The Landlady’s Matterhorn-sized worries

I am supposed to be going to Turkey tomorrow. I have packed my bag, filled the fridge with delightful ready-meals for my students and have made sure the house is spick and span and all the bathrooms have an adequate supply of loo roll. My students use a ridiculous amount of loo roll and I have to replace them so frequently that I wonder if they’re supplementing their diet by eating the stuff.

“I have even primed The Big Son as to when and how he should take out the rubbish”

I have even primed The Big Son as to when and how he should take out the rubbish and recycling, so that I don’t have to return to a Matterhorn-sized pile of empty ready-meal packets in the corner of the kitchen after a week away. Brighton itself has indeed been a Matterhorn-sized rubbish tip recently. I am rather inclined to support the bin-men in their plight as too many companies – Government funded or not – these days are moving the goal posts in order to diddle their employees and too many employees roll over and accept it. So go bin men! At least the seagulls are enjoying the smorgasbord of detritus available on the street…

So, rubbish collections or not, I’m ready to go to Turkey, apart from the tiny fact that I am currently awaiting the results of a blood test to see whether or not I have malaria. I was taken ill at work yesterday and have all the symptoms of malaria, which could just as easily be all the symptoms of flu, or at least a very heavy cold. Being as I’ve spent five weeks of this year in West Africa being an unwilling meal-plan for a variety of mosquitoes, even though I’ve been taking anti-malarial drugs, I thought it best to make sure that I don’t have malaria, as it can be very serious if left untreated. Left untreated in the UK it would be bad enough, but left untreated in a remote part of South West Turkey would probably be much worse. So I’m sitting on my bed, watching daytime TV, which I haven’t watched since Philip Schofield had black hair, and waiting to call the surgery at 5pm to see if my test results have come back. I was informed that the results might not be back until tomorrow morning, which will make for a bit of a mad dash to Gatwick to catch my flight if they are negative. I am hoping to get away, as with all the rubbish on the streets and this sudden humid weather, you never know what you might catch…