Seeing the World

Although it’s still just over two weeks away, I’ve packed my suitcase for the Boston flights and New England driving holiday.

The flights have been paid for with Avios and are in first class with British Airways.  Perhaps not quite as posh as flying in first with Emirates, but I am anticipating this being the most luxurious pair of flights I’ll ever travel on.

The BA first class passenger gets many perks, one of which is being allowed to take the kitchen sink with you.  Not only can I take three suitcases, but I can cram 32kg of luggage in to each one.

Now that’s all well and good, but with two of us travelling that means six cases. And that doesn’t work at the other end when we need to load them into the hire car before winging it around six states.  So when chucking stuff into my once used case and weighing it I was fairly pleased to only have 14kg in weight.

But that triggers fear.  What have I forgotten?  Is something essential missing?  What did I take to Yellowstone last year that made it so much heavier?

The last question is misleading.  I don’t recall the weight of the bag at all.  A couple of thick jumpers went as even though it was July we correctly anticipated freezing overnight temperatures.  But I’m trying to think what I might have forgotten.

That said, it’s a fairly populous part of the world.  The Americans do have things like supermarkets and every Wal Mart I’ve ever set foot in sells clothing in large quantities.  Many of them even do an oil change, so handing the keys over in Salt Lake City, pushing a trolley around a massive superstore and collecting the car half an hour later minus warning light was a surprise activity on the Utah canyons tour a couple of years ago.

I might just throw a coat in.  The fleece is probably enough, but there’s no harm in using the available space for a big heavy overcoat just in case the weather turns against us.

Breakfast

More travel in recent years as well as becoming a weekend Dad have increased my expertise in breakfasts around the UK and the world.

It’s some years since I worked out having no breakfast, working my gonads off in a bank branch until 3pm and then rushing a Greggs something or other and doughnuts down my face was a driver of stress in my life.  I eventually substituted it with toast and an earlier unhealthy lunch which, in turn, was replaced with weetabix or porridge and a protein rich salad for lunch.  That last mix helped me lose seven stone in weight.

But this isn’t about breakfast at home.  Eating this meal out of the house can be great.

Now that I don’t get the occasional cooked breakfast when travelling on business I’ve more than made up for that by introducing protein and carbs in other ways.

My Saturdays with Chris have moved from an occasional breakfast to one every week.  McDonalds used to be my core breakfast out.  But even a double sausage and egg McMuffin doesn’t do it for me now.  It remains the default drive and eat option for a distant footballing away day.

The cost effective breakfast option is Wetherspoons.  Less than £4 for a breakfast wrap brought to your table and unlimited coffee too.  And not many pennies more to have a full English.  As I sit there at 10am wondering how they make a profit in this, I admire the number of people at the bar ordering pints and cocktails.  It rather answers my question!

Toby Carvery is next up.  £4.29 for unlimited cooked breakfast.  It’s probably my favourite budget brekkie although it lets itself down with the oddity of onion infused Yorkshire puddings and reusing the previous night’s roast potatoes rather than having proper hash browns.  £2.09 for unlimited coffee is a bit of a liberty too, although they often have a £5 weekday offer available that includes the drink.

Greggs now serve up a value takeaway option of £2 for a bacon and sausage roll with a hot drink, increasing to £3 if you’re at a motorway services.  Handy when you’ve got a train to catch from Manchester Piccadully when there’s a Greggs just outside!

My travels have also exposed me to the joys of more hotel and B&B offerings.

Kraków saw a £2 a day supposedly continental breakfast with numerous varieties of dead pig included.  Best value by a mile.  Iceland included a fairly basic cereal, toast and croissant option.  It’s amazing how much cereal and toast you eat when a lunch will cost you £20!  Ljublana gave similar, but I wasn’t worrying about lunch costs there so didn’t overdo the consumption.

My Eindoven hotel last week wanted €12.50 for a continental.  I declined, opting instead for McDonalds at €4.95 which included an egg and sausage McMuffin, croissant, coffee and an apple juice.  The bottled juice basically helped me avoid dehydrating later in the day.  No hash brown!

The inclusive breakfast at Holiday Inn Express is particularly good value if you’ve only paid £39 for a family room packed with your kids.  Even if hot food is restricted to sausage, beans and scrambled egg.  Although their Antrim hotel has added proper bacon and mushrooms to that, so hopefully that will become a UK wide thing!  The £29pp breakfast rate at the Hilton Park Lane wasn’t tested but our access to the executive lounge gave us a continental breakfast with bacon and scrambled egg for free!

I’ve stayed in four bed and breakfasts in the last couple of years.  I always forget to reject the tomato (it’s the devil’s food!) which seems to offend.  Beans, black pudding and white pudding I’ll eat but without love.  The rest is great, whatever the mix!  Time restrictions are the weakness of the B&B.  The first one in the Lake District was 8.30am to 9.00am or starve.  I met the deadline.  The other three got me to commit to a time of my choice but that can be a bit of a nuisance if you wake up early or just have the desire to lie in bed a bit longer.  It is cooked to order so invariably better tasting than the chain hotel’s breakfast buffet.

The American motel breakfast is one of my favourites.  Not because of the quality of the food (which isn’t great) but because of the nature of those South West driving holidays they really do set you up for a day on the road.  Coffee to go and occasionally the excitement of a waffle machine or pancake maker to supplement the sugary cereals and peanut butter topped toasts.

I never have brown sauce or ketchup though.  Shame on those who do!

As Read in 53 Countries

Well that’s it then.  Although I’m technically employed for a further twelves days my final salary has been paid and includes a not I substantial amount for redundancy.  Another big step in the wind down of my thirty years service.

I’ve had a little moan to myself about tax.  Having 40% swiped off a large part of the settlement is galling.  Especially when I know that the tax free redundancy allowance would exceed my payment if numerous chancellors of the Exchequer had index linked the £30k tax free amount since the 1980s.

I could get much of the tax back by sticking some of it into pension.  But I’ll have to wait six years to access that and basic statistics aren’t telling me that I’ll be alive in 2023.

I think the payroll people deduct tax on the assumption that I’ll earn the same five figure sum every month.  So I’ll be able to get a small rebate from HMRC.  I might even still be alive by the time they process it!

No correspondence yet about my share option schemes, but I should be able to realise a decent sum from those in the next few weeks.  I’ve also switched pension schemes and don’t have sight of the new one yet.  Albeit I’ll only have paid in three months contributions!  Not that I know I have as my payslips aren’t available!

It’s fair to say I feel a little bit frustrated about the loose ends.  I desperately want to see my payslips which nobody seems to be able to produce.  I don’t even know if my change of pension scheme for my final period of employment happened.  I’m dreading dealing with HMRC to get a tax rebate.  And there’s still the permanent health insurance claim where somewhere inside the workings of my employer the system lost my paperwork.

I look at the sum received and worry about living too long.  Yes, I want to blow the lot on travel but I’m highly likely to run out of money if I live beyond three years and spend at my current rate.  That is a totally alien situation to Mr Responsible here who prides himself on good financial management.  I might get to the point where travelling stops being a buzz, but I’m not there yet!

Worst Scan Ever!

Well strictly speaking, that’s not true.  The worst one has to be the bugger that identified the evil lung cancer.

But tonight’s MRI extravaganza was pretty awful.

It started off badly when I decided to take the country back roads to the hospital rather than the challenge of Halifax town centre at rush hour.  Not being a local I rather overlooked the fact I don’t have a clue where the back roads go and just pointed my car in what seemed like the general direction and went for it.

A chaotic series of twists and turns somehow looped me above the town centre and into the neighbouring village of Sowerby Bridge before doubling me back to my destination.  Amazingly, earlier than the time the sat nav had promised for the easier but more congested turn right and turn right again option.

Street parking was more civilised than my previous weekday visits and I found a side door into the hospital.  A sly thought crossed my mind as I passed the “assisted conception” unit but it was lost as I searched out the MRI section.  And continued to search for a good ten minutes before finding a meaningful sign telling me it’s on the first floor.

Up in the lift.  Unit found.  Closed at 5pm.  A sign saying head to A&E scanning area.  Hell, why didn’t the appointment letter say that?

A prompt service at the out of hours unit and they took me to a changing area, decided I didn’t need the dreaded hospital gown for a head and ear scan and told me to lock my phone, keys and belt away.  I waited, overhearing an old timer being cared for in the scanning room.  “If you just open your legs I’ll pull it out for you” said the medic.

Out of the room he came with a big smile on his face and a little unsteady on his feet.  My turn.  My experience of MRI scans is limited to a private hospital and Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.  Of the two, Huddersfield wins.  Spacious and a choice of music.  The coffee was nice before the private gig.

Calderdale is a different story.  As I was reversed into the scanner I realised that with my 2014 weight I wouldn’t even have fitted in.  The sleeker 2017 model struggled with my nose virtually touching the ceiling.  I am mildly claustrophobic and this wasn’t nice.  For the first time I understood why for some an MRI scan is hell.

A good forty minutes.  No music.  Electronic noises bouncing around.  I counted backwards from 600.  I closed my eyes, but of course the right one doesn’t close.  The breeze across my face dried the eye.  Very very uncomfortable.  I lost count a few times.  My right foot involuntarily twitched a few times.  Occasional breaks in the noise but no break in my location.  Pinned into a tube with nowhere to go.

In the end, after multiple restarts of counting backwards and forgetting where I was upto, I was at 99 when they slid me out.  A brief discussion about the follow up appointment tomorrow and a fuller report further down the line.

I really hope the can pinpoint exactly what is causing the deafness.  But I fear that even if they can there won’t be anything they can do to treat it.

Scanning the Palsy

Tonight sees an early expedition down to the Calderdale Hospital.  For a scan.

This one is linked to my right eye, hearing loss in my right ear, the seven month old Bell’s palsy (which, bizarrely, I hate more than the cancer) and the possibility of labyrinthitis.

When the palsy was first diagnosed I had three scans to try and prove it was a cancer spread to the brain.  Fortunately it wasn’t, but I was banned from driving while inconclusive results were considered by the medics.

Tonight, I think, will establish a little bit more about my facial problems.  But I also think it’s likely that there won’t be any treatment available.  It will go away on its own has been the methodology for this part of my ailments so far.

I can pay £2.80 for two hours parking in a disabled bay in the hospital car park.  Or maybe find a pay and display bay just outside which allows the blue badge holder to park for free.  I’ll be doing the latter while my body still allows me to.  They have rather created an economic model of “force the invalid to walk further” there.

Anyway, hopefully they’ll find nothing too unpleasant.  That would be a game changer.

A Time to Live

I rarely watch normal TV unless there’s a ball being kicked or bowled.  Indeed, at the time this programme was broadcast I’d landed from Eindoven.  Late.  Driven at dubiously high speeds from Manchester to Halifax and had joined colleagues on a night out!  If you can call a Wednesday evening in Halifax that.

I got home very tired.  But a triple dash to the porcelain caused by just about the worst drug side effects I’ve felt this year had me lying nervously in my bed fearing a fourth run done the stairs.  It was 1.30am and it didn’t feel safe to go to sleep.

So I loaded up my BBC iplayer app to watch A Time to Live.  A fairly obvious self interest for me in a dozen people who have a terminal diagnosis and have found themselves in a good place as a result.

It’s not morbid.  It’s not dramatic.  There’s no backstory.  They’re not heroic in the classical sense.  I had an emotional outburst early on, but it didn’t last.  Those moments are very rare these days.

But it is real.  And I suggest you put 58 minutes of your time aside to watch it.

The people in it are from mixed backgrounds.  Differing ages, one as young as 23.  A couple seemed a bit like me, but who knows from the four minutes they had on air!  None of these real people glamourise the situation in anyway and I don’t think the film make does either.

The question of wandering off to Switzerland to end things was raised.  I’m not sure I could do that.  But I’m glad others can choose.  One chose to leave her husband on diagnosis.  Wow!

I’ll add no more.  I think I’d be recommending it if I still expected to get past eighty.  If you want to, take an hour out and watch it.

That Boring pre-Flight Bit

Despite my plans to see more of the planet, I really don’t like airports.  It really should be a lot less hassle to turn up somewhere, hop on board and fly somewhere.

The morning was good.  I sat on a bench in the centre of town enjoying the soaring temperatures and admiring fair maidens wandering past while humming Bruce Springsteen’s “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” to myself.  Street wifi helped me browse away the hours including the shocking discovery that my Priotity Pass lounge card doesn’t work at Eindhoven Airport.  There’s a cost I hadn’t factored in when discarding Amsterdam as a landing point!

Never mind.  I made my usual early arrival at the airport.  Much as I dislike the places the fear of missing my flight outweighs things.  Do I eat in the pre-security area or beyond?  I chose beyond.  I should have chosen the hotel next door!

For the fourth time in a row exiting a foreign country I was drug swabbed.  All clear. Through the pointless perfume shop and over to the sole food place.  €9 for a drink and panini.  Just rubbish!  That, and the lack of comfy seats, is the cost of no lounge admission.  At least there’s free airport wifi.

Eaten.  Still nearly two hours to the flight.  No desire to chat to the pretty Dutch girls in the corner.  Bored.  Another good solo jaunt drawing to a close.

What if They Ban My iPad?