Archives: Writing

I’m in a very weird situation with my body at the moment.

On the one hand, it’s reeling from the effects of the infection and is suffering the usual IV hangover that comes with the first few days of pumping extremely high doses of pretty hard and powerful drugs into your system.  On the other hand it’s simultaneously feeling a huge surge of energy and general boost that comes from having large doses of steroids crammed in on top of everything.

It can’t decide whether to be super-tired or super-energised and it’s seemed to settle on some sort of manically-driven half-way house, where I feel like I can take on the world if only I could have a 10 minute cat nap first…

Still, the main thing is that whatever’s happening, it’s definitely doing the right thing.  Without a doubt I feel hugely better than I did earlier in the week, tiredness aside, and I know that if my appetite is returning (or back with a vengeance) – even if it is steroid-related – then I’m definitely on the mend.

I’ve never been particularly good at recognising (or acknowledging is a better term, I suppose) the signs of an on-coming infection, so I’m quite pleased not only that I picked up on it properly this time, but reacted in the right way by getting myself to Oxford as soon as I could and not just waiting around for my next appointment, by which time it could have taken much greater hold and really started to kick my butt.

I was back at Oxford yesterday for a physio session, which is also a cunning ruse on the part of the team to give me a quick, unofficial once-over to see if there has been any improvement.  They think we don’t know these things, but we really do.  Still, cunning or not, it was reassuring to know that the team all felt I was looking better.  Being multi- rather than mono-syllabic must have helped.

Strangely, this period of minor health-hiccup has coincided with a bright spark of inspiration and I’ve finally broken the back of the script I’ve been working on for the last few months.  I’m now 70 pages in, about 20 pages from the end – at a guess – and it’s all coming together beautifully.  I actually can’t wait to sit in front of the computer and bash out the next six pages each day and often feel like I could do more, had I the alertness to keep focused for long enough.

Still, I’m hoping to have finished my first draft by the end of the weekend and to have redrafted within the week.  The stages between my first and second drafts are very quick – it’s pretty much a read through and polish with a couple of additional scenes, at which point I’ll then sit and work through it much more slowly and may seek out a couple of opinions from people who will give me good, honest notes.

Funnily enough, a great friend of mine for whom I am nominally writing the script, happened to text me on Wednesday to see how I was doing (health-wise, not script-wise) and it was the same day that the whole things became clear and concise in my head, so maybe there’s a spooky little connection thing going on in my head there, somewhere.  Whatever it is, I’m really enjoying it.

The good news is my tiredness seems to have lifted, mostly. The bad news is that I woke up this morning with a roaring headache and couldn’t shake it for most of the day.

I’ve noticed that being chronically ill gives you a bizarre form of semi-hypochondria: every little tweak of a muscle, snuffle or sneeze suddenly seems laden with horrible possibilities.

This morning’s headache, for example. More likely than not, it was a simple, common or garden headache of the type we all wake up with from time to time. To my slightly addled brain, however, it could be a recurrence of the old CO2 headaches I used to get before I started on my NIV overnight. The issue there being that since I’m not actually using overnight NIV, it would imply that my lungs have deteriorated further and the NIV isn’t working hard enough to clear the CO2 from my lungs while I sleep.

The chances of this being the case – considering there are no obvious other signs of major chest complaint (no significant drop in lung-function, no increase in volume of sputum etc) – are pretty low, but it doesn’t stop my brain working the scenarios over in my head almost constantly.

Most importantly, I guess, is the fact that I can see my slightly skewed look at things and take a bit of a step back from it. I’m not fretting my head off about it, but it is still playing on my mind a little. I’m sure I’ll sleep soundly tonight and wake up tomorrow with no problems at all, and I’ll feel foolish for even letting the thought cross my mind. But when you’re sitting on such unstable ground, you get a little hyper-sensitive.

I shall be trying to get back into my exercise regime again tomorrow, having missed almost a week now through tiredness. I shall also be attempting to get back into the screenplay again, having failed to match yesterday’s 10 pages with any pages at all today. I’m a bit hit-and-miss, me.

On the plus side for today, K’s little 2 year-old niece and 15-month old nephew (I’m sure I’ll have got that wrong now, I bet I get shot for it, too) came over for a visit today, which was just gorgeous as they were both in such fantastic moods. Even though I was feel really rough with my head banging and pretty short of breath, I managed to have a lot of fun. Luckily, I could play mostly sat down on the sofa or the floor and not move around much (I left policing duties to K and their Mum, who would race after the little one as he crawled off at top speed to reek havoc in other rooms).

I spent most of the time being either a fairy or a ballerina. I’m not quite sure what that suggests our niece thinks about me, but I’d like to think it means she understands that I’ve got a wonderful imagination, just like her.

Even when you’re feeling tired and rough, there’s something truly infectious about children’s laughter – it reminded me what I used to love about working with the Youth Theatre. Having a child’s simple outlook on life is so rare and so delightful, to focus 100% on what’s going on right now with no thought for the history or what comes next.

With two children as gorgeous and laughter as infectious as theirs, it’s impossible to say I’ve had a bad day.

“We do not inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.”
Native American Proverb

There must be something about being tired and a little bit down on yourself that sets the inspiration glands working over time, as I napped this afternoon and got up to find myself sat in front of the computer churning out 10 pages of my screenplay.  Even I’m impressed.

I have an unnatural love of Aaron Sorkin.  It’s really not very becoming for a man of my age.  I have a kind of giggly school-girl relationship with everything and anything he does.  Oddly, though, not many people actually know who he is.

Most people have never heard of him and fewer seem to have seen his TV shows.  The only thing most people know him for is A Few Good Men, the Tom Cruise/Demi Moore/Jack Nicholson movie, and even then most people only know it when they hear Nicholson bellowing, “You want the truth? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”

He wrote that.

He went on to create and write the immensely under-rated Sports Night, which ran for 2 seasons and 40-odd episodes in the States a decade or so ago, starring some proper actors who went on to big things in Six Feet Under and Desperate Housewives, but never really took off.  It got buried in the schedules on ABC1 over here a couple of years back, but I don’t think anyone noticed it.

After that he hit the big time (at least in the States) with the unbelievably brilliant West Wing, probably my all-time favourite TV show and multi-Emmy award winner.  Sadly, English audiences never really took to it and after the first series was broadcast to critical acclaim but rubbish ratings on Channel 4 it got shifted and bumped around the schedules on E4, More4, Another4, Someone Else’s4 and other such channels.

It was, however, consistently the best thing coming out of the States for 3 seasons, dropped a little in the 4th just before Sorkin left.  It carried on for another 3 seasons and was cancelled last year, ironically after its best season since Sorkin left.

So what did he do next?  The master wordsmith, the writer I most admire, the man, the myth, the legend went and created Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip – a behind-the-scenes comedy-drama about working on a weekly live sketch comedy show for a fictional US Network.

It’s inspired, sublime and completely riveting – I love the whole thing to pieces, even before you add in to the mix Matthew Perry (ex of Friends) in a role that let’s him loose with his very real talent, and two of the West Wing’s best regulars in Bradley Whitford and Timothy Busfield.

The only problem with watching the series unfold week-by-week on More4 as it is at the moment is the horrible knowledge that comes from following TV production in the United States.  You see, Studio 60 is SO good that the network (the real one, not the fictional one) pulled it after one 20-episode series.

Bummer.

Which leaves the tantalizing question of what it did wrong to get cancelled.  All shows have their bad weeks, especially when you’re working in the American system where they write the shows as they go (as opposed to the UK where all but the longest series like Dr Who or Robin Hood go into production with all of the scripts in almost final form), but Studio 60 has so far, in 5 episodes, hardly hit a bum note.

Did the American audience just not go for the show?  Did they just not carry on watching?  Or does it suddenly, mid-season, get completely rubbish.

I’m a Sorkin addict – I’ll watch anything he does because I think he’s one of the most talented writers on the planet.  And I know I’ll keep watching this to the bitter end (and you know already that the ending’s going to be bitter), but it’s kind of turning into car-crash TV, to be watched with your fingers over your eyes from behind the sofa.  Because you have to imagine that for a show this good at the start to get canceled after a single series, something BIG has got to go wrong with the quality of the output somewhere in the middle.

Ah well, you can’t win ’em all.  And even if it does get rubbish, I’ve got 115 hours of The West Wing on my DVD shelf to give me my Sorkin-fix.

It has occurred to me of late, rather alarmingly, that I may be turning into a middle-aged woman.  Not in any real, physical sense, you understand – I’m not that weird, yet – but rather in what I like to call my “Mañana Manner”.

For years I’ve observed that strange phenomenon in women who feel a little over-weight to protest over a long, languid Sunday roast of a dozen or so courses with free-flowing wine and truffles to finish that their diet starts “tomorrow”.  So many “tomorrows” are there in the world of middle-aged women that it’s a wonder today every happens at all.

Losing weight is obviously not an ideal goal for me – being the svelt 52kgs (that’s 8st 2lbs in old money or 114lbs to our American cousins) I am at the moment – but I have found the “Mañana Manner” creeping into other areas of my life ever more prominently as I continue to enjoy something of an “up”.

For weeks now, I’ve been promising myself that I will get back to the screenplay I abandoned half-finished at the back-end of May, when I was whizzing through my 6-page-per-day target almost non-stop.  My birthday upset the balance at the end of the month, and then my prolonged “outage” set me even further adrift.  Now, I seem to find excuse after excuse to avoid putting myself in front of the screen to finish off a piece of work I’m actually pretty happy with.

Last week didn’t help, turning as it did into one of those run away weeks which sweep you up from the start and end up dumping you at the weekend with hardly a moment’s pause for breath (paradoxical, I suppose, since I have hardly any breath to pause for) .  An aborted call in the middle of things didn’t help, but I honestly could not tell you whether or not the last three days really did have their full 24 hours or if someone decided to switch us on to fast forward for a little while.

You know the sort of thing I mean: when you go to bed on Monday, wake up in the morning and it’s Sunday and although you know you’ve been busy all week you can’t for the life of you think of the things you’ve done.

So it was hardly a struggle to continue to find reasons not to get back to my desk, although I’m getting pretty good at that now.

It started innocently enough as a case of writer’s block – reaching a mid-point in the story which needed a kick and not being able to work out where it should come from.  I can’t, however, really cling to that as a reason not to have confronted it in the last couple of weeks, since I sorted that problem out in my head a good couple of Monday’s back.

It is much more a case of the intrusion of the “Mañana Manner” on my writing habits: I can’t possibly start writing today, I’ve got to finish this chapter of my book first.  I can’t possibly start writing today, it’s the middle of the week and I shan’t be able to write tomorrow, so what’s the point in getting into the swing of things, just to lose the flow again?  I can’t possibly write today, it’s nearly the weekend.  I can’t possibly write today, it’s Sunday.  I can’t possibly write today, there’s a small black-and-white dog lurking outside my study window.  I can’t possibly write today, the sun isn’t quite bright enough to echo the mood of the piece I’m trying to create and I’m not going to be able to find the right “zone”.

It’s remarkable how creative one can be in forcing oneself not to be creative.

What’s more, it amused me as I thought these things through to myself as I washed-up (yes, washed-up – if that’s not a sign of improvement, I don’t know what is) that for someone who can procrastinate so spectacularly well around doing something I’m passionate about, how is it possible that I manage to park my butt in front of my computer to bang out nearly 1,000 words of blog most days of the week?  I think my priorities may be a little skewed….

Still, the most important thing is that you’ve got something to read to waste 5 minutes of your day.  After my transplant I’ll have plenty of time to do things for myself, for now I choose to put you, dear reader, first.  I’m that sort of a giving kind of person, me.

It’s been an up-and-down few days (when isn’t it, these days), but more up than down.

The trouble is, this evening I feel so tired and my back is causing me so much bother that try as I might, I’m struggling to pin-point the highs and lows  of the last few days.

A definite high was seeing K’s big niece, little niece and nephew, all of whom I haven’t seen for ages.  It was nice to see their dad, too, although even nicer of him to go get us a paper (thanks, Rob!).

I managed a good hour or so of fairly sedate entertainment, leaving K to do most of the running around and baby-chasing as little Jack set off exploring the wonders of the un-baby-proofed apartment.   Having palmed off the high-maintenance duties to K, I settled myself with a game of chess and a bit of a story book/CBeebies magazine, which is much more my kind of pace.  Although chess with a 1-year-old knocking about is a far more defensive game.

The rest of Sunday was gainfully employed resting, although we did pop over to my ‘rents for some food in the evening.  The trouble is it’s such a long way away now (yes, 20 minutes’ drive is a long way now) that to avoid being a dangerous, half-asleep driver on the way home, we literally only get to swoop in for food and then run away.  I know parents are parents and they don’t mind things like that, but it does bother me somewhat how anti-social we can be.

I suppose it’s one more thing to look forward to post-transplant: those long, leisurely Sunday lunches which start at lunchtime and roll on to dinner time with a good deal of laughing and chatting in the middle.  Another thing to add to my “To Do’s”.

Saturday was very quiet, resting up at the promise of baby visits on Sunday, and expecting a slightly fuller day of visitors were it not for the odd drunken mishap changing plans around. (No names.)

Today started really well after a bad night’s sleep.  I woke feeling surprisingly spritely and sat reading for a while before showering (with my oxygen!) and doing physio and finally getting through the few pieces of copy I had to write to finish off this issue of CF Talk.  We should now be at a final proof stage, which I should receive in the next few days, and  I can check it, correct the mistakes, sign off the whole thing and get it out.

This afternoon has seen a bit of a down-turn, with my chest getting a bit tighter and me more breathless, with a slow onset of not only a headache but a good deal of back pain, too.

As I write, I’m about to whisk myself off to bed to see if I can settle myself and sort it out, before trying to get an early night’s sleep for a change.  I could really do with a good, long night’s kip.  Here goes…

Happily, the jinx doesn’t seem to have lasted too long, which is definitely a good thing.  After a bit of a slow down at the end of last week and a weekend spent doing as little as possible, things seem to be back to where they were before I decided to blog-big about my projects and plans.

From now on I intend to only highlight imminent events on here, and to talk about everything else only once it’s safely behind me.  Which is odd, because I really don’t believe in jinxes/superstition.  As my brother delights in telling me, it’s unlucky to be superstitious.

So, the last couple of days have seen me finally bite the proverbial bullet and really get my head into CF Talk to get it swept off to the designers.  They do a fantastic job, but do insist on having FINAL copy before going to work on it, as they’ve found to their cost in the past that if people are still chopping and changing while they work then a certain turn or phrase or clever image in the text that spurs them on to create a funky look for the page can disappear and leave the reader bemused as to where the page-layout idea came from and possibly whether the designers were smoking something while they worked.

And I know for a fact that Tin Racer is a no-smoking facility.

The trouble with having to provide them with final-final copy is that I’m terrible for making lots and lots of little tweaks to the text for the CF Talk copy.  Often, the copy we receive is too long for the format and needs to be cut down, but I’m always anxious that while I may be cutting and re-jigging the article, I am never rewriting it.  Because the whole idea of the magazine is that it is written by pwcf for pwcf, it’s really important to me to keep the original author’s voice on their work, and not edit it into one homogenous style throughout the mag.

What this means is that while I’m editing, I’m constantly making changes and adjustments to the articles to make sure I’m keeping the thrust of what’s been written, as well as the original voice, whilst shaping it into an article that will fit within the space constraints imposed by our format and style.

It’s not easy and it’s one of the jobs that I always find myself trying to delay.  This time it’s been even tougher as I had a long spell out of the editor’s chair going through my recent rough patch, which meant that I had to come back to look at all the articles again, having completely lost the flow I was in before I had to down tools and sort myself out.

Happily, though (and I do enjoy seeing that word twice in the same blog entry), I have now managed to sign off on over 3/4 of the copy for the new issue and turn it over to the guys at Tin Racer.  All I have left to do is all the little mop-up pieces which come last, like the Editorial for the issue, the contents page and the competition page.

It’s been a long time coming, but hopefully we’ll carry a bit of momentum into the next issue and get it out quite quickly this time round.

Obviously, I’m looking at taking a long weekend off all work-related bits and pieces this weekend to make the most of my 25th Birthday, for which I have so far studiously avoided planning anything.  It’s a little sad, I have to say, to not be able to celebrate things properly, but I’m actually so glad to be here to see it and to be able to share it with all my family and friends, whether I get to see them or not, that it’s not got me down as much as one might expect it to.

I’ll be sure to chart progress of the other work I do manage to achieve this week on here once I’ve got there, but I’ll hold back from jumping the gun and shouting about my plans for the week for now.  I’ve learned my lesson.

Believe me, it’s amazing myself as much as anything, but so far this week, I’ve exceeded my target of 6 pages a day three days in a row – how brilliant is that?

I’ve no idea where this sudden glut of motivation or inspiration has come from, but suddenly things seem to have developed their own sense of momentum and I’m rolling along at a cracking pace and really enjoying myself, too.

It’s not just my new script that’s coming on leaps and bounds.

Live Life Then Give Life is still going strong, expanding all the time and the team behind it has grown and solidified into a (hard)core of people dedicated to improving organ donation in this country.  It’s a privilege to be involved with such a great campaign and group of people, who all work incredibly hard and really spur each other on to greater and greater things.

National Transplant Week, set up and run by Transplants in Mind (TiM) is in July and we’re all working feverishly to see what ways we can come up with to publicise it and raise as much awareness as we can.

There’s also the new issure of CF Talk which is coming together really nicely and now sits with the designers, who are currently working their very particular brand of magic on it.  I love the work our designers do on the mag and this is always the most exciting stage of an issue for me, where I hand them the copy and they come back a week or so later with some cracking imagery.

What’s always really funny about the whole process is that they are fantastically open to comments and ideas on all of the stuff they do, but there’s so rarely anything I want to change with the stuff they come up with it almost always goes to print identically to the first draft version I get sent through.  I suppose it’s a perfect illustration of a team working in harmony together to get all the elements looking their best.

I weary at the moment that it is almost always when things are rolling along at their best that the trip-ups tend to come.  But at the same time, knowing the up-and-down nature of my health at the moment, it seems all the more reason to enjoy doing all of these things while I can without fretting about the “what ifs” or the “what’s coming next”.

I suppose it’s something akin to parents trying to wrap their children in cotton wool. If you never allow your child to go out in the garden and play in the mud and put themselves at risk of germs and all the things children come into contact with then they may very well not get ill and stay more healthy than other children, but they also lose a large chunk of what it is to be a child – to explore the world and find out first hand that mud is mucky and worms don’t taste very nice.

And so it is for me at the moment.  I could easily shut myself away in my bedroom and rest 24/7, spending my days eating, sleeping and doing treatments.  But I don’t want to look back at this time pre-transplant when I’ve finally had my op and think of all the things I missed out on because I was too worried about what would happen next.

If a downturn is coming, then so be it – I’ll take it on the chin and ride it out like all the others.  I hope I can stave it off and continue to enjoy the good side of life.  But whatever happens, it’s not going to stop me doing the things that mean something to me.

Two days of lying in bed and doing NOTHING at all actually did the trick and I am now able to sit in my study and actually comtemplate work.

I say “comtemplate” because we all know (or at the very least we should all know by now) that I’m the world’s number one procrastinator and can find a way to weedle out my time sat in front of my computer better than anyone else in the whole wide, entire world.

As it happens, I have achieved a lot of “work” today by checking and sending emails.  These consist largely of sending ideas out to people for possible projects/ideas for collaborations which I’m hoping to get off the ground.

The Youth Theatre experience has taught me that being house-bound and energy-limited needn’t necessarily mean not doing anything at all, but rather that I need to find the right project and the right people to work with to make the most of what I have to offer.

So I need to find myself things to do whereby I can inspire and facilitate things for other people to pull off: kind of like a producer on a film – which is, interestingly, one of the projects I’m considering.

Like all good executives, what I need is to set up a situation where I can delegate work to the people who can handle it and can fill in for me when I’m not up to the task.  At the same time, it should leave something on my plate to make me feel a) involved and b) useful.  Being a base-touching point-of-contact is perrhaps the ideal situation.

That may all be rubbish, of course, and in fact just be providing a very useful excuse to give me a reason to avoid sitting at my desk and getting any worthwhile writing done, but then I’d hardly be doing myself justice if I wasn’t working hard to avoid working hard.

In fact, trying my best to avoid doing any work appears to be the perfect proof that I need that I must be well on the mend.  If I’m not moaning about not being able to work, then I must be doing my best to avoid doing it when I am able.

Most people would think that ironic, I know.  Lucy I’m not most people.

It appears, having just flitted over to the CF Trust’s message boards, and by looking through my inboxes, that I’ve had people rather worried by disappearing from my blog for the last few days.   Oops.

I assure you, everything is fine.  Certainly improving.

To tell the truth (not sure why I needed to add that, since it hardly pays to lie to oneself on your own blog….) I was bumming myself out, which is why I stopped for a bit.

Far from reminding myself to Smile Through It and keep on finding the positives in the darker times of life, I found that every time I started writing a post on the blog in the last few weeks, it’s only been to say either that I feel like cr*p or that nothing’s changed for the better.  Even the times when things had changed for the better, the change seemed so infinitesimal and pathetic that it either wasn’t worth mentioning, or served only to lower my despondency about how I’ve been doing.

It’s been weird to find myself trapped in a vicious circle of negative thought, and not something I’ve been used to in life.  Most times, my dark periods inhabit the odd spell of a week or so before things conspire to kick me up the butt and show me the way to carry on.  This latest down-turn has been different, though.

I don’t know if it’s the increased fear of mortality (or, “Am I gonna kick it?” as I prefer to call it) or the impairment to my quality of life inherent in having sunshine blazing through the windows but not enough energy to leave the apartment and enjoy it, but I’ve been lost in a mire of negativity for the last few weeks from which I seemed to have lost the map that usually provides my guide.

Sure, I’ve had good moments – I’ve managed to share Easter with the families around me, I’ve shared a little laughter with friends, I’ve even managed a trip to Borders (hurrah!), but there has been an overwhelming sense of good, old-fashioned, Dickensian melancholy hanging over me throughout.

It’s not that I entirely lost perspective on the whole thing: last week I was sitting a the funeral of a young girl who’s been an almost constant fixture of my working life for the last six years, since she’s been coming to the MK Youth Theatre sessions since their inception.  Sitting in the packed church among many young people experiencing their first distressing taste of grief, I realised that the very day I hit my lowest point – Sunday 1st April, as documented here previously – her Mum, Dad, younger brother and Grandparents were waking up to a new world without their beloved daughter.  How could I complain about pain in my life when held up against the pain of a parent outliving their child?

I’ve still appreciated each day I’ve been given, but it sticks in my proverbial craw (I’ve never really known what that means, but it seems to fit here, anyway…) that “making the most of it” is limited to sitting in the chair at the bay window using the bright sunlight to read by, as opposed the to dim interior light all through winter.

Finally, though, after weeks of dragging myself through the rough parts of every day and persevering in ways I wasn’t even sure I was capable of, I seem to have made it out the other side.

That’s not to say things are all bright and rosy, but I have at least got the energy to pop over to my ‘rents and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine if I want to, or to sit in the study and surf the ‘net a while without completely exhausting myself and having to collapse into bed.

I’m able finally to contemplate looking at the next issue of CF Talk, which has been sitting unattended on my desk for nearly 2 months now and is in dire need of completion.  I’m able to think about the other writing projects I was looking at before and see if I can rekindle the spark that was there before.  I’m able to focus my mind on something other than how my chest is feeling or whether or not I should stay in bed rather than move to the sofa.

I’ve one more negativity-hurdle to overcome, and that will be over after the weekend.

This Sunday sees the Activ8 Youth Theatre show at MKT take place, an event which was to have been my first opportunity to get stuck in to directing a short piece for the Youth Theatre and to benefit the CF Trust.  If I’m honest, I saw it as something of a swansong with them, acknowledging as I have to the likelihood that my involvement is being compelled by my chest to end.

Rather than a happy ending, though, it’s going to be an extremely tough one to get through.  Not just physically, although I can’t pretend that that’s not going to be a challenge in itself,  but because I’ve ended up having almost nothing to do with the finished product.  Three weeks’ of rehearsal in a 12 week term doesn’t amount to a contribution, in my mind, and the work I had hoped to see up on the stage is now more likely to bring me down than uplift me.

I wanted so much to make this something to remember – an event that showed the Theatre’s support not just for the CF Trust, but for the whole Youth Theatre, and a true showcase of the talent which has been nurtured through Activ8 over the last half a decade.  And don’t get me wrong – it is still very much all of those things.

But it doesn’t feel like it’s anything to do with me.  I feel like a passenger, an outsider, something akin to a “consultant” who’s seen parts of the process leading up to performance and had a little input, but not someone who forms part of the “team” whose talents are being showcased.

I know that people will shout me down and will be quick to try to dissuade all of my fears and make me feel a part of it, but I can’t get passed the fact that I’ve not been there for them or with them for pretty much the entire term.  This is their show and their showcase, and it’s nothing to do with me any more.  That saddens me, and it’s going to be hard, but nothing will stop me being their to support them.

I am trying to keep my air of positivity and move forward from here – and I know I will continue to progress – but I also know that this weekend is going to be a really tough one to get through.

Thanks to everyone for your good vibes, your love and prayers over the last few weeks.  They really do make a difference, and they have helped me enormously.  I shall endeavour to keep up with my more regular out-put of the past, as I will endeavour to keep myself looking up and not down, forward and not back.

Keep on truckin’.