Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

Barack Obama makes me sick.

Here he is, on my TV, condemning his former pastor for the allegedly "appalling" and "outrageous" remarks said pastor has made in public. According to Obama, "They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans."

It's bad enough that the US is the kind of place where a politician feels compelled to defend or distance himself from remarks made by someone only vaguely connected with him, but when that politician does succumb to the urge to prevent further damage to his image caused by such a vague association, he should not be so arrogant as to profess to have gauged the feelings of an entire nation, such that he may now speak on their behalf.

Sarah, for one, does not feel insulted by the Rev. Wright's remarks. Nor, for what it's worth, even though I'm not an American, do I.

Amongst other things, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has said he believed the 11th September attacks were retribution for years of malevolent U.S. foreign policy that has caused huge numbers of deaths overseas.

Hmm, what is "outrageous" or "appalling" here? The only thing that's outrageous about this remark is that it's patently true. Obama's dismissal of the remark is what I find appalling.

Obama goes on to say that the Rev. Wright's remarks are "divisive and destructive" and that they "give comfort to those who prey on hate". Clearly, Obama needs a better speech-writer to convey the pretence of eloquence, since "those who prey on hate" are presumably those who do good in the world; or so I would have thought.

Now, make no mistake, the Rev. Wright has said a few things that are, at best, hard to prove. More probably, they are simply untrue. Take, for example, the assertion that the US government has spread AIDS in order to wipe out black people. The spread of AIDS amongst certain groups of the American population may, at one time or another, have raised cheers behind closed doors in Washington, but that's a far cry from their having deliberately propagated and spread the virus.

Nevertheless, Wright's entitled to his views and Obama should be defending his right to make them, even if he doesn't agree with the views themselves. Similarly, if he feels that guilt by association is damaging to him with the judgemental electorate, he should merely distance himself from Wright's remarks, rather than condemn the man himself.

Let's get one thing straight here. The attacks on American targets on 11th September 2001 were unquestionably the result of the US's ruthless foreign policy over the last few decades. The terrorists have even said as much. Does Obama perhaps think the US was picked at random and that there's no rationale behind the attacks? Why is the idea of looking inward to seek the motivation for the attacks anathema to him?

Another thing, Obama said that Wright was equating America's "wartime efforts" with terrorism, but Wright referred explicitly to foreign policy, not wartime efforts. Of course, you could argue that American foreign policy effectively amounts to war in many territories, but one can't help but think that Obama wasn't acknowledging that. rather, he was twisting Wright's words to be more worthy of the condemnation that was about to follow.

So long as the US continues to take no responsibility for its actions on distant shores, it shall surely know no peace. We all suffer as a result of America's tragically myopic, unsustainable and pathologically self-serving foreign policy. In fact, I might even go so far as to call such policy "appalling" and "outrageous", "divisive and destructive".

I'm glad I can't vote in American elections. What a responsibility to have to pick the next leader of the most powerful nation on Earth from the pitifully lamentable stable of wankers on offer at the moment.

Between Obama's spineless and transparent attempts at voter salvage and Clinton's sublimely ill-conceived decision to lie that she had been under sniper fire during a visit to the former Yugoslavia in the nineties (not to mention her camp's distasteful negative campaigning against Obama), you could be forgiven for being driven into the arms of McCain. Well, almost.

As usual, it's all about the public image. In America, sound-bite politics are served to a fast-food culture, and every serious candidate will say or do anything to get elected. Obama is not one iota different in this regard.

Version 0.2.0 of Ruby/AWS has been released.

If was quite pleased with the previous version, I'm very pleased with this one. The code has really been cleaned up and a lot of functionality has been added in this release.

Here's a list of the major changes:

• Many more types of operation are now supported. In fact, everything except shopping cart operations is now supported.

• Symbols can now be used instead of Strings as parameters when instantiating operation and response group objects.

• Image objects can now retrieve their images and optionally overlay them with percentage discount icons.

• Compatibility fixes for Ruby 1.9.

• Dozens of other fixes and minor improvements.

There's still no support for shopping carts, but that will change in version 0.3.0. Thanks for your patience.

News has reached me in the last few weeks of the death of two of my former Google colleagues. Both of them were software engineers. At least one died of an illness. It's not yet known what the other's cause of death was.

While I was still working there, two other colleagues died. One had a dodgy heart, the other committed suicide.

A couple of years ago, a bloke I had been instrumental in hiring also committed suicide.

That's five deaths that I, alone, know of; and two of those were within a matter of weeks. Who knows how many others have perished in parts of the company whose grapevine doesn't reach me?

It's enough to make one feel mortal.

We've placed an order for some brand, spanking new garden furniture from Unopiù. This Italian garden furniture shop doesn't have many branches outside of Italy, but we're lucky to have one within walking distance, on the far side of the Vondelpark on the Stadhouderskade.

Sarah and I went there on Monday and picked out a table, eight chairs, a parasol and a few odds and ends. A small fortune, one way or another, but the teak table and chairs should last us many years and provide us with a great deal of pleasure.

I wish we'd ordered this stuff a few weeks ago. The delivery time is two to three weeks, so we probably won't have it before Sarah's folks, who arrive this weekend, return to the States. We may get lucky, though, and have it for the last few days of their stay.

Speaking of the garden, Eloïse has had her first run down the new slide, although we're supposed to let the grass sods go another week before they're trampled by small feet.

The apple tree is in full bloom now, and many of the plants recently placed in the garden have taken and are starting to thrive. By the end of the summer, things should be looking really great out there.

The temperature here is supposed to rise by the weekend and the weather report claims next week will be more like summer than spring, so I'm hoping we'll get to sit out there and enjoy the new surroundings with Sarah's folks, while Eloïse plays on her new frame.

It's taken me a while to write this entry, as it's about something quite different to the usual trivia that I either extol or grizzle about.

Can lightning strike in the same place twice? It appears so.

The story begins with my uncle Paul. My uncle Paul died of cancer a couple of months ago. Nothing unusual about that, you might say; thousands around the world die of cancer every day. We weren't close, but it was quite a blow for my mother. My uncle lived in Winnipeg, Canada and I hadn't seen him since my wedding. Before that, I hadn't seen him in some 25 years. That's how the Macdonalds are.

Fast-forward to 30th March just gone. Lucas is born. In the evening of the day of his birth, I call my mother in Florida to inform her that she now has a grandson. After hearing my news and congratulating me, she tells me that she also has some news for me.

It turns out that the funeral parlour that handled my uncle Paul's death recently received a letter from afar. The letter was accompanied by a request, that an enclosed letter be forwarded to my uncle Paul's widow, my aunt Charleen. This request was duly honoured and the letter sent on.

When Charleen received the forwarded letter, she was surprised by its content. Amongst other things, it politely requested that a further letter be forwarded to my mother, wherever she may happen to be.

Upon reading the letter, Charleen called my mother to inform her of its existence and let her know that she would be sending it on.

The letter had not yet arrived in Florida when I called my mother to tell her about Lucas ' arrival. Nevertheless, because she had had it read to her over the phone by Charleen, she was familiar with its content and could at least give me the gist of it. I was rather surprised to learn of the author's identity and the nature of the letter.

I asked my mother to scan the letter and send it to me via e-mail as soon as she received the physical copy. A few days later, it arrived in my in-box.

The letter was handwritten and metrically arranged, i.e. written in rhyming couplets. This made an already unusual missive even more improbable.

The words told a melancholic tale of one man's quest to locate two people who had inadvertently disappeared from his life almost 41 years ago. They painted a tragic picture. I was left with a strong impression of a man tormented by his past, such that his past had become an inseparable part of his present and the subject of an ongoing quest into the future.

At the foot of the letter, the man had signed his name and given his contact details. His address, his e-mail address, telephone number and even his mobile number were there.

If you haven't already guessed, I am one of the two people he had spent 41 years searching for.

I was suddenly struck by the power I now wielded over this man's life and emotional well-being. By the simple act of picking up the phone and dialling the number at the foot of the page, I could end this man's fruitless, four decade search with a single, swift mercy-blow. Alternatively, I could shrug off the opportunity, do nothing and leave the man to suffer. If I chose the latter course, the man would likely spend the rest of his life not knowing what had become of the two people whose destiny had somehow slipped through his fingers.

The man in question is my biological father.

All I've ever known about my natural father is that he was very young when I was born. I also knew his name, but I've been apt to forget it for months on end over the years.

From that last statement, you might correctly surmise that the identity of my natural father has never been a topic of great interest to me. I've certainly never felt the need to go in search of him. I was adopted at a very young age by my grandparents, so as far as I was concerned, I had a mother and a father.

Unlike most people in a similar situation, it just never mattered to me that I did not know anything about the man who had helped to bring me into the world. The fact that I shared some DNA with him did nothing to distinguish him in my eyes from the billions of other strangers roaming our planet. In my case, blood most definitely did have the same viscosity as water.

Possibly, that (lack of) reaction stems from the fact that I've never been close to anyone in my family. It's my observation that the Macdonalds are a pretty distant bunch of people (and not just geographically). Without our blood ties, it's unlikely any of us would ever have chosen to have anything to do with any of the others. We're not the only such family, but most people don't care to admit their kin are this dysfunctional.

My grandmother, who raised me, would complain at regular intervals that her children, having left the parental home, would barely even bother to pick up the phone once a year at Christmas. Visits from them were, by and large, an even more infrequent occurrence. By the time I reached puberty, I felt a strong desire to fly the nest, too, so I had some understanding of this behaviour.

My grandmother loved me and, at some level, I must have loved her. Her love, however, was somewhat pathological in nature. She needed me to fill an otherwise unbearable vacuum in her life, a chasm of festering, unfulfilled desire that frequently bubbled to the surface to be vented in the form of rancorous bile towards what seemed like the rest of mankind. Me, my grandfather, the neighbours, British people, protestants... anyone would do if she needed to vent some anger.

My grandmother was one of those people who talked incessantly to her television set, as if the people on it could hear her. She rarely had a good word to say about anyone and I think slagging off other people might actually have been her greatest pleasure in life, albeit a not terribly fulfilling one. She had few other pleasures to speak of, save for a gin and tonic, so it's not that far-fetched a claim.

My grandmother's embitterment probably contributed to her children staying away from her. It certainly can't have done much to endear her to them. And so I turned out to be no different. Once I managed to get out from under her roof, I rarely called or visited. I had some warm feelings for her, but our relationship was so antagonistic that if we had only spent five minutes per year in the same room for the rest of our lives, neither of us would have been able to use the time for anything more constructive than berating the other.

My grandfather was a decent bloke, but by the time I was adopted, he wanted little more out of life than to retreat behind his newspaper, coming out only once my grandmother had gone to bed, to watch the snooker. He was a mild-mannered fellow, but I was never really able to respect him, because of the shameless way he allowed himself to be derided and emasculated by his wife. Consequently, we didn't have much of a relationship, either.

I therefore left home with little concept of family. The only family I had known had appeared not to particularly like one another. Birthdays were not celebrated and, to this day, I still don't know my grandparents' dates of birth. We were a group of highly disparate and incompatible people, who -- for no good reason I could fathom -- had chosen to live together in the same house.

So, it's fair to say that I had little interest in family when I left home. I certainly wasn't about to go in search of more of it. Whoever my father was, he had his life and I had mine.

Perhaps surprisingly, I've kept that attitude most of my life. I long ago realised that if I were going to have any close family relationships, I was going to have to engineer them from scratch and create some new human-beings with whom to surround myself.

Sarah has spent the last eight years attempting to grind me down and mollify my stance on this matter, She was, from the very beginning, wildly curious about my natural father. She forced me to ask my biological mother questions about him that made me feel uncomfortable, because I didn't care about the answers and didn't want to create the impression I did.

When Eloïse was born, however, the issue of who my father was ceased to be a matter for just me. My father was, after all, Eloïse 's grandfather. At the very least, perhaps there was important medical information to be had. Perhaps my father's side of the family had some hereditary illness, knowledge about which might prove vital to the health of my children in the future.

So, I very slowly started to soften towards Sarah's insistence that I should make an effort to trace my biological father. By the time Lucas was born, I had only very recently reached the stage that I was prepared to write a letter to the popular Dutch TV programme, Spoorloos, to see whether they could and would assist in trying to locate my father.

How could I have known that, within a matter of a few weeks, my father would surface under his own steam?

I decided almost immediately after reading his letter that I would contact him. On humanitarian grounds alone, it deserved a call. The man had already served a life sentence.

The weekend following the receipt of his letter, I made contact with my father via the telephone. You can imagine what a shock it was for him when I told him who I was. I was waiting for the dull thud of him passing out and failing to the floor at the other end, but it never came.

Just like that, one evening in early April, 41 years of searching came to an end.

He still lives in Ireland, near Dublin, which is where he met and got to know my mother. He told me that he has often stopped in front of the house where the Macdonald family lived in the mid-sixties, imagining my mother, a teenage girl at the time, at the window. I wonder how many times he's stopped in front of that window in the course of the last 41 years.

I can't imagine what it must have been like, to be haunted for 41 years by the few precious memories of your newborn son, to be regularly confronted by the sight of the places you used to walk, hand-in-hand, with your long-lost first love. Imagine not knowing what happened to either... One day, they're just gone; without a trace.

I find it poetic and poignant that my mother had to lose a brother in order for her son to be found by his father. It's the stuff of a naff soap-opera, but however far-fetched this plot line happens to sound, it's perfectly true.

My father's name is Tony and it turns out that I also have three half-brothers. None of those has any children yet, however, so Tony not only made the acquaintance of his first-born son during that first conversation, but also discovered the existence of his first two grandchildren (and little Lucas was still only a week old at the time): rather a lot to take on board in one evening.

Apparently, my uncle Paul's death was announced in an obituary in a local Winnipeg paper. Jason, Tony's youngest son, found the obituary using Google and showed it to his dad, who must have muttered something along the lines of, 'My God, it's them!'

Tony only recently told his other children about me. They were enthusiastic and wanted to help him with his search. If Tony had told them a few weeks earlier, my uncle Paul would have still been alive and they wouldn't have found his obituary. If they had been told a few weeks later, the obituary would have already been removed. Thus, there was a relatively short window of time in which their search would have yielded the desired results.

I don't believe in fate, but fate is making a pretty good case for itself in these circumstances.

And so it comes to pass that the company known as Google exerts its mighty, life-altering influence on me for the second time. Lightning strikes twice, indeed.

I'm still reeling from the realisation of just how profoundly Google and, by extension, the Internet, are able to influence and affect our lives. There must be thousands of people out there with stories like mine. Even back in 2001/2002, we were already receiving e-mails from people who had found lost family members or diagnosed their own illness and managed to save their own life. Amazing.

Since our initial telephone conversation, Tony and I have exchanged a few e-mails. Whilst he has my blog and our photo gallery to tell him what kind of person I turned out to be, Tony is still something of a mystery to me. The first photos from his side arrived in my in-box only a couple of days ago, so I've only just discovered what he and my half-brothers look like.

There's definitely a strong resemblance between Tony and me. There's an expression on his face in those photos that I've seen spread across my face in photos of me.

The initial telephone conversation was quite relaxed, all things considered. Any initial nerves soon subsided. However, I think if we were to continue the communication by telephone, things might soon become rather stilted. After all, we don't know each other at all, so it would be a bit forced to call each other up and attempt to chat as if we had the slightest clue about the daily grind of the other's life.

It's therefore important that we meet up soon and consolidate the contact we've already had. The plan is for Tony and his wife, Bernie, to come here on 12th June and stay with us for a week.

Assuming that contact goes well -- and I can't imagine that it wouldn't -- we will then head off to Ireland during the summer holiday to meet the extended family.

The idea of an initial meeting in a smaller circle is appealing. There's a lot of catching up to do, and many questions to be asked and answered; on both sides. Much of that will be better suited to a small group, as it would be difficult to focus on a lot of this personal history with a wider audience, most of whom weren't born when the events being discussed were unfolding. I suspect it may also be easier to speak frankly in a smaller circle.

30th March was a memorable day. Not only did I gain a beautiful son, but I also learnt that my biological father was looking for me. I had expected to gain a child that day, but it came as a rather large surprise to also gain a parent.

Life is bizarre; it really is. I thought the turbulence of my youth had finally been left behind when I turned my back on Silicon Valley and headed home to sleepy Amsterdam to raise a family. Little did I know that precisely that very concept -- family -- was soon to send such huge ripples radiating across the placid waters of my life.

Even when your life is as peaceful and seemingly uneventful as mine, the next surprise is always lurking just around the corner, right when you least expect it.

Amazing.

Air-conditioning, ah... Something of a rarity in private residences in this country, but with the current minor heatwave we've been experiencing, more of a practical necessity than luxurious decadence.

They say the current hot spell will continue until after the weekend. You don't hear me complaining.

I picked up our new bakfiets last Friday, a customised bakfiets.nl CargoBike Long from WorkCycles, which I wrote back in February.

After a week of biking on the new machine, I'm pretty impressed with it. According to Eloïse , it's "helemaal mooi", so she seems to approve.

Its first real test came a couple of days ago, when I brought back the largest load of groceries from the Albert Heijn that I've ever fetched without a car. It was a huge load and the bike definitely steered more heavily as a result, but it was as solid as a rock and got the job done.

There are a couple of photos of Eloïse showing off the new bike, if you're interested.

Expect to see us as a regular summer fixture in front of Pisa IJs on the Scheldeplein.

The great thing about having a camera phone capable of a decent resolution is that you're always able to record an unexpected but precious moment for posterity.

Today, I took Eloïse out on the bakfiets for a raspberry ice-cream at Pisa IJs. She had got up at 06:00, so she was tired and quickly fell asleep. When we arrived at Pisa, her head was still lolling around, so I parked the bike and captured the moment on video.

A little late, but I should mention Eloïse 's third birthday, which was last Monday.

It had been preceded by a birthday party the previous Friday at her peuterspeelzaal, but the real party was on the birthday Monday itself. That turned out to be very well timed, because the weather was gorgeous and it happened to be the second day of Pentecost (Tweede Pinksterdag), or whatever it's called in English, which is a bank holiday here.

The birthday party proper was a real success, with lots of Eloïse 's friends in attendance.

She was positively snowed under with presents; too much so, in fact. Even the recently reattached Irish branch of the family sent a couple of T-shirts and a card. Thanks to everyone who attended and helped make it such a terrific event.

Sarah baked the cake and helped Eloïse blow out the candles. She seemed to really enjoy being the centre of attention for the day, which is funny, because she's normally quite shy. Of course, she was in her home environment, which helps.

Eloïse 's main presents were a Mijn Eerst Laptop (My First Laptop) computer and a Kidizoom digital camera.

The quality of the pictures taken by the digital camera are pretty awful, but that seems to be of no concern to Eloïse , who happily snaps away at anything and everything. They're supposedly VGA (640x480), but there's so much noise in the photos that they remind me of the first generation of digital cameras from the mid-nineties.

The laptop is fun. It has keys with all of the numbers and letters, but it's not a QWERTY keyboard. It's not a real laptop, either, of course, but a set of educational number and letter games in a laptop-like casing. You choose an activity and then it tells you what to do. The laptop even comes with its own little mouse and one of the activities trains the child in its use. Eloïse 's already made some progress on the machine in the last few days and seems to enjoy it.

Both the camera and laptop were things that Eloïse had requested for her birthday without any prompting. You can imagine why she might have thought they would be fun to have: Mama and Papa spend an awful lot of time playing with theirs.

Soon after Sarah's folks arrived for their most recent visit, our downstairs toilet started to behave rather strangely. It was behaving as if it was blocked: when flushed, the water would rise towards the top of the bowl and it would take a long time to sink again.

By the late evening, however, the problem appeared to have remedied itself. The toilet would flush almost normally again. The next morning, too, the toilet was still behaving well, but in the course of the day, it would slowly start to show signs of being blocked again.

As the days went by, the problems continued. I hoped they would disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as they had appeared, but it wasn't to be. The symptoms started to become more severe. I'd hear the pump in the cupboard under the stairs grinding away, trying to move water around, but unable to. The same cupboard, which also happens to house much of my computer equipment, started to emit the perspicuous odour of foetid shit. My imagination started to run riot.

Meanwhile, the upstairs toilets continued to flush apparently normally. Even the one in the cellar continued to work normally, but I believe that one follows a separate pipe to the street.

By the end of the bank holiday weekend, it was evident that the problem wasn't going to fix itself, so I brought a plumber in. After tracing a few pipes and listening to my description of the symptoms, he advised me that there was a strong likelihood the source of the problem was located outside the house.

Once he'd left, I called the local water board and asked for a technician to come and investigate the problem. They agreed to send someone as soon as possible and, sure enough, a couple of hours later, a couple of blokes dressed in orange overalls turned up at the front door. I was impressed with the quick response.

Within minutes, they'd opened up the manhole in the street and were studying their drawings to see which pipe led to which neighbouring house. I went outside to talk to them. They quickly made an interesting discovery: none of the pipes in the manhole appeared to be coming from our house.

A few weeks ago, the pavement right outside our neighbour's house had been dug up by the water board, apparently to lay new pipes. The suspicion of the men investigating our problem was that one of our pipes had then been mistaken for the neighbour's, and that it had been erroneously curtailed.

The net result of this was that we were apparently no longer connected to the sewage system! A full camera investigation of the sewer failed to locate a pipe leading from our house.

The theory certainly concurred with the symptoms. If our cut-off pipe now led straight into the subterranean sand and we were truly flushing our toilets, baths and showers straight into that, the liquid would take a long while to seep into the ground. That would explain why, late at night and first thing in the morning, the toilet would appear to flush normally again, as the path along our pipe would have had a chance to clear. Over time, though, it was clearing less and less well, as toilet paper and other, er, crap, collected at the pipe's base.

In the course of a day, the higher water usage during daylight hours would fill the pipe more quickly than the water could disperse and the symptoms would reappear. Sinks and toilets would glug, flushing the toilet would fill the bowl, the sound of the cellar pump grinding away at seemingly arbitrary moments could be heard, etc.

The fact that it had taken several weeks since the work on the neighbour's pipes before we had encountered any problems also made sense to the men in orange. They said that it would take a few weeks for the blockage to build up to the point that we would start to suffer its ill effects.

The men with strong accents made some phone calls and informed me that a team of workers would be back in the morning to dig up the street, find the cause of the problem and fix it.

I arranged with them that I would park my car across the relevant area of the street that evening to reserve it for their use the next day. That way, we could avoid having to have the council place signs announcing the work several days in advance, which is the way things usually work here.

True to their word, a team of men turned up with heavy equipment the very next day, just after eight o'clock. Within no time, a large amount of street and pavement had been dug up and the source of the problem located.

Since the street was now wide open anyway, the water board made use of the opportunity to remove the old, porous clay pipes and replace them with shiny new PVC pipes. We were now better off than before the emergence of our problem.

Just over three hours after they had first shown up and started digging, the hard-working fluorescent men were finished and shovelling the last of the sand back into the trenches. A van from the council was standing by to replace the cobblestones once the water board left.

I took photos of the whole event, because I couldn't believe how quickly so much manpower and material had been mobilised to fix a problem -- albeit a serious one -- for a single household. Of course, they were only fixing their own mistake, but I was still very impressed with the response. It must have cost several thousand euros to do the work, which had also been given priority over whatever else the team in question had been scheduled to do that day.

Petje af, Waternet!

I've finally managed to put together version 0.3.0 of Ruby/AWS. The crux of this release is the addition of support for remote shopping-carts. Check out the new Amazon::AWS::ShoppingCart module and the Amazon::AWS::ShoppingCart::Cart class.

The amount of free time I have in any 24 hour period is drastically reduced these days. If this were still 2004, this release would have appeared a lot more quickly. Nowadays, however, the amount of time I can spend on coding and related activities (writing documentation, testing, etc.) is quite limited.

We've also had Sarah's folks over here for the last couple of weeks and been treated to no fewer than thirteen consecutive days of uninterrupted sunshine. Neither fact has been conducive to productive coding.

Anyway, in spite of all of this, the new release is finally a fact. It does feel great to be knocking out useful code again.

With the implementation of remote shopping-carts, the AWS v4 API is now more or less fully supported, save for a few tiny gaps in the functionality of a couple of operations. If I'm not mistaken, Ruby/AWS now supports all of the functionality of its predecessor, the now obsolete Ruby/Amazon, plus a lot more that simply wasn't available via the old AWS v3 API. This is a significant milestone.

This release of Ruby/AWS interfaces with the latest revision of AWS v4, namely the 2008-04-07 revision. I've finally written a few unit tests, too, to prevent regressions from one release to the next.

Another useful addition in this release is the new AWSObject#each iterator method, which yields each |property, value| of the AWSObject. This makes it trivial to iterate over an item's properties.

In addition to the new functionality, a few bugs have been fixed and minor improvements made. In particular, error-checking when performing MultipleOperations and batched operations has been improved.

The gardeners were here again yesterday to give our garden its last major push towards completion.

The chief task yesterday was to install the lighting. We've had small lights placed in the wooden steps that lead from the kitchen door to the patio, plus larger lights around the patio and along the path towards the gate.

We had to wait for it to go dark yesterday in order to appreciate the effect, but it was nice and conferred the atmosphere we were looking for.

The lighting in question is 12V LED lighting, so it doesn't use a lot of power. We have it connected to a twilight sensor, so that it turns on automatically after sunset. You can control how long it stays on after that.

We're still waiting for a couple of spotlights to be placed at the base of two of our trees, which will further add to the atmosphere. Those are 220V, so I'll need a qualified electrician to place those.

Eloïse now has some tree bark at the foot of her climbing frame's ladder, so she can now climb the ladder without having to tread in soil. She could already go up using the rope slope, but now she has the option of the ladder, too. A sprinkler head near the foot of the ladder was moved out of the way today and should be more effective now.

The remainder of the plants have been placed, too. There may still be one more plant to place; I'm not sure; but things are starting to look finished now.

In the evening, our Unopiù garden furniture arrived on the back of a very large lorry from Germany. The delivery men didn't speak a word of English, so I had to haul my notoriously bad bisschen Deutsch out of the mothballs.

The lorry had spent some seven hours on the road en route from Bad Kissingen and didn't arrive until 19:30. I had begun to doubt whether I had properly understood the German phone conversation the day before when we were arranging the drop-off.

Anyway, the old garden furniture has now made way for the new stuff, consisting of a large teak table, eight chairs and a very large rectangular parasol. The spokes of the parasol are so long that it can't be fully closed, so we may end up exchanging it for the circular model, but it looks lovely when open.

Eloïse was very excited by the new furniture when she came down this morning and has been keen to eat all of her meals out there today.

Now we just need a few guests to come over and enjoy the patio with us. The weather is set to continue getting warmer and I just hope it's still good when Tony and Bernie get here next month.

Lucas has chicken pox. He doesn't seem to be bothered by it, except maybe for needing to sleep more than normal. He's so young, though, that he's unlikely to develop immunity from this infection and will probably need to get it again.

Unexpectedly, I also have chicken pox. Since you can theoretically only get it once, I must not have had it when I was a child. Without that knowledge, I've been bracing myself for the moment that my children contracted it to see if I would, too. Well, now I know.

Chicken pox is apparently more severe in adults than in children and that certainly concurs with my experience so far. In no particular order, the last few days have brought:

• the shits
• aching balls
• dehydration
• powerful headaches
• dizziness
• throbbing pain in my lower back
• welts all over my torso, upper legs, face and scalp
• itching
• sleeplessness

It comes in waves of one or more of the above symptoms. The dizziness, headaches and itchy welts are the most consistent.

Sometimes, it's so debilitating, that I certainly wouldn't be able to blog. I might be lying on my back again in an hour, so I should post this now.

I'm not sure whether I've had the worst of it yet. I do hope so, because this is certainly bad enough.

The pox continues.

All other symptoms have now given way to unbearable itching.

The welts continue to appear and are spreading to new areas of my body. Imagine the worst possible place for a bloke to develop itchy, inflamed sores that ooze sticky moisture if you dare to touch them. Yes, I even have them there.

I managed only an hour of sleep last night. The itching was light when I went to bed, but developed into a raging onslaught after just a short while. I made several attempts at going back to sleep, but just moving around in bed was producing enough friction and therefore also skin irritation, that sleep remained somewhere beyond my reach.

I eventually got up at 04:00 and lay on the couch, watching TV. I wasn't any more comfortable, but at least my mind could contemplate something other than the state of my skin.

I'm not sure how many more days of this I've got ahead of me, but it's probably at least a couple more.

I'm a frightening sight at the moment, it has to be said. If I am disturbed by what stares back at me when I look in the mirror now, imagine how I must look to perfect strangers. I look like a monster.

My body, too, looks repulsively diseased. It really is a disgusting sight.

On the positive side, at least the splitting headaches and dizziness have stopped, although I actually preferred them to the itching.

Praise goes to Sarah, who is currently single-handedly holding this household together. Not only I am unable to help, I'm an extra person that she has to help, so she's quadratically busy.

Thankfully, she was able to get some menthol talc and calendula cream today, which actually does help calm my tormented skin.

All I can do is continue to kill time until the virus has had its fun with me.

Each day seems to bring with it a new phase of illness.

After being plied with various gels, ointments and powders yesterday evening, the itching was more or less under control when I went to bed at midnight. I had started to feel tired only an hour or so earlier, which struck me as strange after just an hour of sleep the previous night.

Sarah gave me a homeopathic pill (Rhus toxicodendron) as I went to bed. The next thing I knew, it was 05:50 and I was waking up to pee. I couldn't believe I'd slept without interruption for almost six hours, which immediately forced the realisation that I was no longer itching at all.

I peed and went back to bed, sleeping for another couple of hours.

When I finally got up, full of optimism, things took a turn for the worse. I felt drained of energy and a headache was quickly coming on.

Within a hour, the headache had become a real brain-burster. My head felt like a watermelon that had been thrown off a cliff onto a lava field. The same headache has had me incapacitated for most of the day. I'm enjoying a period of respite as I write this.

The spread of welts seems to have slowed to a crawl, perhaps even stopped. Maybe that's because there's nowhere left for them to go. I have a couple on my fingertips and elsewhere on my hands. They've also made it down to my ankles and even between my toes. I didn't know chicken pox ever went down to the extremities like this.

The welts on my fingertips are very small and aren't quite breaching the skin's surface. They feel like splinters or very minor burns.

Buckets of sweat have been coming out of me today. The diarrhoea was also back this morning. The symptoms at this stage are thus very similar to the first couple of days, when I still thought I was coming down with stomach flu. Maybe the virus is withdrawing with the same force with which it took hold.

I'm cautiously going to say that I'm probably over the worst of this now, but who knows? Some of the blisters are looking opaque now. Yesterday, they were transparent. Hopefully, they'll all start to scab over soon. The ones that had burst or been scratched open are already starting to crust over.

I still look like the arse-end of a mangy dog and that's not going to improve overnight. I just hope I can emerge at the end of this without too many scars.

Last night was difficult. I was exhausted at the time of going to bed and woke up every couple of hours, soaked in my own sweat. My head felt leaden and dull.

I eventually rose around 07:00, as Sarah was having a lot of problems with Eloïse . Lucas had had a fever all night, too, so we were concerned about him.

Within minutes of being awake, yesterday's brain-pounding juggernaut made a prompt return and had me all but incapacitated again. The headache continued to worsen until, at about 08:30, I was forced to go back to bed, where I slept until about 10:00.

Things were no better when I rose for my second attempt at the day. Given that this headache was so painful, now into its second day, and persisting long after classic chicken pox symptoms had all but disappeared, I began to reluctantly suspect some kind of secondary complication.

The fact that my head was pounding over the entire area of its upper hemisphere, rather than in one localised area, led me to conclude that there was probably pressure over the surface of my entire brain. With this in mind, I suspect that the symptoms of the last couple of days have actually been those of mild encephalitis. That's my belief, anyway, as the circumstances and symptoms match perfectly.

Some time before noon, I was forced back into bed yet again, where I fell asleep for somewhere between two and three hours. When I awoke this time, however, I was a little less sweaty and my head felt somewhat lighter.

Since awaking that final time today, the force of my headache has been stable and manageable. I'm optimistic that the end of the illness is in sight, but I won't know for sure until I see how well I sleep tonight and how I feel tomorrow.

Lucas 's fever has been fairly stable throughout the day and he doesn't seem to be in too much discomfort. Poor little fellow, having to deal with chicken pox so early in life. He won't even get immunity from the experience. At least I can rest easy after this is over, secure in the knowledge that this particular illness can't afflict me again.

So, we're less concerned about Lucas now, which is a worry we can really do without.

Hopefully, tomorrow morning will bring the realisation that I've enjoyed a good night's sleep, awoken amidst dry sheets, and am free of headache and itching. I'm optimistic about my chances.

I had a decent night's sleep last night, with only mild sweating. This morning, I awoke feeling tired, but thankfully free of headache.

The sickness therefore appears to be a thing of the past, but the healing is only now beginning. I have sores, scabs and welts all over my body; weeping wounds in places where I'd really rather not have them. Now I have to keep this lot clean and uninfected over the coming days, hopefully avoiding too much scarring in the process.

It feels good to be on the mend and have my energy mostly back. I was able to visit a supermarket and pick up Eloïse from play-school today: simple outings, but pleasurable for one who has not been outside in quite a while now.

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