Autistic School

The complete innocence with which M. helps himself to my lukewarm tea, then offers me the empty cup to dispose off. He gives up waiting for me to take it, and tidies it himself.

Canon GX1

Great excitement a few days ago tracking my new Canon GX1 from Hong Kong, watching this single small package make its way swiftly around the world.  I unpacked it in my break that evening from helping the young autistic chaps, set it on manual focus and 12800 iso and rested it on the car park fence. With the illumination from the windows of just three cottages behind me I had to guess where the lime tree in the field in front was.  I could not see it in the dark. 1 second at f2 produced this jpeg. The quality is not fantastic; the fact that you can see the tree at all is fantastic. This was black night.

Tall Ship.

Last Saturday took the young chap for a day-sail on Tenacious.  The air was so still that the sails were pressed back against the masts, but the sun was out, the food and the company were good, and the sails still had to be set and furled, even if the engines were doing all the work.
Coming back into Southampton, the skipper and the pilot decided to slide gingerly out of the main channel for a few minutes to let this monster pass, and Tenacious passed over Bramble Bank, home to an annual cricket match at low water spring tide when the sandbank briefly emerges from the sea.  http://www.yachtsandyachting.com/news/143271   Only the crazy English................!

Rain

A small thunderstorm just curtailed rose planting, and even shut up the noisy coal tit that has been bustling around the garden with its second batch of fledglings.

Aged 97

It is a truth little understood that a mind riddled with dementia so bad that it cannot remember ten seconds ago, has the determination to hold on to a single particular thought through days of increasing physical pain. 

The thought is this; "If I refuse water and food,  I will be released from this intolerable existence; I will die, and that is now my greatest wish."

It can take a week. The strength of mind is astonishing.

NHS thank you

Watched in awe today at 1am as doctors and nurses stabilised a a 97year old lady who had arrived with a blue flashing light almost unconscious and gasping for air at 60 breaths a minute to 160 heartbeats. With compassion, kindness, humour and expertise they brought down her heart rate, slowed her breathing, rehydrated her, stabilised her blood sugar (she had become diabetic) reduced her salt levels, slowly reduced her chest infection and sepsis with antibiotics, gave her pain relief, and made her damaged kidneys work again.

Finally in the early hours my Mother was calm enough to be able to sleep.

Thank you NHS, Thank you Royal Devon and Exeter Acute Medical Unit. And may all the government ministers and privatisation vultures who knock the NHS go to hell.

Tourettes

At night it's the silence that wakes me up when he finally sleeps.

S V Tenacious

It was waiting for the old chain ferry to Swanage that I first saw the tall ship Tenacious as she slid elegantly into Poole Harbour in southern England.  I was spellbound and decided right then to one day sail with her.  We had a day sail out of Southampton, the young chap and I, which he loved as much as me.  But two months later a phone call came on a gloomy November day asking for someone to make up the balance between able bodied and disabled voyage crew, I dropped everything, cancelled work, and three days later was in Palma de Mallorca for a ten day sail in the Med.

We weathered two gales - the Mediterranean is not always the azure mirror of the holiday brochures - and took our turns on watch, steering the ship under astonishing pageants of stars and planets or through sudden squalls that whipped in from nowhere and lashed our cheeks with pellet raindrops. We climbed the rigging and inched out onto the yards to release or furl the sails, at first with clenched white knuckles clinging onto the jackstays, but later relaxed and laughing. 

We 'learnt the ropes' and hauled on them in gangs of five or more to turn the sails or set or furl them, and did mess duty which was sometimes more arduous; serving and washing up for forty people on a heaving deck is no picnic. During the daily 'happy hour' the whole voyage crew turned out to clean the ship, from the saltwater heads to the scrubbed teak decks.

At Barcelona we toured Las Ramblas with its vibrant food market, a cheerful train of wheelchairs and 'buddies' clogging up restaurants and bars that in lean times were all too happy to have twenty customers descend on them at once. In the harbour we helped hoist the disabled crew, wheelchairs and all up into the rigging and onto the fore top and watched in awe as two of them lifted themselves out of their chairs and with a crew member in attendance and a safety rope, inched their way up the rigging as far as the lower topsail.  

In ten days we just began to learn the complexities of sailing a square rigger, but melded into a motley loyal crew of friends.

Here are a few lo-rez photos of the trip. They are available from www.rexfeatures.com in a more useable size.

Tall Ships.

In November I spent 10 days helping to crew a square rigger, the sail training ship SV Tenacious, which included a certain amount of scrambling about in the rigging.  I just found this picture on Wikipedia which reminds me what a fun way it is to spend a holiday.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Garthsnaid_(ship,_1892)

Owls

The Christmas tradition that is as uncelebrated as brussel sprouts is the start of the twooing season for Tawny Owls, or so it seems. Emerging scullery bound at 3am with a roll of wet bedding into a brilliant cold night, I heard one start up loud and indignant a few feet away. It was disinclined to leave or to quit its noise until I re-emerged from the scullery doorway and tried to spot it in the brilliance of Jupiter's light. It must have been on a branch of the ash tree above my head, or possibly on the roof of the woodshed, but as quickly as it had started, it's call moved to a tree farther away, and then presently it was gone, as if the call had come without a bird, like the smile on a Cheshire cat.