Yet another UK update.

I am reaching the end of what will be my longest stay in the UK since the 1970’s. While the circumstances of my visit were not the best, many aspects of the trip were surprisingly quite enjoyable. I have rediscovered so many things that I appreciate about the "old country".

Before I leave I am learning the ins and outs of the UK Social Services and what they can do for my mother. So far I have been quite impressed. There is a concerted effort to maintain an older people’s ability to live in their own homes rather than place them in nursing homes. After my mother was released from the hospital, the Hospital Social Services group takes over and they move in with a “rehabilitation team” to get my mother back to as high a level of independence as possible. Initially they are going to visit her 4 times a day, once to get her up in the morning, once to prepare lunch, once again for an evening meal, and again at the end of the day to get her ready for bed. As she becomes more capable, and hopefully she will, they will drop off visits until she is stabilized and at that time the local Social Services department in Staveley, my mother’s home town, will take over with the routine visits. So that is up to 4 visits a day to provide assistance with dressing, bathing, feeding to allow an individual to remain independent in their own home. And all at no cost! The benefits of socialized medicine and care!

So that is the plan for my mum – so far there have been a few hiccups and miscommunications, but I am hopeful that all will work as intended. I don’t know a lot about how things work in the U.S.A. but I am doubtful that it would work quite as well, and I am certain it wouldn’t be entirely free. I will have to check up on that.

Out of Hospital...

After 3 ½ weeks, my mother was finally released from hospital today, She is now much better and hopefully just needs time now to recuperate and to get back some of her mobility. After spending most of the last 4 weeks in a bed, she is understandably a bit shaky on her feet.

So for me 3 weeks of hospital visits come to an end. In many ways it was kind of sad to say goodbye to everyone at the hospital. The patients who all wanted to go home themselves but weren’t quite as lucky. The nurses who perform such a heroic job of caring for the patients - my hats off to them. The other visitors who came each day just like me. The doctors who all seemed so young to me (once upon a time a doctor was very much an older person, now it seems that they are barely out of their teens. Anyway, it was all quite a community at the hospital. I am grateful to have been a part of it for a while.

Bolsover Castle

I am continuing to explore the historical past of my home town area. The other day, I went to visit Bolsover Castle. A dominant feature of the landscape around here, but a place that I hadn’t visited since junior school days. The castle has been there in some form or another since Norman times (12 Century), but the present day structure mostly dates from the 1600’s when it was rebuilt as the country home of William Cavendish a big buddy of Charles the First (the one who got his head chopped off!). After the Civil War it wasn’t such a good thing to be a buddy of King Charles, so William had to exile himself to Holland.

The castle has been restored and it is a quite wonderful site now. Hats off to English Heritage for doing a great job in the renovation and providing a great guided tour. I am finding it quite fascinating to re-discover all the old history of this area of Derbyshire. There is so much of interest here and I never really paid any attention to it before.

An Archaeological Dig in Staveley

The old hall in Staveley (my home town) is hosting an archaeological dig in its grounds. The hall has been around for a long time – an early incarnation of the structure is mentioned in the Doomsday Book of 1066. It has undergone various construction periods over the years, perhaps reaching its prime in the Civil War period (1600’s).


At this dig, they have two or three proper archaeologists and the rest is volunteer help. Anyone can show up and after a bit of orientation can work away with a shovel or trowel to unearth the treasures of Staveley’s past. There have not been a lot of discoveries so far – some pottery and glass fragments, animal teeth and bones from the old kitchen and some old pathways, but who knows what secrets lie hidden there...

It is nice to see the community getting involved in discovering Staveley’s past. In my time growing up there, most of us couldn’t wait to get out. We weren’t interested in the unearthing the past.

Sutton Scarsdale Hall

I was early for my hospital visit the other day so I took a detour to the village of Sutton Scarsdale, a couple of miles from the hospital. In Sutton Scarsdale there is an impressive building that would perhaps be classed as a stately home, if a stately home can be a ruin. A grand residence built in the 1700’s for xxx and occupied by various residents through the years. There are rumors that one owner was the model for Sir Clifford Chatterley in D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence being a local lad).

The hall was sold off in 1919 to be stripped of its contents and to be used for building materials. Some of the interiors were shipped to the USA and apparently still reside there in museums in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Now all that remains of the hall is a bare shell – just the masonry, no windows, no doors.

It must have been impressive in its day, it is still quite a structure.

Another UK Update

I am now into my third week over here in England. Mum is getting slowly better. She still has to undergo one more procedure to remove an errant gall stone and then the doctors think they will be able to release her. The operation (a non-surgical endoscopy) is slated for next Wednesday. Then the challenge will be to get her back on her feet and moving around again after what will have been over three weeks in bed.

So things are looking up and mum is certainly more lively and cheerful. However, her neighbour in the next bed is not doing so well and is not expected to survive for long and that makes for an uncomfortable contrast. Yesterday, Friday, at my mum's bed we were all laughing out loud at some humorous thing, I don’t know what, and I looked up to see one of the family members crying at the next bed – just 6 feet away. That made for some very strange, almost guilty, feelings. We were all so happy at one bed and they were so close to us and so desperately sad.

But life goes on in the hospital, this afternoon (Saturday), I arrived there and the neighbour’s bed was empty, all tidy with clean sheets and ready for the next occupant. She had passed away in the early morning lying in the next bed to my mother – very sad and very creepy indeed.

Hello there, sports fans....

What a great couple of weeks of sport over here in the UK - at least my kind of sport anyway.

First, two truly fine Test Matches between England and Australia. For those American’s reading this who are not cricket fans, a Test Match is an international cricket match typically lasting 5 days with so many nuances and fine points that I couldn’t begin to explain (but check this link out). Suffice it to say that the matches were amazing and the entire country has been so enthralled by the games that we hardly noticed the start of football season (U.S. translation = soccer) last weekend.

Then we had the World Championship of Athletics in Helsinki. Last weekend we had full coverage of both the Men’s (Saturday) and the Women’s (Sunday) marathons on the BBC. That was start to finish coverage of both races with no advertising. That would never happen in America, over 2 hours each day of people running through the streets! Not even ESPN 7 or 8 or whatever number they are up to now would have found time for that.

The really sad thing is that I bet no one in the US even knew that the Athletics World Championships were taking place. What a shame.

Is she a chav or an angel….

The Oxford English Dictionary came out with some interesting statistics this week. In English you have many more ways of insulting someone than praising them, and if you are a man you have more word choices for describing an attractive woman, than a woman has for describing a handsome man. There are apparently some 350 words in the dictionary that are insulting while there are only 40 words that could be considered complimentary. There are 50 words to describe an attractive woman and only 20 ways to describe a good looking man.

In the latter situation, I don’t think it is because there are so few good looking men around, I think it is that men are just more imaginative (out of desperation) when describing the female of the species, whilst women just couldn’t care less.

By the way, if you don't know what a chav is (I didn't but likely every UK resident does) , it is a "young lower-class person typified by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of [real or imitation] designer clothes".

Guy Fawkes' 400th Anniversary

There was an interesting article in The Guardian the other day – pointing out the similarities between Guy Fawkes and his 17th Century religious terrorists and the present day London bombers. A few details might have been stretched or omited to make a good story but the basic premise was that the Catholics were the Muslims of 1605.

So for example:
• Guy Fawkes (a Catholic) represented an extreme and minority fringe of the Catholic Church
• King James (a Church of England man) was proud of his tolerance of Catholicism (he was a multi-culturalist)
• Guy Fawkes like the present day bombers was British born, but went overseas for training.
• After the failed attack, King James authorized a bit of a crack down on the poor old Catholics and they were persecuted and shut out for quite a long time. In fact, the Catholics didn’t gain acceptance again until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. That's 200 years!

There are certainly some interesting comparisons here. Are there lessons to be learned? Surely we do not want to go down the same path towards isolation of the Muslims as we did with the Catholics in 1605.

What is also interesting is that this year is the 400 year anniversary of Guy Fawkes and his failed attack on the British Parliament. We seem to celebrate anniversaries at the drop of a hat these days, yet, this core part of every English child’s upbringing is hardly getting a mention on its 400th birthday. (For those Americans who don't know about this, on November 5th every year, the English celebrate Bonfire night with fireworks, a bonfire and the burning of an effigy of Guy Fawkes on top of the fire.)

I suppose it would be a little odd to make a big deal about this sort of event these days and I suppose, in a way, we do celebrate it every year on November 5th.

An update from England...

I have been over in the UK for almost a week now and I am sort of settling in to the time change and the routine now. It has been a week of hospital visits and nothing much else really. Mum was and still is pretty weak – at the ripe old age of 86 you don’t quite bounce back to health very easily. The doctors think they have found the reason for all her problems – nothing to do with the fall she had – they discovered a liver infection that had likely been causing all sorts of problems for her in the last few weeks.

A drain in her side and a cocktail of antibiotics and pain killers appear to be doing the trick - although it all appears to be happening very slowly.

On the positive side, it is good for me (and for anyone really) to be around the hospital environment for a while. It helps remind me of what, most likely, we all have to look forward to if we live beyond our 70’s. Medical science has done wonderful things for curing so many problems, but there are still so many chronic diseases that cannot be cured but only ameliorated with pain killers, anti-coagulants, insulin, etc. The quality of life just does not look that great for so many of these patients. The lucky ones are those that still have their mental facilities, I guess.

UK Bound

I am off to the UK again – my mum is in hospital after a fall - hopefully she will be alright, nothing is broken but at the present time she is just not recovering very well.

So here I am in SFO waiting for the Virgin flight to Heathrow – 10 hours of blissfully comfortable travel I am sure!

It is peak travel time and I had to buy a ticket on short notice. It took a fair bit of digging around on the internet but I finally found something reasonable – by reasonable I mean less that $1,000 (actually $990) – that’s probable very reasonable for short notice at this time of year.

It is surprising how all the various multi-site searches like Expedia or SideStep or Priceline or CheapTickets all give different pricing answers to the same flights. You would thing they are all searching similar databases, but all the results are different. Priceline turned out to be the cheapest this time (last time it was the British Airways home site). There just doesn’t seem to be one place to go for the best deal, you have to try them all and see what anomalies pop out.