Fun and games with our own version of “Carry on Doctor”

Sorry to have left you all hanging when I suddenly disappeared towards the end of March.

Following a gruelling 2025 things had been perking up. fter we had celebrated our March birthdays, just eight days apart, we were looking forward to spending time in the garden.

Unfortunately we were both under the weather, though Marion got gradually worse and when we went to the see the doctor she very quickly called for an ambulance to take me to the hospital.

A lack of appetite, fall in oxygen levels and other matters meant she had to be admitted for a couple of weeks ands was allowed home at the beginning of May.

 seemed good with the world.

a couple of weeks she was allowed home at the beginning of May and all seemed good with the

Trouble is there’s always something round the corner. In my case it was a hosepipe reel, lurking out of sight on a Sunday morning, to get under my feet bringing me crashing to the ground.

I have fallen before and ended up with a sore knee. This time I knew I was not going to get away with it so easily. As I put my hands to the ground to push myself up I literally let out a shriek of agony and saw that my left knee looked like a lumpy .

As my family gathered round I think I must have gone into shock because the next thing I could remember was a paramedic cutting away the leg of my jeans while her colleague administered some form of magic painkiller which had me thinking I might have missed out on the drugs scene in the 1960s.

Suffice it to say that by the time they got me to hospital I was as high as a kite.

I was in hospital for five days during which time they put me under, sliced open the flesh around my patella, put the bits of bone back together, covered it all with a metal plate and sewed up.

A parting gift from the hospital consisted of a pair of crutches and a splint to stop my knee bending – all well and good until you try and sit down.

Since then it has been regular trips to the hospital for physiotherapy and checks with the surgeon who did the repair work.

What made matters worse was that my darling wife had to go back into hospital for four weeks.

Anyway, we are now all back home, my good lady is getting better each day and I have ditched the crutches and the splint and spend my time looking after the boss.

I will also be writing more.

Thief of time steals more than hours and minutes – it can steal lives

I am a man of good intentions.

I am also a procrastinator of the highest order.

Sometimes it is good to defer an action for a day or two: if it’s pouring with rain there is no point working in the garden; if you’re not hungry you can always pop the joint in the fridge and have your roast dinner tomorrow.

Then there are times when you tell yourself you can move items on a to-do list down a few notches as other things are more important

Finally there are things you keep putting off forever because you know that at the end of the day nobody gets hurt. Or do they?

My father-in-law was a regular blood donor, he had a badge to prove it. Over the years I kept saying: “I must go and give them an armful the next time there’s a session in town.”

Unfortunately there always appeared to be something more important to do when that day came: I had an important meeting to attend; I had an appointment with the optician; I was just too busy to find the time.

Did it really matter? There were plenty of other donors.

I was in my mid-40s before I actually got around to giving blood.

Marion and I went to a blood donor session at Diss, in Norfolk.

I was amazed to find how simple it all was. They put the needle in and I watched the blood flow out. After a few minutes they took the needle out, put a plaster on the hole, gave me a cup of tea and a biscuit and I was done.

I had to wait for Marion because her blood flowed rather sluggishly.

That was the first and last time I gave blood.

Soon afterwards I started to have medical problems which precluded me from donating blood and I realised I had procrastinated too long. If I had started 10 years before, or even five years, then my donations might have been beneficial to others.

Nowadays my veins shrink away at the sight of a needle and the surgery nurses have to wander far and wide to find one that will offer up enough blood to allow tests for all sorts of things I have to put up with these days.

Quickstep challenge with the star of the epic Lawrence of Arabia

It is highly likely that anyone around in 1977 remembers that year as the Silver Jubilee of the late Queen Elizabeth II. To me, however, it is far more memorable than Her Maj visiting Holyhead, where I had the great pleasure of being the district reporter for the North Wales Chronicle.

In Spring of that year I had returned to journalism, after more than two years taking a break in the world of entertainment, and Marion and I, with our girls, had moved from Essex to Anglesey to begin a major new chapter in our already hectic life.

There were three major events in my life that sunny summer.

The most important was in the July when Marion and I got married on the seventh day of that seventh month in the 77th year of the 20th century.

The second event came when Marion and I bought our first house together – a delightful cottage on Holyhead Mountain. There was a glorious view from the garden of South Stack lighthouse.

The third memorable event was more journalistic than personal.

I got a call from a contact to say there was a ruckus at the port where the Dublin ferry was due to depart and the person I causing it was the man renowned for playing Lawrence of Arabia – Irish hellraiser Peter O’Toole.

After a quick call to a local freelance photographer, telling him to get to the port as fast as possible, I headed straight there myself.

I arrived just in time to meet the man himself coming out of the harbourmaster’s office with the harbourmaster himself.

The actor was only a couple of inches taller than me yet he seemed to be a giant as I trotted alongside him heading into town.

It is rarely I have had to do an interview on the run but at least Mr O’Toole was quite happy to tell me what had happened.

He said he had arrived early for the ferry and, after checking the departure time, he decided to go into town. He arrived back with, as he believed, five minutes to spare only to find the gangplank was already raised and a crew member was closing the gap in the deck rail.

“I told him to lower the gangplank, ” the actor said, “only for the cheeky sod to tell me I was too late. He said the gangplank was pulled up 10 minutes before sailing and to lower it now would make the ferry late.

“I told him the captain would just have to open the throttle a bit more and just then I realised the boat was pulling away so I called out: ‘Come back, I haven’t finished talking to you’.”

By now we had reached the bottom of the slope where a large black car was parked and the actor turned to me, shook my hand and said: “Now I must go, I have a plane to catch.”

With that he got into the car and my brief link with fame departed.

The harbourmaster was still there so I asked him for his side of the story.

He confirmed what the actor had told me and also told me Mr O’Toole was a regular passenger on the ferry to Dublin and the port authority had authorised him to secure a flight for the actor from a nearby private airfield.

I went back to the office and filed the story. The next morning I contacted the actor’s agent and he told me that the plane had arrived in time for him to be at the port when the ferry got in.

The agent said that when the ferry docked the same crewman lowered the gangland and Peter O’Toole said to him: “As I was saying when you so rudely sailed away . . .”

PS: I checked in with the grandmaster a few weeks later and he told me that the actor continued to use the ferry and had “forgiven” the crewman, accepting that he had just been doing his job.

Seven decades of reading and I still have many years of books ahead

I think I might have mentioned, occasionally, my passion for books.

It’s been a passion for more than 70 years and it doesn’t matter what they are, fiction or fact, I simply don’t care.

What I do care about is holding the real deal in my hands.

Obviously as a tiny tot it would have been one or other of my parents reading me a bedtime story, quite possibly a tale of little Noddy, and his friend Big Ears.

Once I was old enough to read “real books” I was voracious. If it was within reach then I would take it and read it.

I remember books about a young boy called Just William and another called Jennings (he went to a private school) which may have belonged to my brother. I also remember raiding my sister’s little library and reading books about Cherry Ames (nurse – probationer, sister, army nurse and any nursing role you can think of) or the Little Women series about the March family.

By now I was equipped with the key to the guarded safety deposit of books – the local library, which was at the top of our road.

One thing I did realise was that there were boys’ books and girl’s books.

Somehow I did not care. To me a book is a book.

It’s been the same ever since and I don’t care if it’s written by a man or a woman, all I want is a good read.

I’ll introduce you to some of my favourite books here and hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant

I was going to pretend that today was St David’s Day. That would at least be a definite time to get back into the swing of things and tell my readers (I know some of you are out there) what delights lie ahead.

Instead I suddenly find myself in the middle of March with stories unwritten; tales not told; books not read; and seeds not sown. Oh, and a birthday looming.

In fact the birthday has loomed so much that it is here, today.

This is just a trailer for what is to come.

Now I am back in action there’ll be trips back to the 70s; general chat about life as it hits me day to day; a bit of politics (what did you expect? but you’ll get a warning); bits and bobs of general chat; a gardening; and books, of course, lots of books, old and new.

I hope you will stay with me.

PS: watch out for my meeting with a brilliant English-born Irish actor.

Who created who?

When the world was young it was a ball floating in space covered with water which boiled and bubbled as its core grew hotter and hotter until a hole ⁹cracked open and lava erupted before falling back into the waters.

Then the core spewed up more lava until that which fell back into the waters rose above the surface and created land.

In the depths molecules came together and created new shapes which grew into a variety of forms and some came out of the water and onto the land where some stayed at the edge of the land and some spread out.

Those that spread included some that put down roots and provided shelter for those that continued to wander upon the face of the world.

Gradually they changed form and some slithered on their bellies and some went on all fours. Then there were those that raised themselves on two legs and walked upright.

Then an arm reached out and pointed a finger and thus man created god.

NHS kicks off 2026 with vigour

The NHS is still coming under fire, except that nowadays the public are being persuaded to join in the attack.

The persuasion not only comes courtesy of the Tories and Farage’s mob, but also from the Labour government under Starmer.

Naturally the majority of the mass media have joined in the attacks and if you believed the garbage they spew out you would be looking out for endless queues of ambulances, while doctors and nurses check their bodily functions and give them blood transfusions in the back of the vehicles.

In truth the NHS, which has been trying to recover from Covid since 2020, has come on in leaps and bounds.

It doesn’t seem long since we were told we couldn’t expect an appointment with a doctor for at least two weeks.

Yet on the last Monday of December, the 29th, I rang my surgery and was given an appointment on the same day.

The doctor wanted a check made on me at the local hospital. It was a 14-day referral and if I hadn’t heard from them by 12th of January I was to call the surgery and they would chase it up.

The hospital called on 2nd January and I was offered an appointment for Friday, 9th January.

Now that is what my Cornish ancestors would call “a proper job”

Do you see yourself through a glass darkly – or do you go through the looking glass?

Who do you see when you pass a mirror?

Do you know the visage you see?

You know it is you but the only times you see yourself are when you look in a mirror, or, when someone shows you a photograph of you.

But is the “you” that you see the same as the “you” that others see?

Sometimes I look in a mirror and see my father looking back at me. I know he is not really there but people often say that I look like him. Am I just trying to see the likeness to remind me I am a chip off the old block.

What about when I see my mother looking back at me? Do I really look like her as well?

Almost certainly.

If, instead of looking at myself now and a picture of my father at the same age, I compared a picture of myself at 18 and one of my father at the same age I would see him in me, I would also see my mother in a picture of her taken at that age.

One thing that goes against this is how you see your partner now as opposed to the person you saw when you first met them.

I see the beauty I met and married all those decades ago. Her eyes are bright and shining, her hair like silken strands, her lips soft and tasty.

Do our eyes see what is really there or do we see what we want to see?

When I was One-and-Twenty

By A E Housman

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.


This poem is from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, one of my favourite collections as my son David is a Shropshire Lad having been born in Gobowen, just over the border from my beloved Wales.

Flat pack: a right old faradiddle or is it really just as easy as pie?

We tend to think of flat pack furniture – or Ready to Assemble (RTA) – as having been invented in the middle of the last century, and probably created by Scandinavian designers.

In fact campaign furniture was very common in the 18th and 19th centuries with the British Armed Forces, officers only, which could pack down quickly into easily transportable pieces.

Campaign furniture was used by an even earlier general who travelled extensively with his army – Julius Caesar. The Roman army was renowned for its ability to create a properly defended camp after a day’s march and to pack it all up the following morning to be ready to march again.

This is even more amazing when you realise Caesar’s tent would be lined with costly hangings, furnished with chairs and tables and even a bed.

Over the millennia campaign furniture went through many changes and by the 19th century furniture makers began to use the idea for domestic furniture which could be packed flat to be sent to the customer and also stripped down to save space when moving house.

By the mid-20th century more manufacturers began to make flat packed domestic furniture but although high-end companies maintained quality there were those further down the chain who were not quite so thorough and customers often found screwholes misaligned and components not cut to exact measurements.

As you can imagine this led to frustration and despair for the poor customer who would have been told the furniture could be “assembled in minutes with just the aid of a screwdriver”.

Four hours later the piece might finally be put together – but only with the aid of a screwdriver – and a hammer, a saw and various other tools (if you happen to own such items).

Over the years – and there have been a lot of them – I have only bought flat packed furniture three times and appear to have struck lucky every time.

The first was in the late 70s when we needed a dining set suited to a somewhat compact dining area. We settled for a refectory style table, monks bench and simple backless bench.

When it arrived I managed to assemble it in about an hour and a half and we used it for our meal that night.

The whole set used a combination of wooden pegs, wooden turnlocks and a a few screws. A screwdriver and a mallet, to knock in the pegs, and that was it. It was just as easy to disassemble for moving, which was just as well because since then it has travelled around the UK and halfway around the world.

The next flat pack was bought in Australia and consisted of an armoire and two bedside set of drawers. These were a little bit more fiddly to assemble with drawers to put together, handles to attach, hinges and slide in drawer backs and sides.

These items took longer to assemble and as well as a couple of different size scans and a rubber mallet I had to use a bit of glue to strengthen some of the joints, which meant the items could not be easily dismantled for transport.

We still have the armoire and two bedside drawer units.

The third item was a wardrobe with mirrored sliding doors.

This was in some ways easier in that it had less screws and no handles. The problem lay in the weight of the mirrored doors and trying to get them into the right tracks, top and bottom.

This is the one item that is no longer with us as when we moved it was to a property nearby and we managed a DIY removal but the wardrobe was just too big and heavy.

So there we have it. Three examples of flat pack furniture and no major problems even though so many people throw up their hands in despair and have even been the butt of comedians’ jokes. In fact sitcoms on tv frequently spend most of an episode with the stars trying to put together a simple piece of flat pack furniture.

You may be wondering why I have chosen an experience going back decades.

It is because this weekend I have been assembling another flat pack table which consisted of over 20 wooden parts plus five bolts, four nuts and four washers and almost 40 screws.

How big was it?

About four feet high and eight inches square.

Yes, it’s a bird table and it took as long to Assemble as the refractory dining set for four people.