The last couple of weeks have seen a whole pile of relative-visiting.

After I went up to see Dad in hospital, Jayne found out that her uncle was also in hospital and her Dad wasn’t well either. Last week she went over to East Sussex to visit her family and now she is back we went up to see my Dad again.

He is now out of hospital. Not sure whether he was let out, thrown out, or escaped, but he is a lot happier to be back at home and actually looks a lot better than the last time Jayne saw him. Its not that he needs looking after or anything but I realised last week that he does enjoy having company and having someone to talk to.

I was even able to surprise him. Last week we were talking about all sorts of stuff and he mentioned a record he has been trying to find for about 40 years without success. Despite having spend several years as a market trader with a large stock of music, and all sorts of contacts in that field he was never able to lay hands on Duke Ellington’s 1960 recording of the Nutcracker Suite.

I had a search on the Internet and managed to download it and burn it to CD for him. I may well have laid myself open to all sorts of identity theft and credit card fraud by using one of those Russian mp3 sites of debatable legality, but it was worth it to be able to get hold of the album, which is actually pretty good – I can’t understand why it is always out of issue.

The trip up there through West Sussex, Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire is a bit of a bummer though. I don’t think we will be able to make it too often, but I’m going to try and get up more than I used to. At least Jayne’s family are a bit closer.

The irony is that it was only by fluke Dad went into hospital. He is 70 and has never been in hospital in his life. He takes a fairly typical bloke attitude to health: the sort of attitude where you would say “oh look, my arm has dropped off. If that doesn’t get better I might have to think about taking some aspirin”. It was only because his doctor saw him coughing up blood that he was rushed to hospital. I don’t think he would have bothered mentioning it otherwise.