"And then he said..."

Off to hospital again yesterday (the Charing Cross, in Fulham Palace Road) for a check-up following my leg and elbow operations earlier this year.

This has been a long-running saga, dating back to at least early 2003, which came to a head this year when I finally persuaded them to get to work on me with a knife.

To summarise, some time in 2002 a numb patch appeared on the outside of my right thigh. In Feb 2003 a neurosurgeon diagnosed me with meralgia paresthetica and put me on a waiting list for surgery. He warned me it would take a year or so before anything happened. Over the next few months I had some conductivity tests (electrodes jammed into the leg) which confirmed the diagnosis, and settled down to wait.

After that, nothing happened.

For several years.

In late 2006, with the leg worsening and new problems developing in my left elbow, and a few other unrelated health things also worrying me, I got bored waiting and went for private consultation, first with a GP and then with a neurosurgeon, who stuck a rocket up the backside of the NHS and got things moving again.

More tests and consultations followed (mostly repeats of the 2003/04 stuff) then in July they finally did the cutting. Transposition of the left ulnar nerve and decompression of the right cutaneous nerve of thigh, for those who thrive on details.

I woke up after the surgery to mixed results. The elbow? Perfect. No more finger-twitching or numbness. The leg? Disaster. Much more numbness and a world of pain. Some very unhappy weeks followed, involving painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, horrible limping, sleepless nights, black despair and a walking stick.

Eventually, some of the numbness and most of the pain receded. It still hurts occasionally, but there’s variety in what type of pain occurs and it never lasts long, so that’s an improvement on balance. The numbness is significantly worse than before the operation, but I can still detect pressure, even at the place with least sensation, so I’m no longer worried about not knowing if I’m burning myself against a radiator or whatever.

And there’s more than a chance it will improve further over the next few months.

Which is where I was yesterday when I went off for what turned out to be the final stage in the saga. A quick five-minute consultation with a jolly woman I’d never met before and that was it - discharged, with an open invitation to contact them again if there was any deterioration.

A bit anti-climactic, actually. I don’t know what I expected, but this was something that had for a long while been a major part of my life (or, during the early years, something lurking on the edge of my attention, impossible to entirely forget) and it just fizzled out. On balance, I’m glad I had the operations done - the elbow was a success, the leg about break-even with hope for further improvement. But where was the full stop at the end, the handshake with the surgeon and the “good luck, old chap” to see me off?

I wasn’t sure what to do with myself afterwards. Having dragged myself down to London on just three and a half hours sleep and then waited around in a hospital corridor for a late appointment, it seemed too soon to go straight home again. On the other hand, I was dog tired, had nothing in particular to do, and wanted to be back before a workman arrived to fit blinds to two rooms in the house.

I pottered up the Fulham Palace Road, peering in through the window of the Spitfire Polish restaurant at the Battle of Britain memorabilia, then trailing around a bookshop with no great enthusiasm. Eventually I refuelled with a cheese and mushroom crepe and a coffee from a hole in the wall in the Hammersmith shopping centre and descended back onto the Tube. A train was just about to leave Kings Cross when I got there, so I was relieved of the need to think about anything and away I went. A brisk walk from the station and I was home in time for lunch.

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If I type this really fast it may just sneak under the wire and count as a March post, thus keeping up my new average of a post a month in 2007. Pretty grim stuff, compared with the several a day I used to manage when writing this thing was fresh and new in late 2002.

It's not like I've been writing nothing at all, though - the anthology with my story in creeps ever closer to becoming reality. That's its cover over there, beside these words. Neat, huh?

Got an email from the publisher today - they've now got a MySpace page, heaven help us all. For those who are into that sort of thing, it's at myspace.com/norecordpress.

In other news there was this, which just felt like one of those things that needed to be done.

So, well, yes, it's been a while since I last posted. Quite a bit's happened, actually.

For starters, we're probably only a month or so away from the publication by a small San Francisco press of an anthology of short stories that includes one of mine. More on that when I have more, but right now I'm tremendously excited, because it's the first time in a very long time that any of my fiction will have been published.

Also taking a lot of my time is MyBathroomFinder.com, the first step in our fledgling business empire. It's starting to find its feet and generate traffic. Not a lot of income yet, but it's early days.

And the other big thing is Perplex City, the £100,000 / $200,000 treasure hunt and alternative reality game that's been running for the last two-and-a-half years. 50,000 players, 92 countries.

We won it.

If you're used to my usual writing style you're probably waiting for me to qualify it and say something like “well, what I actually mean is that 5000 of us were declared 'winners' but only one person got the prize and it wasn't us”.

Well, as it turned out it was us.

It's been a very weird couple of weeks, with a lot of nice messages of congratulations from people (including some of the ones who came closest to winning it themselves) and some emails and phone calls from friends I'd lost touch with and who saw it in the news.

There's an awful lot to say about it, so I built a small website with the story and a link to my Flickr photos. Go explore, Digg it or stick it on del.icio.us or whatever if that's your sort of thing - I'll still be here when you come back. And believe me, no matter how surprised you are at the news it's nothing to how stunned I am, as I look back at it.

When I fell on Friday I didn't hear the heavy, muffled sound, like a thick bar of chocolate being snapped in its wrapper, that heralded my broken foot of a few years ago. That was some small consolation as I floundered on the ground in the dark, sick with shock and unable to stand, wondering whether I'd have to crawl back to the office on hands and knees. I'd fallen victim to a lack of street lighting and a pothole big enough to relocate the Eden Project to, wrenching my left foot to what must have been the limit of its endurance. And believe me, it hurt.

In the end I pulled myself upright, hopped back to the office, and sat unseen on some garden furniture while I took stock. No chocolate-bar noise = nothing broken. Grazed knee = painful irritant at most. No torn clothing, though one boot was badly gouged. Result: drive home and count yourself lucky. So I did, and found that I couldn't bring myself to top 50mph on any of the motorways, much to the irritation of a Polish trucker who had greater ambitions. Now, a day later, the foot has swelled up like a balloon and gifted me a limp that might politely be called a conversation piece.

Plenty of opportunity for conversation, too, as we continued our house hunting and then dropped in on my parents. We looked at two houses today, but neither turned out to be goers: one was large but bland and the other was wonderfully individualistic but impractically small. Ah well.

Of course, we want the impossible - space, privacy, lots of rooms, parking for two cars, a garden big enough to let tortoises roam while still allowing plenty of space for a vegetable plot, with a good rail link to London (my home town in North Hertfordshire is where we are mainly looking) and of course within our budget. Oh - and one more important criterion: the vendor must be prepared to actually sell it. We had, in fact, found somewhere that met every single one of our requirements, at the price of needing a lot of work, but our making an offer so unnerved the owner that she promptly took it off the market. Nothing we've visited since has quite hit the spot - though we were tempted by another place that looked good until we inspected the alley at the foot of the garden and found it ankle-deep in empty beer cans.

Life, in fact, has thrown a succession of huge things at us in a quite overwhelming manner. I can't even begin to list them, but the weight of the world on our shoulders has been such that writing about it has seemed trivial and impossible. Hence the silence in this blog, which celebrated its fourth birthday (in its DeadJournal form) a few days ago with no fanfare and without pomp and ceremony - or even jelly and ice cream. I don't want to stop writing, but I'm going through a patch where actually sitting down and doing it seems nearly impossible. I have taken one positive step, though - removed myself from Lib Dem Blogs. I realised, in the end, that being on it was a cause of my creative block - I was feeling a responsibility to be serious and sonorous, and to think great thoughts, and that prevented me from just posting as I used to. So now that's gone, at least for the time being. When I've finished migrating all my posts and comments since November 2002 to the newest version of this journal then I'll put back a feed that just includes any political posts I make. Until then, the Lib Dems will just have to manage without me.

It's not like I could deliver leaflets anyway, with this foot…

Ever gluttons for punishment, we spent the weekend in a small tent on a hillside in Somerset. Friday night served up gale force winds, Saturday gave us thunderstorms, but the tent - a relic from my days in the Scouts and 25 years old if it's a day - was equal to all. A very good weekend, and a much-needed break from stuff going on at home. More to follow, but in the meantime here's some photos:

Home, sweet home

Room with a view

Time for tea

Having lots of lovely weather

A while ago I got an email from San Francisco - a very small publisher planning a very low budget anthology had seen a brief snippet of my writing and wanted me to submit more for inclusion. Money would be involved - and, unexpectedly, it would be coming in my direction.

I ignored the email for a while, then thought 'what the hell' and replied. He was still keen. I was worried - lots of questions about rights and suchlike.

So I joined the Writers' Guild, the trade union for inky-fingered fictioneers.

The membership pack came in this morning's post. They got my surname wrong.

The letter began “Dear Mr Darcy”. There was a membership card in the same name.

I'll just go and jump in a lake, shall I?

Seven years ago from the day that's just ending I found myself suddenly and (somewhat) unexpectedly out of a job. A quick bit of spinning and I was self employed, freelance, my own boss.

Haven't had a regular paycheque since, it's all been invoicing by the day.

Haven't looked back, either - I heartily recommend it as a lifestyle if you have a marketable skill and / or a problem with fitting into an office lifestyle.

Try to embark upon it on your own terms and at a moment of your own choosing though…

So, we're back from holiday - have been for a week actually. We walked from Plymouth to Dartmouth, crossing a number of river estuaries by ferry and one by wading, but abandoned the last 20 miles or so because of the blazing heat and caught a steam train to Paignton where we played pitch and putt instead. We were on the platform of Torquay station waiting for a train home when the England / Portugal penalty shoot-out took place - and I was on the phone to Dad while he commentated with commendable restraint on the TV pictures for me.

Have been back at work for a week, which hasn't been terrifically easy, and have been trying to pick things up at the gym again - having come back from the walk with the flattest stomach I've had for two years (since the last one) I want to build on that, not slide back into unfitness.

Have been doing some thinking, as follows:

At the end of last year:

I was going to the gym regularly and getting fitter, stronger and healthier

I was developing an idea for a business that looked extremely promising

I had written a quarter of a novel

I had no involvement in politics

I was happy with my life

whereas now:

I have been to the gym three times since March, have put all the weight back on, and have seen my fitness plummet

My business idea has stalled

I haven't written a word of the novel since before Christmas

The Lib Dem leadership election and the council elections have left me up to my ears in politics

Happy? Pfft.

Now… what should I do about that, I wonder?

I suppose I ought to try and write in this again. November 2002, I set it up. It’d be a shame to let it fade away. Have been working a lot - full time, for the first time in ages. A bit in Islington, a bit in Oxford (horrible drive), and a bit near Wycombe. And before that the council elections - two of my candidates got in, three or four more lost to blatant but unprovable fraud. I came second from last in the ward I was standing in, which was the plan. Didn’t want to win. Still playing Perplex City - we’re now about 130th out of about 27,000. Would quite like to win that - no-one pays you £100,000 for being a councillor.