Sometimes you can see the crap coming at you. It never seems to help. You try to stare it down like a rabbit in the headlights, but that rabbit is inevitably going to end up as a thin patina on some Norwegian truck-driver's tires. Why fight it?

It is terrible yet predictable, for example, when your kids don't wake up at the same time in the middle of the night, but instead decide to tag-team so as to keep you awake for the maximum possible length of time. It is predictable irony when you leave your umbrella in the car (which is incidentally parked as far as possible from the front door of the office) in the morning because the sun is glowing with glowy glowness, only to get soaked to your chuddies at 5:30 as the incontinent clouds vent their bladders upon the whole of England in one go. The canteen menu may advertise, in feverishly-fonted 144pt bold lettering, the arrival of something semi-decent to eat for a change; but you know by the time you get down there, without even looking, as surely as the Little Dutch Boy of Destiny sticks his finger in the Dyke of Fate, that every bastard plateful will be gone and you will once more be forced to fill your belly with manky cheese on toast.

It is at times like this that I remember living with my parents with unaccustomed fondness.

Oh I just love being back at work.

"Take it easy," said my doctor last week. "Don't let them give you too much to do for a couple of weeks." And how am I to achieve that, exactly? An Oliveresque "Please, sir, I don't want any more" is not exactly going to endear me to the management types, is it? No. And the workload is already mounting, and I've only been back two days. My energy levels are roughly akin to those, in the words of the immortal Edmund Blackadder, of an asthmatic ant carrying some heavy shopping. I feel like I have a big hill to climb, and it's only getting bigger, and that rock ain't getting any smaller either.

On the upside, the new kitchen is nearly finished! The flooring is being delivered after lunch, and with any luck the fitter can sort it out before I get home... it looks niiiiice. I might even post a picture.

I had the inestimable pleasure yesterday of meeting up with a couple of truly delightful ladies from across the Pond - Selkie (she whose fault it is, as I keep reminding her, that I got into blogging in the first place) and her charming friend Mona, who have been holidaying in the UK for the past week, and who braved the icy sleet, the biting wind and the British public transport system to come up and visit little old me. We spent an enjoyable few hours sampling Malaysian cuisine, discussing the relative merits of British and American words for cupcakes, inserting healthy dollops of blackcurrant juice into half-pints of Guinness, skipping and doing cartwheels in front of astonished locals (don't look at me, we all know who that was, and now I've been barred from that pub... thanks Mona), drinking erudite tea, and generally talking complete bollocks. It was a more sedentary few hours than I'd originally planned, due to my resident population of still-toxic lung nasties (it's OK ladies, I've stopped with the apologising now), but I certainly had a good time, and hope they did too. Thanks for a great afternoon, you guys, you cheered me up immensely. Also, I now know how to say "I have an axe in my head" in Spanish as well as German, which fact alone makes the day worthwhile.

So I'm actually out of the hospital now, and moving about under my own steam. No crutches or anything, it's great. Still coughing up the toxic gunge, though, which is unpleasant. The pain has thankfully migrated downwards from a saucy 11 out of 10 to a mere 5.5, which means I can come off the codeine (which makes me throw up every twenty minutes). A big thankyou to you all for your kind wishes, offers of grapes, etc. The doctors are saying I "should be taking it easy for a while yet," which isn't really specific enough for my needs when trying to decide, for example, whether it's a good idea for me to pick up my children, help The Missus get the shopping in from the car, or make more than one cup of tea at a time... I'll just have to use a bit of common sense, which is unfortunately in short supply due to the strange effects the hyper-strength antibiotics are having on my brain. Luckily, the purple giraffe who camps next to my bed is always on hand with helpful advice.

Drama!! I'm writing this from a hospital bed, having been taken in on Tuesday evening with severe breathing problems. Nothing life-threatening, as it turns out, but I've got pneumonia complicated by pleurisy (which I thought was the sort of disease you only got in 18th-century period dramas) and septicaemia. Joyous. Anyway, they've got me on 7 different types of medication, plus I've got a damn great tube sticking out of my right hand, which makes typing this pretty interesting, I can tell you. (See how dedicated I am?) Also, the pain varies somewhere from 'knives being stabbed into every inch of torso' to 'chest being sat upon by large sumo wrestler armed with knives which are being stabbed into every inch of torso'. This is making sleep rather tricky, as is the unfortunate gentleman two beds down who talks constantly in his sleep (loudly, and with some vehemence) throughout the whole night, and only stops when the nurses turn the main lights on and wake everyone up for early morning injections and light torture.

So don't expect a lot of posts for the next week or so. (Yeah, like otherwise I'd be posting every day, right?) Right, the nurse approaches with a syringe clearly designed for use on elephants. Wish me luck.