My natural tendancy is towards Grinchiness at Christmas. I am not a fan. Can’t see the point of it, and get concerned about the conspicuous consumption of it all. Despite all that, I really enjoyed it all this year.Because our kids all live in different towns, and have other sets of parents near them, or travel issues, or child access issues, we actually do everything a week or so early when everybody can make it. With the family expanding there are now 14 of us, which is about 6 or 8 to many to fit round our table, so we decided to just go out to eat, and that worked quite well. As I am still very dysphagic I stayed at home whie everybody else went out, but I sent my credit card in my place so that was OK.

When everybody else came back from lunch we exchanged presents, played games and all the rest. Most pf the presents were for the grandkids. The adults all just did a secret santa sort of thing so we all just got one gift each. I got some new tungsten darts and a model of a Honda CB500F, which is one of the bikes I am thinking of getting when I pass my test.

When it comes to December 25th we have already got everything out of the way and can just relax on our own. As it was a nice clear day I encouraged Jayne to go out for a spin on her bike in the afternoon. It was all going very well until late evening. We had taken the dogs out for a walk and winding down for the night when I just collapsed in the hall. Jayne called an ambulance and the crew came to find that I had extremely low blood pressure, and so it was off to East Surrey hospital to have bags of fluid shoved down an IV tube.

Not how I expected the day to end, but at least I got to ride in an ambulance. My verdict: uncomfortable. I like to be upright while travelling and not strapped to a trolley. The ambulance crew and the A&E staff did ECG tests so I ended up with a huge quantity of electrode things stuck to the hairiest parts of my chest. Despite all the needles, the bashing my head on something, and the general scariness of the whole thing, probably the worst part was trying to peel those buggers off without too much agony.

Its all good now though. I’m making an effort to drink a lot more water, as that was the main cause of my brief outage, and I finally started being able to eat more things. Today I managed some mashed potato and cold turkey, a pain au chocolate, and actual weetabix rather than the bottles of weetabix drink. Tomorrow I may try having some bread with my soup and if that goes down I will think about tackling a boiled egg with soldiers.

All of this should make me miserable, but I still can’t help myself feeling that I have had the best Christmas ever, because it really is down to how you feel and not your circumstances and I feel bloody great.