The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘aging’ Category

Happy New Year fuckers!

I hope you’ve all bought new calendars and you aren’t still writing 2009 on your cheques.

Do people still write cheques?

I do, sometimes, but that really doesn’t have anything to do with anything, so I’ll swiftly avoid the diversion in that dead end direction.

Instead, I’ve come to share the latest news from the land of your favourite north London-based hippy. Its actually kind of big news.

Dig this, I submitted “the official northlondonhippy iPhone app” to Apple yesterday, it should be available on the iTunes store very soon for your mobile surfing pleasure.

This isn’t one of my little funny wind-ups, its an honest to god, actual app that runs natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

How cool is that?

On the hippy’s cool-o-meter, its off the fucking scale of coolness into a brand new realm of cool that has yet to be discovered by normal folk. Once the app is available, that new realm of cool will be yours for the taking.

The app delivers in an iPhone friendly format, all of my internet content. If I publish something, it will magically pop up on the app. You will receive my latest posts from this website, as well as having easy access to my busy Twitter feed. I’ve also included my TwitPics and YouTube videos, which are all easily accessible inside the app.

How much would you pay for a northlondonhippy iPhone app?

Really? I kind of expected that, which is why it will be available to download for FREE. That’s a price I’m sure you can afford.

My aim is to make this app the number one northlondonhippy iPhone app in the world. I don’t think it will be very hard to do, as it will be the only northlondonhippy app available, at least officially. I’m sure all the other kids will be creating their own versions to compete with mine.

Ah-hem.

I don’t want any of you to think I went off and learned how to write code for an iPhone, because I didn’t. I used a website called www.appmakr.com which automated the process to such a degree that even a moron like me could do it. If you need an app made for the iPhone from RSS feeds, you could do a lot worse than try this site out.

I will of course, reserve final judgement on AppMakr until I see my finished app on my own iPhone, but so far I am very happy with the service they provide. You will be too once you are rocking my app on your muthafuckin’ iPhone.

Keep watching for my announcement confirming that my app is live on iTunes. Until then, you can join me on some tenterhooks as I try to patiently wait for Apple’s approval process people to whatever voodoo that they do.

While I am quite pleased about my app, I am less excited about my birthday this month. Is there a law that says you have to have birthdays? Can we get it repealed?

Some years I am not too bothered about being another year older, but this year is not one of them.

I suppose a lot has to do with the awkwardness of my impending age…forty-fucking-seven. Its an odd number in more ways then one. Mainly, it marks my decent into my “late forties”.

I don’t like the word “late”, it makes me think of death. I think about death enough already, I don’t need stupid words tacked on to my age to remind me that the mortal coil is getting distinctly shorter every year.

My bones tell me, my muscles tell me, my world weary expression tells me, all pretty much on a daily basis. I am plumbing the depths of middle age.

I’ve been contemplating having my very own mid-life crisis, but I can’t seem to settle on what form it will take. On the menu are:

- a grown-up gap year to trek through the Andes
- a hair transplant
- 3 months of Swiss shin stretching
- a small, red, convertible sports car
- a sexually experienced 19 year old girl on the side
- a mental breakdown

I reckon to make it a proper mid-life crisis, I need to chose at least 3 things off that list, then pursue them with gusto.

Trekking anywhere is out, because it sounds too much like hard work.

A hair transplant just sounds messy and expensive and for what? To look like Elton John? No thanks.

If I was going to have my shins stretched, I should have done it 20-30 years ago, but it didn’t exist back then. I don’t think I am going to live long enough to make the pain & suffering worth it. You only gain a couple of inches in height anyway, so screw it, I’d still be short.

The little red convertible sports car is cliche and I don’t really like red as a colour for a car. Unfortunately, because of my age, red is the only colour a car dealer will sell me, at least for a 2 door ragtop. I’ve checked, its a car dealer bylaw, right their in their charter.

Does it all make sense now? That’s why you only ever see bald, fat middle-aged guys in red Ferraris (or Corvettes if you are stateside). And all this time, you thought they were choosing the colour. Now you know, its the law.

The nineteen year old girl seems on the surface to be an easy option and if I was a member of the Rolling Stones they would be queuing up at my door, but I’m not, so they’re not. Besides, 19 year olds haven’t lived enough to be interesting, so unless I can cram a 50 year old’s brain into their 19 year old body, I don’t see much point. And if I am honest, the only way I am going to get a hot little 19 year old is to rent one for an hour. I certainly couldn’t afford the care and feeding of one full time and I am a hippy on a budget, so this is out too.

A mental breakdown? Don’t I mainly have them on the internet or as it is otherwise known, a running blog.

This website is my therapy, which I guess makes all of you my shrinks. Every time I ask a question, you just have to say “well, what do you think?” Go on, its easy and I just saved you seven tedious years of university and medical training.

Email me for your certificate or degree from the University of North London (hippy). That and a pound will get you a ride on a bus.

As part of my never-ending quest to seek nothing but the truth, I’ve decided to provide the only genuinely honest review the decade that’s nearly finished.

It fucking sucked. Really, it did. I’ll be glad to see the back of it.

Besides iPods, name one good thing about the noughties? Even its nickname is pathetically lame.

The decade started with the Millennium, which was supposed to be the biggest celebration of all time. I spent the night in central London, on the River Thames, broadcasting live to all over the world. Maybe you saw me there, I was in charge of a broadcast tent near Lambeth Bridge, blocking people’s views of the fireworks and River of Fire.

Ha, the River of Fire was the first major disappointment of many in the noughties, a damp squib rather than spectacular and a giant let down for those who braved the cold to witness it. I’ve never heard such a loud, collective, “is that really it?” in my life.

London crowds can be drunken and angry and the night of the Millennium was no exception. As the clock struck midnight and I was transmitting live on behalf of four different foreign broadcasters, someone unplugged our generator cable and everything went dark.  

Don’t worry, one of the technicians managed to get it reconnected and it all worked, though the cables were covered with human urine, which wasn’t so pleasant for the engineer. On top of that, the crowd attacked us and tried to steal our expensive TV gear. I can remember smacking peoples’ arms and hands away from tripods and lights as the fireworks began.

We were all ready for the Y2K bug, a peculiar glitch in some older computers that prevented it for handling 4-digit years, meaning some unpatched computers would think it was 1900, not the year 2000. We expected the telephone network to collapse, the power grid to crash, along with all the jumbo jets flying overhead.

It didn’t happen, nothing happened, crisis averted.

But that didn’t mean the noughties were crisis free, because less than a year later, George W. (for What the fuck?) Bush stole the election and became the most powerful sub-normally intelligent person in history. His presidency dominated the decade and his policies made the world a much shittier place.

Think for a second, if Al Gore had claimed the presidency instead. He should have won it, he did win it, but the Supreme Court had other ideas.

Do you think we’d be in Iraq if Gore had two terms in the White House? Probably not, but then we most likely wouldn’t have Barack Obama now.

Who’s to say?

The Bush presidency was built on the foundation of the Neo-Conservative moment and the Project for a New American Century. How’d all that turn out?

Let’s see, the entire economy melted down to near collapse and we seem to be engaged in George Orwell’s never-ending war while his Big Brother keeps track of our every thought and action.

Cool.

Bush was stupid, his advisors no smarter. They dug one stupid hole after another, each a little deeper than the last.

When the attacks of 11th September 2001 took place, you couldn’t imagine a worse commander and chief to have at the helm, unless you enjoy children’s books about pet goats, in which case he would be your number one choice.

9/11 changed everything, but the real shock and awe was how we felt as we watched the twin towers come crashing to the ground.

I’m old enough to remember when the World Trade Centre was built. I’d been lucky enough to visit the observation deck more than once, its a view you wouldn’t be able to duplicate again today without a helicopter.

We were devastated by those attacks, fiendishly simple, yet executed to maximum effect. I remember thinking that this was the beginning of the end of western civilisation and soon we would all be crawling through nothing but rubble, drinking brackish water from puddles in the streets.

How wrong I was!

9/11 was a blip, a lucky shot, a once in a lifetime terror strike from a group whose success exceeded even their own expectations. I’m sure they didn’t think the entire world would change so radically as a result of their actions, but change it did.

Keeping us secure became the number one priority, the cost being a dramatic reduction in our liberty and personal freedoms. Any extreme, radical action taken by a government could and would be justified by tagging it with an anti-terror bent.

Do you want to monitor all telephone calls and email messages? No problem.

Do you need my banking and credit history before I get on a plane? Sure thing!

How about my shoes, should I take them off too? Gosh, hope I don’t have holes in my socks!

Think how quickly we all simply adapted to these new realities, we made hardly a peep as our civil liberties were systematically stripped away.

Its become such a farce now, here in London you practically can’t even take a photograph in a public place without the police swooping down on you like you’re Mohammed Atta, scoping out another attack.

Think that’s good for business and tourism? Think again?

Terror is not the only thing that’s been scaring us in the last ten years, as the environment’s been on our minds too. You won’t see any government declaring war on climate change, even though its probably more of a threat to more people than terrorism could ever be.

The effects of climate change are apparent to anyone who can be bothered to look, yet there are people out there in the world who try to deny this inevitability. If you tried to deny the threat of terror, you would be labelled a traitor, but being a climate-change doubter will not earn you the same label.

Its probably too late to slow down climate change because we pissed away the last decade arguing about it. It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn tragic as the recent Copenhagen Climate Summit heartily illustrated.

The wars in the last ten years have been quite tragic too, especially the two major conflicts instigated by the West, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The war in Iraq was justified with false pretences and blatant, pre-meditated lies. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and I had no access to any of the intelligence available to our leaders. They knew it too, but made up a bunch of nonsense any way.

I can remember being the only idiot in the world who thought that America and Britain wouldn’t go to war in Iraq. I genuinely believed they had no grounds to initiate a conflict and that they would back down at the last minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong, but not as wrong as launching that illegal and pointless war.

George W (for War Criminal) Bush and Tony Blair should both be sitting in prison cells in The Hague, awaiting their trials for crimes against humanity, but no one has the fucking balls to send them both there. The International Court should have charged them already, even if extradition would never happen. They both should pay for their crimes and sins.

But they won’t.

How many innocent lives have been lost in that pointless war? Iraq was far from perfect before the “allies” invaded, but the electricity flowed, the streets were safe and Iraq still had an educated, functional middle class.

I’m not a Saddam Hussein apologist, the guy was a nasty piece of work, repressive, iron fisted, unpleasant and vicious. But so what? Lots of countries are lead by shitbags, we don’t invade them and impose regime change just because we feel like it.

Regime change on its own is not a valid reason for war. In the case of Iraq, it turns out it was the only reason.

Saddam Hussein got strung up in a hastily organised hanging. There’s mobile phone video of it on the internet, that I’m sure you’ve seen by now. It was a very undignified end for an odious, horrible man. Though back in the 1970s, Saddam was friendly with America and funded by them, because he opposed Iran.

Things change, shit happens.

Afghanistan is a different shade of grey.

After 9/11, there was some sense in going into Afghanistan since that’s where the terror bases and training camps were. That’s also where the leader of the bad guys lived, oh what’s his name again?

Osama something or other.

They had the chance to capture or kill him in Tora Bora and blew it. He’s still allegedly alive and on the run in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The problem with Afghanistan is after they chased Al Qaeda out, they were left fighting the Taliban. Big countries like America are crappy at fighting insurgencies and guerrilla wars, see Vietnam for proof. They’ve been dragged deeper into a civil conflict than they need to be.

Today, Afghanistan is a lawless basket-case of a nation, with a corrupt, ineffectual government at its centre and powerful war lords scattered throughout the country.

President Obama seems to think more troops will help and the decade is ending with him announcing further deployments.

When will they ever learn?

How’s never sound?

And speaking of America’s first black president, Barack Obama is one of the good things to come out of the noughties, but he wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for George W. (Where’d he go?) Bush. Bush paved the way for Obama, with his stupidity, mistakes and far right ideals.

Whether you agree with Obama’s policies or not, having a mixed race president in America is good for the entire world. I never thought I would see it in my lifetime, and like most people I was moved deeply by his election.

Do I think he’s doing a good job? Its way too early to tell. He hasn’t even been in office for an entire year yet. We should give the guy a chance. Ask me again in 3-7 years, when he’s finished and I’ll have enough information to form an opinion. Clearly, I wasn’t a voting member of the Nobel panel, because I never would have given the prize to Barack, at least not yet, anyway.

Personally, it wasn’t such a hot decade for me either. Both of my parents passed away, my father in 2004 and my mother in 2008. I miss them both every day.

This was the decade I well and truly entered middle age. I’m going to be forty-fucking-seven next month. The last decade saw me diagnosed with a stupid illness and I had a sustained period of unemployment while I was between jobs.

The illness, Hashimoto’s Disease, is allegedly under control and I did manage to secure gainful employment, for which I am very thankful, but neither period was particularly pleasant for me.

The progress of technology is one good thing to come from the last decade, I’ve got the some of the coolest toys I’ve ever owned currently in my possession.

I’m on my 3rd iMac, the latest a 27” beast with a quad-core processor that is lightening fast, its like having a stylish supercomputer parked on my desk.

By far, the most amazing thing I own is my iPhone 3GS, it is a gadget of unrivalled beauty, power and usefulness. If I had to choose one piece of kit that’s revolutionised my life, its my iPhone. It does more than I could have ever imagined and its abilities just keep growing with every app I install.

Citizen journalism came of age in the noughties, with websites similar to this one springing up at a rapid rate. The word “blog” didn’t even exist ten years ago and now there are millions of them.

Blogging came along when I needed it most, I started this one nearly 6 years ago during my dark and depressing period of unemployment.

Blogging gave me something to do, something to focus on, something to make me feel like I was still a functioning member of society. I had a way to contribute, a way to participate. Somehow, I still mattered, even if I felt like I didn’t.

Blogging may have saved my life. I would have continued to sink deeper had I not discovered Blogspot back in 2004. 

And that’s where you all come in.

Without an audience, blogging is a bit pointless and while I am still not and will probably never be mainstream, I’ve had a level of support and interest that still astounds me. I’m thankful for every visitor I’ve ever had who has dropped by and hung out with me virtually.

Without all of you, I’d just be some guy writing longwinded essays for my own amusement. Ok, even with you all around, that statement is true, but its still better for having you all here.

Thanks very much for stopping by, you’ll always find a warm welcome here and I always put out on the first date.

I wish each and every one of you the very best of the holiday season. I hope the next decade sees all your hopes and dreams come true.

PS
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I left out of my review of the decade, but this short video review from Newsweek Magazine should fill in many of the gaps. Its quite US-centric, but its only 7 minutes long, so enjoy!

Blah, blah, blah.

That’s what other people’s excuses and apologies sound like to my jaded ears. Just so much noise and hot air.

I’ll spare you mine. I don’t actually have any. I just haven’t bothered to post anything here.

Call me crap-ass if you like. Mr. Crapass. Crappenstein. Crapfuckingtastic.

Just don’t ever call me late for dinner. You can ask your grandparents where that one comes from because its older than they are.

Its not that I don’t come up with great ideas for things to write about every day, because I do. Coming up with this shit’s not hard, sitting down and doing it is.

I always seem to have something else to distract me away from doing something semi-productive and nearly useful, like writing one of my patented hippy things. Ok, I haven’t actually patented them, because someone already beat me to it and got the patent on crap.

I’d rather be day dreaming. I’d rather watch tv, or read or pass out in a drug induced stupor.

Alright, truth be told, its been years since I’ve been in any sort of stupor because I don’t do those naughty drugs any more. I don’t even drink and trust me, if you’re aiming for a stupor, booze is most definitely your bestest buddy.

The only reason I’m gracing you with my presence now is that I popped onto my own website and noticed how long it had been since I bothered to post anything and I thought, “fuck man everybody gonna think I be dead or some shit like that”.

Yes, I my inner voice sounds like that, doesn’t yours?

So here I am, after a nightshift and a couple of spliffies, spewing utter rubbish just for the sake of having something semi-current on the top of my home page. Do people even call them homepages any more?

Maybe I’m just losing touch. I genuinely had to look up some words in the Urban Dictionary that the kids are using these days, because I didn’t fucking understand them.

Maybe I am your grandpa.

Oh yeah, we’re approaching my birthday, its only a couple of months away. Is it too early for me to start my annual moan about ageing and middle age and dying and death and yada yada yada?

Apparently not.

I was going to write something about zombies the other day. I can sum it up for you. I saw Zombieland. I liked Zombieland. I like Zombies. Zombies scare the beejeezus outta me because they are dead, right, but like they’re walking around and you know, they want to eat your brains, only you can’t kill ‘em, um…because like they’re already dead?

Ok, that’s not really my review of Zombieland, though I did see it and I did like it, but that was an actual review I overheard on the street. I might have made up the beejeezus part for comic effect, but the rest is pretty much word for word what I overheard.

I was going to stretch all that out to 1000 words. You don’t have to thank me for sparing you that zombified opus, just send cash or provide sexual favours to me and all my friends.

How cool would that be if random strangers from the internet offered to shag my friends, just because I asked them too. I’d be the most popular guy around. You’d want to be my friend too. I can sort you out with random hook-ups, no charge.

Wait a second, if I have random strangers willing to sleep with people I know, I’d be a fool not to charge something. How about a handling fee? That sounds fair. Shall we call it £200 quid for the hour, you can talk extras directly with your internet date upon arrival.

You see, this is how people suddenly become pimps. One minute, your just typing some crap on the internet, the next you’re running a stable of pros.

Snoop Dogg’s life suddenly makes a lot more sense to me now.

I haven’t put anything new up here in a couple of weeks, so I guess I should just post something.

This is that something, or rather it will be when I finish it.

I’ve only just started and I don’t know where this is going, so how will I know when its finished?

I’m still not feeling 100%, so this could turn into a hippy health bulletin. There’s a little bit to report.

After countless treatments with my chiropractor, my back is now 99.9% pain free. I’m sleeping well and moving well.

I’m still feeling listless and occasionally a bit breathless, but I saw an endocrinologist this week who explained why and made a recommendation that should help.

With thyroid problems, like my Hashimoto’s Disease, your blood is tested for two things, your T4 levels, which is the actual thyroid hormone and your TSH, which is Thyroid Stimulating Hormone and made by your pituitary gland.

While my T4 level was good, my TSH level is still on the high side and should be lower. Lowering it involves increasing my dose of medication again and another blood test in a month or so. I’m going to go see my GP next week to sort all that out and hopefully I’l be feeling some benefits in a couple of weeks.

That wasn’t much of an update, was it?

How about an update on my site?

If you haven’t noticed, even when I’m not putting new posts up here, I am still adding quality content…well quality if you are interested in my musical tastes or what I had for breakfast. I’m talking about my Last FM playlist and my most recent Tweets.

The Last FM widget on the right, shows you the last handful of songs I’ve listened to from my home media centre, my iMac and my iPhone. It also tells you when I was listening, so you can keep up with it in real time. I don’t know why you would want to, but you can if you like.

I’m still enjoying Twitter and I do tweet a fair amount daily, often at weird times, like the middle of the night or early morning. I’m sometimes around during the day and at night, it depends on my weird schedule. I tweet all sort of random crap, from interesting links to odd and surreal jokes.

Today, just for fun, I started using a hashtag for a virtual Glastonbury festival online – #virtualglasto – for people like me who will watch from my sofa, shielded from the elements and poorly cooked veggie burgers. I’m actually looking forward to Springsteen on Saturday night and I hope the BBC don’t fuck me over and only show a couple of songs. We want the whole goddamn set, goddamn it!

Mainly, I’m posting today because I’ve been getting so many new visitors. I’ve had another significant rise.

This is to let all you new visitors know that I’m alive and well and living in north London, just like always. Keep bookmarking me or grabbing the RSS feed and before you know it, I’ll post something amazing that will inform, entertain and amuse.

Just not today.

I think I’m finished now.

Its not lost on me that I haven’t posted anything here in an absolute age and a half. I’m all too aware of it.

I haven’t been so well for the last couple of weeks. Hey ho.

I’m waiting for the results of another blood test, that I had been putting off, but a few days ago, I had a couple of litres sucked out of my arm.

Ok, it seemed like litres, I didn’t look. I don’t like blood, especially my own if its not deep inside my veins.

The reason I’ve been putting it off is because my regular GP of nearly a dozen years is now on long-term sick leave and getting a blood test meant seeing a brand new doctor.

The new doctor and I didn’t get off to a great start. He took my blood pressure using some fancy automated gizmo and when he checked the reading, the expression on his face told me it wasn’t good.

My mother suffered from high blood pressure, took medication for it and was monitored regularly. With that in mind, I’ve always kept a close eye on mine, and thankfully it has consistently been low, 110/70 which for an oversized, middled-aged smoker is pretty damn good.

The electronic gizmo was showing 170/110, which is not good. Its about as far from good as you can be, its “call an ambulance now” good.

I was incredulous of this reading straight away and told him I’m consistently 110/70, young doctor new guy looked like he going to shit himself. I asked him to take it again with an old style, manual sphygmomanometer.

He had to go find one and I was momentarily left alone, my mind racing to the obvious, yet slim possibility that something changed with my blood pressure.

It could explain why I was feeling so shitty again.

The new doctor guy returned with an old-school blood pressure cuff, quickly wrapped it around my arm then pumped the squeezey ball for all he was worth. As he let the air out and took the reading, his concerned expression relaxed into a very slight grin and I knew it was fine.

And that’s all he said, “its fine”. He didn’t even share the correct, final score with me and I think I know why.

It was 110/70, just like I told him it should and would be.

Doctors don’t like it when you know more than they do, even if it is something as personal as your own damn blood pressure. Especially, younger, inexperienced and insecure doctors, like this one, who I unintentionally put on his back foot.

It would have been easier if he just got it right the first time, but that’s true of just about everything anyone gets wrong, ever.

I told him I had Hashimoto’s and needed to get my thyroid levels checked, though I said “T4 levels” just to be snarky and this time it was intentional. To be fair, this was right after he told me smoking cigarettes was bad for me, like he was the first person to share that particular pearl of wisdom.

“Well, gee whillikers, doc, they’re bad for you? I did not know that. Next you’re gonna tell me unprotected anal sex with crack whores is bad for me! I did not know that, either.”

He asked me what my symptoms were and I told him: breathlessness, like trying to catch your breath on a cold day without any exertion, very occasional, but noticeable heart palpitations, alternating sweats and chills, a big lack of energy and worst of all, my back problems have returned.

When I mentioned my back problem, he looked at me quizzically and I had to explain to him how I was suffering from inflammation in the joints of my spine, which were lighting up nerves in my leg, sciatic really. I had to go to explain that one of the symptoms of Hashimoto’s is inflamed joints as attributed by my regular GP last summer.

All of this started last summer when my back gave out and for around a fortnight I could barely walk. I got over it and haven’t had any real back problems since, just the occasional, isolated twinge, but nothing of any concern.

Until about 2 weeks ago, when I started getting severe pain shooting down my right leg, mainly in bed and bad enough to wake me up. I haven’t really slept more than 3 continuous hours since then, though often I wake up, put an ice pack on my back, or take a horrible codeine pill or both, and go back to sleep.

I saw my chiropractor three times last week, which improved it slightly. Since then, I’ve worked a couple of nights and its become bad again. Sitting in a shitty office chair for 12 hours will do that to you.

And because of the bank holiday weekend, I can’t see my chiropractor again until Tuesday, which is also bad.

Moan, moan, moan, I’m just a big hippy baby.

I left the doctor’s office with a blood test form, with more boxes checked than I ever thought possible, hence the litres of blood extracted. He’s running every test imaginable, which is cool, but he did it out of fear, not because he thought there was anything particularly wrong with me.

He didn’t really answer my question about the possibility of my thyroid levels dropping again, requiring an increase in my daily dose of levothyroxine. I don’t think he knew the answer. I don’t know either, but right now, its my best and only guess.

I was told by my regular (and much missed) GP, that once my dosage was adjusted properly, I would “feel like a new person”. That hasn’t happened yet and I’ve reached the point where I don’t think I ever will.

Yep, all of this has me down. I am bored with having health problems, its tedious always being asked with deep concern “how are you? no really, how are you?” I know people mean it and its not that I don’t appreciate their concern, I just don’t like having to answer it over and over again.

Mainly I’m bored with feeling like shit all the time. Its making me think all sorts of things, like: this is my life now, my best days are behind me, I’ve achieved nothing with my life.

All sorts of uplifting shit, really!

Just check out the title of this post, “Running out the clock”. That’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Now that you know the context.

That’s how I feel right now, like I am just running out the clock, on those last few decades/years/months/days/hours/minutes/seconds (delete as appropriate) that I have left.

It doesn’t matter if its true, I mean of course its true, its true for everyone, but what matters I guess is that its how I feel right now. And I don’t feel like I have decades or years.

I should point out I have no medical evidence to suggest I am going to die any time soon and in actual fact, rationally I don’t believe I am going to die any time soon. I’m still talking about how I feel.

Emotionally.

Now, this is the part where I’m supposed to remind you (and myself) that I’ve always been a survivor and blah blah, I’ve come through this and I’ve come through that, but again that’s not how I feel.

I feel like I haven’t got any fight left in me, but that’s probably just the Hashimoto’s talking. I really do feel like my energy is zapped most of the time and doing the simplest things takes tremendous amounts of effort.

With that in mind, think how daunting anything complex must seem to me at the moment, like negotiating my way through the NHS to a better diagnosis and treatment.

Either I need a simple adjustment to my thyroid meds or something else is wrong. I can just about cope with another increase in my dosage and the additional tests required, but anything more than that and I don’t think I can be bothered.

Happy days.

I liked it better when I was the king of fun, but if I am going to get nostalgic, I might as well lament over how much I miss my beloved fresh and legal magic mushrooms and I still curse the government for banning them.

What’s the connection? Right now, I would really benefit from a decent, old fashioned shroom trip. An afternoon shroomed to the gills would do more for me than 10 years of psychotherapy ever could. And it would be cheaper, too.

Six months ago I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease, otherwise known as Chronic Thyroiditis. At the time I didn’t really grasp the significance or seriousness of my diagnosis.

I do now.

I’ve probably had this stupid disease for a while, longer than I’ve known. I had symptoms that I didn’t know were symptoms for at least a year prior to being told of the cause.

I just thought I was getting old.

I am getting old, but age was not causing my problems, my useless thyroid was…and is.

I’m still not well. I find myself saying that a lot lately, in response to people asking me why I look tired, or pale.

I’ve been undergoing treatment for Hashimoto’s since my diagnosis. Treatment comes in the form of a small pill taken daily to replace the thyroid hormone my body no longer manufactures.

The side effects caused by the pills are very similar to the symptoms of the disease. I get heart palpitations, breathlessness, headaches, dizziness, light-headedness and these get worse every time the dosage is raised.

The dosage gets raised every couple of months as I am still not on a therapeutically effective level yet. I started out on 25mg, then went to 50mg and now I am on 100mg of Levothyroxine. Its about to be raised again, probably to 150mg, though I am awaiting for the results of a blood test for confirmation.

Lately, extreme exhaustion and lethargy have been added to the mix. I constantly crave sleep, but I don’t sleep deeply or for very long. I get physically tired very easily and don’t have any of my usual stamina.

My normal walk to my local highstreet used to take me well under 10 minutes, it now takes me closer to 15 and the return journey is stretching to the 20 minute mark.

I’m having concentration problems too. “Brain fog” is another symptom and there’s a real pea-souper in my head most of the time. I find it difficult paying attention to people when they tell me anything complex, my mind wanders and I am easily distracted. The same is true of my reading comprehension, if a paragraph drags on too long, as this one seems to be doing, I forget what it says.

I get waves of nausea, my appetite vacillates between having none at all, to suddenly being ravenous and I’ve been having mood swings too.

All of this sucks the big one in a very real, demonstrable way and I am tired of it.

To complicate matters, I haven’t been having much fun with the NHS.

My GP referred me to a specialist and after waiting months for an appointment, I ended up leaving the clinic without seeing the consultant endocrinologist. The clinic was oversubscribed, there weren’t any seats in the waiting room, the nurses were surly and rude and after waiting way too long, I left.

I did receive a letter of apology from the consultant for my poor treatment, but that is a small consolation. The entire experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth and no desire to ever return to that clinic.

It gets even worse, my regular GP, who I have been seeing for nearly a dozen years has been having health problems of his own. He’s cut back his hours and for the last several weeks, I’ve been unable to see him. I finally gave up and saw the surgery’s senior partner.

The senior partner immediately said she would take over managing my care, which makes me think my regular doctor won’t be back full time any time soon.

Being sick seems to be hard work and I worry if I ever had something seriously big wrong with me that I wouldn’t have the patience to fight my way through the system to get the treatment I would need to survive.

And speaking of survival, people can and do die from Hashimoto’s Disease. One of the things it does to you is weaken your heart and one can suffer from heart failure. I’m not saying that’s what I am heading for, but quite often it does feel that way to me.

I’m told that once I am on an effective dose of medication, I’ll feel like a brand new person. I’ve heard that a lot for the last six months. I’d be happy if I could just feel like the old person I used to be, before I was diagnosed and on this stupid medication.

The exhaustion caught up to me this week and prevented me from getting to work. I’ve been living on adrenalin and my supply must have finally depleted, I sort of collapsed the other night. I’m now signed off work for a week to rest.

I feel like this is my life now and I’ll never feel like my old self again. I know I’m an impatient patient, but I just can’t see a path back to good health. Let’s hope my doctor’s vision is clearer than my own.

Hey hey. Its the middle of the night and I am at work. Where you at?

Its a heavy week for me, I am doing many nights in a row then I have over a week off. I can’t wait!

My birthday has mercifully passed uneventfully except for the weird virus I had for over a week. I hate being sick.

In general I feel crap most days; the thyroid thing I have remains a real drag.

I got one very cool gift from my brother, the nearly complete box set of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. I watched it all in less than a week, which either makes me an über cool geek or a very sad middle aged man. I’ll leave it to you to decide which.

The final ten episodes of BSG are running now, in the states and here in the UK on SKY. I’m all caught up which is cool too.

BSG is very classy and engaging, my brother has been singing its praises for years. He’s right, it rocks!

I think I’ve wasted enough of your time, but sadly not enough of my own. Catch ya next time.

(Blogged from my muthafuckin’ iPhone)

On Christmas Eve, I found out my mother passed away. She would have been 79 next month.

She died the night of the 22nd, the cause of death was pneumonia. I’m told she died peacefully, whatever that means.

Long time readers of my site will probably remember that my mother had a severe stroke nearly seven years ago and never recovered from it. She was pretty much bed-bound, unable to walk or speak clearly. She could just about feed herself and she needed help getting to the toilet.

More detail than you probably need to know.

She went into the hospital the previous week, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Short of her dying, my stateside relatives had never got in touch before. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone into hospital in the last few years and I wasn’t told.

The way I found out was less than ideal.

When I woke up at 8pm on Tues night, I had an email from a cousin I haven’t seen or spoken to in over 20 years, plus I’d had a couple of international hang-ups on my landline.

I didn’t have to be a genius to work out the most likely reason behind this sudden contact.

I also didn’t know what to do.

My cousin wanted me to phone him back because he had “something important” to tell me. Instead, I spent the 45 minutes before my departure for work, doing what I always do, having a coffee, a cigarette and a shower, before dressing and leaving.

I decided to email him back, letting him know I was working and not in a position to phone him. Of course, I could have phoned if I wanted to, but I didn’t. I also told him to feel free to share the news via email and that I was braced for the worst.

Around seven hours later, I received his reply confirming my suspicions, that my mother was dead.

She’s not having a viewing or a funeral, just a quick cremation. It’s the same thing my father did. We’re not big on funerals in my immediate family, but it means I don’t have to go rushing off to the states.

I don’t need to go at all.

I was supposed to work on xmas eve and xmas, but as you might expect I didn’t. I’m going back on Sunday, though. What else would I do?

I loved my mother very much, but I let her down badly in the last few years of her life. When she had her stroke, I was in the states for a couple of months, helping her and helping my father.

And then I came back to north London and broke apart into tiny little bits. For around 6 months, I cultivated a fairly impressive cocaine and cognac habit, with some E’s mixed in occasionally for good measure. Not long after that, I fucked up my previous job.

It drove me nuts that I couldn’t do anything meaningful to help my parents in their old age.

And then my father got sick.

He spent the first year after my mother came home from the hospital and rehab worrying about what would happen to my mother if he got sick. All the worry got him sick and less than a year after that, he passed away from cancer.

I didn’t go to visit.

I couldn’t risk it.

I’m a pussy.

I had planned to visit my mother after my father died, but she gave up her home and moved into a nursing home, near one of her sisters. The one that was always the most evil auntie imaginable.

I warned my mother that it would all end in tears. It did, when my aunt decided it was all too much for her and she washed her hands of my mother and her financial affairs about 6 months ago. A distant relative of my father’s stepped in to take care of things, but it left my mother in an area of the world where she had no one else.

Had my mother stayed put in her home, or chose a nursing home near there, she would have had a constant stream of visitors as she had many friends who lived locally, but instead she gave all that up on my evil auntie’s insistence.

For the few years my mother lived in the nursing home, she would complain about my aunt, even telling us that my aunt wouldn’t let her see current bank statements. I can’t prove anything, but my mother said she was nicking dosh.

Nice.

Just about every relative I have, stole something from my mother. One of my half-brother’s took money from her account and never returned it, other’s took keepsakes and anything of value.

My younger brother went to see my mother, once, while she was in the nursing home and my evil auntie made certain his trip was miserable. She treated him badly, but worse, treated my mother badly and disrespectfully in front of him.

Old evil auntie made a point of telling my mother, in front of my brother, that she threw away every photograph she found in my mother’s house when she was clearing it out in preparation for the move to the nursing home. Every photo from my childhood, plus 8mm home movies from the 60’s and 70’s was casually tossed into a skip.

Imagine if someone did that to your childhood. What would you do?

What could I do?

This evil fucking cunt took over my mother’s life and made her miserable, though the last time my brother spoke to my mother, she said my aunt had visited and tried to make peace. How nice for evil cunt auntie.

I know I’m not the only one with a tragically fucked up family, but now that my mother is gone, so is my very last connection to them. Its just my brother and I, a couple of middle-aged orphans from a deeply dysfunctional family.

The other blessing to come out of all this is my mother is now no longer a prisoner of her damaged and withered body. For nearly 7 years she’s been trapped inside a physical form that wouldn’t and couldn’t bend to her will.

The night after my mother had her massive stroke, the hospital phoned my father and told him my mother was in a coma and couldn’t breathe on her own. They needed to put her on life-support or she would die.

My mother had an up-to-date living will, that clearly stated in such circumstances, no heroic efforts should be made to sustain her life, if her prospects for a full recovery were nil.

My father, desperately afraid and ill-prepared to live life without my mother, took the chicken-shit option and told them to go ahead and put tubes down her throat, for breathing and feeding. He went completely against her wishes.

My father was in denial; at the point, he wouldn’t and couldn’t accept that my mother wasn’t going to recover. Instead his fear and inability to deal with the truth of the situation, condemned my mother to an existence I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

He thought he was doing the right thing and for months, he continued to insist that my mother walked into the hospital on her own and dammit, she would walk back out.

She never took another unaided step in her life.

When I read my cousin’s first email, I’d been awake around 30 seconds. It was delivered to my iPhone and I saw it just after I turned the alarm on it off. In my bleary-eyed first reading of it, an image immediately flashed into my head.

It was both of my parents, together. And they were smiling.

I don’t believe in the afterlife, but I knew in that instant that my mother really had finally joined my father and if I could build a heaven for the two of them, I surely would.

Rest in sweet peace, Mom.

Since receiving my diagnosis of Hashmimoto’s Disease and writing about it here, the word “Hashimoto” is appearing with greater and greater frequency, in various forms in the list of search terms plugged into Google that get you to my site.

Don’t worry, “northlondonhippy” remains the number one search term that finds me. I’m a proper online destination.

But very high up on the list, sits Dr. Hashimoto. Considering the first time I ever heard of it was as it passed over my doctor’s lips preceded by the words “you have…”, I’m somewhat surprised at how common it is.

It seems quite a few of you out there in internetland have Hashimoto’s Disease too, or at least you think you do.

People search for symptoms, search for cures, search for clues on how to live with this auto-immune disease.

I’m far from an expert, having only known of my own condition for several months, but I have been discovering loads of people I know who have thyroid problems.

Everyone wants to know what “your dose” is.

“What’s your dose?”, they all say to me, looking visibly disappointed when I tell them I am currently on a paltry 50 micrograms of levothyroxine, compared to their 150-200 microgram dose.

Its true my dose is currently low, but that is about to change, again. My GP is monitoring my thyroid levels at regular intervals and increasing my dose gradually. The key, he says, is to find the lowest therapeutic dose, because too much can cause different problems. I’m due for another blood test next week and I would expect my dose to go up again as soon as I receive the results.

With me, I didn’t know I had a problem for quite a while, I ignored or dismissed all the symptoms I now know I had. It wasn’t until my back seized up and my legs gave out that it dawned on me I might have a health problem.

Clever, eh? I had heart palpitations, breathlessness, nausea, dizziness, no appetite, no energy, aching joints and a slow heart beat and I just thought it was just the normal ageing process catching up to me.

My doctor assures me that all of this is very treatable and once my dosage is correct, I will feel like my old self again. I’ve felt crappy for so long, I’m not sure what that really means.

So if you’re already diagnosed, just be patient. Give the medication time to even you out, just like I am.

And if you think you have Hashimoto’s, just go see a doctor and you are a simple blood test away from diagnosis and treatment.

And if it turns out you don’t have Hashimoto’s Disease, perhaps this article in today’s New York Times, might give you pause for thought.

Well I’m four years from fifty,
How’d I get to be…
Four years from fifty,
It’s a terrible age to be.

And the title up there, staring you in the face like a miserable old man is refers to where I’m at right now.

I’m feeling full of regrets and seeking redemption.

Does anyone know where they hid the redemption?

What would it mean to be redeemed? Would I need a special coupon for that?

The thing is, I don’t have any specific regrets, like I wish I did this, or I should have done that. My regrets are more general.

Like I wish I spent more time with my parents.

Or I wish I wasn’t my own best and most successful enemy.

Those sorts of things.

Things you can’t change.

But what about the things you can change.

Like your socks.

Besides your socks.

What if you could change things?

Is that what redemption is?

If it is, then I’m fairly certain I’m screwed on the redemption front. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.