Sod it, not just ONE thing! Let’s do TWO things woot! And by explaining those two things, I will also allow you to understand where I have been for the last month.
Actually, no. You know where I’ve been … knee surgery. We are now 7 weeks out and I’m walking more or less without a stick; with a stick while out and about, without one in the house … unless I stand too long, then it swells up and I limp so I need the stick to walk straight (because limping is to be avoided). I’m still doing the physio, although I haven’t for a couple of days (bad, naughty me). The pain is greatly reduced. I do still need to take painkillers at night but I have changed it to a monster ibuprofen at supper time and a single paracetamol when I go to bed. This seems to be doing the trick. I have managed to kick all other pain meds during the day, which is great, but night it does need to be dulled a bit or it wakes me up. That said, because I have walked about five yards today, with or without the painkillers I suspect I’m in for a bad night. Never mind. Tomorrow is another day and I can try again!
After my 6 week check appointments I have been released into the wild by both the physio department and the surgeon so I have booked my first gym session for a week on Monday.
So … what’s been going on? Well, the two things that have been taking up my time are:
Thing one: Knit every day in March Lent for Alzheimer’s Research.
I happened upon this on Shrove Tuesday. As anyone who’s read any of the earlier posts on here will know, both my parents died of dementia and my father’s version was Alzheimer’s. He fought it bravely but it didn’t spare him much and it was horrible to watch him suffer on the bad days. When I saw that Alzheimer’s Research was running a knit every day in March fundraiser I was interested straight off.
Having only small reserves of will power — which I am currently using to do physio, pathetic walks and ice therapy — I decided that giving anything up for lent was merely a recipe for failure, disappointment and self-castigation. Doing something though, that’s a different matter entirely. March isn’t lent, I’ll admit, but as a fully paid up God botherer I decided that lent is what I’d do. I started knitting on Ash Wednesday and have managed to knit something every day since, even if it’s only one row.
To start with they gave me a slightly terrifying target of £150 to raise. I noticed this was all via a form on Facebook and suspected many of my friends would be a bit leery about giving Zuck their card details so I opened a just giving page as well. That also gave me a target of £150, however the two pages fed into a linked one which collates the total from both, so I’ve been sending everyone there. It’s been a bit of an adventure. I’ve posted the day’s knitting every night on facebook with a selection of the most interesting or arcane music I can dig up.
Having finished a pair of mittens and done a pair of socks, I decided I would do a scarf with some yarn that, though lovely, is a bit fragile for socks and a bit too floppy for hats. I decided 3mm needles would be good for this and lacking any of my own that were large enough and being a bit skint, I had the brainwave of going to the Sue Ryder Charity Shop to grab a pair from there. The only pair they had was with a kit to knit a red bear. So I ended up buying the kit and then, it seemed churlish not to knit that. I’m going to send it to my niece.
Red bear complete, I have managed about 6 inches of a scarf (scarves are incredibly slow, in this one, I have to knit 216 stitches to get one row of stitches on a scarf 50 stitches wide. It takes about an hour and a half to add one inch! It’s going to be lovely though, if I manage to finish it before I die of old age.
That said, as of today, I will be putting the scarf aside to do a new urgent project. A lovely chap who comes to my church is in dire need of some fingerless mittens so I’m knitting him a pink and black striped pair. So that’s this week’s project.
On the fundraising front, well, last time I tried to raise money, I did scrape the minimum but it really was a piss poor effort so I wasn’t expecting much.
However, the response has been amazing. Every night I post my progress, in (I hope) a reasonably amusing way, along with the most weird or arcane choices of music I can think of/find on Facebook, and let everyone know the link to sponsor me and what the total is. People have been amazingly generous and I am absolutely astounded to have raised £580 so far.
It helps that, most nights, the total has been twenty or thirty quid away from a nice round number when I’ve posted, so it only takes a couple of donations to get it to the next milestone and that makes it look like it’s really progressing fast!
Anyway, if you haven’t already sponsored me and would like to, the total stands at £580 thus far so if you want to help me make this horrible disease history, it will only take 4 people giving a fiver each to get us over the line to £600! How amazing would that be? You can find links to do that on this page here:
https://socialsync.app/fundraiser/cr-93oj85qyr3wn
Right: Second thing. The Missing Links, my new book, releases on 28th May.
Hopefully, this will be all formats; audio, paperback and ebook. Gareth hopes to record it in April. I am also thinking of doing a hardback special edition on kickstarter but I’m slightly testing the water there as it’ll come out after the book. It is also, enormous, weighing in at a mighty 150,000 words. About 500 pages, gulp. It doesn’t feel as if it’s long when you read it but um … yeh … it’s massive. It’s also much more of a sweeping epic in the manner of the K’Barthan Series as opposed to the Hamgeean Misfit bit of the K’Barthan Extras so far. Anyway, if you think you like the idea of a deluxe hardback, feel free to say so in the comments!
In the meantime, here’s the cover!
And here’s the blurb!
Since The Pan of Hamgee became a delivery man for Ning Dang Po’s premier gangster, Big Merv, he has learned a lot about when to run, where to hide and when to keep his head down. What with his very existence being treason, and the Grongle invaders tightening their grip on K’Barth, he counts surviving each day as a win.
Marcella the Pirate, a small-time gangster, has started a racket selling replicas of K’Barth’s most prized and expensive food: Goojan spiced sausage. When her plan becomes an overnight success, she sets her sights on toppling Big Merv as the Boss of Ning Dang Po, and The Pan’s world is upended into chaos. If Marcella succeeds in her bid for city-wide domination, it will be curtains for The Pan. But there’s more to her sudden rise than hooky sausages – she’s playing a high-stakes game, with blackmail, kidnapping, and a treasonous pact with the Grongles themselves.
Between Marcella, the security forces, and an illegal satirical comedy drag duo who need a stand-in, The Pan is pulled into a web of crime and intrigue that no amount of speed can outrun. As he navigates his way through the mayhem, he must learn lessons fast about power, loyalty and what it means to be true to yourself, even when the world wants you to be something else.
If you’re interested, click here to find out more here
M T McGuire Authorholic 