This year’s durga puja included a Hogwarts pandal! Yeehah.

Friday – my current employment contract ends*

Saturday – my home team crashes out of the Rugby world cup, courtesy of the poms. Mandapanda‘s lot are taken out by France.

Sunday – my hostess’ home team is beaten by Argentina. She’s quite a fan – she bought this flat partly because it’s a drop-kick from the gates of Murrayfield stadium. She’s not happy.

*For many reasons, this is actually a positive thing. I need some time to sort out quite a few personal and family things which I haven’t been able to do while working.

A random sampling of Bruce-headlines

• On a fairly predicable whim, I went to the opening of the new Applestore in Buchanan street and got 2 t-shirts to prove it! Also saw how I look on the iSight webcam in a MacBook Pro. Ugh!
• Next weekend I’m going to Worcester to see my brother who will be on leave from Iraq.
• I finally got around to mending my hostess’ wooden chair.
• My hostess took me to a Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra gig. I found there’s no extracting Nurofen un-noticed from its pack, even when the music is very loud.
• I bought a fair bit of raucous guitar music (1 Motörhead and 2 Manic Street Preachers CDs) from the iTunes store.
• I only lasted the first half of a piano concert (Alfred Brendel). The combination of unpleasant (to me) music and really unpleasant seats beat me.
• I signed on for another month at L&L. (I’m not sure if this and the previous headline about nurofen are related.)
• I finally discovered iSyncing between the Palm and the mac. Now I only have two un-synced address/phone lists (cellphone and laptop/desktop/palm). It took a while to sort the discrepancies between the two datasets.
• As a corollary, I’m getting into iCal.
• Going ‘cold bark’ on Purdeys. (All of the L&L production team is in thrall to britvic.) Still got the Irn Bru habit.

Yesterday was a Good Day.

The most important thing I have to report is that my dad is out of hospital. At the beginning of this week, we understood that the medics wanted to decide whether he needed a stent or whether exercise and medication would be better. However, there was no news on when such decisions might be taken.

On Wednesday, dad had a scan for blood-flow around his heart. This was delayed for a few hours because it’s meant to be done after a period of starvation. However, the ward wasn’t aware of the impending scan and so gave him breakfast. Dad wasn’t aware either and so he cheerfully ate it.

On Thursday, dad had another scan after some exercise. I am puzzled that they couldn’t do the two scans in the same session but I suppose that there’s a limit to the amount of radioactive tracer that can be injected in one day.

Yesterday dad sent me a text to say he was getting out that afternoon. I cried – I hadn’t realised quite how much worry had been stored up in me. I was also concerned how he would get home. Mum was in no state to drive 70 miles because of her sciatica. However, she and dad were both reluctant to pay the £85 that the Red Cross would have charged for this journey. (I’d researched this aspect while I was home last weekend.) However, my brother’s girlfriend collected my mum and sister yesterday evening and together they went to fetch dad. Huge thanks, Jenni!

I phoned dad last night to see if he was home. I’m amused that he’d taken mum, Sue and Jenni to a Worcester curry-house to make sure they were fed and to thank them. I think this was the second proper meal mum had had since dad’s attack. When she got home from the late visiting sessions, she was too tired and sore to make anything more complex than a couple of sandwiches to cushion her insulin injection.

I’m not worried that dad will be on an unhelpful diet now: mum won’t leave him any choice, even if he does want to stray. I doubt he will want to because he’s been sick fed-up of incarceration!

Other good things happened yesterday. I can’t blog about one at all and another was a a hint of optimism about my future. I’ll see how it goes before commenting further. The other good things were celebrating a colleague starting her maternity leave and two other colleagues turning 30.

Finally, my hostess and I went to see Puppetry of the Penis last night. Yeehah! Two adult males completely naked on the stage, doing hilarious things with their tackle. Who could ask for more?

Have a look here. (It’s slow and there is a ‘welcome’ screen to go through… sorry.)

I wish my daemon had been called Unix.

Well, after a number of days of waiting, mum has been told that dad will have his angiogram tomorrow afternoon. We don’t know what happens thereafter but we expect it involves him coming home not too long thereafter.

I spoke to him today and he sounded good – a bit of a cough but nothing that alarmed me. I’ll be please when he is home, not least for my mum’s sake. The travelling and late returns from Birmingham are doing bad things for her sciatica and overall energy.

More as and when…

No, my dad has not been transmuted into a bird of prey, klingon or otherwise. Instead, he has now been taken to Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital for his angiogram.

This seems to be good news for two reasons:

1. It means he has recovered enough to travel and consider the medium- to long-term future.
2. Secondly, it’s a bit less hassle for mum to visit him because she only has to get a bus or drive into Worcester City Centre, travel 30 minutes on a frequent, direct train service to the station that serves this hospital and Birmingham University and then walk what appears to be 400 metres on the hospital’s own connectivity map. This is much better than the plethora of buses or driving to Worcester Royal Infirmary, which appears to have been moved right out in the sticks.

I spoke to dad just after he had arrived at QE – he sounded good. In fact mum tells me that while he was at WRI, he asked he to bring him his allen keys (hexagonal spanners) so he could sort the door on his toilet area!

After a while of nothing to blog, I have something to say but I rather wish I didn’t. On Wednesday night, my mother phoned me to tell me that the previous night my father had had a small, ‘warning’-type heart attack.

Apparently dad had sat down to watch a TV programme about the Grenadier Guards at 8pm, noticed a pain in his chest and was, thanks to mum’s insistance, in hospital before the programme ended. Within a day or so, I’m told, he was looking a lot better: ‘fit to cut the grass’ and just bored and in some discomfort from the shunt in the back of his hand. From my experiences in Kolkatta, I can really sympathise.

Last night dad texted me to ask how to say ‘good morning’ in malayalam to a keralan nurse. (I didn’t know but later found out later that night from a keralan waiter at a curry house that most people simply say it in English anyway. However, the formal Malayalam is transliterated as ‘suprabhatham’ and pronouned something like ‘suprabadam’.) This morning Dad texted me to say he’d been dettached from the monitors, etc, and so could have a proper shower!

Some time next week he’ll be taken to Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital for an angiogram but he’s staying put for the moment because the first week after a heart attack is apparently the most dangerous and so for now he’s better off in a hospital than in an ambulance. Because he was raised as an engineer on imperial measurements, I think he should ask for just under a 28th of an angio-ounce.

My brother is in fairly frequent contact from Iraq by email and has phoned me from there several times since I first emailed him this news. He also frequently contacts his girlfriend by internet chat and has primed the compassionate leave set-up to take messages from us and to be ready to get him home quickly if needed.

Dad apparently also forbade me to come to Worcester precipitately: mum’s interpretation of this is that Dad would fear he’d not been told the truth about his condition if I appeared suddenly. I also know he’s normally self-effacing and anxious for the family to get on with our normal lives, careers and duties. He insisted that mum and Sue go as previously arranged to a scout jamboree today because they’d never get another chance to go to such a world-wide gathering of Scouts. He also got mum to give his Treasurer’s report to the Worcester Scout Fellowship on Wednesday so that as near normal service as possible was provided. I’m not sure I’d be that organised/dedicated under similar circumstances. Still, I have a suitcase packed and ready to go and have told my managers at work that there’s some chance I might need to go at very short notice.

Anyway, I’ll be going to Worcester next weekend for a pre-arranged visit. Meanwhile, despite the better news, the following lyrics (snatched from this entry’s music) seem vaguely appropriate:

I want my dad and I want my mum, a sherman tank and a load of guns.
…
I know the following smut should be censored, OK,
but ‘this shit is fucked’ as they say in the USA.
And they say it in Mexico, London and Jericho,
Berlin and Birmingham, Belfast and Tokyo,
Amsterdam, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan,
Disneyland, Narnia, former Yugoslavia!
…
So just say three ‘hail Jesus-and-Mary Chains’ and two ‘how’s your fathers’,
…
and say goodnight, Jim-bob.
‘Goodnight Jim-bob.’

On a much lighter note, my hostess and I were invited by friends to visit them on Saturday and then go with them to the Callander highland games. There were of course the modern fairground attractions of nasty machines to make you chuck up your candifloss (cotton candy) and luke-warm Scottish attempts to make lager but we (mostly) eschewed these for watching the dog-show and getting an arena-side stance for the actual highland games.

What’s worn under the kilt
It seems that these games have become an international sport: competitors came from as far afield as Poland, the USA, the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Fife! The first sport was called ‘the McGlashan stones’: it involved lifting smooth spheres of stone, about 3 feet in diameter, onto barrels whose tops were about shoulder-height. This was done against the clock – I believe an american was the fastest in lifting all four stones onto their barrels.

This was followed by the sport most known – and joked about – outside of the Highlands: caber tossing. The caber appears to be about 18 feet of smoothed-off tree-trunk. It’s slightly tapered towards the end the competitors hold. Two helpers carry the caber back from where the last competitor has tossed it and lift it into a vertical position. The next competitor then gets his hands under the narrow end and lifts it so it is resting against his shoulder, approximating the ‘slope arms’ position. Once he has his balance, he then runs with it until he feels he has built up enough speed and then flings it so that the heavy end hits the ground and, ideally, the light end goes up and over so that it falls in a ’12 o’clock’ position relative to the competitor’s ‘6 o’clock’.

Very few competitors managed anything like an ‘end-over-end’: the best was a ‘5 to 12′. The commentator would have had us believe that this was due to the wind being against most of the competitors. Personally I prefer the obvious reason: such a lump of wood is bloody heavy!

Then two events took place simultaneously: the log lift, where the competitors try to carry a frame of two logs about 3 yards long and over 2 feet in diameter along a 50 yard course and back. Quite often they couldn’t manage the full course and so the officials used a huge tractor to lift the frame and take it back to the starting point. However, at least two competitors managed the full course so I presume the winner was the one who took the least time. The framework was left in the arena and so quite a few spectators tried to lift it: we all failed dismally!

Dangerously near this course was the ’56 pound for height’ throwing contest: competitors had to single-handedly swing and throw over their heads and over a bar above them a lump of metal of the aforesaid weight. The competition started with the bar at 13 feet. Most competitors managed that and all managed to avoid the weight as it came crashing down perilously close to where they stood and where other competitors were carrying logs!

Quite a few dropped out at 15 feet: they had three attempts at each height. It appeared not to matter if the weight hit the bar so long as it went over. All the way through the commentary encouraged the audience to encourage the competitors and we duly did so as a huge dutchman and an equally huge pole tried for 17 feet 3 inches. The dutchman’s self-encouragement (lots of cries of ‘yeah!’) had most folk rooting for him to succeed. This was no longer a competition between athletes but two competitions between the athletes and gravity because we equally cheered on the pole.

Unfortunately the pole couldn’t achieve 17 feet 3 inches but the dutchman could. He then tried for 18 feet 3 inches: more than the height of three average people. He didn’t quite make this but still managed to be pleased with his performance. The pole was the first to congratulate him on his victory. Good sportsmanship and a damn fine show, methinks!

I then succumbed to the lure of a ‘plastic cup of used bath water’ which made the crafts tent quite appealing. By then the afternoon had nearly worn away so we departed for Stirling’s nightlife: a curry and the Simpsons movie. All in all, a fine day’s entertainment and a wonderful antidote to my domestic news.

And the answer to the above question appears, from what was revealed during the ’56 pound for height’ contest, to be ‘lycra cycling shorts’.

My hostess and I ate at the 9 Cellars on Edinburgh’s Queen Street. We shared a starter of bhel puri and for our main course had a masala dosa each, while sharing a portion of tadka dahl (slim, wide yellow lentils in a rich and tangy sauce).

One taste and I was back in India: the crispness of the dosa, the lightly spice filling, the sambar, the coconut chatni: all so magical and tasty, without any burn so that my hostess could enjoy it too. If you can’t get to south India, you’ll find the next best thing here.