The Sword of Damocles

Well, Rosie was in hospital still on Friday. They had put her back on a full-face oxygen mask because her O₂ saturation wouldn’t sustain itself; after she came out of surgery she was periodically coughing up blood and the hospital surmised that her trachea had been damaged by the insertion of the airway for the op. When it didn’t stop after a day, they thought it was a chest infection.

When we saw her today, she was off the oxygen and waiting for a chest x-ray… and they were keeping her in for yet another night. My mum is beginning to panic a bit and is coming down to stay with us from tomorrow. Previously she was talking about driving Rosie back to St. Helens to recuperate, so I had to talk her down from that a bit! Now she is just coming to be the nurse.

After we got back from the hospital we spent a while contemplating Brett’s redundancy offer. It amounts to pretty much half his annual salary as a pay-off and it gives him lots of options for what to do now. So now we are trying to organise those options to see which combination does the most for us in the future. It’s not easy to see the best path though; between the number of possibilities and the number of constraints it’s going to take a while for us to settle them down. Watch this space.

This evening we headed down to the Wimbledon Theatre for the final night of The Rocky Horror Show. We were in the 10% of the audience who hadn’t come in costume but we still had lots of fun. There were plenty of Franks, Riff-Raffs and Magentas and there was even a (very out-of-shape) Rocky in a gold lamé loincloth. The Rocky on stage, however, was very much the part; thoroughly pumped and defined and cute as a button. He had a good voice too as did Janet, although she was somewhat let down by the audio system which kept making her sound tinny. Unfortunately Frank was played by a very mis-cast David Bedella (the guy who played the warm-up guy and the Devil in Jerry Springer, The Opera) whose voice was too deep and whose performance simply lacked the camp panache that the roll demands. Still, it was an entertaining evening and we had a good singalong… although I was worried for a while that the balcony may collapse during The Time Warp, as it was definitely moving to the beat!

We were supposed to be going to Nick S’s birthday party in Soho after the theatre, but the show finished so late (22:45) that we decided to skip it and wish him happy birthday on Monday instead.