Dr Nick Knight was a colourful character and a wonderful, kind doctor who cared not one jot for political correctness and was just about the least computer literate person I ever met. My GP for a lot of years, he came to my rescue during those early days of my Rheumatoid Arthritis and made my world a very much happier place to live in. He was extremely intelligent, and a very caring, very wise and excellent doctor. He had the insight and the perception often lacking in people today who follow flawed procedures even when they fly in the face of common sense, and he was a breath of fresh air in the medical world I was suddenly thrust into. Close friend of two doctors I worked for for over 6 years, we also had a mutual friend in Julian, a man who came to the Tyne Tri swim sessions at Elswick and who also had a holiday cottage at Newton. His two passions seemed to have been skiing and his red sports car - he had no very close family, but found all the friendship, support and fellowship he needed at our church, Jesmond URC. He was both on the Elders' Committee at the same time I was and Church Secretary for a fairly long spell. Known to everyone, he never missed a Sunday in church, morning and evening service. A great cook, everyone looked forward to his contribution when it came to church lunches and it's fair to say I don't think anyone regarded him with anything other than warmth and respect. Ever since my first visit to Jesmond, he had been a good friend and that takes me back to a point more than 27 years ago, before Derek and I had any family. He watched my children grow up with interest, as he did every young family who attended church over the years. He clearly had a strong faith, and it saw him through some difficult years at Jesmond, where the congregation were forced to step out of their cosy cocoon and face the reality of the dwindling numbers and rising costs of nurturing a dying church which is in danger of eventually dwindling and losing so much spirituality that it could stumble to a halt xxxx years down the line.

I regret so much now having chosen the very moment the call came on Wednesday 12.59pm GMT, to go to our local chemist and collect a prescription. I missed a call from Alison, wife of our minister Nigel, telling me this shocking news. Our church were holding a memorial service that evening, but I didn't check my answerphone until after getting home from work today, just before 3pm. So by the time I spoke to Nigel, the hastily organised service had already taken place. Nigel and Alison had no other choice but to organise something at very short notice - Sheila (ex-organist) put an announcement in the local paper and Nigel and Alison rang round as many church members who had been particularly close to him as they could. The Easter weekend means there are services from Maundy Thursday this week through to Easter Sunday and traditionally it's probably second only to Christmas in terms of hard work for any minister, but additionally we say goodbye to Nigel and Alison themselves this weekend as Nigel takes on a more senior role in the URC and they depart for Scotland straight after Easter.

Some of the things I'll remember about Nick are how every time he tried to print off a prescription he somehow managed to jam the prescription paper in the printer, and after impatiently taking a few useless swipes at it, he would write out the script by hand. His writing was indecipherable even by doctors' standards and it was miraculous the pharmacist was able to prevent the wrong people getting the wrong medicine. This is when he actually signed the script at all .... I frequently had to turn round and go back to the surgery to get this done after the chemist would point out "the doctor hasn't signed this." He had a great attitude to repeat prescriptions and the tendency of some practices to employ their receptionists, not to actually assist, but to put up a barrier between you and the doctor. "I never want to hear my receptionists tell a patient that their script isn't due!" he would say. "If they've asked for it then they need it, and whether or not it's "due" isn't the issue. Whatever the proper course of action is, it will never be sending those patients away after treating them like naughty, shameful hypochondriacs and drug addicts - they need some form of help." And Nick went that extra mile to help me. Not strictly within his catchment area, he fought to keep me on when the practice had to severely cut their patient list to only specifically take those people within the Heaton area.

When he decided to take early retirement and move out to his beloved Thailand we all missed him loads. To think he enjoyed barely 2 years of his much deserved and much anticipated retirement is terrible. The funeral will be in Thailand as he left specific instructions he did not want his body brought back to the UK. With his strong, unwavering faith, I can, at least, take comfort that Nick has finally gone to the Lord he believed in.

Happy birthday to two of my children, my sister and a friend from school who I've known since we were 4 or 5 years old. I'm also pleased to say the Freenode/Paypal mess is now happily resolved and I'm really glad because this is an excellent network, the staff really make it what it is and I think lilo would be proud to see how pdpc has developed since his sad death on November 16th 2006. I've got a lot of good virtual friends on there, it's nice to be back. Seem to be struggling to keep this blog anything like updated, but life has been full of problems and stress - so far 2009 hasn't improved much on the previous year. You should never say things can't get any worse, it's a sure way of ensuring that they do! The biggest scare was Derek being rushed into hospital for an operation to drain a Quincy (throat) absess after which he was really very ill. In hospital for 3 weeks, he needed another chest absess drained and is still off work and needing dressings changed several times a week. My own operation, scheduled for March 6th (admission on March 5th) was postponed for around 3 weeks due to an unlucky leg infection which meant the Freeman Hospital wouldn't admit me. Having waxed my legs, I had an allergic reaction to some cream I put on afterwards, and of course scratched the itchy spots which became infected. Having a lowered immune system due to the immunosuppressant drugs I take for RA, not only do I pick this kind of thing up very easily, but infections can quickly take hold and after a heavy course of strong antibiotics it still hasn't completely healed up. Meanwhile, we're both on the sick and trying to persuade Wessex Insurance to pay out the money we're entitled to and were promised when we took out insurance against loss of earnings. My doctor refuses to have anything to do with Wessex (he's the second GP practice that has taken this stance) and Derek's doctor apparently has his form at the bottom of a very big pile he will do "when he gets round to it". Neither of us get company sick pay and it's hard to live on SSP when you've been used to two regular salaries.

The second big problem I have to tackle is my claim for the 3 months following the car accident in April last year. This has now reached arbitration and I have today had a look at the complete rubbish which is my medical notes around that period. I'll have to spend time chasing toxicology reports and challenging other so called test results and diagnoses, because at the moment I can see where the insurance company have got their ideas from. Then I have to sort out work, and claims for disability benefit, income support, Access to Work etc etc etc. After I've finally had this operation it's going to be about the time I have to appear in court on charges relating to this single vehicle accident. However, the single biggest problem right now is still the extreme lack of money.

Some slightly happier events - we moved our quakenet channel to our own server a few weeks ago and it's actually working quite well, after considerable teething problems. We now have two linked servers, so it's a lot more stable. If you would like to pay us a visit or even start/bring a channel to the network, we can be found on Editnet (link to as yet unfinished webpage to follow), this link will take you to the most popular channel. The ihack server supports SSL, instead of the default port 6667 use +6697. It's a big change, as I finally decided the server ought to be run by ninza and FFx0, rather than myself remaining an equal partner in the project.

Finally, Derek goes off to Bejing later today, ie Friday 13th March, with Rosie and Emily, to spend 10 days holiday with Louise who is over there working for an International English school, teaching maths. She's done an awful lot of travelling during holidays and has been everywhere from Thailand to Japan to Vietnam and many more countries. Rounding off the exotic holidays, my cousin Anne is just back from a cruise to Antarctica which sounds awesome!

Although strictly speaking it's January 20th now, I can't let Emily's 22nd birthday pass without some mention on here. Hope you have a great celebration at the weekend Emily! Meanwhile, 2009 hasn't got off to the best of starts .... I find myself off work with another eye ulcer (different eye) and battles with Wessex Insurance, PayPal, Freenode and though no fault of theirs, an issue of someone fraudulently cashing my cheque to the PDSA. This should have been resolved weeks ago, but Alliance and Leicester have been their usual awkward selves, firstly refusing to send me front and back copies of the cheque and then when they finally decided I had the £10 in my account to support this, taking aaaaaaages to get a move on - I'm still waiting. I'm equally running out of patience with both PayPal and Freenode - this whole mess is going to get completely publicised shortly if the two parties don't sort themselves out! Particularly Freenode, for acting recklessly in what they must themselves now see was hasty and wrong.

Let's hope 2009 is altogether a better year. Christmas passed pleasantly and also New Year's Eve. I'm always glad when the fuss of Christmas has died down and everything gets back to normal and you can remember what day it is, and when the bins go out. For want of anything better to say, do you ever try to recall your dreams by writing them down? A few weeks ago, I had the most realistic, vivid, pleasurable and yet disturbing sort of dream where I really felt what was happening was real. I wrote it down as soon as I could afterwards and it sounds - well - quite ordinary! Just your normal sort of nonsense really, that everyone dreams. It just didn't feel like that.

Well, I'm not going to summarise the year by saying "Goodbye 2008! Things can only get better" because it's not over yet and I wouldn't put it past fate to throw another shock our way, once again making me reel in amazement at just how crap life can get. I'll wait until we're safely into 2009 before I do that. Many events since about June have been skimmed over, which in other years would have had me make special reports on. Emily's graduation from Queen's, where she got a 2:1 in history, for example. Philip's marriage to Jill, and my week in Helsinki where in the strangest of coincidences, I discovered Michael was also going to Helsinki, having been invited by Nokia to Open Lab 2008. There was the continuing battle with Wessex Insurance, my court case and the car crash where I wrote off my lovely Hyundai. Or the party just after coming back to work from long term sick leave, only to have a nasty fall and break two ribs (confirmed by an x-ray after the crash, where I managed to crack another). The eye ulcer, which apart from anything else, made it a disappointing year for Embleton. I can't remember a year where I didn't go in the sea once, indeed I only managed two overnights. One, Barbara and I decorated the front room, and the other was cut short when she decided to take me to hospital having discovered I had an ulcer on one eyelid - the danger being that if it spread onto the eyeball itself, it could easily mean the loss of an eye and I don't have the same strong immunity that most people have, thanks to leflunamide which I take for rheumatoid arthritis. My rheumatoid arthritis itself has got an awful lot worse this year, and several people for the first time are actually being forced to acknowledge that severe fatigue is a big part of the disease, and my tiredness is not the result of staying up late on the computer! Financially the year has been a nightmare, as inevitably a fair bit of my earnings have gone on taxis to and from work. The legacy of the best part of the preceding 12 months on SSP has drained what resources I did have and I've many a time been in the position of wondering if I was going to have to phone up work and tell them I couldn't afford the bus fare there and back.

Still, there have also been some great times. Going to New Zealand first class via Dubai, staying with my Uncle Austin and seeing cousins I haven't seen for over 40 years was awesome! So was arriving at my local cricket club for what I thought was just going to be a routine league 20/20 match, only to discover it was Matt Burke's testimonial and the Falcons had arrived to play cricket against an Australian rugby team - what a hilariously funny night that was! Their cricketing skills are even worse than their chances of staying in the Guiness Premiership, apart from James Grindell who has in the past played first class cricket. Then in September the week I spent in Helsinki was a fantastic break. I loved Helsinki and it was an awesome coincidence to find Michael staying one floor below me, having been invited by Nokia to take part in their Open Lab 2008, along with other elite experts on mobile phone technology from all over the world. Quite an honour for Michael, but not unexpected from my point of view. He's the real thing when it comes to mobile phone technology and general knowledge, hopefully he might now start believing it himself! Then recently Anne and I went to Shetland, which is always a wonderfully therapeutic break. December is not the month most people choose to visit a sub arctic island, but we didn't mind at all. Doing the whole thing on a shoestring inevitably meant sacrificing a couple of days to travelling and no comfortable Eastern Airways lounge. While I love Megabus for its prices, I hate it for its timetable, and I swear I changed coaches at Perth in my sleep.

For everyone who had given up looking at this site through dire shortage of new edits, changes or anything to indicate that I was still alive, here's a long awaited update. It's nothing to get exited about, just a hastily written post so that the index page consisted of at least some content other than banners and links.

Like everything else, when you stop having time to do something, it accumulates and in the end becomes a massive task, so you get stuck in the vicious circle of needing ever increasing time to spend on an ever increasing backlog of what weekly attention could have avoided in the first place. In the end I couldn't put off indexing the last home page one post longer, so I opted to do nothing at all ..... it's a massive thanks to Luke that the site has now at long last caught up, with events covering the last 4 months ready to be described in more detail, and very soon, photos and a short article about my New Zealand holiday back in February, plus a second photopage with pictures from Phil and Jill's wedding (where Emily had the experience of being one of 4 bridesmaids, a flower girl and a pageboy), then a couple from Emily's graduation and finally some from Helsinki, including Michael's experience at Nokia Open Lab 08.

Just a quick update because this site is beginning to look a bit abandoned (thankfully I can usually rely on Naomi to give me a swift reminder if it goes too long!). Lack of time and the knowledge that I really need to archive another page has prevented me tackling a major edit, but I did mean to put a notice on that I was going into hospital for a week. Just out today, I have two more weeks on the sick and then it's back to work (I hope). Still no idea what the DVLA intend to do about my license, it does seem that the accident was just a result of the interaction of some of the (many) meds I have to take. I've currently got a friend staying here until she gets to move into the new flat she's buying - this might even motivate me to do a bit of much needed housework. I really can't believe that this is the 4th time I've been in hospital within 9 months. Let's hope that's it for a while!