Living in Cyprus - December 1999
2nd December:
Back to the orthopaedic surgeon to have a further x-ray on Daniel's broken wrist. They said it was healing well and that he wouldn't need to keep the arm in a sling all the time. Daniel asked if the plaster on his hand could be cut back a bit to enable him to play the clarinet - he's had to miss his lessons, and been unable to play in church for a couple of weeks. The doctor understood this, and the nurse was able to cut away a large enough portion to give Daniel the finger-movement he needs. That's a relief.
I was only charged £10 for this visit including the x-ray, and didn't even bother to argue when they wrote me an inflated receipt, just like last time (see the end of November for an explanation). We asked when the plaster could be removed, and the doctor said about two weeks, or a little more. I explained that we're flying back to the UK early on December 16th, and he said it would probably be all right on December 15th... he wanted to have it taken off there, even though I said it could presumably be done in the UK if necessary.
5th December:
It worked out well that we changed our flights, since the people organising the Christmas concert were very happy to have the boys in it. Tim is singing two solos, since he's the only boy soprano - the traditional 'Once in Royal' and a song from the musical 'Night of Miracles' which is being performed by the choir. Daniel will be playing his clarinet, now that he is able to again!
However, I now need to go out to try and find some reasonably decent shoes for Daniel for this concert! He has some sandals, and one pair of whitish trainers, but it’s almost impossible to find shoes his size here. He doesn’t really want 'smart' shoes (a big advantage of not going to school is not needing to have smart shoes!) but I hope we can find some black trainers that will look acceptable.
Tim will have to have proper shoes since he'll be more obvious with his solos, but then he likes smart shoes, and is hoping to spend January when we're in the UK going into St Francis School, so he would have needed something for that anyway.
14th December:
Richard's just working on a high-tech project... at the carol concert on Thursday the organisers want everyone to sing Cliff Richard's 'Millennium Prayer', with the track playing and the audience joining in. The words were published in Evangelism paper, but the only recording we have is a rather poor quality one that Daniel taped from the World Service radio when they were playing the charts! There aren't *any* copies of the CD or tape on the island, apparently, although lots of people want it.
So Richard phoned a friend at a recording studio in the UK and asked if he could get hold of it and send as an mp3 email attachment, which the guy eventually managed to do. It came as 4.5 megabytes, and Richard has then converted it to a 39 megabyte file by some complicated program of Tim's, and is now recording it onto CD using his work CD-burner! I said it must surely be illegal, but we're going to buy a copy of the real CD in the UK so I guess it's just recording it in advance as we can't get hold of it any other way.
15th December:
Back to the orthopedic surgeon for a last visit. The nurse was about to use the scissors the wrong way around to cut off the plaster-cast when Daniel realised what she was doing and said he would do it himself! He was very relieved to have the plaster off at last. We were only charged £8 for this one. So the entire 'incident' has cost less than our excess on the medical insurance, and I won't be able to claim anything.
Fairly impressive, really, as I'd expected it to be significantly more. And just as well since I won't have to try to explain why I got inflated receipts - which could possibly stir up trouble along the way. We had to buy Daniel an elasticated wrist bandage, which we eventually found at one of the pharmacists, since the wrist will apparently be a bit stiff, and perhaps ache somewhat for a while.
Although
various people will be looking after the cats in our absence, it's
going to be hard to say goodbye to them for such a long time. Daniel is
convinced that Sophia knows we are going, and is worried that she might
not reognise him when we get back in February.
16th December:
At least it won't be quite as hectic as we'd thought - at one point our flights were going to be from Paphos, a two-hour drive away, in the middle of the night - so we thought we'd be doing a 'von Trapp family' scenario from 'The Sound of Music' - singing on stage, then fleeing the country! However they were changed again to Larnaka, much to our relief.
Richard is doing the sound at the concert,
and we want to video Tim's solos and some of the other items, so I
think I'll be the one on the video camera, after he's set it up! As
ever we're frantically busy rushing around trying to get things ready,
nowhere near finished with packing...