Tag Archives: friends

On the Road Again – –

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Jack’s Wednesday guest post is on Thursday again – yawn – – –

One of the highlights of the tour I organize on odd-numbered years is the visit to Ballyeman Barn in Beautiful Antrim and the home of our old friend Liz Weir. Despite the fact that she’d only just returned from the US the day before we arrived, she was the perfect host as usual.

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Liz always cooks us a superb dinner before opening up the room for an old fashioned ceilidh with stories, songs and music. She always invites some of her local friends to join us and the entertainment and ‘craic’ is mighty (as they say in Ireland).

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What I wasn’t prepared for this time was the arrival of an old colleague from my teaching career in Dunfermline. I vaguely knew that John O’Connor was Irish but I didn’t know that he was from Cushendall and that he’d returned there when he retired. Just down the road from Liz’s place.

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My Nightmare – –

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Heck – it’s Thursday so it must be time for Jack’s Wednesday guest post!

I suffer (although that’s not really the appropriate word) from a condition called NPS (Nail Patella Syndrome). It’s a hereditary condition and other members of my family group really do ‘suffer’ much more than me. For me it’s just a weird thing that affects my bone structure – strange knee and elbow configurations , malformed finger and toe nails and very soft teeth with twisted roots. I was even the subject of a dissertation and I have a copy of it!

None of this much affected me too much growing up except for the teeth thing.

Back in the 1950s when dentistry was much less sophisticated than now and (certainly in Scotland) you were expected to just accept the pain as part of the general Calvinist approach to life, I went through a never ending Hell. In fact – maybe that’s what Hell is, and not fires at all – just a permanent dentist’s chair with a foot operated drill and a pair of pliers!

I finally, at the age of 25, had them all out – every one of them. Despite that, I still have nightmares fairly regularly involving that iconic dentist’s chair – and the mask – and the metallic smell of the gas – and the ghostly voices.

Wendy also has dental issues, but of a quite different kind, and she always has dealt with them in a much more straightforward American way (I’ve never understood the US fashion to put every teenage kid into teeth braces!).

Unlike me, Wendy has managed to keep hold of the teeth she was born with, but that has involved all sorts of procedures that never existed in Scotland when I was growing up. Things like crowns and implants.

But on Monday past (which explains the dearth of blog posts) she went into an excellent facility in Knoxville for the difficult extraction of a twisted rear tooth ahead of an implant. Suddenly I was transported back many years because she would require general anesthetic and I would need to drive her afterwards. When I was called to collect her I found her in a state of complete drunkenness with an IV in her arm, and asking me to sing for her. So I did. Then I had to leave her for 45 minutes sitting in the car while I waited for eight CVS employees to fill her pain meds scrip. However I did manage to get her  a cold milk shake much more quickly at a drive-thru!

Everything’s fine – honest it is!

But I’m frightened to go to sleep now , in case – – –