Biking, Book Launches and Biopsies

I mentioned last time that we were selling our car. Well, the car sold on Monday: someone came to collect it, and I watched them drive it away. It was indeed a strange feeling! But it was somewhat mollified by going to buy a bike on Tuesday.

I popped over to Halfords in Enfield, and bought a new ‘hybrid’ bike. When I say hybrid I don’t mean it has a combined petrol / electric engine – I mean it’s a cross between a lightweight racing bike and a slightly more heavyweight mountain bike. They seem to be popular at the moment: they’re often used for commuting (which is what I’m going to use mine for).

Unexpectedly, they built the bike for me there and then and I was able to ride it home! Well, I say ‘ride’… I walked it most of the way through Enfield (after having not ridden in ten years I didn’t want to ride it on busy roads) – but I did ride it most of the way back from Enfield to East Barnet. I’d forgotten how much effort it actually takes to cycle – in my teenage years I had a paper round for a couple of years and just got used to cycling. I don’t remember it ever taking so much effort, maybe I was just fitter back then. The crazy thing is, my old bike was a heavy steel-framed beast: this weighs in a fair bit lighter, being an aluminium frame!

Anyway, on Wednesday I decided to ride it up to college – which is up a fairly steep hill whichever way you go. I took the slightly easier route, and – much to my surprise – I managed it! Hopefully this will be a positive step over the next term, not having to do a 20+ minute walk every time I need to go in.

So. Moving on: Wednesday evening, Phil and I headed into London for Mark Watson’s “The Knot” book launch. In case you are unaware of him, Mark Watson is a comedian who Phil and I really like. He’s just written a book, it was launched at the Edinburgh festival but this was the London launch. A group of people gathered in St-Giles-in-the-Fields to hear Mark reading a few excerpts from the novel, and generally entertain us! It was great fun. Unfortunately we had to head off before the second part of the evening, but before we left Mark signed our copy of the book 🙂

So… that brings me to yesterday. I went into hospital for the biopsy I mentioned before. Basically they needed to take a bit more skin to make sure there were no satellite lesions. I went into hospital for 9AM – and I didn’t get into theatre until gone 3PM! So it was a long wait – but after that, it was done pretty quickly. I was out by 4PM, and then we were discharged about 7PM (would have been earlier but they were really busy).

Anyway, I’m just glad it’s all done. Hopefully that will be the last of the facial surgery I need to have done, if I take care in the sun. I have the stitches removed on Thursday next week, and then I have a follow-up dermatology appointment in December.

So… that’s how my week has been! All ready for term to begin next week … I hope!


Comments

2 responses to “Biking, Book Launches and Biopsies”

  1. […] Watson was very funny – it was our third time seeing him live (well, fourth if you count the book launch a few weeks ago). Unfortunately the tour is now over so you can’t go and see him, but if […]

  2. […] Knot by Mark Watson. We went to the book launch for this book. It’s a very entertaining read dealing with what quite dark subject matter […]

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