Last week I was told that I need the following vaccinations and to take a good supply of anti-malarial drugs with me:
• Japanese B encephalitis
• rabies
• booster for hepatitis A
• meningitis ACWY

I booked the earliest possible appointment (4 pm yesterday) at my local practice to get the hep A and meningitis vaccinations and was told that I could get a private prescription for the prophylactic anti-malarial drug of my choice* at that time. However, I’d need to go elsewhere for Jap B and rabies vaccinations (both prescription** and actual injection), so made an appointment at Ninewells travel clinic for 2pm today to get these injections.

Yesterday, I was seen by a nurse. She discussed the issues of anti-malarials with me and gave me the injections completely painlessly. (However, I was still reeling from the £31·10 cost of the drugs.) Being a nurse, she could not write a prescription for the anti-malarial drugs but said that a doctor at Ninewells would do so without any problems. (It would be a private prescription and hence cost £11 plus the actual cost of the drugs.)

So today, once I’d finally found the travel clinic, I was seen by a real live doctor: name-badge, stethoscope, illegible handwriting, the whole works. She prescribed the Jap B and rabies vaccinations but, as with just about bloody everything, there’s a catch. I can either have a one-off rabies injection which gives 80% coverage or have three injections: one today, one a week later and one 3 weeks after that. For Jap B, there’s no choice: 3 injections at the same intervals. Because of my timetable, I’ll either have to have the third injections for Jap B and rabies in a random travel clinic down south, come back to Ninewells specifically for these injections or not bother. (I’ve already heard that the regular Worcester general practitioners won’t touch me with a barge-pole until my medical records have been transferred to their practice.) OK, at least I have options here (one of which is to forget all about further injections because each will cost me £30).

I then ask the doctor to advise on anti-malarials. She says it’s really up to me to decide depending on my plans:

• Malarone is to be taken daily. Its side-effects can include rashes, abdominal pain, headache, anorexia, nausea, diarrhoea, coughing and mouth ulcers.
• Mefloquine is to be taken weekly. Its side-effects can include nausea, diarrhoea, dizziness, abdominal pain, rashes, pruritis and rarely headache, convulsions, sleep disturbances and psychotic reactions.
• Doxycycline is to be taken daily. Its side-effects can include photosensitivity. That’s a fat lot of use: where do mosquitoes live? Mostly in sunny countries!!!

Overall, I think I might prefer malaria itself!

In the end, I decide on Mefloquin because even I can remember to take a pill once a week and because the thought of travelling with 200 pills rattling in my rucsac doesn’t appeal at all. So I ask for a prescription for it. The doctor says she can’t give one but that I can get it over the counter at a pharmacy. I ask about the others: same response. I think ‘this is weird but she’s a qualified doctor working in a travel clinic – she must be right’ and go off to the treatment area to get injected.

My treatment is interrupted by another nurse coming into the room twice to ask about some medicine for someone else. The interrupter said the name of the patient out loud while standing three feet from me – that’s a breach of this patient’s confidentiality. I was pleased when a doctor who is a vague friend (he’s married to the counselling nurse who saved my sanity a few years back) came into the treatment room – I’d wanted to see them before I go and it’s brilliant to see a familiar face when someone else is about to prong me with a sharp piece of metal.

When it’s all over and I’ve paid the £60 for these two injections, I get on the bus back to Dundee city centre, feeling that if I get the anti-malarials, today will have been worthwhile. So I stomp into Boots and am told flatly that I cannot obtain any anti-malarial drug without a prescription. Now I’m really annoyed and almost lose my temper with the Boots pharmacist. She tries to tell me that this situation is very common and is able to tell me the costs two of the drugs:

• Malarone: £40 for 12 pills ( I should start taking it 2 days before I travel and keep taking it for a week after I return so will need 198 pills, total cost £680)
• Mefloquine: £24 for 14 pills (I should start taking them 3 weeks before travelling and keep taking them 4 weeks after I return so will need 33 pills, hence total cost £72)
• Doxycycline: unknown

So tomorrow I have to try for an appointment with my own doctor to get them to write a prescription for an anti-malarial drug. Why am I being pissed about like this? All I want to do is prevent myself getting ill and costing the NHS a hell of a lot in treating the illness.

***FUMES LIKE AN ARSON ATTACK ON A TOBACCO FACTORY***
—————————————–
*and I’m the world expert on anti-malarial drugs, of course!

**for the non-UK readers, a doctor diagnoses your complaint and decides the correct course of treatment. If this involves drugs which are not freely available at pharmacies, he or she writes a prescription: a form stating that you and you alone are to get these specific drugs, (usually) courtesy of the NHS. You then take the form to the pharmacy and they give out the medicine you’ve been prescribed. (I think it’s fairly sensible system because it cuts down on the number of loonies taking irrelevant or harmful drugs because ‘they know better’*** and means that the NHS doesn’t have to dish out cash on idiots’ random whims. Of course it has its faults. For example, a doctor can only prescribe NHS-approved drugs – unless you’re able to pay the non-NHS-subsidised prices. This caught my mother a few years back when she needed a specific antibiotic but it needed to be in a sugar-free pill because of her diabetes. The one brand of pill containing this antibiotic which didn’t have a sugar coating wasn’t on the NHS-approved list because it was more expensive than brands with sugar coating.)

*** because they don’t – they haven’t conducted the clinical trials and almost certainly haven’t read the results from trials other people have conducted

On Friday I finally got to play a former colleague’s drug-dealing boardgame: XON. The name comes from an acronym for data-flow control but the game has nothing to do with data. Instead, you move around the board, buying drugs on credit provided by a loanshark, aiming to sell them later at 3, 4 or 5 times the cost. You can then pay back your debts and buy property: the first one to own £5 million in property wins.
Of course there are pitfalls:

• you can end up in crack-house hell (TM)
• you can be ripped off by a thieving whore (TM)
• you can end up in HMP Broadshaft (TM) and undergo all kinds of nasty things (or escape via the lavvies if you get the right Stretch (TM) card)
• you can pay a visit to the Bill Burroughs Memorial Hospital (TM), where even nastier treatment awaits you
• if you’re quite unlucky you can be mugged for either your cash or your drugs, forcing you to crawl back to the loanshark
• if you’re really unlucky, the loanshark will call in your debt. If you can’t pay him in full, he’ll take your money and your drugs anyway, increase your debt by 50% and necessitate a long stay with Uncle Bill.

I really enjoyed it, even being catapulted from an almost-winning position to destitution by being mugged for my drugs, then my money on two successive rolls – I’d just not had the chance to buy property or sell the drugs because I kept on landing on XON squares and hence being abducted by mutant aliens, rogered by rabid dogs and generally having a cool time!

The player who had been losing until then very quickly gathered a fortune (mostly formerly belonging to ME) and went on to win the game. I think that’s the best part of the game: all players have a chance of winning until the end and no-one is forced out of the game and left to twiddle their thumbs while their friends keep on having fun.

On Saturday, I bought a few necessary bits at the Stirling branch of Graham Tiso, then met up with other friends who live in Stirling to go around Stirling Castle. It has fantastic views of the Forth valley and a workshop where weavers are recreating seven beautiful tapestries. They only have 20 years’ work left!

I spent Sunday with Elly, who was making sure her dad was settled into Glasgow Infirmary or an operation, then taking her mum to her flat in Edinburgh so her mum was ready to go into a hospital in Edinburgh for her own operation. Elly’s sure going through some trying times!

OK, what have I been up to for the past two days?

Not much happened on Wednesday (er, well it did – see next post) so yesterday I get myself a reasonable set of tasks and achieved most of them:
09:00 – start sorting through my filing box
09.50 – call Castle Furniture to see if when they can collect the old stuff today.
10:00 – Entryphone repair-person due.
10:45 – call surgery re malaria medicine
11:00 – call new bank (Nationwide) to find out what on earth is going on with the new account
11:30 – tell Fairtrade bank that new treasurer is XYZ and new vice-chair is ABC
12:00 – more sorting of my filing box
14:00 – meet up with Ewan
15:20 – sign on
15:45 – more sorting of my filing box, then take some documentation to IFA
19:00 – visit Pete Lidsay and try to find out whether my laptop’s Firewire ports, my firewire cables or both the old AND the brand-new firewire boxes are dead. I know it’s not my back-up disks themselves because they both work in a brand-new USB2 box. But my laptop’s USB ports are USB 1.1 and so desperately slow (18 hours to copy 20GB)
later – collapse

I think I crawled out of bed around 9 and was soon called by Castle Furniture who confirmed that they would arrive around 11 this morning. In the meantime, the entryphone repair bloke arrived. He found that the wire connecting my phone to the buzzer box had become adrift. Fortuantely, easily fixed.

Next Castle Furniture arrived. They took the bed and the stereo case but didn’t want the zed bed or my sofa. I phoned Fife Council to ask for a ‘special uplift’ and was told to have the items on the pavement for 7.30 on Tuesday. Would the FC folk help me take the stuff down from my flat? Would they hell!

I then phone my doctor to ask them to remind me what anti-malarial they’d recommended. They told me that I’d also vaccinations for Hepatitis A, Japanese B encephelitis, Meningitis ACWY and rabies but that I’d need to be treated in Worcester. Worcester said they wouldn’t touch me without my records being transferred to a doctor there, which takes 3 weeks. However, a long-suffering doctor phoned me back later that evening and told me that Dundee should be able to do most of the vaccinations and that they’d do the rest. I’ve just now made an appointment in Dundee for Thursday to get the rabies and Jap B jags and have an appointment on Wednesday in St Andrews to get the others.

Meanwhile I’d spent ages on the phone trying to get various banks to tell me how to transfer my funds to their saving accounts. It’s all very hairy and so I think I’m just going to stick with the Clydesdale. i also spoke to the Co-operative Bank who hold the account for St Andrews Fairtrade. At long last I know for sure who my successor as treasurer is and so have ordered the change of signatories form. I can see this being another nightmare.

I phoned Ewan about 2 o’clock – he was busy but agreed to come around later once I’d signed on. During all this time I’d been going through my filing box, removing out-of date files and records and grouping the rest sensibly. All my records and important documents now fit neatly in the box and there’s still room for all the documentation from my attempts to get a visa to live in the US.

I then went to sign on, then dropped off some documentation my mortgage advisor had asked for, then returned home to finish filing and try to get my laptop’s back-up bits behaving.

Firewire fandango.
When I arrived here, I found that that my laptop’s external backup device (a 30GB laptop hard disk in a Firewire case) had stopped working. I assumed it was the disk and so bought a 40Gb one from Ebay. It arrived but didn’t work. However because it was new, I assumed that I’d been wrong and that the firewire case didn’t work. So I bought a USB2 case and a new Firewire case, intending to keep the 30Gb disk in the USB case and the 40GB in the new firewire case. Neither disk worked in the new firewire case – they’d spin up but just not mount. However, they’d spin up, mount and behave just fine in the USB case. So the culprits had to be either my laptop’s firewire ports or the new firewire case.

So last night, I took the whole lot to Pete’s to try them in conjunction with his macs.
Firstly, both disks, in either firewire case, mounted on his mac – so both the disks and the cases are OK.
Secondly, my laptop will mount his iPod on either of the mac’s firewire ports – so the mac is OK.
Thirdly, my mac will mount as an external hard disk on his mac both via his firewire cable and via my two cables. His mac will similarly mount on mine – so the cables are OK.

I think that covers all the variables – cases, disks, mac and cables are all OK, yet they won’t work on my mac. The only difference is he upgraded to OS10.4.4 using the combo updater (i.e. straight from 10.4.0 to 10.4.4) while I upgraded from 10.4.0 to 10.4.3 and then applied the 10.4.3 to 10.4.4 upgrade. I can go back to 10.4.0, then use the combo updater – apparently this has been know to fix some strange software ills.

I BOUGHT MY TICKETS! I fly to Mumbai on 1st March, returning on 27th August from Kolkata.

Monsoon and madness, ganja and garam masala here I come!

I spent most of yesterday with friends in Crail. I think I woke up when the kids were going to school but didn’t really surface until 10.

I got back to town and went to my lawyer to pay a bill and her rental colleague’s office to arrange for her to see the flat (this will happen on next Tuesday). I also went to see my mortgage advisor to ask about what I should do now I was near to renting the place out.

I’ve done almost nothing to advance the flat. However I have finally managed to leave a voicemail with Castle Furniture so maybe my old furniture will do someone some good.

I also had an eye-test today. Fortunately my prescription hasn’t changed so I don’t need new glasses. The optician was concerned that the fluid pressure in my right eye was a bit high (indicative of possible glaucoma) so they also tested my peripheral vision. All good there too.

This evening I’ll finish scrubbing the kitchen floor and then replace the fridge and cooker so I can cook some food, then clean the fridge.

Most of Friday morning was a write-off for reasons I can’t recall. On Friday afternoon I finished emptying the lounge, then swept and mopped the floor, then touched up the paintwork which had been damaged by the desk rubbing cables against the wall. I also clipped the cable from the phone-jack to the USB microfilter to the skirting board. Then I headed to Edinburgh to go furniture-shopping with Elly.

We ate at Omar Khayyam, the nearest (and very good) curry-house to Haymarket station, before retiring to her flat to chat and plan our foray for the morrow. I wanted to buy a new bed, a new sofa, some chairs for the table I’m keeping in the lounge and to at least look for new curtains for the lounge. I’d already found possibly the cheapest bed available online but wanted to be see if before committing.

Elly had a piano lesson in the morning so, as I recall we headed to Ikea just after mid-day. Ikea is a yellow and blue monstrosity to the south of Edinburgh. Every product has a name in (mock?) scandiwegian, most of which make me cringe. After all, what does it matter whether your new glasses are called Äsgärd or Arsehole so long as they hold the right amount of memory-erasure fluid?

Ikea’s also renowned as the place to go if you and your partner want to be sure of an argument, so Elly and I were very pleased to be just friends – neither of us could cope with an argument just now. We saw nothing we liked in Ikea’s bed range and only one sofa we did like. Of course it was out of stock in Edinburgh, Glasgow and even Gateshead. We did find some cheap wooden chairs that would fit with the lounge. I also bought a bog-brush and some dish-washing brushes so it wasn’t a total loss.

We then headed for the nearby branch of Bensons to try out the cheap bed they offered. It looked fine, was in stock and could be delivered within the timescale I wanted. However, the mattress was squishy, so I spend an extra £30 on a better mattress. By then night had fallen and we were both shopped out so we headed back to Elly’s flat for pizza and relaxation. It’s amazing how tiring furniture shopping can be – you walk a bit, talk a lot and otherwise do almost nothing. However, I suppose the tredness is caused by the stress of thinking about spending maybe £1000 on stuff you don’t quite like (or in my case, will not use). Given the choice, I’d spend the money on a cluster of 17-in powerbooks but they’re not so comfortable to sit or sleep on. We tried to find a vegan cheese substitute in Tescos to augment my pizza and bought something called Cheezly. I’m glad I’m not the only one who found it utterly ghastly.

Around 10.30 we packed up Elly’s wagon and headed for St Andrews so we could attack the kitchen together and then try furniture stores in Dundee. Sunday started late but well – we moved the cooker and fridge freer out of their slots and I cleaned the floor while Elly hemmed my kitchen curtains.

Furniture-shopping in Dundee was a similar riot. The stores are huge rambling things, full of ‘ideal’ kitchens and bedrooms that are the size of my entire flat. They’re also full of Dundonians. Much rambling later, we saw in SCS a display model that exactly matched the green of the lounge ceiling. I was ready to buy it there and then but Elly sensibly suggested that we look elsewhere, then come back and and buy it if nothing else showed up. Nothing else did, mostly because neither of us could remember our way around Dundee’s nether regions. I don’t hold this against Elly at all – she hasn’t lived near Dundee for at least 10 years.

So we returned to SCS and Elly coached me in how to bargain for a better deal. SCS needed the sale today so I wasn’t to appear too interested. Elly also butted in to make them deliver the sofa for free. Her personnel and negotiation skills show why she’s a senior civil servant and I’m an unemployed layabout.

So far I’ve bought a bed (complete with mattress, duvet and linen), a sofa, two chairs and cushions, a bog brush, two dish-washing brushes, 15 metres of co-axial TV cable and two end-plugs, two white shower curtains, two tubes of bathroom silicone sealant, two packs of cable clips, a pair of rubber gloves, alleged mould remover, superglue, a tape-measure and a hammer for £814·38. I think my cooker will be £250 so I’m quite pleased with the costs of making Mycelium Mansion fit for human consumption.

First a bit of a moan… I use iJournal to write my entries (among other things) it picks up the current music better and facilitates linking to URLs and user-names. However it doesn’t (yet) support tags. So I have to then edit the entry in the clunky LJ-interface to add the tag. Boo hiss to using 2 apps to achieve 1 thing!

Today started fine – I was awake at 8.30 after a patchy sleep. I dragged my carcass out of the house to meet up with my bank. I’m finally in the position of being able to threaten to take my account elsewhere and am sorely tempted to move to Smile. Clydesdale treats mac-users as second-class citizens and has no support for Safari. Smile acknowledge that macs exist and tell the users what to do (this is not an invitation to my readership). Also, a friend confirms that their system works on smartphone browsers (at least on Blackberries) so I’m very tempted. Also, Smile has an ethical policy I can’t really fault and Clydesdale is owned by a bunch of Okkers. (‘Hey, Sheila, is Ethics that place where they grow olives and goats?’)

I get home about 11.30 and find that the JobSeeker forms I was meant to receive in the post haven’t arrived. I phone the Cupar office where I’m due to be interviewed and they tell me to simply arrive early to fill in a set of forms there. I see later in the 2-part interview that they laboriously enter my answers into a computer. I wonder why they don’t at least have the option letting me tick the boxes on-line myself. So much paper and time could be saved!

The first part of the interview is to decide the benefits to which I’m entitled. It appears I will get ‘contributions-based JobSeeker’s allowance’ but it won’t start until 8th February because I was paid a month’s notice (fair enough), was paid for 4 days holiday I didn’t get to take (seems a bit unfair to remove my pay for doing ‘extra’ work) and didn’t start the process of registering as unemployed until 4th January (definitely crap because the offices were closed until 4th anyway!) With contributions-based JobSeeker’s allowance comes the news that I don’t get any help with eye-tests or glasses so I hope my current prescription is still valid.

The next part of the interview is about the sort of work I’m seeking and how I’m going about this. I tell them about being in Fife only until 28th January at the latest, then moving back to Worcester and then going to India, so that my active seeking for work won’t really start until September 2006. I’m even more honest about what I would like to do – project management, the production side of publishing, (mac-based) IT for an ethical concern. This is genuine: I do enjoy throwing myself into projects, leading from the front and the production part of publishing. I don’t like the commercial aspects at all and I need to know that what I produce will demonstrably benefit others. I can’t see the challenge in production of novels – all the hard work is done by the author, the editor(s) and the proofreader. And I pride myself on knowing something about macs and IT in general, although I am a mere speck on the windshields of and Pete.

Back to St Andrews about 4.30 and book an eye-test for next Tuesday then shiver my way home. It’s winter in Scotland and it’s bloody cold!

My first task is to clean the kitchen walls. Fortunately the paint in here is OK, provided you like the virulent red. Then I mop the floor and that’s the kitchen finished apart from maybe resealing around the sink. I’m not sure whether I want to do this. The current seal is intact but it’s rather manky, so my choice is between ‘old but functional’ and ‘new but possibly non-functional’.

I then start sorting through some of the guddle in the lounge. In the hall I now have neat piles for

• returning to if she wants any of it
• returning to Ewan
• returning to Will & Adriani
• returning to Baz & Em
• stashing in the loft here or posting home
• dumping

In the bedroom are my two rucsacs and the pile of paperwork to sort through.

Tomorrow I’ll buy my tickets, then clean the lounge, sort the paperwork and take even more stuff to recycle, Oxfam or just dump!

I meant to sign off a text tonight with the latin for ‘Bruce the knight-errant’. I erred slightly and put ‘Brvcivs eqvvs errans’ (instead of Brvcivs eques errans’).

You could translate ‘Brvcivs eqvvs errans’ as ‘Bruce the random horse’.

A mac discussion list threw up the following news item. My feelings are:

For the tens of thousands of home PC users: you could have bought macs and saved yourself so much trouble!

For the people who have to use PCs at work: sympathy anyway, redoubled several times over because of this.

For the BOFHs who have to deal with the mess on top of their normal duties, extreme sympathy. Clearing up shit that’s been dumped on you is never nice.

For the perpetrators of virii: you’re all scum. You have no excuse. You see weakness and you exploit it to show off your ‘cleverness’. If you saw someone who depended on wooden crutches, would you reach for a saw and hack up their means of transport, just because you could?

Well the mould remover failed spectacularly. So I spent ages cutting the old sealant away from the bath, using the nasty chemical guck to remove the traces (not sure I got all of it out) and putting new sealant in.

Ever tried sealing the edge of a bath behind the taps? Don’t – it’s a fucking nightmare. I found the best way of putting sealant into place was to squirt half an inch onto my index finger, then press/smooth it into place. The best tool I could find for removing the wee beads that leaked around the edge of my finger was a plastic picnic fork. It really worked.

So the bath was sealed late last night. I also sealed around the kitchen units. Neither of look totally professional but they do look OK and I’m quite proud.

I also washed the outsides of the kitchen cupboards, even taking the handles off so I could get rid of 10 years’ worth of grime that had accumulated inside them.

Then I sat in bed, looking for deals on beds. They’re expensive! OK, they’re meant to last ages so the cost per night can be as little as 11p but £400 is far more than I expected.

Today I’ll clean the insides of the cupboards and then go out to pay some bills, chase my bank and buy lining paper for the cupboards and drawers.

I’ve phoned Fife Council to ask about them taking away my old cooker. ‘Special uplifts’ aren’t available until 16th January, so I know I’ll be here at least until then. I suppose this gives me time to buy a new one but I want rid of the old one now so I can clean the floor!

Update (1:51 pm)
The kitchen drawers and cupboards have been cleaned to the best of my ability. The former spice drawer is irreprably stained with turmeric. However at least it’s a clean stain! I’ve also asked Kingdom Housing Association to fix the entry-phone and tried to contact Castle Furniture to get rid of the old bed , sofa and fold-up bed. I think they’re still celebrating Hogmanay.

Next things: food, buying drawer liners and more food!

By the way, my dad’s birthday present arrived in Worcester around 8·30 this morning. Misco have excelled themselves: I only ordered it at 4pm yesterday!