When I was here in the early 80s' Kings Cross was kind of equivalent to London's Soho at the time. Although I have very little memory of the event, Colin, the friend that I was travelling with tells a story of how we spent a very happy evening getting vey, vey, rat-arsed with a bunch of stubbly six foot transvestites at a pub here near to the Youth Hostel. Like many big city inner boroughs the world over, it has undergone a process of gentrification and is now a much sought after 'cafe society' locale.
Anyroad, as half expected the end of the ECP treatment and maybe me being a bit slacksy daisy about some of my meds has resulted in a flare up in GVHD and CMV. Nothing too nasty but the Doc is trying a new (to me anyway) technique of prescribing Valganciclovir in an ongoing lower prophylactic dose to keep the CMV down without unduly hammering my blood levels. I've had to start being a lot more conscientious about the non tablet stuff (the tablets are easy to remember) - Betametasone mouth wash, false tears and eye gel last thing at night and in the am. I've also got a Betamethasone cream which is nominally for external use only, but which the Doc has advised I apply to my mouth ulcers 3 times a day. He's also looking at bringing forward my innoculations as I have to have everything done again - all the stuff that babies have up to and including the BCG - should be fun especially polio. It's a bit of an adjustment working with the health system here, we'd been involved with the NHS infrastructure for so long that we had all the contacts and relationships in place so as to make things pretty seamless (a lot of this was down to Jeannette who is great at building relationships and getting people on side - I'm more your taciturn type of bugger).
A lot more of the health service is privatised than in the UK, so it'll take time to get the various agencies used to my presence and to get them to start liaising efficiently - a good example is the blood pathology labs, totally divorced and separate from any hospital and set up as high street walk ins, where all the samples are shipped off to a major processing centre in Queensland before the results get back to the Doc. It took more than a week for him to get the results - makes the NHS in the UK look turbo charged - and this is a week in which my CMV levels were still unknown (but on the up as I suspected).
Enough of that. You may be waiting to read of the latest act of muppetry from this family - we all have our moments and this week it's my turn. Now as a general rule we tend to walk around in the apartment wearing not a hell of a lot first thing - the house cleaning service doesn't normally come around until midday so it's never normally an issue. Milo feels so comfortable in the nud that he's normally down to just his vest within a couple of minutes of walking through the door. We tend to have the sliding doors to the balcony open rather than run the air con full time - being poms unused to living with it, the air con gives us all runny noses.
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| Oh bloody hell - looks like Humpty's out on the piss again. |
So, getting ready the other morning, Jeannette away to work, Milo in his room watching kiddies TV on ABC1. I had just run a bath in bathroom number 2 adjacent to the entrance to the apartment as the ensuite only has a shower, was (obviously) naked when I remembered that I'd left the Kindle in the bedroom and nipped back to get it. Stopped on the way back to stick my head round the door so as to check on Milo - he's watching the Australian version of Play School and singing along to a song called 'Walking in the Bush' lyrics as follows;
Walking in the Bush
Walking in the Bush
Nothing's quite as lovely
As Walking in the Bush
So I started singing along with him and after a bit headed back to the bathroom having tweaked the words slightly to;
Walking in the Buff
Walking in the Buff - etc you get the idea.
Rounded the corner to go back to the bath to be met, mid verse by the room service maid who'd dropped by early to get started.I couldn't really make out her face as I'd put in my lubricating eye-gel which makes things pretty blurry for about 10 minutes - all I know is the door slammed bloody quickly - so not a big music fan then. I decided not to try and follow to apologise as it might only make things worse and still have no idea which of the maids it actually was. I now have to brazen things out with a big shit-eating grin whenever I meet any of them in the corridor, reception or lifts.
Milo is all teed up to start kindergarten at the school local to our new address on 2nd or 3rd of Feb next year. In the meantime he's got about 3 weeks on and off booked in a preschool nursery from now until late January. It's mix of between one and up to three days a week which is great in that it'll give us both a bit of a break from each other and allow him to makes friends with some of his peers who'll be moving on to the same school next year. He's gradually picking up how things work here, one of the carers at the preschool was telling me about how all the kids were lined up the other day ready to go outside and play. So they all put their sunhats on and have to hold their hands out to get a squirt of sunblock to apply to faces, arms and legs. Milo stood dutifully in line, received his squirt of sunblock and then immediately double timed it away to the bogs to wash the stuff off his hands. It took two of them to get him coated up with the slap before he could go outside.
He's having weekly swimming lessons and has been doing really well doing the doggy paddle in his arm bands - up until the past couple of days, when having seen me doing lengths of front crawl in the apartment pool, he has decided that this is how he will swim. To be fair, he devotes a lot of energy to it but the armbands don't help and the mad thrashing looks like he's trying to part the waters vertically down through the pool like some demented mini-Moses rather than make any visible lateral progress. Still it knackers him out and that's got to be good. Oh yeah latest stats anomaly - I'm suddennly shit hot in Turkey, 20 views in one day!?
Reminder for self - Bing Lee next time.
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