I feel the need

To fill you in, my given audience. Not that anything has happened of late of any consequence, but nevertheless, as a committed blogger, with a fee paying audience (you pay the fee of having to put up with my griping), I should dedicate another twenty minutes of my zonked with tiredness late evening to your pleasure.

I always end up writing these things last thing at night, usually after having had a glass or two of red. Which explains why I a) type so incredibly badly, and secondly, miss this point in its entirety, and forget to use the Typepad spellchecker. A combo of knackeredness and drunkenness leads to dreadful public wiffling.

James has got another cold - the last one had morphed in to a mild case of "deep winter chest" and had refused to leave. Now we're back at the beginning of another one. But all this time, he's been religiously having his infant echinacea and Sambucol, and I know it's made a difference. No chest infections so far, and the heavy cold symptoms seem to go, superfast. Nora, who has also been having echinacea but less intensively, has not caught this cold yet, and didn't catch the last one.

Words continue to emerge. As well as "cup" this evening, we had "hug", which was in reference to a slightly nauseating Jez Alborough book with the same name. Proto words are sprouting like mustard and cress. Buh-bow is still ball; baloo-ballooooo(n) is a balloon (Hey! You guessed it!); sschoooo  - shoe;  bapbap - bye bye... and so on and so forth. It's all bloody happening around these parts, linguistics wise.

Meanwhile Nora's Great-Granny Beau is slipping slowly from this mortal coil. Shelagh (my Dad's fantastic wife, fact fans) is trying to be as open, and involving as possible. We're making sure Nora goes over as much as we can do. I hope Shelagh, you don't mind me taking about this. Beau's reached the stage where I can see similarities physically between her and my Dad, when he was dying. It seems so obvious now, in retrospect, but at the time, we felt like blind simpletons, swimming in the dark. Ignoring through sheer ignorance, the evidence that was staring us in the face: that John was dying. I mean we did know that. It's difficult to articulate. None of us having faced that in any great depth before, we literally could not, or refused to, see it in John's demenour, or simply, his face.

The answer to the question of whether it would have made any difference whether we had known, or realised just how close to death John was, in tems of what treatment he received and was recommended... the answer is obvious, and  terrible.  But we just Did Not Know. We felt like we were in an experiential vaccuum. Obviously, Beau is benefiting from our new, unwelcome knowledge and thank goodness she is.

I don't really talk about this aspect of John's death too much because it is too painful. I cling to the knowledge that we knew no better. What sickens me is that the consultants should have. The only thing I can do, because there is literally no point in thinking anything else, is to seek solace in the most cliched of cliches: What's done is done. Put simply: it in fact is irrelevant how I feel about it. John's not going to come back because I feel guilt, is he. So one has to move on, simply because there's no point not doing.

The feelings? If I stop and take stock of them? More anger, more sickness, more remorse and more horror has entered my heart this year than will ever do (I very much hope). Those feelings are not going to go away, and I don't ignore them, but I do compartmentalise them until the point that they're bubbling over the top of the cauldron. then all hell breaks loose for an evening.

It sort of helps, having hada a glass or two. I'd never say this stuff normally.