I will review some of these products during the week; let me know if you have any requests! I recently noticed Aveeno do a shower wash… Has anyone used this before? And do you know if it is available of prescription in the UK?

Shannon ♥

Dear Robert

Good to hear that things have settled down. We’ve been looking at the Adelaide House [retirement home] website, and have been quite impressed. Both the house and the location seem to be excellent. Back at Stow, the tinned food is, I assume, well past its use-by date. (When we visited in 1974, Mum “couldn’t wait” for ecological Armageddon, which no doubt remained imminent, rather like the Second Coming, throughout the subsequent decades.) Funny thing about hoarding: All the accumulated stuff eventually becomes a kind of ball-and-chain — an impediment, rather than a help. In Japan, I hoarded tins of Quaker Oats, with the intention of having something to see us through any crisis caused by an earthquake. But in the end, we just had to eat an awful lot of porridge during our final six months there!

The treatment [for bullous pemphigoid] has been successful. I was on 40mg/day of Prednisone for two weeks, and then on 30mg for two weeks. At present, I’m on 20mg for two weeks, which I suppose will be followed by 10mg for two weeks. (I see the dermatologist again on Monday.) All one can do, I gather, is hope that the itchy blisters won’t return. If they do, you have to go back to the lowest dose at which you were symptom-free, and repeat the process. I stopped using the Dermol ointment after about 10 days, as it no longer seemed to be helpful. Besides, it starts to turn your skin into something that resembles tissue paper.

You can tell Mum that I’m still busy removing graffiti from walls, poles, signposts, and public structures. The other day, I stalked “Bob”, who had passed through our neighborhood the previous night and written “Bob” on every lamp post. Alas, all his efforts were in vain, as they quickly yielded to my solvents. I also cleaned a “Merge with care” sign at the nearby intersection — only to see, the next morning, that the graffiti artist had been back and, in an act of revenge, had wrenched the sign around on the pole and made it face the wrong way. I find that kind of action particularly annoying, as such signs are, after all, designed to save lives. I don’t know where he got the strength from, as I couldn’t rectify the sign with my bare hands. I had to go back home, get my adjustable spanner, and loosen the bolts that held it in place. Restoring the sign to its original position was then a simple matter, as was tightening the bolts to a degree that will surely foil any future attempts to tamper with it. I have no idea what passing motorists thought as I was doing all this. I half expected the police to stop and ask me what I was doing. But I have found that you can’t rely on the city council to fix these things in a timely manner. In fact, it sometimes takes as long as six months to get around to small jobs.

Property Press recently featured our area, and ran a picture of our house — evidence, it said, that the area was a good one to live in, and had some nice homes. So I guess we must be doing something right. I think it’s the native trees in our front garden, plus the immaculate white front wall, that make the house look attractive. Meanwhile, the raised beds in the vegetable garden I overhauled last winter have been producing almost everything we need for our daily salad. We also have some blueberry bushes, which Mr and Mrs Blackbird have apparently been closely monitoring. At any rate, the blueberries mysteriously vanish as soon as they ripen. Phoebe [our dog] is doing well, and seems to have stopped swallowing stones. But she still gnaws stones and small pieces of “bush rock”, which can’t be good for her teeth. Our morning routine remains the same: First I clean her eyes, then I give her a good brush, and finally I clean her teeth with either beef- or poultry-flavoured toothpaste. We then walk through the park and around the block, while I make a mental note of any new graffiti to erase later.

I’m also writing letters to the editor of the newspaper — something I can do more easily, or with less fear of embarrassment, now that I’m no longer a member of the staff. (Writing letters to a newspaper that employs you can be problematical, as another journalist might not agree with you and might insist on his “right to respond”. The situation can then get completely out of hand, as the two staff members, who may sit next to each other, become deeply involved in a bitter, divisive public debate, to the detriment of their work and the office atmosphere.) I recently took the deputy editor to task for saying that “full-body screening” at airports was no big deal. I pointed out that he might think differently if he used a colostomy bag, and was required to produce the thing for inspection. And of course, there are several intimate prosthetic devices that their users don’t want others to know about. My letter in today’s paper, a contribution to the “capitalism v socialism debate”, says that what we have, in our privatized and deregulated international order, is actually a kind of racket in which the rich get even richer at the expense of the poor.

Love Alan