A lonely time

It’s a very lonely thing, to be ill. You can have as many people around as possible but ultimately, it’s you, alone, in misery. And there’s always the secret belief that everyone around thinks you are not as bad as you make out to be and that it was somehow self-induced, and an even more belief that they are right.

As of now, I have been ill for approximately one day and 17 hours. I had just finished a two hour session on my Xbox 360 playing Halo: Reach when I suddenly aware that I was feeling nauseous. This happens quite a lot, especially lately, as I seem to be particularly prone to this form of motion sickness.

Waking my wife from the sofa, I went to bed in the sure knowledge that a good sleep would shake off the feeling. I must have fallen asleep quickly as the next thing I knew, I was awake again two hours later still feeling nauseous and completely unable to go back to sleep. I extricated myself from the bed and made for the sofa in the hope of giving my good wife some semblance of a decent night’s rest. For the rest of the night, I alternately amused myself with my iPhone and making unsuccessful attempts at unconsciousness.

Morning came and I made my way back to the bed as I didn’t want my kids to find me not sleeping on the sofa but by now, it was obvious that this was not going to go away any time soon. The kids got up, my wife got up, I did not. Well, not until a little later when I needed to make a trip to the toilet and promptly spewed.

Since then, I have effectively been cut off from my family, hearing their general day to day noises while I have been trapped in the bedroom, unable to participate. At first, this is all fine as I was unwilling to participate as all my energies went into keeping whatever was left in my stomach in my stomach. But now, I feel like I am some sort of ghost in my own home, tolerated but unwelcome.

I know that this is not true. They are giving me space to help my recovery and avoiding contact in case I pass this thing on, but it is surprising how much you can miss your children even though they are only in the next room from you.

 

 

 

See? I did it again!

Last blog post 19 days ago, so ignore that Coming Up post I posted because they are no longer coming (or, indeed, be up). (What the hell am I talking about?!?)

Quick update, had lovely two holiday from week but back to work tomorrow.

There. Done.

Legoland

Third post in and I’ve already broken the promise to myself to try to post at least once a day. Still, it really is not surprising considering what I was doing yesterday.

I had suggested to my daughter, Sydney, that we could go to Legoland on Saturday as there was a kind of mini festival going on at the weekend. In particular, Carrie and David of Carrie and David’s Pop Shop would be there, as well as a variety of people dressed as favourite childrens TV characters such as Bob The Builder.

However, as I have previously mentioned I’ve been ill for a few days previously and I am still not feeling one hundred percent. So when I woke up and had a big internal debate with myself whether I was well enough to take her. My wife can’t drive and had already planned to go to Hampton Court with our son, so the fall back position was that Syd could have gone with her. Despite a couple of concerned queries from my wife, I, probably foolishly, decided to take her to Legoland after all.

First though, Syd had her ballet class and, as is traditional, that meant the parents were allowed to watch. This means that we were unable to leave super early as we normally would do and probably why it took us over an hour and a half to get there despite being so close by. Fortunately, we had a CD of The Ting Tings in the car which Syd just absolutely loves.

By the time we got there, it was lunch time, and so, in a departure from tradition, we actually bought our lunch rather than bringing along a packed luch. It was surprisingly cheaper than I was expecting, but that may have been because I was feeling too ill to feel hungry.

So we sat outside and discussed life, the universe and pesky wasps that would not leave us alone while eating ham sandwiches and drinking apple juice. It’s always these sort of moments I treasure, when I have a some time with my kids with little interference. I think this is when you can really see the sort of person they are turning into. I think for many parents, eating lunch on a day out is a necessary eater of time when they could be doing something “fun”. For me though, this is the very reason for days out, to actually spend time with your loved ones away from the distractions at home.

After we had lunched, we tried to seek out the Legoland Live! event but after some aimless wandering gave up the search. Syd decided she wanted to try Legoland’s latest ride, Laser Raiders, so I dutifully queued with her for over hour, feeling distinctly queasy as the queuing area was rather warm and then, within sight of the ride, it broke down. Talk about frustrating. However, the engineers managed to fix it within ten minutes so that was all right.

The ride itself was great fun, where you’re in this car with the most ungunlike gun, shooting at various targets along the route. I must confess my competitiveness overtook any other considerations and I was shooting at every target I could see and got a decent score. It was only when the ride was finishing, whenI noticed Syd had not scored anything, that I realised I should have been helping her a bit more.

We then went on a couple of smaller rides in the same area before resuming our search of the Legoland Live! event. We found a white marquee with a stage but clearly nothing was happening in there and it was getting late. We were on the verge of going home when Syd remembered about the water park, Water Works, for which a new swimming costume had been bought specifically. So despite a headache that was brewing, we got her changed and she spent a nice hour getting wet.

By this point, it was definitely time to head home, so we headed back to the car pausing only to buy some popcorn and a bottle of water to ease my thumping head. As we walked across the car park, we suddenly heard the sound of a familiar song being sung in the far corner. It was Carrie and David’s Pop Shop!

We rushed over to find a large field with a large stage set up and there, on stage was Carrie and David! Hurray! We stayed and listened until the end of their set, Syd singing along to the words, me just having a lie down on the grass, and then, for the third time, we thought about heading home.

As we were leaving, they announced Bob the Builder would be back on stage soon, and Syd commented she would like to have seen him. I reminded her that she had already seen him once at the Science Museum but she said that was just someone dressed up like him. I’m not quite sure who she would have expected on stage but apparently he needs to be building something to be real. However, it really was time to go so we continued towards the car.

Syd had obviously had a very tiring day as she soon fell asleep next to me while driving home, so much so that I had difficulty waking her up when we arrived. I went straight to bed to lie down, waking up in time to put both kids to bed, before collapsing on the sofa where I fell asleep again. My memories of the rest of the evening are rather vague as spent most of it asleep but I eventually dragged myself to bed and woke up early this morning, thankfully feeling much better.