life

After my ovarian cystectomy last August, everything seemed to be going very well indeed. I healed quite quickly, stopped aching all the time, started sleeping properly again, and soon felt incredibly energised. It made me realise how much waking several times in the night was wearing me out.

I was supposed to get another ultrasound scan in October to see whether the cyst has truly gone, but due to an administrative error, that scan didn’t end up happening until last week. The bad news is that my cyst is back, and very nearly as big as it was last time. In just five months, it’s grown to 7cm across, which is a bit too rapid for my liking.

Now before I go further, this next bit may stray into ‘too much information’ for some of you, so if you’re squeamish, don’t read on.

My consultant told me that the first operation simply drained the cyst. The hope, obviously, was that that would be enough and that it wouldn’t recur. My assumption is that draining a cyst is easier than removing it, and so that’s the first thing they try.

The cyst itself appears to have been an endometrioid or endometrial cyst, also disturbingly called a ‘chocolate cyst’. What happens is that a little bit of the lining of the uterus comes away, travels to an ovary and starts to grow. Just like it would in the uterus, it bleeds, and the cyst grows.

So rather than being full of mucous, as some cysts are, mine was full of blood. And it will continue to grow unless it is removed.

Whilst my consultant generously gave me the option to wait and see what might happen, it was pretty clear that the next step is another operation, but this time, rather than just draining the cyst, they will attempt to peel the sac itself away from the ovary. That’s likely easier said than done, not least because the photo clearly showed how the ovary had stretched as the cyst grew inside it. Contrary to what I had imagined, the cyst wasn’t a sort of balloon on the outside of the ovary, but embedded in it, which will make it a bit tricky to remove.

The weird thing is that I didn’t feel any of the pain or discomfort that I had had for the first nine months of last year… at least, not until a couple of days after the ultrasound. I don’t know if it was because the process of doing the scan poked it about a bit, if it was psychosomatic, or if the inflection point is just co-incidental.

But what I can say is that I’m now at the same stage I was around April last year with regard to symptoms, and I know it’s going to be a while before the surgery’s arranged. So, fun time ahead. At least, though, I know what to expect.

“Brace yerself,” said Michael in a 2004 email, as he sent me a photo of himself and his three children, Charlie, Lily & Ruairi. “A tad more up to date,” he said of this snap. “Gone, the floppy fringe of my Martin Fry period. Back to the wash-it-and-leave-it version.”

Back then, Michael was in PR and I was struggling with a mutating freelance gig that had way more marketing and PR work in it than I was comfortable with, having no experience of either. We chatted on IM about the problem, and Michael offered to talk it all through with me on Skype. He spent a lot of time with me, helping me craft a strategy, pointing me at the best resources, and giving me the moral support I so desperately needed at the time. In short, I was at the bottom of a big hole and, from the other side of the Atlantic, Michael dug me out of it.

That was typical of Michael. No matter how busy he was, he always had time to help his friends out. He always found time for that call, that email, that chat, that pep talk.

We were friends mainly through electronic means, through our blogs or IM or IRC. Indeed, three days before that email, Michael had celebrated the opening of my new Corante blog about social media, Strange Attractor. Michael also blogged at Corante for a while, at Flackster, a blog which is still funny, sharp and insightful all these years later.

Michael was one of a small group of bloggers who opened their arms to this digital waif, back then looking desperately for purpose and peers. Michael gave selflessly of his time, support and friendship, and it was always a great shame that we didn’t get to meet up more often.

When we did have the opportunity to get together, it was always for far too short a time. Conversation flowed so easily and Michael’s sharp wit, always evident in chat and email, was even funnier in person. His intelligence, compassion and empathy shone through. No matter what I was going through, Michael would always have something wise and apposite to say. But our meetings were never long enough, never often enough.

Michael was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer over the summer. Kevin and I hoped as hard as we could that he would make a swift and complete recovery, but it was sadly not to be. We heard this morning the awful news that Michael passed away yesterday.

Michael leaves many legacies, including Toronto’s annual HoHoTO fundraising event that he helped found and which has, to date, raised $165,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank. He touched so many lives, directly and indirectly, and made those lives that much better. He was a great friend, despite the fact that he often protested that he wasn’t.

Michael’s was a life lived with love. Love for his wife, Leona, for his children, for his family, for his friends and for strangers, for the causes he believed in, for the little things and the big things. Michael, we love you and we will miss you.

I’m back at my desk today for the first time since I had my grapefruit-sized ovarian cyst removed last Thursday. Although I’m not feeling particularly intelligent today, I am free from pain for the first time in months and I’m very happy with the speed of my recovery.

I thought it might be worth just recounting the full story, because in my search for information on ovarian cysts I got a lot of the same basic facts over and again, and lots of fora where women get together to discuss their experiences, but very little in the way of “this is what it was like for me”. I could have really done with reading someone else’s story of their ovarian cyst, if only to have some sort of frame of reference.

That said, if you find this blog post because you either suspect you have an ovarian cyst or because you’ve been diagnosed with one, please bear in mind that different people have different experiences. You might find that yours is radically different to mine, so don’t take anything here as medical advice or any sort of prediction. This is just my story.

It’s actually a story that I think started years ago. Now that the cyst is gone, I realise just how it made its presence felt. Looking back, I realise that it was there at least five years ago, if not longer. I can recognise a point at which my periods got heavier, longer and more painful. More recently, probably a year or so ago, I started getting minor spotting before and after. That was, I suspect, another warning sign.

Yet another long-term warning sign was the sensation that there was ‘something in the way’, something that seemed to move out of the way, but which had been there so long that it seemed just normal. It’s funny how we can convince ourselves that something which, when you spell it out like that sounds deserving of immediately medical investigation, can become just a part of normality.

But all those warning signs did become a part of normality. I ignored them, assumed that they were just a sign of getting a bit older. I even ignored a brief episode last year of hot and cold flushes, which may have been some sort of bug or may have been the cyst causing a temporary hormonal wobble.

I really was foolish not to go and get a check-up. Partly that was down to my ongoing irrational fear of doctors (long story), partly it was down to not really believing that anything was wrong and not wanting to waste anyone’s time.

If you have had any of the above symptoms and haven’t been to see a doctor, go now. You aren’t wasting anyone’s time and the doctor will be as happy as you are if it turns out to be nothing. But if it’s a cyst, or something else, you want to get it treated sooner rather than later.

So, fast forward to early January. That’s when symptoms really started to manifest, specifically I started to find that pretty much everything inside my pelvis had become tender. Going for a wee was just slightly painful. Sometimes going for a poo was the same. I ignored it again, or tried to.

Deep down, I was worrying a lot and wondering what the hell was going on. I didn’t tell anyone, I just fretted away to myself, lying in bed, wondering why having a wee sometimes felt so much like hard work. I didn’t even mention it to my husband, I just tried to rationalise it away. I can be a real idiot sometimes.

Because the tenderness came and went, though, I felt that the symptoms were too vague for me to take to a doctor. Again, that was stupid. Have I mentioned that I can be really very stupid at times? I can. Persistently.

Over the Easter long weekend in early April, however, I woke up in agony and Kevin and I went to the walk-in clinic at the local cottage hospital. They took a urine sample, diagnosed a mild urinary tract infection and gave me antibiotics. The end of that week we went to the US for a holiday, but the pain returned. I had had a urinary tract infection – the analysis of my urine was clear on that – but that was a side show. The main act had yet to reveal itself.

As the discomfort and pain increased, I realised that I was going to have to go and see my doctor, except I hadn’t actually got round to registering with one in the months we’d been in Woking. We managed to do that pretty quickly, thankfully, and I was given an appointment with a doctor who has a good reputation on gynaecological issues.

She took a look, had a poke about, and said that the only way to know what was going on was to do an ultrasound. She gave me a number to ring at the local hospital and sent me off.

Now, herewith a lesson for local hospitals: When you switch your lines on, don’t have an interim message that says “All appointments are full for today” in between the “Lines are closed” message and the point where people are actually answering the phones. I was calling at 8am, as lines were only open between 8am and 10am for appointments that day or the day after, and I kept getting this damnable message that all appointments were full. That wasn’t actually true. Only when I rang one day at 8.10am did I find out that there were plenty of appointments each day,  I’d just been served the wrong message because I was ringing a fraction too early.

The ultrasound easily picked up the cyst as the source of my problems. It was 8.0 x 8.5 x 9.5cm, sitting centrally in my pelvis and crushing my bladder into a boomerang shape. It was also crushing pretty much everything else that got in its way.

As cysts go, it was one of the better sort to have: a simple sac of fluid with no signs of any solid bits. They did a blood test for any cancer markers, just in case, but a simple cyst like this is very unlikely to be cancerous, I was told. The tests came back clear.

It was a huge, huge relief to know finally what was going on, and I wished I’d acted earlier. If I had, the wait that ensued then to get my op would have been much less unpleasant. As it was, I experienced a lot more pain than I would have. My poor bladder struggled to cope with my normal levels of tea drinking and I had to ensure that I didn’t ever let it get full because that was agony. I was waking every night in pain as the cyst settled on top of one organ or another, crushing it. Painkillers became essential every day, but they often left me feeling woozy and vague.

I didn’t have a particularly long wait, as waits go, but it really was an unpleasant time. I found it hard to focus on work and didn’t really want to go out. I didn’t dare drink alcohol as I never knew if I’d need painkillers later or not. I wasn’t able to go for more than about an hour or two without needing a wee, which is fine when working from home, but less good if you’re not near a loo. And I would be woken two or three times a night either from the need to pee or the pain.

I could have avoided all that if I’d just gone to the doctor in January. Or a few years ago.

The pre-op assessment was pretty easy going: Just a few questions about my health, allergies, and habits, another urine test and an MRSA swab to make sure that I wasn’t infected. (MRSA doesn’t just hang out in hospitals.)

In the end, the operation went off without a hitch. The surgeon told me that they would first insert a needle in through my belly button, inflate my abdomen with gas, then open up an incision in the same spot to send in the camera. Once that was there, they’d be able to see exactly which ovary my cyst was attached to, as that had not been clear in the ultrasound. As I expected given the relative pain, it was my left ovary.

They then made very small incisions along my bikini line both centrally and on the left, drained the fluid out of my cyst, then removed the sac itself. The operation scars are small, neat and tidy, and I’m healing well.

(Note, I might have the exact sequence of events wrong, so any gynaecologists who want to clarify the procedure, please be my guest in the comments and then I’ll update the post.)

The nurses, doctors, surgeons, everyone I met at St Peter’s in Chertsey were wonderful. They were kind, friendly and comforting. I was especially happy to see a nurse by my side in the recovery room as I came round. She stayed with me the whole time, watching my monitors and making sure that I was ok and although we didn’t exchange a single word, I was very grateful for her presence.

Coming round is, though, a strange experience. I had been told that there was a high likelihood that I would be able to go home that day, but I was very aware that time was ticking. There was actually a clock in my line of sight, and having been walked off to theatre about 3.15pm, I was surprise to see myself not waking up until 5.45pm (precisely).

I really fought for consciousness, because I didn’t want them to think that I wasn’t going to be well enough to go home. But that whole fluttery eyelids thing you see on TV? Yeah, did that. Once I had my eyes open, the next battle was to keep them open, and to start really getting a grip on consciousness instead of just idly batting it about like a cat with a dead mouse. Overall, that process took a full hour, and then there was a bit of a wait for someone to take me to the ward.

Kevin happened to call the ward just as I was being wheeled in, and was by my side within minutes, which was a relief. Then it was a case of waiting, both for more painkillers, although I felt pretty damn chirpy by 9pm, and for the various layers of nurses, junior doctors and senior doctors to come and see me and say if I was ready to go home. I was, and we left at about 10.30pm. It was glorious to sleep in my own bed!

Now, one of the odd things about abdominal operations, I was told by the surgeon, is that the nerves that serve your diaphragm also serve the tops of your shoulders and any irritation to your diaphragm can cause pain in your shoulders. My diaphragm did indeed get irritated, and oh boy, they were right about the pain! If I breathed wrong, it felt as if someone was trying to stab their way in through my shoulders. Painkillers helped, but I found myself regulating my breathing to reduce the pain. It worked. Mostly.

Thankfully, that was gone within 24 hours, though, and the rest of the pain has been very manageable and happily decreasing more each day to the point where today I feel almost none.

So there we are. I’m still recovering, though I’m very happy with the improvement over the last week. I spent this morning at my desk but suspect this afternoon might be spent napping and watching crap daytime TV from the sofa. I’m determined to take the advice I give everyone else when they are recuperating: Take it easy! There’s no point rushing a recovery, you only make it take longer overall.

And finally, if you’re in any doubt at all about whether to go and see a doctor about some vague and nebulous symptom, please, just go. Better to find it’s nothing than inflict unnecessary pain and anguish on yourself.

I’m off to hospital this morning to get my ovarian cyst removed. The last couple of months especially have been a bit miserable, and I’ll be glad once today is over. It’s a general anaesthetic, which I’ve never had before, but I should be in and out today and back home by tonight. And i can’t wait! 

As mentioned in passing in an earlier post, about a month ago I was diagnosed with a 10cm ovarian cyst. Symptoms started right at the beginning of the year and since then have progressively worsened. Initially it was diagnosed as a mild urinary infection, confirmed by tests, but when antibiotics didn’t actually clear things up I had an ultrasound and there she was, large as life. Or as large as a small grapefruit, in fact.

I finally saw the registrar today to see what happens next and I am happy to say that surgery is on the cards. It’s a simple cyst, filled with mucous/liquid so unlikely to have any complications but they have to check for tumour markers anyway. And I might need a CT scan to find out which ovary it’s attached to because the ultrasound couldn’t tell.

And then, at some point within the next 6 – 8 weeks, I’ll be having fun with a laparoscopy (keyhole surgery). Hopefully the cyst will come away easily, because if it doesn’t they’ll have to engage in a little more rummaging, which would blow my chances of going in and out in a single day. 

I have to say that I really can’t wait. At the moment I barely have a day, or more to the point, a night, without having to take some painkillers. It’s just impossible to sleep without chemical help as there simply is no comfortable position to lie in. And my poor bladder is all squished up into a boomerang shape, which means I’m constantly having to go for a wee. This is time consuming, given the amount of tea I drink. 

But I am counting myself lucky as there are many worse things to happen, and my family has had more than enough medical drama in the last six months. I will be glad to get this all over and done with, though, and get back to being able to bounce a cat up and down on my stomach without yelping. 

Further updates as and when. 

Last year, I laid out my goals for the year. If was a relatively modest list which I had no doubt I’d be able to plough through in no time at all.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. *pauses for breath* Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

At least I managed to (mostly) keep to my overarching goal:

Finish your open projects before you start any new ones.

I didn’t start any major new projects that I shouldn’t have, although I also didn’t finish quite as much as I had hoped I would. Still, I passed some pretty big milestones in 2011, so that makes me very happy.

Here’s my status update:

Writing
Completed:

• Argleton – Yay! An epic battle to get it all done to a standard I was happy with in a time frame that didn’t frustrate my supporters, but I managed in the end. There’s still more to come with Argleton in 2012 though, including an audiobook and a new cover design.

Still to finish:

• The Prequel to the Books of Hay – Still not started, but am going to have to think about it as, whilst I have the setting and some characters, the plot just refuses to come together in my head. Bah.
• The Books of Hay – I was some 30,000 words into this when Argleton struck, but need to figure out the prequel before I decide what to do with this.

New on the list:

• Queen of the May – 10,000 words into this already, and hoping to finish it up very soon. It somewhat jumped to the head of the writing queue because the story was fully formed in my head and so easy to get out.

Crafting
Ditched:

• Black crocheted cardigan – Took a look at this, decided that I didn’t like it any more and frogged it. (That’s knitting parlance for undoing a bit of knitting/crochet.)

Completed:

• Crocheted tablecloth – Hah! Done! Oh yes. Two weeks before we left the Arsenal flat and thus the table it was designed to fit, I finally finished it! Looks good on the gatefold barley-twist leg oak table we bought for the new place, though.
• Blue shrug – This was a gift for a friend, and these things work up really quickly so took no time at all.
• Furry cream shrug – For me! Too chilly to wear it at the moment but will be great for spring.
• Blue mini-scarf – With only one ball of yarn there wasn’t much to do with it except make a very narrow scarf. Came out lovely though!

Still to finish:

• Nuptial cushions
• Jewellery
• Mend throw
• Hatboxes

New on the list:

• Black hourglass jacket – I’m making this with the yarn from the frogged black cardigan.

Misc
Completed:

• Clear out boxes – The move from London to Working forced me to clear out a lot of stuff, and Kevin’s done even more over the Christmas break. Still a few to do, but as we’ve reduced our box count substantially I’m marking this as done!
• Recycle clothes – Done when we moved.
• Find home for unwanted computer – Also done when we moved. Was amazing how fast old computing gear was taken when we left it in our communal hallway with a note saying “Please take me”.

No other misc tasks still to finish or added to the list. Yay!

Focus for 2012
Without a doubt, my focus for 2012 is on writing. Writing is what I have always wanted to do with myself, and I finally have found a way to make it work. I’ll be writing at least two novellas/novelettes in 2012, which I will probably put on Kickstarter to fund the physical copies. I may novelise Tag, my script. I might even start some new novels – I have plenty of ideas, but need to prioritise my writing to take the most promising and quickest ones on first.

My aim is to build up a corpus, a fanbase and enough sales that I can being to transition to writing full time. Kindle sales have a long, long way to go before they can even begin to replace my other income sources, but I am hoping that I can build them up over the next year to provide at least a decent trickle of cash.

I think my main income from writing in 2012 will be from Kickstarter, which will fund the printing and hand-binding of copies of the books for my supporters. I learnt a lot from Argleton, and I can do future projects much more effectively and quickly, which will also make them more cost effective.

The big challenge, however, will be reaching enough people, without the fortune of being included in the Kickstarter newletter which happened last time but is very unlikely to happen again. I can only hope that my reach has increased over the last 18 months!

So, that’s my 2012. I really can’t wait to get my teeth into it!

UPDATE 5 DEC 11: Having been rather robust with my criticism it’s only fair now to be as forthright about the follow up from O2.

The web team at O2 got in touch after my rather angry rant last Wednesday and asked me to email them with details, which I did on Thursday. I was pretty clear in my post about what had happened, why I was so angry, and what I wanted them to do for me, ie give me an upgrade now.

I got a call on Friday from Alistair at O2 and I have to say, the experience was night and day. Alistair was lovely – he listened to me without giving me the silent treatment, he said he understood why I was cross and agreed that I should have been given the upgrade that I was promised. We ended up talking for about 45 minutes as I explained in detail why the three people I spoke to last week simple made me more angry the more we spoke, not less. Alistair agreed that my experience of O2 customer service had not been constructive.

The end result was that they offered me an upgrade to the iPhone 4S and a choice of tariff. I chose the 12 month tariff with the slightly more expensive handset fee as, when I did the maths it was actually cheaper that way. I can, apparently, reduce the tariff after six months if it’s too much, which I may look into. Although to be honest, what I get on this tariff is more, by far, than I got on the £46 tariff I was on before August last year, so I frankly feel like it’s a decent deal.

Alistair phoned me this afternoon to finalise the deal, after I said I wanted the weekend to think about it, and I should get my new phone within the next week or two.

I think there are a few lessons here for O2:

1. Don’t break promises made during the sales process. Ever.
2. If you have to change the rules, do it for all contract renewals and sales going forward, don’t apply changes retrospectively.
3. “Listening” to the customer on a support call does not mean “falling silent whilst the customer slowly works up a rage because they feel they are being ignored.”
4. Small olive branches work wonders. If the original customer service person had said, “Oh, gosh, terribly sorry. We should honour our promises, let me go and talk to my supervisor and get back to you,” and then got back to me with some sort of compromise offer, none of this would have happened. But not one of the three people I originally spoke to gave me any hint of compromise.
5. Never, ever put the phone down on a customer, and never shout at them. If you do shout at them, expect them to shout back.

As Alistair proved, it’s not difficult to be nice, to apologise, and to find an acceptable compromise.

One last thing, though, O2: Please stop phoning people up and then asking them to prove who they are. It’s a terrible security antipattern. Alistair and I had a chat about it, and I asked him to escalate my point up the chain of command, but really, if you want me to prove who I am who I say I am to you when you call me, then you have to first prove that you are who you say you are.

So, all’s well that ends well, although it’s a shame that I had to throw a strop in order to get what I was promised. I can only suggest that, if you’ve found yourself in a similar position, that you too throw a strop and see if that works for you as well.

ORIGINAL 30 Nov POST BEGINS:

Back in August, O2 rang me up to see if I wanted to change tariff on my phone as I was paying for more minutes and texts than I was using. I expressly asked if this would damage my options for an upgrade when the iPhone 4S came out and was told that no, that wouldn’t be affected as I could just phone up at any time and upgrade. So I accepted a new contract for twelve months.

Today, when I phoned up to upgrade I was told that my upgrade had been an “offer” which had now “expired”. Well, I wasn’t very happy to put it mildly. I would not have entered into a new contract if I had realised it was going to remove the option of an upgrade, particularly as I’m on an old 3G which is so sluggish it’s almost producing its own slime.

I asked why I wasn’t told in August that the upgrade was an “offer” which would expire. Apparently, I wasn’t told because they didn’t know back then that they were going to limit their upgrade program. They clearly didn’t feel the need to tell anyone that upgrades were going to be stopped, because no one bothered to tell me.

I feel I have been lied to, deceived by O2. They promised me a free upgrade and my agreeing to the new contract was contingent on that upgrade. Then they just retroactively annulled that agreement, forcing me to wait until May for any sort of new phone. That’s unethical, not to mention terrible customer service.

I just spent 45 minutes on the phone with O2, getting increasingly angry as their customer service people failed to say anything other than, effectively, that I should simply suck it up because they have a clause in the contract that allows them to do whatever the hell they like. By the time that I got to the final person, in their disconnection department, I was livid, a mood that was not helped by being shouted at and having the phone put down on me. Wow that’s a great way to sooth ruffled feathers, O2. Well done.

O2 want to charge me £139 fee to cancel, but I’m going to look into the law on distance selling, because it seems to me that any promises made during the selling process should be binding. Companies should not be allowed to promise you something, no strings attached, and then simply change their mind. If you have any tips on how to progress with that, do let me know in the comments.

Regardless of what happens on that front, though, I will be leaving O2 at some point soon. It makes no sense for me to take on the 24 month contract at a higher monthly rate with an upfront fee of £99 that is their so-called “Fair Deal” upgrade to an iPhone 4S. Fair deal my arse. I’d rather swallow the disconnection penalty if that’s what I have to do than than stay with O2 one second longer than I have to. I will not reward unethical behaviour by any company.

Hello, all the new people who’ve come here from BoingBoing or Kickstarter or Twitter. It’s nice to see you! You’ll have to excuse me for a moment, though, because this blog post contains 100% unadulterated and somewhat self-pitying me, and not much about Argleton (though I have plans… I do have plans.)

I’m writing this partly because it’s 22:33pm and although I really want to go to sleep I feel a bit bad retiring until Kevin is at least getting ready for bed, because he’s an hour ahead of me in Sarajevo and working like a slave. I’m also writing it to get back to my blogging roots, ie I want to have a good old whine.

Just before Argleton was released, I started a new gig writing for the Indian news website, FirstPost, that Kev and I helped plan and launch earlier in the year. It was a bit hard starting a new gig whilst getting Argleton out the door, but I was looking forward to a life of writing about tech in the mornings and then doing creative things in the afternoons whilst gently ambling towards Ada Lovelace Day on 7 October.

Life, of course, had other plans. Our landlord decided to bump our rent up by 11%, i.e. about £200 pcm. We tried to negotiate, having been good tenants who have looked after the place we thought he might be amenable to, say, an 8% rise, which was still a lot and way over inflation, but kinda within what we felt was reasonable. To cut a long story short, he has basically chucked us out on our ear, giving us a month’s notice to find a new place to live.

Kev, unfortunately, had only a few days left in London before a lot of travel, so we frantically ran around north London and Woking trying to find somewhere new to live. We thought we had a lovely little maisonette, but that fell through. We’re still waiting for confirmation on a two-storey duplex near Woking town centre which we applied for last week. The company doing the references, though, seems to be mostly incompetent and incapable of understanding what a ‘family business’ is or how it is that the people who run a family business do tend to be related to one another.

Ada Lovelace Day is also creeping up on me with alarming alacrity. Having had to put it off to try and ensure we had enough time to sort out the website, sorting out the website has taken more time than I had hoped, just because websites do. I’ve been so stressed first with Argleton, then the new gig, and then this housing stupidity that it’s only recently I’ve been able to give it the love that it requires. I’ve rearranged my expectations that 7 Oct really marks a new beginning for Ada Lovelace Day, but not sure anyone else has. I’m in it for the long run and I have plans, but somehow the fact of there being A Big Day feels a bit like a millstone around my neck. The damn thing can’t just evolve quietly at its own pace, it’s rushed and hurried every year by a single significant date, but I feel sort of stuck with it now.

The earliest we’re going to sign a contract on the new place is next Tuesday because the estate agent is on holiday. And then I need to go all-out on doing all the bill switching and sorting and forwarding and arranging that needs to be done when moving house. Thank fuck I’m hiring people to pack the place and move me, frankly, because if I had to do that as well I’d just lose all will to live. And guess when I have to be out of this place? Yup: 6 October. Perfect timing! Kev’s home for one night on 8th October, then away again for a week, arriving home whilst I’m in Dorset at a bash my mum’s organising. Thankfully, he’s then home for more than 12 hours.

Which is all to say that my plans for the latter half of this year have all been well and truly screwed. So much for working on Argleton promo and the geogame (so nearly finished!). So much for working on The Books of Hay. So much for spending some time binding books. I made a beautiful leather-bound journal at a Falkiners’ course in August, and haven’t even had a chance to take decent photos of it yet.

That said, it looks like I am on course to finish that bloody round tablecloth I’m crocheting. Should be done about a day or two before I move out, leaving the table it was made to fit behind.

Still, it could be worse. I’ve had a good whine now, and I feel a bit better, though I’ll feel a lot better which this whole hideous mess is behind me. I have moments where I feel like I’m only clinging on by my fingernails. I nearly lost it on the phone to the reference agency this afternoon, and the poor chap from the movers could easily tell how stressed and frustrated I was. If you do have interactions with me over the next few weeks, do bear all this in mind and give me a big hug. I could do with one.

I know that I’m not alone – quite a few of my friends are going through similarly difficult times at the moment, especially when it comes to rent increases and house moving. The market is insane, with properties being snapped up the day they are put on the agency’s books. Rents are through the roof and it’s increasingly difficult to justify spending so much money to line someone else’s big greedy pockets.

Anyway, yes, sorry. Bear with me. Normal service will be resumed around mid-October. Aaah, only a month to go of hellaciousness. Only a month to go.