As instructed by the JobCentre in St Andrews, I phoned the national jobseeker-helpline today so they could begin transferring my claim to Worcester’s JobCentre.

The helpline worker told me that they only arranged new appointments and could not help with this transfer, no matter what my local JobCentre had told me.

I then googled for the JobCentre in Worcester and found their number on a Worcester Students’ Union page. Why on earth was the top-ranking page not the govenment’s own?

I phoned the number on this page and was politely told to phone their new claims section. I did so and was invited to leave a voicemail with my name, contact number and a brief outline of my issue. The outgoing message said that one of the two ‘fresh claims’ staff would get back to me in 3 or 4 days’ time because they were snowed under.

Both of these calls were at national standard rate. I can afford the costs of these calls and frankly don’t care too much whether or not I get the dole at this point, so long as my NI records are kept up to date. However, I’m irate on behalf of the poor sods who are unemployed and need state assistance: the costs of calls and the wait involved in making a fresh claim may be more than can be born.

Got my tickets today!

Departing 1st March, returning 27th August.

Still nervous as anything – what have I signed up for? Will I be boiled alive? Will I cope with the crowds, the isolation from other UK folk, the cultural differences? Only one way to find out – be full-on Bruce (aka Random Bozo) at the rest of the world!

met the first potential tenants today. They asked some useful questions and seemed a very pleasant couple. Not students!

I think another potential tenant is coming to see the place tomorrow afternoon. By then I should have filled and painted the hole in the kitchen wall where the old gas cooker had been chained to it. (So the alert among you will realise that the old cooker has been taken away and the new one has been delivered and installed.)

…. to the Customer Service person at the Dundee branch of Tiso’s.
The day-sack part of the rucsac my former colleagues had given me as a leaving present had come apart at a seam after a week or two of moderate use. The CS person gave me no shenannigans, just ‘here’s a replacement’.

Walking out of the store, my cellphone bleeped to say I had a voicemail at home. This voicemail was from the same CS person, about replacement filters for my water-bottle. I’d been told that they would order some from other branches but had been unable to do so. I walked back into the store and spoke to the CS person again. He told me that if I paid in advance and gave them a contact address, they’d order more from the manufacturers and post them to me, without charging for the postage. I like free delivery!

… to Jill Logan, practise nurse at Pipelands Road Health Centre, St Andrews
I phoned her just now to ask what I should now do to obtain anti-malarial drugs. I told her that other friends had said that Mefloquine caused them acute psychological problems and that they recommended avoiding it. Jill reminded me that Malarone is ‘fiendishly expensive’ and that Doxycycline can enhance photosensitivity. I really don’t want extra bills or increased chances of sunburn or to carry around 200 pills and at the moment I’m fairly stable from the neck up. Ms Logan was sympathetic to these issues, yet calm and clear. She offered write prescriptions for:

• 2 weeks’ Mefloquine (so I can try it)
• 7 months’ Mefloquine (for use if I get on with it)
• 7 months’ Doxycycline (for use if I don’t get on with Mefloquine)

The beauty of this is that I only need pay for the anti-malarial I actually use. I am very grateful to Ms Logan for her professional attitude and suggestion.

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

Yesterday I dug out the old seal around the kitchen sink and put new sealant in. It’s shrunk a bit as it’s dried so I think another layer will be needed.

This morning I finally bought a new cooker. It will arrive on Monday morning. They’ll also take the old heap of junk away.

To complete the flat rental/renovation piece, all I have to do is sort curtains for the lounge and the storage area, then get my my mortgage provider to agree to the actual tenant, whoever he or she might be.

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!

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!

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 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.