Week 4 – 22nd to 28th January 2023
The tree is coming down…or maybe not!
I had said that I’d be happy to keep the Christmas tree up all year round. I miss it when it’s gone but I do appreciate that it is not the done thing. Being full of flu for the last few weeks has meant that there has been nobody willing to go into the loft to bring the boxes down for the decorations. So, here we are, week four of the new year and the tree is still up.
The plan was to take it down over the weekend, but Heather worked on Saturday and Sunday morning, I watched James play football on Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoons are for napping whilst the second game of Super Sunday is on TV. We’re not superstitious, leaving the tree up isn’t going to be a bad luck charm. If anything, it will keep the spirit of Christmas going throughout the year, maybe even helping to keep us focussed on the fundraising.
It could also be interesting to see how long it will take my dad to crack.
Charity begins at home…
Last week, local musician and former BGT finalist, Josh Curnow started a fundraiser to help him buy his ‘dream’ guitar. He was encouraged to do so by friends, family and fans after posting about said guitar on social media. Anybody can create a fundraiser, for many different reasons, I should know. But, there has been quite a backlash for Josh after many people thought that this was a step too far. When I saw the post I was a little bit surprised; I thought that it was ill-judged, especially at a time when people are struggling to pay their electricity bills and food banks are experiencing unprecedented demand. We’re in a cost of living crisis and spending £2400, raised from a fundraiser, on a luxury item, seems a little rich.
Josh has had some issues to deal with last year which has stopped him from performing, and for a professional, touring musician, anything that prevents you from doing part of your job is going to have an impact on your life. Whether or not that should garner enough sympathy to fund the purchase of a £2400 musical instrument is debatable.
Of course, if people want to donate and have the cash available, that is entirely up to them. In my opinion there are better things to be spending your spare change on than an expensive guitar. For example, www.agoldstitchchristmas.com/donate – our fundraiser to help raise money to provide support for people at Christmas and, if possible, throughout the year. We cannot tell people how to spend their money and what causes they should support, although we can nudge people in the right direction obviously (did I mention www.agoldstitchchristmas.com/donate).
If your fundraiser is for a charitable venture, like ours, it is tough enough to ask for donations when everybody is hurting from the rising costs of shopping, energy, fuel and everything else that we need to buy to get through the week. We have been incredibly lucky to have been supported to the tune of nearly £5000 since we started A Goldstitch Christmas in October 2022. Most people are genuinely very caring and generous and want to help however and whenever they can. Josh discovered this too, with more than £1000 donated towards his guitar.
Do I think that a Go Fund Me was a bad idea? Ultimately, yes. Cornwall Live’s report quotes from his original post saying, ‘he has the opportunity to purchase his dream guitar but that his family must come first so he can’t fork out for it himself’. Josh said it himself when he apologised and said that he would never ‘intentionally cause any upset or unnecessary grief, nor did I mean to be insensitive to the current climate’.
A guitar is one of the tools of Josh’s trade, so this was similar to Darren the chippie setting up a JustGiving page to fund the purchase of a new a new works van, just because he wants one with a DAB radio and a red flash like the A-Team, but doesn’t want to pay for it himself.
There are a number of ways that Josh could have raised money to help with his purchase. A Kickstarter, for instance, that offered a small, arbitrary reward for backing it. Or set up a Patreon account, or a ticket only livestream or three. There isn’t much difference in these suggestions to what he thought he was going to achieve through his Go Fund Me page. It’s all about PR, though.
From what I understand, he was unsure whether to set up the page in the first place, and with hindsight I’m sure that he would not make that same decision again. I’m also certain that this will blow over for him and there will be no lasting damage. He’s a popular boy in these parts and he’ll bounce back.
And what better way to bounce back than to help a little fundraiser that I may not have mentioned very often before, www.agoldstitchchristmas.com. If Josh reads this, I wonder if he might be available for a charity gig at some point this year? Would love to be able to arrange something in and around Hayle this year…
First treatment of 2023
Today was treatment day number 12, apparently. The first appointment was in October 2021, 3-weekly to begin with, and fairly recently changed to 6-weekly. The twelve months or so have flown by.
For anybody that doesn’t know, I am undergoing immunotherapy which is designed to illicit a response from the immune system, to either amplify it or suppress it, depending on the desired effect. The dugs work with your own body to, in my case, fight the cancer cells. So, far it is doing its job quite nicely.
Going to the Headland Unit and the RCHT put things into perspective for you. The patients there receive a variety of different treatments including immunotherapy and chemotherapy. There are people in different stages of treatment, different stages of their illness. Some of the treatment can take hours, with side effects that cause sickness, rashes, sores, weakness, tiredness. Treatment can take its toll and the effects can often be as debilitating as the disease that it’s fighting.
The nurses are generally busy, dealing with several patients at a time, but they never fail to provide a high level of care and support to the people that rely on them. It must be a difficult job; nursing in general is hard work, the highs and lows of the profession must go from one extreme to the other. Working with cancer sufferers must be stressful, rewarding, heart-breaking. It will produce happy moments, sad times and a whole range of other emotions. It’s a calling, not everybody would be able to cope with it.
My treatment takes around an hour to complete, more time can sometimes be spent in the waiting room before being called through. But I can’t complain. The side effects of my treatment are not too bad. My joints ache a little, my thyroid is all over the place and I can feel tired. With that being all, I must thank my lucky stars and be grateful. Things could be a lot worse.
When I was speaking to one of the nurses today, and she asked me how I was feeling, I explained that apart from a few of the usual niggles I was fine and dandy. I told her that I always felt like…
“A fraud?” she asked, and she had hit the nail on the head.
First time around, in 2018, I felt the same. Now, like back then, I feel relatively well and I’m able to walk in, spend an hour in the chair and go home as if nothing had happened. I know that I’m suffering from those troublesome lymph nodes and this treatment isn’t just for show, but compared to those other people who are in a much worse state than me I feel almost guilty about being so well.
The nurse said that it was not unusual to feel that way, and it’s nice to know that you’re not alone. There are plenty of times when you wonder whether you are worrying too much, or not enough, and whether you are being overdramatic. The nurse said, “If there was nothing wrong with you, you wouldn’t need to come here for treatment, would you.”
When Saturday Comes
A good example of how much I like watching football is the time that my aunt gave us her old video camera. It was before digital cameras were a thing, you used the small video cassettes to record on and, if you wanted to watch them on a television, you’d need an adapter to play it through a VHS player. There were several cassettes in the case that we could use, all with things recorded on them. Before recording over them, I thought that I’d have a look to see what was on them. The last thing I wanted to do was record over anything special, an occasion that would never be repeated.
What was on the tapes were footall matches; my uncle ran a team that my cousins, Gary and Paul, played in, and these video cassettes had a number of matches recorded on local parks and pitches. Of course, I watched them.
Football is life, the great Danny Rojas once said, and who can argue with that? Whether it is the World Cup, the Premier League, local Saturday football or videos of Sunday teams playing on old videos I can’t get enough. Watching my two lads play youth football has always been special too, both from under 7’s up to under 16’s. When I was running a team it was a slightly different matter, there was too much to think about and control to truly enjoy the matches.
These days I spend most Saturday afternoons watching our local team play, where James is playing for the firsts. If Jack had’ve continued playing he could have been a part of the set up too, he was good enough but didn’t love football. I don’t think he like football, let alone love it. It would be nice to see the lads play together at some point, maybe we could arrange something.
Local football, particularly in our part of the country, can be difficult to arrange, fund and sustain but can you beat a cold January afternoon watching two teams kick lumps out of each other?
Today’s match ended in defeat; a poor performance was the icing on the cake, with the cherry on top being the peak shithousery that the opposition brought to the table. Our lads are a decent bunch, but the team that we played today were the archetypal wind-up merchants. Let’s not talk about the referee, either. There is a big problem with respect for referees at grassroots level, but when they are as bad as they were today…it’s difficult to defend some of them.