So much has been going on since I last wittered on about my comings and goings and family life. My ailments have been playing up - still going in the right direction, but reactions to children's sore throats act as a litmus paper for psoriatic arthropathy - and my autoimmune roller coaster ride has been rather bumpy of late. However we did all go off to Glastonbury to give my endless fuss a change of scene and treat the children to five days of being hippies on the Green Fields part of the festival. We arrived after an epic journey of gentle squabbling and folding caravan fuss and managed to get in and on site before the main gate shut. This is unusual as we have on many occasions arrived at camp sites including in France, and been locked out and all slept in the car, until the morning. I knew we had officially arrived once the air had filled with an ominous smell of burning rubber and the clutch had been burnt out. We had a nice garden styled camping area, with lots of hippies trotting around in wafting cheese cloth, my husband included - and after a late night.. spent the next day setting up, including lifting the turf up slightly and burying the cable for our solar panels - enabling me to be ill in bed in the caravan, or at times the children, and have internet, and other such things to play with. We go camping an awful lot, I carry at least three bottles of gas, and 6 hot water bottles, and large amounts of wine, which I dish out liberally to anybody who moans anywhere near me. It all went very well apart from one very wearing friend who likes to lecture me for hours on end about how I am doing everything wrong with my conditions, informing me how he is totally gluten free, this said at the same time as he waded his way through a double sized portion of glutenous tagliatelle followed by an even more gluten loaded slice of birthday cake, His lecturing intentions famous for decades amongst all who know and put up with him - however he does play a mean tune or two on either of his preferred instruments, when he is able to stop actually giving music lessons to any other musician on site.
Meanwhile my husband immersed himself in various therapies, dancing and bands going on with an abundance of joss sticks - accompanied by our friend hairy legs who is able to give a sideways out of mouth running commentary , as acidic as my own - designed for my ears only, which continued from when we arrived until the minute we left. The band my husband was in this year took on the behaviors of a hornets nest about to swarm - so I mainly hung out with the children when they were not away at bands or resting and just did what the hell I wanted. Mostly sitting around a good old camp fire. A change is as good a rest and I am lucky to have a partner who despite how unwell I am, thinks it is ok to drag me off anywhere with new things to do.
On the home front, he has been busy, and some very serious and ernest colleagues in one office decided to get a feng Shui expert in - to see if the business could be improved... I read the report and much to his disgust literally howled with laughter... I could see that it was mainly about him needing to tidy up and take his dreadful pictures down which were supposedly causing ruination of everything. He has now confiscated it from me so I can't read any more of it, in case I bump into the author of the report and confer with them about anything. I felt like paying her treble time to come and do his wardrobes and office in our house.
We then loitered with intent at a small festival on the edge of Norfolk - we went of in convoy, my friend in her horsebox full of children, another neighbour with her van full of children and us with ours, and lovely weather and fun we had too. I mainly faffed about and lay down, but we did buy lots of jumble and Pimms and very nice things to eat with lots of bands playing. Once back from that one, he announced with a clap of the hands and quite convincing authority - that he was very busy and had a number of things to do in that 'needing to be violently feng shuied office'. I went in there two hours later, naturally suspicious, having heard that tone for 21 years now - to find him blissfully installed on Freecycle, no sign of any work of course. We did meet rummaging through skips in London, and this is the online version. He had pounced on an electric piano. This triggered many phone calls from a man with a nasaly, train spotterish voice who sounded as if he was busy rubbing pennies together and would never relinquish anything to Free Cycle that actually worked. However I was proved totally wrong - a treat of a grown up piano,has arrived, however we do already have two uprights and four other electric pianos, it is yet another highly satisfactory procrastination aid for him. As fast as I try and empty our house for possible people viewing it's for sale status, he fills it back up again.
I have been laid up rather a lot of late, and late at night have been watching foul television concerning people's embarrassing body ailments.. I just do not get it..sheepish people who have something hairy and embarrassing who are too shy to show the doctor.. but instead show their magnified parts on national television to several million people....I end up feeling most bilious with that programme...I mean why if you are too shy to show your GP your arse, would you want to press it up against the television camera? I also have felt most nauseated by various cleaning programmes in vogue currently. To take my mind off them and my throbbing irritations, he has been helping with my various confinements - firstly by doing lots of upcycling... so that when I am well enough to get down to some cleaning, things are not what they seem... I found some spray bleach the other day for a hideous job involving over due bins in the garden, to find yet another container NOT relabeled containing essence of patchouli and lavender. He also brought a giant fan into the bedroom when I was half asleep, put it on, on maximum and left on rotate. I awoke to find everything in the room blowing around including the entire contents of my dressing table. Once cleared up, I settled for it's lowest setting at the foot of the bed - this makes a rather out of space hum.. which is doubly muddling as I have giant half globe paper lampshade several feet across, from a certain Swedish store which hates chintz... and in the early hours.. with the humming in the background and the dawn light playing tricks I have several times felt that perhaps a space ship was hovering over my bed. Mind you having watched those programmes recently, I do not fit the profile of ladies who are kidnapped by aliens for experiments and then put back again!
During all this, Dithers has phoned me with her various dramas. a man she likes very much came to a presentation she did, and had to see her with a nervous twitch magnified to several times her size on projection screen coupled with several unflattering passport style photographs. She then went off to have minor operation and caused havoc in the hospital, as the surgeon mistook her slight allergy to plasters as being a serious latex allergy, and started taking the operating theater to pieces, this had gone on for quite some time, before the dithering was brought under control again. Her operation went smoothly but apparently as she came around, realized that she was lying next to a man staring at her, who was in fact her next door neighbour.
My highlight of this last week was my young son, who had been ill, once I got ill again, decided to climb our large apple tree and scratch himself to pieces on thorns, in order to pick his mother a large bunch of red roses. Every autumn I plan to prune it, and then forget.. so very large blood red roses made of velvet sprout out of the top of the tree in some abundance. However after this episode I feel I will actually remember to prune it this time around.
Amongst all of this, I am having some positive change, I am slowly losing weight, as we all know this is no easy feat with hypothyroidism but nevertheless it is slowly shifting, and I have had a few more well days with my five things, but I do dread the lecture uniformed people can give about diet without any thought to the fact that you may already be on it... I feel blessed to have bought some hard copies of reading material... as the next person who suggests gluten free or whatever for my over active immune system will be thumped with them. I am gluten free and have been for nearly one year, it has stopped my violent sneezing and I also hope will help my LDN work better.
Tonight I have my second flare up this week, very very annoying, my man had been away at a festival and is now coming hurtling back to see me - I had not expected him until tomorrow. However it is not all down to how I am.. it is rather more due to last night's sleeping arrangements. I did try and help him get ready and was greeted with lots of 'shoosh dear I can manage'. Once he had arrived on site, he informed me on Saturday afternoon, that he had forgotten a sleeping bag, and a camping mat, and that the tent was broken, and that he would be sleeping in the car - wrapped in my best duvet cover, his latest obsession, which he calls a sheet sleeping bag - popping himself inside one as it is too hot for duvets and blankets.. but out in the wilds in only a car.. this arrangement was not at all satisfactory...and my suggestion of borrowing a blanket had fallen on deaf ears...and he had been warmed temporarily by pints of beer. So at any moment I expect him to burst in and tell me more dreadful tales of squabbling bands and minor mishaps.
I am still munching my way through nutri adrenal extra and nutri thryoid and climbing up on LDN with D Mannose added in to try and stop three weekly infection appearing. I hope for radical improvements soon, and will now disappear to Easter Europe to sulk myself better. Mary F x
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