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[curiouswombat]

I'm home. Well actually I arrived home last night, but have only just found time to get down to my keyboard and write!

Skye is very beautiful - I haven't down-loaded my pictures yet, but I think some of them will be worth putting up later.

My friend is a cordon bleu level cook - I could not have been better fed at a 4 star hotel - just to make you all jealous here is a list of main meals eaten by me on Skye, all cooked by my clever friend D.:

Venison in red wine sauce, rack of lamb with an oatmeal and black pepper crust, monkfish in a saffron cream sauce, pasta with spicy bacon and tomato sauce, morrocan chicken with barley couscous, duck with orange and mustard sauce, and kedgeree. Envious?

The cats were funny - the two British short-hairs, Tabitha and Dougal decided that I might be acceptable by the end of the first day - but it took the two identical British Blues, Mango and Rum until the last night I was there to come and play with me. I have led them into bad habits - all four have developed a taste for gluten-free pasta, couscous, and kedgeree! I have cat pictures also - when I get around to down-loading them!

The Dick Gaughan concert was very good - it reminded me of two of my LJ friends particularly - ezagaaikwe and missmurchison.

Why? Well Dick Gaughan reminds me of E's husband Frank - look: Picture of Dick Gaughan

Miss M - well he was talking about politics, as he does, and was describing a conversation in the bar with other performers at a Canadian Festival. One of the American singers said 'I hear you Europeans are having problems agreeing on a Constitution.' DG agreed this was the case. 'Well take ours.' the guy said 'We're not using it!' For those who don't read Miss Muchison (and why not?!) her daughter in particular is interested in the US constitution.

Both S2C and the cat seemed pleased to see me!

Life today has been back to Earth with a bump - I noticed when I got home from work that the freezer wasn't properly shut - and the contents were all somewhat defrosted and had to be thrown out.

And I have just discovered that although I thought my NHS pension had been transfered from the UK when I came home 17 years ago, there is no record of the transfer - so my first 9 years of payments do not go towards my final salary pension - they are frozen somewhere in the UK at the grade I was then. I think this is going to make me about £1,000 a year worse off when I retire in about 9 or 10 years time. If I can even work out how to access that frozen pension, as the Health Authority I worked for no longer exists.

I am hoping the Royal College of Nursing can help me, but the attitude of the civil servant I spoke to was 'You saying that you completed the forms means nothing - the forms are not in your file - therefore they did not exist', so I'm not holding my breath.

Comments

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

The freezer is now beautifully clean, and I've done a basic restock at the local supermarket tonight, so not too big a catastrophe. Three tubs of good quality ice-cream which had melted have been replaced!

I am going to start with the RCN (posh name for nurses union), and see if they can help, but I may well then go to my MHK (Member of the House of Keys - our parliament) and see if he can help - he's a nice guy, so he'll do what he can. I think there may well be a pensions ombudsman in the UK - hopefully this is the sort of thing I can find out from the RCN. Fortunately it is a long time before I retire, so time to try and make some sense of it anyway!

[missmurchison.livejournal.com]

Google is an amazing thing:

http://www.pensions-ombudsman.org.uk/