MrsDoyle

Relevant clip from The Commitments

This made me laugh, it’s so true! Apart from chickens though - I know a few middle class people with chickens.

Good luck! I hope the docs come up with solutions as well as a diagnosis, and you recover.

After ten years keeping bees as part of a charity project, next year I’m leaving that and getting my very own bees. I’m very excited at the prospect!

Also, at the end of this year I’m going on a trip abroad for the first time since 2019. I’m quite apprehensive but still looking forward to it.

A friend and I tried to hitch from Calais to Paris in 1980 or so. Scruffy punks don’t get lifts, turns out. We got the train and arrived in Paris late at night. Hotels by the station were either full or too expensive. We were staring at our map in despair when a young man asked if we needed help. Long story short, he walked us to his mother’s flat and made up a bed for us on the sofa. She cheerfully made us breakfast in the morning - I got the impression her son often brought home waifs and strays. Really nice people.

I left a necklace in a hotel in Canada one time and wrote to them on the off chance that they found it - it wasn’t valuable, it was a sentimental thing. The receptionist posted it back to me in the UK with a lovely kind message. The hotel is called Kindred Spirits and it is on Memory Lane in Cavendish, PEI. The house next door has green gables, just saying.

I grew up in New Zealand in the 50s-60s. We got most info on current events from the radio. Later on there was TV, but it was mainly radio. Our radio had long-wave and if atmospheric conditions were right you could pick up foreign broadcasts.

Other knowledge came from school, obviously, and from libraries. I absolutely haunted my local library, and read voraciously. I still have a fund of info in my head from back then that comes in handy in pub quizzes. When I wasn’t reading I was out with my friends on our bicycles. We rode for miles at a time - I don’t remember ever telling an adult where we were going.

(About libraries - I don’t know if you’re aware, but the tycoon Andrew Carnegie funded libraries around the world, including the one in the city near my home town.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library

Having said all that and making it sound idyllic, it wasn’t. Society back then was repressive in major ways and people’s viewpoints were generally narrow. History books weren’t always telling the truth. It wasn’t terrible compared with say apartheid South Africa, but not great. There was a counter-culture bubbling away - beatniks and then hippies - so it was possible to get an alternative view, just about.

I love the technology that gives me access to not just information, but the lived experience of people round the world. I love reading posts here about mad trivial stuff like what you all are having for breakfast. I love taking a Street View tour of places I’ll likely never visit. I’m reading a novel set in Iceland at the moment, and can “drive” along the route a character is taking. I can video chat with my sister, who lives 10,000 miles away. It’s a miracle!

Chiming in to say you’re right. I ignored acid reflux for years and now have what’s called “Barret’s esophagus”, pre-cancerous cells in my throat. It turned out I had a hiatus hernia. Had that repaired and now have a gastroscopy every couple of years to check I don’t have cancer. So yes, listen to your body.