Sleep Interrupted

The poem I read was “A Ballad of John Silver” by John Masefield.

I’ve been trying to think of what to write here about Les and it’s not easy. I knew Les for ten years — how do squeeze something like that into a few sentences?

When I first met Les I was a little intimidated. Father of two daughters, rifle owner — a fearful combination! — local postmaster, very formal on the phone, and prone to get upset at young men who parked their cars in the wrong place outside his house. Or so I was told.

As I got to know him, though, it became obvious that this stern image was very far from his true personality. Living locally we would visit often, especially once the children were born. We spent many a Sunday afternoon in conversation, putting the world to rights. The abiding image of Les I will keep is of him flashing me a grin, his eyes lighting up as if to say “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this!” while he confided in me a youthful misadventure or his latest purchase that he was keeping secret from his wife, Sue.

Les believed in making the most of life. If you’re weren’t doing something or going somewhere then you were wasting the time you had. Whenever we would visit he would greet us with the question “So, what’d'ya know?”. Lack of an interesting development in your life was met with a grunt of disapproval. Les’ untimely death brings home how right he was.

Les, I promise to make the most of the time I have.

Yesterday was my dad’s funeral. In some respects it seems like a long time ago he died, when in fact it was only 2 weeks ago. I had been both looking forward to and dreading the funeral. I wanted to be able to say goodbye, and yet I know that by doing so that really is the end. He really isn’t coming back. It now seems very final, and yet still strangely surreal.

The service was good, we had Dire Straits playing on the way in, and the Rolling Stones playing on the way out. Andrew read a pirate ship poem which my dad liked, in fact about the only thing Dad ever learnt at school and remembered I think. Something that dad would have found very funny was that the music backing track to the hymns had different lyrics to that which we were singing from the books. It was quite hard to follow the singing, but I know Dad would have laughed. The crematorium was full to capacity, about 90 people. Lots of Masons, old and current neighbours, and ex work colleagues, as well as family. It was nice to see so many people had come, and everybody had a funny story to tell about Dad, I think his sense of humour will be something that is remembered by most people.

It’s strange how quickly normality returns. At least it’s strange to me; I have very little experience of death. The next day I’m back at work and the rest of the world is carrying on regardless. The next day the kids still need a bath. The next day we still need to go shopping.

Tuesday is Les’ funeral. I think this will only be real for me then.

Early this morning, much sooner than any of us had expected, Louise’s father, Les Davis, died.

Patrick Swayze was in the news today after it was announced he is suffering from pancreatic cancer. 10 days ago I would not have known one iota of information about this disease. However, 10 days ago it was confirmed through a biopsy that my dad has pancreatic cancer, and it has spread to his liver. He has not been well for about 6 or 8 weeks, had a burst stomach ulcer, needed a lengthy op and blood transfusion of 9 units to get through it. then had a blood clot on the lung, and several in his feet and legs. As a result of the surgery and transfusion he has also had cellulitis and phlebitis in his legs, so bad that he is still barely able to walk.

It was during an endoscopy to check the ulcer that a doctor noticed irregularities on his liver. They did a full body scan, which didn’t show anything, and then biopsied his pancreas. We have been waiting 10 days for the result and got it confirmed yesterday, although having read all the symptoms of the disease, the confirmation was really just a formality.

I am in shock I suppose. I can’t get over the fact that 2 months ago my dad was fit and well, and now he is in hospital, about 2/3 of his original body weight, depressed, not eating and being sick and with a pretty bleak outlook. He is only 62. He is being generally quite accepting about it, both my grandfather and uncle died of cancer, and dad always said it was just a matter of time before it got him too. I think he thought he would have a bit more time though.

Until the sickness is under control and he has gained some weight, they are not going to start chemo, which I can understand, but I am worried about the possible delay in treatment affecting prognosis. I know he is not going to be cured, but only treated.

Sorry for waffling, I know I am not the first to go through this, but it just feels good to unburden some of my thoughts.

Three years of blogging. It really doesn’t seem that long. Sometimes I blog more, sometimes less, but I don’t see myself stopping any time soon. Hopefully that’s good news, from your perspective…

I got a little excited about our new computer. You might be wondering why. Well, it replaced our old computer, which was a rather geriatric seven and a half years old! Even I had forgotten that it was that old.

So what does almost four iterations of Moore’s Law give us?

Processor: From a Pentium III 800 MHz to a Core2 Duo 2.2GHz. That’s 2.75 times faster but there are two processors so it could be argued (wrongly) that it’s actually 5.5 times faster. There are much better ways of measuring processor performance but I’m not going to get into that now.

Memory: From 128Mb to 2Gb. That’s 16 times as much and bang on Moore’s prediction! (I did triple the memory to 384Mb on the old machine some years back, it should be noted.)

Disk: From 15Gb to 320Gb. That’s 20 times as much! I find it interesting how disks are growing faster than memory, which is in turn growing faster than processor power.

Graphics: I’m not really clued-up enough to comment on this properly but the on-board memory of the graphics card has risen eightfold from 16Mb to 128Mb. I can, at least, run Google Earth now without the machine grinding to a spectacular halt.

Screen: From a 17″ CRT at 1024×768 to a 22″ flat screen at 1680×1050. That’s 1.3 times as much, linearly speaking. Alternatively, in pixel terms it’s up from 804,864 to 1,764,000, which is 2.2 times as much.

Anything new? A DVD re-writer in place of a CD-ROM drive. Eight USB2 ports, half of which are on the front, instead of two USB1 ports tucked round the back. Headphone and microphone jacks on the front.

Anything missing? A floppy drive, a serial port, a parallel port, a reset button and the sound of a Harrier Jump Jet taking off all the time it’s switched on. Good riddance all. Oh, it didn’t come with Windows, either. I bought this computer from Dell with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed instead and saved some money in the process. Now I have a desktop that looks like it comes out of a Hollywood movie. (Although switching some of these effects on does feel a lot light strapping a neon light to the bottom of your car.)

What this adds up to is a very nice to use machine that boots up in half the time of the old one and does surprising things like rip a CD in four minutes without breaking a sweat. The best bit, though, is the price. I got this phenominal set of upgrades in a machine costing 40% less than the old one. Sometimes, modern life is not rubbish.