Last week I wrote a couple of pieces on my blog about my experiences with the French medical services concerning a heart problem I experienced over here.
A couple of commenters were kind enough to say that they enjoyed it and thought I should submit it to the Irish Times to be included in their Health Supplement.
I decided to give it a go, and cobbled together a few of the pieces I had blogged and sent them into the editor.
Yesterday an encouraging reply came back from the editor, she would like to reproduce my piece in the supplement but I would have to reduce it to a mere 900 words.
I checked the piece I had submitted, it was 2060 words long.
I was going to have to reduce it by over a half to have it accepted.
Well it was a literary version of Sophie’s Choice as I then decided which of my verbal children I was going to have to excise.
The first culling was without doubt the hardest, I discarded, I thought, ruthlessly, then counted the result- I had only managed to lose about 300 words.
After that it became easier, I began to realise that I really had to decide which bits I wanted to save, let them remain sacred, and hack heartlessly at the rest.
By cull number 4, I had reduced the piece to about 1200 words – my goal was in sight.
Cull number 5 was different, I nit-picked my way through the text, dropping single words and changing phrases to be more economical with the text.
Next word count came in at 890.
Bingo!
This has now gone off to the Irish Times for their consideration; I’ll let you know if it is accepted.
All in all a fascinating exercise but, honestly, I preferred the original.

For about the last ten years in Ireland all the Garlic which could be purchased was nasty, small, dry bitter little heads. When I brought this up with the shop where I was a consultant in Waterford I was told that it was the only type available in Ireland and came from China.

Every time I went to France after that I bought a string of Garlic – large sweet juicy cloves flushed with pink which melted in the cooking and I know that quite a lot of Irish travellers have been prepared to suffer from garlic scented underwear for some time as they sacrificed some of their Ryanair allowance on a string of the “Stinking Rose”.

I had a fellow Irish restaurateur staying a few years ago and she, having a minister of state dine in her restaurant, bearded him about the Chinese monopoly of the garlic trade.
It was a trade agreement, he informed her, and the Chinese garlic imports were more than balanced by the Irish exports to that country.

From what I read in the IT this morning The Great Garlic Scam has now hit the headlines in Ireland as an Irish food importer has been jailed for six years for smuggling Chinese garlic into the country disguised as apples.
Chinese garlic, it transpires attracts a tax of 232% making it roughly 24 times higher than the tax on other fruit and veg.
The convicted importer owed €1.6million (sic) on unpaid garlic tax which he would not or could not pay.

What an appalling mess.

One part of me applauds that someone who flooded the country with such revolting garlic over such a long time should be made to suffer.
The other part wonders if he is being sacrificed to maintain an unworkable trade agreement which showed total contempt for the Irish consumer.

Back in April 2005 when I had just started writing this blog I decided to put togther this list of my favourite things.

This I revised further in May of 2007- and the whole thing has taken so much time I have decided to give it another outing today.

In Strictly Alphabetical Order
And I reserve the right to add and subtract at will.
Try making one yourself- its an amazing exercise.

Adam Gopnik’s
Paris to the Moon

Alan Davidson’s
North Atlantic Seafood

Alhambra Palace

Babettes Feast

Ballymaloe

Being 63

Being in the shade
in the hot sun

Being on the Radio

Bill Bryson’s
Travel Books

Bookshops

Bridges

Brocantes

Brothers and Sisters

Buying Furniture

Caitriona’s Photoblog

Clive Nunn’s
Black Limestone Table

Constance Spry

Cooking

Crab

Croissants

Dark Chocolate

Daughter Caitriona

Daughter Deirdre

Daughter Eileen

Doing Crosswords

Driving in France

Dublin Bay Prawns

Eating Mayonnaise

Ecco Shoes

Elizabeth David

Fatherhood

Frank Mc Kelvey

Fred Astaire

French Chanson

Garbo

Garlic

Georges Brassens

Getz/Gilberto
Bossa Nova

Gewürztraminer

Gilbert and Sullivan

Gin and Tonic
on a Sunday morning

Giovanna Garzoni’s
Food Paintings

Giving Dinner Parties

Griffith Place

Guys and Dolls

Having Really Short Hair

Hot Gin and Lemon

Hugh Fearnley
Whittingstall

Insomniac Creativity

Internet Clothes
Shopping

Irish Antique Shops

Jacques Brel

James Taylor

Jane Austen

Jane Grigson

Joni Mitchell

Joyce’s Ulysses

Judy Collins

Judy Dench

Julian Barnes

Kate and Anna
McGarrigle
(and all the
Wainwrights,
mostly)

Kir (especially on
an empty stomach)

Lambs Kidneys

Lambs Liver

Lands End Shirts

Le Grand Meulnes
by Alain Fournier

Lemon Tart

Losing Weight

Lucia di Lammermoor

Lyric fm (usually)

Madrigallery

Manzanilla Sherry (well chilled)

Making Bread

Making Mayonnaise

Marcel Pagnol

Mashed Potato

Milo’s
“Smoke Away” Story

Misty Mornings
in France

Monet

My Brothers and
Sisters in Law

My collection of Glass

My Eileen Grey Table

My Grand Nephews
and Nieces

My Green
Gustavsberg Plate

Nieces and Nephews

Not being Overdrawn

Notre Presbytère

Novels of Dornford Yates

Oklahoma !

Old French Pub Glass

Old Friends

Our Birch Tree

Patricia Wells

Patrick O Brian’s
Aubrey /Maturin novels.

Picpoul de Pinet

Poached Apricots

Poached Eggs

Puns

Rasteau in Provence

Red Wines from
Southern Rhone

Retirement

Sally Barne’s Kippers

San Severino

Savon d’Alep

Seamus Heaney’s
Clearances

Seven Brides for
Seven Brothers

Shorter Oxford
Dictionary

Sile

Sleep

Smell of Real Tomatoes

Smoked Salmon
with Scrambled Eggs

Stem Ginger in Syrup

Some Like it Hot

St. Roch

Sunday Miscellany
(Sometimes)

Sunday Observer

Swimming Pools

Theatre Antique d’Orange

The (English) Independent

The Antiques Roadshow

The end of Winter

The Good Food Guide

The Magic Flute

The Marriage of Figaro

The New Yorker

The Smell of Turf Burning

The Weekend
(Since Retiring)

Thèzan-lès-Béziers

Three Rivers of France
by Freda White

Tom Lehrer

Under Milk Wood

Waterford Market
Jenkins Lane

W.B. Yeates;
Song of the
Wandering Aengus

White Bowls of Coffee

White Burgundy

White Peaches

Wild Strawberries

Writing on the Computer

About ten years ago my friend Micheál, who was then also my doctor, put me on a diet. Since I had given up the fags (about ten years before that) I had put on a fairly steady growth about the waist and he told me that I was not improving my health by carrying on like this.
I then bought the Weight Watcher books and stuck to a fairly steady diet plan. After three months I succeeded in losing one and a half stone and there I stuck. The doc was encouraging, I had improved my health and, should I stick to the regime I would likely continue to stave off the dangerous levels of obesity.
And so I did, at least for the next for five years, until we moved to France
But then my fondness for cooking in butter and cream began to creep back into my diet and because I was now weighing myself in kilos I had no particular reference point to relate to my previous bulk.
I also became adept at arguments like; if I am going to have to forswear butter and cream for ever from my diet am I going to lose all of my pleasure in eating?
Then I signed on to the medical system over here and my French doctor in his turn began to complain about the Dwyer Bulk.
Something was going to Have To Be Done.
Then in Ireland over Christmas my son-in-law (a lath on legs) innocently started to talk about this new Swedish died he had heard about. They recommended forswearing all carbohydrates and, they had by this method managed to allow a high proportion of Swedish diabetics to reduce sufficient weight to come off their medication.

Then a friend’s son, a football player, was put on this diet by his coach when the inactivity caused by a broken leg had caused him to put on weight, he swore it was working well for him.

The final straw was when I read in the Independent that Lucinda O Sullivan, their formidable food critic, had managed to lose four stone in as many months by going on what she called a wheat free diet. (She did mention however that she had also given up potatoes, rice and pasta)

When we came back home to France in January I determined that I was going to give this diet a chance- it had, as far as I was concerned, a lot going for it principally I suppose that it was the opposite of the fat control diet which I had, at this point lost all relish in.
Sile, out of fellowship I feel rather than need, agreed to go along with me.
Now I have always been a person who believed that compensations and rewards to self, if one is making sacrifices, are a positive way to ensure that one keeps it up.
I tackled cigarette withdrawal with massive amounts of nicotine patches, extra-strong mints and strong coffee and it worked.
My annual dry November is sweetened by copious quantities of non-alcohol beers and as many exotic fruit juices as I can find.
We agreed that to tailor this directly to our needs we would lay a couple of ground rules.
Number one was that, rather than forever eschewing the spud and the bread we would have one blow out day in the week where these would be allowed.

Number two was that we would contrive still to make our meals as interesting as possible, adding extra veg in place of the missing starch, being prepared to cook with butter and cream etc.

We started this regime in mid-January and now, six weeks later I feel sufficiently confident in its efficacy to give a progress report.
The principal success of this diet is that I haven’t felt hungry while on it- the counting calories of weight watchers left me constantly hungry, cranky and generally low. If I do feel hungry I can (and do) nibble on a chunk of cheese- much more likely to bring the stomach to heel than a raw carrot.

Another secondary positive is that by forswearing carbs you also eat less fat- what good is butter, after all, without a spud or a slice of bread to help it down.
Breakfasts (especially for a putative Frenchman) are probably the most difficult area but eggs, bacon and kippers are allowed (and indeed are eaten) and (inspired by the excellent breakfast offered in a hotel in the Loire in which we stayed at Christmas time) we have discovered a delicious mixture of Fresh Goat’s Cheese, Honey and Walnuts (and/or indeed fruit) which sets us up a treat.
The rest of the day’s meals are really no trouble for a reasonably competent cook- using a slice of tomato or cucumber as a shovel for your pate, and the glories of cabbage with ginger with your curry and then with bacon and juniper with the roast pork are easy tricks.
The interesting news is that by this pain free method (at least to me) I have so far lost four and a half kilos, or roughly three quarters of a kilo a week, nice and steady going like the best diets should be.
I said to Sile this morning that my principal worry is that if I keep this up, in three years’ time I will disappear into thin air (but somehow this I think is not likely.)

Oh dear, Oh dear Oh dear.

Just checked back through my archives and discovered that I have been at this blogging business now since February in 2005, that is seven years and a few days ago, during that time I seem to have made nearly 2000 entries which works out at damn nearly five and a half blogs a week on average.
I have written about just about everything, particularly about food and family , words and travelling. I have married off one daughter and produced two Grandsons and made the dramatic move to France and all with Síle by my side.
A fair proportion of these blogs have been entered at 3 or 4 in the morning (like today’s) as I find this release of steam in the middle of the night as a great cure for insomnia.
Great thanks are due to those Constant Readers who have stuck by me (you know who you are ) and especially those who sent me wishes during the last episode of slip sliding through the French medical system.
(Jeez this is begining to look like an Oscar speech)
Anyway, just before anyone of you drop me off your Favourites list, I have no intentions of stopping- I enjoy reading my own Words far too much for that.
And (as the title indicates) I regard the whole business as being out of my control.

For the last couple of months I have been in a state of anxiety for quite a large proportion of the time because of a recurrent pain in the chest.
It wasn’t a severe pain so I could manage most things without bother and every time my sensible half would tell me to get it checked out my foolish half would instantly pooh pooh any such insanity.
I gave myself very good reasons for this- going to the doctor would make me look a fool because there was nothing wrong except indigestion and/or he would have to send me on for further tests anyway where I would be probed and poked at, all for nothing. There is, I think, a very strong inclination in men to avoid for as long as possible any contact with a medicine man based on such slender reasons as that such contact will result in embarrassment.
At a party recently I heard two (English) men discuss their dosage of tablets “I mean, I don’t know” said one to the other “There was nothing wrong ‘till I went and saw the Doctor” It is as if the concept of preventative medicine had by-passed a whole sex.
Of course when I was sufficiently laid low that I had to admit to myself and then my wife that something needed to be done, and actually made the appointment to see a doctor, the relief was immediate. I was now putting the whole responsibility on someone else’s shoulders and all my anxieties and secret fears dissipated.
The rest, for anyone who has been reading my last few blogs, is history. I had a problem, and a couple of hours on an operating table fixed it completely. I emerged from the hospital (well clinic officially) a new man, re energised, recharged and (more or less) anxiety free. There was not, as far as I can remember any moments of embarrassment- from the moment I stepped into my doctor’s office and described my symptoms his first words to me were: “You were right to come and see me.” The first words the cardiologist said were: “Yes, we have a job to do here” all enormously reassuring to a man with a morbid fear of seeming to be a hypochondriac.
I suppose it would be too optimistic a thought to hope that this would make either me of Josef Savon mend their ways and become a little more open in matters of health but I feel obliged to put it down, to tell my, nearly sixty three year old, self not to be such an ass the next time.

If any of you were wondering about the song was which my Cardio was humming as he put me back together last week I here repeat my entry from October in 2007 which gives not only all the words but also my poor translation.

I have always been a sucker for a French Chanson, Piaf, Brel, Trenet all reduce me to quivering Francophilia.
My latest discovery, of at least a year, is Georges Brassens, partly because he came from Sète, which is just down the road from us in Herault but mainly because he is just bloody brilliant.
The Brassens song of the summer had to be Les Copains d’Abord, partly because it was on the play list of Nostalgie my French radio station of choice whose title exactly describes its repertoire, but also because I managed to do a sort of weird Karaoke of this song with a Hurdy Gurdy lady in Capestang.

One of the great rewards of being semi-retired is that every so often one can clear a day and be totally self indulgent. Today was such a day and I finally made good on a promise I made to myself during the summer and did a translation of Les Copains.
I must confess that when I started out I had no idea what the song was about. It turned out to be a fairly innocent sea-shanty.

I didn’t translate the title, it just works better in French, can you imagine Piaf’s standard, La Vie en Rose, having any resonance at all if translated as The Pink Life?
Les Copains d’Abord roughly means Friends First.

Here are Brassans words followed by my effort at translation.

Les Copains d’Abord

Non, ce n’était pas le radeau
De la Méduse, ce bateau
Qu’on se le dise au fond des ports
Dise au fond des ports
Il naviguait en pèr’ peinard
Sur la grand-mare des canards
Et s’app’lait les Copains d’abord
Les Copains d’abord

Ses fluctuat nec mergitur
C’était pas d’la litterature
N’en déplaise aux jeteurs de sort
Aux jeteurs de sort
Son capitaine et ses mat’lots
N’étaient pas des enfants d’salauds
Mais des amis franco de port
Des copains d’abord

C’étaient pas des amis de luxe
Des petits Castor et Pollux
Des gens de Sodome et Gomorrhe
Sodome et Gomorrhe
C’étaient pas des amis choisis
Par Montaigne et La Boetie
Sur le ventre ils se tapaient fort
Les copains d’abord

C’étaient pas des anges non plus
L’Évangile, ils l’avaient pas lu
Mais ils s’aimaient tout’s voil’s dehors
Tout’s voil’s dehors
Jean, Pierre, Paul et compagnie
C’était leur seule litanie
Leur Credo, leur Confiteor
Aux copains d’abord

Au moindre coup de Trafalgar
C’est l’amitié qui prenait l’quart
C’est elle qui leur montrait le nord
Leur montrait le nord
Et quand ils étaient en détresse
Qu’leurs bras lancaient des S.O.S.
On aurait dit les sémaphores
Les copains d’abord

Au rendez-vous des bons copains
Y avait pas souvent de lapins
Quand l’un d’entre eux manquait a bord
C’est qu’il était mort
Oui, mais jamais, au grand jamais
Son trou dans l’eau n’se refermait
Cent ans après, coquin de sort
Il manquait encore

Des bateaux j’en ai pris beaucoup
Mais le seul qu’ait tenu le coup
Qui n’ai jamais viré de bord
Mais viré de bord
Naviguait en père peinard
Sur la grand-mare des canards
Et s’app’lait les Copains d’abord
Les Copains d’abord

Les Copains d’Abord

No, it was not that sort of craft
Not like Medusa on her raft
As they say deep within the port
Deep within the port
We sailed along swinging the lead
Through the Atlantic and the Med
And call ourselves Copains
Les Copains d’Abord

Tossed by the waves but never sunk
We thought all literature was bunk
And feared not witchcraft or the sword
Witchcraft or the sword
But then our faith was deep and true
In both the captain and the crew
We were the freemen of the port
Les Copains d’Abord

We weren’t the men for the soft times
Like the tars from other climes
Or those from Sodom and Gomorrah
Sodom and Gomorrah
Nor were we like the special friends
In La Boetie or in Montaigne
But were rough buddies and hard chaws
Les Copains d’Abord.

But we were far from saints as well
And let the gospels go to hell
But we were all of one accord
When the south wind roared
Jean Paul, Pierre, Phillipe and Co
Believed in only one Credo,
One gospel one confiteor
Les Copains d’Abord

At the first signs of battle cry
We would be standing side by side
One hand upon the boarding sword
On the boarding sword
There was no need for SOS
Each man could sense his mates distress
This was their only semaphore
Les Copains d’Abord.

At the reunions of the mates
No one was missing none were late
Only those who had lost their sword,
Gone to their reward.
They’d be remembered all their lives
As would their sweethearts and their wives
For no dead man was e’er ignored
By Copains d’Abord

Oh there are lots of boats out there
From Biscay up to Finisterre
But never were such friends on board
Such good friends on board
We sail along swinging the lead
Through the Atlantic and the Med
And call ourselves Copains
Les Copains d’Abord.

Thursday last I took the plunge I went and signed myself into the Clinic de Millènaire in Montpellier to get my heart fixed.
My Cardiologist had told me to expect to be in for at least two nights as there were two distinct processes to perform, both involving inserting tools of different kinds into veins and once there being pushed up into my heart to perform their function. (Just like all roads lead to Rome so all veins lead to the heart).
Signing in was fine, Sile came with me to translate the harder words but in fact my French nearly sufficed.
I was put into a room with two beds and there was shortly joined by a friendly and kindly man of the Muslim persuasion who spent most of the rest of the time praying- I found this very soothing.

After a bit three nurses came to prepare me, one to shave the places where I was likely to be punctured, one to take my blood pressure and to give me an electrocardiogram and a student to watch and learn.
Then (having observed my girth) Madame the head nurse came back with two navy blue paper overalls ,one to wear with the opening at the front, one with the opening at the back (down at the theatre I was to observe that all the little slight French men had to do with only one) and also a fetching little navy bikini bottoms an essential thing to further protect the Famous Dwyer Modesty.
And so, shaven and shorn, having deprived myself off all food and drink for nearly eight hours and with my outfit topped off fetchingly with a baby blue Tam O’ Shanter hairnet the trollyman arrived and hopped me on my Chariot (that is what the French call them) and we headed down to theatre.
Imagine, if you will, Santa as a Gay Gorden in a navy paper mini kilt with matching knickers and toning Tam and you will get an idea how alluring I appeared.
We fortunately met no-one I knew on the way down but we did meet a frightened and lost Frenchman who, when I raised my self up in the chariot to see what was going on, gave a little shriek and galloped off down the corridor. My charioteer , it turned out , had spent some time in Sweden , a Northern and Liberal country , so was totally unphased by Santas in drag.

Once in the actual operating theatre I was rolled onto the table where a gowned up nurse took one look at my double paper pinafore ensemble and proceeded to cut it from me with a scissors. When I said indignantly “Madame you are destroying my beautiful dress” She replied (equally deadpan and quick as a wink) “Ah Monsieur but that blue is just not your colour”.
Thus bolstering my profound belief the French and the Irish share the same sense of humour.

Then a frighteningly young anaesthetist grabbed my arm, stuck one leg on the step of the table and with my arm over his knee deftly, painlessly and in a cool nonchalant fashion stuck a universal catheter in my arm. This was to be my mainline for the next two hours.
First up was my Radio Wave man and he decided to use the groin for his conduit to the heart. What he must have had (the squeamish and the genuinely knowledgeable should look away now) was some sort of soldering iron on a long wire which he then pushed up the vein to the heart. He told me that if I felt any pain I was to tell him and he would just increase the amount of drugs he was pumping into my arm.
At this stage I was completely pain-free, my only sensation was a delightfully pleasant feeling which was somehow reminiscent of bedsits in the sixties.
(I think they had dripped in something soothing into my arm to calm me)

For the next half hour or so he fiddled about with the soldering iron in my heart , every so often I would feel a burning sensation spread up to my jaw but it soon passed and I was not going to Let Ireland Down with a display of wimpishness.
What he was doing in (very) lay man’s terms was fixing the terminals in my heart battery to ensure that the recurrence of the skipped beat would not happen again.

Then to my surprise who appeared at my elbow, grinning from ear to ear, but my cardiologist.
“We decided”, he said” that while you were here we might as well do the second procedure as well- are you okay with that?”
I was fine with that.
Then he proceeded to push a small camera up to my heart via a vein in my wrist. He first of all gave me the same guarantee- “Any pain just let me know and we will fix it”
This one was a little more painful but, true to my new heroism when he asked me was I feeling any I croaked “No It’s Fine”
The cardio shot a look at me and then shouted at the Anaesthetist (in French) “He is being too brave, give him another little cocktail there Philippe”! Then a wonderful feeling of wellbeing spread up my arm and through my chest.
I was no longer feeling any pain.
Then as I lay there happily a familiar tune began to hum in my brain.
Then I began to recognise it; Georges Brassans “Copains d’Abord” one of my very favourite French songs- one I love so much I spent many weeks many years ago translating it, painstakingly, into rhyming English.
My Cardio was crooning it quietly and happily to himself as he worked: “Monsieur “I said “C’est Les copains vous chant” “You know this?” He said smiling. “It is my favourite song.”
I then explained how I had translated it etc. A truly surreal moment between him and me, talking about Brassans while he fiddled with my heart. So for the next twenty minutes or so, while he studied my heart from many angles (I could see out of the corner of my eye the images on the screen over our heads) he continued to hum “Les Copains” – a most reassuring sound as I knew that as long as he hummed contentedly about his work he was finding no evidence of heart disease- which was the whole point of his investigation.
After about thirty minutes or so (I was on the table for roughly two hours) he pulled out his camera, mopped up some of the blood from my various wounds and gave me the verdict :
“All Good “he said “Monsieur has fixed the flutter and I have found no evidence of disease, now you can go home tomorrow and then come into my office next week”, then he asked “Is your wife here” I said she was somewhere in the hospital. He shrugged and went off.
I then had to wait for a half hour in the recovery room , where I made myself busy teaching the nurse in charge the English terms for Hypertension and Echograph ( look them up) as she was hoping to spend some time on a Stage in England.
Eventually about two and a half hours after I had left it, I arrived back into my room- Sile was there. Before I could say a thing she said “It’s Ok, I know it’s good, the Cardiologist came and found me and told me all“ – I was amazed that a man so busy could have found the time for this moment of kindness.

I woke up the following morning feeling as light as a feather. Monsieur le Cardiologue was as good as his word, the strong weight I felt I had been carrying under my heart since Christmas was lifted and I felt truly well again, a marvellous feeling.
And then, the final bit of good news; when I called into the office to pay my bill on the way out, Madame stamped all my reports and smilingly assured me that there was nothing to pay.
Vive Le France!

Over Christmas, on New Year’s Day to be exact, having overindulged myself fearlessly, I developed a painful case of indigestion.
This was unusual in that the pain instead of being centered around the ribs was higher on the chest and stretched between the shoulders. I put it firmly down to the price being paid for the high life of Christmas and, true to form it responded to a Maalox tablet and dissipated.
As January and February progressed and I was back in France this new version of indigestion seemed to become the norm and I started to get a little quietly concerned. Could it (I whispered to my coward self) possibly be something else? But then another Maalox and I would laugh, and call myself a hypochondriac. Who ever heard of curing a Heart Attack with magnesium?
Then we went for a brief few days into Spain and met there my old buddy Michael. Michael is now single and (like myself) a man of a certain age and size.
He told us that having become concerned about his high blood pressure he had gone to the doctor in the Spanish town where he lived and he had sent him to a Heart clinic in the nearby city. There they had told him that he needed some treatment, in fact what amounted to a minor heart operation. This he did, all successfully.
This certainly made me realise that it was possible that I was acting either like a wimp or an ostrich.
On last Saturday week, and Sile and I decided to take a stroll in the hill behind Murviel, after a short climb I had to confess that I couldn’t go on, I was breathless and the chest pains had returned. Finally I slipped out of denial and confessed all to Sile and agreed to see my local doctor on Monday.
A brief note about the French medical system, because we now work in France and contribute to the social security system we are entitled to a valuable card called a Carte Vitale. This covers a huge amount of one’s medical and even dental expenses in France.
So on the following Monday I went to see my doctor.
He shared my concerns and organised an appointment for me with a cardiologist.
Because this is France that appointment was made for the following day.
So on Tuesday I went to meet what I now rather grandly call my cardiologist and there I had the usual tests being connected to a monitor by electrodes and then having my chest probed (externally of course) by an Ultrasound machine.
He then made his diagnosis; I had what he called a Flutter, an irregular heartbeat. He was going to put me on a course of tablets and daily injections for a week, make me take a blood test and on this basis he would decide on my treatment.
The system here is that you contact a district nurse, there a several in our village, and you then go to the chemist and get the necessary equipment and she comes and takes the blood for the tests and administers the injections.
Yesterday was the day to return to the Cardio. Having re-attached me to the machine and read the blood tests he sat Sile and I down and told us of our choices to fix this “Flutter”.
There was a procedure in which I would be attached to an electric shock machine and this usually fixed the problem- this usually only took a few hours and could happen in Beziers but, with this treatment the condition often returned.
The more modern treatment, he told us, involved, going into hospital for two or three days, having an angiogram (basically exploratory but minor surgery) and then some radio treatment which tended to fix the problem fully.
Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to have to watch ER on the tele will guess why I went for the second option.
Then his secretary got on the phone and within half an hour I was booked into the Cardiac Clinic in Montpellier for tomorrow.
So tomorrow I am going into a French hospital, as a patient for the first time.
Watch this space for further developments.

For many yearsa I have owned a book which I inherited from my Father called “The O Dwyers of Kilnamanagh ” written by a Sir Michael O’ Dwyer.

This man , although he mentions our family in Cork in his book as possible connections , was not closely related (I sincerely hope not anyway)

As I came across the book which had spent the last five years in a box , just a few days ago I was prompted to try and find out where he came from and where he acquired his title.

He was it turns out an extremely bright boy from near Kilnamanagh in Tipperary who by brains and scholarship gained a scholarship to Baliol College in Oxford where he got a first class degree in Jurisprudence.

He went to India where he rose through the ranks and in 1912 was appointed Lieutenant General of the Punjab.

The following is how the rest of the history of his life was reported by the Sikh Times on March 25th 1940 :

In April 1919, Indian nationalist agitation racked Amritsar, in the Punjab of northern India. When British officials arrested two nationalist leaders, British agents were murdered, a bank was plundered, the city hall and a church burned. Europeans were attacked in the streets. On April 13, Brigadier General Reginald E.H. Dyer arrived with 600 troops, sent a drum crier through the streets shouting an edict which forbade meetings of more than three people.

As for Sir Michael, long ago he gave his opinion of the Mahatma: ‘The biggest impostor that ever fooled the credulity of a people or frightened a cowardly Government.’

Well well well , I do seem to have a habit of discovering some thoroughly disreputable ancestors.