'Overload. Off-line. Optimise. Overhaul'
or 'A short-lived shutdown for maintenance'

"When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude."

Wordsworth, in 'Summer Vacation (Bartleby text)'

Monday took me north of the Seine for only the second time since May and that month's onset of the Condition.
To the factory, no less.
While the three-hour visit involved a good deal of paperwork, I enjoyed it very much, particularly the fond welcome I received on the English Desk, where it turns out that I'm not yet forgotten.
Something I appreciate about AFP is that since it constantly sees comings and goings, you can walk in after almost five months' absence and many people neither know nor even care where you've been.
So I only had to sum up my medical adventures about half a dozen times. And used really foul language just the once, when a techie told me he knew my forgotten log-in code but wasn't authorised to tell me what it was.
That outburst showed them I haven't changed all that much.
But something I've noticed about life is that, often, when one's feeling gruesome but really prefers not to show it, many people say "You look well!"
Jo, the desk chief, was the only one to temper the observation in detail, remarking on the weight loss, the grey pockets under the eyes and other small signs of fatigue.
But then Jo and I were face to face for longer.

With the first day of Autumn, however, came trouble. Again. I put the computer out of service for more than 24 hours.
It was time to optimise the hard disk, which I did more thoroughly than planned. On tackling one partition, Micromat's Drive 10, which I've never quite trusted but used anyway, froze up.
After waiting more than an hour, the only way out was to shut down the computer the worst way, by switching it off in mid-process.
More than 10 Go of data got hosed. Even DiskWarrior couldn't recover it or rebuild a directory. I guess I could get it back, but have decided that this partition probably deserved wiping anyway and can soon be put to better use.
So that's not the problem.
Where I really wrote myself deep into one or two bad books was by going off-line myself an hour before the AFP trip and then afterwards.
Without warning, once I realised how drained I was. I simply stopped answering the 'phone for almost a day.
I know this was uncharitable and mean, but I need the rest.

"Well, fuck you, I was worried sick about you," I was told on summoning up the energy to return 'phone calls. Along with a warning that opinions about me are being revised because I go incommunicado. My doctor got called for news of me, along with my ex-wife...
Apart from genuinely regretting hurt feelings, I'm used to being sworn at as well as swearing. There's a lot of it about.
I shut up shop for stock-taking. Another year in my life is almost over, an unusual and exceptionally rich one, despite the Condition. I'm "doing my accounts", weighing up what I did wrong, what I did right, and what happens next.

In such circumstances, the telephone can be a tyrant. My reluctance to get an answering machine or a cellphone was infamous among my friends. Even now I won't make calls, unless essential, between 10 in the morning and 10:00 pm.
Nor, often, will I answer them, especially then.
I'll pay the extra to monitor them to see who's after me. One day, perhaps, I will miss that chance to save somebody's life, or mind, or whatever. One day, maybe it will be a distress call I misjudge, to be regretted forever.
But I'll take the risk, I hate being worried about, since it does nobody any good, and if I'm in serious distress myself, I've never been one to keep it quiet.

Yet still I felt guilty! My attitude to the telephone as an intruder to be treated with caution, now made clear, probably disqualifies me altogether from being a "newshound". Somebody supposed to be available 24h/24h.
Heresy this may be, but 4½ months of watching the factory from outside have brought to fruition a sentiment which was quietly growing for years: I'm no longer turned on by "the chase", the competition -- a word you ceaselessly hear in the place, what the "competition" is doing, what it isn't -- and the glory.
The latter, accumulating by-lines, hasn't been my thing for many years. If people like what I occasionally put my name to, that's fine. If they don't, they can move on. When they change it, I don't mind a jot, as long as it's an improvement, which often it is.
And though I'm an avid reader of news, permanently curious, there's scarcely a story in the world that strikes me these days as meriting the urgency and the fuss that surround many a non-event. Contemporary technology has made it so easy to publish rubbish that journalists are caught up in a trap.
At AFP, we can chuck nonsense at clients, with lead after lead, because everybody else is, in the vicious circle of competition for non-stories. Something I admired in a -- mostly -- retired generation was the ability to do a "P13", my priority code for copy that should go to the bin and not on the wires.
This is not yet a dead skill, but it's at risk. Especially when the 'phone adds to the pressure, often vital but sometimes at the expense of concentration, focus, sense and the requisite "distance" from the event.

By the time I'm through with this, I'll have written myself out of a job!

Last week, bloghero Yang warned me that should a diagnosis for the Condition, a treatment and a rapid return to work not come soon, my "social reinsertion" could prove to be a serious problem.
I have no fears on that score. He may right, but not quite as he meant it, since he was unnecessarily worried I might be cut off from the world.
Paradoxically, out of the frenzy of the factory and largely confined to a district I've got to know properly at last, I feel more socially integrated than ever, more at ease with myself much of the time than I have for years.
As the northern "world turns on its dark side" (composer Tippett's phrase), I've been unusually conscious and observant of the sadness and madness of la rentrée for the city's people.
Numerous friends have told me I must feel lonely or, like Yang, concerned that I'm "out of it". I've even been brought newspapers by some because they imagine I'm bored!

Bored is one thing I'm not. It's been a summer of learning and exploring, and so much still to do.
On the contrary, I've rarely felt as "aware" of my environment and of other people as I do now. Less inclined to check my look in shop windows, fret about frayed collars and cuffs, bother with impressions...
And I know who I respect and really care about and whom I don't -- though this may not be evident when I pull the plug.
Which I did because I've had enough.
Temporarily. Just like that. In self-preservation.
If there's a mea culpa, it's for packing more trips into one day than I could handle. But the social security and getting another doctor's appointment couldn't wait, while the AFP paperwork was overdue.
I need to ease off on information overload, however, including the give and take of the 'phone.
Once, at TechSurvivors, that was all I could think of to put down as an "interest" or hobby.
Tomorrow comes the last of this month's arduous tests. While it's merely a set of X-rays, it alarms me because I've been warned that it will be a minor medical marathon, and must start at an hour when my brain's still seized up. I scarcely see what can be done after that, short of slicing me open.
At last, results have begun to trickle in, letter by slow letter, showing some more "anomalies" in my insides. Far from worrying me, consciously at least, these are welcome indications that we're finally getting somewhere.

To anybody who read this as posted overnight, I apologise for words written not exactly in anger, but with irritation nevertheless: the feeling that "J'ai déjà beaucoup donné" and if I give any more it will drain me dry.
But I should put this far more clearly, if at all.
My life, like this 'blog, is simply, as with lots of people, a matter of sharing. Ownership and tight copyright rules are as alien to me as many of the world's regulations.
My nature is such that, for decades, I've been a rail depôt and shunting yard for decades now. Wagonloads of woe and injustice get delivered, the loads are dealt with as best possible, and sometimes I manage to lift the burden. Occasionally I make a bad mistake and misdirect goods, causing an accident.
I've got used to this and generally enjoy it. I try to help people where I can because I get a kick out of it, regard it as normal human behaviour or what should be when it isn't. Some of my friends do the same.
If things work out, I find thanks mildly embarrassing and compliments even worse, but have been told I should take them gracefully, along with the insults.

However, the 'phone can be a curse.
I know my dislike of it is unreasonable and it deepened once I got RSI. Now I can handle keyboards happily again, but ironing has become an absolute "no-no" and lengthy 'phone calls are physically painful.
Three or four friends regard the telephone as a lifeline and use it compulsively. I don't mean to hurt those who sometimes have little choice, but what can't be said in 15 minutes or goes round in circles slowly scrambles my brain as well as sending unpleasant signals through nerves in my arm.
And since I've been off work, I've had the impression that two or three of the people I most dearly love look on me as an ever-present, always available resource to be tapped as it suits them.
When this reached a peak last week, something snapped. That's the worst of me, part of it. My renowned patience quite suddenly wasn't, though it's nobody's fault that too many people needed to unburden themselves at once.
By the weekend, I'd begun thinking, "It's all grab, grab, grab and so little give! My shoulder's soaking..."
Overload. Disconnect. Optimise.

Unfair? Yes, I am. I'll write things here, but hate being probed on the 'phone and deserve the reproaches from people who say, "But when I ask about you, you don't want to talk."

True. I don't. Face to face or in writing, that's my way, and when bills none of us can afford are running up as I search for the words. I can only imagine two things worse than a 'phone: a video-phone and the webcam the Kid occasionally wants.
Anyway, I must think, hard, about the Future After Diagnosis. Love, life, work and play. At AFP, a few say: "Come back, we need you!"
In the newsroom, but mostly on the union and welfare fronts, where I know that some have taken on things I used to do, foolishly imagining that nobody else could -- or would. Dangerous, that!
Well, it's over.
A cliché it may be, but the Condition has shown me that nobody is indispensable. Bosses, in these penny-pinching times, have long been convinced! So it's been no bad thing to quit the battlefield and let other people enjoy the fray.

This 'blog has taken me to rare new places, surprising me as much as I've done my best to keep the Loyal 4 ¼ diverted, disgusted, amused and informed.
At the factory, I raised an eyebrow when asked whether I was looking forward to returning.
"Yes and no," I said.
The expected answer was, I fear, a straight "yes".
Indeed, I do look forward to the hard work and the comradeship, the banter and some of the old pressures. But not to the petty conflicts, the egos in endless "need" of a massage, the superficiality of aspects of the job, and the people who will inevitably waste a lot of my time.

Funny that.
I know perfectly well that time doesn't exist, that it's one of the many illusions of our sensory apparatus, but one or two of the latest readings on the Condition have served to heighten "intimations of mortality".
I enjoyed being 47 and hope to enjoy being 48, but the annual marker looks like more of a turning point than any in years. I don't plan to use such time as remains to me foolishly or tolerate anybody else doing that for me.

"Indeed, the reality of death has always been a spur to virtuous and intelligent action in all Buddhist societies. It is not considered morbid to contemplate it, but rather liberating from fear, and even beneficial to the health of the living."

The Wildcat once suggested a new "character" to join the crew here: the Wallflower.
This was after winning some disclosures about some of my early experiences and a long-standing opinion of myself, particularly what I thought I was to women. I used never to be able to understand their interest.
"What a waste!" she said, sympathetically.
Well. Maybe it was. But that's far behind me now, I'm no Wallflower now, not even a fly on the wall.

The Condition has taught me two other things, at least.
First, I've decided to like myself, nasty side and all, and stop giving much thought to what other people make of me, which is among the many things I can't change. If I don't like myself, or feel endless guilt about heaven knows what, then I can hardly expect anybody else to be interested.
Self-esteem seems mainly to be a matter of being relatively honest, even if that self is multiple, and putting up with what you know of yourself.
It also makes endless self-interrogation an utterly pointless exercise in a kind of wanking which brings no relief, stimulates nobody else and wastes everybody's time.

Three times since May, people have thrown the term "tough love" at me, but I have yet to give the right answer to one question.
I begin to suspect that you get good at tough love when you realise that it might be the best and most selfless kind there is, and that it comes through setting aside the art of projection and other little tricks. Since love is as painful as it's pleasurable, you might as well take it as it comes.
I wouldn't go as far as "love is not having to say sorry", which is nonsense, but if it can't take discomfort, then it's not love.

The other gain is the abolition of loneliness.
Which is not the same thing as depression.
That Wordsworth quote (from 'The Prelude') serves as the final words of a book which upset me the first time I read it, mainly because I was too bruised to take it in then and see how very uplifting it is.
Once you've "got it": 'Solitude: A Return to the Self,' by the late British psychiatrist and occasional broadcaster Anthony Storr (1920-2001).
He's the fellow who said: "It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them."
Most of what I'd want to write about that work is put better at the 'Hermitary' site, where someone's already done what I'd planned and gives chapter briefs.

The second quote is lifted from the Dalai Lama's introduction to the 'Bardo Thodol', or 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead'.
You don't have to be a Buddhist to get rather a lot out of dipping into that from time to time. There are plenty of bad translations, full of psychedelic pseudo-"hip" and other nonsense, but a good one is by Robert Thurman.