I have been blogging away in the night while under the influence of steroids but my app stopped publishing, so now I have lots of material in a bit of a mess. I have been advised by the beloved one that brevity is a virtue and that I do go on a bit, so rather than it wait until it’s in the Bodleian I will publish it in chunks that may have succumbed to chronological hysteria.

I suppose the headline news is I am currently pretty incapacitated, bit like, but not as bad as 10 years ago. Pain is well under control and frankly that’s really the only thing that can break my spirit so I am perfectly cheerful. There is always an absurdist element that overwhelms the orderly progress of serious medical care and I suppose I relish those moments at least in retrospect. I will relay those in due course. Hopefully on Thursday there will be a bit more strategy and a bit less bumbling about but you never know. Meantime I read, I write, I stagger with next doors zimmer – poor Jenny 78 can’t shower till I get my new one – delayed by Amazon (we gave my last one away – hmmm over optimistic), I eat a lot (that’s steroids again) , I learn German, watch disturbing German movies with subtitles, watch you tube videos on film theory and demand 24 hour care from Maria. The latter is a source of guilt but insufficient to prevent me from demanding it anyway. All in all I am a slothful, fat, drug addict. Great company – do drop by!

I don’t acknowledge New Years I don’t care. It’s nothing personal. Don’t be offended.

‘So Chris if it’s not new year, when do you feel an urge sufficient to put finger to iPad and write a blog post.’

(Unusually I have reviewed this blog post) You can skip the next two paragraphs (what a load of drivel) the proper post starts with ‘Two dear friends from my opera directing past sent us a Christmas card.’

But then on reviewing it again I have decided to save that stuff until another post.

My oft repeated response has been, “when I need to vent something and like an over inflated balloon I will explode if I don’t” – but that’s not entirely true. A certain combination of factors must also be present. If I am too over inflated, – let’s call it very worried, then the distance I need from the emotional hot spot, – let’s call it oh my god someone is going to die, I am going to die, my favourite cat it going to die or that old favourite Maria, has been, will be, wants to be abducted by aliens,  is not sufficient to elicit the ‘write a blog you will feel better response.’ So in this case dear reader, no news can mean bad news (don’t forget I am always the dear reader I write this for)  but let’s not panic, no news can at the best of times mean  good news, because there is no hot spot emotional or otherwise to require an evaluation of distance to be triggered  hence no blog post, blessed relief for all. Got it. I am not sure I have – and yes I am in steroid, pain killer, and double dose chemo heaven, that special place where just about any combination of words posited sufficiently early in the morning seem like drops of the profoundest wisdom until you read them a few months later and they reveal their true value – None nothing nichts. So let’s carry on writing nowt.

One of the things that this disease can trigger is liver/kidney problems. If you have blood in your wee or trouble going or not going to the toilet then ring the hospital. Anyway a day or two ago I had none of those issues, but my hands did turnbright yellow. Now one of the symptoms of serious illness is hypercondria so my brain leapt to ‘yellow skin = internal organ failure probably liver.” It did not leap to ‘you have just been handling a brand new pot of Curcumin tablets, derived from that yellowish of Indian cuisine herbal delicacies turmeric.” By the time it had, I had (1) opened the curtains to check if the sun was rising and had had somehow miraculously imparted its hue through the curtains onto my hands, (2) checked whether my reading light bulb was failing and spreading yellow rather than white light into the bedroom and (3) scrutinised my face with my iPhone camera searching for tell tale signs of ‘sunflower syndrome’ where selected boldly extremities go the colour of a well known Van Gogh flower arrangement. Yep it was one those drug induced moments of hallucinatory fear that I had quite forgotten I would experience in irrational waves until my brain remembers that the kind of poison currently being administered is the good kind and stops scaring the pants off me.

Two dear friends from my opera directing past sent us a Christmas card. I checked that the e-mail address I had for them was still connected and to my delight…………….