Making Memories and Curing my Hangover

Good morning. It’s Monday morning. I’ve woken up feeling lousy. Lots of mornings I wake up feeling a bit rubbish but today its hard to put my finger on what's wrong. I suppose it’s a combination of being ill anyway, coming down from my chemo and having a busy weekend. So I’ll stay in bed a while and finish yesterday’s blog update. It’s almost done anyway 10 minutes and Trish can do her proof reading wonders.

Where is it? What have I done? It’s bloody gone. Now I could get a bit pissed off but wait, I have an early version, a quirk of Wix! I retrieve that version and am now about to refinish my musings. All is not lost. So here’s version 2.

I’m beginning to get used to this strange situation that I’m not long for this world. I try not to think too deeply. Little things trigger an unpleasant emotional plummet but distraction seems to be the antidote I need. So when my neighbours offered to bring forward the end of lockdown and give us an introduction to Tier 1 with a bottle of something quaffable I took a nanosecond to agree. Now I still had a couple of glasses of wine in a bottle I’ve been steadily devouring. That’s plenty for me. My most recent drinking speed has been about 1 bottle of red wine every 2 weeks but not Saturday night. Saturday night I cranked it up a bit to 1 bottle every 2 hours. Yes, I polished off 2 bottles of rather nice vin rouge.

Actually that should be vino tinto, it was Argentinian wine. Perhaps I needed a blow out. I really shouldn’t give my ailing liver so much work to do but it seemed a good idea at the time.

The weekend had its moments. On Saturday I fitted the first two parts of the new kitchen splashbacks. Yippee. This isn’t just gluing a couple bits of board to a wall. It’s cutting holes and channels in the concrete for plug sockets, switches and cables. Then shoving glue on the splashbacks and sticking them to the wall. There’s still 7 bits to fit but I feel confident that it’ll be done by next weekend.

Of course the amount of activity that I can cope with is directly affected by the severity of my hangover. I haven’t polished off a couple of bottles of wine for a very long time so I needed to devise some kind of hangover cure. Yesterday morning jumping into the shower just didn’t cut the mustard so I jumped into the sea. That did the trick. We had already planned to take our lunch and spend 2 or 3 hours at Porthluney (Caerhays) beach. So we encased ourselves in neoprene jumped in the motorhome and threaded our way, sometimes with great care, to the beach. There we met Abbi, Cal, Mila and Louie who were also suitably wetsuited and booted.

After 45 minutes messing around in the surprisingly big surf we returned to the motorhome for hot drinks. As if by magic the hangover was gone. Tricia and I stayed on at the beach for lunch then we took off for Bodmin for Tricia’s appointment at Specsavers. In the carpark I washed the dishes. I know how to live.

We got home, I rinsed off our wetsuits, gloves and boots and hung it all in the shower to dry. If you didn’t know me better you could be forgiven for thinking where’s the surf boards? Well not everyone who's in the sea in late November are surfers. I’m a bobber. I bob around in the sea. But I give a great illusion of being a bit on the sporty side. If you look around at home you’ll find flippers and a snorkel for swimming, kayaks, bikes, and golf clubs. It’s all an illusion but I do like to try new things.

Yesterday, while in the sea, with the biggish waves, Louie and I spent time jumping over the waves. Actually I spent time lifting Louie over the waves. Exhausting. Then I did a bit of looking after Mila. I was so knackered that when it was her time to be lifted over a little wave we both fell over. Laughs all round. Last night and this morning I have the aches and pains as proof of having a good time.

A small cost when I'm with the family making fabulous memories.