So that was summer. It was 5C outside our house last night and the central heating is back on for the winter. For Jane, out go the skirts, shorts, sandals and sun tops; in come the trousers, socks, jumpers and (soon, I dare say) vests. We calculate that we, the Shacklepins, had only about thirty days of what we would call “summer”, that is to say days that were sunny, warm and with light airs such that you could sit outside comfortably and enjoy a drink or eat al fresco. Half of June met the criteria; July was a disaster, on the whole, and August and early September offered us dribs and drabs. True, when it was a Good Day the sun was pretty hot with temperatures up to 30C; but overall it wasn’t brilliant for us. Of course, others have been luckier or unluckier, depending on your point of view: it was pretty hot in southern France and Spain though (according to the natives) not exceptionally so; forest fires (caused by arsonists or power cables, not spontaneous combustion) raged through the Greek islands and Hawaii, ruining many a holiday; and I believe that Death Valley in California was a little warm. Later, heavy downpours and storms lashed the UK, but here in Melbury we watched the heavy grey clouds circling us like Red Indians circling a wagon train, but hardly any rain fell – until three days ago, when it finally tipped it down. The media and the paranoid had a field day with the weather, of course: apparently the oceans were boiling, which would take some doing as water boils at 100C at atmospheric pressure; July was claimed to be the hottest on Earth for 100,000 years, but as the Earth was undergoing an Ice Age 100,000 years ago, July 2023 being hotter than then would not be difficult. I am also a bit doubtful about the accuracy of the thermometers used by our ancestors in those days, sitting in their caves and painting themselves blue. But there you are: few people ever question these statements, because they fit the narrative that we are all going to die unless we stop eating meat, keeping warm, making steel, travelling, and refining petroleum.
I finished my last session of radiotherapy at the end of July and literally skipped down the corridor from that oncology department after ringing the customary bell with great vigour. Since then, I have been monitored monthly and my PSA level – a measure of whether I still have prostate cancer – has been consistently zero which, I hope you will agree, is good news. I have been quite lucky as regards the after effects of my nether regions being blasted with radiation for four weeks, so things are not too bad. There are a few irritations, but I won’t burden you with them and – let’s face it – they are better than the alternative.
Naturally, the first thing Jane and I did when we left the hospital was to hit the Big City for a slap-up lunch.. As my treatment rolled on, we had pondered for quite some time on the choice of venue for this celebratory lunch, but we finally decided that the lucky establishment would be Côte – the restaurant chain with establishments in several British towns and cities. It was, perhaps, an odd choice given that our Big City is graced with a good range of individual restaurants, large and small, some of Michelin standard; but we concluded that Côte, for all its corporate image, offered not only the best value, but also promised a good range of quality food that we were familiar with. It was tried and tested. An added bonus was that the restaurant was offering a free cocktail if you chose from the à la carte menu, and this fitted well with our celebrations. I hoovered down Steak Tartare to start with, followed by the Breton Fish Stew for the main course and Creme Caramel for the pudding. They were all excellent, the service was very good, and the bill for the two of us (including a glass of wine) came to about £63 including service charge. Were we being unimaginative and unadventurous by choosing Côte? Probably; but we came away very satisfied by the lunch and did not feel that we had been seen off, as we have occasionally felt on leaving top-end restaurants.
Of course, our next stop after this culinary event was a return to my motor yacht at Noss Marina on the River Dart, which had been laid up ashore in Kingswear for five weeks, missing her Master and Commander while suffering the indignity of having her bottom cleaned and anti-fouled by complete strangers. She looked beautiful on the bright summer day, having also been waxed and polished while ashore. Soon she was afloat again and we were motoring her back to her berth on the marina, where we were given a surprisingly enthusiastic welcome. It seems that, while my boat was laid-up ashore, the marina had taken advantage of the commercial opportunity by offering my empty berth to another boat temporarily. The owner of this interloper had (so I was told by my welcoming neighbours) owned two small dogs that had yapped continually every day for five weeks and, when the owner had taken the dogs for a walk up the pontoon every evening, they had ceremoniously urinated on every shore power electrical connection and mooring line on the way. Never before have I received such a welcome. What is it with boat owners and dogs? I have never understood the philosophy of keeping a smelly dog on a tiny boat, allowing it to annoy neighbours, or permitting it to defecate on the pontoon without clearing it up, let alone taking it to sea. But there you go – I am in the minority on this issue: the damned sea dogs are everywhere; it was the same on the inland waterways and it is the same in seaports.
Well, we have acquired yet another inflatable dinghy or tender, making it Tender Number 3. Regular readers will recall that we acquired our first tender back in August 2020 (Blog 58) after a carefully planned and persistently executed campaign waged against Jane’s willpower, the aim being to enable us to ferry ourselves ashore when at anchor or at a buoy. Tender No 1, while small, light and easily stowed, proved to be just a little too tender for everyday use – that is to say we were in danger of capsizing whenever we used it. We sold that on in June 2021, and upgraded to Tender No 2 (Blog 95) – a second-hand craft of more robust construction and stability which came complete with an outboard motor. Tender No 2 has served us well, on the whole, but Jane has never been entirely comfortable with it because of its tendency to rear up its bow when under full power, to develop an alarming list when there is only one occupant, and to drench her in salt spray when under way. Seeing this a challenge to my naval architecture knowledge (and the opportunity to buy yet another gadget for the boat), I set about identifying Tender No 3, which would be slightly bigger, have a keel, and generally be more buoyant, stable and dry, particularly when single-manned. To my surprise, Jane endorsed my recommendation for a 2.4m craft costing £590; those soakings and wet bottoms must really have got through to her. The Seago 240 Airdeck, which we commissioned in August, has proven to be a much better beast: stable, well-constructed, biddable and dry. It will also take three people as opposed to the previous boats’ “2+1”. As a maiden voyage I took it down to Dartmouth with Jane for a shopping expedition and it was a different sort of experience altogether. Jane declared herself much happier with the boat’s safety and Tender No 3 has now been duly entered onto the ship’s books as a member of the Shacklepin family. In the meantime, No 2 tender has been auctioned off in aid of charity and, I am sure, will enjoy a gentle retirement in land-locked Barsetshire.
Our spell afloat in APPLETON RUM had to be curtailed in early August because we had planned to visit my brother and sister-in-law in South Shields that month. My sister-in-law had been diagnosed with cancer of the eye and sinuses and, she being 93, we were pessimistic of her chances of surviving the year. To our surprise, she had consented to the operation to remove her eye and, by August, she was recuperating at home, though having to be readmitted to hospital fairly frequently because of dizzy spells.
We had originally set out to visit Tyneside back in April, having planned the trip down to the last detail and the last cell on the spreadsheet as required by any driver of an electric vehicle (EV). Long-term readers of this blog will recall my last venture North two years ago, which involved an overnight stop in Doncaster, a convoluted tour of the EV charging points in England and a great deal of stress; a 320 mile journey that would normally take 5 hours in a conventional car took us 24 hours (Blog 100). This April we set off well-prepared and managed to get as far north as Wiltshire before Jane hit a deep pothole and burst the nearside tyre. We then spent four hours on a grass verge, being buffeted by heavy lorries and playing I-Spy, before the RAC – or rather an RAC contractor – finally turned up with a replacement tyre and charged us £324 for the privilege. The tyre had only cost me £120 new, two months earlier. By that time, most of the day was over and it was clear that we had run out of time for the adventure North, so I aborted the mission. We limped home, which we had left six hours before, and I composed emails of complaint to Wiltshire Council and the RAC in the hope of compensation (of which more later). Anyway, to return to August, I actually considered hiring an ordinary car for the trip North, but the cost was prohibitive. We could have gone by train, but I had already spent my fortune on a house, a wife, a car and a boat so the treasure chest was empty. Then I hit on what turned out to be a brilliant idea: I suggested to Jane that we fly up to Newcastle from Bristol just for the day. One day would be long enough to socialise with my brother and visit my sister-in-law in hospital, and we could be home and back in our beds by about 2200. We would miss out on sightseeing, walks and some nostalgia, but we would achieve our main aim of boosting the morale of the troops. I did some research on the EasyJet website and tweaked a few dates here and there. Do you know, the trip (leaving Bristol at 0700, arriving Newcastle at 0800; then leaving Newcastle 1845 and returning Bristol 1945) cost only £120 in total. Of course we still had to pay £38 for parking at Bristol Airport, but the cost was still very favourable (EV charging costs are currently something of the order of £0.20/mile if you use rapid on-road chargers – more expensive than petrol). So off we went: no luggage of course, so an easy transition through security and onto the aircraft. In fifty five minutes we were landing in brilliant sunshine on the Costa del Geordie – it had actually taken us longer to get from home to Bristol Airport than it did for the flight. I was very impressed, despite having done the trip before. We had the usual difficulty trying to get a couple of simple day tickets for the Tyneside Metro from a machine in the airport concourse, the optimum type identified by research on the Internet not being listed when we came to the actual machine, and a stream of returning Tyneside holidaymakers in sombreros, shorts and flip flops chuntering in the queue behind us; but we ended up with some sort of ticket in the end and flopped onto the Metro.
Now, you haven’t met my brother have you? Of course you haven’t. My brother is eight years older than me and – how shall I put it – he doesn’t waste his money on boats. Or car parks. In fact he doesn’t spend money at all if he can avoid it. When I had told him of our plans to fly up to South Shields he offered no comment. I already knew he would not offer to collect us at Newcastle Airport, 22 miles from his home, because he would either (a) have to drive through Newcastle, where it was well known that the traffic system was designed to take the unwary into labyrinthine back lanes manned by rough scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells from North of the River or (b) travel through the Tyne Tunnel, where he would have to pay – wait for it – A Toll, both ways. Either way, airport parking for my brother was a no-go. So I told him that we would take the Metro and get off at the nearest station to his home, namely Seaburn, which is actually in Sunderland. There was a silence.
“Problem?”, I asked.
“Well, I’ll have to pay for parking in Sunderland. And there might not be any parking spaces. And I don’t know where that station is. And I don’t like the mackem tackems [a derogatory term used by Tynesiders for Wearsiders]”. I think he ran out of excuses at that point.
He suggested we get off in South Shields main Metro station, where he would pick us up.
I explained that we would have to change trains to go to South Shields, whereas the Seaburn train went straight through and, in any case, surely the parking problem would still arise? Apparently it didn’t.
So it was, we finally rolled into the town of my birth, still in the sunshine, and as we descended the escalator from the station to the street I noticed two things: one was my brother, duly waiting for us, and the other was a group of four men, naked to the waist and covered in tattoos, sitting on a bench and uproariously drunk on Newcastle Brown Ale. It was 0900 in the morning. I turned to Jane and said,
“Welcome to South Shields”.
The mystery of the parking was soon explained when it turned out that my brother had parked in a disabled bay in a Morrison’s supermarket, half a mile away. It is lucky that we had no luggage.
If my brother does have a monetary weakness then it is a penchant for Country and Western Music and a love of all things American. The former manifests itself in the fact that his car was chosen because it was the only model of Prius that still had a CD player, and the latter in his tendency to wear a MAGA Donald Trump hat in public. I do shudder occasionally – I’m sure you understand. Did we really come from the same mother’s womb? But hey – he’s my brother. Blasted by the music of Chet Atkins at full volume we headed for a short nostalgic walking tour of the main harbour and seafront to see how the old place had degenerated since I took my hand off the tiller back in 1969. There was not much in the way of conversation – Jane and I were deafened by the twang of guitars.
I must say the entrance to the River Tyne, enclosed by two fine piers – each almost a mile long, is a vista that never disappoints. To the north side is the North Pier, Tynemouth and North Shields, with the ruins of Tynemouth Priory and Castle, and the monument to one of Lord Nelson’s captains, Lord Collingwood, dominating the skyline. If you have ever watched the television detective series Vera, then this is where the series is based. To the south side of the harbour is the South Pier and South Shields, the inner harbour entrance marked by a short pier with a red lighthouse called The Groyne, and featuring a small beach – perhaps half a mile long – with beautifully fine sand. When I was a child, this beach was called (inevitably) The Little Beach and it was much favoured by the family because it was protected from dangerous currents and the worst of the swell by the enclosing two piers. Beyond the South Pier, which has a fairground at its base, is a further mile of unspoilt beach of smooth fine sand known, in my day, as The Big Beach. Further south is Marsden Bay with another stretch of sand and the unusual (perhaps unique) Marsden Grotto: a hotel set in a cave and accessed by a lift on the cliff face. As we stood on the north promenade, that day in August, I was delighted to see the harbour looking so good in the sunshine. It felt almost surreal that, three hours before, Jane and I had been in rural Melbury in the dark, yet now, here we were in almost a Mediterranean setting: ships in the offing; the sea a deep blue and the sky without a single cloud. We took in a coffee on the promenade (guess who paid for it) and just watched the world go by before strolling back through the parks to where my brother had parked the car (disabled bay behind a Turkish restaurant and take-away – no fee).
My sister-in-law, Marion, was back in hospital, having collapsed a few days previously and we managed to negotiate visiting her slightly out-of-hours so that we could catch our return flight. We parked 400 metres from the hospital, on a council housing estate (no fee) and made our way in via a small pedestrian entrance next to the dustbins and the mortuary. Marion was in a private room and looked remarkably well in the circumstances. Although her eye had been removed, the scars were minimal and it just looked like she had her eye closed. The plastic surgeon had done an excellent job. I asked if they had let her keep the eye, perhaps in a jar of formaldehyde, but apparently they hadn’t. The only problem Marion had was that, because of the work on her face, it was lopsided as if she had had a stroke. The follow-up radiotherapy had also caused her to lose all sense of taste and the ability to create saliva, so she wasn’t eating. Despite these problems she was still in good spirits, and managed to berate my brother for his lack of hospitality skills at his house (guests offered two stale biscuits for lunch while he ate half a pastie in front of them). It was good to see her, and I hope our visit perked her up (she is now back home again); but it was also rather poignant, for Jane and I were conscious of the fact that this might be the last time we saw her.
Our duty done, and conversation with my brother having run out, it was time to return to the airport for our flight home. The Metro whisked us back without mishap and we were in the departure lounge somewhat earlier than necessary, at 1700. Totally relaxed, and waxing poetically about this new (to us) method of domestic travel, we drifted around, had a coffee, tucked in to a light supper, and generally indulged in people-watching. The cloud on the horizon formed at about 1800, forty five minutes before our scheduled departure: FLIGHT DELAYED ONE HOUR. Oh dear. Thirty minutes later, FLIGHT DELAYED TWO HOURS. The novelty of the airport departure lounge was fading rapidly. One seasoned fellow passenger, who was flying to Belfast and whose flight was also delayed, shook his head sorrowfully.
“You want to watch this”, he said.”When they delay at this time of night they sometimes cancel the flight altogether”.
Oh great. Thanks Eeyore. Desperately I started clicking through my iPhone looking at what the airline’s obligations were and for the location of the nearest hotel. My gloomy Belfast companion redeemed himself a bit by showing me how to manipulate hitherto unknown features of the EasyJet app that would show me where our delayed aircraft was and when it could be expected. Time passed by, and the departures board clicked to FLIGHT DELAYED THREE HOURS. Bars and restaurants in the airport began to close, other flights (including the one for our friend from Belfast) had long departed, and it was apparent that the human flotsam left with us in the departure lounge were all for Bristol. Bored children ran amok, infants grizzled, louts stretched out on benches: my kind of living hell. PING! A text from EasyJet said we would each be entitled to a £3 voucher for food on presentation of a boarding pass. I looked around for food outlets and found only the stationer W H Smith open. With others, I perused their snacks. Do you know, £3 was not even enough to buy a single sandwich? Jane chose a packet of crisps and I eventually found that I could buy some sort of chicken pastie for exactly £3 (it tasted like marinated cardboard). Bored, I scoured the EasyJet app with my newly acquired skills and found that our aircraft was finally on its way from Bristol, having made its way there from Faro in Portugal, of all places. At 2200 we shuffled aboard our globe-trotting aircraft and took our seats. It was then that I received the final piéce de résistance of my adventure, the icing on the cake that had now gone stale: behind me sat a two-year-old girl who screamed in a high-pitched voice, and kicked the back of my seat, for the entire one hour flight. Her mother had no control of her, and admonishments were replied to with a defiant, “NO”. Oh frabjous joy, Callooh Callay. We hit the runway at 2315 and drove home through deserted roads, finally getting to bed at 0100. Wow, what a mini adventure that was. The pilot of the aircraft explained, when we were onboard, just what had caused the delay. Our intended aircraft in Bristol had been taken out of action because a baggage truck had driven into it and dented the fuselage. There were no spare aircraft, so an incoming flight from Faro was sent on to sort us out after disembarking its passengers, instead of flying on to the south of France. The aircrew were somewhat bemused to find themselves in Newcastle instead of Cannes or wherever. Ho hum.
And now we come to the crux of my shaggy dog story, dear reader. I was describing our adventure to a friend, who is a retired airline captain, and he pointed out that, under EU Regulation 261, we could claim compensation for a three hour delay. I observed that we had already received our £3 food voucher, but he thought that the fixed compensation was rather more than that. I checked with the EasyJet website and it outlined the procedure for claiming for delays caused by “exceptional circumstances”. The procedure was on-line and merely required passenger name and flight details. I filled in the form and sent it off. Within five minutes I had an acknowledgement, and within another ten minutes EasyJet accepted my claim and said the money would be in my bank account in four days. Ha!, I thought, another £3 each I dare say. Three days later I looked at my account and saw that I had been credited with £440: £220 each. You could have knocked me down with a feather. The return airline tickets had only cost me £120, so I was £320 up on the deal. Who would have thought it? Good old EasyJet. But wait – there is more. Four months after submitting my claim to Wiltshire Council for my shredded tyre, caused by a pothole, the Council paid out in full for the cost: £324. A week later, the RAC apologised for the delay in attending the breakdown in April and acknowledged that I should not have been charged for the call-out element of the bill presented to me by their contractor; I received a cheque for £120. I’m in the money! It is almost enough to offset my expenditure of £590 on that new tender.
The bedside light came on, waking me up at 0200, and Jane declared,
“I’m sorry. I am going to have to call an ambulance. I have pains in the chest and pins and needles in my arm.”
“Crikey,” I thought, this sounds like the real thing – though not entirely unprecedented as we had had the same problem almost exactly three years previously in 2020 (Blog 59). We already knew that she suffered from atrial fibrillation (uneven and racing heartbeat). Maybe it is the purchase of inflatable boats that sets her off. This time, Jane dialled the numbers while I dressed myself, ready for the green team and a probable trip to Accident and Emergency (A&E). The emergency operator was very good, and took her painstakingly through the usual algorithm, ending with the question,
“Do you have any aspirin?”
“Yes”, says Jane, collecting a rarely used bottle from the medicine cabinet.
“What strength is it?”, asks the operator..
Peering at the label, Jane replied something about so many grains, which puzzled the operator as they had never heard of that unit for medicine. Closer examination revealed that the aspirin had been acquired in Florida in 2009 and was long expired. A further search turned up some soluble aspirin with a British label. That had expired in 2003, but Jane put it under her tongue anyway. We don’t use a lot of aspirin, as you can gather, and those bottles were consigned to the gash bin the next day.
The paramedics duly arrived and did their thing, and then pronounced what Jane did not want to hear:
“Sorry, it’s A&E for you. Your case is complex”.
It would be, of course; the patient is Jane.
Off she went in the ambulance with me following in the car, the ambulance getting lost in our housing estate and having to make two three-point turns to get out into the wide world. We rolled up at A&E at about 0345 and I was allowed to accompany Jane into a cubicle after she had had blood tests and triage. There we sat and sat, as you always do in A&E, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for someone to come. Eventually a nurse informed Jane that her blood test had revealed that she had not had a heart attack, but they would run another test just to make sure. There was a long waiting list to be seen by a doctor, apparently, but Jane was number seven on the list and she would probably be seen at about 0930. Jane sent me home at 0630 after being told the result of the blood test and the probable consultation time; she could see no point in me waiting and the pain in her chest had long gone. I departed into the cold morning, paid the £5 hospital parking fee (absolute disgrace!) and went home for breakfast. Jane was finally seen at the time predicted, not by a doctor, but by a ‘Consultant Nurse’ who sent her for an X-Ray of her aorta and a CT scan of her entire torso. Both came back clear. She was finally given a clean bill of health at noon, when I collected her, after she had been dosed with Gaviscon and another drug for acid reflux – a chronic problem that she has had for several years and which eventually led us to be disembarked from QUEEN MARY 2 as a medical emergency in Adelaide (Blog 10 et seq). I was puzzled by this diagnosis because the gastric problem had been finally nailed by Jane’s gastroenterologist after exhaustive tests after the Australia trip in 2017. The solution had been for her to take a small dose of amitriptyline – a mild anti-depressant – which had been found to work well in similar cases. It then emerged that Jane had recently been trying to reduce her usage of this drug because she saw it as a stigma (“I am not depressed!”) and because she does not like taking regular medicine. I suggested that the recent episode was a re-emergence of her old problem, caused by not taking the medicine. She had the grace to admit that I was probably right. I did not labour the point as she had had punishment enough: the free trip in an ambulance had proved to be very uncomfortable – like riding in the back of a lorry, she said – and the boredom of waiting in an A&E cubicle for eight hours had not been pleasant. Still, she is alive and back with us, and – of course – taking the tablets.
Looking back, Jane fared better than our neighbour, who is a policewoman (police officer?). She had started to suffer a rapid and uneven heartbeat that was most uncomfortable and distressing, and she suspected that it was atrial fibrillation like Jane had. She came around to borrow Jane’s KardiaMobile EKG Monitor, obtained from Amazon (Blog 93), in order to record one of her episodes as proof for her GP. It seems that the doctor was not convinced by our neighbour’s self diagnosis and so had offered her, free, on the NHS… a colouring book.
Say what you like about the NHS, it is the envy of the world, it gets its priorities right and it never wastes money if it can help it – unless, of course, it is hiring Equality Diversity and Inclusion officers for millions of pounds while doctors and consultants are on strike, seeking higher wages. As I said to our neighbour, “After you with those crayons”.
23 September 2023
PS Our neighbour did have atrial fibrillation and is now on a mammoth regular dose of heart pills.
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 