fanfare please…

…as I announce that the winner of my one year blogiversary is …. Becky!  Becky was picked at random by Donald O’Dowd who decided that the piece of paper with her name on looked the tastiest.  Becky, I’ll email you soon to get your address to send the goodies to!  Thank you to everyone for your movie recommendations: as I said before, some I’ve seen and some are in my ever-growing queue…

It’s ten years since I moved to Liverpool to go to University and the other day I remembered the time during my first term that I embarked on the three hour train journey back to Yorkshire with a bottle of Lucozade, my pyjamas and a pretty horrific bout of tonsillitis.  Like some kind of homing pigeon my initial instinct upon feeling ill was to fly back home again.  And have my mum look after me, because no one looks after you like your mum does.  Of course, I felt better after a few days but had to stay in the house as in my haste to leave the big city I’d neglected to pack any clothes suitable for anything more than lying in bed and groaning quietly.

I remembered this because on Thursday, on the verge of a cold, I decided to go and see my mum.  And boy, was I glad I did.  Because at 2 o’clock on Saturday morning I was sat in our local A&E waiting to see and on-call doctor about the fact that I’d been throwing up since 3 o’clock the previous afternoon.  With my mum by my side.  Now there’s lots of reasons why I was glad to be home when this was happening; I was seen by a doctor straight away, being the only person in the waiting room (ah, country hospitals…) when I was given an anti-sickness injection by the doctor I could ask for my mum to hold my hand while it was being done (I know, but I’m terrified of needles) and when I got home I knew that everything would be taken care of for me.  Don’t get me wrong, John’s devotion goes a long way, but I think that even he would draw the line at tending to someone who was making noises like the girl out of The Exorcist until the early hours of the morning.  But not my mum.  And really, what more could you ask for?

But before I did get sick – gastric flu, if you want to know – we went to Durham for the afternoon.  Durham is beautiful, it’s Oxfam: expensive, it’s river: clean and, according to George, it’s Park and Ride: one of the best in the country.

Then, after I recovered we went to the local bank holiday Monday car boot sale and got this,

But more of that to follow.  For now, a cup of tea x