When I worked in a nursing home in Tooting Bec some years ago I helped look after an old Londoner I'll call Tom. He was too old and weak to live at home with his wife. They had no children. ( Read more... )

Still here. I can't kick the Livejournal habit. Every minor whimsical incident that slips into the past unrecorded feels like a little loss, to me anyway*, and my f-list loons and lovelies are too compelling a cross-section of the key-tapping classes to be abandoned ( Read more... )

Hey ho. So now I know what the inside of a crematorium looks like ( Read more... )

Dang! No sooner do I drop the long-standing nihilist/hellraiser bit, become a parent and see at last the beauty and worth of all life when the tv news tells me the Cold War's on again and nuclear conflagration may yet be our dark destiny. Huh. Not that all the terrible weapons magically vanished with the coming of glasnost but in recent years the ( Read more... )

I was all gung-ho to return to work on a hospital ward around the time of my application for interview but that was in sodding February and I am prone to the heeby-jeebies when I have to wait and wait.( Read more... )

This afternoon Mo drove our wee family to my Gran's nursing home in Irvine. We celebrated Gran's one hundred and first birthday on St Patrick's Day this year; the Bean is fifteen days old. It was important to me that they meet, Gran and her fifteenth great-grandchild, soon after the kid's birth ( Read more... )

Many fathers, young and old, intending to be sympathetic but sometimes a bit too gleeful, had advised me, 'Your life's about to turn upside down' in the final weeks of Mo's pregnancy. I thought I had an inkling of what they meant but, as with all life's fundamental experiences, you can never really know what it's like until you do it. ( Read more... )

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Kurt Vonnegut is dead. So it goes.

Nervous though I may be about my new hospital gig, I'm not that sorry to be bidding adieu to office life and the existential head-scratching it provokes in me; 'business' - the name for that which sheaths our fangs. Yesterday The Da and Bro 2 met up with the Boys, the current sharp-creased dream team, to hatch their latest money-generating scheme. ( Read more... )