EDINBURGH

We have just got in from our trip to Edinburgh. We were there from Saturday till today. Had an excellent time. I will post pictures over the next few days.

The house is freezing and of course devoid of dogs so it feels very odd. We will collect the dogs tomorrow morning.

Probably paranoid but since we were burgled when we went to Budapest, I just decided to not write anything here or on Facebook or Twitter.

SPONTANEITY

John has gone to Edinburgh today for a conference and I will not see him until Sunday evening. It makes the week seem very long as well as makes me feel insecure. I always think 'what if I fall over and can't get up?' or some such thing.

I had a dream about grief last night. I can't recall it all but know the theme was about how grief never leaves one, one carried it around like a suitcase that was tied to one by a chain. Or so it seemed in the dream. I think this was possibly triggered by a scene in Grey's Anatomy. Alex, one of the male characters that I do not like, expressed his grief. It was one of those scenes which makes me spontaneously cry. No warning, no lump in throat, just a sudden gush of grief. Hard to describe really, it's almost like something just takes a leap out me in a split second and I find myself feeling grief again. (I feel differently toward this character, Alex, now.)

I must be quite mad. I am knitting a pair of socks with Schaefer 'Anne' on 1.5mm needles!

James was fine at training last night. It appears then that it is the outside, specifically the breeze/wind, that he is afraid of. It was very windy the day of the fire and he was caught up in that.

I went for my swim this morning and whilst it was more difficult it went okay. The water was colder than usual and this made it more painful for me. I don't warm up, I get colder.


More photographs of Pest. This is the Budapest version of the Arc de Triumph. I think you may have gathered that I like sculpture / architecture / art. It amazes me what humans can create.

COLD AND WET

I spent yesterday sleeping, knitting and watching Grey's Anatomy on DVD. I also bathed Luque in the evening.

I have been for my swim this morning but am pretty sore today so I shall sleep some more and knit and watch DVD's!

It is a dull, cold and wet day.

Oh, and Sunday I discovered that my hand held Dyson that I used for cleaning the knitting machines was also stolen in the burglary. Too late to add it to the insurance claim.

Below are more photographs of animals at the Zoo in Budapest.

YARN ON THE HOOF

I should be done with the custom dyed socks today,very nearly used up the yarn. I shall then go back to my yo cable socks using the Lorna's Lace Shepherd Sock. I shall try not to have several pairs on the go again as it seems to take forever to finish a pair.

My swim went well. That is 4 days this week and back up to my usual amount of laps. I am pleased with this as you might imagine. However, my ability to walk has lessened but I don't really care much about that.

Yesterday, I chose not to swim and I had a day of knitting and watching DVD's. I had planned to go to the Littleport service to see a medium whose work I respect. I debated whether or not I needed to take some drugs and in the end decided I would. Not long after I took them, the telephone rang. It was the President of the church asking me if I would fill in as the booked medium couldn't make it. I agreed. I know it is only a little thing, but I normally would not have bothered with the drugs. I also could not get either neighbour to put my wheelchair (manual) in the car for me as neither was in. If I go just to take part in the service, I take my wheelchair because I cannot sit in the normal chairs. The point of this is that 1. I had napped in the afternoon, 2. I had done nothing all day 3. I had taken drugs and 4. I didn't need the chair. You see, I was prepared to work that night even though I didn't know I was going to until the last minute. Funny how things work out.

We have a three day weekend this weekend. On Monday I have Bath Championship Dog Show to attend. The weather people say it is going to be dry and warm. This show is usually wet and muddy. Seems not this year which will make life easier.The judge is a new one to me.

I am going to wear my ecru jacket, Panda waistcoat ( it has Panda's all over it) and bow tie, green trousers and the green with flowers on Docs. Topped off with a Panama.
All of these were taken at Budapest Zoo.

BUREAUCRACY ON DRUGS

Last evening's service went very well. It was an opportunity for me to develop my tolerance levels. Twins come to this service and they are 'special'. They can be quite talkative and distracting. I had to ask them to be quiet several times and I managed to so without getting snappy. They aren't so special that they don't know they need to be quiet. They tend to be 'message grabbers', meaning they think ever word spoken is for them.

The forms I have to fill in are proving truly vexing. 'How many times do you go to the toilet in a day and how many minutes do you take to do so?'. Most of the questions are like this one. If I am not disabled now, I certainly will be by the time this damned form is completed.

I am going to visit another Lhasa Apso breeder today and I will take Whitney, James, Bridget and Carly with me.

I managed a swim today. Yesterday was okay pain wise. Quite why Saturday was so bad pain wise I don't know, but that is just the way it goes.



This is the tunnel that one drives thru to get into Buda. There is then a bridge (more than one) which goes over the Danube into Pest. In case you don't know, Budapest was two towns, Buda and Pest that have been amalgamated into one city.
Now his is a bit more butch don't you think?
This is a Lada, an old Russian car. Here in the UK it was called a Lada Riva as Lada used to sell here in the 80's because they were cheap and reliable, though ugly. My first brand new car was a Lada Samara. The car above might be a Trabant but it certainly looks like a Lada Riva to me.
This one tries hard but ends up looking like a man trying to look butch.(above)

BEGGING FOR RIGHTS

Yesterday I went to The Guild of Machine Knitters day held in town. I had a good time. I met 'net' people that I know, Jane, Alison and Ann. Seeing the garments people had made got my juices flowing so I have been thinking of things I might try on the machines.

I would have liked to have stayed and seen Bill King and his designs but I was having a bad day pain wise. Even though I was in Daniel, the pain was bad. I get this awful cramping down my legs when I sit for any length of time, when it's a bad day. I then have to get up for a bit until pain forces me to sit again. Days like this are up and down and up and down till I just go to bed and sleep. I left and came home where I promptly went to bed. I took more pills when I got up and a couple of hours later I was calling the out of hours doctor to ask if I could take the morphine on top of the Tramadol I had taken. The answer was no. The doctor was really very nice and explained that Tramadol and Morphine are both opiates. Anyway, she did say I could take more after 4 hours instead of my usual 6 hours.

I didn't knit because I was in too much pain. I did watch The Andromeda Strain which as a superior made for tv programme we watched on DVD.I enjoyed and managed to stay still and ignore my body enough to follow the film.

There is no rhyme nor reason to it. I did not do much Friday, certainly nothing like walking or lifting. I can't remember the last time the pain was that bad and the pills not knocking it on the head.

Today I have to fill out forms for the government regarding my disabilities and health. I hate doing this. This is the third time for me. Hopefully this time they will write me off for life instead of 3 years. My disease is progressive, I won't get better, so really it would save much time and effort on all our parts. Strangely, I am written off for life as regards illness. I will get the incapacity for life. This is something different, this is for Disability on top. This is the one I had to fight for, and won before. Now i have to do it all over again. Hopefully though I will not have to fight this time as the situation is the same and I am physically worse than I was when I first applied. All I needed was the Blue Badge (disabled river parking etc) and had no idea it would involve all this bureaucracy. And they treat you as if you are a criminal from the outset, trying to defraud the government. The whole process is humiliating. Even the doctors find it infuriating because their competence is called into question too! I had to see a Government doctor for him to check that my 3 doctors were telling the truth! Even then they go it wrong and the panel lied saying there was no supporting medical evidence. There was, x-rays, and a neuro report which they chose to ignore. This is why I won my appeal.

These forms are so complicated that even John and I can't comprehend them fully so we have to have a professional form filler do it for us. Thank fully, my dear friend Linda (she bred Whitney) is one such person so we will spend much time on the telephone today with her while John writes it down. John has to write because I can't write any more. I can write but it takes so much effort and is still illegible!

I am going to give another service tonight. Not far away. I am looking forward to it. This is a place I can relax in and stay sitting. It is a purpose built church, not a hall.

I have some very attractive mandarin coloured cashmere to knit into a sweater for myself. I swatched a few days ago, the same time as I swatched the violet cashmere. After this, I am going to do something different, a waistcoat maybe. Maybe using the knitting machines version of weaving. Maybe not. But something different anyway.

More Buda below:

A ROLL IN THE HAY

Last night's service went very well. Although I had my doubts about it, I did wear my Sherwani, with the long silk scarf too. It went down well. I know it looked good and not over the top because three str8 men complimented me on it!

The evidence I received to give to others was amazing. One of the communicators told me he rode a Kawasaki 750 and that was correct. He told me how he died, an aneurysm in his head,and then he showed me a haystack. The woman exclaimed and got all hot and bothered!There were others who received good evidence but this one sticks in my mind.

I did go for a swim this morning. I stopped when my body felt tired instead of pushing myself onwards.

The new mixture to get my gut working hasn't worked yet. I took the third dose this morning. It is a powder I have to dissolve in water. Hopefully it'll work soon as I am beginning to feel uncomfortable and bloated.

I only have a few rounds of each sock left to knit now. This is with the Lorna's Lace Shepherd Sock Multi.

More Buda below.

JUST A QUICKY

This will be short as I am about to go and eat. Pork fillet with vegetables. I found my meat whacker so the pork fillet is extra tender and quickly cooks.

I didn't go swimming this morning, had bad night with hips and ribs. It seems I can only manage every other day swimming now and then not as much. Went to see Elizabeth and came up with a large carrier bag of drugs! I now have some sachet thing to take to get my guts to work. It seems the more pain killers I take, the less my guts are inclined to work. Shit!

I have a service to do tonight and I am looking forward to that. I intend wearing my Sherwani and yellow jeans with Mulberry Docs.

I bathed Whitney this morning and left an oily conditioner in her coat which help with the moult.

Below are yet more photgraphs of Buda. I was particularly impressed with the tile work on the church roof. Could have done without the scaffolding but it seem everywhere we have been, they are doing work on churches and cathedrals: Strasbourg, York, Ghent, Budapest, Vienna, everywhere.

LIVE FREE OR DIE

On the way to the pool this morning, I listened to The Partridge Family. Made me feel melancholy. I started to think about the time I first heard them. I was a child, living in Singapore. It was a fascinating place for me. I remember it with a mixture of excitement and awe and pain. Excitement and awe because it was so different to England and Germany, the only places I had lived up to that point. Pain because it was here that I was first sexually molested by a stranger, and the first time my father almost killed me in his rage. It is only by luck that he didn't.

I already knew I was not acceptable to my parents, that I was a bad loathsome child.Yet his hatred of me grew during this period in Singapore and it was also the time I knew I didn't love him. The day he nearly killed me, by throwing a case of books at me which hit one side of my head and smashed the other side into an ornate coffee table leg. I also knew my mother was not on my side either and I was just as despicable to her. She lay me down and sponged my head with cold water all the while telling how bad I was and if I behaved Dad wouldn't get angry. (In case you are thinking she was a poor little victim-she wasn't. She was as cruel as he when she felt like it and he was never violent to her.) That night I did not kiss him goodnight and never did again. He thought I was becoming 'a man'. Fool.

I had been walking in the jungle when an Asian man, Indian or Malay, grabbed me, stripped me and masturbated over me. I was horrified and afraid. His sperm revolted me and I stopped eating or drinking milk stuff after that for a while. I did as I was instructed and did not tell a soul. Until something similar happened to a neighbours child. I then spoke up only to have my mother slap me, show her disgust and blame me for the attack on the other child. Further proof I was just an evil boy.

I was so ignorant then. I spent my life seeking the forgiveness of my family for not being what they wanted. As a result of this I laid myself wide open for more abuse. I never once saw the wickedness in others. I blamed myself for everything. I made friends with people who abused me, who had no respect for me, who found me wanting. I had sex with men (and women) who I didn't want to have sex with because I was unable to say no. I did not know I had been sexually abused as a child. I saw it as me having been sexually precocious and thus to blame.

The cruelty of my elder brother toward me, the hatred of me by my younger one, just added to my conviction I was a bad worthless person.( I now know that their hatred of me protects from feeling the pain of knowing they were not loved by our parents.)

We truly do experience life according to what we believe. My belief that I was a bad person, at core, ruined my life. It caused all sorts of painful behaviour. An eating disorder, self harm(cutting), sexual promiscuity, recklessness with my health. I was unable to cope without acting out in some way. all the while professionals treated me as bad, as sick, as deranged. No one saw the pain I was in, no one saw that I was merely the result of my experience and no one saw how I was telling them of my abuse by acting it out on myself. The arrogance of the so called mental health experts, social workers, shrinks, astounds me to this day.

I sometimes have difficulty forgiving myself for having thought as I did for so many years. For believing them. When we came from Australia to England, I came without a fuss because my parents agreed to bring one of my dogs with us. The others were sold to the first person who wanted them.

We came to England and I immediately got a job at a quarantine kennel and my beloved Sally, a yellow Labrador, was booked into arrive from Oz on August 5th, 1975. On August the 4th the owners of the kennel allowed me to call the people, family friends, who had taken care of Sally, to be sure she had been put on the plane. I was informed that my parents had had her destroyed the day we left Oz.

Despite this, I still believed I was the one at fault. That the treatment I was subjected to was deserved. My feelings of worthlessness and wickedness was compounded by the Xtian religion, in it's various forms, being taught to me at school and elsewhere. There was no shortage of people telling me I was going to Hell, that I was evil and spawn of Satan. I didn't realise then what I now know - I was already in Hell and the people teaching me this rot were themselves disturbed, or wicked, or deluded or abuse victims.

Now I see that the enormity of the pain I would feel when and if I realised that I was not evil, that in fact I was unloved and unwanted because of a deficiency within my parents, was pain far to great to allow myself to feel until such times as I was strong enough to do so. Plus something had to happen to trigger the healing, and the realisation that I was not at fault.

This came about in an odd way. Odd in that it could not have been better planned and it does make me wonder about 'outside power' influencing my life. Thru the 'net I had met a person who clearly did not like me from the moment we met. I spent two days in their company. I had no choice as we were in a foreign country and anyway, I had disassociated more or less str8 away. I was treated with utter disdain and disrespect. Their attitude and manner and the look in their eyes was just as my father's had been. I was found severely wanting in their eyes.

I had disassociated so I was not consciously aware of this at the time. Upon my return home, I began to have night terrors again, I began to get sick, I began to feel terribly afraid. More afraid than I had ever felt in life. I thought I was dying. I was convinced I was. This terror built up over a period of months, with days of crying and me trying to stop it and not knowing at all why this happening. I did not connect it to my past nor did I connect it with the visit to that person.

However, I did begin to realise I was grieving. I felt so bad. Really bad, bad enough that I thought I'd die just from the pain. I had felt nothing yet. Worse was to come. The very root of me was about to be torn out and banished form me forever.

That day I will never forget as long as I live, and longer. I was in my bedroom, unable to leave it. I was terrified, really, really terrified. I was losing my mind. I called out to whatever Power may have been there and I said: If you f'ing well love me, then I need you to show me NOW. The telephone rang and it was the person who has known me the longest, a close female friend. She seemed to instantly know what was happening and she spoke to me as I were a little boy, soothing me with her voice, telling me how it was not my fault, how I didn't deserve what had been done to me. She was not perturbed by the animal like noises I was making, the retching, the screaming as this pain I had kept buried for most of my 49 years finally left me, ripping my guts out as it did. I finally KNEW it was not my fault. That I had not been abused because I was me but because they were them. I was free.

It took months to physically heal from this epiphany. As I healed, I began to change. I began to sleep well. I could sleep and go to the loo when we were away from home. I stopped feeling afraid all the time. I stopped having people in my life who hurt me or made me feel bad.

I developed a need to wear colour. Lots of it, and bright. No longer was I going to drown myself in black and grey and brown. I was going to express myself and LIVE.

This is what I am doing now. At 50 I am finally alive. I am free. Free from them and free from everyone else. I no longer care a damn what anyone thinks. I do as I please and dress how I please. I treat others well regardless of how they treat me because to do otherwise would diminish me.

This life is short. Too much of it was stolen from me. Almost 50 years of it. I intend to live the rest of it to the full, as far as my wrecked body will allow and I will not allow that, the wrecked body, to stop me either.

This is the Presidents Office.

GOOD, BAD, AND UGLY

The dog show on Sunday went well. Whitney won her class and went on to get the Reserve Challenge Certificate. The female that won the Challenge Certificate was the one that stood reserve to Whitney at the last show.

I have been surprised at the amount of cards and verbal congratulations I got from my fellow exhibitors. I have also been somewhat surprised at the spite of some of them. One person, whom I liked, said nothing at the time of the big win, nor did she even acknowledge my presence at this show, despite camping right next to me in the hall. Pathetic woman. She has made up many Champions herself so to begrudge another's success is senseless. How sad to feel like that. It must be awful. No, I am not being catty. I truly think that to feel such jealousy must be awful.

I did go swimming yesterday and did just under half my usual laps. I then knitted and watched DVD's for the rest of the day.

This morning I thought I was not going to be able to get out of bed. I was lying on my left side and I couldn't even roll onto my back in order to get onto my right side and get up. With some thought and effort, I managed to fling myself out of bed so that I landed on my knees and then used the radiator to pull myself upward. I have taken drugs but when I stood to pee just ow, I thought my legs were going to give way. I have that weird trembling in the base of my spine which travels down my legs.

I have show training and will take James and either Carly or Bridget. Assuming my back and legs allow it.

I am going to start putting my yarn on EBAY. I will see what happens. I have way too much and will begin by potting up cones of yarn. It will all be naturals and will vary from very fine to 4ply.

The pictures below are of Buda.

BUDA AND STUFF

DUH! As I was swimming today, and I began to hurt, I thought to myself that this may be the time to stop swimming and not push myself thru it. I asked one of my fellow swimmers who is a nurse and she agreed that if I am starting to feel pain, and I have taken 100mg Tramadol and 1000mg of Paracetamol, then my body was telling me to stop! Perhaps this will mean I can go back to daily swimming. At least one good thing is that the pain in my arms and shoulders has abated this last few days and I am just experiencing the usual.

CASHMERE. I have knitted up two swatches. One in violet and the other in orange. Both are going to be for me. Round neck, set in sleeves, plain.

SOCKS. Well I frogged the pattern I designed yesterday after all! It will work well on a plain coloured yarn, but not on the multicoloured yarn I am using. I think when it comes to these yarns, I will stick to ribbing.

I mentioned how bored I was with knitting ribs for socks on the knitting lists. I was astonished at the amount of people who wrote in suggesting.....ribs!!!!!!!! Still, at least they were kind to write with a suggestion.

Today is sock wash day as I have one clean pair left. All I have to do now is put them all in pairs on the drying stand thing I use. Clothes horse? I think that is what it is called.





This is a toilet. It is sitting on top of a brick chute. From the ground, I had thought it was some sort of ancient lifting mechanism until John told me it was the toilet chute. The King or whoever, sat in there over the chute and let it go!