A stew of thoughts

It seems to have been a busy few days, hence my silence. Some of it has been routine chores like ironing & hospital visiting, some of it seems to have caused changes in our ideas of what we’re doing. The former I’ll not bore you with.

In view of my collapse in exhaustion last week we decided we must eat out at least once a week whether we really fancy it or not. Both of us could do with the break. With this in mind we’re off out tonight for a meal.

So yesterday I had a phone call from a friend, inviting us out for a meal next week. It’s her 65^th birthday, her retirement (at last - like me she spent most of her life anticipating retiring at 60!) & their wedding anniversary. She was inviting a few friends to join her & her husband, Ed, for a meal to celebrate all the above. So that’s next week’s meal out organised. We will be going to our local village pub. We checked while we were there yesterday that they’d realised there were two wheelchairs coming & had put us in an appropriate place, which they had. Ed is the amputee who’s asked us to consider a cruise with them next year.

As for the cruise, that’s all up in the air again. We had just about settled on the trip either to various parts of Spain or the one to the Canaries. Then I checked up on the travel insurance (which all cruise companies insist upon). I soon discovered these days, the insurance companies insist on you have medicals for trips to Spain & its islands i.e. the Canaries, as the cost of medical treatment has soared in those countries. Once any travel insurance company see either the Fox or mine or Ed’s medical record the cost of insurance will rocket, almost enough for a second holiday.

So what to do? Go ahead & insure normally, without a medical, & trust we will not have to make a claim & that the cruise company won’t check whether we’re insured for the area we would be visiting? But surely if you’re doing that, is it worth getting any insurance? Why not just make up a number for a fictitious policy?Visit somewhere else? Norway again, for example? Or the Baltic? Oh why does life have to be so complicated?

We’re back to the drawing board. Meanwhile I’ve come to the conclusion that we, at least, will need a break soon, once the hospital treatment has finished. But where to go in January –I suspect we will have to wait until after Christmas as the Fox’s treatment isn’t due to finish until early December? January in most of Europe is wet, cold & dark. That will need some thinking about.