Road trip countdown!!

I'm so excited at the moment as I got the all clear today to travel to my best friend Louise's wedding in Germany on Thursday!!

Lou moved to Europe whilst studying for her MA and has settled near Stuttgart with her wonderful fiance Gerhard. Lou is so fluent in German that she now has to think of the English equivalent. Wouldn't it be amazing to be so proficient in another language? I went over to stay with them last year and was so embarrassed by my broken schoolgirl German that I vowed to learn more... that lasted all of three weeks and I've forgotten it all again now apart from the basics - oh dear!

Lou and Gerhard make a fantastic couple and I'm so pleased that they found each other. Lou jokes that it is an added bonus that Gerhard LOVES Little Britain and Gavin & Stacey haha! He really seems to "get" and love the British sense of humour - a match made in heaven!

Anyway, I am pleased to announce that Lou and Gerhard have asked me to translate the service into English so that Lou's friends and family can keep track. I have promised her that I will refrain from any Vicar of Dibley antics (we love that show!) and I just hope that I will manage to get through it without crying... I never used to cry at weddings but have needed a truckload of tissues in recent years - fingers crossed!

It will be VERY strange though, because I have to stand next to the Registrar and repeat her address, and I will actually say that they "are lawfully husband and wife". A bit of a responsibility but I'm so honoured that they asked me!! I'm sure I'll never repeat the experience.

The other exciting news is that we are having a change from flying and have decided to make an occasion of it and are driving there - my first ever road trip!!! If anything it will be cheaper than flying. I am travelling with my friend Jen and her partner Adrian but won't be helping with the driving as they have a manual car and I can only drive an automatic. My important job is to supply sweets to keep up morale :)

We are leaving at 7am on Thursday morning to beat most of the M25 traffic and have to be at Folkestone for 10am to catch the Chunnel. I have never been on it before (trying not to think how unnatural it will be to travel under the English Channel).

After arriving at Calais we will then proceed through France, Belgium and The Netherlands before reaching Germany, and then we stay on the Autobahn for hours... and hours... and hours....

Providing we don't get too lost, we should reach our hotel by 8pm on Thursday night. Not bad, considering we will have been in 5 countries in one day!

There are quite a few of us heading over to Germany but aside from our friends Lucy and Martyn and their boys, we are the only ones who are going on a big road adventure. Martyn has family in Northern Germany and they are leaving the UK tomorrow to break their journey there.

I plan to be SUCH a tourist and will no doubt take zillions of photos of various random landmarks along the way (note to self: save some of the memory card for the actual wedding day!!)

The wedding is at 11am on Friday morning, followed by photos at a local Schloss, a champagne wedding breakfast and then the actual wedding reception which begins at 4pm. From then on in it is an all-nighter finishing at 6am. Not sure if I will see the night through - it's been a few years!! Oh, and it is also German tradition to have a free bar at a wedding. With this in mind I will DEFINITELY not be seeing 6am!!!

Most of Saturday will be spent resting, and then we are all heading into the local town for a beer festival called Gockles Fest (Roast Chicken Festival). I kid you not. They had a Raddish Festival while I was there! Perhaps we should embrace some of their community spirit and have jolly gatherings like that here too!

Then on Sunday, we leave after breakfast to catch the 4pm Chunnel crossing. I'm sure it'll be a weekend to remember. So excited!!!

I have tomorrow off work as Annual Leave so will pack then. Have to get Gizmo cat to the Cattery for 4pm so am already bracing myself for the inevitable chase/coercing/begging to get him into his basket. Then for the inevitable peeling-claws-from-top-of cage-where-cat-is-hanging-on manoeuvre! Poor Gizmo cat. I will spoil him when he comes home :)

One question: Why on earth is travel insurance so expensive if you have a health condition? Declaring my CP cost an additional £12 even though I am not on medication for this and neither do I experience any consequential health problems. I don't even use any walking aids but just happen to walk with a slightly different gait. It seems unfair but I guess that's life...

xx

Fury part two!!

After my post yesterday afternoon, we had another thunderstorm!

Nothing of note to write really (although we did get marble sized hailstones), but I wanted to post a few pictures as the clouds were AMAZING. So dark and low that I needed to switch on the light, they reminded me a wee bit of the alien space ships from the movie Independence Day!

It came over so quickly!

Getting darker...

Eye of the storm perhaps? (above the really dark line of cloud)

From my bedroom window

And passing over...

Letters from the past...

Regular readers may remember that I received a letter from my neighbour's daughter Laura a couple of days ago. A real, chatty handwritten letter that I can hold in my hands and read as often as I like. And I don't even have to go near the laptop to access it!

It got me thinking... I really miss letters.

Not bills and other rubbish that is posted through our letterboxes, but real handwritten letters from friends and family that have been laboured over with time and love.

I feel sorry for my sister really, because at the age of 13 she has grown up with texting and email. She is so excited to open ANYTHING that arrives in the post addressed to her because birthdays aside, she rarely receives anything.

When I was young (oh God I swore I'd never use that phrase!!!) my Grandma who lives 100 miles away and I used to write all the time. I used to have a German penpal. I still have love letters that a childhood boyfriend sent me. If I recall rightly they are circa 1987 and also contain drawings of his own designs of the original Transformers... oh to be nine years old again! We used to receive letter writing sets for Christmas and birthdays featuring our favorite Care Bear, My Little Pony and Hello Kitty characters. Even my friends and I used to post funny letters to each other, and felt terribly grown up being allowed to walk to the box around the corner to post them.

An arrival of a real letter used to make me feel warm and fuzzy inside, rather like the moment before you open your Christmas presents.

Where has that gone? We have all become so lazy with regard to "snail mail". If I didn't need to write as part of my job (I'm a receptionist/secretary) I'd rarely pick up a pen to write anything beyond cards and shopping lists. The sad thing is that we want everything NOW. We fire off emails completely taking it for granted that it will arrive on the other side of the world in a nano-second.

There is nothing better on a rainy Sunday than making a nice hot chocolate, retrieving my memory box from under the bed and reading my old letters... I'm so glad that I kept them all, mostly still in the carefully opened postmarked envelopes. They still make me feel warm and fuzzy inside :)

Am I the only one feeling nostalgic about good old-fashioned letter writing?

xx

Fury from the skies!!!

outside my house this afternoon

We have just had an almighty thunderstorm here, crashing and flashing for the past hour! Poor Gizmo cat was fast asleep in his bed and ran to me in the sitting room crying and wide-eyed, poor little thing... though some tasty treats soon took his mind off it!

I have always had a lifelong battle with storms. One of my earliest memories is of my Nan (who was also scared of storms) rushing around covering up mirrors and opening windows "so that the thunderbolt can escape". Of course, I don't blame my dear Nan for my fear of storms but it is nice to know that other people get frightened of them too!

Storm anxiety for me is actually more like a phobia. My heart races, I can't catch my breath, I shake, experience feelings of fight-or-flight and generally feel very, very frightened. Irrationally, I convince myself that lightning will always find ME. Silly really but I can't help it. One term for the phobia is Astraphobia, which makes me smile because it sounds like I'm terrified of Vauxhall Astra's!

I would LOVE to be able to sit and watch a storm, as the drama of crashing thunder and the beautiful lightning show is quite something. Night time viewing has always been a no-no as the lightning freaks me out and my idea of hell is being woken in the middle of the night by a storm!

I even tried watching the storm just now as the lightning was still vivid in daylight, but I chickened out after a big flash and crash... oh well, one day!

It does infuriate me though as ironically I have always been interested in anything to do with the weather. When my friend Lisa and I went to New York we LOVED the Weather Channel. Why can't we have one here in the UK?!

I particuarly like tornadoes. Well, I say "like". To say that I find them fascinating is probably a better description. Obviously I feel sorry for the death and devastation that they cause every year, but I think that they are visually stunning.

I would really love to go storm chasing in the US but the combined problem of my storm phobia and CP means that I wouldn't be able to run quickly to the chase vehicles, so I'll never be able to go. I do enjoy watching tv documentaries on storm chasing and have found some amazing photos on the net. What a true GEEK I am!

There's always something awesome about the power of Mother Nature. However technologically advanced we may be, Mother Nature always has the last word.

xx

Day 5

Hello! Am very pleased to report that I am continuing to improve - had a good sleep for the second night running and woke to find that I didn't need paracetamol today for the aches which are still there, but it is bearable now as opposed to being so painful that I couldn't be without pain relief :)

My best friend Steph came over this afternoon to talk to me through the sitting room window (how common haha! Goodness knows what the neighbours think!). It was sooooo good to see her, and I am enormously relieved that she hasn't gone down with it too considering I was with her on Saturday when I first began to feel ill. I never would have forgiven myself.

I opened the big windows wide enough to feel the warm breeze and sun on my skin, and it was wonderful :)

The main thing I've noticed today is that I'm so TIRED! I find that I'm dozing off after the slightest exertion. I needed a nap after Steph left. Ditto after making a cup of tea and after eating a light lunch. I guess now that the major symptoms have gone my body is busy repairing itself and is preferring to do that while I sleep. (That doesn't explain why I am still up at this hour, I seem to be nocturnal lately!)

One very good thing about being nocturnal is that I have been keeping in touch with my Aunty Sue (who is also a night owl!). I have been scared to go to sleep for some reason and she has been amazing. I love my Aunty Sue - I really shouldn't say it but she is my favourite Aunty, she's so funny and I like her take on life.

I finish the Tamiflu tomorrow evening, and I am a wee bit concerned that I will start feeling ill again. If you haven't already noticed, I am a terrible patient / hypochondriac and if I spent less time worrying about being ill I'd probably recover a lot faster! My defence is that I live alone - nobody to bring me back down to earth when I irrationally start panicking! Anyway must think positive! I WILL go to Germany!!

It was my Dad's birthday today and I felt so guilty that he didn't even get a card from me due to incarceration. This has been a lesson to me. Next time there's a birthday coming up, buy the card a WEEK before the big event and post it at least five days beforehand!! Cover all eventualities!

Dad understood, of course, but that's not the point.

Tomorrow I'm planning on trying to finish "Dear Fatty", Dawn French's autobiography. If you haven't already read it, I totally recommend it. It's written in letter form to various loved ones so is really easygoing. I haven't laughed this much at a book in ages!

Next up is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I am attempting to re-read, possibly followed by Twilight. I bought the first two books after Christmas but have yet to get around to starting. I must be the only person in the world not to have tackled them yet! Mind you, I didn't start reading the Harry Potter books until 2004... better late than never!

xx

Blonde moment...

I think I've broken something on my blog!!!

I have one follower, Amanda, :) but I have noticed that the Followers box on my blog (and every other blog) is empty although Amanda is still showing as a follower on my Dashboard..... perhaps I erased something when uploading my new background???

Hmmmm. Am clearly not proficient enough on Blogger yet to know how it all works! Thinking about it, it could be to do with when I upgraded to IE 8 yesterday??? Who knows!

**UPDATE** It all seems to be ok now!! Maybe it was a Blogger bug! :)

Today

Well, it's Day 4 of my swine flu journey and I'm pleased to report that I feel much better today!!

Slept wonderfully well. Didn't wake up once as far as I remember! Woke when Amanda rang me at eight (she has been wonderful) and we chatted for half an hour about the memorial, about how everybody was, about how we both were.

I got up - no headache today, result!! Realised that my body had mostly stopped hurting, just the tops of my arms and legs are aching today. Realised that I had more energy. Realised that the sun was shining. Realised that I was actually a little hungry. Realised that I had turned a corner.

And good things have happened today too which have made me smile:

Gizmo cat has been really soppy today and let me give him lots of cuddles.

Gail, my gardener, came this morning and we had a nice chat through the living room window. The smell of cut grass made me smile too!

My GP rang as arranged this morning to see how I was getting on and was really kind. He said I would be ok :)

I got dressed this morning for the first time since Saturday (obviously I wore clothes to the doctor's yesterday too!) and realised how much weight I have lost. My perfect fitting jeans are now so baggy that I can easily pull them down without unfastening them and my waist looks tiny. Obviously I don't recommend or advocate swine flu as a weight loss aid, but it made me smile this morning!!!

I plucked up the courage to ask my cousin Claire to fetch me a few bits and bobs (I HATE asking people for any kind of help) and then saw her briefly at the back door for a chat (she stood at a safe distance!!)

Claire brought me Heat magazine too :)

I logged into my Facebook and saw how many people had left me lovely comments, wall posts and inbox messages (I nearly cried, was so touched)

My dear, dear friend Kay sent me some texts and they really cheered me up. I think she's in London at the mo... miss her loads :(

My neighbour Debbie had sent me a lovely email and had also posted an Order of Service from Peter's memorial through the door... had a few tears over this I admit, but was so touched that she did that

I have a new layout for my blog! :)

My Auntie Jennie rang to see how I was. Mum had told her I was ill last night and she wanted to make sure I was ok. We had a lovely chat and she told me about her recent London - Paris sponsored bicycle ride in aid of the MS Trust (Auntie Jennie runs the MS Clinic at a local hospital) AND I found out that my cousin (Auntie Jennie's daughter) is expecting her second child in October!! She couldn't believe that I didn't already know.... I never get told anything lol!
 Had a lovely chat with my Daddy xx It's his 61st birthday tomorrow and I haven't been able to post his card. Guilt, guilt.... he understands though!

My lovely friend Jen rang to see how I was and we had fun talking about next week's road trip to Germany (have I written about that?!) and I enjoyed hearing the latest gossip :)

My neighbour Debbie and her daughter Laura came over to chat through the window, which was great and I really appreciated it. I've got to know them better over the past few weeks and they are a lovely family. We have a lot in common and I'm so pleased that we started talking! Laura has been reading my MO (Mass Observation) directives and ironically my current one is a swine flu diary so she knows how worried I had been about catching it!!

Laura popped over again to bring my MO folder back and also wrote me a lovely letter too. I LOVE letters and it was a fantastic letter :) Laura has lovely handwriting. Not fair!

Hopefully I'll continue to feel better now and at long last my blogs will become cheerful! One day it will be interesting to look back on my swine flu experience, so I am glad I have blogged it "warts and all"!


Most importantly, I realised that I am not alone in the world, even though I have felt as if I am for the last few months, and these last few days have been the loneliest I can ever remember. I have lots of people around who genuinely care for me, whether they are family, friends, neighbours, Gizmo cat or even people that I've "met" on the internet (such as Facebook friends) and don't really know. People care, and I am not alone. And it's the best feeling ever!

From my settee "bed": Gizmo cat at the window