I aren't dead........

........to quote Granny Weatherwax.

Sorry that it has been a while since I last posted!  Real life got in the way as it so often does.  The last you heard from me was that we had to move house.  Things became 'interesting' after that.  My mother in law was diagnosed with a terminal illness and she had little local support available from Mrs E's family.  Her brother had done a sterling job but was finding difficult to cope with the drain of work, family and caring all at the same time, so Mrs E took on the mantle.  That meant her moving from Northamptonshire to Yorkshire to become a full time live in carer.  As these things do her mother's condition worsened and in the end I too moved to Yorkshire while continuing to work in the Midlands.  Once the inevitable happened we then had the job of settling the estate and selling the family home and moving again.  We settled in North Lincolnshire and bought a house here as two of our children live near by.  I work from home a couple of days a week and stay in the Midlands for a couple of nights so I can be in the office.

Then just to prove real life can be just as difficult as soap opera life, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  It appears it's currently the fashionable one to have; me, Bill Turnbull, Stephen Fry all the cool kids have it!  I was told that if you have to get a cancer as a man this is the one to get as it is more likely to be treatable than most others.  Fortunately mine was caught early but as it showed signs of being aggressive surgery was decided as being the best option.  That took me out of the loop for most of the first half of 2018.  Tests, surgery, recovery and recuperation left me with little interest in sitting in front of a computer screen for more than the time I had to for work purposes.  Work on the house went on the back burner.  Since the surgery we have slowly caught up and for the first time in what seems like years (it is actually a couple of years since I posted anything!)  I'm feeling like I want to blog again.

I haven't been totally idle, Facebook interest groups kept me in touch with my hobbies and its easy to put a couple of lines on FB compared with a blog entry!  At August bank holiday I was able to take part in a battle re-enactment as a combatant for the first time this year.  Things are coming back to what passes for normal in my life.

There is a lot to catch up on, 6mm figure painting,  games of  my 2mm ECW rules, re-enacting,  comments on other blogs I like.  And I have one night a week most weeks when I'm in digs in Northamptonshire with a good Wi-Fi connection and not much to do.

Hello world, I'm back.