MRI

I have an MRI scan tomorrow. I have had to phone the hospital three times to get the appointment. This is bizarre because I was told the surgery I am to have depended upon this scan. You'd think they would send out the time and date sooner.

Cancer Diagnosis

I have had a skin condition all my life (BXO) and have occasionally been warned that it can turn sinister.

Over the years I have had a lot of surgery to enable me to pass water efficiently and to remove 'unhappy' tissue. In the last couple of years I have had the following surgery:

• Initial Biopsy, revealing non-invasive cancerous node.
• Excision of cancer boundary.
• Dynamic sentinel lymph node biopsy (resulting in an infection which put me in hospital for 4 days followed by 2 weeks on injected anti-biotics)

Since then I have been under review and seeing a dermatologist as well as a urologist. Things have recently taken a turn for the worse and a further biopsy of a lump has been diagnosed (last Thursday) as G2 cancer.

I now face a glansectomy so I propose to put a few updates on here in case anyone stumbles across this blog.

Please note it is well after midday on April 1st - this is not a joke. In fact tomorrow (2nd) would be my 35th wedding anniversary. Now that I am separated I face this surgery more or less alone apart from friends who are supporting me.

I will be 60 towards the end of this year. My target is to reach 74, the age at which my father died; I shall then feel not too hard done by!

Organist seeks occasional work

The summer holidays are coming and I have a few spare Sundays; I also need a holiday away from home. I would be more than willing to deputise for an organist who needs to get away (especially if there was a fee!). I am happy to travel about 80 miles from home.

I have looked on the Church Times website and found 1 engagement. I assumed, as they were advertising for an organist, that they did not have one; I was right.

But there are not many adverts in the Church Times. There are also not many on the RSCM website. I suppose there could be more in the print editions of these publications, but why?

The Church of England cannot be that blessed with deputy organists, so why can I not find anywhere that might use my services? The site Organists Online is useful and ought to be more widely known.

The hunt continues.

Tidy Up

My regular visitor to this blog will notice that I have removed all but a few posts.

I have decided that, even though I am unhappy at present, there is no point blogging about it.

Life is what it is.

Yuja Wang

I was looking for pieces by Mendelssohn but I kept surfing once I'd found Yuja Wang playing his Scherzo from Midsummer Night's Dream. This eventually took me to the video below. I have to admit that it is so impressive I uttered a 4 letter expletive when her hands seem to move faster than I thought humanly possible.

Peter Skellern

I am sad that Peter has passed away. I didn't know he was ill and neither did I know he had been ordained.

I have a couple of his CD albums but the song which I like best doesn't appear to be on Youtube. It is his arrangement of "Where do we go from here?". From the outset the brass writing, tone and gradually 'unfolding' of the sonority gives me goosebumps.

The words are, of course, sad in themselves and I have often found they resonate with me. Having separated from my wife (with a divorce happening in the next 12 months) the words do not quite upset me as much as they did: I do now know where we are going - our separate ways. When we still living together and there was hope (of a kind) and the lyrics seemed to hit the spot being about two people who do not know what the future holds. But it was all over for us several years ago.

Now it is over for Peter. R. I. P. old chap.

Accompaniments

Having had my piano tuned by a chap who actually knows what he is doing - thus making it playable - I was suddenly asked to accompany a Grade 8 clarinet exam in March; so I have been working on the piano parts. Mozart's Clarinet Concerto (3rd mvt.) should be OK but I am a little concerned about Finzi's "Fughetta" even though the girl is playing it slower than marked in the copy.