To the 9-to-5.  The day job (members of the audience heave a collective sigh of relief – all two of them).

Today’s my last day at work.  After just shy of 21 years, a twinge of sadness is to be expected – you can’t work with people for that length of time and not develop some kind of friendship – but what’s really blown me sideways is the number of customers who’ve rung up, emailed, or sent embarrassingly large bouquets of flowers.

They’re either going to miss me an awful lot, or they’re really, really pleased to see the back of me.

The unsung ones, now quietly dropping off their respective perches and we never know anything about them until their obituary shows up in the newspaper. And you read it, and you think to yourself: “Bloody hell!” and sit there, quite stunned.

Freddie Spencer Chapman is one such. Worked behind enemy lines in the Malaya campaign of WWII, cheerfully blowing up the enemy with bamboo-and-gelignite bombs and inflicting so much damage with two comrades that the Japanese thought they were being taken on by 200 crack commandos. A life that, if it was fiction, would be dismissed as unbelievably far-fetched.

Read his obit, and I dare you not to be moved, inspired, uplifted, and also saddened that we don’t seem to make ‘em like that any more.

We’ve got history, my right foot and I.  What you might call previous.  GBH, ABH, assault with intent.  It’s not pretty.  Mostly it’s black, purple and a sort of greenish colour.

A few months ago, I was trying on some new clothes in the bedroom, and there was a discarded pair of jeans on the floor that I kept tripping over.  My own stupid fault; my balance isn’t great so I should really have picked them up, but I didn’t.  After one trip too many, I lost my temper and lashed out with my right foot, intending to kick them across the floor.

Except I didn’t hit the jeans.  I managed to kick the back of my own left heel, full belt.  Ow.

I’ll skip over the howling and swearing and sobbing like a girl, but suffice to say I think I probably broke my big toe.  It went purple overnight, then black from below the nail to right around the ball of my foot.  A couple of days later I had an appointment with my physio and I explained why I was limping.

“You’d have to be going some to break your toe like that,” she said, looking doubtful.  I whipped off my sock.  “Oh.”

It took a couple of weeks before it stopped hurting to walk on it, then another couple before it stopped hurting when I bent it.  After shading through a whole kaleidoscope of pretty colours, it went back to its normal shade, but I still can’t bend it the same as my left foot and it’s a bit puffy.

Fast forward to tonight, making home-made pizza dough.  I knocked a wooden rolling pin off the worktop.  Onto my bare foot.  My right foot.  Guess where it hit, end on?

You’re waaaaay ahead of me, aren’t you?

Cue howling, swearing, sobbing like a girl etc.  Sigh.

…I entered a short story competition organised to celebrate the author Douglas Reeman‘s 25 years in print.  Somehow, I won, with a rousing Napoleonic War frigate action in the Med.  This was 1984, and I was a whole 15 years old.

I got to meet Douglas for lunch in Mayfair and was thoroughly charmed by the man.  We corresponded for some time afterwards, and he was unstinting in his encouragement of me as a writer.  We lost touch, as school and exams got in the way and I shelved my wilder writerly ambitions for a time.

Recently mum and dad had a clear-out of their bookshelves and I reacquired a sizeable collection of Douglas’ books, including his Alexander Kent “Bolitho” series on which I had gorged myself as a teenager and which inspired me to write my prize-winning story.  Curious, I Googled and found Douglas’ website, which had an email address.

I wasn’t expecting him to remember me but I sent him a short note yesterday to say hello and congratulate him on what is now 50 years as a published author (that’s quite something, in anybody’s reckoning, and boo! hiss! to his publishers for not marking it).

Today I got a reply.  He does remember me, still has photos of the day we met at the Navy Club, and is every bit as charming, gentlemanly and encouraging as I remember.

This has made my day.  I am completely, utterly, and quite ridiculously, made up.

So I sat down at the keyboard, determined to add a meaningful blog entry, and came up empty.  Some writer I am.

The new laser printer is great and working hard for its keep.  It’s also too clever by half.  I wanted to print some address labels but wasn’t sure I had the template filled out the right way round to fit the half-used sheet so I thought I’d print them onto plain paper first.

Uh-uh.  Printer says no, and flashes a little red light at me.  Open cover, close cover.  Green light.  Click “Print”.  Red light flashes.

Out with the manual, section six, troubleshooting.  Third reason for the error light flashing: no media in the manual feed.  Eh?  Are you telling me the printer knows the document I’m sending uses an Avery label template and has therefore assumed I’m going to be feeding said labels through the manual feed slot?

<fx: inserts sheet of labels in manual feed slot>

<whirr>

Apparently so.  Well I’ll be buggered.

New toys arrive tomorrow <bounce>!

It’s sad getting this excited over a humble laser printer, that stalwart of the office environment, scarred by coffee-cups and encrusted with dust.  But it’s mine, all mine.  My first laser printer.

I’ve managed perfectly well with inkjets over the years, but it occurred to me as I was prepping my submissions that maybe it didn’t quite set the right tone.  Didn’t look professional.  I sneaked a few cover letters on the Xerox multifunction thingy at work, on bright white 100gsm paper and was horrified how shabby my synopsis-and-three looked in comparison.  Any agent I had the temerity to send it to would promptly consign it (at arm’s length, by the smallest possible corner, pinky extended) to the nearest recycling box.

So over hubby’s protestations of “But we’ve already got two printers–what do we need another one for?” to which I replied “But you’ve already got a motorbike–what do you need a Fender Telecaster for?” (which left him so speechless I took it as a victory) I ordered a basic mono laser printer.

It’s black.

It comes tomorrow.

It’ll have that cool, sleek, new electronics smell.  There’ll be a New Toner Cartridge dance to do and a manual to read and buttons to press.

Then I’ll print out lovely black letters on crisp white sheets and they’ll be so gorgeous that I cannot possibly fail to make a good impression.  Let’s face it, *anything* that gives one a better chance of being read by these august personages, the Gatekeepers of Publication, has got to be a good thing.

Plus it’ll give the cat a box to play in so she’ll stop pestering me when she’s bored and I won’t have to explain to customers on my working from home days what that whinging noise is in the background.

Got my third Tysabri treatment on Wednesday, and I’m not dead.  So far, so good.

I feel more alert, better able to concentrate, without that awful grey mental fog.  I’ve been able to finish overhauling my website, achieving more in the last fortnight than I’d managed in the previous four months.  It’s good not to feel like a vegetable any more.

I’ve also been able to devote some time to my novel ‘Songs of the Earth’.  It’s at the final edit stage now, and will shortly be hitting some agents’ desks.  Wish me luck.

Two weeks.

Two weeks after chopping in the bikes against a nice, sensible car* and my husband was getting twitchy.

By March, the days were getting longer, the sun was coming out… you can tell where this is going.  He wanted another bike.  The “garage vacuum” was pulling *hard*.

So he’s bought a BMW F800GS.  Not the big Ewan-and-Charley one, but its baby brother.  Tall, aggressively-beaked, looks from the front like Sir Patrick “The Sky at Night” Moore with his monocle:

See?  That’s a 2008 model, but whatever.  It’s the right colour.

Two weeks.  I thought he was made of sterner stuff than that.

* He originally wanted a 4-door Jeep Wrangler but when I tried climbing into one in the showroom and found the ascent required oxygen and a team of Sherpas, and the descent required my beloved’s assistance lest I measure my length on the floor, that idea was quickly canned.

Alas, the time has come.

My balance problems have got to the point where Rob is terrified to take me pillion on the bike, and I am so leery about getting on and off that I have decided, with great reluctance, to hang up my lid.

I’ve always loved bikes, ever since I saw a picture of the JPS Norton and thought “Ooh, shiny…”  Meeting Rob and his beloved Exup made the bug bite hard.  I wanted a bike of my own, had it all picked out, and decided I’d take my bike test.

Rob, naturally, was extremely worried but incredibly supportive, and took me pillion a few times on the Exup to get used to the idea.  I started giggling dementedly at the first swoopy bend and didn’t stop for the remainder of the journey.  I loved it.  I wanted to spread out my arms Titanic-style and whoop with delight.  It’s true – only bikers understand why dogs love to stick their heads out of car windows.

Lid, gloves, boots and jacket followed.  The Exup was not an ideal pillion machine, so I bought us a brand new Yamaha XJR1300.  In black, natch – the right and proper colour for a motorcycle.  Especially a big old air-cooled musclebike like the XJR.  And I loved that too, even if I couldn’t get it off the stand by myself.  We went to Holy Island on it, and up to Melrose, and made plans to maybe go down to the MotoGP at Donington, or visit my brother.

Those plans quickly got derailed.  Whenever we had the time to go out, the weather was foul.  Whenever I had the inclination to book a CBT, there were other things to spend the money on, or I was ill.  Before we knew it 18 months had passed and we found ourselves with a bike with only a thousand miles on it, that hadn’t turned a wheel in over a year.

Uh-oh.  This was not a good sign.  With heavy hearts, we part-exed the bikes in against a nice sensible car.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely car and plenty fun to drive, but I miss gearing up for a ride.  I miss earplugs and helmet hair and baked flies on my visor, the feel of the bike’s back end squatting under acceleration and the wind tugging at my jacket.  It was the closest thing to flying I have ever experienced.

/me sobs.

September 2004 and my first relapse of any significance.  I already had some loss of sensation in my fingertips, but it was rather surprising to be soaping myself in the shower and discovering I couldn’t feel the sponge pretty much anywhere from my boobs down.

Hmm.  Well, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t expected, so I got on with my life as best I could.  A week passed, and I got used to feeling superficially numb over the major part of my body.  After twelve weeks, the novelty kinda wore off a bit.

My consultant said steroids were the order of the day, so in December 2004 I had three lots of IV methylprednisolone.  Ellie’s top tip: make sure you bring plenty of boiled sweets.  Methylpred. leaves a *foul* taste in your mouth.  Six weeks of a steadily decreasing dose of oral steroids followed, and by April 2005 I was stable enough to begin beta-interferon therapy.

It’s one of the idiosyncrasies of this disease that you can pretty much choose which of the four common DMDs (disease modifying drugs) you take.  I opted for Avonex.  It was an intramuscular injection, so quite a big needle, but it was only once a week.

Once a week for three years.  After the whole “Hey, I’m injecting myself – how cool is that?” wore off, I found myself struggling with the injections.  I resented the boxes of syringes in the fridge next to the tomatoes and the milk.  I resented having to hurt myself and make myself bleed for the sake of ‘treatment’.  I resented the flu-ey side effects that were supposed to fade after about twelve weeks but which continued to make me feel like shit after every injection unless I swallowed a couple of ibuprofen.

Maybe I wasn’t quite as Zen about this as I thought I was, and I was really resenting my MS.