"Do you want the bad news, or the irrelevant news...?"

Poor Fuzzy: if anyone has noticed that her blog has gone suspiciously quiet, it's because she's in hospital. Nothing trivial, I can assure you. My brow is furrowed with concern as I write this - I love the wee bugger to bits (I would even offer a kidney, should one be required) and hate the thought of her having to stay at the Sawbones Hotel, not entirely knowing what they are going to do to her - but I managed to overcome my fear of hospitals and visit her. I think she was pleased-ish to see me (although I'm not the visitor she'd have wanted, ideally... ) and that if nothing else I managed to entertain her for a while. I hope she didn't notice my twitching and constant checking for an exit. I'll save relating any details as the prerogative of the poorly one herself. I'm sure that they'll be vivid.

On reflection, I don't have a fear of hospitals so much as a total blind panic, the cause of which has a long and detailed pathology, but let's just say that when my early experiences of hospitals include breaking the drainage bag from where my father had had surgery and having icky blood "stuff" soaking my new shoes and splashed up my pristine white ankle socks, visiting my dying grandfather and witnessing the quiet death of the old bloke in the bed next to him- tugging on my mother's trousers to tell her what I saw, only to be dismissed as "making it up", which was reluctantly retracted when a clot of nurses gathered around his bed, swished the curtains shut and muttered, " -shit, I was supposed to check 'im 'alf an hour ago" and then as a pitifully self-conscious teen spending ten hours on a trolley in a hospital corridor wearing my somewhat unflattering P.E. kit, my knee swollen to the size of a spacehopper, hallucinating with pain and surreally watching the mayhem explode as some drunken brawlers lurched, spewed and sprayed gore around the A&E. I could go on, but it could easily bring on a panic attack and I'm working later.

Anyhow, apart from worrying about Fuzzy's hospital sojourn, I have been working 15-16 hour days getting some project work completed (I think Mrs Gripes still recognises me...) which has left no time for anything remotely resembling a life, let alone a blog. Which means that my blog anniversary slipped past without me really noticing.

Looking back, I think I had very different intentions when starting blogging. Now I'm not sure if I have any intentions at all. I am also aware that I am "self-editing" more than I thought I would. There are times when I want to express something completely different, but I bite my lip (so to speak) wary that what I say might actually affect "real" people -or worse. If I am to continue blogging, then I need to have a serious rethink about how I express myself - should I be brutally open and frank, or should I continue to self-moderate? Can you be too honest? Are there other facets of myself that I should/could explore bloggily?

If I continue to blog, I suppose I'll sort all that out. For now, I'll just worry about real stuff.

Get better NOW, Fuzzy: you're needed back in the blogosphere and the real world...