lifestylesupportguru

Category: Spain

Wheels On Fire

A very good evening to you all from the Lifestyle Support Guru, and a somewhat belated Happy New Year (or HNY as many people wrote. Why not go the whole hog and just use MC for Merry Christmas and HB for Happy Birthday – saves all that tiresome effort of writing or typing the whole thing out!).

Tonight, I thought I would regale you with the tale of a friend who recently had the misfortune of having to be wheeled through Alicante airport. When I say ‘wheeled’, I mean that she was in a wheelchair, rather than attached to a set of wheels like some strange living suitcase – no way she would have fitted in Ryanair’s overhead cabin lockers! How did this come about? you may well wonder. I shall recount the tale as she recounted it to me.
This very good friend had gone on holiday to Spain over the Christmas period with two siblings, to get away from the hurly-burly of a British Christmas. It was a very enjoyable time, visiting the local bars to get the authentic feel of a foreign country. We went – sorry, THEY went – to places such as ‘The Bog Road’, ‘O’Leary’s’, ‘O’Riordan’s’, all filled with people who had lived there since time immemorial, or at least since the 1970s. There was one upstart newcomer bar called Bushwhacka, but the friends couldn’t see that lasting long because they actually measured out the drinks such as Baileys – rather than just pouring them until you said ‘Stop – AND charged an incredible 3 euros for a large glass of wine, compared with the ‘proper’ local bars which charged a more acceptable 2 euros. One other bar which showed potential was called Miguel’s (or something equally foreign) and had a lovely tapas menu as well as an owner who only spoke Spanish.

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The siblings were quite prepared to spend the holidays there, improving their foreign language skills and working their way through the tapas menu. Imagine their disappointment when they turned up the next day and saw a notice on the door; ‘Cerrado hasta febraro’ – ‘Closed until February’! Miguel obviously hadn’t realised quite how much business he could have had over a 12-day period with the siblings.
So, what does this have to do with the friend being wheeled through Alicante airport? Well, nothing, really – I was just trying to give some local colour and tell a tale!

Without boring you with details, suffice to say that, for unknown reasons, the good friend had developed some problems with breathlessness during the holiday and it was thought best to ask for assistance at the airport for the return journey.
Upon the siblings’ arrival there on the day of departure, a very nice young lady turned up with a wheelchair and wheeled the friend off to the special queue for the less mobile, followed by one sibling wheeling two suitcases (the other sibling would be following a few days later). They joined a queue of other similarly afflicted people, none below the age of 70, apart from my friend – God’s waiting room, indeed! Once through the security check (helpers on either side of the stand-up screening machine in case anyone wobbled or fell over), the wheelchairs were all lined up alongside each other to await a helper to take them to the aircraft – this was true GTA! (No, not Grand Theft Auto, more Geriatrics To Alicante!)

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Luckily, the friend had her sibling to push her along – the airport was pretty busy, but the sibling managed to find a space for a wheelchair to await the announcement of the flight departure. (Did I mention that this space was in an airport bar and that every other wheelchair-bound person had found their way there as well?)
All went well, including the friend being ‘offloaded’ at East Midlands Airport via the mobility lift from the plane, during which time she made a friend for life – between getting in the mobility lift and going through passport control, this other invalid had told the friend her full life story, from where she’d been born to why she was on the mobility lift.
The only worrying part was when they seemed to be one wheelchair short and it looked as if my friend was going to have to be loaded back onto the plane and returned to Alicante like some piece of discarded and unwanted baggage. Maybe the siblings could have claimed something on the insurance?
The friend has made a full recovery – well, when I say ‘full’, I mean as full as is possible for a lazy, overweight person who avoids most form of exercise other than walking to the pub. Good night!

A Christmas Message from the LSG

A very merry Christmas to you all! I am delighted to share my Christmas message with you all today, especially since it’s after Her Majesty’s, so you will already have fallen asleep in front of the television stuffed full of turkey or nut roast and several glasses of champagne, prosecco and wine – that’s you stuffed full, of course, not the television – and you will now be ready for some uplifting words of wisdom and support to help you through the rest of the evening and the days that follow until you can fall meekly into 2019!

Even though I have the body of a weak and feeble woman – my doctor might disagree slightly with that description – I have the heart and stomach of a demi-god and can help you negotiate a safe path through the trials of a hectic time until you can relax with a small glass of dry sherry at the end of the day and watch whichever repeats may be offered to you as entertainment. (I can recite verbatim almost every script from Morecambe and Wise!)

I hope you enjoyed Christmas morning, although I suspect many of you were probably up around 4 am with the excitement – and that’s just the adults! – and are now ready to fall asleep again. I hope you haven’t already run out of batteries or found that you bought the wrong size and won’t be able to get any now until tomorrow. If that’s the case, the rest of Christmas night is going to be a disaster, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to resort to Monopoly, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit instead of Hungry Hippos and Lego robots.
If you went to church, I hope you took a good slurp of communion wine in preparation for the fray.
I shan’t send you a message from God because I don’t know which god or gods you worship, or even if you worship one. That is entirely up to you – personally, I favour the Ancient Greek and Roman ways of worshipping different gods for different things and I particularly like Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family – how can you not worship a goddess who created delightful dishes such as Vesta curry, paella and chow mein? And I think she had a son called Pot Noodle.
Anyway, I digress. The Christmas message I want to send to all of you is one of hope, faith and charity.
Hope that you made it to the end of Christmas day without trying to murder that ageing aunt who insisted on telling you how much better she could have cooked the lunch if only she could stand for long enough, but you resisted the urge to tell her that she should have stayed off the sherry in that case!

Faith in yourself to cater for all the family, including the picky eater, the vegetarian and the vegan, the one who won’t eat sprouts and the cousin who insists on ONLY eating sprouts – just be glad he left straight after lunch to visit his mother!

And charity – the charity to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you … to meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.
I’m sure I’ve used those lines before …
And in case you want to know what I got for Christmas, just look at the accompanying photos to spot the treasure from youngest sibling, brought all the way from Australia.

And you will, of course, enjoy looking at the genuine Armani watches I bought from a lovely street seller as a Christmas treat for myself, one in black, one in white (genuine plastic watchstraps, and one works on what I call ‘Armani time’, falling behind by about ten minutes every two hours or whenever it feels like it – but that’s what you get for paying a lot of money for something).

And, finally, Christmas lunch in the sun – not a turkey or sprout in sight!

A very merry Christmas to you all!

Words are all I have…

Words

As many of you know, the Lifestyle Support Guru loves words of all sorts – short words, long words, foreign words, words you can pronounce and words you can’t, and words that can make you smile, and it is with this in mind that I thought I would share some thoughts on words with you today.

Words can help you make career decisions:

For example, I have decided that I will not retrain as a phlebotomist, since the word is almost as difficult to say as it is to spell. The same applies to ophthalmologist.

Foreign Words

Foreign words can take people by surprise sometimes (even if that wasn’t the intention):
A close friend of mine (not the LSG, of course, because I would never use the wrong word) was once on a school trip to Paris where one of the students had been accused of stealing money from another (British) guest at the hotel. As the only French speaker among the staff (because it was a History trip) and the other British guests, the close friend had to translate for both the student AND the accuser once the police arrived. It was fairly late in the evening after a long day visiting various historical sites in Paris, so it would be fair to say that the friend was rather tired and perhaps not thinking as clearly as she might have when the accuser asked her to translate that he had made the assumption that the student had stolen from his wallet. It was when the French policeman’s eyes opened wide in surprise at the use of the word ‘l’Assomption’ that the close friend realised she had made the teensiest of errors – ‘l’Assomption’ refers to the ascent of the Virgin Mary to Heaven after her death and is a religious festival in France!

Wrong in Spain

This same close friend went to Spain at Christmas and, upon arrival at the hotel with an accompanying sibling, thought she would impress the receptionist (and sibling) with her knowledge of Spanish. However, upon approaching the desk, she realised that ‘We have two rooms booked’ had not been covered in her Spanish classes, although she would have been fine giving her age, profession, nationality, number of siblings and ordering beer and wine, all of which had been covered in the first five chapters. After a slight moment of panic before making the assumption (ha ha! See what I did there!) that the word for ‘room’ might be similar to the Italian, ‘camera’, she confidently said, with a smile, ‘Dos camareras’. The receptionist’s eyes opened wide, rather like the French policeman’s, since the friend had confidently asked for two waitresses. An easy mistake, I think.

Speedy Freda

And, finally, words can make you smile (again, unintentionally):
The much-loved mother of some very good friends of mine has just died. I know we all find it difficult to find the right words to say at times like those, but I thought the response from TT (the Tiny Tyke, who has featured in many of my tales and who has a Yorkshireman’s way with words – brief and to the point!) was a classic. I sent TT a text to tell him the news, because he had met Speedy, as she was affectionately known, when he had come on rugby trips to Wales. I read his reply while I was making my way round Sainsbury’s and I got some very strange looks when I laughed out loud.
What was his response? ‘I’m so sorry’? ‘That’s sad’? ‘Please send my condolences’? No, his response was: ‘Unfortunate.’ UNFORTUNATE? ‘Unfortunate’ is when you spill a cup of coffee on the cat; ‘unfortunate’ is when you trip over the said cat and break your leg; ‘unfortunate’ is not what you say when someone dies – unless he felt it was unfortunate that Speedy would now miss the 2017 Six Nations, due to start this coming weekend, and which she loved?
Farewell, Speedy Freda – you’ll live in people’s memories for a long time, FORTUNATELY!