So that's that...

When I wrote the blog about losing my mum in 2012 I had no idea it would be 4 days into the year. It was quite sudden, but we knew it was coming which helped a bit. What also helped me immensely was that it was not drawn out, that she did not spend months in agony rotting away in a hospital bed. That is no small comfort that she was spared that. I won't say much more, losing a parent is very emotional.

I found out in November that my wife is pregnant. Mum knew and was delighted. The day we went for the ultrasound scan was very hard. On one hand we have this wonderful thing happening but it made it even so hard that my mum didn't live to see even the scan photos. She would have loved that. It's funny how things work out and from many conversations I've had since then it seems that this sort of thing happens very often . It makes you wonder...

Where would we be without the internet?

So in September 2010 I posted a blog about insurance companies, and mine in particular. I had a small leak of water which required £1000 of repair work and my insurer refused to cover it. Since then I complained and they agreed to pay the cost of repair, minus my excess obviously. The story goes like this:

I decided to rent out my flat, so arranged landlord insurance. When asked if the property was fully occupied I told them it was, because it would be in a couple of weeks (sort of the whole point of getting landlord insurance!) after I'd finished giving the place a fresh coat of paint. I got the policy documents through, checked the definition of 'unoccupied' and, as I was working in the flat four nights a week, the flat was 'in use' under their policy. Two weeks later I had the leak, prior to finding tenants. I submitted a claim and answered their questions truthfully, including telling them I had no tenants yet. This they did not like and they maintained that the property was unoccupied and not in use. I argued that there may not be anyone living there yet but it was in use, as it's hard to paint the internal walls from outside the flat. So we went around in circles. They appointed a loss adjuster who visited and was told the same story. The claim was repudiated.

Now in auld lang syne that might've been the end of the matter. Google Is Your Friend. Search: "Definition of unoccupied" and I found my way to the financial ombudsman website. Not surprisingly, this sort of situation has happened before and they publish examples of successful and unsuccessful appeals. Wouldn't you know it, there's a carbon copy of my situation described in detail, and the financial ombudsman upheld the appeal. Gotcha!

Procedure dictated that I complain to my insurer in the first instance, so I wrote them a pleasantly worded letter reiterating the situation and quoting their policy documents, and at the end referred them to test case on the FO website. They are allowed 8 weeks to respond. Last week I received a cheque for the full amount, minus excess.

T'internet...I thank you!

What a strange year it has been...

Where to start? I got out of the habit of blogging pretty quickly. The amount of time I was spending at the PC doing coursework meant I couldn't be arsed writing a blog, and the only thing I was doing was the course and I didn't feel the need for a running commentary on that.

So, after the crime scene ex, the 3 weeks after that were a nightmare, totally disrupted by an unprecedented amount of snow. We got there in the end. Some good friends made throughout the rest of the course and I miss them. The rest of the year went like this:

Jan 2011. Exam - passed with distinction, transferred to MSc course. Delighted.

Jan - May. Semester 2, forensic chemistry, and one tough programme.

5th May. SNP win a landslide in the Scottish Parliament elections, winning a majority of seats in a PR system. First majority for any party from an electoral system specifically designed by Labour to ensure that:

1. A Labour-Lib Dem coalition would always have the best chance of forming the government.
2. The SNP could never win a majority, thereby preventing a referendum on independence in a parliament dominated by unionist parties.

Whoops! The independence referendum I've waited for since I was 12 is now guaranteed to happen. I wept I was so happy.

May. Exam - passed with merit after making a few schoolboy errors in exam technique which I kicked myself about. Semester 2 practicals passed with distinction.

June - August. MSc placement - just awful. Equipment failures, little support, a few silly errors on my part and no results. In short, nothing worked.

August. Thesis write up. Some health issues, weeks of insomnia and the effects of sleep deprivation led to the submission of a woefully inadequate thesis, atypical of my usual standard of work.

September. Failed to pass my thesis (unsurprisingly). Re-write allowed but the MSc with merit I was on course for now impossible. Completely gutted. Appeal. Re-write put on hold until health issues sorted, plus there's the small matter of our wedding the following month.

29th October - get married. Felt like the luckiest guy alive, and a brilliant day from start to finish.

30th October - get told my mum probably has lung cancer. A few days later, cancer confirmed, stage 3B. Terrible news, but felt like it was inevitable. What can one expect when one has smoked for 50 years?

The next couple of months are a blurr with the only good news I want to mention being that my appeal was successful and that I can rewrite and resubmit my dissertation as a first submission. MSc with merit now the least I'm capable of gaining once again.

19th December. Mum suffers three seizures in one hour, blue-lighted to hospital. Scans show cancer in bones and brain. Stage 4. Mum won't see 2013. Hard to find words about that.

Christmas f*#%ing sucked. How can I celebrate New Year knowing 2012 will be the year I lose my mum?

Best / worst year of my life

Here come the teletubbies...

So the day is finally upon us.  On Monday my class starts a two week crime scene exercise where we go out to a mock crime scene, act as SOCOs (that's Scenes of Crime Officers to the uninitiated) in order to find and recover the evidence from the scene and take it back to the lab for analysis.  It's supposed to be as near to the real thing as possible, which means we're all going to be in our teletubbies suits - they're the white scene suits you always see them wearing on the news.

In this country you get suited up, bound and gagged before you get anywhere near a crime scene.  It's not like it's depicted on CSI where Catherine wanders up in her high-heeled boots and casually saunters about the place, quipping, and looking pretty bloody good while doing it.  We've been told that in some parts of the States that's actually the norm.  Incredible really.

So our 5 person team will get suited up and let loose on our crime scene, spending about 5 hours out in the freezing cold trying our best to be delicate with the evidence with fingers like frozen sausages.  There's almost 40 of us going to be out there doing it, and I'm going to be really disappointed if there's nothing on the news about it that evening, lol. 

"Stepps was the site of a massive crime scene today where over 30 SOCOs from all over the country, dressed in their characteristic white suits, gathered to examine the scene.  A local resident commented,

'When I moved here from Glasgow city centre, I never thought that this area would be a crime hot spot.  We had a similar incident here last year too. This place is going to the dogs.  I'm scared to go out now.'"

It's going to be a really hard day I think, and that's just the beginning of it.  We're in the lab for 2 weeks solid, 9-5, which for me isn't a huge issue as I've been working like that for the past 11 years.  I think it'll be a shock to some of the other students though.  All in all, I can't wait.  It's going to be tough, but it's going to be so worth it at the end of it.  I'm in a good team of people and I reckon we're going to do a good job.  Hey, if we can manage to collectively lower a long cane to the ground balanced only on a finger each then we can do anything, right? 

Still no mention of sunglasses though...I'm entirely unprepared to remove my glasses and utter a quick one-liner.  I'm starting to wonder if I'm learning anything on this course

Some words should never be spoken...

Today I had the displeasure to have to listen to some mouthpiece of a student prattle on about inane drivel all the way through my lunch.  Then she started on Star Trek...which only made it mildly more tolerable but I managed to ignore her for the most part.  It was only when she said the words
"Wesley Crusher was great!"
that I wanted to turn round and stab her in the eye with my fork.

A night I'll never forget...

So I was thinking of something to write on here during the week, and remembered this one incident from quite a long time ago, I thought it might be an amusing thing to put on here.

The year was 1996, I had travelled to the west coast of Ireland, for reasons which will remain private *cough*.  I was staying in a youth hostel in Dungloe, which, I was told, was the home town of Daniel O'Donnell.  That's a hell of a thing to tell a tourist coming into your town...I very nearly got out the taxi and ran away screaming in the opposite direction.  Anyway, so two things happened that night, neither of which I'll forget.  The first was that I had the best two pints of Guinness I've ever had in my life, and the second was that I was sharing a room with a German guy called "Heinz (like the ketchup)" - his words. (see the picture is making sense now eh?)

So this guy was pleasant enough and we chatted for a bit, I generally like meeting people from other countries even though communication can be a bit difficult sometimes because for reasons which I can't work out, the Dundee accent confuses the hell out of them.  It can be quite amusing sometimes though.  So I go out for a couple of pints and was back in bed early as I had to be up at the crack of dawn to catch my bus back to Belfast.  It was what happened during the night that, had I perhaps been a bit weaker in the bladder area, would've resulted in me soiling myself.

For whatever reason, I woke up in the middle of the night, and from my top bunk I saw Heinz getting out of his bed on the other side of the room...very slowly and deliberately.  He then stood up and paused for a few seconds, looking directly at me, taking a very careful step towards me, before stopping again.

"Ok that's a bit odd", I thought, "what's he up to?"

He began creeping towards me a step at a time, painfully slowly.  OK, so now I'm wide awake, eyes locked on this tall German-shaped silouette that's tip-toeing towards me in the darkness.  I'm seriously beginning to freak out here and my fists are now tightly clenched (and so is my tea towel holder I might add!).  It must've only taken about ten seconds for him to make his way across the room but it felt like about ten minutes.  Now he's standing right next to my bed and I'm about a femtosecond away from launching myself at this psychopath who's obviously about to stab me to death...

....when....

....he walks right past me and into the feckin toilet which was directly behind my bed!  HOLY CHRIST! The guy was obviously just getting up for a single fish and was moving slowly because he didn't want to waken me. 

I'm a quivering wreck at this stage and it takes me at least half an hour to calm down and drift off to sleep.  I've honestly never felt terror quite like that though.  The poor guy probably has no idea how close he came to being attacked by a lunatic Scotsman.  You can imagine how that story might go:

"Ja, so I was in this youth hostel in Dungloe. My bladder was a bit full during the night, ja? So I got up to relieve myself, when suddenly......"

The lights are on...

...but nobody's home

Bless me father for I have sinned, it's been 4 weeks since my last blog.  When I started this I thought I'd have lots to say.  It turns out that I don't have as many thoughts as you might think, lol.  To be honest, I've had so much to do, what with having an experiment to write up most nights and generally feeling gubbed or sore or whatever.  For those that don't know, I was rear ended (ooh-err) by a drunk driver a couple of years ago and have basically been in pain since, to varying degrees.

Anyway...I could go off on a big rant about stuff that's been going on: the cuts; the shafting of the RAF in the north east; the Scottish Office (sic) being as useless as ever - what do they actually DO now we've got our own Parliament, even if it's only really a half-arsed Parliament because all the important stuff is reserved to the UK Parliament, presumably because we're not to be trusted with important things like the Scottish economy...anyway I digress, where was I?  Oh yeah, cuts; the Edinburgh trams project and the hypocrisy of Labour, Lib Dems and the Tories to go on Newsnight and criticise it after it was them who clubbed together to force it through the Scottish Parliament 3 years ago - after the SNP Government planned to cancel the whole pointless and costly exercise; the hypocrisy of Scottish Labour leader Ian Gray to go on an offensive at his party's conference, criticising the current MINORITY Scottish Government for all the "broken promises" after his party and others (see previous point) voted down almost every one of them.  Is the concept of a minority government completely lost on you Mr Gray, or are you just hoping that the Scottish people are stupid enough to fall for your bollocks? Actually, to be perfectly honest, he's probably right, particularly in Glasgow where you could put a chimp up for election, put a red rosette on it, and it'd still win by a landslide.

Of all the political parties in Scotland, Labour are the most contemptible.  They spend the majority of their campaigns spreading fear and negativity and, is often the case, downright lies, particularly when it comes to the case for independence.  All politicians exaggerate to make their own side look better, but these guys take the biscuit.  For the past half century (at least) Labour have had it easy in Scotland and the West Coast in particular, because no matter how poor their record, how much corruption is unearthed, how little they have done for the communities who continue to vote for them time after time, they still get back in.  And now you have this clown Gray hoping to become First Minister.  Are you serious?  Do we really want this guy, who, for the most part, looks like he's just come back from signing on at the job centre, to be the public face of our country?  Say what you like about Alex Salmond, I know some folk don't like him, but he is an excellent statesman and someone I'm proud to have leading the country and fighting our case.  If we go back to having a Labour lackey in charge once again, he'll continue to take his orders from Ed Miliband and the Scottish Government will go back to being a mouthpiece for their bosses down south.  No way, I don't want that, I want someone completely focussed on doing what is best for Scotland, not some subservient from Labour.

On the 5 May next year we'll have this choice:

or

It's got to be Salmond.  It just has to be.  Gray looks like he's been dragged through a hedge most of the time.

In fact, I'm just going to leave it there.  Another blog coming right up