On Friday night I watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, it was brilliant, by far the best of all the films so far! It was action packed from start to finish and the time absolutely flew by. I went with a group of 4 adults and 2 teenagers and we all sat there rivetted to the screen! Harry and his crew have really grown up and I mean grown up! There were some interesting new characters Luna "Looney" Lovegood; Dolores Umbridge; and Sirius Black's cousin Bellatrix Lestrange played by Helena Bonham Carter I couldn't make up my mind as to whether she reminded me of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean or Drusilla, Spike's girlfriend in Buffy the Vampire Slayer!@!

I watched the penultimate episode of Heroes last night on the SciFi Channel, I love that programme, I must be a very sad person as I get really upset when a series comes to an end that I have enjoyed! Maybe that is because there is nothing to watch on mainstream television except for reality TV, who are these viewers I would like to know that love to watch miserable nasty people verbally abusing each other as in Big Brother or Wife Swap. Even the good old soaps are really depressing, everytime I switch them on I have to turn the volume down as the shouting really grates on my nerves, especially East Enders which is particularly dark and seedy.

Bring back the old favourites like Only Fools and Horses and the Darling Buds of May or even the Doctors at Large, do you remember that programme! Whatever happened to Barry Evans?

I can remember on my way to work one morning, reminiscing about our childhood favourite programmes with a colleague (it was a long boring journey!) we remembered The Wooden Tops, Tales of the Riverbank, Captain Pugwash and Mary Mungo and Midge! We then progressed on to Follyfoot Farm, Magpie and Timeslip!

Those were the days!

On Saturday my husband and I drove to down to Canterbury for the day, we had never been there before and were pleasantly surprised. The town was throbbing with tourists and grads in their gowns and caps, there was also not only a french market but an italian market there too! It was preparing for the Tour De France the next day, if we had known that we would have booked a room somewhere and stayed the night, as the atmosphere would have been fantastic!

We both fell in love with the town and will definitely be going back there again, especially as I found a really nice clothes shop called Angels, it had loads of really nice feminine dresses and even had ball gowns! I picked up 2 dresses for only £46 a bargain!!

Just waiting for the sunshine to come back so that I can wear them!

Talking of bargains I have loaded more crystal jewellery onto my site on ebay I am exhausted! They are starting to sell really well now have made 2 trips to the post office today, the best sellers today were the bracelets crystal eggs and spheres.

Can you believe its still raining, my garden is starting to resemble a jungle! Our local suburban foxes are having a great time in my flower beds, they have a fetish for shoes, especially my husband's which they are always stealing!

We found this out when our eldest child was born, during her first summer I had left the garden door open and a brave fox decided to come in and have a look around! I walked into the room and found the fox prowling around the baby's cot, I got such a shock I screamed and the fox turned around and ran out (picking up one of my sandals on its way!) back into the garden and over the fence!

I decided to knock on my neighbours doors and see whether it had turned up in one of their gardens, it turned out that the fox had a stash of shoes behind someone's garden shed!

As the weather is keeping me indoors I have started to sell more of my crystals now, and have had another delivery of really beautiful necklaces and bracelets which I cannot wait to load onto ebay and start selling! As I have completed Reiki II I can empower them with Reiki energy so the buyers will receive lots of healing energy as well.

Well problem is now solved I have bought a new digital camera all I need to do now is learn how to use it!

I have been routing around the house trying to clear it up and have decided to kick a habit of a lifetime and get rid of lots of books, magazines and the children toys such as their old lego etc. I found some great embroidery books and magazines and have put them onto my ebay auction as they have some great patterns in them and it would be a shame to give them to the recycle man. I also have some Warhammer books to load on Space Marines, Tyranids and a Warhammer 40,000 rules book.

I am going to tackle the lego tomorrow as I have so much of it, it will be a big job as there are so many pieces to look through.

My garden is flourishing in all of this rain, it is just a shame that I can't sit out there and enjoy it a bit more! Well at least its giving me an excuse to do something productive at least.

Don't forget its the last episode of Dr Who tonight, I do love that programme its so much better now than when I was a child, although I really did love Jon Pertwee, he is my Dr Who!

I have wasted nearly a whole day today taking pictures of my crystal jewellery and hardly any of them have turned out right, they were either out of focus (the zoom has frozen on my camera) or they were too dark, or they disappeared when I used my flash!

Everytime the sun popped out I ran outside and tryed to take some more pictures using natural light I managed to get a couple of good ones but oh it was so annoying! After all that effort I hope someone looks at them now!

Well at least I have got some more energy today that is in itself good news. While I was having the chemo and my energy levels dropped I would spend hours on the couch watching digital telly, I quickly got fed up with the normal set of programmes and moved onto the holiday channel, after that I spent a number of weeks on the cookery channel. We all grew quite fat rapidly during that stage, I really got into baking and would often whip up a victoria sandwich or one of Rachel Allen's tuscan plum tarts, I even had a go at baking soda bread, that reminds me I still have all the ingredients in my cupboard still!

I moved away from the cooking channel after I lost more energy and enjoyed a few more weeks of gardening instead, not the real gardeners programmes but the makeovers, I loved watching them and soon became inspired to do ours. I would lie there sketching different designs out day after day, I even emailed Chris Collins for advice, I was so excited when he replied and said that he would have a think about it, but he must have been too busy as I never heard from him again!

I soon got my husband roped in, poor man, he spent many weekends during Feb and March digging out the beds, replacing the fence and putting up trellis's for me. I would sneak off to garden centres and buy pots and pots of plants! What a transformation, it looks really nice now! The only trouble is now it wont stop raining, so I can only look at it longingly from indoors! Maybe thats just as well as otherwise I wouldn't be spending my day trying to load half decent photos onto ebay!

Maybe I will treat myself to a new camera tomorrow!

Phew I have done it I have started to load items onto eBay I think I have about 5 crystal eggs on there and a red jasper ring now. My photography isn't that great yet, I am trying to improve the lighting so hopefully will sort that out tomorrow.


My first order arrived on Tuesday and I was so excited, the box was smaller than I had anticipated but it was crammed full of goodies! I really would like to keep them all as there are some really lovely pieces in there!


There are all kinds of crystals from leopardskin jasper to stripey flourite to agate!


Loading them on has really exhausted me and I think I may have picked up a bug from someone as I really dont feel well tonight, so I am off to bed now! If you get a chance have a quick look at ~

http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=geniecrystals

I am so excited I have just updated my eBay account and I am getting ready to start trading once again! I started trading on eBay back in July 2003 after catching a lift home from a work event, on the way home Bob entertained me with his eBay stories and by the time we were 20 minutes from my house, I was hooked!

We arranged for Bob to come around one day to help me set up my new account, I was still working full time from home and instead of working away on my computer like a diligent homeworker, I was busy tidying the house up instead. By the time Bob turned up I was exhausted, it didn't take long for us to set up the new account and have a cup of coffee before Bob was back on the road again, while he was in the car driving back home, he called me and we briefly chatted some more about eBay and his parting words to me were along the lines of 'you have got a slice of cucumber under your dining table!' Bob is a canny salesman and small details do not easily pass him by!

I am a great collector and absolutely love crystals, I am going to sell some great pieces on ebay along the lines of buddhas, pendants, jewellery, massage wands, chakra balancing stones, amethyst and quartz, rough rock and minerals, polished products and agate products, phew the list is endless I am so excited!!!!

Autumn and Winter passed me by in a kind of blur, I can remember lying in bed looking out of the window, I noticed one of my neighbours poodling around her garden, she didn’t know how lucky she was, most of us take everything for granted you just sail along and then one day boom your whole life is turned upside down and your stuck in bed feeling really awful!

My life turned into a pattern I was having the chemo every three weeks on a Wednesday, the side effects would come out over the weekend, so on a typical Saturday I would wake up at about 6ish and my husband would make me tea and toast straight away and then at about 10 I used to have a full English! He would keep me fed like this all weekend as it really helped to keep away the feeling of nausea. It is hard to describe how I felt, the only way really is to imagine the worse hangover you have had and multiply it by 100! Usually by Monday I would start to feel a bit more human so it wasn’t too bad. My strength quickly went and I used to do as much as I could in the morning as by the afternoon, I would be laid up on the couch in front of the telly! Thank goodness I had cable!

As I was allergic to the taxol, I didn’t lose my hair so it was a good job that I didn’t shave it off after all, that would have just been my luck! Short hair definitely doesn’t suit me as I found out on the kibbutz!

One of my friends was a hairdresser by trade and one of the first things that I asked for when we arrived in Israel was a punk haircut! I wanted it to be shaven on both sides and left long on the top and back, I am not sure what happened but the communication between seemed to have gone a bit haywire! I looked into the mirror excitedly and to my horror I didn’t have any hair, instead I had an egg head save for the whispy bit she had left near my neck! Everyone thought it was really funny of course! I took to wearing a baseball cap all the time to hide my bald barnet!

In fact everyone used to make me wear it while we hitched for a lift as one look at me without it and the drivers foot used to push down harder on their gas pedal! One day we managed to get a hitch from a farmer he kindly stopped and the three of us piled into the back of his old car, he dropped us at the beach, as we started to climb out he asked us to mind the eggs he had stacked up on the floor! Why oh why am I so clumsy, sometimes I am like a magnet to disaster! I lost my footing and crunch my big size 7 went straight through the middle! I quickly jumped out and off we sped!

We used to spend hours at the beach just lazing around, one of my friends just had to look at the sun and her skin would turn a lovely shade of brown, while I and my other friend were very fair skinned and we would turn a lovely shade of red! I can remember us sitting either side of her looking like the before and after ad for bergasol, we had the last laugh one day though! On one of our many trips to the beach she wore a lovely white halter neck bikini which really complimented her lovely tan and set it off to a T. As a boring non swimmer, I stayed put on the sand while everyone swam, as I sat there relaxing, my friend came out of the sea, she shook her hair back and started to do her ‘Bo Derek run’ back to me, I couldn’t stop laughing, I glanced down and noticed that her lovely white bikini bottoms had turned completely see through and my beautiful dark haired friend was exposed! I laughed and laughed, at first she thought I was laughing with her so she really played up to it, but it didn’t take her long before she realised something was wrong. It seemed as though it was happening in slow motion as she glanced down and looked up at me horrified as she tried to run back to me covering her modesty! It was so funny!! We still laugh about it today!

After the consultant I met the cancer nurse who sat down with my husband and I and she was absolutely lovely. She gave me lots of leaflets to read and advised me to cut my hair, it was really long and was my pride and joy! On the way home in the car we both sat in silence, everything I had been told kept on going around and around my head, it was such a strange feeling, we stopped off at our local supermarket and while I was waiting for my husband to buy some food, I browsed around the magazines, I spotted an old school friend and said hello, she had heard about my illness and we briefly spoke about it, it was so surreal it was as if I was talking about someone else and not me!

I soon noticed that everyone’s attitude towards me changed, everyone was so kind but they all had that look on their faces, the kind of look that I really hate the ‘I feel so sorry for you look’, you may think that is a bit harsh but it becomes really boring after a while!

My husband was a real rock, night after night people called and he would sit out in the kitchen taking all the calls letting all the well wishers know how I was getting on, my chemo wasn’t due to start until the beginning of November as the consultants wanted me to build up my strength after the operation.

Have you ever gone on a diet or given up chocolate for lent and noticed how many commercials suddenly have chocolate or that forbidden goody on it! Well it seemed that every commercial was a well woman ad or any newspaper or magazine I picked up carried a cancer story in it, it was every where!

One of my husband’s friends wife had been battling with breast cancer for 18 months and after I came out of hospital we heard that she was in remission, I really wanted to meet up with her to see how she had got on and to find out what the chemo would be like. I kept on putting the call off and then one day we heard that she had secondary cancer in the bones! I can’t tell you how I felt for her!

I couldn’t make up my mind, should I shave all my hair off or should I wait until after the chemo and the first handfuls came out, it drove me around the bend worrying about it and finally I decided to cut it into a bob and wait, my mum bought me some beautiful scarves from Accessorize and I found a page on the web which showed you how to wear them in the style of Kylie Mynogue, I sat in front of the mirror practising for hours! I felt really sick about the thought of losing my hair, you don’t know how precious something like that feels when you know you are going to lose it, it was frightening, really frightening! I kept on telling myself that I should be strong and not worry about it I was made of more than hair! But honestly I was really really upset about it!

I was due to have my first chemo on a Wednesday, my eldest daughter came with me to the clinic and one of my friends came to visit, she came in armed with loads of glossy magazines, chocolates and Pringles! We sat in a corner and waited for the chemo to arrive, I was due to have two types, Taxol and Carboplatin, and was told the treatment would take about 4 hours in total. The carboplatin arrived and they gave it to me via IVF and it didn’t feel too bad, so far so good! My friend had to leave to go and pick up one of her daughters from school, and my daughter was getting a bit bored, so I told her to go home for a while and pop back later on (we lived 10 minutes away). Luckily for me she did!

While I was talking to a man about Benefits, one of the nurses came over to change my bags, the carboplatin had emptied out after an hour so she fixed up the taxol which was in a huge bag and would take 3 hours to drip through, only a couple of drops could have come down the tube before WHAM!!! I had a massive reaction, I couldn’t breathe, my chest felt like it was caving in! Apparently my whole body went bright red including my eye balls! The benefits man called over the nurses and they whipped the tube out of my hand quickly!

After my op in Barts I stayed in hospital for another week, the second night after the op I was very feverish and the morphine was making me delirious, it was a very long night I can tell you! The next morning I resolved to get up and start to walk around, the nurses had helped me get off the bed and sit on a chair the day before, and it was like torture, so I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I managed it, I held on to my IV trolley and started to walk around the ward, I kept this up all day, and the nurses eventually removed the morphine and catheter and I was free of all the paraphanalia finally!

It was such a relief, every day I kept on walking and by the Sunday afternoon after a blood transfusion, my husband and youngest daughter came up to visit me, I surprised them by meeting them outside and persuaded my husband to take me out for a meal! We walked over to the nearby Italian restaurant and we sat outside as the sun was still shining and it was really warm, the poor waiter looked a bit taken aback when he saw me as I had on my nightdress, dressing gown and slippers, my arms were black and blue from the drips and injections I was receiving and my hair was stuck to my head! He was very sweet though and I ordered a plate of scrambled eggs, mmm they were good and so was the homemade lemonade! Next to us sat an oldish lady with two young men, she sounded like something out of Absolutely Fabulous and was plying the men with red wine, it was very entertaining for me Darling!!

I can remember the day one of the nurses wheeled her trolley over with her tools of torture, she was going to remove some of my staples, I hid under the sheets and she finally coaxed me out! She was so kind she laughed and told me that it wouldn’t hurt at all and to close my eyes and say a little prayer with her! So we said the Hail Mary and I pretended that I hadn't seen the horrible contraption that looked like a giant pair of nail clippers!

I had to return to the hospital for my results and was finally told that I had Stage 3C cancer, they believed it started in the endometrium and I would be undergoing chemo and radiotherapy. I couldn’t believe it what a shock, after all my trips to the GP and made to feel like I was wasting their time I had Cancer! As the consultant broke the news to me I had to stop him as my body would not stop shaking and I couldn’t take in what he was saying! This couldn’t be happening to me surely?

One of the first jobs we had on the kibbutz was looking after the turkeys, I had to feed them, clean up after them and pick up dead ones! One of my friends had to inseminate them and the third friend was lucky she escaped the turkeys and got a job in the kitchens washing small dishes.

Our kibbutz was quite large and had a number of factories on site producing an assortment of; polysterene containers, bagged peanuts, fruit juice, and a metal factory. I worked in all of them and hated each one as I much preferred being out in the sunshine. The kibbutz had a massive orchard full of orange, lemon, lime and grapefruit trees. A massive cow shed and cotton fields.

My favourite job was working in the cotton fields, I used to love wandering around the fields fixing the irrigation pipes, that was until I nearly cut off one of my fingers, and then I was moved back to the orchards!

My worst job was cleaning out the toilets and showers which the volunteers used, oh my god the smell of the mens urinals! Eugh it was horrendous!!! I couldn’t, I tried, I really really did, but I just couldn’t bear the smell, so the only thing that I could do was put a peg on my nose, wrap a large t shirt around my head and I got a bucket and filled it with hot soapy water and bleach and then I ran in and threw it! Can anyone explain to me why oh why there was ‘toilet’ not in the toilet but on and around the toilet eugh!!!

The rest of the kibbutz looked like a great big holiday camp it was so clean and modern, we had a basket ball court, an outdoor swimming pool, a coffee bar, a large restaurant and a cinema.

We met so many people from all around the world there were some great characters there, and over the months my friends and I even became the pub managers! Well it wasn’t really a pub but a large shed, with a fridge and a record player! We used to order the beers in and serve behind the ramshackle bar!

We often had BBQs with our great friends the turkeys, and we used to sit outside in the evening listening to one of the volunteers strumming their guitar while we sipped our Maccabi’s and smoked our time cigarettes!

Life was so peaceful and uncomplicated, all we had to do was make sure we got up in time for work, once we had finished we would shower, eat lunch and then hitch down to the local beach or lie by the pool all afternoon. I am a non swimmer and one day I had the misfortune of being thrown in, I remember floundering around in that pool until someone shouted out, Jean stand up!!!!

16th June

My temping job in the City was great, I used to get in to work at about 7.30 and run down to the gym in the basement and do a work out until about 8.30 and then shower and get dressed for work every day! I worked with a really young fun team and it was a real laugh. The instructors in the gym were keen for me to start practising my holistic therapies down there, and I was really excited about it. My new life was finally going to take off, that was until my abdomen started to grow, I remember feeling really frustrated that I wasn’t toning up or losing weight and I was really working hard in that gym!!!

That weekend I had another Reiki course thank goodness and the lovely Yogi would be there, well when I walked in to my friend’s house where the lesson was taking place everyone fell silent, I looked like a pregnant goose! They told me to forget the lesson and I was laid onto a massage couch with everyone’s hands on me for some major healing! The Yogi told me that I had to go straight to the hospital as it was a matter of life or death! I was really frightened so on my way home I rang my mum and we went straight into A&E.

After lots of tests and scans they rushed me off to Barts in London as I had to have an emergency hysterectomy!

15th June 2007

Have you ever wondered what your life would have been like if you had made a different choice? I had the opportunity to spend a month in Mexico with friends when I was 21 years old, but as I had just met someone and felt settled in a job I turned the offer down. Don’t get me wrong I wasn’t nervous about packing my job in and travelling at all, I had already done that when I was only 19!

I packed in a job bought a rucksack and jetted off to Israel with 2 friends and spent 12 months on a kibbutz and had a whale of a time! We were 3 scatty Essex girls with no plans or contacts who just turned up on a kibbutz in the early hours one morning and luckily were taken in.

We were taken to the Volunteer office and were kitted out with our regulation shorts, t shirt, jumper and the most hideous shoes you have ever seen, which I could never bring myself to wear!

We had to work 7 hours a day 6 days a week, we could accumulate extra hours so that we could take time off to travel around the country or just head off to the beach. In return the kibbutz paid us £13 a month, provided us with a bed, cooked meals, washed our clothes, gave us stationery and the smokers even got 5 packs a week!

It was like heaven we were going to have a ball!

Last year I had another choice to make did I listen to my doctor and persevere with the damned coil or get it removed! Well I asked my GP to remove it and demanded to be referred to a specialist, while I was waiting for my appointment to come through, something happened to me! My abdomen …. it started to swell!

14th June 2007

Well what you may ask has this got to do with life after redundancy! I took the plunge back in May 2005 to leave my well paid full time job, it was a big risk as I had worked for the same company for more than 20 years, the company was very flexible about where I worked so I spent most of my time working from home which tied in nicely with family life, thank you very much! I had great plans I would set up my own holistic therapy company! Sell on ebay or even property develop! But sometimes life leads you down different roads or makes you veer off into different directions on the way!

Back in 2004 I started planning my great escape from 9 to 5 and embarked on a VTCT course in Reflexology which I absolutely loved and luckily I made some great friends there as well. Our teacher a font of all holistic knowledge was very interesting and I went onto study Indian Head, Holistic Body Massage and Reiki I and II with her. It was during the Reiki II course that things really came to a head for me.

Giving up a well paid cushy job is no easy task and I was really upset when I actually left and felt a great loss at leaving all the great friends I had made over the years. I took a couple of months off went on holiday with the family to Antigua and really enjoyed myself! I had made the fatal mistake of promising to go back to do some maternity leave cover, which turned into another cushy number so I pushed my new holistic life onto the back burner!

It was during the summer of 2006 while I was temping in the City and battling with my lady problems and my GP when I got a call from my Reflexology teacher asking me to join her Reiki II class. I was reluctant as I was in a lot of discomfort as the coil had seemed to make my symptons worse. She told me that the course would help me and so I agreed to come along, the first session was taking place at her house and she told us all to wear white (a good healing colour) and was going to introduce us to a Yogi Master, how exciting!

I was a bit nervous about the all in white bit but went well prepared and an open mind! It was a great day the Yogi was an inspiration even though he could hardly speak a word of English, he was a handsome French man with a big kind heart and we all warmed to him! Well thank god it was a hot summer day that’s all I can say as I spent most of it rinsing my shorts out! The Yogi was very concerned about me and warned me that there was something inside me that had to be removed immediately.

I thought he was talking about the coil …..

13th June

This is my first entry onto my new blog so bear with me while I get used to it!

Have you ever sat in your local GP and wondered why everyone that went in before you seemed to take an age but when it came to your turn you only got two minutes and in that time the doctor spent most of the time tapping away on their computer or just staring at an object on the wall behind you, could it possibly be the clock even? Well that is how I felt last year every time I visited mine.

I am one of those women that sailed through life healthily and only visited the doctor every few years for that horrible internal so you can imagine my horror when I started having ‘women problems’, the first major incident happened at a dinner party in London, luckily I was wearing black but unluckily for me it was a dress! I managed to get out of the restaurant without any of my companions noticing but my fellow commuters weren’t so fortunate.

This was to be the first of many incidents, which resulted in numerous visits to my GP and having a coil fitted and being assured that it would all go back to normal if not disappear all together. Well that turned out to be famous last words ….