Update 23
The week began positively. I enjoyed a proper Sunday lunch with rib of beef and some lovely Burgundy wine. On Monday we returned to restaurant Gianni after an 8 week absence and I tackled a parma ham with melon starter followed by their vitello milanese accompanied by a lovely Primitivo. In the taste department, all is not yet lost. Palliative nurse Michelle rang and accepted that the Steroid withdrawals must have caused my eating problem. I’ve been back on them for a week now and she will discuss with her Consultant a more appropriate rate of steroid reduction from this point on.
Over the last few days we’ve tried to collect the drugs prescribed last Thursday but to no avail. Yesterday, (Tuesday)) I rang the surgery who owned up that instead of as usual, relaying the request directly to the pharmacy, they had printed a paper script which presumably was still hanging around the practice office - how were we to know? The receptionist said she’d forward an electronic request at once so hopefully the pharmacy will have something for us later today and so it’s proved.
Also today, someone called from the ENT team and they want to see me next week to investigate the difficulty I’m still having with swallowing, the hope for further improvement still exists.
According to the Guardian, the survival period for Glioblastoma patients is now 12-18 months from diagnosis. I was initially told 3-4 so who knows what’s to come . There is a new drug that can delay death, but it’s not available on the nhs.
The amount of nonsense still being perpetrated by this government gets no better. If you take away 22,000 police officers (Theresa May) and then only recruit 15,000 new ones ( claimed by Sunak yesterday), you have NOT really increased the number of Police serving the UK, and the levels of corruption currently being revealed about too many of our Police forces suggests that recruitment may not be their biggest challenge.
Above everything else we do need to talk honestly about the harm that Brexit has done and continues to do to our economy. Uniquely among European nations, we have still failed to return to the level of economic activity we enjoyed before COVID. There is no explanation for this distinction other than Brexit and that is so self evident that if we cannot or will not own up about it, then there is no possibility of our repairing the damage. I note that an increasing number of public figures are starting to speak about it but sadly none of them serve in the present government. Most of that lot have their heads firmly stuck in the sand.
Sunak is one whose head is also in the sand about something else: namely his inability to avoid recruiting low calibre performers such as Suella Braverman, Gavin Williamson or Dominic Raab. Not one of these was other than lacklustre in their pre political lives, and the same has been proved true for their parliamentary careers. Sunak must terminate them as ministers before they do even more harm to his government, which still has the potential to improve on those of any of his immediate predecessors. BS warning: I note that even now, out of government, Rees-Mogg is still spouting his usual ill-informed nonsense.
I wonder if you were as nauseated as I was by the sight of Truss and Johnson at last Sunday’s Cenotaph event. Two people who’ve casually brought this country to its knees in pursuit of their own careers and yet who will have a place of honour at this ceremony, every year for the rest of their lives - just so undeserved when thousands of others who attend this event gave so much.
On the subject of war, I fear that we are not paying enough attention to the evil force that is Russia. The land that once rose to the heights of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Checkov and Pasternak or the beauty of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, has now opted to live in the gutter of indiscriminate thuggery - Chechnya, Syria, and now Ukraine. There are apparently no depths to which Putin and those who accept his leadership are prepared to sink. Apart from our limited donations, by and large we in the West can only watch and hope for it to all end, but short of WWIII (generally an unacceptable option) our leaders seem to have no practical ideas how that might be brought about.
The Autumn statement of course left most of the really bad stuff until after 2024 by which time this bunch of Conservatives will probably be history and Labour will have been re elected to clean up the whole crony-riddled mess created since their departure in 2010.
On Sunday our favourite restaurant-with-rooms in North Wales is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a special dinner, and we’ve been invited as guests of the chef and his wife. Margaret will drive us North to Ludlow, from where our friends Igor & Ellen have generously offered to drive us on to ‘Tyddyn Llan’ in Llandrillo. Our first big trip since diagnosis and eagerly anticipated.
