The BIG news today is that my brother Paul has been given the all clear at his Urology appointment. Well done mate! He will also get 6 monthly checkups for the rest of his life, which does mean having someone else's finger poked up your bum twice a year, but hey, enjoy!

Today is blog number 50!!!!!!

I have been told that leaving a comment on this blog is not straight forward for some people. Most people either comment to me through my e mail address or on Facebook. Others just phone me or send a text. I have made all the settings on the blog as easy as possible for leaving a comment but don't worry, staying in touch is just that, however you choose to do it.

Do you ever look around antique shops and see wedding rings, jewellery, books with personal messages in like, 'to Kate on her 21st birthday', or old black & white photographs with people staring out at you, a total stranger? They used to call them second hand shops! They get most of their stuff from 'house clearances'. That's when someone dies suddenly, the relatives all descend on the house like a cloud of vultures on a carcass, to scavenge the best bits first. When that flock has gone, the 'house clearance' guys get called in and they take the rest of the bones away and sell them in their 'Antique Shops'. Now you are thinking.....Where the hell is he taking us this time?

Well several years ago, I started to give things to people, not because I was dying and I certainly don't think I am now. We all tend to carry a lot of what Beverley calls 'stuff' through life, and we have to make sure that we don't simply die one day with all that 'stuff' under the bed. I wanted to make sure that my kids got their baptism certificates, the photos of when they were young, newspapers that I had saved from the day they were born and locks of hair taken when they were just shiny, new little people. I am still doing this now and get great pleasure in seeing peoples' faces when I give them something that I have treasured for a long time. I feel that I am one step ahead of the vultures and that there will only be bones left for those clearance guys.

I have experienced enough funerals to know how argumentative they can get if nobody knows what the deceased wanted; so I decided to E Mail my kids with the ground rules. You know the stuff.....where to sprinkle my ashes, do I want to donate body parts, what kind of service etc. Well, if one of them thought I wanted to be buried, with an acorn between my butt cheeks so that my spirit could return as an oak tree, but then another thought I wanted to be cremated and then my ashes sprinkled on top of Mount Everest, the negotiations could last some time! So I am sorry if this freaked some of them a bit but it's easier to plan this now rather than at sometime in the future when I might really be dying, would you say?

Are you a 'sayer' or a 'doer'?

"It's not what you say, but what you do that defines you".