Normal Service will be resumed... I promise

No time to blog, no time to write my diary even. My poor lovely old dad is still clinging on but it's only a matter of a very, very short time.... I've been spending every free moment at the hospital in the last two weeks, and now by his bedside at home where he's been despatched to eke out his last few days. He has nursing care, but there's nothing more to be done.

I am sorry, gentle reader - even if I had the time, I don't really have the heart for blogging right now. It's all too painful to watch. At least when Great Aunt Dolores went (over Niagara Falls in a barrel, if you recall) we had no time to ponder upon life's great cruelties. No time even for chilling the champagne - because, unlike with my dad, her departure called for the popping of a few corks if anyone's did.

So, normal service will be resumed soon. Quite, quite soon.

Until then......

Excuses, Excuses

Oh, hell and spite - the world has gone mad, and me with it. I'm just ridiculously busy all the time and hence I keep neglecting you, dear reader. Not a wise thing to do, when one's aspirations are to be a writer, for surely - the gentle reader should be the first in line for attention. So, many many apologies!

Unfortunately, yours truly is just a dumb fool who habitually takes on too many commitments and as such, gets crushed and squeezed in between the creaking wheels of responsibility. Or maybe it's the partying that causes the problem? For of course, I still do plenty of that. This last week (or at least since I last wrote here) has been something of a blur really - not a blur of alcohol, to be honest, but more a smudged lithograph of what should have been a well-organized life. I appear to have more plates spinning in the air than one of those people who spin plates in variety shows (whatever they are called - "plate spinners", presumably - does anyone actually do that anymore? Unlikely). On top of that, my poor old dad has been rather ill again and so I've been spending time with him. I even went to watch the England-Germany game with him last Sunday - I thought it would cheer him up to have me waving my England flag and drinking lager out of a can. I saw it as more of a performance than anything else - and to be fair, I was probably more entertaining than the match (enough said).

So, today I have to be brief. My dad is now in hospital with two separate complaints, and not doing very well at all. I'm shuttling back and forth delivering essentials, and sitting beside his bed of course, trying to engage him in quizzes and crosswords. He's doing well on that score - his mind is obviously still working well, even if his body is letting him down. It's quite amazing the things he can remember. It's quite good of him to bother really, because I'm not sure that if I had his problems I would bother doing the same.

The season of killing is upon us, sadly. This sultry, sub-continental heat that we've been experiencing in recent weeks has brought clouds of irritating flies bustling into my apartment on a daily basis. I'm struggling to understand their motivation really, because they don't actually seem to hold any purpose to their visits. Either they fly in stilted squares around the middle of the room, near the ceiling, or they gather in their hordes on the walls and glass surfaces and just sit there in silence. What's the point? If my apartment were littered with rotting meats and fruits, then I could perhaps understand it. Presumably there'd be a good reason for their occupancy of my home if they were to spend their hours here feasting and gorging on the putrefied remains of my decaying waste. But just to fly around aimlessly, or even worse - to sit staring at a wall - seems rather pointless to me, and they certainly shouldn't need to occupy my home to do that. So, I kill them. I get my trusty electric zapper out, and I kill them in their thousands. After each session of slaughter, my floor looks like a dozen Garibaldi biscuits have exploded in mid-air - it's all quite disgusting. But the disappointing thing is that after each (fairly exhausting) session, I return to my desk to continue working only to discover that within minutes, the Chief Fly Controller has despatched dozens of reinforcements to take the places of their butchered comrades. Maybe I should move house.

There are lots of other reasons to move house too. I came here only for six months, just to get away from my former matrimonial home, and only until I'd sorted things out and could get my own place. Nearly four years later, and I'm still here. What a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then; what a lot of alcohol has passed through the kidneys; what a lot of cigarette smoke has wafted perniciously across the villi of my poor beleaguered lungs. Stray cats have come and gone; friends have remembered me, and friends have forgotten me. It all reminds me of a song from one of my all-time favourite albums (and one that I used to play to death as a youngster):

"People come and go and forget to close the door,
and they leave their stains and cigarette butts trampled on the floor.
And when they do, remember me, remember me.

Some of them are old, some of them are new,
some of them will turn up when you least expect them to.
And when they do, remember me, remember me."

It's time for me to move on now, I think. And so, before I take the broom to clear up the debris of the shattered Garibaldis, I post you this message, dear reader: Before Christmas, if I'm still alive (and there's no guarantee of that), then I hope to be writing to you from a different desk in a different home. And perhaps I'll be writing from a different viewpoint by then, too. Maybe by then, I'll have found my way home to Kansas. If I can't do that, then I'm lost.....