David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 5

Second Jab & Three Freebies

The missus and I were called to the local health centre this morning for our second Covid jab. We’re not top of the list but we’ve always been fairly high up because I’m clapped out and she’s just… old, I suppose, but don’t tell her I said that.

There was the usual trip round town first, and by the time we got to the health centre, I was worn out. She treats me like a pack mule. But I was in better fettle than her because she suffers from white coat syndrome. She’s terrified of doctors, nurses, medical procedures and inoculations. They don’t bother me. My only complaint is when I was a kid, I used to get a barley sugar after a jab, and now I don’t. But as the nurse pointed out, I’m diabetic, so I couldn’t have one anyway.

No side effects… yet. Not even an aching arm, and I get that after the flu jab every year.

Failing that, I am now invincible… well, I will be in a couple of weeks when it’s fully bedded in. Course, that means as invincible as an ageing, eccentric, arthritic diabetic who suffers from COPD can be.

Enough of this drivel.

It’s Easter weekend and what better time to hit you with a triple whammy of freebies.

First, one of the early Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, The Chocolate Egg Murders, is free from today until Tuesday. Published by darkstroke, it’s exclusive to Amazon, but it is free, gratis, for nothing. Just follow THIS LINK and download it to your Kindle, tablet, smartphone and get reading.

Second, here’s another buckshee Sanford Mystery, Liquidated in Lockdown. This is a special. It’s a novella which sees Joe asked to solve a murder while self-isolating at the height of the coronavirus crisis. I’ll tell you no more than that. It’s available only via this site, and there are no strings attached. It’s just there and you can help yourself. Grab it by CLICKING HERE.

Finally, a third giveaway, and this one is a Feyer & Drake novella entitled Nostell, which sees Drake called to his old school to defend his nephew who’s facing a charge of murder, and naturally, Sam Feyer is with him.

Once again, you can only get this book from this site, and this time, you’ll be asked to sign up to my Valued Readers’ Club. You’ll need to submit your email address, but before you do, let me hasten to reassure you. I’m not in the business of selling names and addresses. Your details will never be passed to anyone else, and you can unsubscribe the moment you’re sick of hearing from me. But it’s a brilliant and fun way of keeping up with what’s happening, what’s due, what’s dropped, and so on.

You can access Nostell by signing up on THIS LINK.

And that’s your lot for now. Remember, comments welcome, but they’ll need to be moderated, so it may take time for them to appear.

Good Mood Monday

The Cutter

Released May 25

Available on pre-order at:

mybook.to/cutter

Learn more at:

The Cutter

To join my Valued Readers Club

And take advantage of the offer

Visit:

www.dwrob.com/readers-club

Find Jay Raven at

https://www.facebook.com/fantasywriterjayraven

© David Robinson 2021

Feel free to share

With friends

… and enemies

Check out my YouTube Channel at
https://www.youtube.com/user/Dwrob96/videos

www.dwrob.com

A New Release, A Giveaway, A Census Form

Two mjor announcements (and a little bit of fun) in this piece.

The Cutter

Released May 25

Available on pre-order at:

mybook.to/cutter

To join my Valued Readers Club and take advantage of the offer visit:

www.dwrob.com/readers-club

© David Robinson 2021

Feel free to share with friends … and enemies

Check out my YouTube Channel at
https://www.youtube.com/user/Dwrob96/videos

Music “Night Break” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

THE JAB

A daft post but one with a serious message… even if you do have to wait for it.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Impeccable Timing

The big news of the week is that Google will no longer support Huawei android technology. I don’t know all the ins and outs of the argument, except that the Chinese company is accused of spying. Sounds like the kettle calling the pan, in my opinion. I only have to type the word ‘Viagra’ and Google inundates me with adverts for the bloody pills (and no, I don’t buy them).

As it happens, my mobile contract was up for renewal, so I whipped into the supermarket two weeks ago, and after lengthy negotiations I come away with a new, slightly more expensive deal, and a brand-new smartphone… a Huawei Y6.

As always, my timing was impeccable. I’m not kidding, if I bought an electric car, the government would give it a week before declaring that the country was about to stop producing electricity and take us back to the Stone Age.

I haven’t worked out what this means for me (the Huawei business, not the country going back to the Stone Age – something which looks like it’s going to happen anyway). Fortunately, I’m strange. You’ve probably worked that out already. But when it comes to mobile phones, I don’t play games, I don’t surf the web, I don’t take photographs and I don’t make videos, and unlike so many people, I don’t have them super-glued to my ear.

Call me old-fashioned (you can call me a moody, cantankerous, tight-fisted old git for all I care, I’m deaf so I won’t hear you) but I use my mobile for making phone calls. All right, so I send the occasional text, and read e-books on them, but that’s about all. For most purposes, especially surfing the web, the screen is too small and while I appreciate that you can expand the display, my dexterity is fading superseded by advancing arthritis.

Which tenuous link brings me to another subject. My knees and hips and ankles are crumbling on both sides and it’s getting so bad that I don’t know which leg to limp on. We were in the supermarket the other week, spending money on inconsequentials like food and washing powder, and I was going to borrow one of their mobility scooters, but the missus said if I did, she’d walk two aisles ahead of me. She has no desire to be seen in the company of a clapped-out old sod.

SONY DSC

The cheek of it! She’s older than me. Mind, she’s in much better fettle. This is because she’s boring. She doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink and eats sensible food. What kind of a life is that?

News on other fronts, however, is encouraging. Thanks to an administrative error, Murder at the Treasure Hunt, Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery #17 is on pre-order with a planned release on June 1, rather than July 1, and it’s doing rather well. The Sanford Mysteries are like that. They take a lot of downloads in the early days, and it tapers off after a few months.

As matters stand, it reached an absolute peak of #72 in the Amazon UK, Private Investigator chart a couple of days ago, and I confidently expect it to do much better.

People query the length of time between volumes of what has been quite a successful series, and I can understand that. My excuse is… I have no excuse. I’m simply bone idle.

For those of you not already in the know, the official launch will be accompanied by a party on Facebook, and everyone is welcome. You’ll find the link HERE. Just cut along and invite yourself.

And if you care to pre-order the book (you don’t pay for it until the official release) you’ll find it at the following links.

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07RT67THK

Amazon US & Worldwide: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RT67THK

That’s all for now. There’ll be more news as and when we get close to the launch.

The Dark Side

 

I’m best known for my light-hearted work, series like the ever-popular Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries. But there’s a darker side to me, one that looks into the deepest evil men (and women) can perpetrate upon their fellows.

Some years ago Crooked Cat Books took three of those titles, but at my insistence, they were put out under my real name, and because I was more associated with cosy mysteries and humour, they flopped. At the end of their contracts, the rights reverted to me.

Those readers who did indulge, gave them a clear thumbs up, leaving me with a problem. What to do with them, how to market them, make them available for those readers who prefer that kind of gritty tale.

 

Created with GIMP

Ultimately I came up with a new identity; Robert Devine, and I re-published all three under different titles. The Croft tales, The Handshaker and The Deep Secret became the Allan Cain stories, Dominus and The Power, respectively, and Voices became Ghosts.

It doesn’t end there. A couple of weeks back I delivered Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery #17, Murder at the Treasure Hunt to my publisher, and as always once I completed the title, I was in limbo. Inevitably, I drifted to the dark side.

The project is not yet complete, but Allan Cain’s third outing will see him pitted against his most callous and calculating adversary yet in the tale of The Game.

 

Set largely in the wilds of Northumberland on the edge of the Kielder Forest, not only does it see Cain battling a twisted psychopath and his murderous sidekick, but also fighting the elements of a freezing British winter.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress, and let you know when The Game is to be released… As soon as I know it.

Like the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries , these titles are exclusive to Amazon, which means I can put on the occasional offer, and just to get the ball rolling, Dominus will be free for the bank holiday weekend. That promotion starts on Saturday and ends on Monday (although because of the time difference between the UK and Amazon’s HQ, it’s likely to run into Tuesday morning).

Watch this space for more news.

TTSS

I spent last night watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 2011 movie with Gary Oldman. Excellent film. But I have the original 1979 BBC, Alec Guinness serial on DVD, and after watching the Oldman effort, I had to watch that.

Can’t make my mind up. The movie is good, but at slightly over six hours, the TV serial is inevitably more detailed and in my judgement better for it.

Both Guinness and Oldman underplay George Smiley. Oldman has a slight edge(IMHO) perhaps because he was a little younger than Guinness when he played the part.

There are others who were not as persuasive. Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t quite as threatening as Michael Jayston in the part of Peter Guillam. Playing Control, John Hurt is more idiosyncratic than Alexander Knox, but on the other hand, Ian Bannen turns in a better Jim Prideaux than Mark Strong. I also preferred Beryl Reid’s interpretation of Connie to Kathy Burke’s. When it comes to their respective turns as Bill Haydon, I’m torn between Colin Firth (2011) and Ian Richardson (1979). (Spoiler alert) Both were completely unapologetic for their treason, but Richardson was slightly more ‘who gives a toss’ and when it came to Jim Prideaux taking his revenge, Bannen’s approach was infinitely preferable to Mark Strong’s

That’s not to say that there was anything inferior about the performances in either version, and it may be that these observations are a factor of my age. The 2011 film is an excellent example of condensation, squeezing every element of the plot into its two hour time span, and it fits perfectly into the 21st-century drama/thriller genre.

By the same token, the critically acclaimed 1979 serial was a masterpiece of its time… my time, and for that reason, it has a slight edge.

I bought John le Carre’s original novel from a department store in Tampa, Florida, and read it in one sitting on a 10-hour flight home. Le Carre’s enviable writing style demands absolute concentration, and let’s face it, when you’re crammed into a cigar tube with 400 other passengers for that length of time, you need some kind of distraction, and the in-flight movies were as crap then as they are now

Whether you prefer the novel, the TV serial, or the movie, they both give a more realistic insight into the grim and seedy world of international espionage than James Bond and the tidal wave of similar, comic book, adventures which cashed in on 007’s itchy trigger finger and love of gadgets.

The upshot of all this?

I’m currently reading Smiley’s People, thinking about buying the DVD of the 1982 BBC serial, and waiting for the sequel to the movie.

Breakthrough

This is a follow-up post to the video I put up on several Facebook locations earlier today. I describe here exactly what happened, and before I move on, you need to be aware that I pull no punches. Some of the descriptive may turn your stomach. It did mine.

So here we go.

During our brief trip to Blackpool after Christmas, I manage to contract a chest infection. I was just getting over a similar infection from before Christmas, when this one struck with a vengeance and by Sunday I could hardly breathe. I went to see my GP on Monday morning, New Year’s Eve, and started a second course of amoxicillin 1000 mg, three times a day for five days.

We spent New Year’s Day at a family party held at my sister-in-law’s farm, and as the afternoon and evening dragged on I began to feel really ill.

Move to 2 AM and I was having anxiety attacks because I couldn’t get my breath at all, so I dialled the NHS helpline 111. After a lengthy debate they decided to send for an ambulance, despite my insistence that I didn’t need one. I just needed to know how to control the anxiety and my breathing. The ambulance turned up at 3:30 and they decided to ship me off to A&E, even though I said I did not want to go to A&E I just wanted to know how to control my breathing and the anxiety.

Seven bastard hours we were in that department, and when they finally decided what was wrong and what to do about it, they prescribed doxycycline 200 mg, to be taken in tandem with the amoxicillin. They made me take two of the pills there and then.

Twenty minutes later, they began to work and their first effect was to make me throw up. I ended up puking into a sink three times in five minutes. But that was nothing compared with what was to follow.

We were on our way out of A&E, making our way to the hospital pharmacy to fill the prescription, when I urgently needed the toilet. The nearest was a walk of about 100 yards. I didn’t make it. This doxycycline moved my bowels. Worse, it did so time and time again with every step I took. And this didn’t just happen once. It happened on four separate occasions. My wife had to deal with the prescription while I tried to clean myself up in one of the hospital lavatories.

But I still went home plastered in shit from the waist downwards. When I got home my poor wife had to help me clean up in the bath, after which we worked together on cleaning the soiled clothing as best we could.

I tried the pill again in the afternoon, with similar results, although not as catastrophic. After that, I went to see my GP again this morning and he’s now put me on amoxicillin 500 mg three times a day, supported by clarithromycin 500 mg twice a day. It’s a combination I’ve taken before and although it upsets my stomach, it doesn’t make me actually throw up.

The other advantage of speaking to my GP is that he keeps me fully informed. The reason this infection is much worse than others in the past is that my right lung is not operating at all. It’s not dead, but it’s not supplying any oxygen to my bloodstream because it’s chock full of infected gunge, and that’s what we’re trying to sort out over the coming week.

As I write, my life is dominated by the chest infection and its aggravation of my COPD. There are so many things that are not happening because of it, one of which is sleep. I wrote this a minute or two after three in the morning, and I was shattered, I needed more sleep, but I couldn’t. The moment I lay down, the infection kicked in, and the hiatuses in my breathing create the same urgency which sent me to A&E in the first place.

Throughout the day, I was still fragile going from cold to hot, hot to cold, still having those flashes when I cannot breathe at all, but now I know how to deal with them. I don’t blame the crew at A&E. They had people queuing up on trolleys in the corridors, and they were obviously stretched almost to breaking point. In addition, they don’t know me as well as my GP does, and all they asked me was about allergies and as far as I’m concerned, I don’t have any.

It has simply been a catalogue of disaster from minute one.

I entitled this post ‘Breakthrough’ with good reason. It’s now six in the evening, and there has been a breakthrough, but it’s been only in the last hour when the infected crap in my right lung has begun to respond to the antibiotics. Even as I dictate these words, my breathing is becoming a little easier.

I don’t believe I’ve turned the corner, but I do believe I’ve reached the corner and by early next week I should be back to my normal, irritating self.

There’s one positive to come out of this. At least I think it’s a positive I won’t know properly until the end of next week.

I haven’t had a cigarette since last weekend.

My Little Angel

In April 2017, my daughter, Angela Gates, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of motor neurone disease known as progressive bulbar palsy. The life expectancy from diagnosis is between six months and two years.

Despite the unexpected trauma, Angela greeted this condition with a fierce determination to fight all the way, an attitude that is entirely consistent with her approach to life. But there is only ever one outcome with MND, and sadly Angela lost her battle on Sunday, 18 November. She was just 49 years of age. She died suddenly and peacefully, and the only positive her family can take from this is that she is free of this terrible condition.

While our thoughts are naturally with her husband, Tim, and daughters Victoria and Hannah, it’s also a time to reflect upon her life.

Conceived out of wedlock, born after her parents hurried into marriage, she was a cheerful child, one who could light up a room with her giggles. When she was eight years old, my wife and I split up and divorced a year later. Traumatic enough for any child, but life-changing for her and her brothers at such a young age, and yet she maintained her essentially bright outlook.

After leaving school and going on to college, she became a legal secretary, and eventually gave that up to become a mother at the age of 23. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Her first two children, Charlotte and Laura, were stillborn, but her pregnancies were so far advanced that the unfortunate babies had to be named and granted a Christian burial.

Angela greeted what many young couples would consider a complete disaster with her usual strength and stoicism, and her motherhood wish was granted in 1995 when Victoria, was born. Hannah followed a year and some months later.

It seemed at this point that her life was complete, and it was enhanced some years later when she successfully secured a degree from the Park Lane annex of the University of Leeds.

More trauma waited in the future, when her marriage to Derek broke down. This is neither the time nor the place to go into the reasons for that, but at length she settled down with the man who would become her second husband, Tim Gates. Angela was happy, content, planning to marry, when the devastating blow of MND hit her.

She would not let an irrelevance like a totally debilitating disease stand in her way, and in August 2017, it was my pride and pleasure to escort her into the wedding room where she would become Mrs Gates. I enjoy making videos, but pride of place in my collection is one that I did not produce. It’s the video of Angela defying the speech impediment imposed by MND to say, “I do.”

Despite her deteriorating condition, she never lost her sense of humour, and I recall her chuckling at my suggestion that once the arthritis finally cripples me, she and I could hold wheelchair races round the local supermarket.

We live some distance away, and the last time I saw her was about four weeks ago when she was recuperating in a hospice in North Leeds. She was completely without speech, communicating via a whiteboard and marker pens, but even then, she could still smile at my reference to her ‘Darth Vader’ breath mask, she could still pass the occasional flippant remark, and she was hellbent on getting home, back to a life which was anything but normal, but which she so desperately wanted.

At the same time, she never lost her selflessness. In conversation with my granddaughters, I learned that she had already made plans for Victoria’s wedding, scheduled for 2020. Angela knew she would never make it, so instead she planned to arrange for Hannah to deliver a card on her behalf. It’s entirely typical of Angela to be thinking of others when faced with her own insurmountable troubles.

Some memories come readily to me. On my 49th birthday, she sent me a card which read, “One to go to the big five-oh”, in response to which I commented, there’s nothing like reminding the old man of his advancing years.

When she was a baby, I’d been delegated the responsibility of bathing her in front of the fire. She was about nine months old, and she did not want to get out of the bath. So I left her to play while the water was still warm, and she was in fits of giggles as she used the lid of the soap dish to scoop water out and throw it all over the carpet.

I remember just a few years ago when she jumped out of an aeroplane, skydiving in aid of Tommy, the charity supporting research into stillbirths. I like flying, but as I said at the time, I prefer to stay inside the aeroplane. Naturally, she had an instructor tied to her back.

But that was Angela. Courageous, determined, good-humoured, filled with an overwhelming joie de vivre which let nothing stand in her way.

She leaves behind a husband and two wonderful daughters. She also has three brothers and a half-sister, and of course her parents ­­– myself and my wife, my ex-wife and her husband – and we are all, naturally, devastated by her passing. there are also many, many friends, people whose lives she touched and illuminated with her selfless geniality and sparkling humour. Nothing can fill that gap other than our memories of Angela… Not Angela as she became, but Angela as she was; the bright, sprightly girl, the woman of indomitable spirit and courage, the girl with the smile in her voice.

Angela kept a blog Entitled ‘Little Legs’, a self-deprecating chuckle at her diminutive size. In its latter stages, she detailed the slow progress of the disease. The last entry was in April of this year.  you can find it at: https://angie1926.wordpress.com/

Victoria too kept a blog, entitled ‘Daughter of MND”. A frank and open discussion on what she and her sister were going through as they watched their mother slowly deteriorate, you can catch up with that at: https://daughterofmnd.wordpress.com/

Tim wrote a short book detailing their life and marriage from his point of view. Entitled ‘Marrying MND’ it’s available from Amazon, and all proceeds from the book go to the Motor Neurone Disease Association, a charity devoted to helping sufferers, and contributing to research into this devastating condition. You can find more details at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Marrying-MND-Our-minutes-fame-ebook/dp/B078W7BQYW/

My thanks go to the staff at Leeds General infirmary, and Saint Gemma’s Hospice, Leeds, and the MNDA for the care and assistance they gave to my daughter throughout this appalling episode.

A year and a half ago, just after Angela was diagnosed, I put up a post dedicated to my dog, Joe. He was terminally ill and we’d had him put to sleep. I said at the time that it was the most difficult post I had ever written in 10 years of blogging and 30 years of writing. This piece, dedicated to my wonderful daughter, has now claimed the title.

Angela, we love you and miss you.

Angela Gates: June 28, 1969 – 18 November, 2018