The Morganos

I've had a week's holiday. Well annual leave during which time I've moved twice (Once in London and once to Yorkshire). So it doesn't feel like a holiday. But I feel less stressed than I imagine Tony Soprano feeling, so it's all ok. I'm all cosy in my lovely new accommodation in Stoke Newington. The good thing about having live-in landladys is that they pamper you. Well the one I've got does so it feels like home from home. Even the broadband works. The only problem is being apart from the husband and all the other responsibilities that come with being of a certain age. Anyway we had a Soprano fest me and the other half and it was great.

Fatigue

Moving house has never been one of those tips mentioned in a 'How to Relax' book of the 1990s. Or 80s. Or Now. Or probably ever.

But we've done it. And unpacking one box takes approximately one hour. So by 2008 we might have unpacked, except we've got to move again in probably December. So I'm coping by sleeping. The bedroom in 'Courtyard Cottage' is deceptively free of boxes. It's a box free haven, overlooking a beautiful crab apple tree in its prime.

My ambition this week was to unpack the kitchen. However this was overambitious. So instead we've been dining out (how unlike us). But being up North the prices are literally four times cheaper so this suits us fine. My new ambition is to meditate thrice daily, cloaking myself in a relaxed ambience and to stop having over-ambitious plans.

The cats are fine. Because they've been imprisoned the moment they got here
they don't mind too much about being inside. Except if I go in the garden. Which I'm very much enjoying - it's south facing.

A social history of Love

With a bit of luck Blaglady is going to call her latest poetry book 'Anna Tatton's Social History of Love' Immortalising me before I have to do any work to do the same. [there you go anonymity busted. Didn't take long. But I've got a different name now anyway Ha ha].

She had an excellent idea of making what she's written already Volume One, then having the appendix as a list of chapters for the second volume. Anyway I didn't quite understand it but it sounded brilliant.

I've been wanting to write a social history of love ever since I read 'History of God' and 'History of the Orgasm', both of which are excellent books. But no one appears to have done 'History of Love' so after I've done my History of dementia I'm going to have a crack at it. You can look up my early thoughts on this (Sept 3rd 2006).

I think my chapters will be thus:
1) What is Love?
1.5) Love and biology
2) Love and Evolution
3) The Greeks and Love
4) The Romans and Love
4.5) St Paul's letter to the Corinthians and religion etc
5) Medieval Love
6) Early Modern Love
7) Shakespeare and that era
8) Victorians including Freud & Marx
9) One Love
10) The Twentieth Century and Love including homosexuality
11) What's the difference between Care and Love?
12) The Beatles
13) What's the difference between 'being in love' and loving someone/thing?
14) Measuring love
14.5) Tragedy, wars and Love - eg Iraq, Cassablanca [watched this yesterday for the first time]
15) Love : A Manifesto - the Secular Ideal for the twenty-first century

I reckon this one's an even bigger project than dementia. Hopefully finished by 2023.

'I do not want any friends on facebook'

Not a quote from me, but my mother. I've tried talking her through it on the phone and it hasn't worked. So she only has one friend at the moment - who has apparently said it's ok to disown her.

Re: dementia. Nothing to moan about really. In my day job (the one I get paid for so I have to be careful what I say here) we had a presentation on these sort of issues and I was impressed. They turned it into a plea for help which was quite cunning. Of course, with me they were pushing at an open door. Not sure about x and y though.

On things which I presumably can drone on about till the cows come home (an apt phrase from my childhood - they destroyed the potatoes and lettuce I was growing in our vegetable patch 21 years ago). Namely the docu-soap on telly last night about entrepreneurs in a Ugandan village. Needless to say, I had tears in my eyes. One minute a child dying of malnutrition. Next minute, an awe inspiring demonstration of human spirit through dance and song. The human spirit is so bright when you expect it to be deadened.

Why isn't NICE monitoring the £20bn wasted on Sure Start?

I bought a brilliant book a while ago to help me with the MA - Roweena Murray's How to Write a Thesis. Anyway point one of her five points to prevent yourself from getting writers block is to become addicted to writing. Not sure I'm there yet. Then point two is to 'finish today's writing session by defining tomorrow's 3) Do writing before everything else 4) don't worry about done or undone writing 5) gather together all the writing you've done and notice how much there is '.

Good tips.

Anyway I'm going to try and make the blog as dementia orientated as possible so I can see all my writing mount up.

Today I'm fuming because there was a report out a few weeks ago saying there was no evidence that the government's half baked £20billion 'Sure Start' programme has any impact. Of course, now I've actually been elected with a brief to improve older people's services there are a multitude of things that that £20bn could have been spent on which actually have EVIDENCE to support their case for improvements. Including implementing their own guidelines, perhaps having some of their beloved 'targets' on dementia like they do for cancer for example.

The fact is age discrimination is endemic, it's not just institutionalised it's blatant. My thesis, which is supposed to be a history of dementia could be a history of age discrimination. Lives at a certain age are just less valuable to our society. And doctors have told me that.

TO answer my last question I had votes in the hundreds (700people voted) and I was fourth out of five. So my husband has to slap himself on the face say a hundred times.

The three crowns should get one star

I hate to be middle class. But on the other hand there's no getting away from it, once you are middle class (and many of us are there from birth of course) you can't really complain. For fifteen quid, for which you can also buy 3 useless handbags, a printer cartridge and a second hand mobile phone, you can also buy a delicious meal in Stoke Newington with not bad service, which seems to be on the up. And let me emphasise the word delicious. One of the most underestimated words in the british language if you ask me. Anyway that's fifteen quid very well spent. You're full, you've had adequate, in fact more than adequate, artistic inspiration for the day, and you feel satiated.

I'm delighted to report that the governors are all lovely and I've managed to slip a few faux pas in all over the place, with the discreet coded etc to benefit the hospital. Our Chair is Uberkid - Chair of the London Museum (my favourite museum) amongst other achievements which are too lengthy for this short blog. I enjoyed it much more than the so-called training the other day. Much more informative and enjoyable. Long live democracy. As you can guess I'm a new convert. Get my 'results' tomorrow (how many people voted for me!). I'll be living off this election business for years. Well at least one.

A good day and a bad day - Will Big Governor evict herself? You decide (NOT!)

Anyway. Can't decide how much I can legitimately get away with. Not much is probably the correct answer, so being so risk averse I will go with that. Had some horrific training yesterday. I don't believe it will be bringing any of the organisations I'm connected with into disrepute to say that. However if there are any of my lawyer friends reading this who are still speaking to me, if you do suspect me of breaking any laws, especially ones which may affect my income, can you please let me know. You see, I can just delete the words. And, no-one, bar the police, MI5 and the FBI, plus computer geeks will ever know.

Perhaps I'm on safer ground moaning about Tamoxifen. To be honest, now I've got used to it it's fine.

So back to moaning about the training yesterday. I attended training on dementia. It was absolutely rubbish. It was like (and forgive me for being pompous and arrogant, but now I'm elected I'm entitled) Einstein attending A Level Physics classes. Or Shakespeare an oral english examination. Or Tony Blair BTEC in diplomacy. There was this bloke, I could call him a _____, but now I'm elected I don't think my language will plunge to those depths. Let me put it like this: I disagreed with him.
He said potato. I said tomato. It was like that. I don't want to be libellous you see so without going into any detail whatsoever I'll just leave it at that. But I'm right and he is wrong. And he is a ______.

So to cheer myself up I rang up homerton hospital and found out I'm the guv'nor. [should read 'a']

She's the guv'nor!

It should read 'She's a governor'. Anyway I'm now a bona-fide elected governor of Homerton Hospital. No doubt this means that this blog will be shut down, so whatever you are reading is a piece of history.

I've been celebrating with blaglady - she's entered the world of paid employment at the tender age of 97 so we cracked open the prosecco. If there's spelling and pc mistakes in this I apologise. Jim Davidson would know better. To cut a short story pissed, there was a lot of meat on at the hope and anchor so in my new responsible state I ate it all. Long live Megadeth.

On a more serious note I hope to champion the causes of whoever pays me the most (joke) and marries me the most times (not so funny).

Nepotism is a funny old game. Fortunately it doesn't existin the NHS.

I'm not as happy as Larry - Blaglady will contest he was an ex's ex' ex of mine. Power breeds responsibility which breeds stress= money which breeds living in London. Me in Leeds is out of the equation. AT =PM SQUARED minus facebook. Somehow it doesn't add up and I've got to do a lot of reading.
And tell me again - who was the youngest prime minister ever elected who was a woman? And what happened to her burning ambitions to see improvements in the number of dementia cases diagnosed?

Three amazing things

1) Even in the depths of despair writing a list of ten annoying things, one instantly thinks of so many lovely things. Like Hoxton Hall where we had our event on Saturday. It was an original cockney music hall and you can imagine Marie Lloyd flouncing around with everyone drinking too much, people rammed in to the balconies. It only lasted six years and lost its license because it was too rowdy and you can imagine the racket everyone made at the peak of the industrial revolution forgetting their worries walking through the narrow streets on their way home.
2) Delicious chicken salad in a cafe, with roasted peppers, avocado, goats cheese and balsamic vinegar
3) Brian from Big Brother defending himself so well against the homophobic bullying of Jim Davidson. If only one of the women could have done such a good job against his misogynist tirades.

The ten most annoying things in the world

1) Mondays
2) Computers
3) Telephones/their operating companies/fax machines
4) Printers
5) pestilence/poverty/death/global warming/disasters
6) Shops which don't sell organic malted whole grain flour
7) Jim Davidson
8) The media
9) zealots
10) dementia

The Perfect Diagnosis

They give you an appointment to give you the results. Then they rang to check I was attending and bringing someone with me.

Then we had the appointment. With the same doctor who I'd had all along. And he was there with two other people. One sitting down and one standing. There was a little bit of small talk. And then the nice doctor said 'I'm sorry to say but the lump is malignant.' And they let us ask a load of questions. The doors were locked to stop us being interrupted. And he said I probably wouldn't remember much of the conversation as it's shocking news so we could just go home now, tell the family, and come back next week to discuss the treatment plan. And then the person sitting down introduced herself as the breast cancer nurse who would be the main point of contact, she gave me her pager details and a load of leaflets - about breast cancer, its treatment and alternative treatment at the breast cancer centre. And that was that. As perfect a textbook diagnosis you could ask for.

But God help you if you get dementia. Chances are (50%) you or your relatives will never get a diagnosis. And the diagnosis is never perfect. The so-called 'Nice' guidelines recommend not to tell you if they think you don't want to know. There is nobody applying the sorts of standards of Cancer Care to dementia. Nobody will ever discuss a treatment plan with you, mainly because there isn't one, because the care slips through the gaps between personal care (social services) and health care. It's a long, difficult death, lasting 20 years but you won't die at home or in a hospice. They're all for cancer patients (95%).

I won't be cycling round the world I'm afraid. Or doing a triathlon, or in fact anything where some poor souls have to sponsor me. Cancer patients are well served. And they have plenty of people, dead and alive fighting for their corner. I don't know whether to crack open the champagne or cry for 2 years over the death of this Cancer Superwoman. I prefer Cherie Booth to be honest.

But if I help a quicker and better diagnosis for even one dementia patient I'll be a little happier. If I stop one doctor writing 'Old Age' as the primary cause on one death certificate I'll be a little happier. And I will be very sanctimonious about it indeed. As sanctimonious and victorious as the next cancer superwoman. And if anyone writes poison pen letters telling me to vote Tory, euthanasia works, have chemo once a week, stop reading, stop studying, worship Madonna, stop eating out, sell my engagement ring or some other thing that I don't want to do in a million years I won't be dignified. I will tell them to piss off.

Is 'All you need is Love' the best song ever composed?

There's nothing that you can write that isn't written.

But that wasn't a line from the song.

Anyway we've had a lovely weekend, despite my husband not forgiving me for booking us into the worst hotel in the world. He recorded me a video of it for posterity to make us laugh if ever we get depressed. We had an overlap with Yorkshire rental arrangements where it meant he didn't have anywhere to live for 2 nights and this 'Lodge' was my answer.

And then we moved him into this cottage near York - friends renting it to us. And I got thinking about friendship again. Would I be friends with my relatives if I wasn't related to them? And some friends are like relatives anyway. You've grown up with some of them. And like relatives, because you're friends with them say for example because they're friends with your mum, you don't really have that much choice. And neither do they. You have all this small talk business. Are you enjoying work? Did you watch Supernanny? But I still love em. All of em.

I'm just about to celebrate 20 years of friendship with one of my friends. It was actually last year (the 20 year anniversary date) but we both had too much on. We've been through everything together, sort of. And a lot not together. And we're probably quite different now. We went to Donnington 88 together and nearly got crushed in the Guns N Roses push. She introduced me to good music and nice people. I made friends with her friends, she made friends with mine. I became part of the family for a while. She was always beautifully dressed. She had a few boyfriends and so did I. She got engaged. I moved to London. She got married. I moved jobs. She became a teacher. I became a preacher (not). And she came to my wedding and stayed right to the end. When I treasured my 'Shortcuts to Bounching back from heartbreak' after splitting up from Silly-boy, I wrote inside 'What is a friend?'. That's one.

Anyway the answer to the question is possibly.

Advo-cake

Someone, who will remain nameless, has asked me to write their business plan for a 'dragon's den' application for an innovative bakery idea they've got up their sleeve. Anyway to make a short story extremely long, I've been trying to think of how I would make their innovative cakes (I haven't been let on to the actual invention so I could be totally wrong on that to start with) fit in with my business ethics. This happened to coincide with a meeting I attended in a professional capacity. What I learnt (well, more reinforced what I already knew) at this meeting is that care is absolutely shocking for those people with 'complex' needs at home. What happens if you have multiple scelorosis, motor neurone disease or Alzheimers is that you're effectively fending for yourself. Nobody, for example is prepared to feed these people, apart from their relatives. The District Nurses are (allegedly) only willing to replace bandages, Home Care workers do the hoovering. 'Feeding' is part of the grey area between personal care, health care, domicilliary care and home care. Money isn't the issue. It's just how it's organised. I was suitably livid after discussing this for a while and was thinking of how I could possibly persuade the Dragons to give me loads of dosh to solve this problem and combine it with my friend's application. And I came up with 'Advo-cake'. It would combine advocacy with cakes. Poor people would be able to get a home-delivered cake in return for a nominal sum (say £1) a week. Then they could upgrade if they wanted to a sort of Car Breakdown Service for themselves where they get an emergency advocate to see them if they get a 'long term condition'. For the £1 a week service we'd be able to keep an eye on people and slip in the odd leaflet informing them of how the system works.

Anyway, business was never really my strong point. Or cakes. I might retract the business plan idea, especially as we've got so much on at the moment.

Offer accepted

The offer on the house has been accepted. So only another four months of stress and juggling about eleven balls to go. Except it's more like a year as it's only then that the MA is over. I'm resorting to read Richard Rorty on my lunch break. Good distraction. There's a good poem in there too. My problem is I seem to discover these academics I like, just when they've recently died. Like Roy Porter. He died about six months before I tried to contact him. And Richard Rorty wrestled with the reaper of grimness two months ago. I give up on this poetry lark. Rorty & Porter would approve.

Blogging on the train

GNER is quite amazing, certainly compared to MEGABUS. In fact slicing your knuckles with a blunt razor blade is quite good compared to Megabus. Anyway, they've got wifi, which my wonderful husband managed to sort out for me before I departed. So here I am typing aware on the World Wide Web publishing to the 'world'. And it's a bit of an experiment. I'm quite pleased it's a little experiment I seem to have beaten even Blaglady to. You can survey the scene and report back to your 'readers' or 'market' or 'friends' or 'self'. Anyway there's a couple in their thirties sitting at the table down and to the right. They're married. I've clocked the rings. She's Asian he looks northern. They look like teachers and I'm wondering if they're coming back from the Leeds Festival. And basically that's what everyone who's on this train looks like they're doing. So it's not a very interesting or exciting experiment. The married guy with glasses married to the Asian lady is now asleep. That says it all really.

But I bet Tony Blair is now regretting he didn't do a journal when he was in office. I'd hate to have to try and remember all the interesting bits 10 years from now that happened today. We saw my cousin and her fiancee for example. They showed us how they've converted a garage into a bedroom, and they've got two reception rooms in this new house. They recommended that we didn't live in Halifax. And then we had an afternoon nap. It's all these titbits of information that just get lost in the melay. Although ironically today ten years ago of course Princess Diana died so most people remember a lot of detail about that day as it's etched on our memories. I remember that I was in London staying in this awful place near Turnpike Lane, which had mice, with my Ex. Radio One was playing non stop funeral music which I woke up to thought it was weird, then they said why. I was doing my post-grad diploma in journalism and had this brain wave of building on the anti-media backlash that occured by burning loads of tabloids in the streets. But I never sorted it out. I still think about what a missed opportunity that was. I hated the media, it was a stupid idea to do a vocational course in that area. I failed the diploma. The rest, as they say, is history.

Ten Amazing Things (to do on holiday)

1) Watch Kate Nash perform (on telly)
2) Kiss your husband
3) Make sure you bring your slippers, especially if you're going up North. In fact come to think of it don't bother otherwise
4) Read GErmaine Greer's article on Princess Diana in the Sunday Times.
5) Then have a heated debate on the defammation laws with your husband
6) And then look them up on his phone on Wikipedia
7) Then moan about the internet on his phone - ie you can't read it. Hopefully distracting him from the fact that you've lost the debate.
8) Go for at least one amazing meal per day. Like The Durham Ox near York.
9) Try something like Beetroot Souffle.
10) Then start saying things like 'Is it me or are people at festivals getting younger?' And Look at the sky out of the window. Thanking your lucky stars you're not actually at a festival, getting dirty/too hot/cold/bored/annoyed/stuck in traffic. And finish your wedding thank you cards.

Excited about the 'new', postmodern history of dementia

There's so much going on at the moment, hardly got time to breathe. We've put an offer on a house in Leeds - 2 bed semi in Chapel Allerton £150k. I'm supposed to be doing all the research for my course which starts in October. We're renting our flat out, moving to York temporarily, applying for jobs left right and centre, trying to make friends with my brother's friends in London so we're not Mr and Mrs Billy-no-mates up there. Fitting in work around that and the usual being a quite frankly pathetic friend to all my existing friends in London. Then there's all the financial rubbish linked to this - sorting out a loan to put as a deposit on the second house, trying not to think about the stock market crash, how much debt we're already in.

Anyway I'm still happy, most excited about my MA. I just think that with house buying 'property' is so much about luck, I know normal people would be most excited about that. But in many ways the more you own the more you have to worry about. Doing an MA in the history of dementia is a totally different kettle of fish. There's an element of luck, but it's much reduced.

I'm narrowing down my field. It's going to be called 'The Forgotten Forgetting: The deaths of a generation in the 1990s, a post-modern history of dementia". I'm going to link the rise in age discrimination which I will prove occured in the 90s with increasing, untimely and unreported deaths from dementia, hand in hand with a reduction in real terms expenditure on treatment of the disease. The documentary with Barbara and Malcolm Pointon supports this, plus the report from the National Audit Office a few weeks ago. I feel vindicated. Like Dementia's Joan of Arc. Perhaps not a brilliant analogy. Anyway...

I'm about to email my (brilliant) tutor and ask her how many death certificates she thinks I should look at - 100 or 1000? I'm trying to cram in all the primary source research before I actually start which is a tad ridiculous. It worked when I was doing my undergrad stuff though. Then you effectively concentrate on writing up for the next 9 months.

The other problem is I can't decide whether I'm a postmodernist or not. They're all a bit weird. And the modernists seem to write better stuff. What I think is that we're in the postmodern era. The era when infinity seems as weird and wonderful as it really is, when people talk about nonsense. Progress seems a distant era, perhaps when our parents were growing up. So we're all postmodernists now, whether we like it or not. I prefer postmodern to 'new' as it conjurs up 'new' labour images which make me feel a bit sick. And the 'neo-philiacs' in Private Eye. But the 'neophiliacs' manage to distance themselves from the postmodernists just by putting that word in front of themselves. I don't think they can escape.

How long before I stop wearing a coat?

I've come to Leeds for the weekend to acclimatise before we move here. The thing you easily forget about up North is how about 1% of the population wear coats, even if the temperature is about 10 degrees below Zero. But the fascinating thing is I USED TO NEVER WEAR A COAT EITHER. Back in the day, when Northern cities really were run down, I never wore a coat out, in January. So the moral of the tale is that non-coat wearing is a purely cultural phenomenon. I won't be able to get Northerners to wear coats, they'll infiltrate my softie southernised culture and persuade me not to wear it, in their subtle, influencing ways. But how long will it take?

A two star review of 'Hope and Glory Britain 1900-2000' by Peter Clarke

Another of the stupid IT things which annoys me is Amazon book reviews. Blaglady introduced me to this hobby a few years ago. But unfortunately for them I give them detailed, negative reviews and those ones they don't publish which really gets on my nerves. But now, this is critical. One of the things about studying & writing is that you have to try and write every day. So you can get feedback, improve your style, find your niche, get confidence, improve spelling and so on. So I'm going to start publishing my negative reviews on my blog. This will also help with my MA, where summarising books is a good skill to have, obviously especially if they're relevant.

So here goes:

Yes, the Spectator and the Telegraph rave about this book, but for most of us, who have to read it anyway as it's a core text on a reading list, we struggle to give it three stars. In fact the three stars it's getting is just in case any of the professors who have contributed to it and will be marking my work shortly might read this review and spot who I am. Anyway to cut a long story short, if you enjoy watching the History Channel (which incidentally in our house is called 'The War Channel') if you like Newsnight, Dragon's den, subscribe to the Economist and want to be a Merchant Banker when you graduate, then I suspect you'll devour it in less than 2 hours, and give it 5 stars here.

For me, it's a bit too much like nineteenth century historians would write about the twentieth century, for example on page 53 'Asquith stepped effortlessly into the premiership in 1908 and looked the part immediately'. You know what? I don't care about Asquith. That was under the 'Fiscal Crisis' by the way if that whets your appetite.

As it proceeds through the twentieth century it gets quite hilarious,as the book tries to stay up to date, almost as if the publishers want you to have it as a coffee table book and as if you'd pick it up to remember what was going on in 1992. So on page 414 there's a footnote 'It was not known that Major himself had had an affair in the 1980s with the Conservative junior minister Edwina Currie until the publication in 2002 of Currie's memoirs'.

It's not so much history as politics. The twentieth century is treated in the standard way of a progressively improving place with good chaps leading the way. Boring, turgid and ridiculous. And who, by the way, was the Metric Equivalents of Imperial Units Chart on page 6 published for? Some French metric historical political enthusiasts who might have picked up the book by accident? I wonder how many times the owners of this book have thought - ooh, how many hundredweights are in a tonne, I might pick up my Peter Clarke history text book to check?

I did like the prologue, where he looked like he was going to talk about interesting stuff like married women having 10 pregnancies, but actually the whole book is more like an instruction manual to the mood swings of prime ministers and imperial heavyweights.

Tamoxifen advice

They're being very strict with me about taking Tamoxifen and finally I'm getting used to it thank God.