Oakwood as usual
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Oakwood as usual |
First, a merry Xmas to you all. So 2008 – wherever did that one go ? One moment your scribe was juggling with the concept of reaching 60 in February and the next it was December. All in all, a sort of squiffy year – Les was 60, the family had 4 operations, 3 of them on Felix, we went skiing, we went to Honkers and Singapoops, Les went to look at elephant seals in California (its a long story but apparently they are related), Nannie was poorly but is much better, Gillian had to have another knee replacement, her third altogether and not normally associated with bipeds, Leo carried on carving out his career in Singapore and Issy got through her second year in Brummie land.
That was it. If you want a bit more detail, read on.
Felix had operation number 1 on his ankle – (javelin throwers get a fearful battering on the left ankle). All fixed up. There was another Burns night with our good friends and then everything went very blank this time.
February really rocked in comparison to January. Les celebrated (this seems an entirely inappropriate word for a 60th birthday), his well, 60th birthday in some style with Gillian in Hong Kong and Singapore with Leo, our far-east correspondent and number 1 son.
We took lots of very exciting pictures. Here are some of the others.
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Leo trying to get round his Mum and succeeding admirably. Dinner dangles behind. |
Chinese New Year. Five barges in the bay lit the night sky up for about 40 minutes. Astonishing. So that's what they spend all our money on. |
Two highly trained Singaporean Chelonian Monks performing the spectacular dance of the seven flippers. |
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This is what is known as a clear day in Hong Kong. |
They take floats pretty seriously in Hong Kong. Here some Shaolin monks float by on their way to a Kung-fu festival. |
They can be very cruel to visitors though. |
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We ate things which Leo thought were food. Here a quick lunge to the heart with a toothpick finishes off the last struggles of whatever it is. It was like picking up a sticky horse dropping but it didn't taste as good. |
A curious incident here. This is a tree walk in Singapore through tropical rain forest. Its really superb but the monkeys are apparently dangerous to tourists and there is a guide at the end of the bridge to warn people and to help out if they get in difficulty. The guide warned us not to look the monkeys in the eye and hopefully they would not bother us. However, when Les stepped on to the bridge ... |
They all disappeared at high speed whispering something like “I'm not going near that unless I hear it talk first.” You can just see the last one launching itself in a death-defying leap to escape. Les was very upset. The guide made it worse by saying “How did you do that ? They never do that. Do you want a job ?” |
Les had his 60th birthday bash on the 1st March. A couple of hundred people showed up and we all had a great time rocking the night away.
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The CISM Sisters. CISM stands for Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics. It also stands for Celebrities Into Sado-Masochism, a shortly to be released Channel 4 production following up from the highly rated Celebrity Rehab and Celebrity Celebates, a program consisting entirely of Cliff Richard – not for the faint of heart. |
The internationally famous Juniper Hill Blues Band. Jerry looks on with concern in case Les sucks too hard and swallows the harmonica. |
Nannie getting into the swing of things, bless her. She stood up wonderfully to the festivities even though pushing 86. Judging by everybody else, Les is obviously playing in Ab again when the rest of the band are in G. |
More travelling in this month.
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We all went skiing and mountain walking again. Here Gillian and Hilary pose next to an idyllic scene in La Plagne again. Meanwhile your scribe was sinking up to his waist. |
Les learnt a new Swedish word on one of his many trips ... |
... and once again enjoyed Moules Mariniere and rather too much Belgian beer in the wonderful Akkurat in Stockholm with good friends. The gentleman clutching the next bottle of nerve poison (its Carolus and its effects are amazing) is your scribe's old friend Mats who by his fine example was primarily responsible for your scribe ditching 11 kilos he no longer needed this year. |
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April also found Les in California as he consults on a committee on the impact of high frequency sound on marine mammals. This committee always seems to meet in nice places :-) Its a dirty job but somebody's got to do it. Here he communes with nature in the form of wild elephant seals.
On the far right, notice how Bertie viciously flicks sand at Cyril for calling him a jolly lazy seal. These animals kill by snoring. |
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May turned out to be a very up and down month. We had a lovely time listening to Isabelle's end of second year recital and Les met up with the class of 1967. At the other end of the scale, Felix who was in superb condition after a great winter's training and hoping to qualify for Beijing had his season crash round his ears when we discovered that he had had an undiagnosed stress fracture in his elbow for several years. After two MRI scans, he had been advised to carry on throwing through the pain as it was “only a small impingement”. In May, the crack spread ¾ of the way across his elbow and he could no longer continue. This spectacular piece of misdiagnosis along with a couple of later examples led us to believe that some members of the radiology profession don't know their sphincter from a hole in the ground. See September for the rest of this saga.
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Issy after a successful tootling. Its wonderful having a real musician in the family. She can even play in Db whatever that is. |
Some of the members of the class of 1967 trying desperately to look respectable against all the odds. The reason they are laughing is that your scribe is trying to master digital technology enough to take a picture. You are looking at Keith, Neil, Phil, Colin, Paul and John. If you have friends as good as this, you are very lucky. |
Felix with his second throw of the season throws 70.99 in the British Universities, breaking the club record, the Surrey record and much of his Olecranon thanks to indifferent radiology. |
June is Isle of Wight time. So we did it again.
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Gillian grinning on the Isle of Wight. We grin a lot on the Isle of Wight, its that sort of place. |
Les familles Crimmins et Hatton, having a very relaxing time on their way to the pub for an even more relaxing time. |
The Preservation Hall Jazz Band from New Orleans inexplicably turn up at the Union Chapel in Norf London. They later claim to have been abducted by Orleans. |
July found Les in Copacabana visiting the University of Rio and their amazing marine tank, (40mx25mx15m deep) ! Although it sounds terribly appealing, Copacabana is actually a little ribby. Each evening, attempting to eat, he was pursued by approximately 20 ladies of the night eager to ply their trade. In modern, forward-thinking Rio, they bribe the waiters and follow you into the restaurant. In spite of these minor setbacks, Rio remains an awesome place to visit, providing you eat in the hotel. For more of Rio, see your scribe's first trip at http://www.leshatton.org/Documents/riodejaneiro2006.html.
Later in the month, the Juniper Hill Blues Band played their annual charity gig. Strangely all photos recording this event have disappeared so you will have to do without the spectacle of Les dancing on the tables in his bejewelled disco dancing culottes.
We don't get invited to weddings much anymore so it was a great treat to clock up two in August.
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Here, Les performs his now infamous gorilla shuffle aka Salsa whilst Isabelle pretends she is somewhere else. The judges on the left, borrowed from the X-factor for the evening panic as they realise they did not bring any zeroes. |
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And that was August. |
And this is where Felix' story really starts. After the might of the London radiology scene failed to diagnose a stress fracture for a few years, we discovered that nobody in the UK could fix it either. As it had been broken for so long, the blood supply in parts of the bone had failed meaning that it would never heal on its own. There were times when we thought we were living in a third-world country from a medical point of view. Much frantic research finally revealed the Steadman-Hawkins clinic in Colorado, (which fixed Alan Shearer and Michael Owen). Apparently, we don't fix sportsmen and women in England, presumably because we have got so few. For example, it is reputed that Dr. Steadman at said clinic has fixed more English Premier League footballers than the whole of the British medical fraternity combined. To cut a long and harrowing story short, Gillian took Felix over to Colorado in September where an awesome surgeon reconstructed the elbow with bone grafts taken from the hip. He did this from the inside without breaking the surface of the bone – an astonishing piece of reconstructive surgery. Now why can't we do that ? Well take it from us, we apparently can't. We even had consultants here telling us to take him to the US as we are apparently “crap”, (their words not your scribe's). Even more surprising, the cost of the surgery was less than Gillian's knee replacement surgery of last year, including the airfare.
While all this was going on, Nannie was wheeled off to hospital with internal bleeding with what turned out to be an ulcer thankfully. After a week, the hospital discharged her without telling us or her GP and made her walk to the front to get a taxi.
In the aftermath of the credit crunch where the country has literally been sold out by the greed and incompetence of the financial community, we hope sincerely for an outbreak of competence in the UK sometime in the next few years.
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The crack can clearly be seen in this X-ray just after the operation. The surgeon fixed it with two screws and a bone graft. The screws can come out eventually. 12 weeks later, the union and healing is complete and Felix has returned to weight training. On the right, call him Mr. Fat Fingers just after the op. If he can throw over 70m with a broken arm, we are hoping he will go on to achieve his ambitions. Travelling to the USA for an operation is not for the faint-hearted and is fraught with difficulties placed upon you by the British insurance community. First of all, nobody will insure your travel, even your baggage if you are travelling for the purposes of medical treatment. Second, private medical insurance will not cover treatment abroad even if you can't get it fixed here. So the insurance community joins the other parties in this whole thing who did not exactly cover themselves with glory. Les dreams of a day where bankers and insurance advisers can be used as a source of fuel. |
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This featured a splendid trip to Sheffield (and a third operation on poor old Felix to fix a torn meniscus in his right knee, which appears to have gone OK, so three operations later, he is back in serious training). Its not easy having Olympic aspirations.
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First to see Queen at the Sheffield Arena. They were very, very good. In the first picture on the left, the audience have already stolen the rest of the band. This is one of a number of photos taken before the Arena heavies told people to stop taking pictures, stop enjoying themselves and stop doing anything else as they had only paid 60 quid each for the privilege. This has something vaguely to do with copyright so Les would like to add copyright lawyers to significant parts of the medical community and most of the finance and insurance communities as volunteers to leave the planet as soon as can be arranged. The far photo shows the route our SatNav took us on a so-called A road over the Peak District. This is the easy bit. We had just emerged from what appeared to be a tank proving ground. We really must write to the programmers who do not seem to be able to distinguish between A road and an A road. This is A road. Just. |
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Gillian after battling through two knee replacements in 2006, had the great misfortune to trip over a curb whilst carrying some boxes. This twisted the partial knee replacement in her left knee necessitating its replacement with a full one. So back in she went and is now out and convalescing. The pain is pretty bad but the same surgeon did this operation as did the previous ones and patched her up very well indeed fortunately. The surgeons in our lives have been excellent but don't play pin the tail on the donkey with the radiologists.
Very late production of this newsletter. Les clocked up 21 foreign trips all told and is lucky to have had a very busy year.
Totto the tiny tortoise calmed down a bit and shacked up with Trampolina. Dotty our daft cat slept most of the year. Fang our giant spider stayed in Hollywood. Our new pet showed up ...
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Ming the exploding Robin says hello. |
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We hope you and your families are well. We wish you a very merry Christmas and health and happiness in 2009. |
