Does this work?

Is this going to work? I'm writing this entry in an email and having it sent
directly to my blog. I didn't know you could do this until now. If it works
then it could be pretty useful.

Better

I didn't realise how long it had been since I put an entry on here. Anyway, things have been happening at last. I now have a date for my transplant - 17 September. Dad and I met in Manchester last week with the surgeon. Apparently Dad's passed all his medical tests and is an excellent match too. It seems like his op is going to be more major than mine. They have to make a pretty big incision and dig deep inside to get his kidney out, while my op will just involve plonking the kidney in just under the surface of my abdomen. The only worry is the anaesthetic. I'be had hideous problems before with anaesthesia so this time they're going to do the whole thing while I'm awake. They'll use the technique sometimes used with pregnant woman - an injection in the spine. Mr Riad, the surgeon, has reassured me that this will work fine but I'm still quite apprehensive.

Horrid

Blood pressure creeping back up at a horrible rate along with headaches and blinking spot in the corner of my right eye. Strangely, while most people end a dialysis session with low blood pressure, mine is always now much higher than when I started. I'm really not enjoying dialysis any more. The headaches get worse soon after the start of treatment which makes it impoossible to sleep, and I find the sounds of alarms, televisions, nurses chatting and joking, almost unbearable.

Mum's still at Les Marronniers and it looks like she's making progress with the house renovations. She emailed Dad to say that work would be finished by the end of the week and the house would be ready for guests.



Les Marronniers - almost ready to let!!

Pimp Wars is addictive. I've been playing for almost a week now and have an empire of 2000 well-armed thugs and 1500 whores who earn me plenty of money. It's a great way of wasting time.

The weekend went by in a blur. I slept until 1pm on Saturday but strangely felt exhausted by 7pm and slept on the sofa until midnight. I had meant to visit Ben in the evening - he came up with Wil in the afternoon and invited me over. From midnight to 7am I watched TV, surfed aimlessly and washed the dishes before going to bed where I stayed until 8pm. At least it was a cheap weekend.

I'm getting to know a pair of Daily Mail racists. He's a retired policeman and she is his uptight wife. Retired, they both spend their days driving patients to hospital appointments.

I came across them when I started seeing a flashing black spot in my right eye. The hospital immediately banned me from driving to dialysis and arranged for me to be taken there and back by hospital car. They are an amiable couple, pleasant to talk to anfd have some of the most rabid racist views I've ever come across.

To see people like them in the street you would never imagine their outlook on life. But in reality there are plenty like them. How does this happen? The Daily Mail cannot alone be to blame; they have simply taken a sound commercial decision to reflect, in a lucid and entertaining manner, the instincts of a vast swathe of British society. The frightening thing about these people is their sheer ordinariness.

One expects fascist to have shaven heads, tattoos and union jack emblazoned shirts but today's fascist-in-the-majority looks too boring even to notice.

Smoke

Just watched a beautiful film. It's called ’Smoke’ and it's a tale of a New York cigar shop owner, a writer, and a teenage boy. I don't usually watch films twice but I think I will make an exception with this one.

Blogskins.com is a great idea. People can submit designs for blogs for others to apply to their own blogs. Unfortunately I was unable, for some reason, to apply any of the styles to Blink. With a bit of luck this is only a temporary glitch. Right now there are only around thirty designs - some good and some downrght dreadful - but it's the kind of site which I think will grow pretty fast.

I seem to have got to the bottom of the transplant logjam. Everything came to a mysterious halt in Dad's testing to be a donor of a kidney for me a few weeks before Christmas. It started when Manchester's transplant co-ordinator mysteriously disappeard. All we could discover was that she had 'left rather suddenley". Today with one simple phone call I found her replacement who quickly arranged for tets to take place in Preston on 18 March. After that we'll finally know if Dad is a dead cert candidate.

Daniel Pearl...

The widow of Daniel Pearl wrote a beautiful piece about her husband after his murder by kidnappers in Pakistan.

Pissed off...

Lots of strange sleep over the past few days. On Wednesday I didn't wake until after 4pm when I was due at the hospital by 4. I phoned the hospital and told them my car had broken down then almost killed myself driving stupidly fast to Shrewsbury. I won't do that again in a while.

Blood pressure high again - 212/118 and lots of headaches. Ben called tonight from France. Sounds like they are having a nightmarish time there. Ben grumpy, says he should have gone on his own and that Mum is incompetent at decorating. They should be back on Sunday.

Done very little work this week. News Wales is suffering and the house is a mess. I just have no energy to do anything. Gwen's coming today so I'll have to make an effort to make things remotely respectable. Itching like hell. aching, and I'm seeing a black spot out of my left eye.

I sometimes wonder if I'm depressed. Or do I wallow in self-indulgence? When I think of it objectively there aren't many plus points. The worst thing is the sense of limbo. I'm waiting, without information, for news on my transplant and on the tumour in my neck. I see Mr Gurusinghe next month when he's supposed to decide whether to whip out the neck tumour. That would be a relief - symptoms aren't very noticeable but just knowing it's there is worrying me sick. I'd rather have that out before my transplant if possible.

Bad head

I dreamed of something very complicated last night and woke with a deep headache at around 2pm. Dialysis is getting worse in that it leaves me in a zombie-like state for 24 hours afterwards. Mum, Hope and Ben set off for France yesterday to sort out Les Marronniers. I worry about them driving so far. Very cold here and I've still got no oil for the rayburn. Right now I'm wrapped in a blanket and my fingers are starting to go numb.

Prince Charles, a fashion icon for our age, shows off his stylish new jacket.. Hey! Where can I get one of those?

Will BT own the internet by next Tuesday?

BT is taking its controversial hyperlinks patent suit to court next week. The telco claims it owns the patent for the ubiquitous web feature according to a 1976 filing, which expires in five years time. The telco could demand licence fees for the use of the technology should it be successful. Nice to see BT still acting as greedily stupid as ever. It's going to be fun if the unthinkable happens and they actually win.

Blogger Pro...

I took the plunge and paid $35 for Blogger Pro. There's not much different about it to the free version - apart from the ability to post drafts and future items, plus a nicer 'Blog This' box. I have high hopes of lots more innovations in the near future. Oh, I just noticed, there's somewhere for an item title too which is a nice touch. And is it just my imagination or is it much quicker to post items?

A letter from Mr Riad, the transplant surgeon in Manchester, came today. He's decided to get all the tests on Dad done in Preston which should speed things up. When I saw him last September I assumed the transplant would take place in less than a month. Now it looks like I have a few more months to wait - as long as Dad is considered fit enough to be a donor.

I spent a lot of time tonight looking for information on epidural anaesthetia - I will have one of these instead of a general for the transplant surgery because of my problems with the latter. I could only find stuff about childbirth which was rather worrying.

I can't face eating the hash cookies. They have a strange smell. I melted a bar of chocolate and covered the cookies. I'll give them to Ben tomorrow and see what he thinks.

A TV programme tonight on the state of the NHS shows that Britain is still in the third world of health care. A major neurosurgery unit could not afford a device, called a Neuro-navigator, to help them locate the exact position of tumours during surgery.

I've got some hash brownies in the oven. This is an experimental recipe using dried leaves from a pruning session, dried and crumbled to powder. The powder was added to a lump of butter in a pan and heated to just below boiling point before simmering for three minutes, stirring constantly.

Then I discovered there were no eggs. They're fairly crucial to the recipe but I decided to carry on. Problem two came soon afterwards when I found the only chocolate in the house was a pack of eight Kit Kats and half a pack of Dream Topping.

I decided to improvise by crushing four Kit Kats in a bowl. Next I put two tablespoons of honey into the warm butter and powder and stirred until it was one big green mess. I poured this over the crushed Kit Kats and slowly added flour and a little Dream Topping. As the mixture thickened I added a splash of milk to get the right texture. On tasting there was a definite need for more sweetness so I added a couple of handfuls of sugar and mixed before adding the whole lot to a greased cake tin. Then into the oven at 180. Not sure why I chose that temperature but that's what Delia always seems to do. Now I'm waiting for them to bake so I can have one before I go to bed.

I love this picture. I didn’t take it. I was sent it by a friend about three years ago before I was due to travel from St. Petersburg to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Venturing deeper into the wilderness of Siberia this is exactly the scene that greeted us as we pulled in at remote stations. Everyone is ther to greet the train, and during the ten minute stop tere is a chaotic flurry of trading.

There is a mind-boggling array of things to buy - freshly caught fish, vodka, vegetables, strange souveniers, all kind of unrecognisable home-made food and drink.

But the buying isn’t just one-way - traders on the train, mostly Mongolians, do a brisk trade in boots, jackets, shovels, potato mashers, and even puppies that they have managed to smuggle onto the train. These traders have travelled as far as Italy to load up on goods to sell, making the eight day journey once a month and bringing huge crates of goods back with them. Oranges, almost unseen in the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator, are stacked on luggage racks, in corridors, and even in your own compartment if you vacate it for long enough.

The route is an anarchic bazaar travelling across Europe and Asia filled with Russians, Chinese. Mongolians, and surprisingly few Westerners. The compartments, when shared by four people are cramped but the atmosphere is communal as passengers wander along the train stopping off for Vodka or to share a meal with others. And as the train passes through eight time-zones it's very difficult to keep track of time.

Coal-fired boilers at the end of every carriage are tended jealously by the carriage attendant who also reluctantlu hands out extra blankets. A constant supply of hot water from the boilers means you can brew up at any time of the day but washing is more difficult. Showers are only provided in first class. I decided a week's worth of dirt was tolerable as did most other people.

Damn - I wish I could go again.