Holidays!

I have been really very neglectful of this poor old blog lately, haven't I?  Well, I can't guarantee things are going to change that much I'm afraid.  It seems I'm now using Facebook as my blog which means all my (now long gone) readers who aren't friends can't see anything but then I'm not sure my life is all that exciting to anyone who isn't me so...you know.

Anyway, The Lovely Husband and I have just celebrated surviving 20 years of married life without killing each other so we took ourselves off for several luxurious days in strange and beautiful Venice and, as I normally now do, I posted many photos (in the manner of a travelogue) onto my Facebook page.  A friend commented about how he always does a blog post with his photos because it makes them easier to locate afterwards and I realised that was actually a pretty good idea so I thought I might poke this moribund beast with a pointy stick and get it lumbering into reluctant action again, at least for the holiday photos if nothing else!

So, we went away twice in 2014 - in June we went to Florence, and in August we went to Copenhagen.  Had a fabulous time in both cities and many photos were taken.  We were meant to be also going to Marrakech in December 2014 but, unfortunately, I came down with a mystery gastric ailment in November and the elderly disabled mother of one of the friends we were going with was rushed into hospital so it was decided to cancel the trip which was a shame as the photo opportunities would have been magnificent.

In 2015 we didn't go anywhere at all.  This was mostly due to the fact that my mystery gastric ailment took approximately nine months to resolve itself and during a lot of that time I couldn't actually leave the house for very long as I needed to be close to the loo at all times.  It was horrible.  We never discovered what it was despite going on an elimination diet, having several blood tests, a poo test, going on protein pump inhibitor medication (to eliminate stomach acid), having an endoscope shoved down my throat to look at my stomach, and a transvaginal ultrasound shoved up my hooha to check for ovarian abnormalities.  All came back normal, which was on the one hand a huge relief (yay for no cancer of stomach or ovary or coeliac disease or stomach ulcer) but also deeply frustrating (WTF was going on?).  I took up mindfulness meditation for a while to try and stop myself fretting about the ongoing pain, the constant visits to the loo and the (actually welcome but would have preferred it under other circumstances) weightloss of 1.5 stones (about 20lbs).

In the end, by about August 2015, it had just sort of tapered off.  I found I didn't need to take the Buscopan for the IBS-like symptoms, my digestive system started behaving itself properly, I started putting weight back on (boo!), I had more energy and was, to all intents and purposes, back to normal.

So, yeah, we didn't really go anywhere much for the whole of 2015.  I managed a sort of day trip down to Brighton in April 2015 as TLH was running his first marathon there, but I just loaded up with Immodium, wrapped up warm, found a deckchair on the beach near the finishing line and stayed there for 4 hours while he competed.  He did very well and finished in a time of 3:53:59, which is fantastic.  He's running it again this coming Sunday.

Anyway, as I said, I'm just resurrecting this thing to do some posts about the holidays, so I'll start with Florence in the next post (it may take a little while to write it as I'm battling both my Apple Mac and my Windows PC's photo software as neither are playing ball at the moment so just bear with me....)