Revival of the Full English

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that I am an enthusiast for the full English breakfast as well as for Apple techie devices. Well, this morning my friend D kindly invited me to join him for such a treat bright and early in the morning: sausage, egg, fried bread, baked beans and bacon, washed down with excellent coffee and seasoned with lively conversation. You’re only young once, eh?

This set me up well for a quick (actually I don’t quite do quick yet) trip into town to arrange for further work on my laptop, which is finally showing signs of hard drive failure. It will perform tasks happily for about ten minutes and then start loitering around like a shiftless schoolboy smoking behind the bikesheds; it will get lively again for a while, only to slope off again in due course to light up another gasper.

A friend goaded me by email today, saying that he thought Apple devices never broke down, fnaar, fnaar! Not so, they wear out like any other piece of kit, although their durability is better than many other machines. His gentle jibe did however prompt me to think about just what it is I like about Apple kit: excellence of design and functioning, that extends to the packaging and the retail experience. I have worked with PCs often enough to know that I just prefer the stuff bearing the fruity logo: PCs are a means to an end that is very often at variance with your own plans, while Apples have soul. No one is perfect, though…

There is something further of a medical nature that I have been meaning to share with you for a while, which is that the recent chemo has cleared up my psoriasis. This is what I expected to happen, since that dismal disease (much much commoner than Waldenström’s) is based on abnormally quick turnover of skin cells, just the sort of activity that will be curtailed by the cell-slaying (cytotoxic) action of chemotherapy drugs. Skin cells normally develop and die over 28 days, whereas the process is accelerated to four days in psoriasis. The significant metabolic increase leads to a proliferation of blood vessels and therefore to redness and inflammation, in addition to scaling as the abnormally developed cells are shed. The whole thing is an utter bore, requiring time-consuming applications of ointment in order to try and maintain a reasonable appearance and flexibility of the skin and minimise soreness and discomfort.

At the moment I am pretty bald, although I have managed to keep the sparse hair that did not fall out in hospital. I half expect the psoriasis to reassert itself once my hair makes its comeback, but these moments of freedom are very welcome.