Broken...

Still alive and kicking… despite a ride in an ambulance and a 15-hour wait in York A & E. Yes… the NHS is “broken”. E, N & T tomorrow.

Licensed today: Killrush, Eire... 

Light chasing shadows...

Trying – but not hurrying – to acclimatise myself to mobility issues, and the new ‘hard of thinking’ reality which makes writing more of a chore than a pleasure. At least the sun is out, with light chasing shadows around the Old Sunday School. Pic licensed today: a quarryman and his JCB digger at a quarry in Gloucester…

Back home...

Back home now, with plenty to think about. I’m trying to stay optimistic, even while rehearsing the ‘worst case’ scenarios. Saw this pic used in yesterday’s Guardian… 

Riding out the storm...

Riding out the last of the storm with Howard, in Bramhope, with no new symptoms over the last couple of days. Beginning to understand how much the last four weeks of trauma have taken out of me…

A drunkard's roll...

Woke up this morning and, for the first time in a month, my thoughts didn’t immediately coalesce around the cognition I’d lost. Only when I walked across the room, unsteadily, did the events of recent days come flooding back…

Skating on ice...

My days, since Christmas, seem to be taken up with mundane tasks, which take three times as long as they used to. Writing was always so easy, like skating on ice, and spelling came naturally. Now it feels more like a chore, to set my thoughts down with any coherence, and my fingers don’t seem to land where they should. For every other word I need to press ‘backspace’, to tidy up my mistakes…

A change of plan...

I had plans, at the end of the year, with the big book all finished… but life had other ideas. I had a stroke… in the darkest month of the year… and my priority is to make some sense of the experience. So I’ll keep the blog going for a while… if only to save myself the trouble of explaining, to family and friends, what the hell happened… 

That's all, folks...

After ten years I'm giving up my blog. I gave myself till the end of the year to finish - finally finish - my big book. My task now is to get it profitably into print, and that may be just as hard as writing the damn thing. 

From my first blog entry, dated Thursday 30 October 2014...

"Writing a blog is like writing with your finger on a misted-up bathroom mirror. In theory your words will be accessible to everyone in the known universe with an internet connection. In practice your audience may be smaller."