Hail and Farewell

It's soon to be farewell to the out -of -date Moffat Book Events home page advertising our Oct book event and hello to a new look for 2012. Keep tabs on the website around next Tues and Wed. I am housebound this week with a couple of packs of antibiotic so it will be a case of A Journey Round My Room a la Xavier de Maistre (1871). I suffer from a chronic physical condition called bronchiectasis, originating from very early childhood when my lungs were damaged - one worse than the other - by pneumonia. Some people, including myself until it suddenly became life-threatening, think that pneumonia is on a continuum where a cough and a cold are at one end, and pneumonia at the other. No. When you have pneumonia, your lungs pack up to a greater or lesser extent so that your whole system, all your vital organs and your brain are deprived of oxygen. This is highly inconvenient. I have begun to learn to recognise the symptoms which I can describe as feeling a) extremely unwell but also b) spaced out (the result of the aforesaid lack of oxygen reaching the brain). Even so, I was sitting - clearly not my usual breezy self - on a sofa in London on Saturday evening and had to be told by my elder daughter to go to bed, go straight to bed and not to pass go etc. My doctor and my medicine are in Moffat so I came straight back north the following day and will be lying low for the necessary week.