A time to dance, a time to weep: reflections on a winter’s day

Yesterday was a strange and difficult day. I had planned to be spending time with my inspirational classmates from the 2011-12 LLM (Masters in Law) course at Queen Mary, University of London, celebrating their graduation. Instead I was at the funeral of a member of my extended family in the bitterly cold and foggy East Anglian countryside. Life’s like that.

The last few weeks have been eventful and taxing in a way that I had not anticipated. As John Lennon said – life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. My other plans consisted of writing my next piece for this blog and preparing for the inevitable (for me) stress of the Christmas/New Year season. Life, however, had other plans of its own. Dealing with the unexpected is often hard for many people. If you live, as I do, with the illness ME, it pretty much screws you completely.

I have had  no resources left to write the post(s) which I had planned but I cannot lay this year to rest without thanking you for reading this blog. I plan to continue working and writing as best I can when the New Year gets under way and hopefully I have recovered a little from the events of the last few weeks.

I feel overwhelmingly frustrated by the constraints imposed by my health problems; however, whilst I must accept the necessity of managing my health on a mundane day-to-day basis, I want to avoid focussing on that and concentrate instead on what I hope to do in the future. Much of that revolves around my very slow-cooking plans for practical awareness-raising of the mistreatment of ME patients. However, there will be other subjects too – because life is not a single-issue campaign: hence the sub-title of this blog. I cannot achieve nearly as much work as I would like nor update the blog nearly often enough but there will be more work and new posts as and when I am able.

So I wish you a joyous and peaceful festive season – whoever you are, wherever you are and whatever your religion or belief system. For many people, this season can be a difficult and lonely time, in which case I want to say that I will be thinking of you particularly, even though I may not know you personally.

Thank you for reading this. I hope to meet you again in 2013.

“A time to dance, a time to weep”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHvf20Y6eoM.