Sometimes my blog entries are full of shit. This one certainly is, as will become clear.

I'm not saying that my ageing friend is a hard taskmaster. I'll let you make up your own mind on that one.

Picture the scene. Tuesday night in Winchester hospital, visiting time. It's the day before our big big presentation to the outsourcer - a presentation we have been trying to get for months and months. I cannot attend, and tjis is now confirmed.

I am in bed, dressed in the same gown I had surgery in - still covered in blood and that yellow stuff they paint you with. Connected to my litle R2D2 morphine machine, which bleeps obligingly as it dispenses the evil (but most most welcome) painkiller directly into my vein. It is calibrated to make sure that it will only dispense 1mg of morphine every 5 minutes, and this seems to have trained my brain into subconsciously counting 301 seconds - so I know that when I press the button again, I'll get another dose.

A conversation with the pain specialist was interesting:

"On a scale of 1 to 5 - how is your pain?"

"I don't know"

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"I haven't a clue - I am completely wasted on this morphine. I don't even know my name"

On reflection, this may have added to the pressing need to get me off the machine. But, see blogs passim, I wasn't about to give up my only means of controlling the pain - the alternative was waiting for over an hour for a nurse to bring me some paracetemol.

So, in comes my ageing friend - all caring and concerned. He arrived before The Missus did, and we chatted for a couple of minutes about how I was and the like. Always the optimist, I told him I was fine. "OK, so would you be able to have a look at this then?", and he promptly produced a USB stick from his pocket - the USB stick containing the next days presentation in glorious PowerPoint.

The laptop was duly produced, and we went through the presentation.

I had two shots of morphine last night, to get me over the worst of the pain, and managed to get a reasonable night's sleep. Good to be back in my own bed. The human body is a wonderful thing (especially the half of the species that are female bodies - particularly wonderful, and The Missus is a prime example) and sleep is it's natural medicine. Throughout history, there is no medical situation which has been made worse because of a good night's sleep.

Some more Co-Codamol this morning when I woke up, and I even managed to wander around for long enough to bring a rather exhausted and well-deserving Missus a cup of coffee in bed.

Thing about Co-Codamol (Codeine and Paracetemol) is that it's not that strong as a painkiller. It can take the edge off it, but doesn't actually take it away. It can also floor you for an hour, meaning that a lie-down is necessary. I went back to bed and slept till about 11:00. When I woke up, I've had no painkillers since. It's still sore, but I want to manage without them. In and of themselves, they have no healing properties - they can actually slow things up. Also, they have side-effects.

I always read the label on medication. I make it my business to know what I am taking and - particularly - what the side-effects may be. Interestingly enough, the morphine label doesn't list the side effects. I have to wonder - is this because there are none, or is it because if you are in enough pain to take morphine then you probably don't care what they are.

So, the major side effect of Co-Codamol is constipation. Not just any old constipation either - really evil constipation. I even asked The Missus to phone Honda, and speak to their R&D department - I may well have discovered a 100% natural and environmentally friendly method for achieving 100% compression in a sealed chamber.

Constipation is nothing more complicated than dehydration. As food is passed through the digestive tract, nutrients are removed from it and enter the body. Water is absorbed by it, to make sure that what you end up with is something which can be passed through the intestine and into the bowel. If it does not absorb enough water, then it becomes rock-like and dry - the bowels then cannot move it properly.

Laxatives operate by attracting more water to the gut, softening the contents, and creating something soft which the bowel can move. This is why taking too many laxatives will give you diahorrhea - too much water gets absorbed.

So, you can imagine a situation like the one I have right now. Everything upstream in the digestive tract is liquid, and it is blocked at the other end by a fairly solid, dried-out lump of granite.

Back to the doctor today, we need something to help out here. My ageing friend took me. Sat in the doctor's waiting room, he produces a notepad and pen, and starts working through some of the questions from yesterday's proposal (which he did on his own). I was actually finishing one of the answers which walking with the doctor into the surgery, him taking notes as my voice faded along the corridor.

The doctor decides we need to tackle this problem at both ends, as it were. Osmotic laxatives (water-absorbing) to get more water into the gut, and suppositories at the other end to help get some water in at that end. Lovely.

My ageing friend took me to the chemist, waited outside (putting in a phone call to the outsourcer whilst he waited) and I emerged with a rather large paper bag. My ageing friend then started cracking jokes about how "that will never fit" and the like.

On the upside, we are collecting a rather amusing set of anecdotes for the future. When somebody, someday, decides to write a book on the success story of our Company, then they will have some rather unbelievable stories about presentations worked in in surgical hospital wards, whiteboard sessions with broken collarbones, and demonstration software created on a laptop whilst straining on the toilet - experiencing something closely resembling childbirth. You couldn't make it up.

Moving around a lot better though - an awful lot of this is due to good sleep. At this rate, I'll be back on the bike in a week.

The electricity man came to read the meter. One look at me and he asked "collarbone?". Asked if it was bike-related (the two AJPs in the garage being a bit of a clue), then went on to tell me his own tale of misery, carnage and snapped clavicles in Dusseldorf in Germany. My ageing friend calls it the "Motorcycle Masons". I call it "connecting with people".

Big decision on Monday - the outsourcer from Del Monte will - hopefully - say "yes" to our proposal. It is years ahead of the competition (Mr Happy in this case), and probably 3 or 4 years ahead of its time.

Unlike previous occasions where I have been 3 or 4 years ahead of my time though, this is different. I am not alone. I am surrounded by people who work all day and all night, through sickness and injury, because they are passionate. No bullying, cajoling, persuading or ordering around. It is this level of dedication that is required to build a successful Company. It does not guarantee success, but not having it will guarantee failure.

I will keep you posted as things happen.

I will also let you know the weight and sex of the baby when it arrives.

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