ah, hello grindstone, my nose seems to think we've met before?

At last, I can use my computer again without resorting to valium and profanity.

I managed to welcome on board some kind of virus shenanigans that kept sending me robust invites of a sexual nature ( and no - I haven't been surfing THOSE kind of websites). My security system identified it well enough and stopped it from raiding my bank account or luring me into the sordid world of kitchen implement sex, but it couldn't stop the scores of pop-up messages from flooding my screen. This slowed my computer down terribly. It is a feeble beast anyway, as it only houses one memory card with the capacity to store about three grocery shopping lists, but after contracting this illegal alien, my machine seemed to experience complete hard drive lobotomy. It's binary code language appeared to have been reduced by 50% so that it now only communicated in noughts. I had to reset it to a previous date in the end to put a stop to it.

It wasn't so terrible in the end; hauling myself back into the saddle that is employment. I went back last week on a run of three nights. As I walked onto the unit, familiar smells greeted me. Antiseptic, food, fermenting bed sheets; these were the odours that welcomed me back. One of the residents (codenames used to protect the not so innocent) Mrs DG, was sitting on the sofa in the lounge. She suffered global brain damage several years ago after a heart attack and hypoxia as a result. This has left her very labile in presentation; as I knelt down in front of her to say hi and ask how she was, she touchingly caressed my cheek and smiled. Three minutes later, she had bounced up onto her feet, wild-eyed and threatening to insert a cup of tea up my arse. It's how things are here and you never take it personally. Hell, if you did - you're in the wrong job.

It was the staff christmas night out last friday, held in a pub just outside Much Marcle. By God, it was almost splendidly awful. We were ushered into a small function room at the back of the pub. What it's function is remains unclear, but I would guess broom cupboard. It had a dance floor the size of a hearth rug. The company was good and much laughter and piss-taking did the rounds, but we were served a curiously tasteless succession of courses for our meal, except for the cheesecake which was overburdened with flavour and stamped all over my taste buds. It was the all-time vampire of deserts and had sucked all of the flavours out of the other foods.

After the food, the dancing. This was excrutiatingly embarrassing as the party just didn't kick off. Even known ravers were reduced to shuffling their feet listlessly and staring at a spot on the floor. People began to peel away in hearty numbers so that there was more life on the car park outside the pub. By eleven p.m. there was just the DJ, the hospital lush (the suspicion remains that she drinks surgical spirit; a hospital our size shouldn't be getting through 200 litres a week) and me and two workmates. Hayley is a girl always looking for the next party, so she disappeared into the fleshpots of Ledbury. I was staying at another work colleagues house, as I couldn't drive home after drinking. So it was, that we stumbled through the pitch dark to her manor.

In this, I do not exaggerate. Penny lives in a place called Bickerton Court Manor. I have looked it up on the Net and discovered that it has a recorded history from the sixteenth century at least. It is a wonderful place! She gave me a tour and its innards seemed to ramble off forgetfully in several different directions. Penny has three children and they have a whole world to explore in that place. They could start a game of hide and seek and not meet again for the rest of that week. Mealtimes must become search and rescue missions. I lost count of the bedrooms, dining rooms and staircases strewn around. There was a fantastic cellar in the bowels of the dwelling which smelt ancient and harboured wooden beams which must have been living, growing trees several hundred years ago. I was given a large room, from a selection of large rooms on the second floor, North Wing. It was as cold as a tomb, so that I wore a layer of clothing in bed and piled two thick quilts on top of me to stop me slipping into a coma. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered about the lives, the faces, the worries of the people who had resided here in times past. I was in the old servant's quarters, Penny had told me. Typical, really.

As befits an ailing bladder, I awoke in the depths of the night with a desperate need to pee. It was pitch black and, half asleep, I was disorientated and edged, crab-like, across the room to reach for a source of light I could see. I quickly found myself grappling with a huge set of dusty curtains. Somehow, I had skewed about and made my way to the main window. The source of light I had been lured to was a crescent moon. I was woken at about half-eight by a smiling Penny and the alluring aroma of a mug of coffee. A hot drink in the morning is always the civilised way in which a host tells you, 'Get your arse out of bed.' I was fetching my ten years old son, Matthew, for the day today so soon thanked Penny and headed off.

It was a glorious, pin-sharp day. As I drove along, the Wye Valley presented me with splendour to spare and glided past my window with the smiling countenance of the young and handsome. Matthew was full of hugs when I arrived at his house, just north of Bristol. Shelley (Matt's mom) was in the lounge and Mark (her fella) was upstairs in the bathroom. He came downstairs in a cheery enough manner, but looked oddly tired and pouchy. Pleasant aromas had wafted from the bathroom as he had carried out his ablutions, but his freshen up had failed and he looked like his face had been sat on by a gibbon. Mind you, I hadn't even washed or brushed my teeth yet, so I was one to talk.

I drove the two of us back to mine, Matt chattering like a magpie the whole way. We played a few games on my X-box once home and I also asked him to sort me out his 'very best, slimmed down version of the things I really, really want for Christmas' wish list. The finished product still carried enough financial clout to make Richard Branson duck for cover. Matt also did me a 'favourite foods' list at my request, so that he no longer has to exist on noodles, cucumber and rolo chocolate mousse whilst in my company.

We went out to feed Connie the donkey and Paxton the goat in the afternoon. Golly, it was cold outside. They seem to be best buddies, so I was surprised to find Connie standing alone in the field outside of her pen. Connie enjoyed double the fuss and attention (not to mention chopped apple) but there was still no sign of Paxton. Since he can be a surly bugger, who has attempted to skewer my groin on a number of occasions, I wasn't too bothered at first but we had a look for him across the paddock anyway. we hunted all over and then extended the search down a wooded slope to the river, but still no Paxton. There was just a torpid fisherman. I uneasily began to suspect that he'd met his demise somewhere. I was aware that my neighbour, Mick, had armed himself with a large branch after also coming under attack from the irascible Paxton. My brother had named this the ' Mick Stick' and I now contemplated whether Paxton had been brained with the Mick Stick. we finally went to check out the goat living quarters and called out his name as we approached. Paxton appeared with an alacrity that suggested he knew we carried food for him. It was so cold out, I guess that he had just decided to stay indoors, snuggle in the hay, perhaps read a book. Paxton had a look in his eyes that seemed to say, "Yeah - the stupid donkey still went out to chew frosted grass and get hoofbite, whatever, - that's why you refer to dumb humans as asses, 'cuz this dude IS dumb!"

I had to take the wee man home again at half-eight and got back myself at eleven. This was after driving hypnotically along dark roads that swirled with freezing fog, which reflected my headlights back at me so that visibility became, at times, hazardous. I fell asleep on the sofa whilst trying to watch a documentary on the 'Blackout Ripper' of the second world war. I awoke at one a.m. with a cricked neck and a saliva pool spreading near my shoulder. I went to bed, to be subjected to strange, fractured dreams.

The alarm woke me yesterday morning at six-fifteen It was hellish cold outside (contradiction in terms) and it took me ten minutes to defrost the car. I had a twelve hour day at work, which turned into a thirteen and a half hour one. It was not the smoothest of shifts; Mrs DG has a cold and was grouchy, bordering on murderous. Mr PA was brought back early from social leave by a disgruntled partner, as she had not been supplied with enough of his medication and the staff nurse on duty hadn't checked the amounts before he'd gone (not good - I had to apologise profusely on behalf of the unit). The personal monies were in disarray and didn't add up correctly, two people cancelled shifts (one at short notice - always an ulcer cultivator), it was the monthly changeover for medication (which involves labelling unused meds for disposal - a tiresome task best described by weeping) and the unit phone became rebellious and refused to accept incoming calls from increasingly irate family members and partners of our residents. I had to stay late to write up my daily reports and finally escaped one and a half hours later than I should have, then to spend another ten minutes patiently defrosting the car before the half hour drive home in numbed state.

I tell ya - gin and tonic over ice never tasted so good! I stopped up 'til about one a.m. last night. Slept well, too, and now have the pleasing notion that I'm not back to work for three days. Just have to start my christmas shopping now. Goody gumdrops.

recovery period

I'm due back at work tomorrow after a nine day period of annual leave. This in itself is deflating, but I have twenty-four hours in which to bully my body into some sort of functional condition.

Now let's get this perfectly clear; I love it when my big bro' comes to visit for the weekend, it's just that he's now gone after two days of us drinking like vikings and eating foods laden with enough salt content to orbit my blood pressure.

He arrived on friday evening, which meant that I had spent friday daytime feverishly cleaning the house, so that he didn't contract anything life-shortening whilst here. This in itself is farcical when examined. I mean, it isn't as if we exercised, ate fruit and pulses and meditated to the sounds of wind chimes while he was here. The healthiest act we committed was buying three bottles of wine, not four.

Be that as it may, I decided the house really did need a damn good cleaning. I reflected that the carpet wasn't really supposed to crunch as you walked across it, so made myself industrious and went through the whole house - bathrooms (one of the toilets actually frightened me with the strange growths which seemed to be cultivating beneath the water line), hoovering (during which the hoover fell open into two halves and pumped out into the atmosphere, the furniture and immediately thereafter, my lungs, a billowing cloud of about two months supply of dead human skin and dustmite carcasses), energetic scrubbing of the kitchen and enough pine disinfecant to make the whole cottage smell like a Canadian glade.

Mark (my brother) arrived as I was machine-gunning my eleventh German trooper. C'mon - 'Call of Duty 2' still rocks! After initial greetings, dampened out by an exploding grenade and the wail of a human being in the last seconds of life, we decided time was a-wasting and opened some beers. And so the decline began. During the next forty hours or so, we partook of beer, whiskey and wine and soaked this up with garlic bread, pakoras, salted nuts and crisps. And these were just snacks between meals. If memory serves, and it is entirely fallible at the moment given the punishment my brain cells have taken, we went to our respective beds at two a.m. I attempted some reading of a book I am only partially enjoying, but I seemed to keep reading the same four lines and I really didn't think it fair that I make the hero get repeatedly shot in the shoulder, so I gave up and fell into the kind of slumber bears usually enjoy in winter.

Saturday morning was disappearing into eternity as I got up later that day. It was eleven a.m. and I felt okay, except for a mouth so rank in nature I thought my lower bowel had been regrafted to my tonsils.

Mark got up immediately afterwards and we took an excursion into the nearest town of Ross-on-Wye. It was cold out, but the freshness of the air slapped me into an alertness that would have evaded me if we'd stayed indoors. we wandered around Ross, mainly looking for a phone shop so that Mark could buy himself a battery charger. He'd left his own at home and the phone had unfussily expired during the previous evening. I bet he regretted his forgetfulness; we found a suitable charger after trying our third shop, but it cost him fifteen pounds to own it. I've never seen a man grind his teeth during a financial transaction before.

We had lunch in a pub and I tried an experimental beer, which my body accepted with the minimum of protest. My attention was caught by a very attractive female, sitting across the room in the company of either an extremely hairy boyfriend or the world's first domesticated sasquatch. She had thick brown hair and a dazzling smile that made my 'want' glands start acting up. I purposefully walked right past her when needing to make a trip to the small room, in order to surruptitiously check her out at close range. Sod the boyfriend; if he didn't want her leered at he should keep her in the cellar back home. Better yet, my room back home. As I walked near, realisation gave me a roundhouse punch and filled me with enough self-loathing to consider grabbing the nearest spoon, with which to gouge my own eyes out. She looked to be about eighteen years of age. Gack, Gack! Horrible, balding, perverted, forty-one years old me. I had to spend the rest of the meal looking everywhere but the particular area of the room she was gracing.
After the meal, Mark and I decided that the house wasn't groaning with enough alcohol, so we purchased said bottles of wine and then returned home. I have lived in this little village of Bridstow for seven months now and love it here. The only potential problem evident is that I am residing in a rural area and tend to make more acquaintances with quadropeds than actual people. Therefore, I had accepted an invitation from a neighbourly couple to attend the Annual Village Christmas Fun Quiz tonight and Mark, lucky fellow, had become a willing participant too. It was dark by the time we drove the short distance to the parish hall at six o'clock.
We quickly met up with my new frends (Martin and Heather) and introductions were made and a table quickly comandeered. As a newbie I knew, vaguely, about five people in a hall of about ninety souls. Mark was worse off than this as he knew only me. Whether this is why he suddenly scuttled off back to the cottage to bring back a bottle of wine, I am not sure, but he returned grinning and brandishing it enticingly. The quiz was a little delayed, but it enabled us to chat generally and for me to re-introduce myself to a few folk, who I had last seen when we commemorated remembrance day for the soldiers of both world wars about three weeks ago. On that occasion, the wreath had been laid at the village stone memorial, but a rogue gust of wind had swept it rebelliously around a corner half-way through the names of the dead being read out. The local chairman of the parish council had conspicously scampered after it as the two minutes silence had begun; a silence punctuated by the sound of a wreath being crushed, when he had been forced to step on it to stop it from gambolling joyously down the busy A49 road.
The quiz itself was a rather strange affair. I was used to a format where the compere read out each question to a collective audience split into groups. The idea here seemed to be that each table was handed sheets of paper containing the questions and everybody just got on with it in little insular pockets of knowledge. It all felt rather like an exam, rather than a quiz.
"They left the 'fun' out when they arranged the quiz," muttered Martin out of the corner of his mouth, before glancing furtively towards the body of judges as if scared of being thrown out for talking in class.
For the next hour and a half, the competition cantered to a gentle climax. All the way through, we were about joint fourth in a competition of fourteen tables. We wobbled badly when required to identify four farming implements. This is not entirely surprising; all four of us are 'townies', growing up amidst slabs of grafitti-dressed concrete and sprawling council estates. We got one out of four correct and somehow managed to label a muck-spreader as an animal feeding trough.
There was a short break in which plates of food were distributed. Martin and I both explored village quiz cuisine, which consisted of a baked potato, some sparse greenery and a piece of chicken I swear began life as a draught-excluder. During the meal I went off to find a knife with enough oomph about it to penetrate the chicken. On my return, in fine Chaplinesque style, I sat down and my knee connected with enthusiasm against a table leg. The wine glasses danced, the cutlery did a quick jig and the bottle of wine abruptly toppled and sent its contents gurgling liberally across the table. After the obligatory round of apologies, during which my brother called me an 'oath', I returned to my meal to discover it residing dismally in a half-inch swamp of white wine. The baked potato tasted very peculiar afterwards, though the chicken did soften up a little in texture. I still ate it all as well, even the wine-imbibed salad. Well, I'd paid for it!
Heather had to leave beore the last part of the quiz. They had a four month old whippet puppy at home and I guess she needed to see how much of their electric cabling Jack (the puppy) had ingested whilst left alone. The three of us left powered through the last two rounds of the quiz and finished a respectable second. We won a box of chocolates and a round of derisive cheers. These cheers became ever more cynical in nature when we also won three of the prizes in the raffle ticket draw. Mark and I chose a bottle of wine each as our prizes, which was a bit like Greenland importing snow considering the stash we had back home.
There was the usual hustle and bustle of people departing and chairs and tables being cleared away and then Mark and I dropped Martin off home before coming back to Brock Cottage. As inevitable as dead bugs on a wind shield, we began drinking. This was actually beginning to feel like do-it-yourself-embalming by now, but we persisted though to the early hours of the morning whilst playing music and chatting about life and where the hell all the years had rolled off to behind us. It was four a.m. before we surrendered to the pleas of our internal organs and went off to bed.
I awoke and got up at eleven a.m. once more. I felt bloated, bleary and intestinally blocked up. And this we do for fun. Mark got up soon after and cooked us both a brunch consisting of sausages, bacon, eggs, beans and tomatos. Well - we might as well add arterial congestion to the mix, I figured.
After eats and me also feeding the local wildlife, Mark took me on a drive to Symonds Yat on the English/Welsh border. The view at the top of Symonds Yat cliff is reputed to be one of the best in England and it was magnificant. It was a day of diamond-sharp coldness, but the sun was out and the view was very good, with just an allure of mist toying with the distant Black Mountains in Wales, some twenty miles away. A few species of birds were evident, feeding off a ball of fat and seeds which had been pushed into the crevice of a tree for them. Mark saw his first Nuthatch, its pale blue body and sturdy beak hacking at the fat ball. It has a cry sounding rather like a forcefully dripping tap. There is also a pair of Peregrine Falcons in residence here, but we weren't fortunate enough to see them. After about half-an-hour we meandered back to an open-fronted shack which sold coffee, cakes and chocolate and also framed photographs of the view from Symonds Yat. We had a coffee, which I cupped gratefully between freezing hands. My digits were throbbing, though considering the amounts of rich alcohol and salt-encrusted foods we had been enjoying, I suppose I could have been experiencing the early onset of gout.
Mark had to return home to Birmingham tonight, so we made our way back to Brock Cottage. There was time to have a last mug of coffee together and then spend half-an-hour hunting and maiming each other on the split-screen mode of 'Call of Duty' and then Mark had to go. I was sorry to see him go as ever; our get-togethers fly by - and not always in an alcoholic daze. In fact, usually we do a lot less drinking and a lot more hiking and will do this again, come the spring.
I now have the evening in which to relax and consider the prospect of returning to work tomorrow night.
Bloody hell - pass me a bottle of wine.