Pedestrian dangers - pavement flagstones and tree roots, remedies, cure, prevention

Raised paving stone caused accident. Bruising visible on face uner eye and on bridge of nose.

Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

I look dreadful. After my acccident I seem to have aged overnight. Aged ten years. Miserable, baggy eyed, injured. I could not sleep, kept waking up, in pain, as I tossed and turned and winced. When I cleared my throat ed my chest hurt. When I winced my face hurt! 

I had a nasty accident. I was walking along the pavement which has small square flagstones. Many of them had been lifted by trees. I tripped over one of them and fell flat on my face. (Americans say sidewalk where the British say pavement.)  How can I prevent that happening again and how could you prevent it happneding to you or any elderly or accident-prone person you know?

Possible Protection

A padded balaclava to protect your nose and face.

The accident happened  January 27th, Saturday, at about 6 pm.

I was going to a friene' house for dinner. I felt very shaken. I thought that having my dinner and a drink would make me feel better and recover better than sitting around without supper in a hospital's A ad E department for hours, being kept up half the night. They probably would not do an x ray until morning, on Sunday, or Monday. So I would have to go home and come back. A waste of my time, and their, and a risk of cathing colds which are going around, a cold from all the extra walking about, or Covid-19. I would also have been at A & E a long way from home and if admitted my family would have to travel a long way.

I had a blocked nose all evening and had trouble biting. My teeth hurt. My nse hurt. My cheek hurt.

By the end of the evening I had devloped a dark bruise under my eyes. 

I went home, hoping in vain that it would all get better overnight. At around 5 am I woke and found I was dripping red blood from my nose. I realised that the blood in my nose has been interfering with my breathing.

 For American readers, pavement, the British word, means sidewalk in American wording.

Update, Monday. X-ray showed no broken bones. Good news. Doctors prescribed pain killers and medicine to reduce sewlling

Useful Websites

https://www.personal-injurysolicitors.com/trip-injuries-pavements/?

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What you need to know and say in Hospital overseas

You need to be able to communicate to staff in hospitals in any country you are visiting.

In 1984 I was at a turning point in my career. I had been a freelance travel writer for a long time and for the first time I was sent by Brides magazine on a press trip to report. Unfortunately, the last night people played the guitar all night so I got little sleep and woke up groggy. That didn't matter. All I had to do was get on the coach and catch the plane home where my husband would meet me at the airport.

The coach taking us to the airport broke down. It looked like we might miss our plane. We were told that another coach was coming. leave everything behind. and cross the road to the hotel. I left my camera on the bus, and crossed the road, hurrying after the group, thinking, I should not have left my camera with my vital pictures for the magazine on the bus.

In England, the traffic drives on the other side of the road.

I woke up in hospital unable to move. My camera was covered in blood. My leather sandal was torn in half. I had been knocked down by a car and had multiple injuries including a lump on my leg, a broken collar bone, and blood coming out of ear from a brain injury.

Drugs
I was really happy. I was on morphine.

When the morphine wore off I was in agony. I was screaming. People rushed in and held me down and gave me an injection. When the drug wore off, I realised that my drug induced high was phony. I as alone in a foreign hospital where I could not speak the language.

I decided that if I ever recovered my health, I would never take drugs.

If your relative in hospital is seriously ill, and lying still, but happy to see you, smiling and content, it may be because the hospital is efficiently controlling their pain with morphine.

You might want to kid them that they are getting better and coming home. Don't kid yourself  that everything is ok without check whether the hospital knows something you don't know about the patient's condition and the drugs they are taking. Say or do anything you need. Get a will, a signature, anything you need, just in case, door keys to the house, just in case.

Learn languages. Keep translation devices with you. Why languages?

Even if you think you are fluent, almost bilingual, things can go wrong with technical misunderstanding. In hospital in Corsica, I asked for a radio. I said, un radio. They took me for a radio. A radio in their language meant an X-ray.

The modern fashion is for doctors to tell the truth so that patients can get their affairs in order.

The old-fashioned way was never to tell anybody they were dying.

Why. Because they might lose their will to live. This happened to my father. I was very cross.

Morals to this story:
1 Check what drugs hospital patients are taking.
2 Don't tell somebody they are dying. Ask them to set their affairs in order so you can look after things when they are ill. Cancel mail orders and subscriptions. Get passwords. Insurance policies.
3 Learn languages.
4 Remember that un radio in Corsica means not a radio but an x-ray.

• About the Author
  Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
  I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.
  
  Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and other language clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.
  
  I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other Wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
  Or quicker to type and easier to remember:  tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
  
  useful Websites
• https://photoscissors.com/
  https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogs
  https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-say-thank-you-in-several.html
  https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2019/05/introducing-yourself-in-english-spanish.html
  https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2020/01/second-set-of-portuguese-words.html Please share links to your favourite posts
  https://www.toastmasters.org/find-a-club
• https://www.facebook.com/angela.lansbury.121
  translate.google.com
  duolingo.com

How To Get A Job Teaching English In Singapore - and practise your demo lesson

What you need depends on which age you wish to teach.

I wanted a teaching job with flexible hours.
1 I wanted to be free evenings and weekends. That meant I could not teach at Berlitz which wanted me to be free to do a one to one lesson any time.
2 I wanted to be able to travel with my family and go back to the UK from Singapore to see my parents and inlaws and son at Christmas and in the Easter and summer.

I found the solution was to teach a short course in a private school. The courses would be four to eight weeks all day, 9-5 Monday to Friday.

Time Spent Marking
However, I also needed to mark homework books and essays in my own time, and correct exams done on Friday afternoon to be given back to the pupils first thing on Monday. That meant three hours of (unpaid) time over a weekend.

One solution to the homework marking problem is to read out the answers in class and get pupils to mark their own work. If you don't trust them, and want an accurate assessment of what they have understood and learned, you can ask them to swap books with the person sitting in front or behind.

Another solution is to set them working on exercise two silently, whilst you mark exercise one. They might need two exercise books, so that you can mark book 1 whilst they write in book 2. Alternatively, to share the work intruction and test books and ask them to write asnwers on loose leaf sheets with their name and class and date at the top.

The school might provide books, or work sheets which can be copied on their copier. If there are many copies avialable you can quickly choose and pick up the batch.
However, you may need to arrive early, wait for others to finish their long  to print out materials for the class.

How to get experience as a teacher to establish my credentials when seeking work as a business trainer? You can start giving workshops at Toastmasters. I would suggest join a club or two dlubs, even four or six, go through their pathways programme which includes interactive sessions.

When I wanted a work permit for a private school I had to provide my university degree certificate, the orignal, not a photocopy.

Before starting work I had to take an x-ray to show that I was clear of TB which is catching. You can't have teachers with TB talking and shouting, breathing and spitting over pupils.

The school typed out a simple short letter saying they needed a teacher urgently for a class starting that day. They sent me by taxi to the work permit department. Half an hour later I cought that taxi back to the school with my work permit. Half an hour later I was teaching my first class.

This year another teacher, a neighbour in Singapore, suggested I might like to work in state schools as a relief teacher, which he had done after retiring.

You apply through the MOE, Ministry of  Education.

Another friend of mine has applied four times to be a teacher of music and English.

When she was placed on the shortlist and called for an interview, her interview was in three parts. The first part was a five minutes demo lesson. One one occasion the adult judges acted like children in the audience being obstreporous to test classroom control.

Next a question about how she would react to challenges.

Finally the general interview on why you want to teach and your short term and long term goals.

I suggested that she should do a demo lesson at Toastmasters and get feedback. This would be useful for both teaching and interviews.

Toastmasters international clubs providing training in public speaking and a chance for you to rehearse a presentation you are doing elsewhere.

Useful Websites
https://www.moe.gov.sg/careers/teach/how-to-apply/teaching-schemes/relief-teaching
https://www.toastmasters.org/find-a-club

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

My Medical Emergency - why insurance is essential

Map of Corsica from Wikipedia showing Corsica's capital, Ajaccio, on the west coast of the island.

Ajaccio has the hospital where I was flown.

Problems
On a press trip in 1984 I was hit by a car, crossing the road in Corsica. I was on a press trip for Brides Magazine, and we were on our way home to the airport, but the coach broke down. We were asked to leave all our luggage including our cameras on the coach and cross over to a nearby hotel to await a replacement coach. 

I do not recall the impact. I was unconscious. I had multiple injuries, head, ribs, calf. I had to be flown by a helicopter to the hospital. 

I was bandaged up with my right arm against my body. I could not lift my arms nor my head.

Language Problems
I had trouble talking to the lady in the next bed. I assumed she did not understand my French accent. I tried bonjour, which is French, then Buona sera, Italian.

Later I asked a friendly male nurse, who spoke French, if he could speak to the woman in Conrsican. He explained, in French, 'the patient cannot speak because she has had an operation on her jaw'.

I later demanded to see and receive my possessions, my bag and clothes and shoes. Somebody brought my sandals. One sandal was in two pieces.

The PR went home with the group. My husband had to cancel last night at the proms and fly out. 

It took several days in high season to find five seats on a plane to get me home on a stretcher, three seat spaces for a stretcher, one for my husband, one for the medically qualified person which the insurance company and airline insisted should accompany me on the flight.

Answers The best thing was that Brides magazine, who had commissioned me to write an article, insisted on taking out insurance on my behalf, although I told them I had my own annual travel insurance policy. Their travel insurance covered everything. I had a helocopter to Ajaccio, an X-ray, several days in hospital there, flight back to the UK, transfer to the private Clementine Churchill Hospital, care there for several days.

The best part
Finances taken care of. Private hospital with private room, great food, TV on the wall. The curtains were so good I asked to buy them when the hospital refurbished.

Worst thing?
The Coriscan hospital staff did not speak English. I asked for a 'radio' and got an X-ray (radiography).
My collar bone was not set straight but left to find its own way so I am slightly lopsided and can't wear horizontal stripes.

Moral
Take out travel insurance covering all countries. You can sometimes buy travel insurance at the airport.

Modern hospital with trees and greenery in Singapore.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.

Language Misunderstandings - and the radio

Language misunderstandings can be amusing, puzzling, annoying, or downright dangerous.

In hospital misunderstandings by doctors or patients can cause trouble. I know this from my own experience.

Hospital in Corsica and The Radio
In 1984 I was knocked down by a car in Corsica. I was flown by rescue helicopter to the hospital in the capital Ajaccio. I spoke fluent French, I thought, as a second language. For the Corsicans, Italian was a first language and Spanish a second language.

Nobody could converse much with me. I was on a painkiller, morphine. I tried to speak to the woman in the next bed but she didn't answer. (I later discovered she had had an operation on her throat or jaw!)

So I asked if I could have 'un radio'. The nurse said she would ask. Later she came back and said she had arranged for me to have a radio in about an hour. Time passed. No radio appeared.

Meanwhile I was taken downstairs for an Xray. I came back and still no radio.

I asked again. Another nurse came back. She said, "The other nurse says you had a radio."

I asked, "Where is it?"

She went away and came back with a file of X-rays. On the cover was the word Radiography. The word radio in French was short for radiography, meaning X-ray.

Not only was there no radio. Not only that, I had asked for and received an unexpected X-ray.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, language teacher.

Pearl Quality and Pearls in Singapore and Japan

Here's one store in Singapore with a website. They clearly state that some of the pearls are faux which is a fancy French word for false, which is a good sign.

In the UK I once went with a friend to buy a Xmas gift of a pearl necklace in John Lewis. I had always previously thought that a major department store might be reliable. However, I think you often get more interesting design in speciality shops. We were told that pearls should be re-strung every year to guard against loss. What a nuisance for the recipient.

For the amount paid for a pearl necklace, matching pearl bracelet and pearl ring - three items to worry about breaking or losing a pearl, the buyer could have bought his lady a solid gold necklace which would always have kept its value and never broken.

http://www.chomel.com.sg

Japanese shops also sell pearls. I once bought silver grey pearl bracelet, in silver, at a good price from a shop in Japan. You can either buy them on holiday in Japan or on line.

I also found a Tahiti Pearl Market on Facebook.

What to look for when buying pearls
Not so exactly round that they must be machine made.
Nor huge imperfection.
Larger pearls cost more.
The expensive lustre or mirror quality, compared with the cheaper dull matt or chalky surface.
Colours affect the price, but what colour you like may depend on your skin colour, so a cheaper colour might suit your better.
An x-ray will reveal the inside showing whether they are man-made and solid, or built in layers like a tree. A magnifying glass will show the slight irregularities of a natural pearl.

Writers on the site say that if you rub two real pearl's together, they grate, but two fake or mad-made pearls are smooth. I'm not sure I'd risk damaging my own real pearls or anybody else - unless I was sure they were fake and wanted to prove the point. That's why the real pearls are divided by knots, firstly because they are valuable so will be kept for ever, not just a season, but secondly because real pearls are more likely to scratch each other with their protrusions.

More discussion on:
http://www.pearl-guide.com/forum/showthread.php?1206-What-makes-a-freshwater-higher-than-AAA

More information from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, researcher, author and speaker .