Hello people just talk!

 I am nearly always the one who strikes up a conversation, maybe I just like the sound of my own voice. But with lockdown it’s difficult. I haven’t seen anyone and it’s gotten so as I don’t know 🤷‍♂️ if I actually want to see anyone. For me to be like that anyone who normally is a bit shy must be really anti people. I know I can pick up the phone but really the only people who I have called since lockdown have been my family and because lockdown has taken away things to talk about. Now in normal times I don’t need anything to talk about, I once struck up a conversation with three strangers explaining that I will talk to myself lamp posts and stray dogs! The strangers all women of a certain age asked which category did they fall into then one came to the conclusion of ‘stray dogs’ which caused much hilarity. The spoken word can  be such a lift, I used to read poetry aloud to Heather my wife and have only done so once in these lockdown conditions ☹️ I must try harder.

Depression is a thief it steels your sense of fun in life, now that might not sound much life ain’t meant to be fun but if you don’t enjoy life you become miserable. I am sure life was never designed for you to feel miserable! When life is fun you actually smile 😆 Everything becomes a reason to laugh you smile and those around you smile, smiling is infectious. You might smile to a lady weeding her garden and finding her task tedious that brief smile could lift her spirit and her tedious task becomes a joy. The trouble with COVID is we are all wearing a mask 😷 so we are being robbed of simple joys. My personal pleasure is music, l love early rock n roll and music from my youth and the 60’s and 70’s to me music stopped in the 1980s  and restarted when Adele released 19 in 2008 I enjoy all of her albums. Ed Sheeran has become another of my favourites. 

My mainstay of enjoying life in recent years is photography. With the advent of digital photography and then the camera 📷 in phones photography has be one of the easiest of hobbies to get involved with. I do have a phone but mainly use a camera 📸 as this gives me far greater control over the creativity of an image. I am not an artist but sometimes I do venture away from the cameras auto settings to capture something a little bit different. Then after shooting the pictures I have some more fun transferring said pictures onto my laptop 👨‍💻 or more recently my iPad. Transferring images by WiFi is new to me and as with any learning experience fun and frustrating in equal measure. Twenty years ago I tried using photoshop and was bewildered by the complexities of post production of photo’s I didn’t enjoy the process and on one forum I frequent I use “life’s to short to learn photoshop “  as my tag on each post😃

Each of these stages is an escape from reality! When I am engrossed in taking photos or transferring them and cropping and enhancing the images I become detached from my everyday problems. I use photography as a means of escape. I will write ✍️ more about my escapism from depression in future posts. 

Another day in bed, thanks MS

 I thought about getting up this morning but staying in bed was a far better idea. I was exhausted after a busy day yesterday, when I did wake up first thing this morning I did so with much reluctance, Heather made me my porridge 🥣 which I ate in bed, drunk a cup of tea took my tablets and went back to sleep 🛌 💤 l finally did get up at 3:30 . Multiple Sclerosis makes me tired beyond tired. It is referred to a fatigue because we all know about feeling tired, you know what it’s like after a busy day you want to kick your shoes 👞 off put your slippers 🥿 on and sit if front of the television 📺 and slob out. With MS you got to bed full clothed and you don’t take your shoes 👠 off. Heather woke me this morning and I was still knackered. I went back to sleep immediately and only surfaced to take on water.

Multiple Sclerosis make a mess of people and my variant is called Primary Progressive and where many people describe MS as “oh you have good days and bad days”  well with primary progressive MS the disease gets progressively worse!  More information click here on the link https://www.mssociety.org.uk/

Had day in bed with my Multiple Sclerosis

 I was awake at six and knew today wasn’t going to work. I went back to sleep, Heather made a cuppa and I had breakfast (porridge sqwiushed banana and honey) and went back to sleep 🛌  💤 😴  until after two o’clock when I woke up in a panic. My indigestion and acid reflux does that I feel like I can’t breathe 🧘‍♀️ and wake up in a real state. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/heartburn-and-acid-reflux/

https://www.royalberkshire.nhs.uk/patient-information-leaflets/GI%20Physiology%20Gastro%20Oesophageal%20Reflux%20Disease%20GORD.htm

West Ham versus Manchester United

 Boring first half they have just gone in for halftime and it’s nil nil and the most exciting thing is a ball put past a West Ham defender. We turned over and watched Ben Fogle in Ireland off grid with author Mark Boyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Boyle_(Moneyless_Man)

By mentioning Mark I am doing the thing he objects to screen time but hey ho I am a rebel 

Black and white photography and Lightroom and Amateur Photographer magazine

 Last night as was reading this weeks AP ( Amateur Photographer) magazine in bed. Oh well I’ll own up, I read it in bed most nights! What was different last night was there is a whole section on black and white photography. Also there was mention of processing images in Lightroom. Well I’m never far from my iPad so I downloaded a free version of Lightroom and gave it a go. I have tried messing around with various apps to process my photos and I usually come up with the decision ‘life’s to short to learn how to use programs like photoshop’ but last night I linked with Lightroom and have been messing around with it most of the day. I’m back in bed writing this before I go to sleep still my Amateur Photographer magazine beside me, I have it on subscription, as soon as the first lockdown was announced I set my subscription up so I was safe in the knowledge I could get my copy without leaving the house 🏡 as most of you know I am in a wheelchair so having it delivered just makes so much sense. 

As I just said in the past I have not ‘messed’ with my photos,  I shoot jpeg. I detest photoshop and think heavily photoshopped images aren’t real photos but I may be weakening 🤣 I enjoyed playing with Lightroom 😱 Yes I know almost twenty years after getting my first digital camera 📷 I am actually using a tool other than cropping. And I intended to do it again today 🤣

Snow ready

 Whilst I may now be wheelchair based I once had legs and a body that actually worked! Pre Multiple Sclerosis days I would love to be out there as a family snow ball fighting and sliding down slopes on the sledge. Yesterday Victoria our youngest daughter phoned to ask “have you got a sledge” Heather said “of course we have” Victoria turned to her two sons and told them “I told you Grandma would come up with the goods” evidently she had been trying to buy a sledge 🛷 online without success! She should have tried Grandma first she was offered not one but two. A circa 1960’s wooden one and a 1980’s plastic one  so in preparation for the forecast snow she came and collected both. I won’t be using them and I don’t think slipping and sliding in the snow is high on Heathers agenda for tomorrow. 

So the moral of this post is grandparents don’t ever throw anything away and children check with mum and dad when sledges are unavailable on Amazon Prime or on eBay at extortionate prices. Our sledge was bought at a boot fair for a fiver current price on eBay £100 to £200 happy sledding kids 

Big headlines won’t head off a recession dead cat bounce

 I had to smile 😊 at the news headlines back to normal by next spring who are they kidding . I used to think the Bank of England was an honourable institution, well after the Governor espoused that little nugget of wishful thinking I have changed my mind. Pent up savings are going to save the day. The economy isn’t even going to hit a bump in the road and not so much as a mention of the recession I feel we are hurtling towards. I too can manipulate figures and I could predict a sunny future after all it’s still winter so the sun is sure to shine sometime during the summer months, but predictions of normality are in my mind hogwash. In this article https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/04/uk-banks-given-six-months-to-prepare-for-negative-interest-rates 

The report says to prepare for negative interest rates so are we going to bounce back to normal or bounce like a dead cat

Because Andrew Bailey, the BoE governor, said: “The monetary policy committee’s central forecast assumes that Covid-related restrictions and people’s health concerns weigh on activity in the near term, but that the vaccination programme leads to those easing, such that gross domestic product is projected to recover strongly from the second quarter of 2021, towards pre-Covid levels.”

He also went on to say recovery will be driven by ‘pent it savings’ driving the recovery. To me that smacks of the eat out to help out debacle of last summer

People won’t have the choice the used to have as not many shops will have survived. Any one remember Debenhams or Top Shop ?