So where exactly is Munster?

We have just had a really nice weekend when the BUF and the VNSO came to stay. In fact, the only thing that might have improved it would have been Friday night (as they came on Saturday) and the chance to make a dent in my Merlot mountain – oh yes, and possibly a little more time to peruse Tesco’s finest^*1!

Anyway, on Sunday, we were at the dining room table, having just played a board game and I got up to make a visit to the ‘little girl’s room’. Well, I wasn’t up for long, as my body and head were quite keen to get where they were going but my legs just stayed where they were and I went thump down on to the floor.

“Are you OK?” asked hubby.

I thought for a second...

“Um”, I said (rather experimentally) “Ow?”

“So”, came back his voice from the table, “Where is Munster?”

The fact that hubby just blithely carried on (well, his excuse is that I do fall over a lot!) resulted in much amusement...

So, I guess I know where I fit in the grand scheme of things....and that's somewhere behind scoring to find out who won the game I guess. But, do you know, it’s not that that worries me, it’s the fact that I fear that now whenever I chuck myself on the floor, some bright spark is going to pipe up “Where’s Munster” instead of “Are you OK?”!

Oh yes....and ...... if you want to know!

^*1 ‘In’ joke - sorry!

New poll...

I have added a new poll that will run for the next 2 weeks.

The last one showed that 66% of my readership have a disability and 33% are close to someone with a disability which kind of surprised me. I don't know about the last 1%....

Anyway, I kinda think the polls are fun so I think I will do a new one every 2 weeks - you never know, I may even do one asking if you eat the stalks of broccoli.

Anyway, if you have any ideas of what I should ask, then leave me some suggestions via comment. Keep them clean though please...

The Link magazine

Just as a curious kind of aside, I get a magazine form the Spina Bifida Association, and just after I wrote this entry, the latest edition popped onto my doormat. You’ll never believe, but there was an article on...yes, you’ve guessed it...the aging Spina Bifida population. How wild is that?

Added a poll

Just out of interest I've added a poll on the right hand side. I'm simply curious why people read the drivel that I type!

I may try another question next week so keep a look out...

...and by the way, I can't tell who you are from clicking on the box!

A carrot or a hammer??

Today hubby and I went out for a day trip to a local county show and we were lucky when the sun shone all day and it was really warm. Now struggling around a lumpy bumpy field in a wheelchair was almost bound to result in:

1. a face forward tumble out of the chair and
2. a cut hand /skinned knuckles on the portaloo door (ew!)

but nothing like that was really going to dent my mood, as to get such lovely weather so early in the year was just great. We even ran into the BIL and his partner so that was nice too.

On the way home, hubby suggested that we stop off in a little hostelry that he knew. “You know the one” he said, “It’s the one across the other side of the river that you have to go across the footbridge to get to”.

Well, you can be sure that I remembered it then but only because of a story that a friend of hubby’s told me from when a group of them went there. On that occasion they took someone with them who was a bit older than the rest of them – someone who actually had pretty advanced Parkinson’s disease and who couldn’t walk very far at all. He told me that he took one look at the footbridge and just decided that it was too far to walk and so hubby’s mates cooked up a scheme to get him across to the pub. Now this scheme involved a sack truck and some elastic bungee cords. Now when I first heard this, I think I assumed that they must have been to at least 3 pubs already(!), but in the end, they did get him across the bridge in exactly that way. They stood him on the trolley, strapped him on tight with the elastic cords and wheeled him across to the pub where, no doubt, he had to sit in the garden because the trolley wouldn’t go up the steps to the front door. I guess it was the thought that counted though...

Anyway, I asked hubby why he thought that the chap had refused to use a wheelchair and hubby couldn’t come up with anything apart from ‘the kind of prejudice that is typical of people who are determined not to give in’! Now most of my friends might think well, heck, she can’t talk, she’s as stubborn as they come and half the time doesn’t use her chair when she needs it...and yes, I admit it, there are times when that really is true. But equally there are times (like today) when I see my chair as a tool and something to make my life easier (despite the faceful of grass and the skinned knuckles!).

“Why wouldn’t he use the right tool for the job?” I queried. “After all, you wouldn’t try to knock a nail in with a carrot would you?”

Death by diarrhoea

So, MIB^*1 has joined our group and we were sat at the dinner table when the subject of drugs came up. Now, I know what you are thinking and you’re wrong...you see, if you put a group of disabled people around a table sooner or later the conversation will turn to drugs or surgery (LB bless her taught us all liver transplantation over the dinner table!) and in this instance it was the merits of one kind of painkiller over another.

We had mentioned aspirin and paracetamol and were then moving on to ‘harder’ drugs when MIB decided to tell us about the time she was put on oxycontin when she came home after surgery. She also mentioned the rather alarming side effect of ‘bunging you up’ that various opioids are famous for and so decided whilst in the chemist getting her controlled substance prescription filled, that she would pick up some syrup of figs. She picked up 2 bottles and put them on the counter and the 16 year old part time assistant turned to her and said:

“I don’t think that we can sell you more than one bottle of that, I’ll have to check” – and disappeared out the back. Time passed and eventually she came back - “Thought so, we definitely can’t sell you more than one bottle at a time...we can’t risk you harming yourself...”

At hearing this, in pain and after having to wait for so long, MIB retorted “Here are my 50 morphine tablets, and here’s the syrup of figs. Now, if I wanted to commit suicide, which do you think would be my weapon of choice? Do you really think I’d drink 2 bottles of syrup of figs and then sit on the toilet until my insides dribbled out?!?”

Her daughter waiting by her side slunk quietly away ...




^*1Mad Irish bird

The aging spina bifida population

I was wondering the other day (well, it is what my blog is about) and it occurred to me that for the first time in history we have a relatively large number of people who are getting older who have spina bifida. I know that if you were born before the 60’s, the kinds of operations that they did to put spina bifida right were a bit hit and miss (if indeed surgery was an option). I have a friend 10 years older than me and all they did with him was stitch up the lesion on his back and keep their fingers crossed – he ended up paralysed, but most people older than him just simply didn’t live much past teenage years. Now I’m not saying that people didn’t survive, because a minority did, but now, with modern surgical techniques, you wouldn’t expect a spina bifida baby to have any less chance of survival than anybody else.

So, what am I trying to get at here? Well, babies in the 1960’s are now adults in their 40’s. They are about the oldest people alive who had surgery with the more modern technique (although the 60’s was still a bit experimental shall we say...!) and there’s no frame of reference as to what happens to these people as no one has (boldly) gone where they are going.

Take me as an example, I have scoliosis – that’s pretty common in spina bifida people – of course your spine has a weakness to start with so you might expect it. You might expect other neurological things too and they might deteriorate with age as things change for everyone as they get older. What about my achalasia? They say that is caused by the nerves to my oesophagus dying off. That’s neurological...is that to do with my spina bifida? Is it that nerves from my spine have wrecked my swallowing? Who can answer that, as we are all aging at the same rate and we are the trail blazers. Imagine that?

The odd thing is, that you might feel that it would be an idea to document all of this that is going on with my body and all those other people who are my age with spina bifida. “Document it”, I hear you cry (I did, I really did hear that) but you see, there’s really very little point...by the time the 70’s had come round the spina bifida operation was hugely improved. Babies didn’t have to wait until they were 3, 4 or 5 months old to have surgery; they were operated on the day they were born. By the 80’s nutrition had improved to the point where spina bifida was becoming rarer and in the 1990’s they started adding folic acid to bread and all sorts of things which reduced numbers even further. Now, it’s so much rarer – in 60 years time, there will hardly be any spina bifida population at all. Spina bifida will eventually become something only in history books (with any luck) and there won’t be any cases to pass knowledge on for.

It means that for a number of people born in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, they will be a small population of aging spina bifida babies who will all grow old together (well, we all hope we will anyway), and will face unknown trails along the way but whose experience will be of no use to future generations. There’s an odd thing, isn’t it?

Spontaneous Transplantation?

I do hope this post doesn’t gross you all out, but you see today I found a hair on my chest!

Now, I do have a theory (all that wondering does that) and that’s that it may have been a case of spontaneous transplantation. You see, as many of you know, I use an epilator – under my arms! I do that because I am “hard” – or possibly because I am “a real man” ^*1, or maybe just because I like the results, but regardless, it involved plucking your hair out by the roots – and lots of them at a time. Inevitably some of them fall downwards (that’s gravity that is) and I fear that one of them may have dropped into my bra. Being recently plucked (and therefore still ‘alive’) and in the warm and cosy environment of my bra I fear it may have spontaneously transplanted itself into my chest. Now, I don’t know too much about the subject (maybe I should ask Elton John?) but it seems feasible. So, what of this stray hair? Well, it’s gone, plucked and gone and there’d better be no more where that came from!

Of course, there is another theory, and that’s that it got lost from the great internal hair ball and took a wrong turning. I of course know that there is a great internal hair ball (and not from living with cats!) but from observing men. You see many men are basically lazy (not hubby of course) and the older they get the lazier they get. Assuming that the old adage of lazy mind, lazy body stands, then they will also have lazy hair ball and hair won’t want to do all that struggling upwards to get to the top of the head, oh no, it’d much rather take an easy route out through the ears or nose or just push its way out through the chest somewhere close. This is of course why men go bald on top but get hairier and hairier in odder and odder places as they get older...

Now, I want to make it clear – I am not a) a man or b) lazy and as to the hair, well, you decide...

^*1I was famously called this by a friend when I once decided to smack myself in the mouth with a lump of metal and then didn’t cry.....!

Sorry.....

So sorry, but these cracked me up.....


1. If you take an Oriental person and spin him around several times, does he become disoriented?
2. If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren't people from Holland called Holes?
3. Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
4. If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?
5. If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?
6. Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?
7. When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?
8. Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a racing car not called a racist?
9. Why are a wise man and a wise guy opposites?
10. Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
11. Why isn't the number 11 pronounced onety one?
12. 'I am' is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that 'I do' is the longest sentence?
13. If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?
14. What hair colour do they put on the driver' licences of bald men?
15. I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered if Chinese mothers use toothpicks?
16. Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them?
Why don't they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the postmen can look for them while they deliver the post?
17. You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
18. No one ever says, 'It's only a game' when their team is winning.
19. Ever wonder about those people who spend two pound a piece on those little bottles of Evian water?
Try spelling Evian backwards:
20. Isn't making a smoking section in a restaurant like making a peeing section in a swimming pool?
22. If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhoea, does that mean that 1 enjoys it?
23. Why if you send something by road it is called a shipment, but when you send it by sea it is called cargo?
24. If a convenience store is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the door?

Reader involvement

A while ago, I added some little boxes to go at the end of each post so people can tell me if they like the post. Dunno what subjects the boxes should be tho’ so any opinions would be appreciated...be nice to see them used too....

Also, I was wondering the other day - if quitters never win, and winners never quit, than who is the fool who said, "Quit while you're ahead"?

Tesco photo shop 1 WH Smith 0 – Naming and Shaming – Oh yes!

So, I ordered a photo book from the Tesco photoshop and it duly arrived. I was delighted with the inside, but the cover? Well, it was like Hotblack Desiato’s Disaster Areas’s ship^*1, – all black buttons on a black background when it came to the title. OK, so maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it was black printing on a dark surface and hard to read so I e-mailed to complain. I received an e-mail from a very nice lady who asked me to return it (freepost) and she said she’d look into it. After a week or so she mailed to say that they would replace it with another cover of my choice and gave me simple and clear instructions on how to upload my new choice without paying for it. So...well done Tesco!

By contrast, I ordered 2 books for Christmas from WH Smith – both hardback copies. When they arrived they had sent me one hardback and one paperback. I emailed and got an automated response that said they would reply personally in 48 hours...but they didn’t. I emailed again and got exactly the same response (i.e. none). I phoned and after 20 minutes of ‘you are in a queue’ they cut me off. I emailed again and yet again I have had no response.

So I was wondering - what is the use of a company who is completely unreachable in the event of you having a query?

Eventually I phoned again and spoke to an 'oik' who told me that the catalogue was wrong and that the book was in fact only available in paperback so that’s what they had sent me. He said that if I wished I could return it (at my own expense of course). I got no apology and it probably cost me £5.00 in phone calls to get this information.

I will never ever order anything else from WH Smith online again and no, I don’t care that I am telling the whole world how dreadful they are....

^*1 If you don’t know who this is, you really should...!

The Park

We live opposite a park and I really love it. The funny thing is that i don’t really go into the park that often, but I still love it...and I found out from the lady that we bought the house from that she felt the same way. She told me that when she put the house on the market, she had spoken to her sister about it and her sister had suggested that since she never actually walked in it, she wouldn’t miss it all. She assured me that she would miss it, and over time I have really got to understand what she meant.

One of the great things about living opposite the park is that it means that you’re not actually opposite other houses – in fact, all that’s on the opposite side of the road to our house, are trees... I have become acutely aware of the passing of the seasons as those trees unfurl their leaves in spring and shed them in the autumn. They are home to birds and squirrels in the summer and glisten with frost in the winter. Some days the trees cast ghostly shadows through the mist and there is always some sound of nature to be heard in between the hum of cars from the main road down the hill.

Last week, just for a change, I decided to take a walk in the park and was lucky enough to spot a squirrel popping its head out of hibernation as I passed small clumps of snowdrops nodding prettily in a gentle breeze. The crocuses were just starting to show some signs of colour and there were thousands of daffodils standing in tall green spikes ready to open in time for St David’s day. It was beautiful, the traffic noise seemed to be absorbed by the green of it all and it was lovely to just take a moment to chill out in green surroundings.

So, you don’t need to go into the park at all, but it’s nice to do. I decided to tell you all, just to remind myself of how nice it is and maybe to reinforce that feeling so that I get to do it more often. In this mad manic world, its special to find a little time and space to relax in....

All a bad dream?

I had a cheese sandwich...yes, I did! That means that for the first time in about 10 months, I had a slice of bread that wasn’t toasted and then dunked in coffee to make it pliable enough to get down me. It was simply a slice of bread, a bit of butter and some cheese and I just ate it without any real problems at all. It makes me wonder if the memory of my achalasia is really nothing more than the heading suggests – just a bad dream!

Of course, the sandwich was different to eat than before I really started to have problems with my swallow. I used to bite, chew, swallow, bite, chew, swallow, bite, chew, swallow until it was all gone but this was more like bite, chew, swallow .............bite ...... chew ................ swallow .................... bite ........... chew ................ swallow until it was gone – so altogether a slower process. Hubby likened it to only allowing one man on the rope bridge at a time...no peristalsis means that you simply have to let gravity get your food down for you and some things are more influenced by gravity than others. I never thought I’d be wondering what to choose off a menu based on how heavy it was but I can definitely state that lettuce is so light that it doesn’t seem to go anywhere at all!

All the same, this seems to me like a return to some kind of normality and I am starting to find it hard to remember struggling to eat in the way that I was. Long may it continue!

I'm still dreaming of pizza BTW...I have £15 in my purse and I'm waiting for Saturday!

Happy birthday metalwork!

Actually, that’s a fib...it’s not my metalwork’s birthday, but in the midst of learning how to eat again and getting over my latest surgery the birthday thing just slid by. All the same, better late than never, so here is my report on what Its like to be 3 years on from having a major scoliosis correction operation.

I really don’t know where to start....except to say the most important thing of all....my spine has got no more crooked over the last 3 years. Now, that may not seem unexpected (or even exciting), but all those times I stop to think about it, I realise what a scary place I would have been in had I not gone under the knife. Breathing and eating, all of those things we take for granted would really be an issue the longer it went on for. At the time of my surgery decision, I was told ‘10 years to major organ failure’ and I didn’t really get it...but now I do, especially since it’s just not on my radar any longer. I am truly a lucky person and one who has been given a fresh lease on life. I will never be able to express that adequately....

Now to the nitty gritty... and the bad bits. I have discovered that scoliosis surgery is no cure for pain and that when you are rigid inside you often wake up in the morning completely rigid on the outside. Turning in bed some mornings is painful and awkward but usually wears off pretty quick once I apply some WD-40 (joking) and once I just get moving! Painkillers work fine and I don’t need to worry too much about it – like all people with pain, I get tired and crotchety from time to time, but actually I think it’s a very small price to pay for all that breathing and stuff.

I came out of surgery with some numbness and nerve pain in my leg. Neither has really gone. I still have to take the gabapentin (but a teeny dose compared to what I was taking) and there are compensations to numb bits...I mean, when Bugalugs tries to climb up my leg, it doesn’t bother me in the least! Having half your tummy numb and half not is kinda fun and an endless source of entertainment in working out where the edges are....and more practically, when I had my recent surgery, my consultant poked me (none too gently) in the stomach – “Does this hurt?” he asked and I was cheerfully able to tell him that it didn’t hurt a bit!

My walking is fine by my standards. I still only have 2 speeds, dead slow and full stop, but I am able to get into Tesco’s and buy milk and suchlike. For all longer distances I have my wheelchair and that gives me an incredible amount of freedom and independence. I can whizz round places, taking unnecessary detours all I like...its brilliant!

So, there you go, I guess it’s not so different from 6 months or even a year ago. Now I am eating from my achalasia surgery and feel so much healthier generally I feel pretty great. I know that I will always have limitations in my life, but so much of that is due to my spina bifida and I was an incredibly lucky spina bifida baby with the way I learned to walk and all. I just think that I am a very lucky person generally – isn’t my body an amazing machine? – and not just because it’s stuffed full of metal either!

No cats were harmed in the production of the last blog entry....

Ooops....

What do you get when your cat knocks your glasses off the bedside table in the middle of the night and your husband steps on them in the morning? This, that's what....

I don't think he could have broken them any more comprehensibly if he'd tried!

The good news is that I have spares and he had shoes on...so at least no one was hurt...!

Bravery and burglary!

Whilst I was off enjoying my stay in hospital (joking!) hubby called me up on my mobile:

“Now, I don’t want you to worry about a thing, there’s nothing to panic about”...
...of course, this immediately starts alarm bells ringing and I immediately want to panic...

He goes on to tell me that while he was visiting me in hospital the night before, someone had tried to break into the house and he came home to find the kitchen window wide open (having been forced from the outside) and Clumsy was at that point missing. Now Clumsy and Grace are both house cats, so it has been assumed that the burglars tried to get in and Clumsy went into guard dog(cat) mode and was at them teeth and nails and they ran away. He is getting all the credit for this even though the security light on the landing inside may have also had a part to play. Anyway, the good news is that they didn’t actually get in, nothing was taken and all we are left with is damage. Clumsy came home looking very smug and has said nothing about where he buried the bodies....

It seems that they first got into the shed...now there’s another tale, as we had a garage broken into in our last house and they simply levered the padlock hasp off the door. Oh yes, the police told us, very common, those locks give easy, now what you do, is drill holes in the door and put washers on the inside so they can’t easily lever the lock. (And then he said Evening all and disappeared!) Well, it’s true, it works, the lock didn’t give so they just smashed the door down instead!

They took nothing from the shed apart from two left handed gardening gloves – (presumably to match the two right handed ones that they nicked from down the road??) and I fell to wondering about this area and gloves. What is it? Do all the burglars around here have cold fingers? When my car was broken into they stole some purple fluffy gloves and I have really little hands too. So they now have a pair of tiny purple fluffy gloves and one tiny left handed gardening glove (mine) and one large left handed gents gardening glove (hubby’s)...so I’m starting to wonder if we have a band of kleptomaniac amputees around here...?

Private versus NHS

I don’t think I mentioned before, that through some quirk of fate, I currently have BUPA cover and so was able to get my operation done privately (and therefore faster). I can now confidently report that in private hospital you get your own room (very nice) and an en suite bathroom (also very nice). The downside is that the loo paper was very cheap and in an effort to look as much like a hotel and as little like a hospital as possible; there were no handrails in the bathroom. Interesting, given that people are having surgery there...

On the subject of the staff, I don’t know what to say. In the NHS, in my experience, you have an incredibly dedicated nursing staff who are, more often than not, rushed off their feet. In amongst all of this, most of them try and make you as comfortable as possible and do the best they can (especially given how many people they usually have to cope with at once). Of course, access to them is often fairly quick too, as you are in a ward with other people, if the nurses don’t answer your buzzer, 3 other people will press theirs too and there’s usually someone fit enough to toddle out of bed and get help in an emergency. Private’s not like that - you’re in your own room and there are more staff. It means they have more time to spend with patients and so they do. This means they’re not out there in the corridor spotting who’s little red light is on and needing help. Friendliness and helpfulness first class...access to them? A bit hit and miss, it seems...

I guess when it all comes down to it, apart from the single room thing, the main difference is the food and I missed out on most of that. Having been checked in at 9.30 and on my way to theatre at 11am (out about 3pm if you’re interested in such things) and then nil by mouth or water only for the next 36 hours I only got one day of the food and then it was the famous ‘sloopy’ stuff. It was beautifully presented though on lovely china and with plate covers to keep it warm and all. Very nice food too...

The question is, given that there are pluses and minuses to the NHS and private, would you pay out all that money, just for good food? I don’t know that I would – the thing to my mind that you pay for is no waiting list and quick treatment at a time convenient to you. At the end of the day, if you are having surgery it’s all the same, they chop you open, you wish for pain relief and then you start to get better and get home as fast as you can!

Fun, fun, fun–doplication.

I have had a fundoplication as well as a heller myotomy and find it hard to believe how many new long words this has made me learn in the past few weeks! Anyway, the idea of this fun-thingie is to stop reflux. Now, as I am sure you are all aware by now, my achalasia has meant that my stomach valve was shut so I guess you want to know why I need reflux preventing surgery – no, you don’t want to know? Tough, I’m gonna tell you anyway!

You see, the heller myotomy splits the outer wall of the oesophagus to open up the valve. The oesophagus is something like a bicycle wheel (but without being circular obviously) – in that it is made of something like an inner tube and outer tyre - and in the myotomy, the outer tyre is split lengthways to allow the inner tube to relax outwards. The only problem with this is that once healed in this relaxed state, the valve never shuts again and so food goes in easily, but acid can come out just as easily. Result – swap achalasia for GERD in one easy session.

In order to prevent this they do the ‘fun’ thing which basically involves taking part of your stomach and wrapping it around the bottom of your oesophagus in a sort of knot and stitching it there. When your stomach contracts to throw acid up your gullet, it contacts the knot and effectively tightens it, (hopefully) preventing acid reflux. Isn’t that clever? Well, I thought so, so that’s why I’m telling you...

Of course, if they stitch the knot too tight, then you may as well continue to have achalasia, too loose and it won’t work, so here’s where I hope that my surgeon is really good and has it just right. So far, I can’t tell for sure, I have had heartburn like pains some nights since I had the surgery (but not all by any means) and of course, I’m not fully healed yet so that’s to be expected. I guess I’ll just report back in a couple of months and let you know just how clever my surgeon really is....

Gastric gurgling and gnomes

My stomach has been making odd noises since I started eating again and it made me realise just how quiet it’s been over the past year. I guess that with my LES closed, all the food in my oesophagus was just dripping into it slowly over a period of hours after I ate and so it simply never filled up and never had too much to work on or to make a noise about. On a similar note, I also find it virtually impossible to remember when I last that full feeling in my stomach after eating a meal before my surgery – although just the smallest bowl of soup when I first started eating and I felt incredibly bloated. One of the nurses told me that it was almost as if I had had a self imposed gastric band in place and after so long, my stomach had probably shrunk. I guess such things will all take time ...

I mentioned to my surgeon how odd my stomach felt and he looked very concerned. Maybe odd was the wrong word to use...as I just meant different to what I have been used to more recently..not odd as in bad!

Odd may be a bit of a good description for my surgeon too. I mean, he is very sweet and (I hope) good at his job, but he is just so gnome-like to look at.^*1
Give him a long beard and a little fishing rod and he would look right at home on the edge of any garden pond. He would be a natural extra for LOTR^*2 or any other great fantasy film and I can’t help feeling that he would be perfect in any live role playing situation with just a minimum of make up!

^*1 This is about 10 minutes long...but worth sticking at....?
^*2 Yes...I know there are no gnomes in LOTR, but I couldn’t think of any other amazing epic fantasy film ...suggestions on a postcard please...