Tarrant & Andrews Family Diary

Much Better Day

After a really bad couple of days, today was much better.

Cindy managed to get up after lunch, then I pushed her in her wheelchair into town. We went to Capaldi’s for coffe, where – lo and behold – we bumped into the children who had gone out with Lance and Mary.

Cindy stayed up for tea and is now watching Daziel and Pascoe. Lovely to have her downstairs!

Mick and Susheila

Mick, Cindy’s colleague from Abbey Grange came round to see Cindy this afternoon, with his wife Susheila. Cindy was still in bed unfortunately. She hasn’t got out of bed at all today, has been feeling very tired, breathless and achy.

Cindy Gets a Haircut

Just taken Cindy up to Brian’s for a haircut. Her hair has gradually grown, till now it looked a bit mad and wild. Much better now, short still, but it looks deliberate!

She didn’t get up today till 6ish – feeling very tired and breathless.

The rest of us walked round the city walls with Phil and Marcia and then went for pizzas at La Piazza. P+M left at about 3. Last visitors for a while – we should have a chance to settle down and sort our selves out a bit before school starts next week. Lovely to see everyone, but a bit busy.

Just Like the Old Days?

Phil and Marcia are visiting (with Claudia and Lucas) and we’ve just finished playing cards – just like when they used to live in Yarm and we were in Acomb. We’ve also been eating Betty’s cake and drinking Betty’s coffee – what we did back then! More children now though.

Rose, Claudia, Phil and I went on a Breadcrumbs trail earlier today, while John, Lucas and Marcia went to the NRM.

During the late afternoon, we got over excited to the point of barely being able to watch the tv – exciting finish to the 4th Test.

Cindy has been very tired and achy today, she got up around lunch time, and had to go back to bed before supper, and hasn’t eaten properly this evening.

Quietish Day

Nothing particular during the day – a bit of tidying up, putting away the washing… Toby went off to Monk’s Cross with Tom and Josh, but didn’t buy anything.

John and Rose went over to Tom and Anna’s for a short time in the afternoon and I pushed Cindy into town and we had coffee in The Pantry – opposite Clifford’s Tower.

In the evening we went and had supper at Lance and Mary’s. Their Danish friends Ole and Lillian are visiting.

How is Cindy?

Good question, but the answer isn’t so good.

She’s gradually getting more exhausted and finding walking around more and more difficult. She uses oxygen for getting up stairs and often at other times too. It takes her a long time to get going in the morning, but she’s around for lunch, afternoon and the evening. She needs to use the wheelchair for longer trips out of the house. She’s had nausea on and off for the last few weeks, which seems to under control at the moment.

She’s going to start on a new drug soon – Tarceva. This is a new, unlicensed drug that is only available on a “named patient” basis. Dr Bottomley says that there is probably no-one else in the world who has used this drug to treat the particular cancer that Cindy has, but it has been effective against some lung cancers, so it’s worth a go, paticularly as the side effects aren’t too bad.

Cindy, of course, is still being very positive about things and does as much as she can.

Computer Out of Action!

No entries recently as the computer hasn’t been working properly.

To catch up:

Wales – rock climbing;excellent walk just E & Will – I nearly slid down the mountain; Ffestiniog Railway; home.

Toby to Ilam Hall for week with YHA watersports activity holiday. He had a very good time indeed.

Mandy and David to visit – C&E stayed at Marriott Hotel with them to celebrate Mandy’s birthday, Amy looked after J&R. Also went with them to La Piazza.

At the moment James, Emma, Jacob, Sam and Hannah are staying with us. We’ve been to the beach today. It was blowy and coldish, but fun.

Beach Again

Some people went off to Portmerion, but Mary and all 5 of us went off to Harlech Beach again. Not quite as sunny, but still lovely.

Katharine and Simon cooked a lovely barbeque this evening, then Will and I went off to explore climbing rocks for tomorrow’s planned morning climb.

Walks and Trains

Will, Toby, John, Rose and I set off on the Snowdon Horseshoe; Jane, Andy and Mary went on the PYG and Miners trail to Snowdon; the rest wanted to go on the train to the top. There were vague plans to try and meet at the top.

The train was booked up until 5pm, so they went on a different train around a lake. John’s sunburn was really bad, so he, Rose and I went down to a lake and waited till Will and Toby came down the hill. Toby walked Will into the ground apparently, limitless teenage energy! Mary, Jane and Andy did their walk as planned.

Pool in Stream

We walked down to the stream in the grounds and found a waterfall with a fantastic pool at the bottom of it. The pool is deeper than I am tall; big enough to jump and dive into, and have a swim of about 3 strokes across and 10 strokes round. Rose was first into the water, as she slipped, then John and I went in.

Water was freezing!

Sunday – Beach

Went to Harlech beach – about a 20 minute drive. It’s a lovely flat sandy beach, with views of Harlech Castle, the Llyn Peninsular and the Snowdonia hills behind it. The sea was nice and warm – much warmer than the North Sea.

John got quite badly sunburnt unfortunately, due to not having his sun cream renewed often enough.

Journey to Wales

Saturday – time to go to Wales.

Cindy woke up not feeling very well, but we loaded the car up and left anyway. The journey to Ffestiniog was about 5½ hours, with Cindy sitting throwing up fluid every half hour or so all the way. In spite of that it was a surprisingly good journey, with the children all being fantastic and Toby map reading very well.

When we arrived, we unpacked and Cindy went to bed. Jane and Andy had already arrived; Katharine, Simon and Thomas arrived at almost the same time as us; and Lance, Sarah, Will, Jack and Grace, who had all been camping, arrived soon afterwards.

The house is lovely – very large, spacious bedrooms (8 of them), big sitting room, well equipped, slightly run down kitchen and amazing garden and grounds. The children all ran around working off their pent up energy, while Andy and Jane cooked a lovely meal.

Maurice at Thruxton

Maurice used his birthday present today – a driving experience at Thruxton.

He went round first in a Mazda RX8, first a passenger, then as a driver. Then he went round in a single seater racing style car. He was really good and overtook a few other cars.

There were loads of amazing cars there that you could pay to have a drive in. I was amazed by how interesting I found it!

Jayne’s Birthday

We all (Jayne, Steve, Christopher, Pat, Maurice, Mandy, David, Amy, Tom, Cindy, Me, Toby, John and Rose – Matthew AWOL) went out for Jayne’s birthday last night to a very nice Italian restaraunt in Emsworth called Niccolino’s. David had said that the portions were big, but they were truly enormous. Really wide menu, very good pizza.

We all had a really good time, especially when the waiter came round to help Steve sing to Jayne in Italian!

Badminton

I played badminton against Simon on Tuesday and John and Toby had a game. They played together really well and John picked up a lot. Toby has decided not to play football in the autumn, so he’s looking for a new sport to play regularly – he’d really like to play tennis, but I’m not sure if there’s a club with indoor courts. Maybe he’ll end up playing badminton at the RI.

Spy Game

We went to the York Castle Museum to try out their August activity. Followed a booklet around, looking for clues as to who was the spy finding out secrets about the Rowntree’s chocolate factory. Good fun and it made you look more carefully at things you might otherwise ignore. There were a few characters dressed in period costume who introduced activities that were fun, including one solving a code that I couldn’t work out! We found the spy in the end.

Weekend at Home

We got back to York in time for lunch, unpacked and started on the mammoth washing pile! We ran out of washing powder before it was finished.

In the evening we went to a party at Matthew and Clare’s. Fantastic food, lots of salads (didn’t have enough of those while we were away), olives, bread and smoked salmon. Thomas and Joseph have grown loads since we last saw them, Thomas is off to school in September and Joseph is running around chatting.

On Sunday morning John, Rose and I went swimming. We had to go via Tesco’s because I couldn’t find my swimming trunks. Ended up with some horrible green and yellow shorts, disliked by one and all, but they were only £2.50. Good swim – and I booked myself onto a “Swim for Fitness” course in the autumn. I’ve always wanted to have a relaxed, efficient looking front crawl and have finally decided to do something about it. The classes are from 9:20 till 10:00 on Wednesday evenings, so that’ll be tiring.

Later on we went to Chrissie and Jonathon’s for a BBQ. Nice to get together with them.

Lake District

We had a fantastic week in the Lake District, staying in Keswick.

Some of the highlights included:

Scrambling up a waterfall to the ridge on the west of Derwentwater, and running for half an hour from the top of Cat Bell to make sure we got the boat.

Go Ape – high ropes through trees followed by mountain biking all afternoon.

Tea at Bryson’s in Keswick! Yum yum.

Swimming and playing in Toby’s new inflatable dinghy in the Lake.

Card games on a rainy afternoon.

Fish and chips – more food.

A good time was had by all.