I didn’t tell you, did I?

When I was in hospital a couple of months ago, one of the investigations they did was to stick my head in an MRI scanner to see what, if any, damage the Varicella virus had done. Thankfully they found no trace of anything bad.

But

When they looked at the pictures they saw something unrelated that they thought was worth further investigation. A small artery in my brain is a bit swollen. I have an aneurysm. It’s in the “anterior communicating artery,” a small cross link between two arteries feeding my brain. The staff at Southend Hospital who spotted this sent the scans to a specialist neurosurgery unit at Queen’s Hospital in Romford. They sent back a request for further imaging and the day after I was discharged I went back to Radiology for a “CT Angio”– a CAT scan of my head with a contrast medium to highlight the blood vessels. I didn’t like that much; the contrast medium made me feel a bit queasy, but it soon passed.

I was sent an appointment for a consultation in mid November which I duly attended. I saw two consultants. a Neurosurgeon and an “Interventional Neuroradiologist.” There was also a specialist neurosurgical nurse.

They told me I had an aneurysm. No shit. The artery in question is about 25%-30% larger than it ought to be. This is not good. There is a small but real chance of it rupturing in the next few years with consequences ranging from mildly unpleasant, which could mostly get better, through major permanent disability to, well, let’s not go there. Except that I have to.

There are two options. Well, three, but they made it pretty clear that they don’t recommend “conservative management” which would mean having further scans every six months or a year. Their advice was that this was only kicking the can down the road and that sooner or later I’d be faced with the same choices.

Which are: Craniotomy. They remove a small section of my skull, poke around in the grey stuff, and isolate the offending bulge with small clips. Replace the bone and in time it will heal and no one would ever know it had been done. It’s the “definitive solution” but traumatic, painful and with a longish convalescence.

Or, Endoscopy. A small cut in an artery in my groin and they navigate a probe through the blood vessels until they get to the bulge and reinforce it from the inside with a stent. Quick,; in and out of hospital in two days and short recovery. There’s a small (about 1 in 30) chance of it not “taking” and having to be done again. They’ll do scans every now and then to keep an eye on it. The main drawback is that I’ll have to take anticoagulant medication for the rest of my life to prevent blood clotting around the insert. It’ll be a small annoyance for the first six months on quite a strong blood thinner but after that it’s aspirin forever which is fairly benign. They pointed out that a very large number of over 70s take anticoagulant medication without any problems.

I was rather taken aback. Going in I’d kind of assumed that they’d tell me what was wrong and explain what they wanted to do about it. I wasn’t expecting a choice. They said they understood they’d given me a lot of information to absorb and they didn’t expect me to make a decision on the spot. I’d be sent comprehensive notes and contact details for the nurse so I could ask questions. They would be happy to have another in person consultation as well.

Walking out of the consultation in a partial daze I was pretty sure I wanted the endoscopic procedure. Something about having the top of my head sliced off really didn’t appeal.

Then Karen and I stopped to decompress in the hospital coffee shop and by the time I’d settled a bit was leaning towards a craniotomy. “Once and done” and no annoying drug regime.

It was a bit of a wait for the notes but they eventually showed up and I formulated a bunch of questions for the nurse. She sent back a comprehensive set of replies and I spent the Christmas holidays pondering the options.

I went back and forth and round and round and early in January I emailed them asking for the endoscopic procedure. I just couldn’t get past the image, inaccurate as it may be, of slicing the top off a boiled egg.

So then they sent me a couple more appointments. One was supposed to be a phone call but for reasons never explained that didn’t happen, and a couple of days later, an in person appointment in Romford. That was my pre-surgical assessment. Blood pressure, height, weight,etc. A longish medical history questionnaire and then they took some blood,–quite a lot of blood–some skin swabs just in case I was harbouring MRSA and an ECG. I got a short list of instructions on fasting for the day of the surgery, and that was it for the time being. I now had to wait.

I waited quite a long time. Well, I thought it was quite a long time. I had no real idea of how long I could expect to wait. I had a slight memory of the surgeons saying back in November that it wouldn’t be long. Maybe a few weeks. But it got to five weeks and I was starting to wonder.

Then the phone rang one lunchtime: “private number.” Normally I don’t take these but I had a feeling…

It was the hospital. They’d had a cancellation and there was a slot available in two days. Friday 28th.

Did I want it?

Yes, I rather thought I did. A bit short notice but let’s get it over and done with

OK, I was to present myself at the day surgery unit at 7:30 that morning. I should expect to be there for one night, maybe more but at least one night.

So there we are.

That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it? Well, judge for yourselves

It probably started on Sunday 6th October. I’d been on a long (65 km) , organised bike ride starting and finishing in Ware, in Hertfordshire. It went well. I was a bit pleased with myself because I actually finished, unlike the previous year when I’d basically given up after about 15 km and found a shortcut back to the start.

Sitting at the designated rest stop half way round I noticed a slightly odd feeling on the right side of my head. It wasn’t quite bad enough to be called a headache but it was something off. I dismissed it as one of those transient things that would go away in its own time.

I kept noticing it as I was driving home afterwards and through the evening.. So that night I took a couple of ibuprofen before bed.

Next morning it was still there. So then I started to come up with possible reasons for it, each of which would naturally mean it would go away of its own accord. I’d had a tooth out a week earlier and I’d been taking a codeine based painkiller. Was it a withdrawal symptom? The internet seemed to think that codeine could provoke withdrawal headaches.

The other thing was also related to the extraction. I reasoned that I’d had to brace my head against the force of the dentist pulling on his forceps and might have strained my neck muscles. Which of course had been masked by the codeine.

But instead of fading, which it would have done if it was either of those it got slowly worse, and by Friday I realised that I was taking too much ibuprofen for too little effect and managed to book myself a slot at the doctors.

I saw a nurse practitioner rather than a GP but I can’t fault her approach. She took my history and checked me over for signs of a minor stroke (which was a rational and plausible possibility.) That seemed OK so she considered the next step. Either she could book me in for blood tests on the Monday or we could try to get me into “SDEC” — Same Day Emergency Clinic–at the hospital for a CT scan of my head. I was all for cracking on. She cleared it with her supervising GP and printed off a letter of introduction to take to A&E, because she couldn’t get through to the SDEC “Gatekeeper” (She admitted they rarely can)

So Karen drove me up to A& E. It could have been worse but it wasn’t fun. It was full, but not horribly overcrowded. It took about half an hour from walking through the door to sitting down in front of the triage nurse, who was less than pleased at the attempt to game the system. But he passed me through anyway. I couldn’t have cared less. I was in.

Wasn’t too much of a wait before someone came with a wheelchair (in general inpatients aren’t allowed to roam unsupervised) and off we all went to SDEC. They took my history, did some quick observations and told me what was going to happen. First was blood tests , then a CT scan of my head, then, something that no one had mentioned before, a lumbar puncture to extract some cerebrospinal fluid for testing.

The LP was a touch traumatic. First I had to sign a consent that detailed (as consent forms tend to do) all manner of horrific but unlikely problems. Then I had to bend over while the doctor shoved a large needle between two of my vertebrae and shoogled it about, MILLIMETRES FROM MY BLOODY SPINAL CORD. Well they managed to extract a few bottles of fluid without paralysing me (Although the tingle that went down my right leg was a bit unexpected) and sent them off for testing. One of them, I discovered went to a specialist unit in Coventry. This will be important later.

It was a bit of a wait, but then we got the results. The CT scan showed no head trauma. The blood tests were average and the CS fluid was mostly normal, in particular there was no trace of blood, which along with the clear CT scan confirmed that I hadn’t had any kind of head trauma. But it did show an elevated white cell count, indicating some kind of infection in the lining of the brain. I was invited to return on the Monday morning to discuss treatment options. But I was told to come back immediately if the symptoms got much worse. In the discharge letter I saw later that was called “Safetynetting.”

We went home.

Sunday morning I woke up and for a short period thought I couldn’t see out of my right eye. Then I realised that although I couldn’t make out much detail I could see the power LEDs of various bits of kit scattered around the room. I wasn’t , thankfully, blind in that eye but it was badly blurred, far more than it usually is with my myopia. I figured that excessively blurred vision counted as worsening, so back to SDEC we went.

They booked me in to see an ophthalmologist that afternoon. He had a good look and told me I had Uveitis, an inflammation of the lining of the eyeball, which can lead to headaches that present as near they eye but not actually IN it. He gave me steroid eye drops and a treatment schedule that extends into December, after which I am to see my usual optician.

Back in SDEC, I think they made an understandable but unfortunate mistake. They decided that Uveitis explained everything and sent me home as MFD. Medically Fit for Discharge, cancelling my Monday appointment. And things did, briefly, seem to improve through Sunday and Monday.

The shit hit the fan on Wednesday. Karen took a call from the doctor who’d seen me in SDEC. (he couldn’t reach me on my phone) Further analysis of my CS fluid, the bottle that I mentioned had gone to Coventry, had revealed the presence of Varicella Zoster Virus. VZV. It’s a member of the Herpes family and is responsible for chickenpox and shingles. I’ve had chickenpox but I seemed to be wide open to shingles, and here it was in my head. It was now certain that I had viral meningitis. I had to go straight back back into SCED with an overnight bag.

Overnight. Right.

After booking me in, the very first thing they did was punch a hole in my right arm and insert a cannula, which I would have for the next six days, Then they ran in a bag of saline with a shot of Acyclovir, a common antiviral agent known to be effective against Herpes family viruses.

They kept me in for the first night in a single room in the short term admissions ward, but very late on the next day I was moved to a 6 bed unit in general medical. I arrived at about midnight and I should probably apologise for the noise I made blundering about in the half dark trying to get myself ready for bed.

I’d had four bags of Acyclovir on Thursday and then three bags every subsequent day. 6am, 1pm and around 8pm The 8pm could be annoying because while they were very good at remembering to put them up, they sometimes forgot to check whether they were done and it would get to bedtime with me still hooked up. Charitably, they were overworked.

When they hooked my up to the first drip, they gave me a rundown of the possible future progression of my treatment. They needed to see just how bad the infection had got and how firmly it had me in its grip. If it hadn’t really taken hold, then I could get a few bags of IV Acyclovir and go home with a box of pills. Oral Acyclovir. The way to do that was to have a better look inside my head. That meant an MRI scan of my brain which they hoped to schedule for Thursday.

Well I asked a couple of times but it didn’t happen until Friday, which had a slight knock on effect.

On Friday morning I spoke to another doctor, the consultant in charge of the ward and she clarified that I’d have the MRI scan, which would be reviewed by the “Infectious diseases specialist” (who I never saw) and it was their decision whether I could be discharged with oral Acyclovir. The problem was that the infectious diseases specialist didn’t work weekends so I was there until at least Monday. Oh well. But I did at least get the scan on Friday morning.

The weekend passed off uneventfully. Three bags of Acyclovir a day. I was starting to feel a bit better. The previous Thursday the headache had been really awful but it was now fading into the background. I started to get into the rhythm of the ward. Breakfast at 7, morning meds round, drip at 8, lunch at 12, drip at 1, coffee and biscuits at 3, tea at 5, drip at 8, evening meds round and bed. And at regular intervals someone would come round with a trolley and take my blood pressure. In amongst all that I had to organise going to the bathroom to do my eye drops. Six times a day. Karen came in every evening to bring me good cheer and fresh T shirts and underwear. One blessing was that I didn’t have to wear one of those undignified hospital gowns that open at the back. And I had my phone and tablet to keep me occupied. I could even, by using my phone as a hotspot, stream various TV shows. The phone signal was good on the 4th floor. (They discourage streaming on the hospital WiFi network) On Saturday a doctor told me the MRI showed me clear of any long term damage but the decision to discharge me or not was still in the hands of the infectious diseases specialist on Monday

Monday morning I had a drip bag and then a blood test. I was assuming I would be ejected after lunch

No.

Just after lunch a nurse came and started me on a giant bag of pure saline that she said would be up for eight hours. So I wasn’t going home. Something to do with my kidneys.

Later, a doctor came and explained. It’s a known and quite common side effect of IV Acyclovir that the kidneys can get slightly clogged with its metabolites. It might have been better if I’d drunk more water, but no one said. That’s what the saline was for, to help flush the muck through. They gave me another bag overnight and said that should fix it. I’d have another blood test in the morning and depending on the result, I could possibly go home in the afternoon.

And to cut a long story short, that’s what happened. The first I knew about it was when a nurse came after lunch and took out the cannula. Then they gave me an envelope of paperwork and enough oral Acyclovir for three more days and waved goodbye. I called up Karen for a lift and that was it.

It’s been nearly a month now and while I’m feeling much, much better than I did, there seems to be quite a long tail. I still get, not exactly headaches, but a feeling of a bit of a stiff neck. And I think there’s a little bit of a reaction to the steroid eye drops I’m still taking and will for a couple of weeks yet. It’s a bit two steps forward, one step back. Subjectively it seems to correlate roughly with with tiredness and stress.

And that I think is the main reservation about the treatment. They staff at the hospital were focused on getting me well enough to push me out of the door and free up the bed. Which is understandable I suppose; no bed in my unit was ever free for more than a couple of hours. But maybe someone could have sat me down for ten minutes and told me what to expect going forward.

So. Was that a “brush with death”? What would have happened if if I’d just carried on swallowing ibuprofen? One possibility is that my own immune system might have dealt with the infection eventually, just like it does with other viruses. But at what cost? The first doctor I saw was slightly concerned that I could have scarring of the lining of the brain. That sounds scary.

Or maybe I’d have developed other symptoms that couldn’t be ignored until it was too late. But that all happens in the other leg of the Trousers of Time. In this leg, I seem to be virus free–or the virus is dormant. As I understand it Herpes family viruses never really go away. They just shut down. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know why it suddenly woke up. It’s a slight worry that it could happen again. It may be worth investigating the shingles vaccine.

There’s a coda.

The day before I was discharged I started to notice a slight soreness in my right elbow. Obviously I ignored it. My best guess was that it was caused by holding my largish tablet up so I tried to stop doing it.

It wasn’t that. After a couple more days I couldn’t ignore it any more and got someone at the GP surgery to look at it (again, not a doctor; a paramedic practitioner) One look and he diagnosed “infective bursitis”. Antibiotics and ibuprofen gel. He thought it was rather likely that it an infectious agent had tunnelled in through the site of the cannula and worked its way round but that’s something else I suppose we’ll never know for sure. I did find out later that cannulas aren’t really supposed to be left in place for six days. They should be removed after four or so days and a new one put in somewhere else. Anyway the elbow cleared up in a few days.

And there we are. I’m starting to feel better; I’m reintroducing myself, slowly, to the bike and I’m enjoying it. I think I’m going to be OK.

It’s one of those times when I seriously regret not taking many photos of my working life.

21st October is Trafalgar Day, the anniversary of the major sea battle when Admirals Nelson and Collingwood engaged and destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet under Adm. Pierre Villeneuve.

In 2005, because it was an anniversary with noughts on the end, the Navy had a bit of a do in Portsmouth, centred, obviously, around HMS *Victory* and the BBC, including me, went down there to cover it. Sad to say I wasn’t part of the team that got to go on board. I was running the live camera on the press gantry overlooking the ship, doing correspondents in vision for News 24 (as it was still then called) and the bulletins. Even though I wasn’t on the ship I enjoyed it well enough.

The advance briefing we got from the Navy told us that as part of the commemorations *Victory* would “fire her broadside” for the first time in nearly 200 years. Given that she mounted around a hundred guns we thought that would be quite spectacular and rather looked forward to it, even the fifty or so on one side would be impressive enough.We set up and waited. With seconds to go I was framed up and running; I suppose a dozen others were as well.

And…

“Pop, pop, pop, pop…..”A handful of small firecrackers went off in some of her gun ports. That was it. In retrospect I suppose it wasn’t very likely that they’d run out a row of 32 pounders and let them off (even with a tiny gunpowder charge and no shot) but it was kind of an anticlimax.

And yes. Sorry, but no pictures.

Well, the Squirrel Bloke came back yesterday, had a look in the loft and…

…nothing. No squirrels in the traps, no evidence that they’ve been even sniffing around. He suspects that all the unaccustomed activity up there has driven them away.

Fine by us. Either way they’re gone. He said he’ll come back in a week or so and check again and if there’s still no evidence of residency he’ll set to blocking up the access. Be interesting to see how he does that. When I had squiggles at my old Acton place I tried nailing fine mesh wire under the eaves but it wasn’t terribly satisfactory.

We shall see

To be continued.

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.