At 8.00 this morning Sally got a telephone call. It was from our youngest daughter Ellie, on her newly acquired mobile. She was in the downstairs lavatory and had run out of loo roll. Could we please furnish her with some ? The nerve !

Duncan

Much has been happening. The biggest news is that we can confirm, Lesley Joseph of Birds of a Feather fame and much else besides will be hosting our Breath Of Fresh Air Evening on Sunday 15th June at Hall Barn, Beaconsfield. So please buy tickets, lots of them. The price is £10 each and the proceeds got to the Wexham Park Ventilator Fund. We will have a fabulous show with music from a Little Night Music, hilarious sketches, evocative readings and poetry and a number of stars who have yet to be named. The wonderful Sarah Kestleman will also be reading a piece.

It promises to be a great evening and you can book tickets on 08700 667720.

More news. I am now published and have a “What Is ?” column in Traditional Boats and Tall Ships magazine. So if you want to find out the derivation of The Knot, how to calculate True Wind Speed and Angle from Apparent, why Weather Helm is better than Lee Helm, what a Chum is or Baggywrinkle, look no further than “What Is ?” in TBTS.

My assault on the Nationals, Regionals and Magazines is also underway with the most devilish clever promotional device to get noticed. Somehow, some way I will get my next career as a columnist off the ground. Stand by for rejection letters, or worse still the deafening sound of silence !

Apropos of that I saw two articles in this morning's rag. One concerned a girl who had started drinking at 12 and by the age of 14 had very serious liver damage, according to the doctors, and now at 18 will die if she touches another drop of alcohol.

And the other story showed some dramatic shots of a man taking a photo of the sunset in the Grand Canyon, perched precariously on top of an isolated rock and further shots of his leap back to the safety of land apparently over a 1,000 foot drop.

To which I have these comments;

A fourteen year old drinks 6 bottles of wine and a litre of vodka a day ? And it's paid for out of her dinner money ? Where did her parents think she was lunching, The Ivy ? How ridiculous. Either someone is telling porkies or someone is telling porkies. Even at the height of his drinking Gerard Depardieu was claimed to be getting through only 4 bottles of wine a day and he is a fairly substantial chap. What did this girl's parents think when she returned home stinking to high heaven of booze, slurring her speech and collapsing all over the place ? Not to mention the vomitting. “Hard day at school dear, never mind”. Some people get what they deserve, parents, child and all. Ludicrous..

A man is seen sitting atop a rock sticking out above the Grand Canyon. Camera on tripod he is drinking his way through a six pack of beer waiting for the sun to set. He is after a good sunset shot. Tourists nearby see him and take photographs of this strange site. The sun sets, the shot is taken and with his gear under his arm and his rubbish, for he is no litterer, he makes the 8 foot leap back to the safety of the edge of the canyon. The tourists notice he is wearing flip flops. A Dutchman takes some shots of this foolhardy act. This much we are told by the paper and we think, “what an idiot”. However, a quick whizz round the internet establishes that the shot of this man was taken by a professional Dutch photographer called Hans Van Der Horst who has as you would expect has a fabulous website of stunnning pictures. And in fact just out of shot was a ledge so that if the man had slipped he would have only fallen a few feet to safety and not the 1,000's of feet to the canyon floor that we are led to believe. So the picture is not what it seems. Omelettes sur le visage all round then at the Daily Mail and P45's for the research department, I wouldn't wonder.

Duncan

OK this is a major push for the Wexham Park Ventilator Fund. We have some £19,000 in the account. We require £36,000. We are very kindly receiving the profit from the Maltman’s Green Summer Ball. The profit will come very much from the Auction. I have put up a weekend on Dorothy Lee my Hallberg Rassy 352 sailing boat as one of the prizes. Last time I did this the weekend went for £650. We want to do better than that this time. I am Master of Ceremonies for the evening I will also be running the auction. So I am very much singing for my supper, or rather the Ventilator Fund’s supper.

Then there is the Chiltern Shakespeare Company who are very kindly donating the profit from their show, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. During the run of their show on Sunday the15th June we will also be holding an evening called A Breath Of Fresh Air (Breath of fresh air/Ventilator, get it ? Oh, well suit yourselves) which will be an eclectic offering of song, verse, prose and sketch.

There will be songs from the top London shows sung by the stars themselves. A major star will run the show and we have other stars lined up. However, stars and their schedules being what they are it is always difficult to pin them down until near to the performance date but trust me we have some big names. And as soon as I have clearance to say so I shall be shouting from the rooftops.

You see, it’s a double edged sword. We need the money for the fund so we need a large audience and to get that we need stars but stars also need a large audience because otherwise we won’t have mazimised their star status. So, as much as we need them, we also need you to book tickets.

And of course there is the Midsummer Night’s Show to support, so I am asking for quite a bit of work here. And it is all in aid of getting a ventilator for Wexham Park Hospital.

It was all very well of She who must etc... to stand there in ITU and promise that we would make up their shortfall. Naturally she was grateful that her comatose husband was having his breathing done for him and being kept alive by one of these precious things. But little did she realise that the effort of raising the cash would practically kill him. For not only am I taking part in A Breath Of Fresh Air (now known as BOFA) but for some reason I forgot about the ‘no’ word when the director of Midsummer Night’s Dream asked if I would like to play the part of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and I am doing that as well.

It’s all part of my rehabilitation I tell myself. And of course being a dreadful show off, all of this standing up in front of people be it as an auctioneer or in BOFA or Dream is great fun.

Re BOFA and DREAM these are held at the estate of Hall Barn. Doors open 2 hours ahead of the performance and one can bring a picnic supper and eat this in the lovely grounds, down by the lake, on the lawns, by a folly etc. and feel quite gentrified, or indeed damp - from the grass - if you don’t bring a rug or chairs. The seated area is raked (you all get a good view) and covered (you all stay dry should think the unthinkable happen).

Here follow some of the details you need re dates etc and a bit about Hall Barn. However there is only one thing you really need and that is the booking number.

08700 667720

It is very important that you book.

Dates for Dream are 11- 14 and 18 – 21 June

Date for A Breath Of Fresh Air is – ONE NIGHT ONLY SUNDAY 15th June – Don’t Miss it !

I want to be able to walk in to ITU on the 30th June with a cheque for £36,000 and take them down to the Ventilator shop and buy them the machine !

As good old Fred Pontin used to say “Book early to avoid disappointment.”

Please support us and help us to reach our target for the Ventilator. I would try begging you but I think that might be demeaning. So please, please, please, please, please come. Apart from anything you’ll have a fabulous time at both or either of the shows.

Duncan

I am sprawled on the sofa watching television. My bag is full, a little liquid and a lot of air. I could go upstairs and change but it is late and I will change when I go up to bed which will be in a short while, so to release the pressure I let a little of the air out, a sort of fart. Lifting up my shirt I unclip the top of the bag and expel the air, being careful not to expel anything else.

I am officially discharged from all things medical as of today. Bed 9 in ITU that became Room 16 in the Paragon Suite that was a person has now officially disappeared.

The surgeon even muddled up my bowel with someone else today when he told me that I had half of my large bowel left which is interesting because I have a drawing by that very surgeon which shows that I have no large bowel, except a couple of inches at my bottom and a couple at the other end by the ileum, which is partly why a reversal of the colostomy is unlikely. They have moved on a long way from ‘Duncan bowel’. They are busy people and they have saved many lives since they saved mine and it is my replacement in Bed 9 of ITU that they need to concentrate on now and not the living.

In a way it is a positive thing that they are starting to forget me. In another it is alarming that something that was so traumatic for me cannot be shared with them.

I am asked questions about how I feel, energy levels on a scale of 1 to 10, my mood, how work is going ? I pat the answers back.

I do not ask any questions because I know that they do not have any answers.

I do have questions though but they must remain unanswered. Time will tell, I am sure

I was asked how the bag was going. Well, if you allow for the fact that one's self esteem is on the floor. Virginia Ironside who is apparently an agony aunt, wrote in the Daily Mail about her colostomy. She was much praised for her frankness. Although with her ability to bathe unbagged and the fact that her reversal is due soon and that she has the greater part of both small and large bowel, she and I did not have the same need for a colostomy. I wrote a comment on the Daily Mail internet website and was interested to note that we were writing down the left hand side of the page about colostomies and down the right hand side were banners which one could click on of the beautiful people and what they had been up to recently. There wasn't the sniff of a colostomy there.

The beautiful people on the right and on the left, the un-beautiful.

Will colostomy ever be a subject for open discussion or will it remain in the closet ?

The subject of lavatory paper was always considered infra dig and now Andrex advertise openly. Immodium is all over the telly, so you don’t have to be all over the loo, presumably. Products to prevent fluid retention and unseemly leaks from female persons are thrust in our face, so perhaps colostomy will be next. Ostomates of the world unite.

Duncan

Do you remember when we had something called insurance ? No, really we did.

It was a very good idea Let me explain how it worked.

In return for insuring the contents of your house against mishap from within or without an insurance company would do its sums and charge you a fee, a premium.

The terms were laid out clearly and in the event of a claim the insurance company would check that there was no foul play evident and then pay out.

Simple.

Not any more.

The insurance companies realised that they could afford an awful lot more champagne and foie gras for the directores if they introduced something called and ‘excess’. An excess to match their excess if you like. Of course the public are no saints and there were a few scoundrels who robbed their own houses, or indeed burned buildings down to claim on the insurance and collect the cash. But I like to think it was the rising cost of champagne that brought the excess in.

Now you will find that the value of your claim will be less than the excess, so in effect for most things, despite paying your insurance premiums you won’t actually be insured.

I know all this because I have just adjusted our contents and fabric policies. Now I am paying a quarter of what I was before by the simple expedient of having the highest possible excess on the policies. Given that I can’t afford to claim for any small loss I have decided to insure for large loss only – a full clearance burglary or a gutted house.

Mind you the specifications of the deadlocks, the lockable windows, the fully monitored alarm service and so forth are a nightmare and the insurance company will weasel their way out of anything if they can, so I am wary. There will also be conflicting and confusing information in the small print which will probably mean my insurance is invalid if we are burgled in a month with a vowel in it but I am doing my best.

I don’t expect to get paid out if something goes awry and we need to claim. In fact I was on the brink of leaving insurance alone altogether but this is where Insurance companies are so crafty because there is always the niggling thought of what if...

Duncan