rainy days

it's raining here in the UK, a storm blown in from the continent with lots of rain. Its been an odd year so far and I seem to be taking each up and down pretty well, which is good considering my ability to escalate anything beyond it's natural magnitude.

I lost my job of course in march, this was inevitable due to government cuts and not too painful as I have a pension I can fall back on, having retired once before. I then plucked up courage to try for a position as a mountain guide and pending the results from my assessment last week I will start that soon. This is a dream come true for me and one which I never ever thought would transpire, and the asking for it came about from the serenity prayer "Courage to change the things I can", which is a true statement if ever there was one.

The physio for my shoulder following the operation seems to be reaching its zenith in terms of impact and hopefully that will end soon. All in all the shoulder is a lot better now and at least I can move and sleep.

I have started a new web business also, which is in it's early days, but I am hopeful of it flourishing. The website provides a portal for people wanting to work as an interim "whatever" and where prospective employers can view candidates. I have high hopes for it and the apartment in Rome it will fund the purchase of.

Some bad news is we lost Tilley our dog last week. Tilley is the one in the picture. She hadn't had a good start to life, then we found her and she fell in love with My Beautiful and never let her out of her sight. She hated all other dogs but was great with people and she was so pretty. About 3 weeks ago we noticed she was losing weight and off her food and sure enough cancer had ravaged her body. She gave loads to us and taught me a lot about living in the moment, especially around food. I miss her terribly as does My Beautiful.

I was at Intergroup today and learned of the death of a fellow member from drugs and drink. He joined before I did, was very dogmatic in how to apply the programme, became a founder member of the god squad, and went round telling everyone they needed god, that is until the church he attended told him as a born again christian he could no longer be a drunk. To which he responded by going out and getting drunk for the next few years. He slipped around for more years than I can care to remember, working all the time and trying to stay sober, which at time he managed for some lengths. But there was always the inevitable. He was a nice man, who tried hard to make it happen and the world is worse for his loss.

It made me think about why people don't make it. There was something in this young man that strived a little too much to ensure that people believed his message, I guess more for him than them. A little like whistling in the dark or "act as if". It seemed more important than actually staying sober. Certainly church attendance, belief in god, god himself, long association with the fellowship didn't seem to help any. There was sporadic and incandescent attendance at meetings and I guess there is a clue, attendance at meetings and attitude, and acceptance. At the end of the day this really is a simple thing to achieve, just decide not to pick up a drink one day at a a time, and then keep doing that. Determination and persistence seem to help along with constant identification with others in meetings. It is so simple. So simple thousands seem unable to grasp it and there is the conundrum of the disease.

Take care all of you and have a good week.

at least that is over

I have just arrived home after my operation to release a frozen right shoulder. I am right handed so you can imagine what an incapacity having the whole of your right side numbed is, and I am talking writing and typing here for those whoes minds are on a lower plane. So this will be short. The op seemed to go well apart from the anaethetist who had trouble getting the needle in for the first local sleep drug. For such a person to be struggling should have set alarm bells ringing but by that time I was telling god to look after My Beautiful, should he require my services on a full time basis.

After coming round I was having a little problem breathing which became much worse and rapidly so. It turned out that the nice anaethetist had frozen the nerves that operate the muscles that pump your lungs up and down and I'd also got what they said was a mucus plug in my left lung. So all in all it wasn't great but they sorted it. Beautiful arrived at the hopsital to take me home, just in time to witness the coomotion of all the docs and nurses trying to get me to breath, whioch wasn't good for her.

I went throught the NHS as I believe in it and we pay for it, but the NHS sent me to a private hospital. I have to see the building and food were way beyond the standards I would have found in the NHS hospital. I am not sure about the level of care though, it was very high and very professional and I have had similiar in NHS hopsitals, I have also had much worse in NHS hospitals and it begs the question if one hospital can do it why not all of them.

I have had some wonderful messages of welcome on my return to blogging and that was nice. To White Rabbit all I have to say about the offers from SB is Max Moseley. Need I say more. YOu would not be dissappointed as I am sure Max wasn't.

On a lighter note I saw the images of the two children of Andy and Fergie arriving for wills and kates wedding. Now I pay for these two and I am entitled to an opinion and all I can say is that it was real good of them to dress up in funnyhats and dresses for the occasion. I wonder if any of the servants proffered an opinion before they left for the day, if they did all I can say is that in breeding is alive and well.

and another thing!!!

SB just wouldn't leave me alone so I,m back posting. You wouldn't believe the type of enticements she was offering, I can't go into detail, but enough to say that I am back posting.

Well it's been a while since i posted and there is not one ounce of guilt or regret. Just lost the habit of posting and got diverted by a few other projects that took up time. Nice to see some familiar tag names, I hope you are all well and I just know that you will all be heaving a sigh of relief that I have posted again.

Whats been happening??

The job finished, the UK sank deeper into the proverbial and people trusted the politicians even less. I've had a frozen shoulder which gets operated on next tuesday.

There has been lots of time for reflection and realisation. After been sacked along with everyone else the first thought was find something else to do, something that pays. Then a quote form Walden kept coming back to me "most men lead lives of quiet desperation" and I realised I was just walking back in to the same trap I walked in to when I was 16. Then an opportunity came up and I thought lets have a go. So I have jumped from the thought of a standard 9-5 job and decided to become a Mountain Guide. I'm already a volunteer park ranger so it isn't such a stretch. I've been accepted for assessment by a trail tour company and if I pass that then the next step will be to get a lot of people lost in the mountains.

I cannot describe how excited I feel at this prospect ( the guiding, not the getting people lost) I am very, very grateful to My Beautiful who just said, go for it, do it.

Life is good. I hope it is for you.

Take care all of you

The year seems to be well underway. Work wise we all received our redundancy notices last week so we now know the outcome. I have had an idea about a workers co-operative which seems to have met with some acceptance so I will be working on the broad details over the next few days.

I went to the Region meeting last Sunday and the topic of Conference was discussed and what if any was it's importance. Conference does seem disconnected from the everyday member. Whenever I hear conference spoken about it is always with a sense of preening and privilege and pride. Yet group conscience meetings, and that's what conference is, are never spoken about in the same way. The language of conference is also a little elitist, with questions constructed in a manner that does not allow the uninitiated to immediately understand the meaning and reasoning of the questioner. It seems that a great expense is laid out for something that returns so little to the vast majority. The number of times that meetings have changed because of conference decisions can be counted on a couple of fingers in the time I have been in the fellowship.

And yet there does seem to be a place for conference, even if it is only to keep the board in check. A objective, conference in GB has been sadly lacking in, in recent years.

Another topic raised is the fellowships lack of money. Apparently, if i were not for literature sales we would not be solvent. The question comes to mind what are we spending money on if we need book sales to remain afloat. Surely, the correct way to conduct our affairs would be to cut our cloth accordingly. That is how a business would conduct its affairs.

Surprisingly, the number of members in the fellowship who attend UK meetings is just 30,000 which is not many when you consider the population. If it was pro rata with the US it should be 10 times as many. Yet alcohol is said by the health system to be the second biggest killer in the country. Makes a person wonder why the meetings are not held in sports halls rather than dingy little rooms in the bowels of a church.

Happy New Year to you all

A happy new year to you all I type on my new laptop as I sit on the settee watching a run through of last year cataclysms. The laptop wasn't for xmas it filled a hole and frozen shoulder which has prevented me from typing words at my desk.

I have no idea what the year will bring except unemployment, for how long remains to be seen. I will also be taking My Beautiful to Paris in February for her 50th birthday, so that is something to look forward to. I think it will be a year of challenges and opportunities, often those are the same things.

Keeping balance will be important as will keeping a sense of humour.

A good thing to look forward to is spending time with my wifes father who has just moved next door to us. He's an interesting old character with a wealth of experience to tell me about. It will be nice seeing how our year unfolds.

To all of you out there I hope the year is kind to you and your loved ones.

Take care.

Days pass by

The days have been passing by here in England. Snow has taken its toll of getting the day to day mundane things done. England never has, and I guess never will, get the hang of snow. The first snowflake brings the country to a halt, we seem ill prepared to deal with the effects of snow, or perhaps ill prepared to accept the changes we should make because of snow.

I've been attending my meetings and feeling that I am part of the fellowship which is nice. There has been no axe to grind or resentments to feed so life has been stable on the alkie front. Its a nice period to have, one which I know will change at some point, for better or worse who knows. But just relaxing back into the comfort of AA has been good. I have been working with a sponsee on step 6 and talking about how the decisions we make affect our lives for years to come sometimes forever. And that if we make those decisions based on being liked by people we are apt to trip up and end up resenting or worse drinking over what we perceived should have happened and didn't.

We are just off to next door to look at the couples house as they are leaving and we will rent it from them so that My Beautifuls father can live next door. It will be almost a year now since his wife died so the timing will be poignant. It will be good having him close by and good for Beautiful to be able to spend time with him on a daily basis. Its something to show gratitude for in the midst of job losses, illness and fear for the future.

We are both fine and getting on with our days, love is in the air constantly and that is both comforting and a blessing. So I guess in the scheme of things we don't have anything to grumble about.

Take care all of you and have a good weekend.

Whiteout

I have been away from the posts for awhile, work and a little illness keeping me from the keyboard. It has given me some time for reflection on the state of the world and all that is of it. The haves continue to have more it seems. The organisation I am being sacked by has just appointed a new chief exec for the last dying 12 months at a salary higher than the PM's, equivalent to £600 per day, although she will be paid for 5 days per week she will only be working 2. The rest of us are eagerly awaiting our gruel allotment and to be told when we will be shoved out in to the cold.

My illness was a strange one. My Beautiful brought home one day and lovely little cough, with which she proceeded to spray liberally around the house countless little pockets of infected air and surface and goodness knows what. She coughed so much, it was disturbing my watching of the telly. Anyway, true to form, she didn't keep the delight to herself and succumbed last Friday. I think by the time I had got IT, it had mutated into a rare and unique form of new unidentified virus that no human has had to suffer before. I was gallant and strong so much so that My Beautiful as well as feeling guilty became worried that I really was ill, as I had stopped complaining for a whole two days. That friends is a measure of how ill I was.

We have had snow here and as always it brought the country to its knees. Conquerors do not need to develop weapons of mass destruction to conquer England, all you need to do is develop a snow making machine and we are done for. We have had a lot, not as much as some of you have probably, but a lot for us poor brits. Its melting now and so the next bit will be floods, fire and pestilence will surely follow.

Take care and have a good weekend