So healthwise I started the year by being sick, naturally. Having spent Christmas coughing up gak and feeling very wheezy and out of breath (‘just a virus’!) I went to bed early on New Year’s Eve, in preparation for our skiing holiday. Whilst watching The Sound of Music on New Year’s Day I started feeling very unwell and aching joints and a fever soon followed. Sigh. As we were travelling the next day I contacted the emergency doc and with a 7pm appointment made the family drive me up to the Hospital. A set of fierce antibiotics later, plus prednisolone for the cough, I was able to return to my bed and look forward to a 4am start…

Skiing of course could not have been a better start to a Year of Health; all that exercise! All that fresh air! All that, um, cheese and bread and wine, with a bit of bacon and duck fat thrown in. Safe to say that the healthy eating didn’t start during our week in France but we did get plenty of exercise and fresh air. My antibiotics worked a treat, although leaving me with a horrible bitter taste, nausea and an inability to drink. Not the ideal sitch when a 3 course meal with wine is on the menu every night. Still, I didn’t suffer half as much as Alfie, whose asthma went into overdrive, leaving him coughing pretty much constantly. To the point that my husband, a health worker and nurse by trade, started saying that it couldn’t possibly be asthma, as it so clearly was not responding to any of the drillion inhalers we had brought, nor to the prednisolone we’d brought from a previous bout (plus he got my leftovers). He may not have taken to skiing like the proverbial duck to water, but by God he didn’t give up, cough or no cough. Sure a bit of fuss about the boots and setting off for ski school every day but he got on with it, despite being, in his own words ‘the weakest in my class’. He bloody wasn’t neither, executing the most beautiful snowplough down a couple of blue runs on the last day. That’s my boy.

Still, the focus on health could not have come at a better time, as we were about to find out.

(Quick note re time here;  I’m publishing retrospectively so using the weeks to orientate where we are in the year.  At some point I may catch up with myself and publish in ‘real time’ but until then bear with me…)