I harvested the first pears yesterday and today: Williams Bon Chrétien; the Conference ones on the other tree aren’t quite ready to come away, although I suspect today’s high winds may have a say in that matter. I see pear and almond crumble in my future!

It’s taken seven years from planting for the Williams to mature enough to fruit – there is some truth in the old saying ‘pears for heirs’. In previous years we’ve had plenty of blossom but that’s been it. The Conference crops heavily in alternate summers; this is its third ‘on’ year and the fruit is so heavy the lower branches are barely inches from the ground. This making it somewhat awkward to reach the shed . . .

Well, that’ll wake you up good and proper.

Wednesday is bin day here at Cooper Towers. When I opened the bedroom curtains this morning, I noticed that my beloved spouse, when he left for work at oh-my-god-o’clock, had neglected to put the blue recyclables bin out for collection. Not to worry, I thought; I’ll put it out after breakfast.

Except by the time I got down the stairs, I could hear the bin lorry in the next street. Oh noes!

So out I trot, barefoot but otherwise dressed, opened the gate and trundled this big 240-litre wheelie bin out to the path. Since wheelie bins are not the nimblest-handling things, I managed to trundle it over my left foot in the process.

More precisely, over my toes. And the bin was full.

All together now: owyabuggershitthathurts.

Sigh.

The Cooper family is proud and excited to announce the arrival of a new baby girl, Kathryn (Katie for short), who was delivered on Friday afternoon.

She is very, very red, but very, very pretty – a sister for three-year-old Lara. Mum and baby are doing well; dad’s wallet . . . not so much.

Oh, the weight? 8 07lbs.

No, not 8lbs 7oz, eight hundred and seven pounds, wet weight.

Yes, you read that right. This is not your average bundle of joy: she sleeps through the night, never cries or complains and only needs feeding every 220 miles or so.

Ladies and gentlemen, please say hello to the Triumph Rocket III Roadster, the largest-engined production motorcycle in the world . . .

Who’s a pretty girl, then?

In case you were wondering, Lara is also a Triumph – a Speed Triple 1050 in matt black, for those days when one needs a little more hooligan in one’s motorcycling.

Today I had an appointment with my neurologist, who gave me the results of my recent MRI scan. Compared to my scan of March 2009, it showed a decrease in both the number and the size of the lesions in my brain.

This is A Good Thing: it means my relapse rate has been stalled, and my poor beleaguered body has been able to start repairing some of the myelin damage caused by MS.

How much of this is due to the Tysabri infusions I’ve been on for the last two years, and how much is due to me finally acknowledging that the day job with its horrendous commute was no longer sustainable, I’ll probably never know. Bit of both, most likely.

Since I gave up work I’ve been able to get the rest I need, and be kinder to myself. That means on a shitty day, if I don’t get out of bed until 11am, so be it. On good days I’m up at 7:30. Most days it’s somewhere in between. Either way, these results confirm that quitting my job and changing my treatment regimen were the right things to do.

One small winged insect in the ointment: Tysabri (natalizumab) has an immuno-suppressant effect, and some immuno-compromised people, like MS patients and transplant recipients given anti-rejection drugs, have gone on to develop PML, or progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, which is often fatal.

The science bit: PML is triggered by the JC virus, which is widespread in the general population, lying latent in the gastrointestinal tract. In an immuno-compromised patient it can “reactivate” and trigger PML, because JCV can cross the blood-brain barrier and directly infect (and destroy) the oligodendrocytes which protect the myelin sheath around the nerve-cells’ axons in the central nervous system – that’s your brain and spinal cord.

I was blood-tested last week to see if I’ve been exposed to JCV. The general risk of developing PML is about 1 in 1,000; if I’ve been exposed, that rises to about 1 in 400. Given that somewhere north of 70% of the population will have been exposed to it (usually in childhood) this, as you can imagine, gives me some food for thought.

I’ve had two very stable, relapse-free years with Tysabri. Back in 2009, when it became apparent that the beta-interferon therapy was no longer working, I looked at the risks, weighed up the benefits, and decided Tysabri was the best treatment option for me and my highly-active at the time MS. I still think that is the case, but when the blood-test results come in, if my risk profile changes, I am going to have to think through my choices once more and see if I’m still comfortable with it.

UPDATE:

I got the result of my blood test and I am negative for JCV. This means my chances of developing PML as a result of my Tysabri infusions have dropped to around 1 in 7,000. I think that deserves a woot, don’t you? WOOT!

My mother-in-law was ruled by superstition. If she dropped a piece of cutlery on the floor, it would lie there until somebody else came into the house and picked it up for her – sometimes for days.

If two knives crossed on a plate, she’d spend the rest of the day waiting for a fight to start – and heaven help anyone who spilled the salt, or opened an umbrella indoors. Just as well I never told her Rob had seen The Dress before we got married, or I might never have heard the end of it.

But me? Not a superstitious bone in my body. I’ve never had a lucky pen to do the lottery, and if ladders are in my way I walk under them without a qualm. Dropped a teaspoon? I pick it up. If I’ve just come in from the rain, I leave my umbrella open to dry in the utility room because if I close it up wet it’ll go funky and smell bad.

I don’t even have any writing rituals. Some habits I’ve got into, maybe, like writing notes longhand, but not what you’d call rituals. Or so I thought.

Last night, making a cuppa, Rob fumbled the coffee jar and dropped it onto my favourite mug. This one:

and took a gurt chip out of the edge. And what was Ms Rational’s first thought? Sheer horror: how am I going to finish writing my books now?

[This space intentionally left blank for your gales of incredulous laughter]

I’ve had this mug a very long time. My best friend gave it to me years ago, for my birthday I think. I used to use it at work; first for its intended purpose, then, when I got sick of the horrible over-boiled taste of the water from the work kettle, as a pencil-pot on my desk. When I gave up the day job I started using it for tea again: it holds much more than the everyday mugs in the kitchen, which meant fewer trips up and down the stairs to refill it, and the handle was comfy to hold.

Now I am bereft. I know it’s only a thing, and things are not important, but I hadn’t realised just how accustomed I’d become to having it to hand whenever I was writing. Fortunately, it’s not terminally cracked and I can still use it, but clearly, its days are now numbered. This will not do.

Perhaps I can exploit my husband’s feelings of guilt and get him to buy me one of these:

If you haven’t already heard about the Genre for Japan auction, where have you been the last few days?

Fantastic lots, many of them pure unobtainium, including critiques, artwork, stuff signed by really cool people like Neil Gaiman and Joe Abercrombie, your name in a book, Stephen Deas to do with as you will (more or less) for two whole days,  . . . and personalised ARCs of M D Lachlan‘s Fenrir and Songs of the Earth from, er, me.

If you’re a writer, a reader, connected with genre publishing or just a fan, you should check this out. Follow @GenreforJapan on Twitter or visit the website, and get browsing, get donating, get involved.

And get your bloody wallet out!

I have been a strident advocate of real books, but Amazon’s relentless Christmas advertising campaign got to me, and convinced me that I needed a Kindle – even though I didn’t actually want one. Add that to my Christmas loot burning a hole in my pocket, and the result was inevitable.

I have to say, it’s impressed me. Beautifully engineered, it is light, readable, vastly more portable than the chunky hardbacks in my library, great for train/plane/long stay in hospital. But it will not replace the paper book in my heart.

Why? An e-reader doesn’t smell right or feel right and has no substance.  Reading an ebook is just like reading a technical pdf (and I had quite enough of them in my last job, thank you very much). It’s utilitarian. It has no soul. And I can’t take it into the bath.

Picking up the Kindle is nothing like walking into my library and seeing the rows of old friends on the shelves, each one of which instantly evokes a fragment of the story, or the holiday where I first read it, or the birthday for which it was a present. An e-reader to me is a tool, and as unromantic as a screwdriver.

We all need screwdrivers sometimes, but we don’t keep them on display like the best china. We bring them out when we need them, then put them away again. And so it will be with my Kindle, I think.

I’ve just finished reading my first ebook, and if the author wasn’t a friend I would feel no compunction whatsoever about deleting it from the device. Yet every paper book I’ve ever bought remains on the shelves in the library – even the ones I didn’t really enjoy that much – and anyone who tries to get me to part with any of them is liable to get hurt.

Oh, come on. Which of these two would you rather pick up?

I love notebooks. Proper hard-backed ones, Moleskines, gorgeous Italian suede covered journals, even supermarket cheapies as long as they’re pretty. Blank ones, ruled ones, refillable ones, it doesn’t matter.

People know this, and buy me things like that one up there as presents. They’re gorgeous to look at and lovely to handle, and I imagine myself under a cherry tree on a sunny summer’s day, writing in them (with a fountain pen, naturally – I have eight or nine to choose from, including a Parker 51 that’s older than me), and what I write will be beautiful. It can’t be otherwise: on those pages, anything but sheer poetry would be an offence against nature.

And then, after I’ve oohed and aahed over them, I put them back in their fabulous presentation boxes and put them carefully on the shelf in my office and never open them again, except once in a while to admire the printed endpapers or stroke the butter-soft leather.

Why? Because they are so beautiful I can’t bear to sully their pages with something so crude and permanent as ink. I just can’t.

My husband’s bought me several Cartesios, two Rossis, and the most unspeakably gorgeous InTempo, shipped all the way from Florence (click on that picture on the left, I dare you. Go on, click on it – you will not leave the site without spending money). He’s also responsible for a large part of my fountain pen collection.

And when I try to explain to him how much I love the journals he’s bought me, and that’s why I can’t bring myself to write in them, he doesn’t understand, and looks vaguely hurt, and I want to cry.

“But you’re a writer. Writers need notebooks, don’t they?”

“Yes, but–”

“But what? They’re just paper; they’re meant to be written in!”

“I know, but I can’t!”

“You’re a freak, do you know that?”

And I nod miserably, and go back into my office, take out my fountain pen, and don’t write in them again.

I haven’t had much to say lately. Not normally a problem for me, I must admit, but there you go.

It’s been a fairly grim couple of months. Progress on Trinity Moon was agonisingly slow, and every few hundred words I managed was hard work. Let me rephrase that. It was sweating-bullets, squeezing-blood-from-a-stone Hard Work. I was even beginning to doubt my abilities as a writer and stressing that I would miss my deadline to deliver the book.

Every day was an effort to drag myself into the office and stare at the computer screen.  Some days it was an effort just to drag myself out of bed. It was frustrating, demoralising, depressing.

In September, I had the first of two emergency admissions to hospital. Acute pancreatitis and jaundice. I couldn’t even drink water without vomiting. I spent my third wedding anniversary holding my husband’s hand in casualty for 6 hours, and the next two days on IV fluids. This also meant having to be catheterised to measure my hydration levels. After four days, they let me go home. I could eat again, but had no interest in food. All I wanted to do was sleep.

A month later, I was back in A&E, this time with acute biliary colic, and spent another 48 hours in hospital.  At least my liver function was normal this time; I was just in pain. In the hospital, they ask you to grade your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst pain you’ve ever experienced. I’ve had a fractured spine, and a post-lumbar puncture headache, so I like to think my tolerance for pain is quite high, but even with 10mg of morphine in me, acute biliary colic hit a 7.

Two weeks ago, I had my gallbladder removed. The surgeon said it was “ready to come out” which I think is consultant-speak for “it was a bag of gravel ripe to cause lots more problems, so you’re better off without it”, and discharged me the following morning.

Keyhole surgery is something of a misnomer. They should call it keyholeS surgery. Four incisions, and a couple of random holes – whose precise purpose was unclear. I was a bit sore for the next few days, but as the discomfort faded I started to feel better. So much better that I could look back and see just how shitty I’d been feeling since the summer. No the wonder I wasn’t writing much, or well.

I’m still not massively interested in food, but at least now I know I can eat without worrying whether it will trigger another trip to casualty.  I’ve had enough morphine to last me a good while, thanks.

Fast! Effective! No willpower required!

Just follow this easy 3-step plan and you too can look forward to a wardrobe full of clothes that no longer fit.

Step 1. Develop numerous gallstones.

Step 2. Pass a stone sufficiently large to form a blockage in the bile duct.

Step 3. Contract acute pancreatitis.

Side-effects include: extreme pain, projectile vomiting, dehydration, jaundice and a trip to hospital for IV fluids and morphine.