Well, it seems OK. Yesterday morning Ed visited the doctor again, who gave him the all-clear for the flight to Portugal. Since we leave at 7.10am from Stansted, and therefore have to be there at the ungodly hour of 5.10am (yes, there is such a time), we’re driving down to Stansted after lunch today and putting up at a B&B (well, a B anyway. Not sure we’ll feel much like the other B at 4.30am) and leaving the car there. They’ll transport us to the airport and pick us up on the way back.
So here we are – all set. I’m taking a little netbook with me, there’s free wi-fi, so as long as the tiny netbook doesn’t drive me demented, I’ll try and blog a bit while we’re there. Otherwise, see you all in a fortnight.
Oh, BTW, there are ghastly storms in Portugal at the moment! C’est la vie!
Late Monday evening, Ed felt a bit woozy – like you do sometimes if you get up from a chair too quickly. So we toddled off to bed, expecting everything to be all right by the morning.
But it wasn’t. He still felt dizzy, and had a bit of discomfort in his chest. Since we’re due to fly off to Portugal on Saturday (yes, wonderful timing, isn’t it?) we decided he had to see the doctor. We got an appointment yesterday morning and off we drove.
The doctor was wonderful. Checked Ed all over, pronounced “acute atrial fibrillation”, gave us a letter and sent us straight to hospital.
By the time we’d traipsed long corridors finding the right department, poor Ed was feeling grisly. Then we sat and waited while the nurse was busy with another patient with chest pain.
When she got to Ed and stood him up, his legs buckled. With that, about six people materialised from nowhere, got him into a side ward, stuck monitors onto his chest, thrust an oxygen mask over face, and sent me out. It was terrifying.
I sat outside in tears, whereupon somebody bustled up with comforting words and a cup of tea.
Anyway, they were all marvellous. Put Ed on a drip with some stuff to stabilise his heart followed by morphine for the pain, did endless tests, took a chest X-ray and ECG.
I had no phone or money with me, so when Ed was stable and much better, I came home and rang the family. Al came straight over and we drove up to the hospital again with an overnight bag for Ed.
During the time I was absent he’d be seen by three consultants, and when we got there, a cardiologist arrived. He was very reassuring. Said Ed’s heart had stabilised with the medication and everything else was fine. He put him on Warfarin because apparently the biggest risk with AF is stroke, and sent us home with packets of medication and a letter for our doctor. He said the Warfarin would need to be monitored, but that could be done in Portugal and as long as Ed is feeling all right by Friday, we can fly.
And all this for free. I LOVE the NHS!
He seems fine this morning. We have rung Portugal, who say there is no problem about getting Ed to a clinic, and they’re giving us a ground floor room. So hopefully, all will be okay.
Could do without this sort of excitement, though.
Ed and I went back to the old parish to a funeral on Friday.
Remember the lady who was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver on Christmas Eve? The family had to take the agonising decision on Christmas Day, to turn off life support.
Then they had to wait for the inquest, and although the driver turned himself in, since then he’s been disputing the accident, so things are dragging on and on.
It was the funeral on Friday, and I’ve never seen the church so packed. It’s the biggest church of the six in the benefice, seating 350, but they were standing six deep at the back. Ed and I arrived half-an-hour before the service was due to begin, and managed to snag the last two seats.
It was a good service, led by Nigel the Curate and Meg, the local (retired) priest from that parish. But it was really sad meeting people again under such circumstances. There were many tears at the funeral, for she was one of those quiet, unsung saints. She was born in the village and had lived there all her life, so everybody knew her and loved her.
Yesterday we cheered up with a visit from the family. It’s Ed’s birthday on Tuesday week, but we’re off to Portugal next weekend, so they came to see him before we go.
Can’t wait to get into the sunshine! More sleet and snow today, and church was so cold I thought I might quietly die. We stayed to a Lent hunger lunch after the service – home-made soup with French bread, followed by rice pudding or bread and butter pudding (all the guys chose that, all the women chose rice!) Then we went home and filled up on toast and marmalade. Not sure that’s quite the point of a hunger lunch, but you have to keep the cold at bay somehow.
That’s my excuse, anyway.
Had Nigel the curate and his wife, Rilla, over to supper last night.
“Come at six thirty,” I blithely said, “so that we can eat at seven.”
But this was Nigel, so at twenty-past six we got a call. “What time did you say? Oh! Well, it may be nearer to seven than six-thirty.”
So there we sat. The clock crept round to seven, ten-past, twenty-past. At twenty-five-past, we got another call.
“I’m standing outside the pub. How do I get to you from here?”
So I gave directions and eventually they arrived, soaking wet as it had been raining all evening.
To be fair, it wasn’t entirely their fault, as there were roadworks, they had been diverted and got lost. And naturally had neither a map nor satnav with them.
Anyway, all was forgiven the moment they arrived because they’re such good company. The meal was good, the wine flowed freely, and Nigel kept us in stitches relating tales from his student days. He’s a very good actor, and very funny.
So a good time was had by all, except that Ed didn’t sleep well afterwards.
“We ate too late,” he said.
Yesterday was orange Sunday in the Scott household.
Not that I knew it was going to be orange Sunday. I expected orange Friday, or at least Saturday, but no, it turned out to be Sunday. And I’m not talking mobile phones.
I’ve been looking out for weeks now for the Seville oranges, to make marmalade. They come at the end of January or beginning of February, but if you blink, you miss the season.
It turns out that Tesco’s, where I shop, never stocks Seville oranges. A friend told me a week ago that she’d got hers from Sainsbury’s, and made her marmalade. But somehow or other I never got round to Sainsbury’s, so thought I’d had it for yet another year – and after bullying Ed to keep all those empty jam jars that stack up in the garage.
Anyway, on Friday he went down to the local farm shop for provisions, and rang me up to say they had Seville oranges. (Strange, since they sell local produce. I’ve not yet seen any oranges growing locally, let alone Sevilles). Unfortunately I was on the phone at the time, so he tried my mobile, which was switched off, so he drove all the way home to ask what I wanted, then all the way back to buy them. And they say romance is dead.
So there I stood on Friday afternoon, chopping up oranges, scooping all the pips into a clean handkerchief (don’t have any muslin), and adding pints of water. But then I discovered that the recipe said, “leave to stand overnight”. That was it for Friday.
On Saturday I started again, but discovered that you only boil up the mixture and cook the fruit for an hour and a half, then leave it to stand overnight again, which brought us to Sunday.
Ed sensible suggested that we went to the small church this week, since the service there is at nine thirty rather than eleven, and I’m glad we did, since it took me almost the whole of the rest of the day to boil up my marmalade to setting point (tested by forming a “good wrinkle” on a cold saucer!) and pot it. Then I discovered I hadn’t enough jars, so had to empty out the coffee into a plastic container and use the coffee jar.
The end result? 18 pounds of really quite tasty marmalade (well, it is a recipe handed down from at least my grandmother, if not earlier!)