Why do they call it the 100-day cough if it’s gonna last (so far) more than 128 days!? It must have been named by the same publicists who named the 100-year war. Which, incidentally, still technically hasn’t ended…
This bleeding cough is driving me nuts, sending me ga-ga, although no one appears to have noticed. There’s me struggling to breathe, and all people can think of is, well, someone else.
Take my youngest little boy for instance. 30 years old? Big deal, I’ll be there soon. (Well, 30 years coughing maybe.)
Cute isn’t he? Er … wasn’t he…
Then there’s my youngest daughter, due to sprog in about four months. Everyone’s clucking around her excited that she’s to have a baby hormonal time-bomb (aka baby girl). No one seems to care that my ducks are busy laying eggs…
My father-in-law is still fading away in hospital (even I draw the line at making light of this) which leaves my mother-in-law (I sense a ‘humour opportunity’ coming) living with us, clucking around me whilst gently mocking my cooking skills. If nothing else it is helping me practice my Peter Sellers french accent.
There is certainly a lot of clucking going on. And coughing.
In a vain attempt at lifting spirits I tried turning once more to rugby.
Despite Montauban doing well, England have gone and spoilt it all by narrowly missing out on the six-nations cup. Made worse by my continuing failure to grasp some of the more basic French vocabulary, thinking ‘Samedi’ meant ‘Sunday’ thus missing the bloody match altogether.
So how about some respite in the Pyrénées?
Beautiful but (there’s always a but) this was the last opportunity to ski as the resort is closing today, despite there being shit-loads of snow. Added to which, because we are, ahem, responsible adults, our stay was restricted to only one day so that we could spend time trying to get comfortable sitting on a hospital floor.
Now there’s something not quite right about hospitals. The general idea, I had reasoned, was that you go into hospital because you are unwell and require aid to get back to one’s normal state. This seems perfectly logical to me. Hey! I run a couple of animal hospitals, I know about these things!
So why does someone like my ‘papa’ get admitted because of having pretty much end-stage aspiration pneumonia, and get pretty much ignored for a couple of weeks (quote: “don’t bother pressing the alarm button in the night because we won’t come to you anyway”) until they realise that the bacteria that they have incompetently given him to add to his woes (in his case both C. difficile and MRSA!) are potentially hazardous to other inpatients (and staff, and visitors) thus then throwing the medical book at him, plus, just to make him feel really on top of the world, shove him into isolation where the only way to visit him is to wear fancy dress! That includes masks that we’ve taken to writting our names on so that he can tell who we are…
Well, there is a life outside hospital (although clearly not a great deal inside it) and to cheer us up a little, it looks as though the farm purchase is going to happen (long live the strong pound). This place is just down the road…
So, having got all that off my chest, I’ll bid you farewell as the sun settles behind the mountains of the Vallée de Ger.
Well, I’d like to, but we’re still in Montauban where it’s bloody pissing down…
A bientôt
Phil
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