Finally…

….got Transit finished and the camera-ready copy emailed off to the printers. It was a bit of a mare all round – I had to hold the nearly-finished copy until the Council News came in on Friday night; when that happened, I found it was too long to fit in the space I reserved for it, so I had to do some editing, along with some shuffling around of other articles. In the middle of all that, I managed to lose most of an article and had to reset it. After days of searching, I couldn’t find a suitable image for the cover (well, not one that came free of copyright), so I decided to go with nout a cover illustration – that meant making up some typographicallly interesting headlines instead. Then I found myself with a page spare and had to find something to fill it with….
But it’s done now. I can’t completely relax – the web edition still has to be finished. But that can wait for a couple of days.

Not feeling too well today. I managed to do something to my knee last night – twist it or something – and it’s stiff and painful today. Both my knees are pretty b*ggered – arthritis, plus general crumminess and falling-apartness. So things go wrong with them very easily. I’ve taken some painkillers; they’re working, but as usual, they’ve turned my brain to mush so that it’s hard to concentrate. Which isn’t a great help when you’re trying to pull a magazine together and the deadline is tonight.

Somebody gave me a health book today – they’d promised it to me a couple of weeks ago, said it would help with my various ailments. I assumed, from the conversation, that it was some sort of diet or nutrition book. But it’s not. It’s written by some self-styled “metaphysical lecturer and teacher” (when I hear somebody glibly trot out that sort of phrase, I have to restrain myself from hitting the offender with a dictionary and telling them to look up “metaphysical”). And it’s all about how we create our own illnesses by negative thinking. Most of the book consists of a lengthy list of of illnesses and conditions, with the negative thoughts that cause them and suggested positive thoughts to cure them. Amongst the many conditions that negative thinking causes, and which positive thinking can cure you of, are ‘accidents’, ‘insanity’, ‘inflammation’ psoriasis, acne and AIDS (I am not making any of this up). Don’t bother with doctors, medical treatments, health regimes or anything else foolishly materialistic and allopathic – just recite these marvellous postive thoughts each day and you will be cured!
Looking up my eye conditions (longsightedness and astigmatism), I discover that I have a fear of ‘looking into the future’ and ‘looking at my family’ respectively; the book cannily doesn’t actually state that if I get over these two fears then I will develop perfect eyesight – but that is certainly implied. Since I was born with severe longsightedness, and my astigmatism came from having most of the optic nerve in one eye destroyed by measles at two months old, then I have clearly been suffering from these fears since before birth. I wonder why none of the many opticians and ophalmologists that I have seen never recommended that I throw away my glasses and treat my sight by tackling my innate fears and negative thinking?

However, the book doesn’t have a listing for “b*ggered-up knees”. So it would seem that they aren’t my fault. Well, that’s good to know.