Machines and medievals

First a gripe. The 'most fragile suction machine in the world' broke again last week. Split plastic - the manufacturer says our nurses are too heavy handed - none of them are male (not meant as sexist) and as far as I know they don't do weight training. Now this is a potentially life critical piece of machinery, to keep his airways clear. I'd have thought the response would have been to get it fixed urgently and argue about it later. (How naive am I?) No, because it's still in warranty, loan store don't want to pay for it mending and the manufacturer say we've damaged it by not following the cleaning instructions properly ... so it stays broken. This is why we held on to the old obsolete one when it passed its sell by date - so that we'd have something to get through the 'admin delay periods'. If it isn't mended quickly, I'll have to go into shout mode again. Probably need to do some calculations to sort out the shout ballistics ... direction = loan store v manufacturer, elevation = seniority level. Thank goodness we're not on Direct Payments.

Meanwhile, we took our son to a medieval re-enactment over the weekend. Lots of interesting textures (he was decidedly not impressed with the chain mail but seemed OK with the pigs head), smells (herbal tent etc. interesting), and tastes (the blackberry and cassis jam was much better accepted than the damson preserve). All in all, he had a reasonable day without too much hypersalivation from the hay fever. He's off out without us today, with one of his mates (plus nurse of course) but didn't forget fathers day - the chocolates will not last.