Dear Rebekah,

The time has come to make other plans. It's that thing we all have to do, at some stage, to fool ourselves into thinking that we can salvage something from last lot of plans that didn't work out either. This year's first journey to Spain never had a 'Plan B' until a few days ago …and then it was only a nascent plan. I'm not really being obtuse …just not leaping in and explaining everything straight away! Where's the fun in just being presented with the factual account of some recent events …you might as well read a local government progress report on tree planting in the area (gripping reading for only a handful of terminal nerds). All will be revealed …eventually. Feel the suspense!

Stephanie just isn't getting well fast enough for us to take the risk of trying to drive through France …she might be perfectly okay by our revised departure date in mid March (but things do not look good). The chances are that my dear wife would arrive at each destination town so tired that she would lack the stamina to take in the sights …this turns the trip into something gruelling. Would I go off around the town, with my camera, and enjoy the evening whilst Stephanie languishes in a hotel room? Never in your life!

No, it looked as though the only option left was flying (just as well, because I really have not progressed much past the pronunciation pages of my French phrase book). I could easily write a couple of hundred words about what I think about French pronunciation …but I will spare you (for the moment).

Then Stephanie passed a kidney stone and there was blood in her urine. We went to see Stephanie's doctor and she asked for a urine sample to be taken, at home, the following morning. Can you think of one uniquely female physiological event that would make such a sample completely pointless? At fifty-four Stephanie wonders how much longer they can still come along regularly! A blood sample was also taken to test for the concentration of something called Creatinin (a fairly reliable indicator of certain things not being as they should be in the kidneys). If this reading was not within acceptable parameters, then all thought of going anywhere was quite out of the question!

It's one thing to decide to fly somewhere and it's quite another thing to be able to do so without the fear of medical complications. The driving trip through France looks as though it may well be postponed until the autumn. A this stage, the only possible alternative is the possibility lies in buying a replacement for our ageing Spanish-registered Citroën and driving it to England. Oh, how I would love to buy Spanish flag stickers for the back of such a car …how to get ignored by the traffic police!

Stephanie was tense when we left the doctor, her voice kept breaking and it wasn't hard to tell that she was worried. But, the blood tests came back from the lab today and, whilst things are a little on the high side, there isn't a great deal of room for worrying. We plan to book the flights tomorrow. Remember what I said about plans?

At a conservative estimate, my web site gets about 120,000 hits a year …the true figure is going to be a lot higher than that …but it's founded on a baseline of the 24 hours between Christmas Day and Boxing Day …when all the normal figures nearly dropped off the bottom of the scale! With this comes the irksome chore of weeding out all the useless mail I get. The people who send this sort of thing out cannot possibly do any profiling as they are consistently wrong about everything I am likely to be interested in.

I am constantly sent offers of one thing and another that is guaranteed to enlarge the size of my penis. They all start from the same basic premise …trying to sneakily imply that life would be so much better if my love truncheon was bigger. I have serious doubts about the efficacy of any of the potions marketed by these companies. Let's just suppose for a moment this stuff really works …I have even bigger worries concerning the side-effects on the rest of the body. You don't do this sort of thing without biological payback!

If all the claims were true and I was using every last one of these preparations, I would need custom-made underpants and specially tailored trousers.

If I draw together the various threads of the advertising sent me most often, then I am also being targeted as someone with erectile dysfunction …maybe they assume I have problems because I should never have taken all that stuff in the hope that my one-eyed-trouser-snake would assume mammoth proportions.

It seems that I am also in dire need of a Ukrainian wife, half my age (according to the advertising I get). I suppose that, if I had been taking all the pills and potions the first two groups of companies recommended, then I would (in all probability) have a massive pork sword in a more-or-less permanent state of arousal! This could be embarrassing outside of the confines of the bedroom.

Curiously, there isn't a single company that seems to market something that you can put on your overworked male member when it gets all sore from excessive use!

There are, however, plenty of companies that assume I desperately need a home loan …to the extent that I am 'pre-approved' for one of their deals. This would be the home loan I needed when my 25-year-old Ukrainian wife cleans out my bank account and runs home to mamma with horror stories of a husband who, despite being in his early fifties, placed relentless demands on her for sex!

I suppose I should be grateful that the Internet has singularly failed to entice me into completely ruining my body and my life!

Best Wishes,

Nigel.