Action Stations

The day after my last post Sue got confirmation of her job in Borneo along with a whole raft of information, so we are now running around like maniacs.

Sue sets off for Kota Kinabalu from Bari Airport on Friday.  Last weekend we spent booking tickets and pouring over Google Earth at the 20 possible postings Sue had to chose from.  She finally settled on Mukah a small fishing town in Sarawak.

Originally I planned to join her before Christmas, but already I can feel the pull of a new adventure and hope to depart by the end of November if possible.  This would mean leaving Puglia in mid October to go to the UK where my current plan is to do my British Humanist Society celebrant training and a one month Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Brighton.

I feel scared and disorientated by the speed with which all this is happening and I will be sad to see Sue off on Friday, even though we will hopefully see each other again before November is out.

The local speciality in Mukah is sago worm, large white grubs found in the trunks of sago trees and eaten raw.  They taste like chicken allegedly.  Mmmmm.

Argh!!! (continued)

Ha, ha!  Nearly two weeks ago I expected that our lives would by now have some shape and clarity.  Well not quite.  Sue had her interview and on Monday was made a provisional job offer by the British Council in Borneo.  However, since then we have heard nothing further despite the fact that the job is meant to start in less than two weeks.  Knowing how Byzantine the processes are for this kind of overseas aid work Sue can’t yet be sure that the job is in the bag and therefore can’t really begin preparing to go.  I know she is excited about the job and in her head she is already driving around remote village schools, but she is also conflicted about leaving our home.  Over the last couple of days she has been taking pot plants from off our terrace and planting them on our land – as if she is releasing them into the wild, which made me sad.

I heard nothing about the interim management job I went for and sent an email to the agency last Friday when the same job was readvertised.  I actually got quite a polite email saying they were still deciding who to put forward to the client and would get back to me.  So a glimmer of hope remains about this.  I also had a derisory offer for “La Fulica” a couple of days ago, which I would nevertheless have accepted outright, were it not for the fact that it also involved delivering her to Greece.

Basically I feel powerless.  Constantly in anticipation of an email which will create some more certainty and unable to do much to make anything happen.  Well maybe in another two weeks …. !!

Argh!!!

Considering it's the dog days of high summer our lives have been very stressful waiting for things to happen.  Usually I write about this stuff after the event, but this time I'm in the middle of it.  Last Thursday I was accepted onto a training course to become a "celebrant" at humanist funerals.  It's a short course, but after it I will be able to officiate in crematoria and other places in the UK where people want a non-religious funeral or memorial service.  Last Wednesday I sent my CV off to an agency for a well paid interim management job in London.  I know that I would be very good at this particular job, but that because of my age and (for an accountant) "exotic" lifestyle I don't stand much chance of getting an interview.  Realistically, if I don't hear today I can forget it and I will need to start accepting that the chances of finding well paid consultancy work in the UK are getting increasingly remote.  As a fall-back I am considering training to teach English as a foreign language, which means a four-week course, probably in London.

Today Sue learned that she has an interview as a teacher trainer/mentor with the British Council in the Malaysian part of Borneo on a two-year contract.

So, putting this lot together: Sue and I may end up living in Borneo for two years; or, Sue may be in Borneo and me in London earning good money and being a busy celebrant to boot; or, I may be in London while Sue teaches English in Puglia and studies for an MA; or, we may both remain in Puglia eking out our savings and becoming more and more shabby genteel before finally starving to death; or, none of the above.

We should know which of these combinations is going to happen by about next Friday.  Sometimes life is so full of possibilities I could scream!

Dad, again

Dad rang me last Monday from A&E to say he had had a fall. Since then I’ve been putting in calls to try to piece together what actually happened.  Not easy as he is pathologically incapable of telling the truth about himself and even at the best of times the NHS has trouble getting its story straight.

If I took the various things he has told me at face value then his strength has been failing rapidly over the last few weeks leading to a fall in which he probably broke his hip and he is now awaiting a “special scan”, which will determine if he has a fracture and possibly the extent to which he is riddled with bone cancer.  Following the “special scan” the doctors will finally realise how badly they have misdiagnosed his increasing mobility problems and will operate on his hip or his knee or both, leading to death on the operating table or a “cure”.

Reading between the lines a more believable storyline might read:  Dad is obese and has bad arthritis in several joints which has a variable but increasing effect on his mobility.  For the last couple of weeks it has been especially bad, leading him to believe he is in a rapid terminal decline.  Last Monday he was visited at home by a new female GP, who he obviously fancies and who told him that there was very little the NHS could now do for him. Immediately she left, Dad in a fit of anger lowered himself to the floor and pressed his fall alarm summoning an ambulance.  At the hospital his inability to describe his symptoms in a clear and rational way led to the clinicians not finding much and not knowing what to do next.  So he has been given a low priority and shunted into a bed awaiting a scan, which the clinicians have called “special” just to get him off their backs.

As a result of writing this the scan will probably reveal he really is very ill and will now stoically fade away leaving me filled with remorse.  Yeah, right!

I think this is called compassion fatigue.