This is because Jamie and I are splitting up, as of two weeks ago today. We have been together for just shy of ten years, the anniversary would have been this September.

No one else is involved. This is an amicable split, though not mutual. I still love Jamie very much, but the decision is his, and once Jamie has made his mind up, nothing, not wild horses, not natural disasters, will alter it.

In these situations, friends and relatives always have to have an opinion, regardless of whether they are aware of all of the facts. I ask that people refrain from speculation and trouble making. I am not willing to let go quite just yet. Call it flogging a dead horse if you will, but I am sentimental like that.

Offers of friendship, tea, sympathy, and wings to shelter under would be most welcome right now. The exception is that I cannot do phone calls. I feel too drained.

It will take a long time for us to extract ourselves from our shared life, disentangle our finances, our living arrangements, and our possessions. Nothing will change quickly, but it will change.

My own edits are quite similar. These are the words and phrases I search for and try to fix.

1. Sentences beginning with “It”.

. It

Clunky: It rained on Saturday. Better: On Saturday, it rained. Better still: Saturday morning, and the rain beat against the roof like rice on a tin drum.

The exception to this is when the sentence is a follow-on and you have already just described the object, when an ‘it’ would avoid repetition. Saturday morning, and the rain beat against the roof like rice on a tin drum. Clunky: The rain gurgled through the drain pipes and… Better: It gurgled through the drain pipes and… Better still: Water gurgled through the drainpipes and…

2. Overuse of “it was”.

it was

Clunky: It was an overcast day. Better: The day was overcast. Better still: The sky loomed, thick with cloud.

3. Overuse of “there was” or “there were”

there was

there were

Clunky: There was a house at the end of the lane. Better: A house stood at the end of the lane. Much better: A house nestled among the trees at the far end of the lane.

4. Overuse of the past continuous/imperfect tense – the “was ~ing” or “were ~ing” format.

was {1}<[a-z]@ing

were {1}<[a-z]@ing

Above are the wildcard searches you can paste into the MS Word find and replace.

I am the first to admit that I overuse this format, mainly because it can draw you into the action in a way that the past simple tense does not. The past imperfect tense has its place when one action occurs at the same time as another. However, continuous unnecessary usage in the text makes for ugly prose that is hard to read aloud.

Clunky: I was sitting on the doorstep watching the sunset, thinking. Better: I sat on the doorstep watching the sunset, thinking. Better still: Sat on the doorstep, I contemplated the sunset.

5. Adverbs. Words that end in “~ly”.

<[a-z]@ly>

Adverbs are usually used to convey mood and nuance. However, when you throw in an unnecessary adverb, you can end up bludgeoning or patronising your reader. Everyone has a different level of tolerance for adverbs. Often they aren’t as necessary as you think they are, and you can convey your meaning without them through context alone.

Clunky: “Shut up!” She said angrily. Better: “Shut up!” She snapped. Better still: “Shut up!”

I try to stick to no more than one or two per page, but I have a flowery writing style. If your prose is simple and non-descriptive, you cannot afford this many.

(It was time to sort out her prose, she mused thoughtfully while she was watching the dahlias nod their heads).*

* Fix me. Please.

I like Amy Pond. I like that she’s hot, I like that she’s sexy. I would like to see more Amy Pond on the television. If Amy Pond was up for it (and she seems like the kind of girl who might be), I would.

I also like Amy Pond’s short skirts. I like her hot pants. I like her legs. I would like to see more of Amy Pond’s legs on the television.

There is however, a line, beyond which we get silly. Amy Pond in Renaissance Venice, wearing a denim skirt that barely covers her ladygarden, is SILLY. Amy Pond wearing hot pants in Wales in the middle of winter is SILLY. Karen Gillan is a redhead, a very beautiful redhead, and I can only imagine the lengths that she must have gone to, to prevent her naturally pale skin from turning lilac.

I am not a Daily Mail reader. The sight of bare skin does not shock me. The last thing I want to do is give justification to the anti-Pond prudes. I am aware that Karen Gillan has some say over her own wardrobe. However, just as I hated the way that the Who team made the gorgeous Rose Tyler look frumpy and fat (and whiny and tearful and insecure), I also hate the way the Who team (Gillan included) have made Amy Pond look like a bit of a Peri Brown.

“I thought we were going to Rio,” is not an excuse. It is a writing device to get around the fact that the Who team have dressed Amy inappropriately for the weather, in order to show off her stunning legs. This does not make it any more believable. It takes two minutes to pop back into the TARDIS and swap your hot pants for a pair of jeans. Besides, if you were expecting Rio, why the heck are you wearing a cardigan and a leather coat?

Who’s companions are notorious for dressing inappropriately in historical settings, and it’s never worked. Unless it’s part of the plot, it comes across as SILLY. Every time I see it done, my disbelief fails to suspend, especially when the natives go on with their daily lives as if they haven’t seen a semi-naked woman step out of a big blue box.

There’s a line. In the middle of Renaissance Venice, that line is canions or breeches (which, to be frank, would be far sexier than a denim skirt anyway). In the middle of a Welsh winter, that line is OPAQUE TIGHTS. It is possible to be sexy whilst wearing appropriate attire for your surroundings. Skinny jeans and long boots are sexy. A silk dress is sexy. A corset is very sexy. Unlike hot pants, they are also subtle.

Too much overt sexiness turns you into arm candy, burying your personality and hiding your intelligence, because people are too busy looking at your body and saying things like, “Fwoargh, that Amy Pond is a bit of alright.” Currently, Amy Pond will go down in companion history as “the hot, vapid one with the legs.” I’d much rather see her as “the hot, kooky one with the brain,” because she does have a brain. Did you notice?

Let’s face it. The BBC wardrobe department (Gillan included), are dressing Amy Pond for the dads. Sci-fi is a field dominated by men, and is notorious for limiting women’s representation in the genre to under-dressed, over-exposed sexpots. Frequently their characters are brainless, passive or reactive instead of proactive, require rescuing and defending (sometimes with macho fist fights), or serve no actual purpose to the plot. Take a look through a list of the top one hundred sci-fi films, and count how many of them have prominent or leading female characters with distinct personalities, see how many of their names you can remember, and try to recall points in the plot where they altered events by making a crucial decision. Now count how many films have more than one significant female character, and how many films have a female character who is not a love interest.

Even amongst the progressive and/or woman-centred science fiction, we still find the sexpot. Uhura, though revolutionary in her day, was still a secretary in a short skirt. Lara Croft may have been a female lead, but she was a walking pair of tits with an underdeveloped personality. Barbarella was, well, deliberate.

Star Wars broke ground back in the seventies. Princess Leia, although she did require rescuing, had a proactive, commanding character who actually influenced the plot. Terminator and Alien also broke new ground, simply by having a female lead (even if she was always on the defensive, running away from a violent threat).  Star Trek made huge inroads by having a female-dominated cast in Voyager – Captain Janeway, B’Elanna Torres as chief engineer, and Seven of Nine, who managed walk the fine line of being both sexy, and intelligent. Yes, the outfit was sprayed on, but the fact that Seven was proactive, had a big brain, a distinct personality, and was slightly terrifying, balanced the gratuitous one-piece. As a result of having several strong female characters, Voyager actually passed the Bechdel Test. Women spoke to one another, and not always about men!

Doctor Who made inroads of its own back in Sylvester McCoy’s day, with Ace. Ace was the first Doctor’s companion who did not scream and run away and require constant supervision in case she wandered off and died. Melanie Bush was pathetic. Leela was a walking jungle Jane outfit. Peri Brown was a screaming cleavage. On the other hand, Ace was ace. The Doctor Who team wrote her as an antidote to the companions who went before. She blew stuff up, against orders. She smashed up Daleks with baseball bats. She spouted dreadful fake slang. She was hot, without being blatantly under-dressed for the weather. The Doctor couldn’t control her, but he loved her with a fatherly affection that he rarely showed his previous companions, with perhaps the exception of Sarah Jane.

Having a loose cannon for a companion is a great opportunity for plotting and conflict. I had very high hopes for Amy Pond, first when she handcuffed the Doctor to a radiator in episode one, then when she took matters into her own hands in episode two, “The Beast Below,” and released the star whale against the Doctor’s orders. Unfortunately, we haven’t really seen any more of that side of Amy, apart from a brief moment of trying to seduce the Doctor, and, under River Song’s influence, making him look foolish now and then. To suggest that Amy’s character is poorly formed, inconsistent, and indistinct, is justifiable. The scriptwriters don’t seem to have a clear grasp of who she is. So far, Amy is largely passive and predictable. Sure, she uses her ingenuity when she needs to, for example, by training a gun on the Silurians (to no benefit, the action became irrelevant due to her immediate capture), but it’s very much a case of the plot driving her actions, rather than the other way around. She is largely reactive, not proactive.

Even “Amy’s Choice” did not give Amy a choice. Aside from the fact that her relationship with Rory isn’t believable (she’s both too hot, and too smart for him) and such attempts to justify the pairing in the script will not work, the idea of Amy, very pregnant, driving a van into a wall to kill herself? Over Rory? How Greek. How “woe is me, I shall throw myself on my husband’s funeral pyre.” Some choice. Yet again, Amy was reactive instead of proactive, responding to events beyond her control instead of taking charge of the plot. There was an opportunity for a very powerful psychological battle to take place when the Dream Lord trapped Amy alone with him on the frozen TARDIS. It could have been electric. It did not happen. In the end, the Doctor resolved the episode, not Amy.

A female character needs to have a mind of her own to justify her own existence in the script, otherwise she is a decoration. In Amy Pond, we have a chance to see a companion who can create conflict by not doing as she is told. She can be sexy and intelligent at the same time. She does not have to become a gaudy piece of arm candy put there for the dads to enjoy, with a beer, post-football, on Saturday teatime. She does not have to be a stereotype. She does not have to be Peri Brown. I’m not asking for radical feminism, or extra layers of clothing, just a believable woman who exerts her influence and makes significant decisions. Thus far, the Who writers (with the exception of Moffat) have not given her enough opportunity to be these things.

I would like the Who writers to think harder about Amy Pond, and what makes Amy Pond tick, because when she is written well, she is glorious to watch. I would like them to go away and watch Ace and the seventh doctor, and perhaps Tank Girl, or Terminator, and then get back to us, having stopped salivating over the legs, and started to concentrate on the brain.

In defence, I actually thought it was well-plotted. For one, no MacGuffins, no Deus Ex Machina, and no cop-out Star Trek technical solutions, which makes a change. The spitfires were pushing it, but the existence of the inventor made them plausible – I’ve seen far worse in some of the dross from the last series (e.g. RTD’s finale).

I thought it was GREAT that there was barely any use of the sonic screwdriver. It’s a cheap plot device that practically every writer uses to get the Doctor out of trouble, when in old school Who, the Doctor did clever stuff, like talk his way out of problems, and his sonic screwdriver usually failed him (all hail Douglas Adams!).

What makes Doctor Who great is his character, not cheap special effects and small explosions. In this episode the plot was driven forward by the strengths and flaws of the characters, and I particularly enjoyed the Kafkaesque quality of the Doctor’s frustrated ranting at the start, it added Mark Gatiss’s signature surreality. I wish it had continued in that vein for much longer, there was so much potential material there!

Also, Jammy Dodgers = classic Tom Baker moment, of which we need more.

People seem rather suspicious of these multicoloured “Spice Girl” daleks. It’s fairly obvious that the BBC are onto a marketing ploy with them. I wonder if as we get to know them, they will develop individual names and personalities? We saw some of that in the Daleks in Manhattan episodes a couple of years ago, and it would be an interesting way to go as it provides a way to set them against one another.

I do agree that this episode felt more like it should have been a whole series. I still lament the new ADHD standalone format, I’d love to see a return of four or six parters, they provide so much more opportunity to play with the characters and develop depth.

The last series seemed to consist of David Tennant running around shouting and blasting stuff with his sonic screwdriver like a tacky rip-off of Luke Skywalker, as writers tried to squeeze plot and special effects in to the time available. This doesn’t make for good TV, unless you’re 5 years old. We seem to be moving away from that, although there was still some running. Pond’s interaction with the inventor towards the end of the episode was a very welcome antidote to that, and I hope to see more non-tech solutions like this in the future.

“It snowed when she was born,” Mama said. Mama is – or was – Mum’s mum. She took the snow falling outside as a good sign. Mum survived the operation but was left with serious disabilities that have lead to her slow decline and eventual death.

Perhaps it is fitting that today, out of the blue, on the day of her funeral, it snowed again.

This is Mum’s eulogy.

MUM

Mum was a very special person. She touched the hearts of many people. Even though Mum was severely disabled, she couldn’t be kept down. Many people have come to us and told us that what they remember most about her was her lovely smile and mischievous giggle.

Mum grew up in Nottingham. She left school at sixteen to become a nursery nurse. She and Dad married young and moved to Leeds while Dad studied for his degree. This was the only time she lived away from Nottingham, and it wasn’t long before Nottingham drew her home again, to her family.

Mum was happiest working as a nursery nurse. She was a very caring person and loved small children. This reflected in her parenting. When Mum fell pregnant, she happily gave up work to raise my sister and me full time. She was a hands-on mother who spent many hours playing with us and teaching us, and we thrived as a result. She always pushed us to achieve. Because of her support, Sarah was able to study music, and I was able to go to university.

When we were old enough, Mum went back to work, as a teacher’s assistant at Priory Junior School. She taught a boy called Daniel who had Down’s syndrome. When Mum first started working with Daniel, he could barely speak, and his parents and teachers thought he would need lifelong care. Mum taught Daniel to hold conversations and speak in sentences. He learned to read and write. Because Mum helped Daniel, he was able to go on to a regular secondary school. He eventually learned to drive and was able to support himself by becoming a delivery driver. I have no doubt that Daniel achieved the independence he did because Mum helped him.

Mum went on to do an Open University course in psychology and sociology. She was a star pupil who consistently scored ‘A’ grades. Unfortunately, after three years she became too unwell to finish her degree when she developed fibromyalgia. Instead, Mum became active in the formation of the Nottingham Fibromyalgia Support Group. Today this group is one of the largest and busiest in the country.

Sadly, illness defined the last twenty years of Mum’s life. First, she endured fibromyalgia, and then about eleven years ago, she had a brain aneurysm that disabled her and left her with many health problems. They say that that which does not kill us makes us stronger. They say that character is defined by suffering. It is a testament to Mum’s strength of personality, and her fighting spirit that she survived her illness for so long. Most people would find it impossible to deal with paralysis, but while others would have given up, Mum kept battling on, and though she sometimes had her dark moments, she remained surprisingly stoical about her condition. She was very brave and stayed strong right up until the end.

The last few years of her life were quite peaceful. Mum loved gardens and wildlife. Uncle Kevin and Dada remodelled the garden at Conway Road, and she was thrilled with the result. She would sit contentedly in her chair for hours watching the fish in the pond and the birds at the feeder.

Mum was very close to her family. She loved a gossip. She was always the first on the phone with any news. I often remember her talking excitedly and laughing on the phone in the evening after dinner, with Aunty Jill or Mama. She and Mama had an extraordinarily close relationship and saw one another other every day, and spoke on the phone at night. They were best friends.

Mum was an accomplished cook, and she loved to bake. She was very patient with Sarah and me and would set up baking sessions in the kitchen to make buns or jam tarts or chocolate crispies. She would supervise us as we spooned mixture into bun tins and she always let us lick out the mixing bowl.

She was a skilled seamstress. She sewed the bridesmaid’s outfits for her own wedding, and several of Dad’s suits. She regularly made curtains and cushions, and outfits for school plays and ballets. She was pretty cool for a mum, and would happily get involved in our teenaged fads, from Star Wars to Nirvana. She made stunning mini-dresses for Sarah to wear on stage with her band. I remember tie-dying cotton sheets with her to turn into hippie dresses when I was at university.

She loved animals and had a habit of adopting stray cats when she was younger, which Sarah has inherited. She loved to laugh over the mischief our dogs got up to, even though it was often at her own expense. She loved to spoil them when they were puppies, and I remember how I often heard her voice chiming through the house, and their excited barks as she called them for treats.

She had a very mischievous sense of humour. I remember on one occasion she bought a whoopee cushion from a joke shop, ostensibly for Sarah and me, and proceeded to use it on everyone she knew. Dada was her favourite target.

What I remember most about Mum is that she was always very sensible. She was a source of great wisdom and advice and was easy to confide in. She always looked out for us and was quick to defend us. She was the most levelheaded person I know, and I feel that calm reasoning of hers has helped us through many troubles.

If she were here now I think she would be telling us to look after each other, because that is what Mum was best at – being a mum.

Around six and a half years ago, I was admitted to hospital with a full-leg deep vein thrombosis, inflicted on me by the third generation Pill. The Pill did terrible things to my body, and so did warfarin treatment. I was never right after that. The progress I had made in recovery from fibromyalgia was reversed, and in the months that followed I crashed into a miserable existence of exhaustion, headaches, back pain, muscular pain, mental fatigue, irritability, attention deficit disorder, and most of the time I felt that my brain was only half awake. I gained weight rapidly. I developed reactive hypoglycaemia, in which three hours after every meal I would be plunged into a shaking, confused state of starving hunger.

I went to the doctor. I told her my symptoms. I showed her the patch of eczema crawling across my face. I explained how I thought that there was something wrong with my hormones, as I seemed to be constantly “hormonal”. She gave me the big brush off. There was nothing she could do about my hormones, because the cure for hormones is the Pill, which gave me blood clots. There was nothing she could do about fibromyalgia. I would just have to grin and bear it. If I had put on weight, I should go on a diet. She gave me steroid cream for my eczema, which made it worse.

So I went away, determined to fix the problem for myself. I went on a low carbohydrate diet. I stopped eating junk food. I began taking huge quantities of vitamins. Within a few weeks I had lost all the weight, cleared my persistent brain fog, and my eczema went away all by itself.

For one whole honeymoon year, I felt better than I ever had in my adult life.

Then I caught bronchitis in Nice, France. This was not some ordinary variety of bronchitis, but the worst bout of illness I have ever experienced as an adult. As well as having problems breathing, I had a terrible sore throat and a hoarse voice, and there was a strange lump in my throat. I began to have palpitations, ectopic beats, night sweats, muscle twitches and cramps, and I was very frightened by the behaviour of my heart. I could feel myself gaining weight day by day. But I recovered, eventually. Over the next few weeks I lost half a stone without even trying. I had tons of energy and ran around the place fixing up our new apartment in Nottingham. Wasn’t I pleased with myself? More fool me, this was part of the pathology.

Six weeks later I reached the top of the roller-coaster and began the descent. The eczema reappeared. My brain fog returned. I was fatigued from the inside out. The back pain returned. I couldn’t concentrate on my work at all. I was in floods of tears over nothing, and I didn’t understand why. I kept on trying to fix myself with my healthy diet and tons of vitamins. After all, it had worked the first time, hadn’t it?

But this time it didn’t work, and over the next six months I would gain a stone and a half in weight and lose a significant proportion of my muscle mass. I fought it every step of the way. The curtain of brain fog descended. I no longer had the concentration power to work full time, so I had to reduce my hours to part time. I was fatigued and achy and prone to rashes and frequent headaches. I felt like I was suffering from constant flu, with pains in all of my muscles and utter exhaustion. I became very withdrawn, unable to cope with life’s normal stressors. I should have gone to the doctor again, but I didn’t, because the doctors had never been able to help, the only pills they tried to give me as a teenager were antidepressants that made me very ill, and they often looked at me as though I was a fraud.

I struggled on and on, trying different diets and vitamins to control the mysterious weight gain and try to improve my skin. Eventually I found something called the failsafe diet, which cuts out food chemicals from the diet – natural salicylates, polyphenols and biogenic amines that the body has to detoxify, and which can affect the body in many unpleasant ways. I discovered that I had a horrendous number of food intolerances, caused by deficiencies in enzymes meant to destroy natural toxins. I underwent my second period of recovery and restoration. There were very few foods left for me to eat, but at least I could think straight again. My higher brain function was restored to me, I was no longer fatigued and in pain every waking minute, and I could leave the house without feeling ashamed of my eczematous skin, which cleared up very rapidly.

I lost a number of friends over my dieting and health obsession. I think they thought I was mad, and no one likes being around an ill person in any case. I’ve been called many things I am not, and judged lacking for not being normal. From my position, I have acted only rationally in the face of adversity. Instead of lying down and dying, I have fought tooth and nail to regain my health and retain some dignity in my appearance, controlling my weight and my eczema as best I can. If you felt like you had a really, really bad hangover and flu every waking hour of your life, wouldn’t you do your damnedest to get better?

So there I was, scraping along at rock bottom, with concentration so poor I could no longer work at all, made a virtual recluse by the collapse of my self-confidence, my inability to cope with other people, my constant fatigue, and my desperate desire to avoid any social occasion that involved food, because most foods made me ill.

Then before Christmas, I got food poisoning – the irony. Yersinia, in all likelihood, which has symptoms often mistaken for appendicitis. After the Yersinia, I went through a mysterious period of recovery where my skin was very good and my weight looked after itself. I got tons of work done and had loads of energy and raced around fixing up the house for Christmas. More fool me, it was part of the pathology.

Then in the new year, I lost my appetite. It just vanished. In response, I started eating less, thinking it was a blessing, really, as I would be able to lose some weight for once. More fool me, this was also part of the pathology. For four months I dieted, and though I should have lost a pound every week, I only lost eight pounds in total.

Two months ago, strange things began to happen to me. Dots in my peripheral vision. Noises in my head. My concentration worsening further, if such a thing was possible. My memory seemed to be disintegrating, and I couldn’t remember the simplest things – forgetting why I had left the house, forgetting routine items of shopping. My eczema flared up. I was very touchy and emotional. I had aches and pains all of the time. The headaches came back. Shortly, I could feel my heartbeat. My heart beat pounded slowly, day after day, and all day and night I could feel it. I felt constantly cold and weak. I developed problems breathing. I was so short of breath that I felt like I had to drag in air just sitting still, as though I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I developed sleep apnea. I trembled internally, frequently felt faint, and had low blood pressure. I was at once sleepy, yet I had insomnia and couldn’t sleep. I twitched and had shocks to my brain like little seizures. I woke shivering with cold. My body temperature hovered around 35.5 degrees Celsius, half a degree above clinical hypothermia. I had these strange tingling sensations in my fingers and drawing sensations in my wrists that I would later discover were Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

I thought it was my fault. I thought perhaps I had given myself anaemia, that all my desperate, proud attempts to keep my weight down and control my eczema and attention deficit disorder and full body pain had finally come back to bite me. Something was terribly and fundamentally wrong, and it couldn’t possibly be “fibromyalgia”. I went to the doctor, who, in typical style, told me I was “just anxious” and probably had an infection. I should wait for a couple of weeks and then come back.

I waited through two torturous weeks of hell, and asked to see a different doctor. Finally, and perhaps because I did not mention the demon word fibromyalgia, this doctor listened to me, and she ran some blood tests on me. When the results came back, I didn’t believe her.

The demon has at last been named, and the demon’s name is not anaemia, not fibromyalgia. I am not a hypochondriac. I am not a malingerer. I am not a diet-obsessed freak who thinks food is poison. Food really is poison, to me, since I simply have no enzymes with which to deactivate its toxins. It is not my fault. It never was. I am someone who simply slipped through the cracks of the healthcare system, forgotten, vilified, left to battle alone.

The demon’s name is primary hypothyroidism. My thyroid gland has been destroyed by a series of unfortunate infections, via a condition known as subacute thyroiditis. While the infection is active, it causes a brief period of high thyroid hormone output as the cells in the thyroid are destroyed, causing weight loss, high metabolism, and high energy output. This is then followed by a longer period of hypothyroidism, in which the body’s metabolism shuts down, enzymes are not manufactured, many vital functions, including brain functions, are impaired, the body grows cold, and energy is stored instead of used. Most people recover and their thyroid eventually heals. I’m one of the people who doesn’t get better.

Hypothyroidism is a devastating, insidious illness. It exhausts the adrenal glands which destroys blood sugar control. It destroys the muscle tone of the body, including the heart muscle. It impairs the function of the brain and can cause rapid cycling bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, some forms of autism, and hallucinations. It causes a loss of confidence, an intolerance of stress, and an inability to cope with people and social situations. It shuts down the body’s energy production, it raises cholesterol levels, causes the skin to bloat and accumulate water, weakens the immune system, causes skin infections, and causes the blood to clot. The sufferer truly suffers, dragging themselves through a shadow world, in chronic pain, unable to cope with their daily existence.

Twenty years ago, I was misdiagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist: fibromyalgia, which means, “you have all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, except we forgot to test you for that, or, your labs were just inside the normal range, so we didn’t bother to pursue that line of inquiry any further, even though a short treatment trial of thyroxine would not have harmed you at all.”

Hundreds of thousands of people have been misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia, because their thyroid lab tests fell inside the boundary of the normal range. Many misdiagnosed people are now recovering through administration of thyroid hormones, some, having obtained them without prescription via internet pharmacies, because their doctors would not listen. This is an open secret in the hypothyroid community, one which, despite six years of scouring the internet for answers, I was unaware. In a way I am fortunate, because my lab tests are out of range, and they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have a real, physical problem. Yet what hurts me most is that some of my friends still do not understand.

For twenty years, this demon has been eating away at me, and I did not know its name. This demon has stolen my life away. For twenty years, my body has been crying out for a hormone with which it has not been supplied, a hormone called thyroxine, which costs the NHS less than one pound per month to prescribe. For twenty years my body has been dying of hypothermia, after the first of a series of infections assaulted my thyroid gland.

Now I know the demon’s name, I know how to fight it, and I have a future.

So picture the scene: it’s almost midnight. I’m driving back from Nottingham along a black-as-pitch stretch of dual carriageway with bust cat’s eyes and worn white lines. In spite of the poor visibility I make good headway because the vegetation has grown high enough that putting my headlights on full beam doesn’t disturb the traffic coming in the other direction. Then I draw up behind a guy who can’t drive. He has his lights dipped, and he’s doing sixty. I don’t feel comfortable overtaking him as I’m too close to him to put my headlights back on full beam, and wouldn’t dream of driving fast enough to overtake him with them dipped. The road is narrow and can be unexpectedly curvy. So I stay behind in the slow lane.

The guy behind me has other plans. When he catches up he’s intent on overtaking us both with his headlights dipped. So there they are: one in the left lane, one in the right lane, neck and neck in front of me, driving through the pitch darkness. Then, right at this very moment, out of the gloom streaks a fox, silhouetted in the headlights, as close as can be to the cars.

The overtaker swerves left violently to avoid the fox, almost hitting the other car, then he swerves right to correct himself, almost hitting the reservation. The fox streaks off into the grass, untouched.

Behind them my heart is pounding through my chest. I would have been too close to avoid the crash.

He’s still a puppy, only eight and a half months old. He only learned to swim a few weeks ago. I took him down the Rivelin valley where a tannin-rich stream rushes through a wooded gorge. There used to be a series of mills along the valley where people ground flour or made cutlery on smooth grindstones. There are several disused millponds fed by the stream, and though they’re murky and dank, Jasper was happy to wade around in them. I threw his ball just a little further into the pond each time, and he took his first swims out into the deep water. Bless him. He did very well for ages, and then he suddenly lost his rhythm on a particularly long swim and started splashing the water up with his front legs, which astonished him so much that he chickened out and turned back to shore in a panic. He stood on the beach howling at his ball. It took much encouragement and praise before he would go in and get it again. That was enough for one day.

Then I annoyed my partner by sitting in front of an infra-red/visible red light in bed for ages when he wanted to go to sleep. It’s amazing how it undoes the tension in my shoulders and back. Something to do with endorphins. The pain was less after the shower and the food, but the red light took it off completely.