London

Down in London with work today for the AGM of the charity my company are patrons of. No HRH this year , but it is held in impressive surroundings, the I*C*E building on Gre@t George Street. A stones throw from the Houses of Parliament, it's everything you could want from a grandiose building of it's type. The eye travels up automatically and finds en route tributes to those Engin33rs of yore (only some of whom wore stove pipe hats). The names are legendary...well in my world at least (yes some of us knew who the Smeaton was that the Kaiser Chief's refered to, without the aid of Google). The building is beautiful and for a moment I could almost forget how much of my professional subs go towards the upkeep of a building I have visited only twice in my life - a hit rate that puts me about 200% ahead of most of my colleagues!.

Between a long (working) journey down, the meeting itself and then that long late night/last train journey back, I've put in eleven plus hour workday. So it seems fair enough to me that I juggle things a little so that I also fit in seeing Mum and Dad.

Mum hasn't been at all well. The doctor thinks it may be some new medication she had been starting to take and so she's slowly being weaned off that. It'll take a few weeks to reduce the dose and then have the last of it leave her system, so we're trying to be patient, but it's hard. She's tired (like falling asleep mid conversation tired), a little confused and generally just not quite 'there'. Most worrying of all is that these are the exact same symptoms that she had before the big time crash last year.

So we're trying to be patient and stay positive, but it's hard.