Dave's blog

I’m due to speak at Way with words this weekend for the second time. I first came to the festival to talk about the Self Sufficient-ish Bible a few years ago. At the time it was an odd experience as I’d never been to anything that prestigious before (I’ve not been to that much since then either!). There were famous writers everywhere most of whom I couldn’t recognise at all! I ended up having lunch at the same table as one of the Dimblebys, I forget which. Andy very politely offered him tea which he very rudely ignored and later John Snow walked in the bar to which I inadvertently shouted rudely ‘Bloody hell, it’s John Snow’ which he politely ignored.

It wasn’t all rudeness, we did meet fellow writer Paul Kingsnorth. He was promoting his book about corporate England,called ‘Real England’. We’ve kept in touch, Paul and his wife had dinner at my house not so long ago.
He was our first real insight into the world of the writer and what it could be like to earn your living from books. It’s an odd profession as you spend long hours alone getting stressed about deadlines and writing about things you’d much rather be doing than writing, like gardening or foraging.

This year I’m doing a Gardener’s Question Time with fellow Green Books authors. I’ve met most of them already including the Compost Guru Nicky Scott. Nicky is a great bloke, there’s not many Jazz musician’s with such a passion for compost (or is he a composter with a passion for Jazz?). There will also be Andy McKee and Mark Gatter of Polytunnel books fame and the ‘no-dig’  gardener Charles Dowding.

Once I’ve done the question time event I’m set to speak later in the afternoon (at 5.30 Saturday 16th July). I’m a little nervous but I’m hoping I’ve judged my audience right. I did a terrible talk not so long ago where I judged the audience really badly. I spoke about the bands I’ve been in and towards the end played a video by my old band ‘Vontergarten’ here it is.  The video isn’t all that bad until you get to the end, you’ll see what I mean if you watch it. You could have heard a pin drop, I had to joke my way out of it but it was really uncomfortable.  I’ve got some gags in the talk for Saturday but as I think the average age at Ways With Words is 70 I’ve got nothing in there that is too risqué. Hopefully it will be a fun event.

A few months ago I wrote how I was living in some Kafkaesque world where everything was some kind of trial, something we have to endure, that life is clogged up with meaningless struggles that take us away from the true nature of being.
Now I think I’m just turning into Larry Bloody David the writer and star of Curb your enthusiasm -For those who haven’t seen it, ‘Curb’ as it’s often referred to follows someone who is constantly caught up in the tiny dramas of everyday life and is powerless to do anything else.

So, two months ago just before I moved, I told the phone company (The Phone Co-op) I was moving house, I did this by email as I was kept on hold for far too long to do it over the phone. On arrival to the new house I presumed the line was dead because it wasn’t switched on yet and I would just have to wait – as I said, I presumed this. After two weeks in a rare moment in front of my desk I check my emails at work – I find an email from the phone Co-op saying they’ve been trying to call me… …on my OLD landline number!

They tell me the line should work so I wander off to get a phone signal, I call them and tell them it doesn’t.

More time passes and I email the phone co-op again to tell them again the line is dead. Rather than send an engineer round they told me ‘I must be plugged into an old socket’ and I ’should look for a working socket’. This was all by email as of course I had no landline phone and to make matters worse the granite cottage I now rent has no phone signal. I may as well have been using a carrier pigeon but as well I may as well have been talking to an alien.

Now after two months of borrowing internet contentions wherever I could just to keep up with work they’ve finally sent an engineer round. Then surprise, surprise, he found there was a fault with the line, by the end of the day it was fixed.

With no landline, no internet and no mobile signal I’ve been cut off from the world for ages – has it been blissful? Well at times yes, but mostly it’s just been frustrating.

Still, there are millions of blogs that talk about this kind of thing, so I won’t dwell on it, just wanted to explain my absence.

I really should write about foraging or growing food a bit more often on my blog. I made a decision not to a while ago, I may change that decision soon – I just never wanted to write a ‘the week I’ve been mostly eating…’ type blog.

Other news – we’ve been to the hospital again (much less of a drama this time transport wise) it seems Ellie’s every growing bump is going to be a boy!!!!
I’m over the moon. I would have been happy either way but somehow the first one being a boy is really exciting.

Last week was a week of firsts. It was the first time I saw a copy of my brand new book, I arranged to have the first one off the press delivered to me and I was the first person to receive a copy (I was even a day ahead of the publishers).

Despite spending so much time writing and editing the book, I thought I’d be sick of it by now but no, it was still really exciting to see it. It does look really good and I’m not just saying that. I wanted this one to really be practical, to be the sort of book I would buy if I hadn’t written it. Thankfully it does that AND looks nice.
The other first was an even bigger, life changing first. It was the first time I got to see my unborn child!! Yes, I’m going to be a Dad, Ellie is now coming up to being 13 weeks pregnant!

We had a real adventure trying to get from Staverton where we currently live (for the next two days!) to Torbay hospital for the scan. Neither of us drives and in their infinite wisdom the bus company have withdrawn the only direct bus from Totnes to Torbay hospital.
This meant a bus into town, a bus to Paignton Zoo then change for the world’s slowest bus service, one which seemed to stop at every bus stop in the Torbay area. Ellie completely lost her sense of humour by the third bus, as by 11.15 it was clear we weren’t going to make the 11.30 appointment. She went from her usual serene and jokey self to being irritable and irritated by everything I did. To make things worse I knew I had to be back at work for 12.30. I had already decided to book a cab but even so it looked very unlikely I would be back in time. I could already hear the frustration and disappointment in my boss’s voice as she would no doubt have to cover the teaching for me if I was any later.

I could feel my blood pressure rising as the bus trundled its way through the centre of Torquay, picking up pensioners from the pound shops. I called the hospital and told them we were running late, they told me the appointment could be cancelled if we were more than 20 minutes late, it was now 11.30 and I couldn’t see any signs for the hospital.

Eventually we made it to the hospital grounds and after deciphering the colour coded map (which should in theory make life easier but instead resembled some cryptic colour blindness test) we sprinted to the maternity ward.
A male receptionist told us we were late, just in case we hadn’t noticed, and we may lose our appointment. We were out of breath, stressed, barely talking to each other and very anxious not to have gone through 2 and a half hours and three bus journey for nothing. It’s a joke really; it’s only 10 miles between my house and the hospital, google directions claim it only takes 26 minutes in a car and 2 hours 53 minutes walking. So we would have been just 23 minutes longer if we’d have bloody walked!!!!

A woman behind the counter said it would be okay and they would squeeze us in, Ellie’s sense of humour returned and after she had some blood tests we went in for the scan.
Nothing prepared me for what I saw. Or at least nothing prepared me for how I would feel having seen what I saw. It was a real life person. It had toes, hands a head and it looked like it was having a great time. It was jumping around like no-one’s business, seemingly loving all the attention it was getting. Ellie started to cry and I couldn’t stop smiling, there is was, a little version of Ellie and me growing inside her. It all became real at that point, before then it was an abstract concept but since the scan I know in just 6 short months we will be parents.

On the way home the very expensive taxi driver told me how he missed his children growing up because he was working too hard. He explained how his son had gone off the rails as a teenager and how he never sees him because he lives in Australia. This seemed to be a real warning as I can be known to do an 80 hour week some weeks. So, if the two people who read this remember can you email me in 6 months, then a year, then every 2 years (or whenever you remember) to remind me to stop working so hard so I can see my child grow up?
To tie up the last thread of this story I was late for work, and my boss was angry with me (but understanding at the same time-she’s not a monster!).

The icing on the cake is none of this was necessary, there is a service in Totnes called Totnes caring which will take you door to door for just a donation. I’d left it with Ellie to book a car but with her pregnancy brain she left it far too late to call. Next time I shall book it myself and hopefully keep hold of my relationship and my job!

My book has been printed and there are now coverless copies of it sitting at the printers waiting to be bound on Tuesday. I feel like I’m in a no-man’s land between editing and publication. In other ways I’m out of no-man’s land; I no longer feel ill, on the contrary, I seem to have found some hidden energy and I look and feel, fitter and healthier than I have in years.

I’m looking forward to these few months ahead, in many ways they are why a lot of writers choose to write. It’s a chance to come out of solitary confinement and actually meet who you are writing for.
As I said in the last blog I did a Gardens Question time in a Bristol shopping centre last weekend. It turned out to be a lot of fun and I even managed to give some half knowledgeable sounding answers! I must have impressed my fellow panelist from the Botanic Gardens, as he ended up offering me a job teaching in Bristol! Nothing is finalised yet but even being asked was a real compliment.

So after Bristol, last night I had my first real book talk, appropriately taking place in my home town of Northampton. It wasn’t just that Northampton is where it all began for me, but also because it is the town that lots of new products are tested in before they get rolled out to the rest of the country. Northampton is not only geographically the middle of the country, it is also the most demographically average place in the UK. This makes it a marketing wet dream as companies have tested everything from chewing gum and crisps to late licence drinking and chip and pin on the population of this ever expanding market town.

I had a lot of friends in the audience so it wasn’t necessarily a fair test but it did seem to go down quite well. Being somewhere familiar, amongst familiar faces was far better than times I’ve spent the weekend on my own to talk in a tiny place I’ve barely heard of.

If I mentioned in an earlier blog that I didn’t really like writing my own biogs then this is the flip side. I do like meeting people after talks, gardeners are (nearly) always down to earth and friendly people.
My ‘tour’ hasn’t been finalised yet but over the spring and summer I should be in Oxford, Bristol, London and hopefully in August I’ll find some events to do in the North East (I want to visit friends there!) – so anyone reading this in Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Leeds, Hexham that might know of an event that needs a speaker please drop me a line.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted and life, it seems, has got just as busy as it ever was, if not more so.  I seem to be taking it in my stride a bit more now though, I’m not staying up for the sake of it and, lack of salt in my diet has cut out almost everything that’s bad for me.  I’m now getting up at 6am as I’m unable to sleep in.  I’m eating nothing but fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds and rice cakes along with a healthy amount of carbs (Yes carbs are good for you, don’t believe the hype! we were healthiest as a nation in the UK when we ate a lot more potatoes, they are not fattening, think what you would eat instead??!!!). – Nutritionist cap comes off.

So what am I doing at 6am in the morning, well now I’m not teaching for the ‘holidays’, no  its mainly book promotion, catching up on emails, article writing, blogging, tweeting -  life as a modern writer eh?

I mean did John Claudious Loudon, founder of Gardener’s magazine and writer of the first Encyclopaedia of Gardening, tweet when he finished his first draft – I doubt it.  Are we going to lose whole swaths of text because the writers put it up on Facebook instead of in a manuscript?

What happens if a magnetic pulse wipes out all digital media, everything gone, millions of man hours of work wiped out. This here only exists in digital form, a series of 1’s and 0’s.  Although I can’t see my book being put alongside the likes of George Orwell and Oscar Wilde (or even John Loudon for that matter) I’m glad I have something in print, something that will last.

On that subject the book gets printed today!!!!!  I’m debating if I should go along and see it being done but with no car it’s at least 2 hours each way. A four hour round trip would cut into my day quite a lot. I’m still trying to wrap up a college course, I’ve got loads of assignments to do for it. I fell behind writing the book and now I’m even further behind, still I’ve got today and tomorrow to catch up – WHAT AM I DOING WRITING THIS THEN!!?

Okay, before I get round to doing that I should mention the Bristol Garden Life Show have me on the panel of a Gardener’s Question Time event in the Gallery’s Shopping Centre on Saturday and Sunday. There are 4 ‘shows’ altogether at 12 and 3pm each day. I’m sort of looking forward to it but bricking it too.  It doesn’t matter how long you have been in a subject there is always someone more qualified there, this is no exception, my old boss from the Botanic Gardens (I wasn’t there that long and only as a volunteer) is also on the panel.  He buys plants from all over the world for a top academic botanic garden, I’ve kept allotments for 10 years and write for gardening magazines – I mean he’s completely out of my league! When I used to see him at the gardens I was always massively intimidated, he has that air of someone who knows a lot.  I think I’ll leave any questions about Proteas or South African plants to him!

Okay, strange how that kind of thing keeps happening, just had a call from Steve at the allotments office in Bristol who’s organising the event, he’s put my mind right at ease. He gave examples of questions and it’s no different than my students ask me, I always have an answer even if it means asking them a lot of questions first.

It might be quite fun, I will just have to know when to shut up and let someone else speak.

So life continues.  I’ve been up and down this week. On Thursday and Friday I got quite down as I felt like I really was what I am, quite an unwell man. I filled a wheelbarrow up with compost at work and had to sit down to catch my breath. I’m used to doing a lot more than that, when I was working as a gardener full time I could gravel a front garden in a day, filling barrows up from 8am to 4pm.  On my allotment I would move 12 wheelbarrows of muck in an afternoon, uphill whilst smoking.   I’ve long since quit smoking but the illness is making me as weak as a 60 a day man. I’m building my strength up and, each day I can do more but it is slow.

The doctors were another kick in the teeth on Friday as I can’t get an appointment before some of my medication runs out. My hospital meds and GP ones don’t match so the nurse can’t give me a repeat prescription. So next week I have to miss college or teaching to get an appointment just so I can get a bit of paper signed.  It would be easy if I could just jump in a car and drive there but I have to take the train or get a bus and there aren’t too many of those a day.

At work food has been a bit of an issue – thankfully I’ve had Julia (author of Gaia’s Kitchen) who, along with Sarah one of the other cooks, have gone out of their way to be helpful.

Had a nice moment with my boss as she pointed out a snake’s head fritillary growing through the cracks of the paving in the herb garden.  We shared stories of finding the plant in the wild. I once dragged Andy through boggy field in Oxford to find them in Iffly meadows around this time of year.  I think it could have even been when we were doing the Oxford literary festival. Such a beautiful flower with it’s unreal chequered flower head.

Food at home has had a bit of a breakthrough as I’ve discovered liquid aminos, a low sodium soy sauce with just 160mg of sodium per ½ teaspoon. It’s bloody delicious.

So back to work for full hours next week – writing and college work today and Monday, college Tuesday and Wednesday morning then teaching Wednesday afternoon all day Thursday and Friday.  I at least get to have breaks and I can teach whilst sitting in a wheelbarrow if I get tired – I prefer to be ‘hands on’ but I don’t think anyone minds me not lifting a spade at the moment.  Bloody diuretics mean I have to nip behind a hedge every five minutes but I’d rather that than a kidney transplant!

What a month it has been! I’m tentatively back to work now and things are slowly getting back to normal.   I’ve just been writing up my invoice for the month and can’t quite believe how little time I’ve had off.  Considering I was in hospital for three days and, for a couple of weeks, I could barely walk more than a few hundred meters without getting tired, I’ve not really had much time away from work.

Everyone around me has been great and I can honestly say I am in the best place on earth to be ill. The amount of help that has been offered has been unbelievable, I’ve had friends visiting all the time and those who haven’t been in the area have called me up or sent me messages.

The steroids (prednisolone) are a bit shit to be on if I’m honest. It’s hard to describe but I just don’t feel myself. I’m keeping a positive outlook as the alternative is just despair.  They could be worse, I just occasionally feel light-headed and I’m finding it hard to sleep at night.  Although having said that the insomnia is getting less and less pronounced as the time goes by.  The warfarin is a drag as it means I’m not allowed to do a lot of things for the risk of bleeding to death. I have grown a bit of a beard to avoid too much shaving and I’m not riding my bike anywhere just yet.  I have to get my levels checked twice a week which means getting into town and hanging around for the bus home. This has been okay as it means I get to hang out in cafes and catch up with friends but it does mean I’m spending money rather than earning it.

We’ve sorted out our home situation and it looks like we’re moving to somewhere much better. It’s a cottage with an orchard and veg patch and log burning fire.  It looks (and sounds) like it will get cold in the winter so I think we’ll see about insulation and doing what we can to make it warmer.  Our current landlady is still being pretty useless, we’ve now had no bathroom light for months, we asked her to fix it and she suggested coming round with a lamp, A LAMP IN THE BATHROOM!!??  She has no sense of urgency, surely she wants to sell? Who’s going to want to buy somewhere that looks like it has electrical problems before they move in!!??  We’ve had an electrician round to look and now we just wait to see if they can spare a few pounds from their millions to pull some wires out and put them back in. It must be hard for them, what with the tennis courts to resurface and the Bentley to polish.

The next step of the illness will be changing my meds. I can’t wait to get off the diuretic tablets, I need to pee around every half hour at the moment and about three or four times in the night. The pred will get lowered at some point which may or may not give me problems.  I’ll cross that bridge when I find it.

For now it’s a really nice feeling return back to health. Each day I’m able to do more and more.  The other day I crossed the ford in the river near my house. I waded across the 20 meter, up to knee depth water to get from my village to the estate and as I got to the other side I just laughed out-loud to myself.  It was such a rush, Ellie and I had been looking at that crossing all winter and really looking forward to crossing in the spring. It felt like a real mark in my return to health and I just filled with joy (no doubt in part due to some euphoric effect of the pred).

After a real hellish start this month has certainly looked up, I’ve never had a time like this before and hopefully my life will be somewhat boring from now on!

23/03/11

Right, I’m sure this is getting a bit boring for anyone who was looking for a gardening blog but, for the time being, I’m afraid writing this is helping me so you’re going to have to deal with it!  I had thought that I might split this blog in two, one Minimal Change Related and the other back to bits of comedy and idle thoughts, that way my Mum could read one and Newton Abbott woman with all the cats (see Fat Feet posted 5^th March) could read the other.

Anyway, for now I have one blog so, to begin with I was wrong about the meds coming down, I’m still on 60mg of prednisolone, I will be for at least a month. I’ve been looking up the side effects and I seem to be very lucky, some people are really struck down by the drug.  The worst thing I seem to get is insomnia but I’m used to that anyway. I do feel like I am taking something, I feel different but it’s not necessarily bad.  If anything it is making me feel quite positive.  I could do without the emotional side of things, I feel a bit weepy at times, not sad but I did have a little cry whilst watching Miss Potter, the film about the life of Beatrix Potter.  I’m not usually that kind of person, I can be sentimental yes, but not THAT sentimental.

The other side effect is my voice seems to have changed, it gets quite croaky and soft, getting worse by the evening.  I looked it up and about 0.17% of people on Pred (I’m in with the Nephrology lingo now)  can suffer from dysphonia (or altered voice) as a side effect.   So let’s put this into perspective, 2 to 7 children in every 100000 get minimal change and 10-15% of cases are adults so that works out at 1 in 500000 or 1 in half a million.  So if I’ve worked this out right, which I might not of done, one in 850 000 000 or one in every 85 million (or is it 850 million?) get MCN/MCD and dysphonia.  That means there is a good chance I’m the only person ever to have had these symptoms as an adult in the UK – if not I’d love to hear from you (if nothing more than to prove both the stats and/or my maths are way out).

Now I could think ‘why me?’ in a bad way but, instead the scientist in me thinks it’s absolutely fascinating and now the question ‘why me?’ takes on a whole new scope.  MCD is by and large idiopathic, meaning they have no idea what causes it.  In simple terms my immune system back fired and started to turn on my kidneys rather than the causative agent (if that’s the right word?) – possibly a virus or bacteria.  Now what that agent was is a mystery, it could be the cold I had at Christmas or it could even be as a result of me keeping bees.  I did wear my bee suit not long before all this happened – I dressed up in it to cheer Ellie up doing a ‘What are you doing Dave?’ sketch from 2001 Space Odyssey.  She didn’t really laugh that much so I guess it wasn’t worth it.   Now, bee venom is known to hang around for a while so although I wasn’t stung recently the suit would still hold traces of it.  It could be that the bee venom was the trigger for my immune system to backfire and start attacking itself.

I don’t want this to put anyone off bee-keeping, it is very, very, rare to get MCD and even rarer for it to be caused by bees, you actually have more chance of winning the lottery AND being struck by lightning.  However, for me I think it has put me off looking after bees for good. The nephrologist I spoke with yesterday said it could be a precaution to stop bee-keeping, I can’t help thinking he’s right.  It’s funny I got a fairly abusive message from a vegan about bee-keeping.  I thought it was a shame she felt that way as not only am I long term vegetarian and occasional vegan but the methods I practice (sorry, practiced now) aren’t for honey production but for the welfare of the bees. We only had a small amount of honey each last year, about two jars each for 15 people from 5 hives.  The rest we left for the bees as their food for the winter.  Without beekeepers there would be no honey bees, without honey bees there would be no food. My conscience is clear for the bee keeping but I am aware that others may not see it that way. A rather superstitious side of me occasionally thinks I may have been hexed by an angry vegan (if you’re reading this, it worked, can you reverse the hex please!).  Still, I know that has no basis in rationality and I try to think this isn’t from someone else’s ill will.

It really makes you think how random the pattern of life is, if I follow the chain of events back this all started back in June 2009 in a country lane in the Cotswolds (I think I may lose a few people at this point, but thanks for reading so much so far and for the rest of you still reading bear with me this does make sense eventually).

So, it all started when Ellie and I foraged a bumper crop of cherries (I blogged about it at the time http://dave.selfsufficientish.com/blogs/2009/07/living-for-free/) that led us to the idea that there was real abundance without the need for money. From this we decided to see if we could live without cash for as long as we could, without having to change our lifestyle too drastically.

We did pay rent, bills and travel but everything from food and clothes to entertainment and books we had to find without dipping into our wallets.  The experiment lasted six weeks and although I was living in Bristol at the time it ended in Totnes bookshop when I bought a copy of Phil Chandlers the Barefoot Beekeeper.  I though the book had to hold some significance as it marked the first purchase I made in over six weeks.

That September I enrolled on a Sustainable Horticulture course being run at Schumacher College by Cornwall’s Duchy College (the same course I now teach on).  After speaking to a long term volunteer at the college we decided it might be a good idea to do something about the plight of the bees. The next day I brought Phil’s book into college to see if anyone was up for keeping bees.  It was a near unanimous yes and we quickly formed a bee keeping group.  We built two top bar hives and by another twist of fate one of the students knew Phil, the author of the book and, he agreed to come in and teach us all about bee keeping.

At the same time nearby Buckfast Abby were scaling down their operation and offering out hives and bees, free to a good home.   So almost by magic we built up an apiary of around five hives which included the famous Buckfast Bee.

Now, over the winter one of the hives got very weak, it looked like it was been attacked by hornets and a lot of the honey was being robbed by neighbouring healthy bees, so we had no choice but to feed it sugar solution and hope for the best. During this feeding my suit got dive bombed by bees,  they stung the suit like mad, spreading their venom all over it.  The rest of the story you know – I put on the suit for a joke, my body reacted to the bee venom attacking my kidneys, my feet swell up from excess protein leaking from my kidneys, I’m diagnosed with Minimal Change Disease (still failing to see the irony in that name).

It is funny really as the bee keeping part of the story started in Totnes bookshop and so did my new book (this is thankfully a much shorter story).  I went to the book launch of a book called Local Food by Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins at the book shop.  I met Rob and Tamzin briefly and asked them what it was like to work for Green Books, they said it was great. A while later I contacted Green Books, they said they’d love to have me on their (Green) Books then come that spring Grow Your Food For Free was commissioned.  I’m due to have the proofs of the book today; I’m waiting in for the postman as I type. It’s no doubt why I’ve written so much, a distraction from the excitement, I can’t wait to see it.  I’ve seen the odd page or two but not enough to get an idea of it.  Ellie has seen it as she’s been into the offices and she loves it, that’s a very encouraging sign as she’s illustrated it and she is the most hypercritical person when it comes to her own work.

So for anyone reading, the book is being launched at the fateful Totnes bookshop in May, date unconfirmed as yet but around release date of 12^th May.  I can’t help wondering what strange path it might lead me on, it is unlikely that I’ll get a 1 in half a million kidney complaint again but as it all started in Totnes bookshop, I am prepared for anything.

Ha, the proof came just as I was about to post this blog. They look good, they look really good…..

Life has settled into a new kind of normal. My kidneys are functioning again and I now go to the doctors twice a week to get my warferin levels checked.  I’ve got a hospital appointment to check everything is totally hunky dory tomorrow but it’s so far so good.

I’m still tired and not sleeping at night but as for side effects off the steroids I seem to be having remarkably few. My voice has changed, its croaky, weak and perhaps even a little higher but that seems to come and go throughout the day, getting worse in the evening.  I hope it goes, I like my voice, wouldn’t want to lose that!

My brother came down to visit on Friday and I spent longer out of the house than I had done since this started (bar the trip to hospital).  Like most families, we don’t always get on, but I’m glad to say this time we had no problems with each other and he actually did me the world of good. It was nice to show him some plants he hadn’t come across and reminded me a bit of old times when Andy was still learning about foraging.  I built on the extra energy I seemed to find that day the following day and I’m slowly trying to push myself back to the energy levels I had before.

I had great hopes and dreams about writing a novel or at least getting ahead with articles but to be honest I’ve done very little.  I found twitter and already I think I should ban myself from it, I think it’s probably healthier to smoke than to go on that thing! It’s just banal little statements mixed in with something interesting, real addiction stuff, small reward after a long wait.  I think I may have upset Alys Fowler by asking if her Mum’s cake was a foundation block to her polytunnel.  It seemed funny to me at the time but I’m cringing a little now, I mean I don’t know her, it’s a bit rude.

God, I’d much rather be well and outside than stuck inside twittering, it’s like temping again but without the pay – the worst of both worlds.  I’m getting a little better at chess at least and as for the novel I have written an outline.  I’ve also done a little meditation which has been really quite interesting, this might sound strange but at one point I felt what it was like to be a single bacteria cell. It was fleeting but, I shut off every sense and felt what it must be like to only exist, to not have to think, just to sense a food source and move towards it – hard to explain but it was quite a moment.  It was no doubt drug side effects that enhanced the meditation but it was a very interesting thing to go through.

The next step is lower the dose of steroids from a Euphoric 60mg to a ratty and irritable 5mg. I’m not looking forward to that!