One moment you remember - stories to share around the OTF fireplace

[Femme Folle]

I know, and that's why I deleted a post I wrote on here. It was more a campfire story than a fireplace. I'm not sure that I have any fireplace stories. I don't seem to have any children or endearing older relatives.

[Balderdasha]

Back in 2012, me and my then boyfriend were on holiday in Chiang Mai in Thailand. It was a blazing hot day and we walked from our hotel into town for lunch, before the guided tour of palaces and temples we were due to go on in the afternoon. The day before we had been bamboo rafting down a river with water snakes and wanted something slightly more sedate.

As we came back from lunch, we noticed an incongruous branch of Boots, which had a sale of pregnancy tests in the window. My period was one day late, which I was assuming was due to travel disruption, but I bought a couple impulsively just to set my mind at rest.

Back at the hotel, in the ten minutes we had before the tour, I quickly did the test and left it on the side in the bathroom for the recommended waiting period. My boyfriend walked into the bathroom, picked it up, and said 'Are these things meant to have two blue lines?'

The shock, tingling and sudden flood of potential ramifications is like nothing I have experienced before or since. We were not trying for children, were still in fact trying not to have them, but had thankfully already had all the necessary discussions that yes, we'd both like children, either two or three, preferably with each other, just maybe not right now.

We had thirty seconds to process the news, then a guy knocked on our room door saying that the tour minibus had arrived, and off we went looking very stunned. We walked around the gardens of a beautiful palace, discussing our options. We both definitely wanted to go ahead with the pregnancy.

After the palace, we went to a golden Buddhist temple at the top of a hill where my boyfriend proposed in a huge rush of words. It wasn't exactly because of the baby, he'd been aiming to propose to me on mount Fuji on our next trip to Japan that we were in the early stages of planning, and now he didn't know if we'd get a chance to go there, so where better to propose than a beautiful temple looking out over the mountains? I accepted, and we went to write our names and the words 'our little one' in a heart we drew on a big swathe of orange fabric that was being wrapped around one gold cupola.

Once we got back from the tour, I went straight back into the same branch of Boots and bought as many pregnancy vitamins and folic acid tablets as I could find (there is bad history in my family, I should have been taking them for three months before trying to conceive). I then spent most of the rest of the holiday weighing up whether continuing my use of DEET insect repellant, or potentially contracting malaria was more dangerous to the fetus.

My life has never been the same since. We never have got round to going to Japan yet. Maybe we'll take the kids up mount Fuji when they're older. My thankfully healthy daughter was born in the Chinese year of the water snake.

[diggedy derek]

Some lovely posts on here.

When I was about seven, I had a curious little problem with some warts on my hand. The treatment for these back then was to use some kind of super-cold liquified gas which was sprayed on them, and they would hopefully drop off a few days later. It was uncomfortable and a little unpleasant but not particularly painful or unsettling.

It took place in an old hospital in Reading, Battle Hospital, and it felt a little military, a low red brick building that was once a workhouse. Cold metal cylinders stood in the corner of a pokey room on colourless lino.

I had been going to the sessions several times over a couple of months, and they had been having some effect but it was a tedious and sometimes grueling. It was lonely and a bit weird for a young kid. And it made me feel a bit weird also, even though a few warts weren't a big deal, and they're a distant memory now.

At one point in the treatment, I was told – I can't remember who said it, probably a combination of the nurse or my mum – that I didn't have to carry on with it if I really didn't want. Lots of the warts had gone, not all of them, but it had made some difference at least. And with warts, they told me, sometimes you just wake up one day and they are gone anyway.

So I had a way out. I was ecstatic. I remember parading round the room flashing V For Victory signs, something I had learned about recently. I was delighted that I was never going to have those feel that sudden numb blasts on my hands.

On the way back in the car, I remember feeling folourn, and then crying inconsolably. It was partly the finality of leaving the hospital for the first time, and maybe the hastiness of my decision, which I took as if I knew more than the nurses and my mum. It was also a sudden realisation of what seemed like my ungratefulness and oneupmanship, in a small room with two other human beings who either cared for me, or were in the professional process of caring for me.

I shouldn't be too harsh on myself, I was young, and silly, and that's OK. But I do remember this moment as a time when I was given the first taste of responsibility in my life, and I took it lightly, which is a heavy thing.

[hobbes]

Funnily enough, one of my oldest friends had a load of warts on his hands around that age. His poor mum tried everything including hypnosis to get rid of them, to no avail.
Then one morning he woke up and they were all gone.

[diggedy derek]

Weren't we actually born in the same hospital (different to the one above)? Anyway.

[hobbes]

Gosh, were we? I was born in the cottage hospital in Wokingham, I think.

[diggedy derek]

Yep.

[hobbes]

I have no recollection of how you knew that. Although given the last time we were actually in the same room was before the cub came along, perhaps that's not a surprise!

[diggedy derek]

Yeah, it just stuck for some reason. I grew up there for my whole childhood.

[Uncle Ethan]

A Remembrance Sunday when I was 18. Dad had never said much about his wartime experiences but he was pretty quiet that day and I just gave him a hug. He broke down crying and told me he had always felt so guilty that he had lived when better men than him had not and how haunted he was by the death of German pilot he shot down in 1940 in France.

In the way that manly men do because they don't know any better, I joked I was quite glad he had made it for purely selfish reasons.

Long after he had passed on I was contacted by the niece of an agent he had helped pick up from France in difficult circumstances later in the war, while he was with the SOE. She had said the man and his family had for 50 years wanted to thank Dad and the rest of the crew for what they had done that night. I wish he'd known about how they felt, it might have helped him with his survivor guilt.

[seand]

A Remembrance Sunday when I was 18. Dad had never said much about his wartime experiences but he was pretty quiet that day and I just gave him a hug. He broke down crying and told me he had always felt so guilty that he had lived when better men than him had not and how haunted he was by the death of German pilot he shot down in 1940 in France.

In the way that manly men do because they don't know any better, I joked I was quite glad he had made it for purely selfish reasons.

Long after he had passed on I was contacted by the niece of an agent he had helped pick up from France in difficult circumstances later in the war, while he was with the SOE. She had said the man and his family had for 50 years wanted to thank Dad and the rest of the crew for what they had done that night. I wish he'd known about how they felt, it might have helped him with his survivor guilt.

Wow, this thread.

Great story Ethan, thanks. What's interesting is your Dad's understandable guilt at taken a German pilot down all those years ago. Such humanity and empathy is utterly admirable. I shudder ever time I hear the usual vacuous shit about brave boys going out to defend democracy etc. It was a goddamn hideous situation where one group of brave young men were sent out to try and murder another group of brave young men.... for what? Isn't it fantastic to hear the impact he had on that family in France.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Yes, there are many, many lovely stories on this thread. I don't want to comment upon and commend every single one of them, so this is just a general "terrific stuff, keep it up OTF" missive.

[nmrfox]

Since moving up to Sheffield in 2001, Mrs F and I have always supported (and she indeed has worked at) our local animal sanctuary. After several years of walking the dogs there, one day I was asked to walk the dogs from the isolation unit - thats those that have been brought in and have no vaccination history. At 6 feet 2 small dogs aren't really my thing, but I was given a succession of yorkies, spaniels, jack russels etc to walk. Just before closing time the last dog was given to me and he was much more my thing. He was much larger, brown and fluffy with a cute face and looked like a mixture of about 6 dogs. He was an old lad, about 11, who had been picked up wandering the streets of Rotherham. No one knew his name. As we walked along, he kept looking up at me and I just couldn't resist. After having nothing but cats during the 20 years or so of our relationship, on Good Friday April 6th 2012, Ted came into our house and into my life.

He'd obviously read the "My Dad is the Greatest Dad ever" manual for dogs as he was utterly devoted to me. He was great with all of the family but would always be with me when I was in the same room with me. When I worked in India for a couple of weeks he drove everyone mad by barking at any noise and running to the door expectine me to be there. My wife would ring me up so I could talk down the phone to him and, so I'm told, he would perk up immediately at the sound of my voice. When I got home my first night back wasn't spent in the comfort of my bed next to my wife, but on the rug in the lounge laying next to him as he just wouldn't settle or leave me alone. We have 4 children and I love them all dearly, but this was a very special bond between the pair of us.

As I said, he was an old lad and gradually arthritis began to cripple him. It got to the point that whilst his head would want to go for a walk sadly his body couldn't keep up. So on Friday 13th March 2015 the worst decision of my life had to be made and I drove him to the vets for the last time. Driving along I decided to put the iPod on in the car. It's always on shuffle and the first song that came on was "Sunshine on Leith" by The Proclaimers. I had to turn it off as driving was becoming hazardous through blurry eyes and even to this day over 4 years later, if I hear that tune, I always well up. I just wished I'd been told what they play on the PA at Easter Road as I think a few of the patrons there were a bit uncomfortable at a tall Englishman sat in the stands with tears rolling down his cheeks during a trip to Edinburgh a couple of years ago.

[Johnny Velvet]

Yes, there are many, many lovely stories on this thread. I don't want to comment upon and commend every single one of them, so this is just a general "terrific stuff, keep it up OTF" missive.

Seconded. I've nothing comparable to contribute really but it's all lovely to read.