Monthly Archives: March 2015

Mar 08 2015
6 Comments
Daily Life

Never Go To An All-You-Can-Eat When You’re Starving

all you can eatI took The Teenager out for a meal today to celebrate some recent exam success.

They don’t do GCSEs like they used to (in my day, we just had one huge exam in each subject; nowadays they seem to do them in dribs and drabs, tsk), so I imagine we’ll be having quite a few of these meals over the coming months.

Anyway, it could have been bread and water for him earlier this week after I got his report card from school. Two weeks late.

I was only made aware of this by default after speaking with another parent and when confronted, The Teenager fake-smacked his forehead and said, ‘oh yeah, knew I’d forgotten something, must be, like, all that studying filling up my brain, like, totally.’

To cut a long story short, when he’s good, he’s pretty impressive but when he can’t be bothered, he’s awful. A snippet from two of his subjects – ‘… it appears that he has deemed this subject entirely irrelevant to his educational needs’ and ‘his mock exam was disappointing because he answered the wrong question.’

Anyway, lunch. A warehouse-type all-you-can eat soulless place, with tables crammed so close to each other I was able to read the Twitter timeline of the diner next to me as he scrolled through his phone, ignoring his friend and stuffing his face with noodles.

I was starving. So was The Teenager, but that’s nothing new. So we grabbed our plates and checked out what was on offer. The usual suspects (vague impressions of Thai, Chinese and Indian food with some salad thrown in) and we piled our plates high. Lovely.

Unfortunately, being British I felt a bit awkward going up a second time, and a third. As I passed the gaggle of waitresses, I felt compelled to say something stupid like, ‘oh, haven’t eaten in days‘  (one glance at me would confirm this is simply untrue) or ‘thyroid, eh?’. Why? I cringed as the plates piled high on our table, but I was determined to get my money’s worth.

We eventually moved like locusts towards the desserts section. Mini cheesecake? Yes please. Mini chocolate roulade? Don’t mind if I do. The Teenager made impressive inroads into the ice-cream bar.

Finally, we staggered to the door and as we headed back to the car, The Teenager said, ‘Aw, thanks mum, what’s for dinner?

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Mar 03 2015
12 Comments
My Ramblings

What MS Isn’t

dancingThere’s plenty written about what MS is, but what isn’t it?

It’s not:

  • An ‘easy’ illness (I’m probably not the only person to be told, ‘Well, thank goodness it’s nothing more serious, eh?’)
  • An excuse – it is what it is and I won’t be apologising for it
  • A competition – why tell me your MS is so much worse than mine? If it makes you feel better, go ahead; it just makes me feel guilty
  • Always obvious – if you passed me in the street, you would have no idea I had MS (until I stumble, but hey, I could be drunk?)
  • Cushy – you might think enforced sofa-dossing is a dream come true, I hate it with a passion
  • The same for everyone – put 500 MSers in one room and you’d have 500 different stories

Recently, stem-cell treatment for MS has hit the headlines, and how – all the tired phrases were rolled out: ‘MS sufferer’, ‘cut down in the prime of life’, ‘tragic’. Funnily enough, I am none of these. However, I have been contacted by various people over the last few days all telling me the same thing – MS is curable! You can get back to real life now! You can dance again!

Now, anyone who has ever seen me dance will know that this is not necessarily a good thing. The only shapes I throw are the bodies of other people across the dance floor as I bump into them. Yes, the news from the trial is wonderful and I couldn’t be happier and of course the media loves a good news story, but behind the headlines there are thousands of us, millions of us across the world, just trying to get on with life.

MS, and more importantly, living with MS, has changed phenomenally over the last three decades. Sadly, the public perception of it is lagging far behind. Behind every diagnosis there is a unique life story and we don’t want that to come to an abrupt halt just because our brains threw up one lesion too many.

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Mar 01 2015
18 Comments
Daily Life

Our New Addition …

Bronte2I couldn’t help myself. I was (and still am) deep in mourning after my beloved cat Dora was knocked down and killed recently.

I shouldn’t have looked at the cats seeking their ‘forever home’. Their big, pleading eyes, their sad stories, their heart-wrenching starts in life.

So we now have a new addition to our little family – Brontë. Quick explanation about the somewhat pretentious name: she arrived with the name ‘Bronwen’, and, much as I love Welsh names, it seemed a bit of an odd choice for a tiny kitten, not even six months old.

She wouldn’t answer to my new choice of name, ‘Flump’ nor The Teenager’s, ‘Pancake’ or ‘Dog’. We tried out ‘Batwoman’ and ‘Kerpow’ (check out her Bat Mask), to no avail. So she became ‘Bronnie’ until one evening I called her ‘Bronty’ by mistake and she came trotting over. Result. Being of a literary persuasion (lol), she is now named after one of my favourite authors.

Anyway, she has settled in remarkably well, so well that she enjoys nothing more than scampering up my curtains and sitting on the wooden pole, grinning down at me. She also tears around the house in an endless loop and can make a toy out of anything – she’s smitten with my hair bands and has fished out seventeen of them from a bowl in my bedrooom (I counted) and laid them all on one of my rugs in an impressive pattern and every so often she returns to rearrange them.

In short, she fits in well. She’s also great to snuggle up with when the dreaded mid-afternoon MS crash happens. We mute the telly and radio, choose our blanket and flop onto the sofa.

Plus, she adores The Teenager and he’s in awe of her acrobatics (and her fondness for squatting in my larger plants before I can chase her off), although she is now banned from his bedroom after she stole his expensive headphones.

She may be hard work right now, but I wouldn’t be without her. A bit like The Teenager …

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