SINDIE AND THE CAVENDISH CENTRE

We all know what she was like... "Don't give all the money to the Interflora!"

If you would have arranged flowers for Sindie's remembrance, she asked if you could send the money you would have spent to The Cavendish Centre instead. They were a great help to Sindie and Gary.Please only give what you can spare (the amount of your gift will not be shown), but rest assured, every penny you can give will be put to very good use helping families get through difficult times.

The centre provides supportive care to cancer patients, their carers and children. It helps people find ways of coping with the physical and psychosocial effects of the illness, helping them to live through the illness with maximum independence and optimum quality of life. The service is free.

Please click on the link and read all the lovely things that have been said about Sindie, from people far and wide! If you have lost someone to this dreadful disease called cancer, you might like to donate a small amount to Sindie's favourite charity. Thank you for reading this. XX

http://www.justgiving.com/Sindie/

FAREWELL TO A VERY SPECIAL PERSON

A VERY SPECIAL PERSON

I would like to tell you a little bit about my beautiful niece Sindie, because she was a very special person.
Last night after a five-year battle with cancer, and at the tender age of 39, Sindie closed her eyes for the last time and is now at rest.

Before she became too ill, we attended creative writing classes together, shared our hobbies and shopped together. She had the utmost patience and saw the funny side of life like no other.

When my husband was in hospital, and knowing of my great fear of spiders, Sindie told me that should I find a large eight legged beastie in my house I was to phone her night or day, whatever the time, and she would hurry round and dispose of it for me. This became reality one night about 1 am. I phoned Sindie and within a couple of minutes she had put on her coat (she was in her pyjamas and in bed), jumped into her car, and sped round to my house, to rescue me. She thought it was very funny and never once complained about me getting her out of bed. It was the first, but certainly not the last time she would save me from my worse fear.

I've been wracking my brain to think of lovely stories about her, but thinking of individual ones is very hard. I have suddenly realized why. Her life has just been one unending lovely story since she grew up and became a wife and then a mother. Always smiling, always there to help, advise or organize. Always ready to share, always ready to listen to your problems and never letting anything get her down. She was my friend, my confidante, and she brought sunshine into my life. I loved her to bits. You don’t meet many people like Sindie, and now there is a great hole in our hearts. Farewell my very special person.

Since posting this blog, we have learned that Sindie especially asked if, instead of 'donating ' to Interflora, we send a donation, no matter how small, to her favourite cancer charity. Perhaps you would like to click on the link below and read all the lovely things that have been posted about her. If you have lost a loved one to this dreadful disease, maybe you might like to donate a little too. Thank you.

http://www.justgiving.com/Sindie/

GOOD NEWS!

Today I went to the doctor to get the results of the scan on the lump in my neck. I am relieved to say it wasn’t the dreaded big C. Thank you to all those kind people who sent me their good wishes or said a little prayer for me.
It turns out that I have a nodule on my thyroid gland that has to go one way or another. I have had another thyroid blood test and will be seeing a specialist as soon as the results are through. Whatever happens now can’t be as bad as I feared, so I am feeling much relieved and will now get back to my postings very soon.

I'LL BE BACK !!

Sorry I haven't been around much. I know a few of you have been waiting to find out all about my phone call. I have had a few problems just lately that have rather taken the edge off my blogging a bit. Not the least being the long wait for my scan. This has now come through and I 'walk the walk' on Tuesday morning. Once that is out of the way, I will feel more like blogging again I'm sure. Till then ...

BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN - I THINK!

Here I am again after an unforgettable string of mishaps. It started with my thirteen-year-old cat Boomer, suddenly having a heart attack and dying without any signs of illness. Shortly after, my computer deciding to go AWOL for six days. I thought that it was a server problem and sat tight. Suddenly it came back so I went to various friends’ blog sites to explain that I was back again – WRONG! After three days I went off line again.

That wouldn’t have been so bad if at the same time my freezer hadn’t decided to join in the fun. I rang my friendly neighbourhood freezer mending man, only to be told that it would never make another strawberry ice-lolly again.

That wouldn’t have been so bad, if I could have gone on line and bought a new freezer. (People, who know me well, know that we don’t have transport and we live in a small village, so have to shop on line all the time).

That wouldn’t have been so bad if my telephone hadn’t started making a disgusting noise while I was trying to get my act together.

That wouldn’t have so bad if my keyboard hadn’t decided to seize up and refuse to type vowels, and gradually more and more letters. Although I couldn’t open any web sites or my blog site, I could send and receive emails. Now that too was becoming very difficult and time consuming.

My last disaster (or so I thought) came to light after a visit to the doctor. He found a lump on the side of my neck, and I am now waiting for a scan to find out what it is.

After a couple of hours spent in the very welcome company of my special computer doctor, I was back on line in full, and my blog site was also up and running.
That was two days ago. Two days spent trawling all over cyberspace for a tall frost-free freezer and a new keyboard. The former is still out of my grasp and the latter, luckily, wending it’s way to me. I thought that that was the end of my run of disasters until this afternoon, when the crown on my back tooth fell off! This coupled with the news that my lovely dentist was on holiday for two weeks and was leaving the practice in three! Mr. H. has been tending my teeth for fourteen years, what will I do without him?

OF SHOES & SHIPS & SEALING WAX & CABBAGES & KINGS

The three children were soon happily settled into the local primary school. New friends were made and the house and garden was often playground to several small boys and a dog. Lynne rarely asked her friends to play in the garden. She mostly preferred to go up to her own room where all her dolls, books and games were.
When we were all settled down to a routine, it was decided that I should return to work to enable us to have a better standard of living.
Feeling somewhat uneasy, I enrolled at the local employment agency for ‘temp’ work. Operating a PBX switchboard was no longer an option for me. Switchboards had significantly changed since my old ‘operator’ days. Also, apart from working for my brother for a few months, I hadn’t typed since my first job at the age of fifteen. To say that I was nervous was somewhat of an understatement. So I settled for general office work, which meant being a dogsbody who also typed envelopes and did everything that nobody else wanted to do. Of course this job carried he lowest paid rate for office workers, but at least it was a start.
There was no way that the children would suffer from my return to work. I made it quite clear to the agency that I would only be available to work from nine-thirty to three-fifteen. Each morning I prepared myself for work, then got the children up and gave them their breakfast. It wasn’t until I had kissed them all goodbye and waved them off that I left for work. Each afternoon, I would rush home to be there when they all returned. I didn’t want my children to become so-called latchkey kids.
I don’t pretend that the ironing didn’t pile up or dust didn’t collect in places, but I was always there ready to listen to how the children’s day had been, and provide them with hot meals and home made cakes, just as my mother had for me.
My typing capabilities soon returned and I upgraded myself to copy-typist – for more money! The children grew older, their school hours increased, so did my working hours. I seemed to be appreciated by those that employed me. I was hardly ever moved on, and stayed with each company for weeks and sometimes months at a time.
I worked for quite a long period at Wadham Stringer (Unipart), and shared a job in the stock control dept with a lovely lady who turned out to be Cliff Richard’s aunty. At that time, he and his family lived at Waltham Abbey, which was next door to Enfield where we lived. She told me many tales about Cliff and how he handed down his clothes to her son. I also got to see the wedding photos of Cliff’s sister.
School holidays and teacher’s strike days were a nightmare, as far as our income was concerned. Whenever the children were home from school, I also had to be home. That meant no wages for me, and no housekeeping. Arthur’s wages came under a great strain and something had to give: usually, an electricity or gas bill. If we really couldn’t manage, then Mum and Dad Chapman could always be relied on for a loan. It was at times like this that I wished my parents hadn’t moved to Kent. Although they rarely had money to spare, there was always an abundance of love, support, and an overflowing ‘goody-bag’ whenever they were around.
At eighteen, our dog Rusty was getting old. He was very arthritic and his eyesight was going a little, but he was still full of fun and ready for the odd game or two. He would spend most of his days mooching around or dozing. In the evenings he would snuffle around the back garden for a while, then usually lay beneath our bed in peace and quiet for the best part of the evening. The gap beneath our bed was so small that he had to get down on his tummy and shuffle along on his haunches to get into the gap. We would often hear a noise, like someone shifting furniture, coming though the lounge ceiling, and would know that Rusty was going for forty winks!
One evening at about ten-thirty the phone rang and Arthur answered it.

To be contd…

NOT ALL PLATES ARE CLARIS CLIFF

The couple that sold us the house took everything they could remove without damage. We even had to go and buy light bulbs for all the rooms. The kitchen had a strip light that they‘d wanted to remove, but our solicitor had said no, it must remain. Nevertheless, all the curtains, nets and floor coverings had been stripped from the house, so we were glad of the two hundred and fifty pounds that we’d received from our ex-agents.
We were very proud of our new house. Lynne had her own bedroom. It only measured six feet by seven feet, but it was all hers. She could, theoretically at least, keep the boys out of her belongings. The room was so small that there was only room for a single bed and bedside cabinet, which had to stand at the foot of the bed! I said that Lynne’s clothes could go in my wardrobe, a decision that I never was happy about. As she slowly grew into a teenager, she always had more clothes than me.
Philip and John were allocated the middle bedroom, which was a good size for two small boys who loved sleeping in their new bunk beds. Once Arthur had got going with cupboards, shelving and toy chests, all the children were comfortable and delighted to have their own space. We painted a road plan on to a large square of hardboard and set this into the centre of the boy’s bedroom floor. It was complete with roundabouts, zebra crossing and petrol station. Philip and John had dozens of Corgi and Matchbox cars, and would sit for ages vroom-vrooming them up and down the painted roads. Those cars experienced more than their fair share of crashes and fatal accidents, involving soldiers and North American Indians, who just happened to be standing in the middle of the roads!
We hadn’t been living in Enfield very long when the firm that I worked for fell upon hard times. Belts were tightened and workers (including me) had to be laid off. As I had a whole house to play with now, Arthur and I decided that I should stay home for a while unless our finances dictated otherwise.
Then we received the letter from the hospital, saying that John could now have his second operation. This time, Mr Lloyd-Roberts wouldn’t be carrying out the operation; it was to be done by one of his colleagues. The operation itself was a success, but the scarring was quite bad and we weren’t very happy about it. We were, however, still very grateful for the skill and dedication of all concerned at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children.

One amusing anecdote comes from this otherwise worrying period of time. After John’s initial operation he had proudly told friends, relatives, teachers and even strangers in the street, that he had plates in both his legs and, on learning that he was to have his plates removed, he asked if he could keep them afterwards. The surgeon who was to perform the operation told us that they were made of precious metal, which was very costly and always re-cycled. However, seeing the devastated look on John’s face, the surgeon took pity on him, saying that he’d ‘do his best’. John came back semi-conscious from the operating theatre and the surgeon came to his bedside to see how things were progressing. After chatting to us, he put his hand into his pocket, smiled, and pulled out a little brown envelope.
‘There you are John, I said I’d do my best,’ the doctor laughed. ‘You’ll probably get me fired, but you’ve been such a brave boy, you deserve these.’ He placed the package on the top of John’s bedside cabinet. ‘Here’s your plates, look after them.’
John smiled a sleepy contented smile and dozed off again. It wasn’t until later when he was fully awake that he asked once more if he could have his plates. We handed him the envelope. His face fell.
‘These aren’t plates, they’re just pieces of tin,’ he said.
The penny suddenly dropped. All this time, we had been glibly talking about John’s plates and had stupidly though he knew what we meant. In his childish mind, a plate was a dish that he ate from, and he had expected to be handed a couple of tea-plates! We felt so sorry for him. He’d longed for the time when he could look at his plates and, all the time, they weren’t what he thought they would be. Nevertheless, he saved the plates, screws and stitches and took them with him when he finally left home as a grown man.