eat more than one piece."

He went on the Atkins diet in the end... but that's a whole 'nother story.

I've been trying to decide what to do about tomorrow's D&D session all week... well, in fact, longer than that, because it's postponed from last Saturday. One of our party had some unexpected travel that weekend and couldn't attend, so I said, fine, we'll postpone, not a problem, I've had a bit of trouble preparing anyway due to the funeral. This turned out to be an excellent idea, because of course this time last week I was suffering grievously from an overdose of assorted Burger King trimmings, so I was in no state to do any preparation (or pretty much anything else) on Friday.

I have probably already mentioned some of this, but I'll just recap. Lord Smallpiece of Ashwood has hired the party to find his missing Great-Uncle Algy, who's a vampire (so far, this is identical to the starting premiss of the first book, but it diverges very quickly, as the party in the book is at least 20th-level, whereas our current gallant band is only 4th-level, so obviously both the challenges and their solutions have to be very different). They have successfully discovered that the kidnappers went east, and the latest piece of information they've obtained is that there are three of them, they're all male, and they stopped at an inn called the Oaken Staff. So our party naturally will be going there tomorrow to try to find out which way to proceed. What they don't yet know is that the Oaken Staff stands at a crossroads; so, very roughly speaking, you can carry on eastwards, or you can go north or south. So they need to know which way Uncle Algy and his coffin were taken.

I thought "ah, fun could be had with unreliable witnesses here," and this rapidly crystallised into an actual logic puzzle. There are three drunken halflings in this inn, who arrived at the same time that the party with the coffin left, so they know which way they went. These three are brothers who own a farm, so they stop at this inn regularly on their way to market, and therefore the innkeeper knows them. Their names are Mott, Cott, and Stott Barleyfield, and by the time our party arrives, they've had fifteen flagons of ale; however, they have not had five each. One of them has indeed had five, but another has had three, and the other one has therefore had seven. It's not possible to tell who has had how much from their general demeanour, as they're all a bit slurred. However, in the grand tradition of logic puzzles, the one who's only had three flagons recalls everything accurately; the one who's had seven gets everything muddled and therefore makes no true statements at all; and the one who's had five will get it right about half the time. Needless to say, they disagree about which way the coffin went, and so our party is going to have to unscramble their tipsy ramblings to get to the truth.

I'm really not a high-combat DM. Obviously I'll do some combat some of the time because everyone likes it a bit and some people like it a lot, but if you have nothing but combat it gets a bit samey. I like to switch things around, and to this end I don't simply give XP for combat. You manage to recapture all the baby owlbears without either them or anyone else getting hurt? That's worth good XP in my book. You solve the drunken halfling logic puzzle? Ditto ditto.

Now I just have to write it. I expect I'll be reporting on the results later, but I do know one thing: I can make it quite hard. This party is bright and should never be underestimated!

I think I've previously mentioned that I make string bags. These things go down a storm at the local food bank; they're big, they're light, and they're strong. They'll easily swallow 10 to 15 kg of tins, jars, packets, bottles, and other heavies. Of course, we do encourage people to bring their own bags, but they generally don't know that if they're coming for the first time, and even if they're not, they quite often forget. We do have other bags available, but one of these is equivalent to two or three supermarket carrier bags, plus it's reusable, plus when it finally does wear out it's biodegradable, because it's made from jute twine.

If you want to learn how to net, the finest resource I know is available here: https://archive.org/details/netmaking00hold/page/n5/mode/2up Net Making by Charles Holdgate is a wonderful little book with extremely clear diagrams. I downloaded it as a refresher course, but it explains everything so well that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to a complete beginner. You will also want netting needles, as they're called (actually they're shuttles rather than needles, as their purpose is to hold a long strand neatly rather than to pierce anything); the traditional design is boat-shaped, but it is much easier to wind modern steel ones, which you can buy here: https://www.ginabsilkworks.co.uk/search/products?keywords=netting These are also a lot better than the traditional ones if you're trying to do fine-gauge netting, because they're thinner so it's easier to put them through the holes. For a string bag it doesn't matter too much which type you use. The only other thing you need, apart from your twine and a pair of scissors, is a mesh stick. For the string bags I use a strip of aluminium edging 3 cm wide; I used to use a small folding ruler about the same width, but it drove me nuts because of the hinge in the middle. I didn't realise how much that was slowing me down till I got the aluminium strip. What the mesh stick does is to keep the size of the meshes nice and even, because you wrap the twine round it every time you make a mesh knot.

This is how you make one of my string bags. If I don't give specific instructions for a technique, then it's in the book.

Start with a 12-loop grommet (which is to say 11 mesh loops and one drop knot). Work one plain round. Now work increases on alternate rounds; every 3 meshes, then every 4, and so on, till you've done a round where you increase every 7 meshes followed by one plain round. Work 4 more plain rounds (you've now got a total of 32 meshes).

Work 15 loops, then turn your work and knot the working strand into the bottom of the loop you've just made (note that this is not the standard decreasing technique, but it works very well for this bag). Work back to the beginning of the 15 loops - you've now got 14 on the current row - then turn and do the same thing. Keep going like this till you're left with 8 loops, and knot the strand into the bottom of the loop you've just made as before.

You're now ready to make the first handle. While Mr Holdgate does cover this in his book, he also tells you that you need a second person or a solid anchor point to make a handle, and I'm here to tell you that no, you really don't. You just need your wrist and a little dexterity. If you struggle with the dexterity, by all means make the handle the way he tells you in the book - whatever works for you. But what works for me is that I now loop the working strand over my wrist and knot it into the loop at the far end of the row, then take it back the other way and knot into the first free loop on the left, and so on, repeatedly going across from left to right and back again till there is one free loop remaining, which you leave for now. Then finish the handle using lark's-head knots the way he tells you in the book (or a fancier method such as the bosun's plait if you feel so inclined). Finally, knot the strand into the remaining free loop, and finish by drawing the end inside the handle using a darning needle. You should have 16 loops remaining on the other side of the bag; rejoin the twine, and do exactly the same as you did on the first side, starting by working 15 loops into them.

And there you have it - a really good, sturdy, useful string bag. May it serve you well!

I had a great-uncle. Well, I possibly had more than one; but Uncle, as we always called him, was the only one I knew about, and he had enough character for several great-uncles. To be fair, not all of it was the sort of character you'd want to celebrate; I'm afraid he was a terrible old racist (to the point where, when my sister had a black boyfriend for a while, we were all instructed not to tell him), and he'd probably have voted for Brexit if he'd been around at the time. But still, there was a good deal about him that's worth recalling with affection.

There was never a time in my life when Uncle wasn't old. He was born in 1900 and I was born in 1964; my parents had a photo of him as a very small child, just about old enough to walk, and he was wearing a dress, because that was what you did in those days. It made sense. There were no disposable nappies and the range of available fastenings was limited, so children of all genders were just put in dresses till they no longer needed to wear terry nappies. Those were bulky, so the dress would also hide that effectively. By the time I got to know him, he was a somewhat tubby but nonetheless energetic old buffer with a great fondness for sherry, which he never overdid... except in trifle. Uncle's trifles were notorious. I think he tipped in most of the bottle. He was equally fond of butter, as a result of which his sandwiches were quite a struggle for the rest of us; I'm pretty sure he used a cheese plane. That butter wasn't spread; it was sliced.

Uncle was an upholsterer by trade, and a very good one, so he worked at a number of the large country houses, including Chatsworth. He made a fair bit of money doing that. Of course, by the time I came along, he was retired. At that time he lived in what was supposed to be a temporary prefab just outside Harrogate, which had been up since WWII and is very probably still in good condition; it had a lovely garden, which he enjoyed maintaining although it was quite large (he even had his own croquet lawn, though I don't think he played very often). He was single for most of his life, but he married for the first time in his early eighties. Yes, you read that right. You see, he proposed to this lady when he was much younger, but she turned him down, and eventually she married someone else (who was possibly already a friend of his). Uncle just continued being friends with both of them, until in the fullness of time the lady's husband died, and after a decent period Uncle proposed again. This time she said yes. While there were many things about which I didn't agree with Uncle, I'm right alongside that one; it is far better to be single than settle for the wrong person. I think they had about four or five years together before she died.

After her death he decided he was perhaps getting on a bit now, and it would make sense for him to live close to my parents. So he bought a house which was almost opposite to them. He was due to go and see them at Christmas that year, but by then, although he'd closed the sale, he had not yet been able to move in. Uncle could be an astonishingly stubborn old cuss when the fit took him, and he decided that, no matter what, he was going to sleep in his own house. So - at the age of not too far off ninety - he strapped his bed to the roof of his car and drove across the Pennines with it; and he did indeed sleep in his own house. History does not relate what my parents thought about this, but I'm quite sure that if they'd known he was planning to do that, they'd have got him a camp bed or something.

Uncle lived in that house till he was 99, at which point, very reluctantly, he was forced to admit that he really ought to be in a care home. The problem was his short-term memory; while he had all the rest of his marbles, that had failed him badly, and he'd had several near-misses through things like forgetting he'd left the gas on. So, a few months shy of his hundredth birthday, he moved into a home, and a little later my parents asked him how he was enjoying it.

"Oh, I don't like it at all, dear," he grumbled. "Everyone is so old!"

He was, needless to say, the oldest resident in the home. By quite some margin.

He reached 100. In fact he wasn't too far off reaching 101, but he died just before Christmas at the end of the previous year. He had specified that he wanted to be buried in Harrogate, but the funeral had to be postponed due to the fact that it was impossible to get the hearse across the Pennines due to heavy snow. That was something of an irony. Uncle always hated snow.

And, almost immediately after he died, my eldest niece was born, and the family saga rolled on.

Everything was fine on the way home yesterday till we stopped for lunch at a service station. There was a small food court with five different places to eat and/or drink, plus a shop at the back selling things like toys, games, puzzle magazines, and the various other things people want in order to prevent boredom on long car journeys. (For some reason, the loos were accessed via this shop, and the signposting wasn't great... well, to be honest it was almost non-existent. The disabled loo wasn't bad when I found it, though.)

I prefer to have my main meal in the middle of the day, and the most substantial option looked like Burger King. I seemed to recall they used to do a vegan burger, so presumably they still did.

Well, they did; in fact there was a choice of two, both somewhat more substantial than I actually wanted, and you had to order them using what they called a "kiosk". It wasn't really a kiosk. It was a large touch screen with a card reader at the bottom, and it was not massively intuitive (to the point that neither of us found any customisation options, though I was informed later that they were there). So I ordered a Plant-Based Whopper, and the friend I was travelling with ordered something chicken-related, I think.

It was, honestly, not very nice. I hate vinegar, and this thing had both ketchup and mayo in it (I mean, why?). The patty itself was all right - you rarely find an actually bad vegan burger these days; but I could have seriously done without several of the accoutrements. Salad, fine, but what were those weird little things that looked like slices cut from the very tops of tiny courgettes (so you got the slightly wrinkled edges) but didn't taste like any vegetable I was familiar with? So I went up to the counter and asked politely if there was any way customisation could be included on that touch-screen thing in future, which was when I found out it actually was there, but not immediately obvious. The lady asked me if I'd like a replacement burger. I said, no, I'd already struggled through the one I'd got, but thank you, I appreciate the thought.

I got something sweet to take the taste away, and we proceeded on our way. After a little while, I started to feel very tired, so I semi-dozed (I find it very hard to fall asleep sitting up, especially in a moving vehicle, but I did get quite close); and it gradually started to filter through to me that I was also not feeling very well. By the time we were nearly home, I decided it would be a very good idea to check Sibyl... and I was right. Her bag was as flat as a pancake. She was blocked.

It is, as I have probably mentioned before, quite amazing how ill one feels with a blocked stoma. Somehow I managed to get self, wheelchair, and assorted luggage back into the flat, unpack the minimum I could get away with for the moment, and then go and crash out on the bed. After a while I dragged myself through to set up the laptop so I could let my sister know I'd arrived home safely, managed maybe ten or fifteen minutes on there e-mailing her and catching up on stuff, then had to go and crash again. I took my pills with the intention of eating later, but the eating part never actually happened; Sibyl did, however, start unblocking herself shortly after I'd taken the pills, so that was hopeful. Normally when that happens I start to feel better quite quickly.

I didn't. I wondered why. I crashed some more. Then I moved and thought "oh no, I'm going to be sick". I had to go and get the bucket, which, fortunately, lives in the bathroom, which is next to my bedroom. And indeed I was sick; not a great deal, but since I'm on ondansetron it shouldn't really have happened at all. I did finally start to feel a bit better after that, but I kept the bucket next to my bed overnight just in case (fortunately it wasn't needed). This morning I'm basically fine but still a bit washed out.

And now you all know what not to have at Burger King.

There are several ways to get from (approximately) Cambridge to Kendal; we went up the A1, turned left at Scotch Corner, and came down via Kirkby Stephen from the north. On the face of things that seems like a rather odd way to do it, but the M6 has a notorious tendency to get ram-jam, and my friend's satnav said the route we took was the quickest. We stopped en route at a service station for a loo break and a bag of crisps apiece, where we spotted an advertisement which read "Keep the wheels turning with a sausage roll", and my immediate reaction was to ask how that worked. I mean, yes, if you're cycling, but I don't think the advertisement was primarily aimed at cyclists!

Anyway, it was a decent journey. At one point we ran into what appeared to be a long tailback, and I got my knitting out; but it cleared surprisingly quickly. After that, there were a couple of warnings about queues but they didn't actually materialise.

Dressing for the trip turned out to be somewhat problematic. It was over 20 degrees when we left, but the maximum temperature forecast for here today is less than 10 (plus rain); so I put my boots on, reckoning I should be all right in the car with the air conditioning, and all my outerwear travelled in a separate bag. We arrived a little after half past six, to find that my sister has an absolutely stinking cold (because colds are inclined to have the worst possible timing); thankfully she's a bit better this morning, having slept well last night. However, this meant that my other sister decamped to a hotel because her husband is absolutely paranoid about getting the cold; he's not only still recovering from long COVID, but he has an operation coming up which has already been postponed a few times, and he really doesn't want it to be postponed yet again due to sniffles. So in the end the whole family stayed in the hotel, which meant there was room for me to stay here... which does mean shuffling up and down the stairs on my backside, but it also means my sister doesn't have to schlep me and my luggage around, so on balance it's much more convenient.

It turns out I've forgotten my codeine, which is a bit of a nuisance; I need it to help with Sibyl. (As I explained to my sister this morning, I am not addicted to it but Sibyl is! I haven't noticed anything different after missing it last night, and for now I've got away with it regarding Sibyl, but that is unlikely to continue.) So I have had to order a few pills via the NHS 111 website, to be picked up from the local pharmacy. The NHS may be creaking in a number of ways, but in many other ways it's still blindingly efficient. The pills will be ready in under half an hour.

And so it's the funeral this afternoon, and that is going to be weird. Because funerals always are.

There is a thing called Sock Madness on Ravelry; the reason I know about this is because there is a channel dedicated to it on one of my crafts Discord servers, and Best Online Friend said I'd probably enjoy following it. She was right. I'm never going to participate, because I know exactly how I do socks and it doesn't involve a pattern, whereas the whole point of these is that you have one; but I do enjoy watching everyone else losing their minds over when the next pattern is going to drop and then all working the same pair of socks in various different colour combinations. They're almost always interesting patterns, at that. I liked the first one very much; it had a multicoloured grid effect, and you did the narrow vertical lines using surface crochet, which is a very sensible way to do those in knitting but I'd never seen it before. It's high-pressure, time-sensitive, competitive sock-knitting, and therefore as far as I'm concerned it makes a good spectator sport.

I, however, have knitted so many pairs of socks that I pretty much have them off pat now. Cast on 8 stitches on each needle using Judy's Magic Cast-on, which leaves you with a completely smooth toe - no seam, no ridge, no nothing; you can't see where the cast-on happened. Increase at each end of alternate rows till you have 24 on each needle. On the top side of the final plain round, do a (k1, m1) 12 times in the middle of the set of stitches so you have 36 on the top needle. Start the cable pattern on that side on the next round, leaving the sole plain. Keep going till it measures about 21.5 cm. Turn heel using the Fish Lips Kiss method (available from Ravelry). Work another 8 or 10 rounds as before, increasing on the sole side of the last round. Start the cable pattern on the back of the sock on the next round, matching it to that on the front (you need to increase an extra pair of stitches so that the Irish moss stitch at the edges meshes nicely). Continue till you run out of yarn (assuming you're using one of those cakes of Tencel mix that Adelle at Vegan Yarns sells you - otherwise, continue till it's about the right length). Switch to contrast yarn and 2 x 2 rib, suitably decreasing on the first round. Continue till you've almost run out of yarn, then cast off; either use double crochet, or m1/m1p in the middle of each rib section on the round before you cast off. Darn in ends, of which there are not many, and bingo, you have socks. Since they are not and never will be part of the Sock Madness, I have to assume that they are Sane Socks.

I was not planning to speed-test them, but I have two things going on at the moment. The first of these is, of course, my mother's funeral; I'm going to go up for that tomorrow (time still TBA) and return on Friday. I will bring some knitting because I always do, but the thing is, if I'm taking knitting anywhere, it does have to be portable. This is not usually a problem, but now we come to the second factor.

Usually, Adelle's yarn cakes are very well-behaved. There's an end on the surface and an end sticking out from the middle, and you can use them both at the same time, which is how I always knit socks. (If you buy one of the sock kits, she'll wind the main yarn into two balls or cakes rather than just the one, but you can also get the yarn separately so that you can mix and match, and in that case you'll get a single cake, unless you want it as a skein. I don't.) This particular yarn cake, unfortunately, was a bit of a Sibyl. The inner end unwound all right for a few rows of the toe box, and then... wouldn't. I had to take a very deep breath, unwind the entire cake, and then rewind it into a series of small, loosely knotted skeins in order to carry on working with it. So it was do-able, but not portable; and it won't be portable till I've got it down to a certain point, which I should, all being well, reach today.

All of which means I've been going gangbusters on these socks, and it's now looking as though I can, at least in theory, knit a pair in a week, which is about what you need to be able to do for Sock Madness, except that so far they haven't had a heavily cabled pair like mine. After this pair, though, I do intend to ease up a little. By the end of yesterday I had a rather sore arm, following two quite intensive days, in both of which I did about 10 cm (one of them including the heel turns).

The next pair I'm doing is for Porthos. His birthday is in June. I'll be able to take my time over those!

We don't have Peter's direct testimony, other than Mark's Gospel, for which he appears to have been the primary source. But if we did, I suspect it would go a bit like this.

"Oh no. Don't you go telling me women can't be witnesses. I'll be frank with you - those women were far more faithful than I ever was. There was I thinking I was so strong and brave, telling him I'd stick by him whatever happened, even if they arrested me too and put me to death; and he looked me straight in the eye and told me I'd deny I even knew him. Three times. Of course I thought, no, Rabbi, you've got me all wrong, I'll be faithful even if nobody else is; but he was dead right. I was about as much use as a pot made from sand and water, and you can imagine how I felt... until I realised that he knew all that and he still thought I was worth something. That was what gave me the courage to come back, in the end.

But the women! They followed him the whole way, and even if they couldn't do more than mourn, they did that. And then they were the ones who prepared all the spices to put in the tomb; I'm not sure they knew Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea had already done that, but, after all, more wouldn't have hurt. If he'd still been dead, of course.

What? Yes, obviously he was dead. Do you think Roman soldiers don't know when someone's dead? They kill enough people, after all. And just to make doubly sure, they stuck a spear in his side. Oh, he was dead all right, and it seemed like the end of everything. We'd all completely forgotten everything he said about how he had to die and then rise again. It's not that we're stupid, but it just didn't really go in at the time. You know? We were all expecting he'd deliver us from the Romans. We couldn't get our heads round the fact that he had a much bigger problem than the Romans to deal with, and he wasn't planning to deal with it in any way we were expecting. We knew he was a king, of course we did. But we also knew what kings were like. Power. Majesty. A throne. A big army. Well, he... it's hard to explain... he both had all that and he didn't. And he was always wrong-footing us, but... in a good way. He was trying to get us to see. And it took all this before we did.

So, yeah, I was feeling pretty terrible. I heard Judas went off and hanged himself. That was sad; he was in just the same position as I was, but he never saw far enough to understand that Jesus knew all about him and still called him "friend". He could have come back the way I did, but that's not what happened. Poor blighter. What he did was awful, but... the rest of us weren't exactly so much better, were we?

And then two of the women came rushing in to say the tomb was empty. He wasn't there. They said he'd been raised, and even then I still couldn't remember he'd predicted exactly that - well, the state I was in, I suppose it wasn't too surprising. I went and got John. He's changed so much; he used to have such a hot temper, but he's so wise and quiet and stable these days. He was just the person I needed alongside me. We ran to the tomb, and... no stone. No Roman soldiers. No body. Just two angels - they couldn't have been anything else - confirming exactly what the women said. I'll never forget what they said. "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

Good question. The answer, of course, was because that was where we expected him to be, because... you know, when you boil it right down, I reckon we pretty much stopped listening at the point where he said he'd have to die, so we never got as far as hearing the bit afterwards about rising again.

It took a while to find out what had happened to the soldiers. Joseph and Nicodemus told us later that they'd been terrified when the angels appeared and rolled away the stone, and they'd run away. It takes a lot to frighten a Roman soldier, so it must have been quite something. And they ran straight to the high priest and his cronies, who said, "don't worry, we'll cover for you", and cooked up some story about how we'd come along and stolen the body. I mean, yeah, as if we'd have had a chance against heavily armed professional soldiers, especially when we were all shattered, demoralised, and scared witless. Still, it saved the soldiers from getting crucified themselves, which is what probably would have happened otherwise; and they weren't nice people, but I still wouldn't have wished that on them.

You know there are still people saying that? Saying we stole the body and then claimed he'd been raised? All right, people can think what they want, but I'd love to know why they think we'd cheerfully risk our lives for a lie. I asked someone that once. He stammered something about how maybe I didn't know it was a lie, maybe the people who stole the body were people I didn't know, or something. So I asked him how come several different people, over a period of more than a month, had seen him since he rose from the dead. That one stumped him. One thing you can't fake is multiple independent eye witnesses.

And, you know what? Because he did exactly what he said he was going to - because he did die, and he did rise - I ended up with the strength and courage I always used to think I had. But there's a difference. Now I know it doesn't come from me."

Well, in fact there were several this morning. Our church has more than its fair share of doctors, including at least one GP, one A&E specialist, and one respiratory specialist. But, this morning, we were having a joint service with another local church; we always do that on Good Friday, but usually it's at their place, and their place counts as "local" only if you have a car. This year, however, it was at ours, so I'd have gone in any case, but I happened to be rota'd to sing. And when you're up at the front singing, you get to see the entire congregation, which meant I instantly spotted the lady in the very obviously hand-knitted red cabled jumper. Yes, you can get machines to do cables, but they make flat pieces which are then cut and sewn. They don't do proper shaping, which was what we had here.

So, of course, after the service, I had to go and ask her if she knitted it (she didn't; someone else did), and that was when it turned out that she was the GP who saw me about a year ago, if I recall correctly. I had had a mild panic because my left boob had suddenly become noticeably larger than the right one; however, by the time I actually got into her surgery, they were the same size again, and since then the left one has been going up and down in size with such abandon that a) it's very clear it's nothing more sinister than a slightly dodgy lymph node on my left side, and b) I've had to buy two different inserts to even myself out. Most of the time I wear the smaller one these days, but sometimes I don't need one at all, and sometimes I need the walloping great big one. Fortunately, it seems to have become a lot more stable, and I rarely need the big one - it can be a little uncomfortable when it over-inflates to that extent.

If you have a similar problem, it's good to know that there are little exercises you can do to help; I don't bother with these unless it does actually become uncomfortable, because the rest of the time I can just stick an insert in and rely on the fact that it'll drain itself naturally after a while, but they are here: https://www.wsh.nhs.uk/CMS-Documents/Patient-leaflets/Lymphoedema/6773-1-Simple-lymphatic-drainage-breast.pdf It's also the case that a lot of people are uneven anyway (and, indeed, I quite possibly was before this came to my attention, but it's harder to notice when you have less on top). This is where the inserts come in. I get mine from a company called Evenly; they're expensive, but they're comfortable, they're natural-looking, and they don't tend to slide around in your bra. They cover anything up to three cup sizes different. Even at the worst I'm never quite that bad, so I have one that deals with anything up to one cup size different, and another that goes from one to two.

Anyway, she asked me how that was doing, and I replied cheerfully, "oh, still going up and down like a yo-yo, obviously nothing serious the matter." Exactly where this leaves my bra size is a question for the ages, but the same bra still seems to fit all right wherever I currently am on the insert scale, so riddle me that.

It is indeed a small world!

Odd to think that it’s exactly ten years today since my health started to go dramatically pear-shaped. I was travelling up to Kendal for my birthday, and as I was crossing Manchester Piccadilly station, I fell completely unexpectedly flat on my face, causing me to miss the train I was supposed to have caught. I wasn’t at all hurt, but it was obviously quite embarrassing. I didn’t think much more about it at the time, but a couple of days later I almost fell getting up from a chair at my parents’ house, and after that my balance deteriorated quite rapidly. I saw a doctor when I returned to Sheffield, and they told me I didn’t have an inner ear infection, but they were at a loss to know what I did have. By the end of April I was getting around with one of those walkers disguised as a shopping trolley (I still have that!), and by May my guts were starting to go noticeably wrong too. I think it was nearly the end of May when I was finally admitted to the Northern General and promptly collapsed, so I had Sidney for almost exactly three years (he was finally replaced by Sibyl on 31 May 2019). Quite a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then, but the biggest miracle is that I’m still here. To this day I can’t quite get over that.

They didn't know, and they still don't, whether or not the balance problems and the digestive problems are linked. Our NHS is absolutely amazing at dealing with individual serious illnesses - after all, they did save my life back in 2016, and it's a source of great sadness to me that a good many of the people who were involved in that have probably had to leave the country since then due to Brexit. What they're not so good at is putting things together as a whole. My dear friend Athos is an extreme example of that. He has so many things wrong with him that it's quicker to say what's right with him; his kidneys are fine. The rest of him is under the care of his GP surgery and no fewer than six different hospitals, each with its own particular speciality. (Having said that, his heart has stabilised so much that they may decide to take his pacemaker out once the battery packs up, rather than replacing the battery as normal, so that would bring him down to five hospitals. Even so, it's a lot, and one of those hospitals is the other side of the Pennines from where he lives.) Almost certainly at least some of his conditions are linked, because they all started around the same time; and they're not all complications of diabetes, either, because the diabetes wasn't the first thing to start. At the moment, thankfully, he's pretty stable, but most of his numerous conditions are the type that could potentially kill him if they took a turn for the worse. Well, if they're not investigating what's behind all that, they're definitely not going to be able to investigate whether or not my far less serious conditions are linked. My digestion is under good control now thanks to a fairly high dose of omeprazole, and the balance... well, it's not getting any worse, and it's not going to kill me barring a fairly freakishly unfortunate set of circumstances.

But for now, I can say along with Granny Weatherwax that I Aten't Ded, and consequently the world has a good deal more baby hats, string bags, calligraphy, stories, and poems than it might otherwise have done. And I'm equally happy to report that Athos also Aten't Ded... and consequently the world has a wise Athos. We need a few more of those.