Newer readers may be shocked to learn this, but regular victims readers will know that EBL is not a naturally calm and cheerful person. I hide it well, by which I mean not at all.
Today is in theory the day they let me come home from hospital, so all being well I will be travelling back across the Wolds today, moaning and complaining all the way. If Sigoth manages to grit his teeth long enough to get me back, rather than opening the car door and slinging me into a ditch on the Beverley Road, then I will be ensconced somewhere and resting.
I have had a run of health issues over the last year or so, resulting in 5 general anaesthetics; this will be the sixth. Experience tells me I wake up manic and then crash completely, so I assume I will nto be able to write a post to you. Therefore I lined this one up before I left.
Now I enter the strange grammatical vortex familiar to those of us who like accuracy and also have recorded answerphone/voicemail messages. These will have been along the lines of “I’m not here right now – well, of course, I’m here in the “right now” of recording this but not the “right now” of you listening to this” variety.
“I am not here right now. Please read my blog and leave a message. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible when I return. “
There must be a medical term for the kind of anxiety some of us experience trying to phrase all this correctly so we are not being untruthful or inaccurate. I resorted to “I can’t take your call” for a while, but it didn’t sound right. It sounded like I just couldn’t be bothered to talk to the caller, as if they were not important.
A former colleague had a very brief and efficient message of “You know what to do and you know when to do it!”, which had the elegance of being concise but was a little too casual for a professional voicemail in my opinion. Also I didn’t think it would go down well with the various Aunties who might encounter it on my home phone. I swear I have more problems with Aunties than Bertie Wooster, although fortunately none of them chew broken bottles or kill rats with their teeth.
I had another colleague once who was (and presumably still is) American and spoke with the kind of accent which is rather a flat and monotonous tone. It was a perfectly pleasant voice to listen to when you were with him, but whenever he answered the phone people thought he was his own answering machine and tried to leave him messages instead of actually talking to him.
So hopefully the situation is this, if I can get my tenses lined up correctly. I have been/will be at the hospital and coming/back home today. At some point in the future (oh, that bit was easy!) I will again be able to write posts over which your suffering souls may shudder. In the meantime, I am being/will be doing my best to keep calm and not commit crime induced by boredom.
Do you enjoy enforced bed rest? Because I don’t and won’t and can’t. Tell me how you manage, before I have to bite my own arm off in a desperate attempt to escape lethargy. Amuse me, I beg you.
Namaste.
Electronicbaglady's Bag of Bits 
Hope you have (had) good luck and are (will be) on the mend. These tenses are making me tense. Watch movies and read books! Try not to throw them across the room. xxoo
Home a bit later than planned so only time for one episode of due south so far. However all went well so hope to be back to the keyboard in the next few days x
Here’s a suggestion to amuse you. Join the group of critical friends and test drivers of my new website which is going public this week. Read it, comment, do the polls and compare yourself with others, send in contributions or the first angry picture. If you find it doesn’t work anywhere please let me know. It’s at http://livingwithconflict.net Hope you are fairly comfortable after the medical attention.
Will try once I am fully at computer – this is just a quick check and I’m not really here 🙂
Get on with writing your book EBL – I envy you your enforced bed rest 🙂
It had crossed my mind! Can’t type at the moment but soon, I hope. Now back to tea drinking – it’s a hard life 🙂