Scribblings

I have just been reading blog posts by an old friend, Phillip Bruce, an ex-next door neighbour of ours from a time when we lived in adjacent houses just off Worthing's eastern sea front. He was a fine writer having cut his teeth on journalism and PR. Phillip would come home to England 3 or 4 times each year from HongKong where latterly he had handled the public relations element for the then 'New' Hong Kong Airport. When he returned to England full time after the airport's opening and probably, more to the point, after Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control, it was not long before he knocked on our door... In his hand he had a bucket half full of mussels. In all my adult years of living in Worthing it had never occurred to me to collect mussels from Worthing's seashore. It just wouldn't have seemed right.  But, as only a relatively rare visitor... we hadn't socialised too much either - but there he was bucket in hand saying "How about Mussels and Mash...

Firstly let me apologise for the delay...Plenty has been happening since that last blog entry - the one with that baleful photo of me back in February, with the baldy scabby thing on my head and the 'helmet'... The helmet! For four months I wore that thing!... It was loud, hot and the term 'tunnel vision' was mentioned more than once. So anyway the helmet is now a thing of the past - but not before much angst, anger, ineptitude, misdiagnosis, mis-information and a few vets later...  some disappointment and plenty of money... not mine I hasten to add, has been spent. I haven't actually had anything to call my own since my stripey towel disappeared just after I arrived in a box from Crete and was handed over to new uprights in MacDonald's car park in Sevenoaks just off the M25. I am, as I write this, just finishing a course of anti-itch tablets that cost a hundred quid (GBP). I know! ...For a while I thought that the word 'effing' was directly linked...

I've been in the UK for three months now (but I have been on two trips to Brittany too so that's a month in France)... and it's safe to say it's all going well.  Well... with a couple of tiny reservations... As you can see I am wearing a 'hat'. I am being bathed, pummed; administered with creams, lotions, forced to take potions and pills. All of this is accompanied by a mantra of... "Do you know how much all of this is costing, 'King Dog?" Fortunately I'm not made to wear this plastic monstrosity when I go out for a walk... Others of my species would ROTFL or whatever is the modern parlance. It would certainly ruin my street cred. And I don't like to use the common name for what I've got, because it makes me feel... well, less than my best (and anyway I prefer its proper name, 'Mycosis', it, at least, has a slightly classier ring to it)... but it's Ringworm - see what I mean? Ugh!! And, whilst it is far from life th...