Has this stuff been coming in since the Russians took over?

Right. Where the fuck did all this spam come from?

*wanders in* *waves hello* *wanders out*

I note with increasing bafflement that Locus have put The Push on their 2009 Recommended Reading List.

...`Dali's Clocks,' my last short story of last year, didn't make it into Jetse's Shine anthology, but he's very kindly put it up online at DayBreak Magazine. You'll probably have noticed that I'm usually my own worst critic, but I just read through it again and I don't think this one is too shabby.

The Push is on the shortlist for this year's BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction. That's how absurd the universe is.

The knee is still not well. My GP says it should be pretty much healed by now, but it's still weak and sore and I still can't put a lot of weight on it, so he referred me to the orthopaedic clinic up at Barnet General. Who x-rayed the damn thing again, then poked and prodded and twisted it some, and then gave me a leg-brace that's a sort of aluminium/neoprene/velcro version of the calipers you used to see on those child-shaped collecting boxes for the Polio Society and referred me for an MRI.
The appointment for the MRI came through today and it's at Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, which means that not only have I taken the knee to three different hospitals since I fell over, I've taken it to three different counties. Well, two counties and a borough, but who's counting.
The MRI's on Saturday, but I'll have to go back to see the consultant at Barnet General a fortnight after that to discuss the results. The doctor I saw at Barnet thinks it may be a ligament tear - which is what every other doctor who's seen it thought - or a cartilage problem. Like everyone else he did the thing where he said, "And we'll see whether it needs physio, or..." and let his voice trail off before he said `surgery.' I don't want surgery. Not keyhole surgery or porthole surgery or patio door surgery or any kind of surgery.
As for the other stuff, not so bad, but not there yet. *hugs*

I should have done this ages ago, but please, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, roll out the barrel, deck the halls, and pray essay with me the Ancient Semaphore Of Greeting (discovered etched into the glass of the Great West Window at York Minster) for kaz_mahoney and daj42 are among us.
Welcome, Karen and Derek.

Hm. Yes. Well.
Things have been a little bumpy over the past few months, I'll have to admit. What with work and various other things, it was sometimes eleven o'clock at night before I sat down to do anything for myself and then I was working through to one o'clock in the morning, often rather frantically, to get things done. Then getting up again at half past six to get ready for work.
Then I was given some evening jobs to do - not especially late, but they meant I was getting home around eight and not getting any time to myself until midnight or so, and it started to take its toll. I started nodding off at work and wandering around in a fog. Things probably weren't helped by the fact that I was getting a little too fond of the booze, to the tune of about half a bottle of Scotch a night. One night I looked at everything I had to do and I thought, `Bugger it,' and went to bed instead. And I did that the next night. And the night after that. I did manage to keep in touch with things through Facebook, although mostly as a form of displacement activity while I was at work.
I have a friend to whom something similar happened while he was at university and he thinks I had a bit of a brush with nervous collapse. I'm not sure about that, but things did get on top of me all of a sudden, which was scary and not nice. I don't think it was depression, because depression is a terrible thing and all I did was kind of slump, but something did go wrong in my head for a while.
It's odd the way things work out. A month ago I slipped and fell in the kitchen and tore a ligament in my knee, and ever since I've been at home on crutches. The first week I lay in bed, zonked out on painkillers and mostly asleep, and ever since I've been resting. Which it turns out I really needed. I've also managed to go some distance towards drying out, which has been quite difficult. I'm still having the odd nightcap, but hopefully the mad drinking is over. As usual, God poisons his gifts, because without a drink I now seem quite unable to write.
I know I still have stuff to do, but I'm kind of picking up sticks at the moment. Bear with me.
*hugs*

I don't get out to West London for work very often. Partly because it's a drag to get there and back from the office, and partly because there isn't very much `there' there. I did recently do a piece for the London Diary about the fiftieth birthday of the Chiswick Flyover, but I cobbled it together from published sources and what I've seen from the car. You'd be surprised at how much journalism is done by remote control these days.
The one place in West London I seem to go to quite a lot is the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, mainly because half the office seems to be on their mailing list and every time they issue a press release I get multiple emails of the same release tagged with the words `Something for the Diary, Dave?' Mostly, I ignore them, but I got one a couple of weeks ago that tickled my curiosity, and to find out about it you'll have to look behind the cut because ( here be piccies and stuffCollapse )