Looking back.

Well It’s that time of year again, where we look forward to the coming year, and at the same time look back at all that happened in the year gone by.

Ok we’re still a week or so short of the end but here’s a quick summary of all that’s gone before.

The year started quietly and got quieter, with nothing much at all going on. I had’nt been anywhere, seen anyone or done anything special over the festive season… business as usual then.

There was a little fillip early in January with my decision to declutter my life a bit [yeah yeah yeah, you’ve heard it all before] Since I’ve long fallen out of love with hillwalking and mountaineering in it’s more extreme forms, and biking just is’nt my thing, I needed something to keep me in some sort of shape, and my acquisition of an open canoe was designed to do just that. It got a lot of use too, but only around here. Circumstances later in the year more or less put a block on the planned trips into remote bits of Scotland.

The big thing happened in early April when the love of my life, Sian entered my err…life. How this came about has been catalogued elsewhere on this blog, but what has’nt been recorded was what happened afterwards.. Basically from May onwards Sian was one very sick girlie, totally exhausted, stressed and just generally going downhill. With a bit of hassling from meself she went to a doc and then a specialist and then in a matter of days into hospital for an op to remove cancer in her breast….which was all successful. Oh I have’nt mentioned the court case either…and I wont, but that had it’s moments too, but at least she won. But that’s another story.

By the middle of June she was home and in convalescence, ready to start the next traumatic stage – radiotherapy. It all meant that she was home on sick pay that would’nt support a anorexic mouse and ultimately no job to go back to, not that this last bit was bad since we are in no doubt that the stresses and strains of that was a prime cause of the illness to begin with.

Thankfully the radiotherapy went without a hitch, the only real problem was a case of nasty ‘sunburn’ to her boob… not so the tamoxifen that was recommended that came with all sorts of weird side-effects. Sian only lasted 3 weeks on this before deciding it was’nt needed [the consultant agreed] but it’s taken months from that point to get it out of her system.

Between all this and my abortive attempts to get going on the bathroom, all my proposed canoeing trips away were put on abeyance, the boat was hardly used - so little I hoiked her out of the water early August, reclaimed the mooring fees and put her up for sale. Holidays have been confined to long weekends, firstly in Plymouth where I went to fetch sian back from Brittany and then a couple of impulse trips over to France, because we happened to be in the bottom left hand corner of Britain anyway… and that’s it really



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