Flesh and Bone by The Telephone

Johnny Cash. That’s the answer to the question, “Who did the best version of Personal Jesus originally written and performed by Depeche Mode?” in case that was playing on your mind.

The pain has been quite severe and I have lost a lot of sleep over the last few nights. I have invented a number of new and exotic curses that I mutter to myself for the duration of any period on my feet. These include; tiffitut, cuggafug and fucklebunk.

Basically I am okay. Frankly, the inability to sleep because of pain is slightly preferable to the sort of nightmares I was having last week. Swings and roundabouts and none of them too bad really.

[...] has acquired a sampler for the keyboard on eBay. You can record or download a sound and spread it across the keyboard; so for example, you could record a sung “Do” and then create that sound at a pitch you would never be actually able to sing. All music students, in my experience, record their own bodily functions and play Moonlight Sonata in farty noises; it’s a rite of passage.

But perhaps most crucially, living in Whitby, we now have the rare opportunity to produce songs such as Space Age Love Song and Wishing by a flock of seagulls, quite literally.

We’ve now set a date to go visit my folks in about a month’s time which I am really looking forward to. They have a lovely big garden and a hammock, what more can I say? They also have a pond now.

For my folks' miraculous thirtieth anniversary, we were making them a firescreen. Two years later, we still haven't finished this project. However, it was only in the eleventh hour that we realised we weren't going to do it on time and the heroic P took me on a wild dash across the North Yorks Moors looking for something, anything that would do as a present. It looked like I was going to have to buy them one of those vacuum cleaner cover things. Rather like these. I have no taste for them but that was honestly the best thing I could find - my choices were that appalling.

As a last resort P drove me to a pottery place he knew in Pickering. He didn't know what it was called, but as we drove up I saw it was The Green Man Gallery. And indeed, most of their items were green men - you know, leafy ceramic faces you find in gardens and places (this explains what they are and what they mean). And Mum and Dad's first date took place at the Green Man pub on Halloween 1973.

This was a piece of luck.

My parents adored the Green Man we bought them and attached it to the side of the house. They then bought a second, smaller one which they put on a garden wall. I have recently bought a couple more in bisque (unfinished ceramic), which I am going to paint up for my folks' garden. I thought that if we put them out now, by the time Tinker is old enough he or she can go looking for them in secret overgrown places.

My Mum wants to take us to all sorts of towns and beauty-spots when we're down south. I'm a little worried about this; at Christmas she had counted on my being able to go shopping with her in order to get my birthday presents and how ill I was came as an unpleasant shock. She's talking about Cambridge, Kings Lynn and I don’t know how long she has been going on about the gardens at Angelsea Abbey. Here are some rather nice pictures. When she first told us about them my mother declared, “It is a lovely place and they even have a motorised buggery for people who can't walk very far.”Publish Post

I hate disappointing people generally, but especially Mum who is really quite particularly bothered to see me suffering at all. Never mind, I think she will be more realistic this time. And to be honest, there's still a part of me thinking, "I've got a month. I could improve a great deal within a month and be able to have all sorts of adventures come the end of May."

We'll see.