be brave...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been called cynical. Cynical, negative and pessimistic. For a time, I was called it so often that I almost believed it myself and began to build my sense of self around it. 

The cynic. 

To be honest, I’m not sure that this has ever really been the case. It certainly is true that, as a younger man, I would throw stones and would criticise without feeling the need to offer up anything constructive. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in going through that phase. It’s also true that, when feeling frustrated or powerless at work (annoyingly often), I would sometimes deliberately seek to tear people down in a way that was ultimately self-destructive…. But I was young and stupid and I don’t work there anymore (which is probably just as well: some people choose never to forget the person you were fifteen years ago, even if you’ve long since changed). 

I think it probably boils down to this: I like to ask questions. These days, it’s usually to genuinely try to understand something because I’m curious. The problem is that lots of people don’t like to be asked questions; they don’t like to be challenged by someone because, if you don’t know the answers or you aren’t very secure in your opinion, it can feel as though you’re being criticised. No one likes to be criticised, right? I try not to be threatening about it, but nobody’s perfect and I’m probably not the finished article even now. 

I think my MS has changed me, actually. Or maybe it’s just revealed another side to my personality. Nobody knows what causes MS, nobody knows if it will progress for me or what my outcome will be. There’s very little that I can do to change any of these things. I’m not really one for serenity prayers, but I do think that this has taught me acceptance. To paraphrase Kipling, to meet with Triumph and Disaster and to treat those two imposters just the same. I’m calmer, more relaxed and better able to approach life on an even-keel (whilst also remaining perfectly capable of frothing in indignation watching the news. Nobody is perfect. My wife is doubtless scoffing as she reads this). 

What’s the point in being pessimistic? I’m well aware what MS might do to me and I know all too well what it’s already done. I simply don’t see how dwelling on either of those things does me any good at all. MS pages on Facebook seem full of people wrapped up in their own invisible pain and suffering. I don’t doubt that they suffer, but I simply don’t understand the attitude because I try never to allow myself to think like that. Perhaps that’s easy for me to say, but I hope it’s a philosophy that will stay with me, whatever happens. “The Road not Taken” by Robert Frost is one of my favourite poems; my interpretation of it is that you should never waste time regretting the path you didn’t take. 

They say that a pessimist is never disappointed. I think they’re always disappointed. Besides, I’m a runner, and as Kipling also said:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, 
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, 
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! 

Well, I can definitely do that. Maybe not as fast as I use to be able to do it… but I can still do it.

pseudo human being...

Back in the day, it was an iPod that was my first introduction to Apple.  It was one of those rare devices that absolutely and immediately changed my life: in this case, by completely revolutionising the way that I listened to music.  I was one of those kids who was always taping things off the radio; I made mixtapes for people well into my 20s (it seems ridiculous to think about it now, but writable CDs weren't really a thing for most people for a really, really long time.  Long after all my music was on CDs, the only really practical way of making a compilation was to use a cassette).  I had a minidisc for a while, and that was okay but distinctly limited by the fact that not many people had minidisc players.... which may be at least part of the reason why that didn't really work out as a format.

Anyway....

I think my first iPod had a capacity of 30gb and I was suddenly able to carry around so much more music in my pocket... although, because my music was almost entirely on CD, I also had to learn how to rip CDs into MP3s first.  I then had to buy and install a firewire connection for my PC to be able to connect my new device to my computer.  I don't know about you, but how many times have you opened up a PC and installed a card? I worked in IT and it was my first time.  On top of all that, Apple hadn't made a version of iTunes for the PC yet, either... so I was forced to use something called "Media Jukebox" by JRiver (I haven't used this in over a decade and I think they still send me emails).  So I started ripping CDs onto my hard drive, and the choices I made then can still be seen in my library of MP3s today: every new CD that I bought was ripped immediately, but I selectively went back through my back catalogue, and loads of the CDs I didn't rip then have never been added since. The process of ripping a CD took ages on my old PC, and I just didn't have the time or patience to rip my way through a back catalogue of 1000 or so CDs... so I made some choices, and I'm still living with those choices today.  I guess I'm a completist, but not *that much* of a completist. Pah.  Evict me from the man club.

iTunes arrived for the PC eventually, and I moved my library over and downloaded my first track from the Apple Store.  79p for "Vertigo" by U2.

I loved the old iPod.  Even when Apple did everything they could to move us into newer technology, I loved being able to buy a device that had storage big enough that it was capable of holding my whole music library and I didn't have to choose what I loaded.  For me, the 160Gb iPod classic was where it was at.  I had an iPhone and used that for my day-to-day consumption of music, choosing playlists and albums that I wanted to carry with me all the time... safe in the knowledge that I always had my classic, and my classic had everything.

...and then Apple stopped making it.

Lots of people made a massive fuss about this and seemed angry at Apple for taking this choice away from them.  I sort of understood where they were coming from, but what the hell did they expect Apple to do about it?  They'd decided to move on, and that was that.  I was a touch worried that I wouldn't have the choice of something with this much storage, but my (second) classic was still pretty new, so it wasn't something I needed to lose any sleep over quite yet.

When we went on holiday to Switzerland and Austria this summer, we were going to be driving around everywhere, and I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to some music, so I packed the classic.  In truth, I'd been using the playlists on my iPhone more and more, but I still liked the idea of something with everything; something that had the whole of "Surf's Up" by the Beach Boys and not just a playlist of the band's greatest hits.  I quickly discovered something that Apple already knew: the iPod classic has a spinning hard drive and not solid state storage; it's built on old technology... and in the car we were using, it was painfully slow and crashed every couple of songs, requiring a full reset each time.  Needless to say, I just used my phone for music.  Suddenly, the iPod classic felt every bit an almost obsolete piece of technology.

Imagine my delight when I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 7 and discovered that I once again had a device with the storage capacity to easily hold my entire music collection.  In fact, the 256Gb storage capacity of my new phone is in fact significantly bigger than the 160Gb of my old iPod classic.

Technology, eh?

Naturally, in the time since I've started curating a digital music collection on my hard drive, I've bought a record player and started buying 180g vinyl, sometimes of music that I already own on cassette, CD and on MP3.

That's just the way of the world though, eh?

I could fascinate...

Marathon training is a funny thing.

Well, I say funny, but what I actually mean is all-consuming. I’m in week 6 of a 16 week programme that culminates in the 26.2 miles from Blackheath Common to the Mall on 24th April, but already, most of the time when I’m not actually running is spent thinking about my next big run. I’ll give you an example: my training programme says that my long midweek run this week needs to cover 8 miles. For the sake of time-efficiency, at the moment I’m breaking my long mid-week run up into two pieces by running the 3.6 miles to the office in the morning and the 3.6 miles home in the evening. This isn’t quite the same thing as running 7 miles all in one go, but the mileage is the same and the run home in particular is good training on tired legs. As these runs soon start to peak over 10 miles, I think I’m going to just run them in one go in the evenings when I get home from work, but for now I’m happy enough to break it up.

There’s a problem. As I’m sure you can probably work out for yourself, 3.6 miles plus 3.6 miles does not equal 8 miles. As anyone who has trained to a programme like this before, you can add miles to your training runs, but you can’t run less than you have scheduled. For me at least, it’s really important that I line up at the start of my marathon knowing that I haven’t taken any shortcuts and that I’ve put in the mileage required to be able to get me around the course in one piece.

So this morning, I got up into my running kit, ran to the doctor’s surgery for an appointment. It's on the way to work, but once I was done there, I ran back on myself to add another mile or so to my run before heading into work.  That way, I could make make sure that my total this evening covered the full 8 miles. Ridiculous, right?  And I had to plan that out in advance and everything, you know. And as I was planning that, I was simultaneously mapping out my route for my Sunday 16 miler in my head: a long loop of the Embankment from Lady Bay bridge is about 6 miles. If I run that and then throw in a 10 mile Big Track loop, that will be my miles covered. Job done. I should get another few hours of “Wolf Hall” done too.

You see?  All-consuming.

I’m going skiing in a couple of weeks. We’re going Saturday to Saturday, so this means that I can get my long run in on the Sunday after we get back, but that I need to cover my long run before we go. So.... I’ve taken that Friday off so that I can fit an 18 miler in before we go. That's what normal people do with their holiday time, right? If you’re interested, I’ll tell you the route I’m considering.

No? Suit yourselves.

I’ll still be taking my running gear to Austria, obviously… but I think I can cope with missing the midweek runs as long as I have the long runs covered.

So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that I’m spending an awful lot of time at the moment either running, or thinking about running. The really worrying part is that I’ve still got ten more weeks of this to go and the mileage is only getting bigger from here.

Just as long as I’m not boring anyone though, yeah?

We’re running to raise money for the MS Trust. You can sponsor us here:

http://virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

you're weightless, you're exotic...

For the last year, I've had various problems on my left side, all apparently deriving from a combination of a loss of flexibility in my ankle and a general loss of muscle strength in my left side... both likely MS related.  I've seen a specialist sports surgeon and various physios, most of whom have acknowledged that they can't address the underlying cause, but they can try and address the symptoms.  That's fine by me because all I really want to do is keep running, pretty much whatever it takes.

The latest stop on my journey was a visit to the orthotics department at QMC on Friday.  The lady was really nice and she gave me a pair of carbon fibre insoles to wear in my running shoes to try and stop the collapse of my left knee inwards when I get tired. I've tried insoles before and they've never really done anything for me.  In fact, things seemed to get get better for me generally when I switched to a more minimal running shoe.  I'm not a barefoot running zealot, by any means, and I never thought that it would be in the least bit sensible for a man of my size and with my mechanical issues to cut down the amount of cushioning in my running shoe.  Well, all I know is that switching shoes and drastically reducing the heel cushioning has cut down the niggles I'd been having *and* made me faster.  I don't run in a completely barefoot shoe and I'm not entirely sure that I ever will, but the change seems to have worked for me.  That said, I'll give these new insoles a try anyway: the collapse of my knee when I get tired is likely to be a key part in the chain of mechanical failures that's been giving me problems in my knees and hips, so as I start to increase mileage towards the marathon, I'll see how they go.  Besides, there's no reason why increased support under the arch of my foot isn't compatible with a drastically reduced heel cushion anyway.

The other thing that the orthotist gave me on Friday was an velcro ankle cuff with an elastic strap that attaches to a hook you put over the tongue of your running shoe.

But that's just for my private fuzzy tingle times.

OK.  No it's not.  That's my Strassburg sock.

The idea is that this particular S&M device provides a bit of tension as you run and prevents you dropping your foot at the ankle. Foot drop is a really common symptom of MS and is related to a loss of flexibility in the ankle.  In my case, this manifests itself when I get tired and I start to scuff my left foot.  This has led to knock-on issues up my left leg and into my left hip, exacerbating the problems caused by the collapse of my knee inwards (I'm learning a lot about biomechanics at the moment).  This ankle cuff is supposed to stop the drop.

I've worn this contraption on a couple of runs now, and it's far less uncomfortable than you might imagine.  Is it helping?  Well, I think time will tell.  The orthotist felt that if I was going to run longer distances, then this was an absolutely vital support to help keep me on the road.  Needs must when the devil drives.

I ran 6.60 miles this evening, and having felt fatigued and MS-y all afternoon, I motored around in an average pace of 7.49 minutes per mile... which for me is really quick.  Either those horrific interval sessions that I've started doing on a Wednesday evening are starting to take effect or I'm now effectively bionic.

Maybe both?



I'm more machine now than man, you know.  Twisted and evil.

I've been locked out....

I've been cycling to work for nearly a year now, and in all that time, I think I've only used my car to get to the office twice - both times when I had to get to an appointment in the middle of the day.  We're pretty lucky with the facilities at my office, to be honest: as well as a changing room with a decent set of showers and my own locker, we've also got a secure bike shed that requires a pass to open the shuttered door and contains metal loops bolted and concreted into the floor to lock your bike against.  

At this time of year, as you'd expect with the nicer weather, there are quite a few more people cycling to work.... but as there's plenty of room, this hasn't really been a problem.  I usually arrive at around 07:30, well before most people, so I have my pick of spots to lock up my bike.  When the place gets busy and you have to share a post, the form is for bikes to top and tail on either side so that you get as little in the way of other cyclists as possible.  It's just common sense, right?  Some people are clearly a little possessive of "their" post, and leave their locks on them all the time, but there's nothing really wrong with that, and generally it's a pretty harmonious community of cyclists feeling smug when the traffic is appalling to get offsite in rush hour.

Imagine my surprise when I went to the bike shed to cycle home the other day at around 18:30 and found another bike chained to the frame of my bike.  Not around the post, just around my bike.  I looked at it for a moment, not quite believing what I was seeing.  I then actually unlocked my bike from the post, as though somehow I thought that I would be able to take it out and ride home.  Sadly, no.  Some idiot had managed to lock their bike directly to mine and make it impossible for me to cycle home.  Brilliant.  I imagine it was an accident, but that didn't stop me trying to work out what I had done to warrant such an act of antisocial stupidity (my bike was a lot bigger than the one locked to it, so I assume only a moron would want to come back to the bike shed to find an enraged much larger man waiting for them).

My options seemed somewhat limited: wait for the guy to turn up and move his bike? Walk home? Ugh.  What a massive pain.  More in hope than expectation, I went round to reception before they closed and explained my predicament.  They called security.  Security turned up with bolt cutters.  They checked my ID - presumably to make sure that I wasn't a splendidly inventive thief - and then spent the next five minutes cutting through the cable of the bike locked to mine (I guess those locks have improved over the years, huh?).  They then put the bike into their truck and took it away.

Well that escalated quickly.

On the one hand, I'm delighted with the result and the idiot had it coming.  But I can't help but feel a little bit bad about what must have gone through his head when he knocked off work, changed to ride home and found his bike had completely disappeared.  

Well, let's not overdo the sympathy though, eh?  What a plum.

[This kind of post is the reason you read this blog, right?  Insightful, funny, thoughtful, challenging..... none of these things.  It's not even quite an amusing middle-class problem.  Well, look... I nearly wrote about how awesome Metallica are.  Again.  So count your blessings.  I've saved that for tomorrow instead.  Something to look forward to]

I can hold my head still with my hands at my knees...

At the back end of last year, I set myself a completely arbitrary running challenge. In 2014, I will run 600 miles.  I wrote it down, and I handed it in to my running club with the other members' targets and goals for the year: run a marathon, run the Robin Hood half in less than two hours, complete 5km without stopping to walk.... that kind of thing.

There wasn't any great science behind it, and I very nearly wrote out a target of 500 miles before deciding that wasn't stretching enough.  600 miles is 50 miles a month, and that seemed stretching but achievable.... not least because I'd spent much of 2013 being injured and was suddenly very aware of my apparently growing physical frailty, perhaps down to my multiple sclerosis.

I was unable to run more than a few miles a week between March and June because of a problem with my ITB, and I'm still not really able to go much further than about seven miles without really starting to hurt myself as my hip, knee, calf muscles, ankle and foot all start to complain.  So, yeah.  600 miles, why not?

When I got home, I had a look at my running stats on Runkeeper.

2013 471.3 miles
2012 666.7 (this was my first full year at running club, I think)
2011 562.5
2010 262.5 (well, we spent 9 months travelling the world)
2009 441.3

Injuries permitting, 600 ought to be do-able.  50 miles a month.  The stats tell me that the most I've ever done in  single month was 94.5 miles in August 2011.... goodness knows what I was thinking then, as I generally clock in around 40.  Another 10 miles a month, body allowing?  Why not?

I went out on a 4 mile run this evening.  That's not really very far, and I didn't really run it very fast.  My body felt tired and I had sore ankles and weak feeling arms and shoulders.  Physically, I wasn't feeling great.  Running is a funny thing, though.  Mentally, I felt absolutely fantastic.  That run took me to 253 miles for the year.  A third of the way through the year, and I'm 42% of the way towards my target.  I'm having physio on my ankle and I'm waking up in the night with muscle spasms in my calves, but I'm still running and tonight, I felt great.  I might be stubborn to the point of stupidity, but it's being able to flog myself like this that makes me feel alive.

Runkeeper have just emailed me to inform me that April 2014 saw the quickest average pace in my running since I started tracking in 2008.  I'm forty years old and I have multiple sclerosis, but I'm not dead yet.

Oh, and I entered the ballot for the 2015 London Marathon too....

hey man, now you're really living....

At the supermarket this week, I tried to liven up my mundane life by changing my breakfast cereal of choice.  Now, normally of a morning, I like to have a sesame seed bagel with some marmalade or golden syrup or something lightly spread across the top.  I do like my bread, after all.  On some mornings though, I just hanker after something different.

It is for mornings like those that I keep a box of cereal in my kitchen cupboard.  Yeah.  That's how I roll.  I've tried various sorts, but my default cereal of choice is Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.  I find their advertising tedious in the extreme, but I like a cereal sweet enough without being entirely infantile or smothered in chocolate.

Anyway.  I wanted a change.  After a few seconds of consideration, I picked up a box of original Alpen and popped it into the trolley.

Living the dream.

In some ways, it's a nostalgic choice.  We used to have this at home when I was growing up and it's a very aspirational cereal from the 1980s.  It's worthy enough, up to a point, but it's not quite in the same category as some of those newer, pricier mueslis and granolas that look like unsweetened bird food - never mind the fact that anyone who has any kind of middle class pretension is mixing their own granola nowadays.  Yeah.  It might be naff, but I've never been a dedicated follower of breakfast cereal trends, so Alpen would certainly do for those mornings when I don't fancy a bagel.

It would do just fine.

My wife wasn't so sure:
"Why have you picked Alpen?"
"I like Alpen"
"But it's a woman's cereal"
"What?  Why would you say something like that?  How exactly is Alpen a woman's cereal?"
"They sponsor 'Grey's Anatomy' on the telly"
"Oh.  Right".

I bought it, but such is my disapproval of their televisual sponsorship choices that it tastes like ashes in my mouth.

I'm lost but I'm hopeful, baby....

As a runner, I often wear a lot of lycra.  I assure you, this is not just for reasons of pleasure.  I'll have you know that it's a very practical material.... Anyway.  One of the difficulties with lycra - amongst its many, many advantages - is that it doesn't have many pockets.

When I run, although I don't often take too many things with me, I do need to carry a few bits and bobs: my iPhone I carry in a case that I wear on my left arm.  It tracks my runs and it holds my running playlist, so it's pretty much essential, but I've got that covered.  I also need to carry a key or two: my door key and occasionally my car key.  When I'm out with running club, I also need to carry my gym membership card, my running club loyalty card (I'm due a t-shirt next week!) and maybe also my cash card.

Now look: I don't want you thinking that I'm one of those guys who goes out running in a pair of lycra shorts that don't leave a great deal to the imagination.  No, I'm afraid I'm far too demure for that and I will always - always - wear a normal pair of shorts over the top.  Most of these shorts have pockets, but not ones that you would entirely trust to hold a house key or a cash card.

Pretty tedious story so far, right?  Oh, I assure you, it only gets duller from here.

So I was looking for a storage solution for my stuff when I was out running.  I don't really want to wear a fanny pack around my waist, so I was looking at little wallet-type things that you clip onto your shoes.  I don't entirely trust a velcro fastening for this kind of thing, especially not on the part of my body that moves the most when I'm out running, so I was specifically looking for one with a zip fastening.

I found one from an Amazon vendor (who turned out to be Sports Direct) for 79p (plus postage) and everyone was happy.  Especially when they also sent me one of those huge, chavvy Sports Direct mugs  into the package for free too.  I had a bit of bother with the courier, but 79p and a free mug, you know?

...except that, when it turned up, it had a velcro fastening.

I'm sure it's fine, but I find myself intensely irritated by the whole thing.  The whole deal cost me less than a fiver, but I wouldn't have bought the damn thing at all if I had known it didn't have a zip.  But at the same time, it hardly seems worth the trouble to send it back as my time is worth more to me than the hassle of packing it up and returning it.  I'm not going to use it; I'm not going to return it.  And all because they couldn't be bothered to get their product description right.  Grrr.  I've emailed them, but I don't really expect that a company like Sports Direct will be much into goodwill gestures.  Have you ever seen Mike Ashley?  Plus, they advertise their actual shops as offering 24 hour delivery - presumably meaning their website.  Am I the only person who finds that irritating?  Surely, even if their website was available 24x7 - which it won't be - they will only actually deliver when the postal service and couriers are operating, right?  And who would want a parcel delivering at 3 in the morning anyway?  Or am I over-thinking this?

So.  Wrist wallets, anyone?  Zipped, obviously.

It's a thrill a minute reading this blog, innit?  Bring on the book deal!

come on and cover me....

I had a call from my medical insurer today, checking that everything was okay with my renewal.

Well. Hmmm.

I never planned to have medical insurance at all; I acquired it as a non-contractual benefit when I was outsourced in 2004, but didn’t really think anything of it until I actually needed to use it. When I woke up that summer morning in 2005 with a numb hand and made an appointment to see my doctor, I was starting a journey that would take something like 4 years and require many visits to a few different neurologists in different hospitals, several diagnostic MRI scans, lots of blood tests, an evoked potentials test and, finally, the lumbar puncture that confirmed my diagnosis with multiple sclerosis.

As I’m sure you can imagine, those first few months and visits to see the neurologist were pretty scary, and I was very glad that I had medical insurance in-hand to make sure that there were no delays in getting the best available diagnostic assessment. Not knowing what is wrong was far, far more worrying and stressful - for me at least - than actually being told I had MS.  About halfway through that diagnostic process and still firmly in limboland healthwise, I was earmarked for outsource again – well, insource actually, back into the company that originally outsourced me. Whatever. Except that suddenly, I had a reason to care: this one did not provide medical insurance as a non-contractual benefit. Continuing my existing medical cover was apparently impossible, but now I was sitting on a "pre-existing", undiagnosed condition that significantly complicated getting a new provider.  You try getting an insurance company to take on a liability of unknown size without receiving a pretty hefty quote back.  Yeah.  Exactly.

HR, true to form, did not care and refused to see how this was any of their concern– my existing medical cover was a non-contractual benefit from my old company that they didn’t offer and were under no legal obligation to provide. Why would you expect your Human Resources Department to display any empathy with human beings, right?  My new company did have an arrangement with a medical insurer, but now I was looking at the thick end of £50 a month for basic cover, or £100 a month if I wanted to cover my undiagnosed condition…which of course I did. More than a grand a year just because my stupid damn employer couldn’t make up their minds about how they wanted to be structured and did the hokey-cokey with my career. So much for the 'people people' caring about people.

Luckily for me, I found someone else in my department - one of our leadership team - who cared enough about my situation to arrange for a permanent salary bump the equivalent of the £50 a month to cover the basic medical insurance and a one-off payment to cover a year’s worth of the difference to the full cover… this guy had no need to do this for me, but when I thanked him for his efforts on my behalf, he told me that the really sad thing was that he’d actually had to do very little to make it happen. Well, at least he cared enough to do that much... and I've not forgotten it.

So there it is. I ended up with medical cover that cost me around £100 a month that covered me for everything, including the thing that was eventually diagnosed as my MS. That £100 is now nearer £150 (although, much to my amusement, my courtesy call today included the marvellous information that the annual increase to my policy wasn’t as much as it would have been because I’ve used my policy so little. His exact phrase was that “you’ve had a reduction on your annual increase”. Still an increase, mind…. But a reduced increase. Like a minor gun-shot wound, I suppose. Better than a major one, but still a gun-shot wound.

Anyone reading this in the USA is likely already rolling their eyes at my health insurance ‘problems’…. But it gets even better. As soon as I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I fell into the capable care of the National Health Service: all of my diagnostics, treatments and consultations are now entirely free to me… not least the drugs that I inject each week at a cost of more than £1000 a month. I was seeing a neurologist privately at the time, but I immediately began to see the same consultant on the NHS. In fact, a colleague of mine who had the same symptoms as me at the same time (and ended up with the same diagnosis) saw the same consultant on the NHS with no wait and was actually diagnosed and treated on much quicker timescales than me!

But still I pay for private medical insurance. They cover a condition that I don’t think I actually need covering, but for some reason I’m reluctant to let that cover go as I know it is likely to be excluded elsewhere.

I can afford the cover, so I guess it’s a nice problem to have…. But it still seems ridiculous.  Not least because I could be covered under C's company insurance (she's important enough to get it), but I'm reluctant to have my cover tied to her continuing employment with this company.

Hmmf.

It’s not all bad though. I ended up having my eyes done in the same hospital where I saw that private neurologist. I was expecting to pay in full, but as they knew all my insurance details, they just ran it through that and it all went through. That’s a couple of years of subscription covered, I guess.  If I end up needing surgery on my knee, that will be covered too, as are all my various trips to the osteopath and/or physio.  It doesn't amount to the money I pay in subscription, I suppose.... and I'd maybe be better off just paying directly as and when needed... but it's there if I need it.

I'm an idiot, right?

If there is a moral to this story, it is simply that the NHS is amazing: my private insurance has not given me an iota of better healthcare, or access to better doctors or better equipment than the NHS would have provided for me; as soon as I was diagnosed, the NHS took up the heavy-lifting and are paying for everything without question.  I don't know if my insurance company would have signed up to more than £1000 worth of drugs a month, perhaps for the rest of my life, but the NHS stepped in without question and even offered me a choice from the various disease modifying drugs on offer.  Money never came into it.  I know that the coverage in the NHS varies from region to region, and from condition to condition (my own neurologist told me that Nottingham is brilliant if you have MS, but terrible if you have epilepsy)... it's certainly not perfect, but it is still entirely remarkable.  Healthcare free at the point of access to everyone: this is an amazing, precious thing and we should cherish it and work to protect it.

The Supreme Court of Justice in the USA has just ruled that the Individual Mandate that underpins Obama's Healthcare policy is lawful, hopefully opening the door to affordable, tax-subsidised healthcare for everyone.  Good, right?  Seems to make sense to me, and yet it is facing vehement opposition - even by some of those who stand to benefit the most - who seem to think that it's the beginning of the end of the world.

People are fascinating, they really are.

...and so is Ian McCaskill

If you’re British or have ever spent any time in this country, you’ll know that we’re hopelessly obsessed with the weather. We’re blessed with a temperate climate that isn’t too much of anything: not very hot, not very cold; neither particularly wet nor too dry; not prone to cyclones or hurricanes or any other kind of extreme weather event…. Perhaps as a direct result of this, as a nation we seem to be fascinated with every tiny fluctuation in the weather conditions in every part of this little island.  We love the shipping forecast for heaven's sake.  It interrupts national broadcasting and is full of the most wonderful, impenetrable poetry - "North Utsire, South Utsire, Tyne, Dogger. Northeast 3 or 4. Occasional rain. Moderate or poor"- but how many people actually use it for its original purpose?  Don't they have radar and t'internet on ships these days?

This summer has been a case in point: it’s been a dry winter so we have hosepipe bans. This makes the news. Then we have a bit of rain, and that makes the news… because we have hosepipe bans (“you need to think of it like a bank account” said the man from the water board on the radio, “all this rain has topped up our current account in the rivers and reservoirs, but our savings accounts in the water table remains very dry”). Then we have some hot weather and the papers are full of people with their shirts off in the park. This weekend, we had floods and they made the news nationwide. We love a bit of weather here. But only a bit, mind.  We get nervous and excited if we get too much.

Anyway. If it wasn’t a fallow year, the Glastonbury Festival would have taken place last weekend. As I heard people in the office moaning about how it looked like we were not going to get a summer at all this year, I couldn’t help but think about the conditions that I’ve seen over the ten or so years that I’ve been attending the festival. I’ve been to some of the wettest Glastonburys on record – the floods of 2005 and the prolonged downpours of 2009 in particular; I’ve been to some sunny Glastonburys too – 1993 was lovely and 2010 was scorching… but as I went out for a run from the office one lunchtime this week, it struck me that the weather we’re having right now is pretty much typical of the weather I see when I’m standing in a field in Somerset drinking cider and watching a band I’ve never heard of: it’s a bit blowy and a bit damp around the edges, it might be a bit chilly with rain during the night, but there’s also enough sun about that you pick up a bit of a tan if you stand outside in a t-shirt all day. Wimbledon started on Monday too, and what’s that most famous for? That’s right, rain.

So, for all that it seems like we’re talking about the weather even more than usual at the moment we’re probably, er…. having entirely typical weather for this time of year? Haven’t we got anything else to talk about, for goodness sake?

Look, I realise that the fact I spoke about the weather on here myself only a couple of weeks ago means that I’m hardly in much of a position to criticise this obsession…..and by talking about it again now I’m just colouring in my own stereotype…. I’m just saying.

What a ridiculous people we are.