::falls down laughing:: another continuing series

This one is called Reading Reader Mail.

. . . So the ME is still bashing me around some,* speaking of continuing series, although I hope most of the other series aren’t boring.   Also there’s an unnecessarily large amount of extraneous rubbish falling across my personal landscape that I can’t quite think how to turn into an exciting blog post or twelve.**

So I thought I’d distract myself, & I hope you too, by telling you about a couple of recent reader emails. 

A BRILLIANT one a few days ago suggests ‘in my copious unallocated free time’ for which the acronym is, of course, IMCUFT.***  YESSSSSSSSSS.  This is now totally in the lexicon.  Put it in yours too.  There is such need for this acronym in the MORE &^*($£”!!!! STUFF ALWAYS INCOMING modern world.

But I hear from some of the very best people?   Apparently they read my books?  There’s just no accounting for taste even in IMCUFT reading??, but, believe me, I’m grateful. † 

I had an email yesterday from a young woman who describes herself as working in the corporate world because it pays the rent/mortgage, & that the next time someone gets on her nerves she is going to consider biting a leaf at them††.  I will now forever treasure the image of someone rising to her full height, twitching her snappily tailored blazer in a subtle beige tweed & her complementary-ecru wrinkle-free pencil skirt into perfect drape & conformity, tossing her magnificently coiffed hair in a gesture both confident & indignant . . . & plucking a leaf from the bouquet of roses she brought in from her organic, chemical free garden that morning, & biting† it at the large looming authority honcho master person standing in front of her.  Who will of course throw up his [sic] hands & stagger back with a cry of, No, no!  Not the leaf biting!

I have a frivolous mind, even when the ME is whacking me.   I feel much better, thank you. 

& hey.  There are lots of footnotes to this post.  I can write about ANYTHING, right?  As long as there are footnotes.†††

* * *

* On my way to somewhere else, which is how it usually is on the internet, I fell over a recent rant on the subject of life with ME.  This person’s problem is that they still go to &, worse, listen to doctors.  Of course they’re upset.  But I was disheartened that the nonsense I dealt with over twenty years ago when I first crashed & burned with that particular diagnosis is still going on, & thumping patients who do not need any more thumping.  I’d got to my ME the, or at least one of the, usual routes, regularly recurring glandular fever for about the last two previous years—& I’d had mono[nucleosis] in my 20s, so I was already on the way, I just didn’t know it yet—I tested positive for Epstein Barr, blah blah blah.  & my delightful NHS GP didn’t believe in ME^, & said that viral flu ‘sometimes took a while to get over.’  Uh huh.  I’d meanwhile done my own reading, I’d had a lot of time for reading, the previous two years, lying around having flu, although the ME brain does make comprehending what you’re reading a little wombly . . . we had to go private, finally, to find a doctor who would take ME seriously.  I can say, in long, grim hindsight, that doctors have made me worse, not better, about 90% of the time in my 72 years & still counting^^, but this one was in that top 10%, & he gave me some very useful suggestions & then set me up to start figuring out what worked for me, because, he said, doctors really don’t know what’s going on.  Bless him.  My experience is that your average doctor’s First Law is not do no harm, but if you don’t know, don’t admit it.  I think the graded-cumulative-exercise thing as a ‘treatment’ for ME hadn’t really got going yet;  I was starting to learn how to manage mine before I heard about it, & when I did, I was appalled.  The basic idea seems to be that we’re not exactly not crazy or malingering, we’re just poor sad self-doubting creatures who need a little encouragement from a jerk in a white coat. 

OKAY SHUTTING UP NOW.  It’s just . . . I’m really upset that this is still going on.  Anyone out there who has ME, or suspects they have ME, believe yourself.  You’re the expert on you.  Do your homework, & get on with your life as best you can.  If cumulative exercise works for you great.  But if it doesn’t, STOP.  & don’t let some jerk in a white coat bully you about it. 

Readers of the old blog will have heard all this before.  It’s just . . . I’m not much of a joiner, as you will have noticed, & I don’t belong to any ME forums or follow anyone talking about their experience of it.  I wasn’t ready to find out how little has changed in the last almost quarter century.  I was lucky when I was first struggling to cope:  I had Peter, who buckled down & took care of me—including when I took it out on him that I needed taking care of, which I am not proud of.  I was eighteen months on the sofa & I hated it.^^^  

But the thing that has made it possible for me to cope is that I work from home on my own schedule, or lack of one, & I do it sitting down.  Bad brain-fog days are—bad;  but I’m not a ballet dancer or a stevedore.   I’ve never gone through—because I haven’t needed to go through—the awful business of trying to get a disability pension.  If you weren’t sick & exhausted at the beginning of that process, you would be by the end.

^ This was years before the NHS grudgingly acknowledged that ME/chronic fatigue was real, & we weren’t all malingering &/or crazy.+

+ just crazy.  & delusive etc.

^^ No.  I’m not exaggerating. 

^^^ Although even that wasn’t all bad.  Peter bought me a proper TV, big & fancy at the time, although it would look like anode ray tubes & rabbit ears now, & my best friend told me to watch BUFFY, which was only just being broadcast over here for the first time.  & also, our three whippets had the best time of their lives, that 18 months, because they got to lie on the sofa too.+   Dog rules in any household I hold sway over is that dogs are only allowed on the furniture when a human is there first, & invites them.

+ Peter walked them.  I used to fall off the sofa, crawl into the kitchen, make myself a cup of tea & prop myself in a chair till they got back.

** YO, LIFE.  I NEED BLOG MATERIAL, OKAY?  MAKE A BLASTED NOTE.

*** You need to have read the previous post.  Just in case you haven’t. 

† At least I assume, or I hope I will be forgiven for assuming, that people who write to me via the blog & the email address listed there & on the web site^ have read my books.  Maybe there are a few people who typed in ‘German Wire Haired Pointer’ on their browser & stop round this blog occasionally, hoping for more hairy four-legged slavering thunderbolt stories, and their idea of fiction is Colson Whitehead or Marilynne Robinson or Francis Spufford, all of whom are splendid but so far as I know none of them has ever written about dragons or enchanted swords or border collies.  However I think most of the blog readers & people who write to me read my books.

&.  Erm.  Thank you.  It’s not just earning a living:  you want to hear that your books reach some of their readers.^^

^ Yes still sadly neglected & on the raging doodah list SIIIIIIIIGH, I am sparing telling you how long the list is I don’t want to be responsible if you faint & fall out of your chair.+

+ This is what dogs are for.  Genghis is presently wrapped around me# in such a way that if I tried to fall out of our shared bench the only thing I would be able to crack my head on is a dog.  Who would probably mutter huffff & go back to sleep.

# Very useful as winter closes in.  I don’t have the central heating on yet.  I go from dog blanket at the laptop to blanket blanket in bed. =

= Although speaking of winter, & ways to avoid turning the central heating on, I have a GOOD DOG GENGHIS!! story for you.  Really!! 

I have two woodstoves & a working fireplace downstairs@, although the only one I use is the woodstove in here, the long kitchen-dining room@@, which is the chimney I had CLEANED yesterday.  Genghis was delighted with the stove cleaner.  He started rolling out all his I’m-so-cute-play-with-me moves, & after about a minute of this I grabbed him by the scruff @@@ & ordered him in a calm, firm, I am-boss-&-you-are-obedient-dog voice, to get back up onto our bench.  You could see the thought bubble over his head:  BUUUUUUUUTTTTTTTT . . . I persisted.  Eventually he climbed onto the bench, & gave me The Look.  He doesn’t glare, he’s too good-natured, but he can certainly look sad & disappointed & oppressed. 

The thing is, he stayed where I’d put him.  WHAT?!?!?  I wasn’t ready to sit down yet—I was chopping fresh organic vegetables or something, I do an awful lot of that—so he had yards of opportunity to pour off the bench again & go see what interesting thing the stove cleaner was doing.

BUT HE DIDN’T.  I have no idea why, but don’t tell him that.  VERY GOOD DOG GENGHIS.

@ & the kitchen hearth chimney, which is blocked, plus four more unused & now blocked chimneys upstairs.  Old Victorian house.  When in doubt, the Victorians put in another chimney.  This whole area is Victorian, & we all bristle like mad with chimneys.  If you squint, you can almost turn them into crenellations.$

$ ESPECIALLY AFTER THE EXTERIOR-CHIMNEY MAN PUT ANTI SEAGULL SPIKES ALL OVER EVERYTHING YAAAAAAAAAAAAY

@@ I knocked a wall down.  Some day I will tell you stories about house renovations.  I think I’ve threatened you with this before?  Be afraid.  Be frightened out of your wits.  Perform distraction techniques, like sending me funny emails that I can riff blog posts on.

@@@ Genghis doesn’t wear a collar indoors.  Of course I knew the stove cleaner was coming.  Of course I knew Genghis would be thrilled with the stove cleaner.  DID I PUT A COLLAR ON MY RABBLEMENT & STRAMASH MACHINE??  No of course not.  Never occurred to me till I was linking my hands around his neck & pulling. 

^^ I am very well aware they don’t reach all their readers.  We aren’t going there today.  Not all books are for all readers, okay?  Okay.

†† See previous post again.

††† You seriously don’t want to put any commercial florist leaves anywhere near your mouth.  I don’t even recommend picking them up in your bare hands.    

‡ Almost anything.^

^ Okay this is another list I’m not going to scare you with.