Everything Was Going So Well......

If you have visited here before you might remember that our autistic daughter Sarah, is apt to be a little volatile when faced with routine changes. When those routine changes involve transport to and from the day centre that volatility is apt to become something a touch more volcanic.  As of a Tuesday last week the bus has been arriving an hour late by Sarah standards. A chance meeting with a member of staff from the day centre while we were in Asda the following evening shed some light on the bus problem, and please don't ask what we were doing in Asda on a Wednesday evening, it happens almost every week and deserves a post all to itself which may or may not materialise depending on the mood I'm in.

Apparently some pen pusher behind some desk somewhere has decided there cannot possibly be staff taking buses out from the day centre as early as 7:30am  and the new proclamation has been made saying 'Thou shalt not drive the minibus out of the gates of the day centre before 8:45am and if thou doest the wrath of god will fall upon thee followed by weeping, wailing, rending of garments and gnashing of teeth'

A little background information is probably required.. the annually contracted transport supplied by Rhondda Cynon Taff to take service users to and from the day centres across the area started well last September, new contractors seen by most as pretty good compared to the previous bunch of cowboys, bearing in mind the council always chooses the cheapest contract. Sadly the good start quickly degenerated into the usual erratic timing, bizarre routes and untrained escorts with little or no idea of what was expected of them. Several of the service users found all this more than a little upsetting and the day centre decided that they may as well use their own mini buses for those clients most affected by the contractors inconsistencies.

Because of the sheer size of the catchment area for the day centre, never mind the terrain and the remoteness of some communities, this means an early start to get everyone in by 9:00am. Nobody had a problem with this, staff hours adjusted accordingly and from my point of view things could not have been better. Round about 8:00am the bus would arrive and Sarah would be ready and waiting because she was going with people who she likes and trusts and who understand her need for routine and no surprises.

Everything was going so well and then this twerp sitting behind his desk on the other side of the mountain who has probably never visited the upper reaches of the Cynon Valley pokes his nose in and now we are in turmoil again. With no warning or time for preparation things have got to change, so not surprisingly Sarah's volatile volcanicity has gone ballistic. We have had a week and a half of weeping and wailing, only one garment got 'rended' but gnashing of the teeth has been evident accompanied by ear splitting screams and flying fists.. so far only one fist has landed, my deflection skills are well honed.  Nothing has been broken yet, which is pretty good going but the poor old dog is keeping a very low profile and has taken to slinking around corners very gingerly and hurrying across open spaces with ears and tail very low. Husband behaving in a similar way to dog, although his verbal skills are a great help. He can make Sarah laugh which gives us a few minutes to regroup ready for the next onslaught when she forgets what she is laughing about and gets back to the business of making her discomfort over the transport known to anybody within hearing distance.

We all know times are hard and services are being cut back, but this particular proclamation is not going to make any difference to the social services finances, all it is doing is causing disruption to staff, service users and carers alike by messing up schedules and time tables and confusing the hell out of anyone on or near the autistic spectrum. As this change coincides with the schools breaking up for the summer holiday that is the excuse I am using as reason the for the disruption which gives us six weeks grace in which time she will hopefully be used to a new routine.

It does effect the finances of a carer that I am aware of though. She lives alone with her daughter who has CP, is wheelchair bound and without speech. This lady has a job which starts at 9:00am, when her daughter was picked up 8:15am this was fine, plenty of time to catch a bus to work . Now her daughter is being picked up at 9:15am which means she cannot get to work much before 10:00am. She loses an hour in the morning and it looks as if her chances of keeping the job are further threatened by the uncertainty of the return home times. Didn't mention the change in coming home times did I, well Sarah used to get home at about 4:00pm, now it can be as early as 2:00pm but averaging at about 3:00pm. The proclamation also stated that buses must be back inside the day centre gates by 4:45pm.  This irritating little pen pusher has just increased my caring hours by eight hours a week, and has made it extremely difficult for another carer to carry on working.

I wonder how he would feel if a bigger pen pusher told him he'd had eight hours cut from his working week starting now with no consultation, after all, that is a whole days wage. Financially it makes no difference to me, I get the £55.55 a week carers allowance for the approximately 144 hours of care I now deliver per week to my daughter, with our income support duly reduced by that amount per week to make sure we don't creep to far above the poverty line.. I know my place.

The most important point I am struggling to make here is that these changes were made with no warning, no consultation and apparently no good reason.  Things have calmed down in our house now, but we have had at least ten days of upset and upheaval which could have been avoided if we had been given a decent amount of time to prepare Sarah for the imminent change and I'm sure that goes for other carers too, we have to make alternative arrangement for care if we cannot be in the right place at the right time, we need to know in advance if times are changing. The same goes for the staff at the day centre who are having to deal with multiple service users all in a state over routine changes and the uncertainties that go with it.  Most importantly the service users themselves have enough challenges in a day without having to worry about who will be on the bus, what time the bus will leave or arrive and who will be there to meet them, sudden changes may not bother your average administrator. but they have a profound effect on your average service user and that just isn't fair.  Awareness of the consequences of changes when you are dealing with service users must be paramount in the minds of administrators within social services, surely?

Thats it, rant over until the next time, 2:00pm is fast approaching and you can bet your life if I'm not prepared Sarah'll be home expecting everything to be in order and I still haven't located the album artwork for Amy Winehouse's (RIP) album 'Back to Black' which seems to have gone missing while I was uploading it to Sarah's iTunes and shuffle over the weekend. Everything has to be in order for her in iTunes and every track must have it's artwork, and if it doesn't there will be weeping and wailing, a rending of garments and a gnashing of teeth and I don't feel like dealing with that today....

It's Carers Week. I'd Better Say Something About It....

Carers Week 13th – 19th June 2011

Carers week already, it crept up on me this year. I know I've been seeing references to it all over the place but after a year of being vilified in the press about being a 'benefit scrounger' it is easy to forget the positives. So today I finally got my head around it, made a few phone calls and got my week organised.

A sort of bonus for this week is that Sarah has a few days in respite so I don't need to be home to meet and greet in the afternoon or worry about the damage the husband and daughter 'home alone' combo might do to the house and any trauma inflicted on the dog in my absence.

So tomorrow sees the start of a week of "activities for carers living in  Rhondda Cynon Taff designed to give a mixture of opportunities for you to access information and advice, to learn from other carers experiences and to have a little fun!" And the first event is.....

'Trouble Shooting drop-in session. Access support, information and advice about wills, benefits, debt, and getting back to work with support.'

Very nice, much needed I'm sure, but I'm having a 'week off', better known as respite, and since all the above has a tendency to depress me I'm steering clear of that lot, and anyway, I got a better offer for lunch from the Older Carers Support Worker. I turned 60 this year, I'm officially older, I got a bus pass! No pension yet but they moved the goal posts on that one. Never been one to refuse a free lunch so that's Tuesday sorted out.

There's nothing doing on Wednesday, so I suspect that will be the day I have to go to Aberdare and Asda and pull some weeds out of the garden. Thursday could be interesting.....

'Carers Celebration and Information event in Hawthorn Leisure Centre - bring your gym kit! A chance to find out about support available for carers locally and your opportunity to join the Carers Strategy Implementation Group meeting, join in a taster adult education session or a relaxation class, have a manicure and join us for a buffet lunch.'

Bring your Gym kit!?!?!? I think not. Observing and commenting on the Carers Strategy Implementation group meeting seems much more appealing and most probably pain free. Apparently there will be floral arrangement and relaxation classes available too. I opted for floral arrangement a couple of years ago, the relaxation class followed by a session with a hypnotherapist after the floral disarray were a godsend. Hopefully the Strategy meeting will take us right up to lunch and I can avoid getting involved with the 'gym inductions' and the 'free taster Zumba Gold (designed for the over 50's)' and be home in time for tea. Friday is the most interesting day for me, I'm involved with this already so really I should be there.....

'Carers Sharing Session. Find out how you can be a part of recruiting and training the next generation of social workers, nurses and social care staff. Come and hear other carers stories and meet the staff you may be working with over lunch.'

These sessions are great. They are a mixture of carers, service users and staff who provide an overview of their experiences of involvement and the benefits they have gained or seen, followed by a chance for others to get involved. In my experience much is gained on both sides, service providers are often unaware of problems carers and service users may have beyond the direct professional involvement, carers and service users don't always understand the problems within social services, and of course carers and service users don't always agree! These get togethers are always eye openers on all sides and the knowledge gained is invaluable.  Which brings us to Saturday.....

'Carers Day Out! An action packed activity day for carers and cared for in Dare Valley Country Park. Try out Canoeing, have a guided walk or learn some circus skills - suitable for carers and cared for of all ages and abilities.'

Now I submitted myself to this torture last year, the 'gentle warm up' almost killed me, and if you think I'm going to break the habit of a life time, which is the avoidance of canoes under all circumstances, you've got another think coming! I already know how to juggle and how to spin plates, both activities quite pointless and a bit boring after a while. The only other circus skills I can think of are unicycling, stilt walking, tightrope walking and the flying trapeze so I think the wisest move would be total avoidance of the beautiful Dare Valley Country Park on Saturday.  A little bit of gardening if the weather allows seems quite appealing.

So that's my carers week sorted out, three lunches and plenty of opportunities to put the world to rights, see a few old faces, catch up with the gossip, share some moans about the ConDem government and their cuts, then share some more moans about all the stuff that's gone wrong with social services or day care or health or the council or best of all, the new neighbours weird behavior or that obnoxious child from up the road. You know the stuff I mean, the important stuff that is really none of your business but certain to take your mind off of caring and benefit cuts!

If you are a carer, have a good Carers Week, make the most of it and spread the word. If you're not a carer then think yourself lucky, spare us a thought and remember that becoming a carer can happen to anybody at any time and it is not something you choose to be it is something you have to be and believe me, you will get precious little thanks or recognition for it. Understanding and a little bit of give and take can go a long way towards making a carers life easier, we're just ordinary people who have to deal with and be responsible for someone else's life as well as our own for as long as it takes.

That's all, I could go on forever about the difficulties but that would be boring for me as well as you! I could also get all sentimental about the joy of giving and the sense of worth and achievement you get from caring, but to be honest, that goes against the grain and would be a load of sentimental twaddle anyway, so if you got this far, well done! Thanks for sticking with it to the end.........

It's All Over The News So I'd Better Talk About It....

That's right, Panorama on the BBC last night. I didn't watch it... I watched and read the comments and disbelief washing all over Twitter.  I suppose it's a reflection of the people I follow, but at one point 90% of the tweets I was seeing were something to do with care homes and care workers. Of course all were expressing shock and sorrow that such an appalling thing could be going on.

You won't be surprised to hear that I have a lot to say on the whole subject of care homes and care workers and in particular, how they care for people with autism and learning disabilities. Our daughter lives with us at home and we know how difficult she can be, but that goes without saying, when she is not staying at home she stays in a small respite house, one of half a dozen or so run and owned by the local authority which take a maximum of four clients at any one time for a few nights of respite care each month.

They are almost fully booked for the foreseeable future, and sometimes stays have to be cancelled because they have to use the respite beds for emergencies. Carers get sick too, particularly the elderly ones, and if they have to go into hospital or even worse, pass away, places have to be found quickly for the upset and confused sons or daughters in reasonably familiar and homely surroundings with people they know and trust. These are ordinary houses in ordinary streets and fortunately for us, our local authority uses this model when moving people who need constant care and attention out of the family home and into supported living. Ideally three compatible clients and of course care assistants or workers who are aware of the difficulties these people are facing and are trained and confident enough to deal with them. Now and again things go wrong, but on the whole it works and most people are happy with the way it works. The thought of any of the people I know living in these houses being placed in a hospital setting for care is absolutely awful.

Of course, I do not know all the details of the dreadful happenings in Bristol but the fact that it is being described as a 'private hospital' speaks volumes to me. I have no experience of private hospitals as such, but I do have a little experience of the privately run care homes for the elderly, my own mother was in one briefly here in Wales and my husbands grandmother was in one in London, and her daughter, my husbands aunt now in her late 90's is in one also in London. In all three cases, care was and is only just achieved and individual needs a nuisance to a mainly foreign staff with very little understanding of the English language, here I should say that some of them were and are angels in a very difficult place, albeit scrupulously clean and ordered and run with military precision! I won't bore you with the bedsores, broken leg, disappearing chocolates, disappearing shoes, disappearing teeth, dreadful food and so on and so on. It was and is the indifference that bothers me.

We all know that caring is an expensive business, £20,000 to £30,000 per annum for the elderly, give or take ten grand either way, finding a figure for the cost of care for a person with learning difficulties, a disability, autism or mental health problems is more difficult, but at the bare minimum it seems to be more than three times the cost for the elderly.

Pause for thought and a flight into fantasy... £100.000 per annum... I could pay off the mortgage, get the bathroom sorted out, do a few repairs around the place, even have a little holiday... all in one year!

Back to reality, you can see why the private care home for the elderly businesses expanded into the care for the disabled business! Sadly I don't think they realised that caring for the disabled is a completely different kettle of fish.  We have private care providers who are supposed to fill the gaps social services can't cater for.. they are a disaster, they send out domiciliary care workers to people who don't know them and are expecting to be taken out if only to walk around the shops and have a cup of tea. I won't bore you with the extended telephone debacle which took place between me and one such care provider over five days a couple of weeks ago which resulted in complaints being made and apologies being received and over a week of anxiety and upset for our daughter which spilled over as challenging behaviors at home and at the Day Centre. It was a very difficult couple of weeks which could have been avoided if the care provider had got its act together and delivered the correct training for their staff, and I mean all of their staff including managers and the poor girl in the office, who has yet to master the art of delivering bullshit down the telephone in a convincing manner!

When it comes to providing services of any sort to service users in their own home, in a shared supported living home, in a 'private hospital', in fact, wherever a person with learning difficulties, autism, CP, Downs, mental health problems or whatever spends most of their time, they and their families should be able to expect those services to be fit for purpose. Fully trained staff who treat their clients with the respect they deserve.

It is a sad reflection of our society that it takes a current affairs television programme to make the 'authorities' take notice,  I suppose we have to be thankful there wasn't something really interesting on another channel and enough people did watch and comment to make it front page news this morning. Eminent people, experts, professors, cabinet ministers and the like are being wheeled out to make comment and people have been arrested. For the first time in quite a long while now I'm able to say I do not sense the usual indifference.

Some of us have been aware of instances of bad practice taking place but have said or done nothing, not from indifference but from the knowledge that although a complaint will be listened to sympathetically and appear to have been addressed it will only have been brushed under the carpet, usually because dealing with the problem will cost money. Most annoyingly from the parent carer point of view, is the innate superiority that some (and thankfully fewer as time passes) care professionals display when you question aspects of what is happening with your son or daughter, they obviously haven't run across the excellent Expert Patient programme which is being made available to parent carers in many regions now!

At the very least, many more people will now be aware of instances of abuse and malpractice within social care, possibly even newly aware that there is such a thing as social care for the people some members of the press have been insulting with the label 'benefit scroungers' in recent months. Awareness is a good thing, we need more of it! So thank you to the brave whistle blower for persevering and thank you BBC for the broadcast. Now lets hope the government gives this more than just lip service and sees the danger of  privatisation and the lack of accountability inherent within it, especially when you are dealing with societies most vulnerable members, many of whom do not have a voice.

A Little Ramble Around An Abstract Concept...(or coming to terms with the inevitable)...

Last month, in March, I had a birthday. It was one of those 'significant' birthdays with a 0 at the end of it. Wow, the tyranny of numbers. An abstract concept used to measure the passing of time which is also, arguably, an abstract concept. We hang a lot of importance on the 0's and the 5's and of course to be contrary and human, we have disregarded 20 and made a mega fuss over 21, only now we've shifted that celebration 3 years earlier and 18 is the liberating number.

I recall in the dim distant past, my own 21st, well no, to be more accurate, I don't recall it at all, It kind of past me by. I had been traveling and had arrived back in London to find a small package from my mother which contained a 21st birthday card with profound apologies for forgetting such an important event but they (her and my dad) had been away for a 'spring break' and had forgotten all about it. Taped to the inside of the card was a little silver St. Christopher pendant on a silver chain and wrapped in tissue paper. The irony of receiving the St Christopher after what was to be the last bit of extensive travel I would be doing for a very long time was not lost on me, then or now!

That was in 1972, and what a grim year it was Edward Heath was Prime Minister, the miners were on strike and there was a State of Emergency  declared. We had Bloody Sunday in Derry. Watergate was getting underway in Washington and there was the massacre at the olympics in Munich. In fact, terrorism was taking hold all round, with hijacking and bomb scares, real and imagined, being reported everyday. It was a pretty bad year for earthquakes too... you can see where I'm going can't you? 

Yes, 39 years later we're having a pretty grim year again, but what goes around comes around, things will improve eventually, governments change... but that is not the subject in hand today, back to the numbers... Thus far I've been manageing to keep the exact total of my years to myself. Not an easy thing to do with a calendar obsessed autistic daughter, she has been reminding me and anyone else within earshot about it since Christmas.  My mother in law saw fit to send me a rather gaudy card with a large 60 emblazoned on it in red and gold, I've often questioned her taste over the years. The other daughter, bless her, chose to send me a bunch of sunflowers and an invite to go up to London and visit soon, just me, so we can hit the galleries and museums. Absolutely no mention of birthdays or numbers.

A couple of years ago I got a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions telling me I would not be able to claim my retirement pension until I am 62. I was expecting that, no big surprise, in fact, it is to be expected that the goal posts get moved just as I'm within shooting distance, it's been that way for the last 25 years! Anyway, I'm a carer, I'm not sure retirement is an option. So here I am trying desperately to ignore the number and what I perceive as the stigma which goes with now being an 'over 60' woman. There is an assumption that all I could possibly be interested in is Bingo and soap operas. Well let me tell you, I barely watch the TV at all and I've never played bingo in my life!  I admit to look at me now you wouldn't imagine that more than 40 years ago I had hit and survived the hippie trail to Katmandu, been chased by a police horse in Grosvenor Square and taken a lot more risks than I should have. I'm not sure I believed I would reach the age of 21. But I did, and I started my first business that year. Small but profitable. But I digress, I am really talking about admitting to being 60.

Oh, but that is not so easy, in my head I'm still at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969, that was the year Bob Dylan and the Band played there, the weather was beautiful and I fell in love, not with the right person of course, but that didn't really matter. A year later I was in love with someone else sitting in the pouring rain on a golf course watching Jimi Hendrix play his last gig at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. None of that is relevant, it's just a bunch of memories, but memories are all bound up with experience, and these are what our minds are made of. I suppose what I am trying to say is, just as physically you are what you eat, mentally you are what you remember, what you have experienced.

So how do I come to terms with this horrific number? Well I'm going back to where I started. An abstract concept for measuring time, they are just numbers and if I choose to I can ignore them. We all know you can't turn back time and we are all moving into the unknown, the future is a mystery, we can only guess but we can't really know what is going to happen next. To help us move forward into the unknown we rely on experience and memory, it's why we fall in love with the wrong people and do reckless and dangerous things when we are young, you live and learn.  Well that's the theory, and we all know that theory and practice don't always go hand in hand. For example,  by now I should be making less mistakes!

Acceptance looks like the only way forward, damn it! So look for the advantages.. need to find the spectacles first... right... still drawing a blank. Here's one, nobody is going to expect me to be keeping up with fashion, so I can wear what I like, within reason. Oh and here is the best one, the over 60s bus pass. Free rides to Asda, and if I feel like getting on the bus at the bottom of the hill just to get to the top of the hill, the driver can't complain that he doesn't have a fare for only going 2 stops! Priceless....

I'm Cold, So Here's a Little Story About a Summers Night in 1982

Let me take you back to the summer of 1982, an average sort of british summer, raging hot days mixed up with bouts of torrential rain.  Sarah was not born until December 1985, we had no children, we had no encumbrances, we were still young...ish,  and we were trying to make a living selling our wares at festivals and any other event we could hustle our way into.

Thats the background, now for the specifics...  the date was most likely 31st July, it may have been the day before, but that doesn't really matter. The place was Port Elliot, a stately home in St Germans in Cornwall.  The event was The Elephant Fayre, held in the grounds of said stately home. Headlining were Siouxie and the Banshees, John Cooper Clarke and the Albion Band  but that is irrelevant.  We were selling wooden badges and mobiles made by our own fair hands with designs relating to rainbows, clouds and raindrops and were trading under the name of Heavens Above.

Here, check out the prices!

Thats enough detail, I'm sure you've got the picture, just another early 80's music/arts festival attended by the usual suspects.  So we roll up there in our old Morris van, set out our stall and pitch our tent ready for a weekend of hopefully good trade. Port Elliot is a lovely spot on the River Tiddy...which is tidal, and we are set up on a slightly raised piece of ground on the edge of what was called the 'events area' along with quite a few other diverse traders. We were there for four days and we remember it as being busy because we were pretty much tied to the stall and didn't get about and see too much of the festival beyond our little space, not that you'd want to since when the tide came in the events area tended to get a bit damper than was comfortable and it was apt to get an ethereal sort of mist wafting over it from the river at dawn and dusk.

On the night that this story is about it was particularly damp probably because it had been raining most of the previous day. We had closed the stall down and gone to find food and drink and then settled down for the night in our tent which as I said was pitched on a bit of higher ground, next to a path which lead up to the main camping area but close to stall and van. Every good festival in those days was frequented by one chapter of another of Hells Angels, a few yards up the path from us were the Windsor Chapter with quite a nice bonfire lighting up the night. All in all, it was a quiet, uneventful night, until at about 3.00am when we heard a voice coming from the direction of the events area, at first a plaintive little cry of 'I'm cold' repeated a few times. Fair to say, 3.00am in the morning in a damp field in the mist at the end of July is probably going to feel a bit chilly. Well this twerp really wanted us to know about it, by 4.00am there were a few of us beginning to get the message loud and clear since he turned up the volume and the frequency of his mantra.  He was by now getting a few muted responses from various disgruntled campers. Then we heard the distinct sound of a tent being unzipped and the sounds of rummaging followed by heavy booted footsteps stomping past our tent accompanied by  grumbling along the lines of 'So you're cold are you.'

Spurred on by the prospect of an event in the 'events area' we ventured outside of our tent and into the mist. We couldn't see anything very clearly, it was still quite dark and the mist was pretty thick, but we could see a figure making it's way down toward the sound of the cold complainer and hear the heavy biker booted footsteps accompanied by the sloshing sound of fluid in a container. There is no denying it was cold, we got back into the tent. The cries of 'I'm cold' were still hanging in the air, accompanied by a lot of grumbly mutterings and the sound of fluid splashing on the ground. Shortly after that we became aware of a rather bright and flickery glow emanating from the events area, then more muttering and some more cries of 'I'm cold', then some slightly more irritated mutterings and a thump. After a short silence came the last utterance from the event area that night... 'I'm hurt'. Then we could hear the heavy biker booted footsteps and sloshing fluid in a container sound accompanied by chuckles returning to the campsite. A small ripple of applause could be heard from nearby tents and quiet laughter from the Angels camp fire.

Later on the sun rose, so did the mist, so did we come to that, and the Angels, and the few others that had been witness to the shenanigans in the night and there for all to see in the event area was a large circle of burned grass, at least 15 feet across. It attracted a surprising amount of attention through the course of the day. We denied all knowledge of its origins and listened to various theories of ancient pagan ritual around and within rings of fire which bought to mind events two years earlier which I will write about some other time, I only wrote this because whenever anyone says 'I'm cold' this is what I think of, you have no idea where a burning ring of fire will take me! Later that day we had a cup of campfire tea with the Angels who really were a nice bunch of chaps and as bad as it sounded, the hapless cold caller was never in any real danger, he just chose the wrong part of the event area if he was looking for sympathy, and was keeping the only Hells Angel that wanted to sleep awake! To my knowledge that was the only event to take place in the event area and quite a few people were a bit cheesed off that they must have missed something quite spectacular, as I said, we pleaded ignorance and all things considered we had a good weekends trading and some good free entertainment, albeit at 400am.

That's your lot, a little story with no politics, disability, carers, cuts, Xmas or autism. Normal service will be resumed soon, so make the most of it while I can only bring myself to write about my dodgy past...




 

I Know It's Pretty, But With Only One Boot......

All this snow is a damned nuisance as far as I am concerned.  I know it looks wonderful and kids love it but all it does for me is complicate matters no end.  Slipping and sliding on ice and maintaining ones equilibrium is a discipline I have never mastered.  The correct footwear is essential and sometime between the last snowfall and this one, my pair of snow friendly shoes have worn out and been disposed of.  So, time to seek out the old faithfuls, must have had them for nearly 20 years by now, Kangaroo boots with little pockets on the ankles which have been used to stash no end of diverse cargo over their 20 odd years.  The pockets are irrelevant, just a few happy memories, the important thing is that they are good for walking in snow and on the nightmare we have today which is black ice.

I went with confidence into the darker reaches at the back of the wardrobe, located the right Kangaroo boot fairly quickly, fired with success I probed further for the left one.  Who knew I had two pairs of purple Doc Martens? I vaguely remembered one pair, absolutely useless in snow and looking a bit tired and worn.  The other pair are brand new with chisel toes, I was a bit taken aback by these, can't think where they came from, or when come to that, and trying to wear a pair of brand new Docs in icy conditions didn't strike me as a sensible move so they were put to one side for further consideration while I delved deeper for the other Kangaroo. Two pairs of cowboy boots and some aubergine coloured leather knee highs with a 5 inch heel later I realised that the boot I required was not where it should be and short of someone breaking through from Narnia and pinching it, it must be elsewhere.

I won't go into detail about some of the other places I looked into for this lost boot, It should be sufficient for me to say that during my search I found items of clothing and accessories that have been in and out of fashion more times I care to remember, and am quietly pleased with myself about a few garments I ran across which I made back in the 70's which are still intact and looking pretty damn good, though I say so myself! But, the object of all this mayhem, one left Kangaroo boot, remained elusive and as I write, remains elusive. The upside of this loss is that I haven't been able to venture out too far into the world since it started snowing. For me this is good. I do not like snow and ice, sorry if I 'm repeating myself but that's all there is to it, I don't like it, and now I've turned large parts of the house upside down looking for a lost boot.. to no avail, so I can go out and do stuff I don't like doing anyway!  Madness!  I decided to make the most of home deliveries from Asda, a far more sensible option than slipping and sliding to the wretched store, which I have to admit is just visible through the bare winter trees at the bottom of the hill, covered in snow.

I did find some shoes which were just about serviceable in arctic conditions, problem with them is they are size 8 mens walking shoes.  They belong to my husband, he thinks they are only a size 7 therefore has been unable to wear them because they pinch his toes.  Personally, I'm a size 5 or 6 depending on style and manufacturer, so two pairs of very thick socks and I can just about get away with them, but they don't exactly make me feel very confident and although it shouldn't be an issue during extreme weather conditions, who wants to be seen out in a pair of their husbands discarded shoes?

Sarah is not to good with snow and ice either and this is a difficult time of year for her, She has her 25th birthday the 19th December and is anticipating gifts and a cake, Christmas a week later, she's just anticipating gifts for that, food is neither here nor there for her at Christmas. But the biggest seasonal problems for her have already started to appear, cancellations due to bad weather.  So far, a trip to Cardiff, a visit to the health spa Jacuzzi, a service users disco and a Gateway Christmas party have all been cancelled.  Personally, I was just pleased I didn't have to struggle out wearing a ridiculous pair of shoes!  Sarah had the screaming ab-dabs of course, to say she went into meltdown doesn't seem appropriate given the current temperatures.  But things have settled down a bit for her, she is in respite this weekend which she almost always enjoys and transport to and from the Day Centre has been amazing this week.  I don't like to think how they've made it around the side roads up on this hill to pick up the four service users that live around here every day this week, none of them in the least bit confident in the snow.  The transport guys have helped them from the front door to the bus and the from the bus to the front door, all smiles and jokes and reassurance, absolutely brilliant. They are of course all wearing appropriate footwear!

So, at some point soon when all the snow and ice have receded I will be found looking in the shops for something decent and reasonably priced to wear on my feet in bad weather, and you can bet your life when I find and part with cash for something appropriate I will also find the lost left Kangaroo boot....

One Year Later... Charity Stays At Home... Revisited...

I hate this particular Friday every year, and the few days preceding with all the wind ups and the posturing  that goes on in the name of charity, or perhaps that should be The Big Society given the current political climate.

I posted this last year, a week after Children In Need 2009.  Dealing With The Day: Charity Stays At Home.  If you've got a minute or two just skim through it.

A year on, could we have imagined then that we would be in an even worse situation today, especially for the poor and disabled, whom the children now considered to be in need will surely grow up to be, with a government whose intention appears to be to decimate the health and welfare services?

Again, apologies to anyone offended by my opinion, and if you are offended, come and walk in my shoes for a week or so and see if you still feel the same way.