Chrystal is down for a few days so she can visit Jayne in the hospital.  Being a student she arrived with the obligatory suitcase stuffed with laundry – its a tradition or an old charter or something.   She has also been totally bingeing on television.

She doesn’t have a TV up in London so is making the most of it for the duration and is devouring shows I have never heard of like an alcoholic who has found himself in a pub after six months in Saudi Arabia or a rescued Chilean miner let loose in a pie shop.  I just wonder how she knows about all these programmes.  I have a TV but I have never heard of most of them.

Well done to the NHS for doing such a good job in such a bloody awful building.  And it is a terrible building.  The hospital is a sprawling place with a maze of corridors, about a quarter of a mile from one end to the other.  I really think that a more compact layout with several more stories would be more sensible.   Another thng about the layout is that there are not many doors, or not closed ones anyway, so air conditioning doesn’t do a great job.  It is never working to keep an enclosed area cool but is having any coolness leeched away into corridors, and on to the outside world since a lot of the doors to the many courtyards are open.

A tower block with a smaller footprint would surely be more effective in many ways.

The one good thing about the hospital facilities, from a visitor’s point of view, is the shop.  The league of friends run a nice little coffee shop which charges reasonable prices.  You get so used to outlets with a captive customer base trying to screw the customers that it makes a change when you find they don’t charge £1.50 for a can of coke.  Just look at the WH Smith in an airport, motorway services or rail terminus to see how usually works.  Apparently that is coming to an end though.  The hosptal is closing down the shops run by volunteers on a not-for-profit basis and having franchises of places like Tesco, Smiths, Boots, Costa or places like that.   Instead of £1.30 for a filter coffee and a packet of posh biscuits it will a few pounds for a skinny decaf flatscreen Americano.  Not good when you have gone up there in an unplanned emergency situation like I did, with only a few pounds on you, most of which went on the car parking.

I was only able to have a coffee at all because I saved at least six pounds by parking in the golf club car park instead of the hospital car park.  The hospital keep trying to introduce parking charges for staff and the consequence of that will probably be that the golf club car park gets full up by 7am.

It wouldn’t have been such a problem if I had realised there was an ATM on the site.  I just assumed that if there was one it would be one of those ones that charges you to withdraw your own money, and I automatically and unconsciously don’t count them.  Apparently not, and I am kicking myself.  Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that go.  It would fit in with all the other ways the management are trying to gouge staff, patients and visitors out of a few quid.  It is getting to the point where a visit to Thorpe Park will be cheaper than a day visiting somebody in hospital.

Fortunately for Jayne the medical attention is better than the structure, and we never had to worry that any treatment for what is, after all, a life-threatening disease would be jeopardised by a lack or funds or insurance and had no risk of bankrupting ourselves for treatment.  Worth bearing in mind when attempts to dismantle the NHS start getting mentioned again.

Uncle John in 2009

I set out from home this morning (or just after noon actually) thinking to myself “I have a rare midweek day off work and I’m heading back to Essex for all the wrong reasons” and immediately decided that if I ever wrote a novel that would be the opening line.

But I was heading back to Essex and it wasn’t for a reason I would have wanted at all, but for a family funeral. As with many families we only all get together at funerals, weddings and maybe christenings. Funerals are my least favourite, especially when the deceased was only in their early 60s.

When I was very young I was a bit scared of John. I really don’t know why, but it didn’t last. He was practically the living embodiment of the word ‘avuncular’. A long time ago he moved to a small village on the Essex marshes so we never saw him as much as we could have done, but it was always a pleasure.

John is responsible for, or shared in several of the funniest moments of my life. Silly things that fall into the you-had-to-be-there category but his laughter was infectious whether it was at one of my jokes, one of his, or something on the TV.

My favourite was surely the time we were at my Mum’s. There was me, John and my sister’s ex, Neil. We had all had a few beers at some family function and John told Neil not to worry about something. He quickly followed it up with “Neil desparandum!” which I thought was clever and funny, Neil didn’t get it but John thought was the funniest thing he had ever heard to the extent he was helpless with laughter, barely able to repeat the phrase, which would set him off again.

Happy times.

John was also responsible for me meeting my first wife when he took me along to a New Years party, full of him and his friends where I got off with the only other teenager there. The rest is history, but I’ll forgive him that: “Neil desperandum” trumps all.

Yet again, I was immensely proud of his son Robert (my godson for what its worth) who spoke at the service, which I could not have done at my Dad’s funeral.

Charlotte AKA Lottie, sporting a pink Rambo-style headband

We were babysitting today¹ , looking after the three week-old granddaughter while her parents went off to Ikea.  To say Jayne has been looking forward to this would be a something of an understatement.

The other day she was going to go to Hobbycraft to get paints.  Now I know that I don’t know much about babies, but even I know that three weeks is a bit young for messing about with paints.  I don’t know what age is right for that sort of thing but I’m pretty sure it is measured in months or years and not weeks.Anyway, Jayne went out this morning to pick her up and came back with so much stuff I thought we were adopting her or something.  I can’t believe how much stuff the logistic support for a small child  requires!

The first challenge was the buggy.  Frankie had very kindly shown Jayne how to collapse it to put it in the boot of the car but didn’t think to demonstrate how it goes up again at the other end.  There were a few phone calls, and I had a bit of a fiddle with it.  Somehow I got the thing unfolded but I’m not sure I could repeat the feat, and I suspect there is an easier way to do it.  One that doesn’t involve turning the thing upside down.

I took a few photos.

Later in the day we had to do something a bit weird.  Jayne had bought one of those kits where you can take impressions of a baby’s hands and feet in clay.  She spent a lot of time rolling this stuff out in its frame and then dangled Lottie over it while I tried to press her various extremities into the clay.  Couldn’t stop her clenching her right hand so the impression of that looks more than a little deformed and it looks like she has one foot bigger than the other because we had to have two goes at her right foot.  Got there in the end.

It wasn't all sunshine and smiles...

I’m not an expert on babies and, to be honest, not a big fan of them, if I was I would have made more of an effort to have one of my own at some point, but I am a bit fascinated by them, especially the tiny fingers and toes.  The nerd in me looks at a baby and nods appreciatively at what a lovely scalable design it is.   I still can’t get over a small person having a foot the size of my thumb.

Of course, the thing that is hardest to get used to is when Jayne shouts up the stairs “grandad come and have a look at this”.   It took a while to work out who she was talking to.

1. When I say ‘we’ I mean that I was also in the house but Jayne did most of the gushing and cooing and all of the feeding and changing

Not a bad trip at all.  All the queues for Lakeside were on the other side of the road and the M25 was not too jammed up.  Very foggy though.  I thought it was bad enough around here, but once we reached Essex the fog was really heavy which delighted the locals because they all love an excuse to put their foglamps on.

It was only when I was commenting on this that Jayne told me that our car has foglamps…  It was only last week she told me that we had a rear washer.  How long have we had that car?   Three years? More?  How come I only find out what features it has in the week I intend to replace it?  It shows how rarely it is my turn to drive it.

It was good to see everybody though.  This is the one time each year we are guaranteed to get all three siblings together with partners and an assortment of offspring.  I was a little worried over the past weeks that we might end up with snow preventing us getting there, or preventing Jane from getting down from Yorkshire but it all worked out in the end.

All back now, and with the “Big 4″ DVD to look forward to (Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax in one 5-hour concert).  If that gets too much I also have a book which says it will teach me to play the Ukulele I got last christmas.  We’ll see.  I am remarkably resistant to instruction when it comes to musical instruments.

Annie enjoyed the party, but I’m not so sure she will enjoy the headache tomorrow morning quite as much,

And then she went to Frankie & Charlie’s NYE party, after which I had to practically carry her home…  she says that this morning’s headache was self-inflicted and totally expected so it doesn’t count so she is not writing anything down.  Just as well really.  If there is any justice it would have been right off the scale!

Surely in today’s world you shouldn’t use a bit of photocopied paper for that sort of thing anyway.  Sounds like a candidate for a blog.

1. I am guessing a bit.  Haven’t actually studied it

As is often the case, I have returned home with even more books to add to the queue – just when I was on top of my reading list.  No complaints though: I can now look forward to the new Malcolm Gladwell book and the Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, which Rob got signed by Ariane Sherine while he was in London.

I can also look forward to playing with a remote release for my camera, thanks to the Essex-based sister.  A work colleague swears by these for totally avoiding camera-shake when doing night-time photography with long exposures but there is no way I am taking the camera out in all this rain so I will have to wait for that pleasure.  What it does mean is one more suspicious-looking gadget in the luggage when the camera bag goes through an x-ray machine.

Chhristmas is now officially over.  In our house we don’t consider that it has really happened until we have been back to Essex for the day.

Looks like it will just be the three of us sitting down to Christmas lunch!