The story so far:

Just before Christmas I did that thing where you’re walking downstairs and you think there’s one more step and there isn’t and your foot hits the ground HARD. It sent pains into my right knee that slowly faded but never fully went away. Some kind of damage to the soft tissue said my osteopath, it will heal very slowly because there’s not much of a blood supply there.

Well I was living with it OK. I could walk, (did six miles over four of the Seven Sisters on the south coast in May) cycle (did a number of 80-100km rides) and swim (occasionally. The Estuary can be cold in the spring) and all I ever noticed was sometimes I’d get a twinge when pushing the bike off from a standstill.

Until June 29th, when literally out of nowhere, in the space of about three hours it went from perfectly normal to something’s not right to I can’t bloody WALK.

And this time it didn’t seem to be fading

Saw the GP who said arthritis and ordered an X-Ray.

Saw another GP (you take whoever you can get at our practice) who looked at the X-Ray and said arthritis and sent me to an Orthopaedic surgeon

The Ortho looked at the X-Ray and said arthritis and ordered an MRI.

And in the meantime between careful cycling (for flexibility) and cautious treatment from the osteopath things were getting a lot better

Now read on.

Saw the Ortho consultant again after having the MRI (Funny thing: he may be The Man but the detailed assessment of the scans on his screen was obviously done by someone else in Radiology; he clearly hadn’t seen them before the consultation)

Confirms his first impressions. Mild to medium osteo-arthritis that’s not going to get any better. Will need a new knee in five years or so. (I suspect this is pessimistic, but there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?)

I also have a torn medial meniscus, and although the detailed assessment was chock full of technical medical jargon, the word “fragments” leapt out at me. Presumably bits of cartilage floating round the joint.

And apparently some kind of cyst at the back of the knee.

My immediate options are:

Keyhole surgery to clean out the joint. Won’t return me to the staus quo ante but might improve things by 50%. Also, could actually make things worse and of course there are all the risks associated with surgery and anaesthesia. He asked me directly, did I want that and on balance I thought not. He gave the impression he thought it was the right decision. “Avoid the knife if possible.”

A steroid injection to reduce inflammation. We got this close to arranging it before he suggested that he could recommend it to my GP and I could have it done there if I felt it needed doing.

Or, leave well enough alone and see how things develop.

And all the time I was thinking, Things have been improving. I’m almost completely asymptomatic at the moment. I can walk, cycle and swim without pain and it stopped waking me up in the night over a month ago. I only ever notice anything if I try to bend it sideways and how often does anyone not a sportsman do that? It’s actually getting better ( I do–sometimes–strength and flexibility exercises and get ultrasound on it once a month from the osteopath. Something’s working)

I’m going to leave it for now. If I have another flare up like I did in June I’ll go straight back to the GP and, I imagine, start with the steroid. And if that doesn’t work ask them for another Ortho referral for surgery.

What I find interesting is that this only blew up the first time late last year when I landed heavily on the leg coming downstairs, which presumably was when I tore the cartilage. I wasn’t getting any chronic symptoms of the underlying arthritis that I can think of at all. Which is why I have a feeling that five years to a replacement is pessimistic.

I think there’s a few years left in me yet.

One of our many shared fanships is the late Keith Waterhouse, whose straightforward response in his Daily Mirror column at the end of 1972 to Nixon’s latest murderous “peace offensive” in Vietnam I still cherish, in the original clipping.

(Roy’s right. I do archive things – a professional deformation of someone whose first official task in Her Majesty’s Service was ensuring the accurate computer posting of accounting records, and whose last often involved researching back to the dawn of VAT in 1973.)

In response to the comment “But what else could he do?”, Waterhouse says: “Well, the alternative to doing something is not doing it.” I haven’t seen anyone improving on that excuse exterminator in just shy of fifty years.

I haven’t yet read “Diary of a Nobody”, which introduces us to the supposed narrator, Charles Pooter: I don’t know if Roy has. But Waterhouse had, and had the genius idea of writing a parallel version from the wife’s point of view, which became a very successful stage play. And it was called “Mrs Pooter’s Diary”.

So when I saw Roy’s account of our beginnings, I was always going to have that precedent come to mind and want to give the world my own take on “This is how we met”.

(And by the way: the price of that ticket in April 1980 was £1.40 – terrace of course.)

I have archived Compuserve Forum discussion threads where this Roy Gillett geezer pops up fairly constantly going back to around 2001: I think if I tried harder I could take it back a long way further.

He always kept it polite, even when obviously exercised over some topic that had pressed a pet “hot button”- I won’t mention them, but anyone who knows us both can guess a few. Seemed harmless enough, and a couple of times when a bunch of us from UKCA Forum met up, we got on pretty well. The second time in fact Roy and I “closed the pub” after Budgie had gone to roost, since neither of us had anyone to go home to, we were still enjoying talking, and the beer in the Black Friar (a remarkable pub – not to be missed if you have the chance to see it) was outstanding. I could drink a lot more of it in those days (sigh).

In the year that followed, outside the Forum, I used my honed audit skills on the Census returns to solve a family history puzzle for him, and he advised me on the odd tech issue. It felt a bit like finding a friend – but not too close, and not too much. I’d heard too much about the perils of “online dating”.

So then there started That Long Discussion Thread (“Life on Mars”). I probably wouldn’t have read it if Roy hadn’t asked about Old Trafford – I never watch telly as a rule. It sort of sprouted branches, as discussions do, and I somehow mentioned that I was thinking of popping along to the BFI to see a Buster Keaton film – I’ve always preferred him to any other silent era classic. And, as Roy says, I pulled his leg about it being “The Cameraman” – I said he might want to come along and pick up a few professional tips.

I mean, this is a senior news cameraman for the national broadcaster of Great Britain I’m tweaking, but he didn’t then know where I lived, why worry? And how likely was it he’d say yes?

Oops.

Now I was only some five years from the breakup of my first marriage, and a very nasty business with The Other Man that had me pretty well traumatised. And even more recently, a sweet, elderly and very junior colleague had also refused to take “just friends” for an answer and been so upset by my eventual very clear rebuff that when he shortly after expired from a heart attack, it was hard not to think “Well couldn’t I have just tried?”

I had little reason by then to trust either men, or my own judgement of them. So it was not without trepidation I agreed to meet this guy in a possible dating context, choosing a pub literally within shouting distance of the office – and took care to let a friend or two know where I was going, and where to find him if I didn’t show up for work next morning. (Roy Gillett – if anyone could have managed to spell it right first time! – at The BBC. Gonna be a really hard find, that one.)

So I walked in and there was this bloke in pale-coloured “smart casual” wear scrunched up behind the farthest table from the door – he swears he wasn’t cowering but that was what it looked like to me. And if I really made that teeth-grindingly corny remark, I’m not surprised. He didn’t even correct me (as he usually does) that he’s NOT a stills photographer!

We had that pint, chatted, and saw the film – and it soon became apparent that, having either never picked up or easily forgotten about his increasing deafness, I had hit the jackpot choosing a silent film. Things were going well, and thanks to a friend who at that time played regularly with the Philharmonia I knew a reliable Portuguese/Italian restaurant only a step away.

(Caprini is still there, and still feeding singers, musicians and audience at a very reasonable price. It’s on the corner past St John’s church, heading for the station.)

We talked. And we talked. And we talked some more. And we pretty well “closed” the restaurant as well.

So the evening got to that point – the goodbye scene. A quick, polite kiss and he says something like “Let’s not leave it that long again.”

And I thought: “Yeah. I think you’re going to be ok.”

And I dared – and here we are. Thirteen years, already, and still talking.

Happy Anniversary.

And thank you, Dear.

Friday 10th March,2006. I’m sitting in a pub in Southwark–The Stamford Arms, now rebranded as The Hungry Bear of all names–and in walks Karen.

Karen and I knew each other slightly from a Compuserve forum: UK News and Current Affairs and we had, in fact, had a beer a couple of years previously along with another member, Lee “Budgie” Barnett, but mostly we knew each other online.

A couple of months earlier I’d posted a question about a detail of the BBC’s entertaining SF detective series Life on Mars. A minor plot point involved a game at Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground and I was surprised at the very low price on the ticket. I asked if that had been the going rate at OT in the early 70s. Karen not only knew the answer but, being a Moo fan, had a more or less contemporary ticket to prove it.

Well it started a long running discussion that ranged all over the place, so far beyond the remit of the forum and the other members that we soon took it private, and somewhere in there she mentioned that she was going to see a classic Buster Keaton silent film one Friday at the NFT, which wasn’t far from where she was then working on the South Bank

“Oh, ” typed, “want to kill the time before the film with a pint? “

“If you’re going to come to the pub, why not come to the film as well?”

Seemed like a plan. She bought tickets.

So she walked into the Stamford Arms, looked round and said ” ‘Ow’s my favourite snapper?”

The film was The Cameraman, in which Buster’s character trades in his tintype for a newsreel camera in order to impress the love of his life. It was an appropriate choice; being silent it posed no problems for my hearing and I did rather enjoy watching Buster more or less invent all the tripod related slapstick that I regret to say we were still doing in the industry 80 years later. (No I don’t)

After that we went for a meal and…

…we still haven’t stopped talking. And a couple of months later I realised we’d shifted from “Want to do something this weekend” to “What shall we do this weekend?”

I could bang on about how we discovered a shared love of the classic The Perishers cartoon from the Daily Mirror and bonded over a strip featuring Ole Boot at the Cartoon Museum. Or the day out in Brighton that was nearly scuppered because my car got stolen. But I probably wouldn’t be able to stop so I’ll leave it at “…haven’t stopped talking.”

So we adopted the 10th of March as our anniversary, which handily gives us an excuse to swerve celebrating Valentine’s Day. We just do it four weeks later

That was thirteen years ago. This year will be different, though. As you probably know, we finally took the next step and got married last April, so we’ll mark it properly in a few weeks.

But for now, Happy Anniversary, me dear.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you see something and it’s so unexpected, so out of the ordinary, that for a short while you don’t actually see  it? You just feel that something in your sight is indefinably wrong but you don’t know how?

Happened to me a while ago. First week in March last year

I was over in Acton for the day. I had an appointment on the High Street and it was at a time that made it convenient to take the bike on the train and cycle from Fenchurch Street.  Well, I did all that. Got away from my commitment at about 2pm and rolled gently up Horn Lane to Casa Gillett. All I wanted to do was a security check and collect the post.

I opened the front door and–well it’s hard to say what I saw. It’s a bit of a blur.  I simply couldn’t process what was in front of my eyes. It had no context . I have an impression of there being something  large and white lying in the hallway and my first, panicky thought was that I’d been burgled. Again.

Then the noise broke through the fog. A rushing, roaring sound, and I saw that, well, I couldn’t properly see the length of the kitchen.

And then it pulled into focus. Water. Cascading through the kitchen ceiling.  Sheets of it.

A leak. A bad one.

It took a while, and involved lying face down in a couple of inches of cold water reaching under the kitchen cabinets but I eventually managed to close the main stopcock and the torrent  slowed and stopped. 

Then I had to take stock.

The power was off, and with that, the heating. Large chunks of the ceiling had come down in the back  bedroom and in the rear half of the living room.  The “white object” lying in the hall was a sheet of the ceiling paper and the plaster work above was bulging.

The suspended ceiling in the kitchen was just a sagging, soggy mess and the floor was inches deep in water. All the carpets were soaked. 

So I phoned the insurance.

They were very good. The call handler took details and once I’d confirmed that the water was off she told me to lock up and walk away for the day; a loss adjuster would be in touch. She offered to find me alternative accommodation but I just said I’d go to the “other ‘arf’s” and she was OK with that.

I secured the bike and got the train back to Essex

Over the course of the next couple of days I played phone tag with the loss adjusters in amongst trying to evaluate the damage. I really shouldn’t have bothered. It was a professionals’ job. The only thing I did of any use at all was to get into the loft and fix the source of the trouble. 

It was all down to the “Beast from the East”.  Despite me keeping the heating on as frost prevention, at some point in the week before the discovery a water pipe had frozen up in the loft. It hadn’t burst the pipe though; as far as I could tell, the ice had pushed a compression joint apart. It was a simple enough matter to remake the joint. and it’s been fine since. 

Basically, mains pressure water had been pouring into the loft for up to a week. It quickly soaked through to the rear bedroom and bathroom and then into the void between floors, where it spread through the whole house and down into the ground floor.

The loss adjusters were pretty good. The first thing they did was assign a local recovery specialist and I met the boss on site about a week later. 

He walked into the house, took one look and muttered, “This is Bad” (It sounds a lot worse in his Eastern European accent) His crew started work that day. 

They condemned almost everything and started slinging it out. Bed, chests of drawers, dining chairs, most of the soft furnishings, all the carpets and floorings  except for the front bedroom. Then they installed a bunch of dehumidifiers–large fan heaters that suck in cold damp air and condense moisture out and left them going.

They ran for six weeks before it was declared dry. It cost a fortune. I know because they were efficient enough to note the meter readings before and after. 

Then the builders came. Well, eventually the builders came, but that was my doing because I was expecting the loss adjuster to call me, and he seemed to be waiting for me to call him. I suspect that with a fair number of water damage cases on his desk he was happy to expedite those that were costing a mint in bed and breakfast accommodation and leave me at the bottom of the pile. 

Down came almost all the ceilings. Off came all the plaster. Out went all the kitchen units and the non-ceramic bathroom stuff. I got sent a “Schedule of works” and a request to choose wallpapers and paints and stuff and there was some back and forth with the supervisor and the office about what I could and couldn’t have. That took another couple of months until they signed it off in November and then the carpet people got involved.

That was an interesting example of the kind of fragmentation and diffusion of responsibility that seems to be the norm now. 

The  insurance issuer  (Nationwide) had passed me on to their underwriter (Royal Sun Alliance) who appointed a specialist loss adjuster (who, by the way changed ownership during the year but that was at least transparent to me; my bloke-of-contact remained the same)  who engaged a flooring surveyor in Blackburn who sent the assessor round and nominated a supplier and fitter in Kenton. Who I then had to visit. And by this time it was late December and they couldn’t get the new carpets ordered before the New Year.

Oh, and then they screwed up by making an appointment to fit it all assuming that all the carpet would arrive from the manufacturer in time. Which it didn’t.  So they had to come back a fortnight later. It was finally all finished only about a month ago. Just short of a year.

And while all this has been going on I was intermittently in contact with the loss adjuster about the financial loss. I made an estimate, based on comparing the bill for first quarter of 2018 with Q1, 2017 on how much the water escape had cost. He accepted that in such a hurry I wondered if I’d underestimated. He got, as I said, a cost of electricity from the recover team and I had to put a price on the list of stuff they’d thrown out. Much rummaging in the files for old receipts, checking websites for current equivalents, and for the bed, I think it was, submitting a scan of an old credit card bill with all but the one relevant line redacted. 

Finally I tried to estimate out of pocket expenses for living away. I suggested a proportion of the council tax and utility costs here at Watson Towers and added a couple of overnights for the days when I had to meet tradesmen on site first thing in the morning. And again, he agreed so fast I wonder if he’d been expecting a lot more. I think perhaps he was just relieved I wasn’t costing him £500/week in a Travelodge (And frankly, having stayed in the local Travelodge when I had a morning appointment once, I was relieved too.) 

One final thing. When the time came to turn the heating back on, it wouldn’t. I got the engineers in and after a bit of faffing  they diagnosed a failing pump. With that replaced all was fine, but I wondered. Did the pump fail a year ago and cripple the heating? Was that the original cause? Probably never know, because the  flood (Not a flood, said the family insurance expert. An “escape of water.” There’s a technical difference) put the power off and erased the evidence. 

And there we are. The place has been about 80% redecorated mostly at someone else’s expense. We took the opportunity to empty it of most of my accumulated stuff and this now looks like a good time to let it go. I really can’t justify the cost of keeping a 3 bedroom house in West London just for the handful of times a year we need an overnight. The savings on Council Tax, insurance and utilities would pay for quite a few hotel stays and we’re already looking like Frequent Flyers at the local Holiday Inn. 

More on that as it eventuates.