I Have Physiotherapy And Save A Life

Wednesday 2 July 2025. After all the weather forecasts here yesterday saying how nice it would be it was a day of white skies and a bit of rain later. I didn't think I was all that late going to breakfast club, but our usual table was already full and our little club of three ended up sitting away from the window for the day.

Miss Franny came with her brother Bob, or Smiley Bob as he's known in dog agility circles where he acts as a judge all over the Northern hemisphere. His (I'm sure) long suffering wife Mary made up our little reunion. It's always fun to meet up with them. They arrived just as the physios' exercise class was beginning. So they joined in with the leg stretching and arm waving and general hokey cokeyness!

Then the physios whisked me off to the gym where a short flight of four steps was waiting for me to see if I could fall a bit more gracefully than I did the last time. No getting up there with a Zimmer, but they had bannister rails on both sides and so, with one of the physios behind me ready to be knocked over and give me company if I fell, I climbed slowly up the four steps to a small mock landing then came slowly back down. No falls, no submissions, and any knockouts were reserved for how I felt.

I did it another two times by which time I had done just three treads short of climbing our stairs and coming down again at home. Now I gratefully accepted the offer of a rest before skipping merrily - no, better make that 'climbing slowly' back up and down twice more.

Later on I walked to and from the toilet from the Day Room, again further than I've driven a Zimmer before. The rest of the day was spent dozing and doodling a sketch.

Thursday 3 July 2025. I'm now using the walking frame more and finding it easier with only the occasional wobble. Because of those wobbles I'm not supposed to use it without a nurse at my side or behind me to lend a supporting hand.

The TV in the day room was taken away yesterday. It was a colour TV but limited its display to blue only... the blue got darker and darker towards the top of the screen until you couldn't make out any details at all. Still it was the only hospital TV showing blue movies... The replacement hasn't shown up yet but is to be a whopping 70 inch one. This means even people at the back of the room will be able to watch it.

The weather took a bit of a turn in that whilst it was sunny and bright, there was a fair bit of breeze making it quite chilly out in the garden. Then at lunch the Mutterer (remember him?) decided he had had enough of his pudding and scrumpled his paper serviette and put it into the bowl. Five minutes later he must have changed his mind because when I turned to face him, half of the serviette was poking out of his mouth whilst he was chewing on the rest. I had to put my fingers into his mouth to get it out. Probably another life I've saved. It must have tasted horrible but he was still doing his best to get the rest into his mouth.

Our little gang of three musketeers spent the day in the Day Room as usual. Although I had been woken as usual and asked if I was going down as usual, it was 40 minutes and 9.00am after being told I was next that anyone came back for me. It transpired that some of the nursing staff were on training courses, leaving very low numbers of staff to deal with the usual number of patients.

I turned down the offer of being wheeled down in a chair and walked with the aid of my Zimmer - it now sports my name on a little tag - and used that for the rest of the day to get to and from the Day Room to the loo etc. Miss Franny witnessed one of these journeys back and I was treated to a quick look of surprise and a big beaming smile.

An Occupational Therapist came to talk to me about what I might need putting in place at home which I took as a very positive sign that I might be able to go home shortly. As I approach being in hospital for eight full weeks, that was a very pleasant prospect to think about. For my family as well as for me. Fingers crossed. Oh and I finished my sketch seen above. It's of somewhere in the Cotswolds but don't ask me where...

Friday 4 July 2025. Two workmen came in and we all thought that the new super-size TV must have arrived, but no, they were measuring for new window blinds. One of the two men was particularly suited for the job - he must have been seven feet tall...

Lytham Festival started last night with Stevie Wonder headlining. As the nurses changed over to the night shift one was yawning. "I live just four minutes from the seafront," she said, "They've been doing sound checks all day, I haven't had any sleep at all..."

It had been an overcast day and evening brought a bit of rain. The three musketeers relinquished their muskets and escape plans and one by one we were wheeled or supported as we walked back to our rooms or ward bays.

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What Happened Onboard in Valencia

Friday 31 August 2007. We emerge from the caves at San Jose and into the sunshine and heat of Spain. The coach takes us back to the Island Star where we get a bite to eat and then join Cissie and Ada as usual on the Pool Deck.

They have a final gem to tell us. First of all let me explain something about the ship's toilet system... Ships have a different flushing system that works on a vacuum rather than just a simple flush of water. Connecting toilets to an outlet to the open sea can have disastrous siphoning effects where the toilets can turn instead into fountains of spectacular proportions. The vacuum makes a wierd and quite noisy PHHHHT-POOOOOSH! sound. Having a vacuum system means it's safer to get off the toilet before flushing of course as otherwise you can find yourself slightly shorter... Hence the old joke about the lady who gets stuck and her husband has to call for help. "But they'll see me with my pants down!" cries the lady.

Her husband chivalrously places his cap over his wife's lap and the ship's engineer comes to deliver his verdict. "Well, we can get your wife up without any problem, but that chap's a goner...!" Got the idea? So, the vacuum system is prone to blockages because the pipes are smaller than usual and during the week both we and the ladies had experienced a couple of problems when the system became blocked somewhere along our corridor and the ship had cleared it without problem once it was reported. Cissie and Ada though seemed to have a wierd problem with the flush operating after some delay once the knob was pushed.

And so to today's tale of woe and hilarity... "Eeh, I just fancied some crackers!" says Cissie. "It was about half past one and I'd just been to the loo but it wouldn't flush. Anyway, I didn't want to get crumbs in my bed so I took my crackers and went and sat on the loo to eat them." Yes I know... it's not what you were expecting is it...? "Well I was sitting there in my nightie on the loo, enjoying my crackers when all of a sudden: PHHHHT-POOOOOSH! I jumped out of my skin and got crumbs all over me!"

One of our favourite spots overlooking the pool deck.

This is our usual afternoon view from where we sat with Cissie and Ada. We enjoyed it so much that Fran decided in a moment of madness we should book another for next year and -eek- we're going to take my mother along! So tune in this time next year as we take our very own equivalent of Cissie and Ada along! We booked with a nice young lady who spent the rest of the week saying "Hello" to me every time we passed and therefore getting me in a great deal of trouble... Although not as potentially disastrous as the day a young lady had walked past our table in a very (and I mean very small bikini). I pulled my best leering face once she had safely passed only for Cissie to boom out at the top of her voice; "Oh! Liked her did you?!?" I didn't look round to see if she'd heard...

As we leave Valencia to head back to Majorca, we book a table in the Steak Restaurant and enjoy a sumptious silver service meal. The excellent starter is followed by a salad course and then the main meat course. The knives they brought could have done serious damage - I think they get them from the same source as the lumberjacks... Fran opts for slivers of lamb, I go for the filet mignon and we have a superb meal, helped along by an easy going conversation with our waiters and a bottle of wine, drunk from some generously-sized glasses! Fran lets me have the lion's share, luckily the lion doesn't mind and soon I am beyond caring that we have to go home on the following day!

And so Saturday 1st September dawns and we find ourselves back in Palma, Majorca where we had set off on our cruise one week before. We have breakfast with the two ladies we had had so much fun with. "Tell him what you did last night!" urged Ada.
"I went to the loo and forgot to pull my nightie up," Cissie confided. "I only noticed when I stood up..." Our flight is called. We say goodbye to the ladies, who have another week left on the ship, and they wave us off from the Pool Deck as we collect our luggage and get on the coach to the airport.

I was to get a letter from Cissie on the 26th of September. She wanted to know whether she was Cissie or Ada - it should really have been obvious flower! And said: "I'm glad you had a great time on holiday. We had a lovely week after you had gone. (Take it the right way) I don't mean because you'd gone. I mean we did. Nothing happened. I mean...oh never mind!"

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The Long Drive To Amalfi

Tuesday 22 May 2018. We arrive into the Port of Naples at 7:00am. We have an excursion so the alarm was set for silly o'clock.

We were booked to take a boat ride to Amalfi, but apparently there was only one other couple wanting that particular tour. I did suggest they either got a smaller boat or we would just spread out, but to no avail. Instead we transfer our booking to one doing both Sorrento and Amalfi by coach. It will be a long day and most of it will be spent on the coach...

Norwegian Eric is dogging our footsteps... Right on top at the back is a climbing wall. You'd have to be seriously deranged wouldn't you? We board a coach and settle down for the ride to Sorrento. We spent a week there once and have plans to invest in a bottle of Limoncello, that wonderful lemon-based liqueur so beloved of.. er... me... But what's this? We have made a stop at a Limoncello factory! I want to drink it not watch it being made! But that's not a problem as it's still so early in the morning the factory isn't actually working yet. However we still get the talk and tour. When we reach the shop we gasp at the prices... Our plan to buy in Sorrento does not change... Having wasted half an hour out of our day we get on the coach and waste another 20 minutes as the guide tries to find another bored couple who have left the factory to sit on a hidden bench in the factory garden...

A photo stop above Sorrento. This is "above" in the same sense that Blackpool Tower is "above" Douglas on the Isle of Man. Sorrento's harbour is the one against the cliff dead centre of the photo, not the one in the foreground.

Being familiar with Sorrento we decide we will duck out of the guided walking tour. Especially when we find that we have just one hour ten minutes and the coach has to stop well outside the town so there will be a 10 minute walk both in and out. I'm not sure what the guide showed them, but none of them seem particularly thrilled when we catch up with them later.

I suspect they may have had time to buy a drink but not to sit and take their time over it. Which is pretty much what we did and then went in search of our bottle of yellow nectar.

The little market streets of Sorrento are interesting and fun places. At night the locals promenade here, all dressed to impress and to meet friends and socialise. We find lots of places with Limoncello at much less than factory prices. Strange that...

Then there's literally 5 minutes to do whatever we want before we see the guide and coach driver legging it back towards the coach park and we head back too. One of the passengers is limping and supported by his family, obviously in pain. We were quite worried, but he seems to be alright after a bit so perhaps it was a turned ankle or something.

It takes ages to reach Amalfi. The roads are so narrow that in many places they are governed by men with stop/go signs. They don't seem to have any way to talk to each other. I think that they just turned the sign to "go" when there was a break in the traffic. So it leads to scenes like this halfway between the two signs where we meet other traffic and one vehicle has to reverse to a slightly wider bit of road. Miss Franny watches a wing mirror pass by literally one inch from her window. It doesn't look quite so dramatic on the photo but believe me... one inch...

Our total time in Amalfi was two hours. Again because we had been here before and knew the town, we ducked out of the guided walking tour (we are real rebels, aren't we?) and surprised a restaurant barker by accepting his entreaties and taking a seat to order a pizza. Pizza margherita in this part of the world is as good as you will taste it anywhere in the world.

We didn't have a great deal of time for a detailed sketch so I kept it to half a page (so roughly A5 size) and when a few drops of rain started to fall we headed over the road to buy an ice cream. Again, ice cream - gelato - in Italy is something to die for. We got into the shop just as the young serving girl dropped a large metal tub of ice cream sideways into the space it had come out of and then struggled to get it out again. As the owner looked at me and raised his eyebrows, she got the giggles and there was a moment that severely tested my rudimentary Italian but was very funny! We left with our ice creams and a pat on the shoulder from the owner. I glanced back and the girl was grinning at me with mischievous eyes through her fringe. Dammit, when did I get so old...? Miss Franny grasped my ear to help me safely across the road.

It was a long drive back to the ship. Out of an eight hour day we have spent over 5 hours either on the coach or at the Limoncello factory that we didn't want to visit. Ah well... We repaired to the Squid and Anchor pub on Deck 7 and a pint of Guinness disappeared quite quickly!

It was quite overcast but very warm and we sat on our balcony until it was time to sail away. A fine figure of a man...

I read until the harbour wall started to slide past as we got under way which was our signal to get ready for our evening meal.

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One Man's Treasure - More Finds...

Today we are back at my uncle's house with so many more varied things to find yet. Please note, this house has been emptied, none of this stuff is still there. Finding all these things, many of which I remembered from visiting my grandparents' house as a child was like plunging into emotional turmoil. We murmured in recognition, we gasped in amazement. We burst out laughing a number of times. We burst into tears a few times too.

My uncle's tape recorder. It was older than me. The Truvox Tape Deck Mark III came as a kit. You got the tape deck itself - the rectangle of cream-coloured material and then found yourself a box to put it into and bought or made an amplifier and bought a loudspeaker. Uncle Geoff made the box out of plywood and covered it in green material. I presume he made the amplifier as well with the three knobs on the right hand side. Bottom right is a Magic Eye. It glowed green except for a tiny arc at the bottom which acted like a meter needle - the gap between the two edges of green light got larger or smaller depending on the volume, both when recording and playing back. If the edges touched when recording then you were overloading the tape and the sound would be distorted.

I'm not exactly certain of the date, but in 1953 the colour of that black cover over the recording and playback heads became gold coloured on new models. Compared to most tape recorders it ran backwards. The full spool of tape went on the right and it travelled to the left hand spool. This of course makes it impossible to play any of the tapes recorded on it on a more modern player without a bit of jiggery pokery. It was two-speed. The deck could be used at either 7½ inches per second or a more economic 3¾, though this did affect the quality of sound. There wasn't a switch to select the speed. Instead you will notice that there are two wheels of different sizes on top of the machine next to the empty spool. One of these was put on the spindle on the left of the tape heads and acted as a pinch wheel. Large wheel for 7½ inches per second and the smaller one for the slower speed.

Stamps. Oh my goodness... Stamps... Uncle Geoff had always collected stamps. There were boxes and suitcases and albums and envelopes full of stamps. There were envelopes from the Post Office with full sets of new stamps, which he had on subscription as they came out. Unfortunately as he got older he found it too much trouble to open them, take the stamps and mount them in his special stamp albums, held in special holders to preserve their mint condition.

Likewise he hadn't opened any junk mail for quite a while. We found we had to open about ten years of mail in case anything referred to or contained anything of value... It took a while... It ended up with immense piles of leaflets, envelopes, demands from TV licensing to license the TV in the "empty" house. "We will send someone round!" these said regularly every six months... Whoever they sent should have looked through the letterbox - the pile must have almost reached it...

There were childhood collections of stamps. Small albums with a page for every country. By the time he got to adulthood he stopped buying stamps from anywhere apart from the UK - which included stamps issued in Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

The only exception was for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977. When that occurred he bought 3 copies of every single stamp that commemorated the event from all over the world. That's what this box is. Unfortunately all other stamp maniacs (sorry! philatelists!) did the same...

So how big was this collection? Well, he only had five stamps from the reign of Queen Victoria. But he had every other single stamp, in mint condition, ever issued since the start of the reign of King Edward VII, whose very first stamps are shown here. They were issued in 1902 and lasted until 1913. They are shown mounted in holders so as not to be spoiled by the gum of a stamp hinge. There were also lots of other duplicates of used stamps both loose and in albums.

Terrified at the thought of sending them by carrier, we stuffed the collection into the back of my car and took it to a specialist dealer in Warwick. Apart from those two boxes by the wall on the left, which are someone else's, all of those boxes are full and contain my uncle's stamp collection. Selling in the middle of the current austerity etc. was not a great experience...

Anyway, so that's the stamps. Now for the medicines! My uncle had inherited from my Grandma Burke the habit of taking the phrase "How are you?" as a desire of the enquirer to know every single symptom down to the weight, dimensions and number of "I've been coughing up green chunks all week..." Long before the Internet they had a massive tome - an encyclopedia of ailments, illnesses and limb loss that was consulted as soon as anyone sneezed or even sniffed. "Oh, I have been poorly..." my grandma would say, "but we've looked it up and we know what it is!"

"But Grandma, you can't have licked a Peruvian tree frog..." we would point out. Unfortunately one of the bottles in this Biochemic Medicine Chest has been broken at some point but, fearful of not being able to treat any outbreak of Galloping Gob-rot, it has thankfully been replaced and filled with the required antidote.

Nu-San Burnojel somehow manages to bring napalm to mind more than a jel for the relief of burns and wounds... Luckily it also sorts out abrasions, cuts, sunburn and general affections of the skin as well. I might try some, as sometimes my skin feels like it wants to get far too affectionate and Miss Franny has to pull me away by my ear...

Kaolin is a type of clay and widely used in medicine. In fact the medicinal use of clays both internally and externally go all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Before you start to recoil in horror, let me remind you that use of clays in spa treatments is still in wide use and the preparation of Kaolin and Morphine as an oral medicine for diarhoea is also still available but not as widely as it used to be due to newer treatments. Such were the horrors of skin ailments in that encyclopedia of grandma's that she invested in two massive half-pound tubs of the stuff!

And yes, the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that the tins seem to be standing on top of an arcade pinball machine. Correct. There were three, but I'll deal with them in a future article. The nice man who took them says we can go for a game when he's got them going...

Iron Jelloids. To be taken like a pill and one to be swallowed three times a day with or after food. Note for the unsure - that is three different pills - you don't have to regurgitate it to be swallowed again... Oh, the fun we had with Grandma and a good magnet...

What the heck is a Derbac comb, I hear you say?

It's for getting nits out of your hair... Or fleas off the cat... Or Peruvian tree frogs before you feel the urge to lick one...

Wylex plugs. Before the standard three-pin plugs that we have today in the UK, this is what your plugs would look like with the earth being the round pin.

We started with a reel-to-reel tape recorder so we'll end with this. This is a tape splicer. Using this handy little device you could chop the tape into bits and rearrange them all in a different order using the razor blade and then the Scotch tape. Or any old clear sticky-backed tape. The razor blade was very sharp and just shoved any old how in the box. I found it with a shout.

"Hey our kid - pass me the medical encyclopedia, the Biochemic Medicine Chest and Burnojel please!"

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Unexpected Finds at My Uncle's House

Following on from our look at my Uncle's cameras and photographic stuff yesterday, here is a record of just some of the things we found on our first visit to his house in Rochdale. I have known this house all of my life. It was my grandparents' house and Uncle Geoff lived there until 2002 when he moved to Blackpool to be closer to his brother, my father, and the rest of us. Despite much prompting over the years, the house in Rochdale remained full of stuff that he had told us he had got rid of and other stuff that we knew was still there. I hadn't seen the house since 2002 and was not really prepared for all that we found... I'll just stress now that it is now empty.

Fran and my brother admire the garden which has somewhat overgrown and come seeking warmth through the kitchen door...

On top of the sideboard were my Grandad's glasses with a locket containing photos of my grandparents. My Grandad, John Burke for whom I was named, died in 1973, my Grandma, Annie, followed at the ripe old age of 90 in 1988. The photos come from a single group photograph taken at their wedding in 1921.

The 1950s family washing machine was standing in the corner of the room. The Hotpoint Electric Washing Machine had a modestly disreet little on/off switch modelled on the gear lever of a Morris Minor...

I hadn't seen it since the 1950s and was amazed at how small it was. The last time I saw it I could not see over the edge...

Upstairs in what had been my Grandma's bedroom, we were preparing ourselves for finding things that might trigger an emotional reaction. What we were not expecting was a massive hank of human hair. Probably my grandmother's but it could also be from some other relative. Explains where my daughter's red hair comes from. Hmmm... not the milkman then... An old toffee tin contained more examples of my family's ability to produce long flowing locks. What the heck happened when I was born...?

Phew! My Grandad always shaved with a cut throat razor until late in life when his hand was becoming unsteady. Quite sensibly he placed his razors in their boxes and left them for his grandsons to find some 50 years later and wonder what the heck to do with them.

This is a wooden box with poker work design on top. Poker work was exactly what it sounds like. The fireside poker was placed in the coals of the fire until glowing red hot and was then used to char or burn a design in the wood. Perhaps the trend started with the Spanish Inquisition, whose inquisitors would practice on chunks of wood whenever Protestant or heretics were unavailable... Unfortunately the wood had suffered over the years and had the consistency of soft cardboard...

It contained my Grandad's spats. White leather covers for his shoes. Watch a 1920s/30s gangster film to get the idea.

The house was four storeys, with both an attic and a cellar. Traditionally the places where people left junk. Y-e-s... Sorting through some of this was in turns amazing, hilarious and totally gross. One massive box of textiles material had a can of liquid furniture polish under the first layer. It had rusted through and all the bottom contents were soaked in a dark sticky substance that I couldn't immediately identify. I of course had found it the hard way...

There was so much paper. In the 1930s when paper was the medium for lots of play - drawing, writing, battleships, paper aeroplanes etc. - my Grandparents must have kept and stored as much as was humanly possible. There were blank cards from rotary filing systems. There were sheets of blank invoices from various places of work. There were lots of schoolbooks kept for the blank pages still in them. Not just Dad's and Uncle Geoff's school books... They must have asked school mates if they could take their books at the end of each school year...

Uncle Geoff was the first in the family to get into hi-fi. Here is a 1950s Leak valve amplifier. Top left is the pre-amplifier for it. Bottom left is a radio FM tuner. Bottom right is a 1930s Bakelite radio

A "Princess Mary" Tin from Christmas 1914 with the countries: Belgium, Japan, Russia, Montenegro, Servia, and France inscribed on it. A fund was set up by Princess Mary to provide a Christmas gift from the nation to every person in the King's uniform serving afloat, overseas or having been wounded.

From the attic to the cellar. Here my Grandad had his workbench. An engineer by trade he not only had tools; he made tools! There were lots of examples: boxes of files, nuts, bolts, dies and taps for making nuts and bolts...

On the floor was this metal box, looking suspiciously like an ammunition box... I looked it up on the Internet. It is an ammunition box, used to transport four 25 pound shells during World War II. We opened it very carefully...

Oh, what a disappointment!

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