"And then he said..."

Off to hospital again yesterday (the Charing Cross, in Fulham Palace Road) for a check-up following my leg and elbow operations earlier this year.

This has been a long-running saga, dating back to at least early 2003, which came to a head this year when I finally persuaded them to get to work on me with a knife.

To summarise, some time in 2002 a numb patch appeared on the outside of my right thigh. In Feb 2003 a neurosurgeon diagnosed me with meralgia paresthetica and put me on a waiting list for surgery. He warned me it would take a year or so before anything happened. Over the next few months I had some conductivity tests (electrodes jammed into the leg) which confirmed the diagnosis, and settled down to wait.

After that, nothing happened.

For several years.

In late 2006, with the leg worsening and new problems developing in my left elbow, and a few other unrelated health things also worrying me, I got bored waiting and went for private consultation, first with a GP and then with a neurosurgeon, who stuck a rocket up the backside of the NHS and got things moving again.

More tests and consultations followed (mostly repeats of the 2003/04 stuff) then in July they finally did the cutting. Transposition of the left ulnar nerve and decompression of the right cutaneous nerve of thigh, for those who thrive on details.

I woke up after the surgery to mixed results. The elbow? Perfect. No more finger-twitching or numbness. The leg? Disaster. Much more numbness and a world of pain. Some very unhappy weeks followed, involving painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, horrible limping, sleepless nights, black despair and a walking stick.

Eventually, some of the numbness and most of the pain receded. It still hurts occasionally, but there’s variety in what type of pain occurs and it never lasts long, so that’s an improvement on balance. The numbness is significantly worse than before the operation, but I can still detect pressure, even at the place with least sensation, so I’m no longer worried about not knowing if I’m burning myself against a radiator or whatever.

And there’s more than a chance it will improve further over the next few months.

Which is where I was yesterday when I went off for what turned out to be the final stage in the saga. A quick five-minute consultation with a jolly woman I’d never met before and that was it - discharged, with an open invitation to contact them again if there was any deterioration.

A bit anti-climactic, actually. I don’t know what I expected, but this was something that had for a long while been a major part of my life (or, during the early years, something lurking on the edge of my attention, impossible to entirely forget) and it just fizzled out. On balance, I’m glad I had the operations done - the elbow was a success, the leg about break-even with hope for further improvement. But where was the full stop at the end, the handshake with the surgeon and the “good luck, old chap” to see me off?

I wasn’t sure what to do with myself afterwards. Having dragged myself down to London on just three and a half hours sleep and then waited around in a hospital corridor for a late appointment, it seemed too soon to go straight home again. On the other hand, I was dog tired, had nothing in particular to do, and wanted to be back before a workman arrived to fit blinds to two rooms in the house.

I pottered up the Fulham Palace Road, peering in through the window of the Spitfire Polish restaurant at the Battle of Britain memorabilia, then trailing around a bookshop with no great enthusiasm. Eventually I refuelled with a cheese and mushroom crepe and a coffee from a hole in the wall in the Hammersmith shopping centre and descended back onto the Tube. A train was just about to leave Kings Cross when I got there, so I was relieved of the need to think about anything and away I went. A brisk walk from the station and I was home in time for lunch.

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It’s been quite a while now since we moved out of the flat we rented for nine years and into a house of our own - but for one reason or another we’re only just in the process of giving notice.

Today we were back there cleaning carpets and painting window frames - and we were reminded of exactly why we left.

Same killer motorway traffic a stone’s throw in every direction, same ghoulish upstairs neighbour looming randomly out of the shadows with her dog, same feeling of being under everyone else’s noses (partly, admittedly, because we have the curtains down for cleaning), same odd detritus of other people’s lives under your feet (discarded latex gloves in the car park tonight, close by where a couple can sometimes be seen sat in a car in the dead of night and where we once found a discarded condom wrapper - unsavoury thoughts follow inevitably).

But most of all, the same bloody moronic pounding thumping dance music through the walls and floors, like having your teeth drilled (trust me on this, I have a season ticket to the dentist at the moment), making you want to go downstairs, knock on their door, smile sweetly and say “excuse me, could you possibly turn your music down before I STUFF YOUR FEET UP YOUR NOSTRILS?”

And now I’m back home, at my desk in our office with a mug of hot tea, in the blissful uncrowded silence of the outskirts of an unassuming market town, thinking ‘ahhhhh… THIS is better’.

Which is probably why I’ve managed to write something again, five years and ten days since I first set up shop on DeadJournal.

I appear to have spent the evening somewhere trendy. This is highly out of character, and I'm not at all sure I approve of myself for it. Nevertheless, ta very much to the fine folks at Sticky Content and to Justin - it was fun.

There was obviously a lot of fun going on at the police station in Chiswick today, too. I could tell this when I phoned them for the third day running inquiring whether they'd yet visited an address where I'd been told some items stolen from me might have been spotted. In fact, I think it's fair to say they were having a laugh.

At one point, as I explained the situation, I was sure I heard my surname being shouted in the background in confused tones. This was a little alarming, so I asked whether that was what I'd heard. “No,” came the reply. “They're having a quiz as a team-building exercise and someone asked 'who was the leader of the Daleks?'”

Well, obviously it was Davros, so I said so, and spelled it for him. So he shouted across the room “the caller says it's Davros”. A roar of laughter came back down the phone.

It is, of course, a pleasure to have an opportunity to help the police with their enquiries.

I wish they'd help with mine.

I have some practical advice to anyone who believes the best response to teenage yobbos is to hug them, as David Cameron currently seems to be suggesting - and that advice is, don't.

My attacker wasn't wearing a hoodie - this was back in 2000 and fashion in those days ran to a baseball cap and black and white camouflage Moschino trousers - and I don't think the rest of his gang were either. But undoubtedly their younger brothers are out tonight wearing them.

His first couple of blows with the bottle opened up a wound by my eye that would later need six stitches and another on my hairline that would need two. 'Sod this for a lark', I thought, and tried some sort of action to stop him.

I closed up on him and leaned forward in an attempt to trap his arms against his body by hugging him. It didn't work - I got the hug in, but his arms were still free and he now had an easy target in the shape of the top of my head. Three more blows with the bottle, each one needing three more stitches, and all the while I continued to hug the ungrateful little bastard.

Trust me David, it doesn't work.

I travelled home from work on Thursday on the Tube and on South West Trains during the second half of the England v Trinidad & Tobago match and it was brilliant - the quietest I can remember the public transport system ever being at any time, let alone at rush hour.

I noticed a young woman on a Northern Line train who was reading, and looked deathly tired. She had dark shadows under each eye, slanting down towards her cheekbones, and they were perfectly mirrored in tone and angle and size by her eyebrows. It made her look as if someone had drawn a big dark cross on her face.

Amusingly, while the match was going on, particularly on the Tube but also on the overground service a bit, the vast majority of passengers were women - maybe only one in 20 was a man. What's more, most of them were young women, dressed for summer. It was like a beer commercial - “Carling don't build public transport systems - but if they did…”

Spectacular. I blame global warming. And the government, of course.

At the going down of the sun
Roofs and balconies of our flats silhouetted against the sunset. Not 10 minutes later a neighbour was going over that balcony railing in the top right on a ladder, then through a window, having presumably locked herself out.

It's a conspiracy
Our local vicar, swivel-eyed though he is, never misses a trick…

In my household we tend towards the view that Douglas Adams wasn’t, in fact, a novelist but instead a philosopher and a researcher of the infinite who chose to present his theories and conclusions in the form of radio scripts and sci-fi novels. He was also - despite most of his work being set on other planets - one of the most observant chroniclers of London since Dickens.

Just after six he returned to Fenchurch’s house in the alleyway, clutching a bottle of champagne.

“Hold this,” she said, shoved a stout rope into his hand and disappeared inside through the large, white wooden doors from which dangled a fat padlock off a black iron bar.

The house was a small converted stable in a light industrial alleyway behind the derelict Royal Agricultural Hall of Islington. As well as its large stable doors it also had a normal-looking front door of smartly glazed panelled wood with a black dolphin door knocker. The one odd thing about this door was its doorstep, which was nine feet high, since the door was set into the upper of the two floors and had presumably originally been used to haul in hay for hungry horses.

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Adams famously drew on the parts of Islington he knew well for details to throw into the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide trilogy - for example, phone numbers as probability odds and the estate agency Hotblack Desiato as a minor character’s name.

The old Royal Agricultural Hall is still there, only it’s not derelict anymore, it’s the Business Design Centre and I work there a day or two a week. After Beloved Other Half reminded me of the passage quoted above I went off in search of the nine foot doorstep one lunch break.

Since I forgot it was down an alleyway I didn’t find it, but I did grab a few pictures of the sort of streets in the area - typical north London streets I suppose, except north London’s not my manor and the typical looks exotic to me still. Where I am, out west, we don’t have long rows of brick terraces like these and I was fascinated by the contrast - only yards apart were roads where the homes looked like elegant town houses and roads where they looked pokey and proletarian, despite being almost identical in design.

I found it easier to imagine Douglas Adams walking along the pavement than I did Arthur Dent floating above it.

Anyway, here are the pics.

My vague potterings were interrupted last lunchtime by a cat's cradle of blue tape across the road in my path, cordoning off (among other things) the scene of a shooting the night before and the restaurant where I'd been planning on eating.

Police were still there in numbers, even though the shooting actually happened on the previous evening, and at one point a group walked line abreast, peering at the tarmac for kloos. They looked bored, like 14-year-olds on a geography field trip.

It was a bright sunny day, and nobody felt like hurrying so everyone was content to watch them quietly, apart from one irate truck driver who'd had to do a u-turn in his articulated lorry and wanted the world - or, at least, that part of it in a tall hat directing traffic - to know about it.

I ducked into an overpriced curry house for lunch instead (very small portions) where I tipped without checking the bill first, thereby failing to notice that service was included.

Here be pics.

Downer
Upper Street is taped off and empty at the busiest part of the day

You're fingered, sonny
By now, most of the police had nothing more challenging to do than answer questions from the public.

Blue tape
Lots of this stuff everywhere.

Pounding the pavement
A few people got past, but mostly the businesses behind the police line were stranded and closed.

Edit: An arrest has been made.

Life is full of strange moments: today I was followed in a traffic jam by a Fairey Swordfish.

For those whose childhoods did not involve Airfix kits and glue fumes, I should explain that the Swordfish was a prime candidate for wartime aviation's least likely success story.

Already hopelessly outdated by the start of World War Two, the Swordfish was nevertheless the Fleet Air Arm's main torpedo bomber. Its crews nicknamed it the Stringbag, because it seemed to be held together with the stuff. It was a three-seater open-cockpit biplane, with a top speed slow enough to make getting out and pushing an attractive proposition at times of stress.

Despite these disadvantages Swordfish crews sank more enemy shipping than any other allied aircraft, including on one memorable occasion a significant proportion of the Italian Navy. And this is the aircraft that was following me up the road.

To avoid confusion, I should make it clear that it wasn't flying, and nor was it trundling along the ground under its own power - it was on the back of a lorry. Since Swordfishes flew from aircraft carriers, they were designed with wings that folded back along their body to cut down on storage space. Trucks are, of course, narrower than carriers and, even in its emasculated state, the aircraft stuck out on both sides, necessitating a police escort.

As I say, it was behind me in the traffic so I didn't get a proper look at it or the chance to grab a photo before it disappeared down the A4. I guess it must have been the Royal Navy Historic Flight's aircraft, on its way to the London Air Show at Earl's Court. It's not as if the roof comes off to allow it to fly there, I suppose.

So there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. But it was still odd, and a bit special.

I can remember when products were built to last and didn't stop working just because they'd been thrown across the room in a cold fury a few times. I say this because my phone finally started malfunctioning beyond a level I was prepared to tolerate, so I had to replace it.

Having said I didn't want a phone with gadgets, I ended up having to buy one with a camera - and of course I'm now bemoaning the low quality of the pictures it takes. Still, at least it's got me taking photos again.

Here's some recent shots:

Dancing on the ceiling
The dark shapes of fitters roped to the roof inside the Business Design Centre hang cables in preparation for an exhibition.

Nothing to show for it
A fitter stands in the middle of blank exhibition stands that will soon be filled with all the clutter and colour of a trade fare.

Why I hate living here
We have equal opportunity bigots here - they hate everyone, whatever their colour or creed. This bus shelter graffito, along with National Front stickers nearby, targets Muslims - but everyone gets it in the neck eventually here.

Reflections on a long wait
On a wet, chilly evening, the bus indicators reflected on the ceiling of the shelter - and demonstrated that how cold you got depended rather on where you were travelling.

They've landed!
Not, in fact, an alien invasion - just the old and new Feltham. The glare from a hotel marketed squarely at airport travellers shows behind what used to be a toilet block - and now seems to be an art studio, or some such thing.

Lights, camera, action
Wet Tarmac and sodium lights give the local cinema complex an unworldly look. This view, coincidentally, is exactly the one seen by the central character of my quarter-written novel at a crucial life-changing point in the narrative. Not that you need to worry about that.

Round and round and round about
There is a roundabout out Uxbridge way that has without a doubt the worst traffic jams I have ever had the misfortune to have to weave a path through. It really is a case of move forward by inches and every car for itself.

Ducks in a row
I'm not sure if they wanted the car wash or just to top up with unleaded, but these ducks marched across the forecourt of the petrol station where I was having my lunch in a very purposeful manner.

Do as you're told
This sign is on the garage of a house on one of my regular leaflet rounds during the council elections. There's nothing else on the outside to suggest the place is still conducting whatever dubious business produced the sign - but I'm certainly not canvassing there!

Don't even try it
Our local general store has the most enormous guard dog you ever did see. Shame it's usually asleep across the shop door…