In the spirit of taking my mind off it....

I wrote a letter. It's the kind of rambling letter that you write to someone when you have nothing to say except the wish to make contact.

Thing is, I'm in much more regular contact with all my friends at the moment, we have texts and phonecalls and skyping and visits. Really different to when I'm alone in an unknown location with a rucksack and I want to send a little five minute view of my dreamlike life back to my friend at home with their important objects like jobs and houses and schedules.

So I thought that perhaps I'd try a thing. You know, a blog thing where I invite comments and then give a prize.

This will combine two of my favourite activities.....sitting for hours in cafes, and the sending and receiving of letters. I have the idea that I will, every so often, go to sit in a public place and fill as much paper as I can with the things I see there. Then I will offer to send it to a reader.

Know this, you are very special because you are one of the miniscule number of people in this world who read my blog and if you want to receive a letter, a real life piece of paper in the post, that will maybe say something important but will more likely say nothing at all, then leave a comment and, in one weeks time, I will pick a commenter at random and it will be you! and I will send you the letter...anywhere in the world!

Here is what you can do in return..

1) Nothing, just keep a secret letter that only you and me have seen and that will never be repeated or published anywhere else because you have the only copy of it, keep it all to yourself, forever.
2) You could put it onto your personal internet world, blog, thing and it would be like a guest post or just an interesting link.
3) You could send me something by return of post (I'm sure I will get my own address very soon).
4) Reveal that you are actually a globe straddling book publisher and you want to make me rich.
5) Reveal that you are in love with me and want to come to my house and ply me with infinite pleasure.
6) Do the same on your blog for someone else, pass it on, like.


And because this is the internet and we are all scared of making real life contact; I will only use your address to send you one letter and then I will throw away the piece of paper it was written down on (and I will scribble over the address first in thick black pen, so you don't get cloned by the people who go through rubbish bags) and I will never contact you using this method again. I won't tell anyone your real name and I won't look you up on Google Earth. I definitely would never come and look though your windows while you were asleep (unless you were my next door neighbour and then the blog/real life coincidence might be so strange that I would not be able to resist taking a little peek....but I would probably tell you about it later in a self-depreciating, I'm so wierd, kind of way and hopefully we could laugh about it).

And while I'm talking about letters and post and other things. I will tell you that I have recently joined this website www.postcrossing.com which is for people to send postcards to strangers. And while it's slightly more boring than I imagined...mostly because it's not full of quirky, creative people who want to write strange things to strangers...some people just want to collect postcards (sad face)...I will tell you about it anyway because in my imagination, being a reader of oddness on the internet, you are interesting and creative and maybe you'll join too and make this website more like how I would like it to be.

Oh, and the mother fucking hospital visit where I'll Finally end this stupid limbo...tomorrow, 1.30pm. Fuck.

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your nice letter of January 12th.

It’s true, when I sent you a postcard mentioning a medical problem, I was definitely skirting around the issue. A pretty vague way of putting it. So here it is.

I have a large ovarian cyst, it’s swollen up out of nowhere to occupy the entire right side of my abdomen. I’ve gone from a flat stomach to a bloomingly pregnant 4 month bump in just 8 weeks. Cysts in themselves are not a great problem, apart from getting in the way when you’re trying to bend. I’ll have an operation next week to remove right ovary, cyst, appendix and omentum. The scary part is that a blood test shows a high level of something (ATP maybe?) that indicates it might be a rare form of cancer. Might be.

The cyst can’t be diagnosed until it’s removed so I’ll find out a week after the operation whether or not I had cancer. Which feels pretty neat and tidy.

What’s happening right now has been a whirl of blood test and scans, following the cancer alarm being raised. There was fluid in my lungs which appeared and disappeared just as they were preparing to draw it off. It’s been dramatic and worrying at times, especially finding a place to stay during the treatment. I’m very independent (as you might have guessed) and the thought of entering the post op period of great vulnerability in a place where I didn’t feel comfortable or welcome was a horrible prospect. But that has been resolved and I can now prepare for the operation in peace.

Another relief is that the CT scan showed no lumps anywhere else which means that I probably don’t need chemotherapy post-op. If this cyst does turn out to be a germ cell tumour then it will be out already and in the hospital incinerator and no other lumps means I just go into follow up treatment, regular scans .
So really it’s exactly as you’d hoped – serious enough to be impressive but not properly serious. I just need to recover after the operation, which is basically a caesarian cut. So a week in hospital and 8 weeks of no heavy lifting. I don’t know how mothers manage this with a brand new baby in tow.


I have half of another letter to you which I started in December, before events overtook me (as they have done quite often this year). I’m very aware that my correspondence has slipped, but the longer I leave it, the greater the backlog of events I have to relate and so it becomes more difficult.

Here, then, is June – December 2011
In Brief.

I went to Germany, bought a kayak, hitchhiked with it for 600km to Ingolstadt where I joined a group of people and together we set off to kayak down the Danube. I made friends, I annoyed people, I drank a lot, I found a boyfriend, I met hundreds of people of varying nationalities, I had amazing and crazy and intense and incredible and beautiful experiences every single day for 3 months, I was thrown out of the organised tour for breaking too many rules (and endangering my life) but I continued to the Black Sea anyway. When the tour finished I bought another kayak for the boyfriend...who I didn’t like very much by this point....and we kayaked alone through the Black Sea, down past Romania and towards the port of Varna, Bulgaria. We hitched a lift with a yacht outside the port of Mangalia, last town in Romania and had a mad 30 hours rounding the point towards the harbour, towing our kayaks behind the yacht and struggling for hours when they became waterlogged by the choppy sea. When I arrived in Varna I dumped the guy, sold the kayaks and lived on the yacht for a month while I searched for a place to live. Eventually I found a small, barely livable house in a small village in the NE of Bulgaria – free in exchange for basic decorating and gardening. I spent very little time there...3 days, then a visit to Serbia, 10 days, then a month housesitting elsewhere. But finally, for the month of December, I was there, preparing to settle for the winter, learning Bulgarian, meeting my neighbours and curious villagers, making tentative friendships, going to help in English lessons in the big school in the nearby town.
Trying, even, dare it be said, to approach the blank page and write something.

I wasn’t planning to come back to the UK but when it came to about the 20th of December, I got an urge. So I closed up the house and set off. 6 days hitching, a detour to Sarajevo and two lorry loads of Turkish tomatoes later, I arrived in London. A few visits to friends, a mention of the strange feeling I had in my stomach, a visit to the doctor and now here I am....nothing to be done but try and keep up with myself.

So there you are; it's been a while since we exchanged letters but now you've got a better picture of what I'm doing, lumps, bumps, travels and all. What's happening with you?

Lots of love

haveyouseenthisgirl

We interrupt this scheduled broadcast

Grounded, is what I am. Shackled, hobbled, paused, clamped. I have been hijacked by my own body; my will power, my freedom of movement have been subdued by a stronger force.
Something is growing inside me, an alien thing, the unwelcome expansion of a small organ. My body will kill me if this is allowed to continue.
I must go to the hospital, be cut open, have things removed. Then see the nature of the beast within.

I have the attention span of a bee.
I ache.
My brain cannot read text without stopping mid-stream. I cannot read, I cannot write. I can merely exist, see people and receive love and care. The only thing I have to give is my need. My awareness has shrunk to the size of my stomach.

But I will note this in the timeline of my life. Here it is; my hiatus. And hopefully, in a few months, I will continue, not unchanged, but as planned.