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I started experiencing strong pins and needles in my feet in December, and subsequently strange aches and pains, including a burning pain in my thighs that exerted a pulling effect on my kneecaps.

I tended to let it ride since I have little faith in doctors, and found the routes on the Internet hard to digest. But I eventually saw 4 doctors, and had 3 different sets of blood tests that yielded no problem.

So I was referred to a Neurologist in March. Today, over 5 months later, I had the appointment, which I will recall here since I was troubled by its shortcomings.

First, he asked me why I was visiting. Yet he had pages of notes about me in front of him. Maybe my doctor had failed to say why I was visiting him, but this seems an odd omission.

I was given a urine test, and passed with flying colours. As I did blood pressure.

He asked about my symptoms, and essentially nothing else. He failed to ask if I had the symptoms before, if I had had an accident that might have been a precursor.

His physical check was extremely quick, and from my perspective, superficial - two of the doctors I had seen earlier had carried out more comprehensive neurological investigations. Basically, he tapped my arm for a response - on my right arm there was none and in my left there was a disntictive response, but he seemed to carry out the test  with no conviction. He tested thumb strength. He tested that I could detect a cold object on my legs and arms, but so fast that I had no time to answer properly - there was no enquiry as to whether the legs were more or less sensitive than the arms.

I did not have to take my socks off because he did not bother  to even look at or touch my ailing feet.

He very confidently  announced that there was categorically nothing neurologically wrong with me. I pointed out that this did not resolve my problem, and what should I do next. He suggested low impact exercise, yet had failed to ask about my lifestyle early, from which he would have discovered that exercise had no healing effect on the condition over the last 8 months.

It might be that I am being harsh on the man, but the tests he carried out could easily have been carried out by a neighbour of mine. His position of expertise seemed to manifest  only in the speed of test, and the speed and resolute nature of his conclusion. His words were ‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with you’ as far as I can remember.

What do you think? And where do I go next? The Internet articles on the symptoms tended to lead to amputation or death, so I gave up reading. None yielded any action that I could take.

I have been very busy writing a Web based Go game commentary site :

www.learngo.co.uk/GoViewer/ListGames.php

I wrote it using the new HTML5  canvas, and Javascript. Unsurprisingly, all browsers except Internet Explorer support it well. Let me know what you think.

The World Cup Final was characterised by some brutal tackling, perpetrated mostly by the Dutch. Sad though that is, it does not take much imagination to work out why.

The simple fact is that the players can get away with it, the possible prize for victory more than justifying the risk of punishment.

And the punishment? A yellow card is shown to the naughty player. Whoa, this is going to make the player buckle at the knees.

True, it is a deterrant not to repeat the misdeamenor, for fear of a red card.

But 14 yellow cards clearly shows that the players were ‘playing the game’, and getting their deal of brutal tackling in before the yellow card tempered their behaviour. Well, you may say, the card did the trick.

And I say no.

First, the post yellow card behaviour should be the norm. And second, it is not because the yellow card itself is not sufficient a punishment. Of course, football is petrified of copying the sanctions of other sports. But if it adopted the well recognised ’sin bin’ concept from Rugby and Ice Hockey, then there would be a more tangible punishment to both the player and the team. And if the sin bin duration was set at no less than 10 minutes, then the Dutch would have been reduced to 10 and even 9 players during eth game yesterday.

And the normal consequences of a yellow card, with a ban for one or more games, is never going to be a deterrent in the holiest of holy, the World Cup Final. Nothing that follows matters.

Alas, Sepp Blatter is happy to keep the ‘beautiful game’ untarnished by progress such as this. His glasses must be very rose tinted indeed.

Time to put a cap on my religious comments.

Either God does NOT exist

or

He does not care

In the latter case, the examples of his failure to demonstrate care and compassion are endless. Maybe a neat one is the case of cojoined twins. Why would a God that cared ever go to such lengths to join two of his most loved and cherished people together in a way that will see the premature demise of at least one of them in many cases, and that requires countless hours of great skill by surgeons to undo His work to give them a hope of a meaningful life.

A stock answer is that they are paying the price for a former life. But they do not know anything of the former life. And God knows this. So how can that be a punishment that accords with the concept of a caring God?

And tell me why I should give my life over to someone who does not care?

Oh what joy it is to be a light sleeper! Sure, if any crook were to try to get into my house, I would up and at him at a moments notice. Meanwhile, as a consequence if this genetic tendency to be super sensitive to sound otherwise buggers up many a night’s sleep.

This morning, for example.

04:04 The faintest sound of birds tweeting woke me yet again. But I soon drifted back to sleep.

04:45 Bloody mobile phone declares that the battery needs charging by beeping. So I have to go downstairs and switch it off.

05:19 After eventually dropping back to sleep, a cacophony of seagull shrieks awakens me. After 30 minutes lying there, relaxing (or trying - my brain needs sleep but my brain insists on alerting my conscious mind to each and every shriek) I get up and visit the seagulls. There are about 20 clustered around some ripped open black bin bags. They had found some rice and rotten apples that should have been out into the plastic boxes for food waste. I scare them away but struggle to get back to sleep. It takes me at least 30 minutes.

07:20 The council, in their iwsdom decide that this hour of the day is fine for refuse trucks to noisily creep down the road, beeping their horns for good measure.

07:40 Another noise awakens me. Lost interest in what it is.

08:35 Miraculously, I sleep on beyond my normal waking hour, and feel good. Many other days, I would be tired and sleepy all day  as a result of these interruptions. Like a form of Chinese torture - I cannot afford to get annoyed at thenoises that awaken me because that is a recipe for staying awake.

If you are a deep sleeper, enjoy your privelege, and marry someone who will wake up when the house is being robbed or is burning down. Those who do not suffer regular sleep deprivation have no idea of the damage it does to enjoyment of life and your health.

I have had the best night of sleep for over a week and feel fabulous. But it may be in part due to an experiment I carried out.

At 4:30, bird twittering awoke me. As I relaxed, each tweet arrested any slide into sleep. So I told myself to let the sound ride over me. It did not, alas, happen. But eventually I fell asleep.

Only to awaken again at 5:30 to the louder sound of seagulls.  I guess you get an idea of what can happen to a sensitive soul.

This time, I was able to ignore them better, and drifted to sleep again.

But underlying this was a resurrection of an attitude that has faded since I finished writing my book on health. Namely that I had gradually become drawn into letting events and how I feel determine how life is going. I was now therefore aware of a need to recreate an attitude that allows me to enjoy each day regardless of what happens. This background to my efforts to ignore birdsong was necessarily a positive one, replacing the negative frustration that has infused such early morning awakenings recently.

So when I slept on to nearly 8:00, I awoke feeling uplifted in mood in addition to wonderfully rested from a complete cycle of sleep. The change of attitude lifted my mood. By seeing the World differently, I felt happier. You do not need a new iPhone, or a big day out to be happy. It is the attitude that you bring to life that determines your level of happiness, and I had lost the plot on that one for a while.

So it was time for me to correct my ways. But I have to say that it has been very difficult this week when my daily focus to relax and holiday has  been heavily compromised by day long heavy tiredness from poor sleep. It is easier to focus on the daily events and ignore how bad you might feel when those events engross you. Relaxing does not distract you very well for how you feel.

I have finally concluded that my brain acts far too often in a way that is not best suited to my life. It acts contrary to my needs and desires and quality of health.

Much as I would like to rectify this situation, much of the behaviour and habits of the brain are delightfully submerged away from direct conscious control. By way of example, let em describe the start of my day today.

I awoke at 4:30 am. There were no obvious noises that I was responding to. And for sure, I had no desire or need to wake so early. I am actually on holiday and want to lie in! My brain decides otherwise. And never informs me why.

Fortunately, I was able to fall back to sleep for a couple of hours. When I awoke subsequently, I was obviously not fully rested. I needed an hour or more of sleep. Or that is how it felt. I no longer try to force myself to sleep. Or get irritable at being awake when I want to sleep. I just relaxed and drifted back to sleep.

Some short while later, my brain decided to awaken me so that I could listen to the faintest sound of a bird tweet. How on earth such a tiny sound could awaken me I have no idea. Quite why my brain should choose to waken me I have no idea. I would like to tell my brain to never ever waken me to the sound of any bird song again. Bird song is no reason to deprive me of sleep. But how to tell my brain? No idea.

Sleep was later disturbed by my next door neighbour’s alarm. It frequently wakes me before it does my neighbour who is lying right next to it.

I have sleepy sore eyes but can get no more sleep. And a headache also, just for good measure. And yes, my brain does not tell me why. I get up and can sense straight away that I cannot think clearly. The same as 4 other days this week. The stifled mental capacity lasts all day.

Conversely, when I do get that extra hour of sleep, I can think with utmost clarity and have boundless energy all day long. I literally go from one extreme to another, simply by virtue of 1 or 2 hours of sleep difference.

Knowing that failure to get the apparently requisite amount of sleep makes the relaxtion needed to go to sleep hard to achieve. It is all a big lottery as to wether I am dull or sharp minded. True, this is true of most people - they vary in mental shape each day. but it is matter of degree - I vary by vast amounts from one day to the next.

But oh to be able to tell my brain to let me sleep right through each day. To be able to operate at top level every day. Quite who would lose out if I could do this? I am not seeking money or things from others. Merely from myself.

Even in well intentioned and well disciplined Scientific Research, there is a tendancy to attribute the correlation of one thing with another as implying a causal relationship. As Professor Kirsch illustrates, the correlation between large heads and the liklihood of large hats upon said heads does not imply head size created the hat largeness. But there is a more subtle trap in the seeking of a cause for an effect that we all fall into from time to time.

When I try to tweak my lifestyle to enhance life quality, it invariably works. And I attribute the change to the effect of course. Except that the effect can partly and sometimes often be put down to optimism in the change that expresses as the placebo effect. So when someone says ‘the only things I did differently last week was to stop eating burgers’, you can be sure that they will be wide of the mark. They will have discounted placebo, and many other little things they will have differently also.

I thouroughly enjoyed my intense April book writing endeavours, not least because I proved to myself that I can work around my headaches and work almost full time hours, but also because I found myself deep in flow and was almost devoid of headaches. But more than this, I now realise that the effect - my ability to work hard and long - was caused not so much by effort and diligence, but more to the belief that I could achieve, coupled with the huge desire to achieve.

Now I am in editing mode - correcting and juggling hundreds of paragraphs of writing. And I found my headaches intruding again. And of course, this was because I was no longer in the flow - I was doing work that was bitty and required concentration. Until it occured to me that the return of the headache blight was more likely to be one of attitude than situation. So I visualised being in the flow again, and treated the editing process as a vital, flowing activity also. And lo and behold, the headaches lifted almost instantly, and my productivity soared.

This attitude is there to be tapped. You do not have to wait for the power of placebo. You just have to believe in change and it is likely to manifest itself.

Many who know me actually do not know me. They know a little about me, but mostly allow my apparent superficial, over chatty ways to blind them to anything deeper. And they allow my regular frailalties to label me a hypercondriac. Whilst I agree that I can focus too heavily on ill health and injuries, this is hard to avoid when emotions are triggered so readily by such. To give a sample of health derailment that I have to suffer with, and have to suffer mostly in silence because no one takes my ailments seriously, here is the story for this week.

Wednesday I start feeling a dead ache in my left arm. I ignore it and get on with my day, but it does not fade away. Ignoring ailments and getting on, by the way, is anti-hypochondriac. The ache is so much at night that it badly affects sleep. Again, I try to relax and ignore it, but am only partly successful.

Thursday, I am hanging with tiredness, but continue working on my writing, but by late afternoon feel overly tired.

Friday sees me full of life by mid morning, and become hyper. Overly energised, I work flat out on my book, but know that I need to calm down or the hyper state will get out of hand. As I calm down, my heart paradoxically starts to race. I ignore this as much as I can, although the anxiety that is almost certainly causing it makes me feel very very unsettled. I start to feel frustrated by this rollercoaster of conditions.

Saturday I awake with a pain in my right knee. It may be caused by anxiety, but when it makes walking down stairs difficult, then I have to pay creed to it. I feel somewhat down in mood after the previous two days, but look forward to football in the afternoon, even though I have an mild but irritating left achilles tendon problem from two weeks ago. I play badly, and this injury and the sore knee makes running difficult. And before I leave the pitch, I sustain a right calf strain. Believe me, this is the last thing I want, and again, I accept my fate and limp home, and then to a coffee shop to read a very interesting book on the brain, but feel depressed in the evening.

Sunday I awake with a headache, depression, and a burning feeling in both thighs, but decide to just focus on enjoying the day.

That has been the rollercoaster of the last few days. Even if I am a hypochondriac, what could I actually have done differently to avoid that emotional and physical journey? It is simply a delusion to say that I did not feel the aches and pains and tiredness and depression. It might be that my attitude created these ailments, but if so, I really struggle to work out what I did wrong - each day I tried to just get as normal. If I did think or act in a wrong way, then the consequences were certainly enormously disporoportional to the cause.

After 5 months of strange leg problems, I still await a neurological examination courtesy of the NHS. I mostly get on with life and do not worry about the leg problems, but for 5 months they have compromised what little football abilities I have, and made the games less enjoyable. However, there has been one gain in all that time - 16 years of mostly daily tension headaches are almost a thing of the past.

Apologies for reusing this sleight on the Virgin group of companies. But it kind of sums up my experience today with a new Virgin V+ set top TV box. The saddest thing is not so much that I had problems, but that this was a totally predictable matter.

I had a window from 7am to 7pm to wait for the new box to arrive. 3pm was not so bad, so I took the risk of installing it - just 4.5 hours before the Liverpool game was due to be shown on the ESPN channel. This was a bad move.

I spent 25 minutes uncabling all the boxes under my TV, cleaning and installing the new V+ box with the other gear. A reassuring message appeared on my TV showing that at least I had gotten somethingright when I powered up. A call to Virgin was required to activate my set V+ box. I had to give them it’s serial number. So why did the set top box not tell me that serial number on the screen when it powered up? Getting such user friendly basics right would mean many fewer calls to support.

The activation failed. It got stuck saying Ld30 on the V+ box. Presumably an error code. Not sure really because the lady on the support line knew less about the set box technology than I, the customer did. Each question I asked her only served to fluster her further. I eventually got two guys to try to let me switch back to the old box, since they declared the new one to be faulty.

I had to tell them the serial number of the old box. And this was because the new box activation had erased the old box number on their system. And this is simply because there is no mechanism to revert back to the old box. They do not allow for this extremely likely request.

So I was literally stuck with two non functioning boxes. And a need to traipse to the pub to watch my beloved Liverpool limp through another game.

The Virgin repair man will be with me between 12 and 4pm tomorrow. Another wait in. Oh joy. And an update here as to the outcome. Your guesses? Maybe he will supply another new box that will work first time. Just maybe.

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