February 26, 2017

Everything hasn’t been complete plain sailing over the last few weeks as I carelessly collected my second deep vein thrombosis at the end of January. The earlier one was seven years ago. As illnesses go then it was a needle fest with daily blood checks and booster blood thinning injections for a few weeks. For a man who had spent his whole life avoiding hypodermic syringes then this was a condition to make up for lost time in a month.

Second time around then the treatment is less demanding, mainly popping pills. However, there has been the requirement for a CT scan, which required the insertion of a cannula. As we all know then none of this hurts but to describe my anticipation of the event, as anything less than stressful would be wrong. I actually came out of the scan shaking like a leaf. Feeble I know but we’re all made differently.

Possibly and strangely then I always feel that I should not be using the NHS. I walk in there  knowing that it is a precious resource and maybe it should be prioritised for those who couldn’t afford health insurance. It lives in a world of bad news stories about a lack on money, patients on trolleys in corridors, political strife and unhappy staff, which is probably not completely or nearly true. My experience of York District Hospital is nothing other than good.

Other trips into York were a lot more pleasurable and the present Mrs Ives took me to the theatre to see ‘Sunny Afternoon’. This musical has been on tour from the West End. It is the story of The Kinks. They take the story up until the early 1970’s when their catalogue of classic pop songs was at the top of the charts. Great stuff. Even more salutary was the power of the ‘grey pound’. On a damp Wednesday evening on a cold February night to get a full house at £36 a seat is no little achievement. The audience, my wife excluded as she reminds me, was of a certain vintage and they have the time and money for nights out.

As my Twitter description (@AHIves) advises then I have a large record collection – about 3,000 albums. I list this, naturally, on a spreadsheet (I am male and this is what we do). I wanted the spreadsheet to do something quite sophisticated with various ranking charts. So I asked my Favourite Youngest to put her immense talent to find a solution and I sent her the file. She played around with it and sort of found a fix. In her work she input some data to trial the fix. If you look at the picture then she’ll see what she thinks about my record collection!

Lastly when Anna gave up her grocery/delicatessen in Knaresborough – ‘Mungo Deli. Then it was probably time to move on but she so did enjoy the people interaction and misses the folk she became a friend to. I asked her about a small toy on her counter that wound up and would then somersault to entertain the small children who visited the shop with their mum. Unfortunately this was surrendered amongst the other assets. However a replacement toy has been sourced and now resides in Acaster Malbis. Ahhhh…..