I appear to have conditioned myself to be completely dependent on my mobile phone. This time last week I had an ancient mobile, by which I mean I’ve had it for five years or so. As the battery slowly lost its ability to charge, I replaced it, and then got a new  battery charger, but last Thursday night I discovered the charge point on the phone is actually dying, dying, dead.

I was staying at Future Inns Cabot Circus that night, courtesy of Destination Bristol, and my first thought was to ask my hubla to bring me one of his old phones that he habitually holds onto. But then I found that the ‘Call in case of emergency’ number’ was wrong (out by just one digit, it turned out. Note to self, always check the emergency number I carry is correct!)

So I couldn’t access my contacts, which meant I couldn’t access my hubla!

The fear that shot into my heart was utterly irrational. When I travel abroad I rarely have a phone with me and I manage just fine. But somehow within my own city I feel the need to be constantly contactable.

I survived that day without a phone, but when my hubla presented me with a new one that evening, a rush of relief flooded through me. We all have our weaknesses and addictions – turns out mine is communication, in all its forms.

© Brandon Keim

For the next month I’m planning to immerse myself in my YA (young adult, to the uninitiated) novel with the view to getting it ready to start venturing out into the world again in September.

Part of this involved getting to know the competition, which meant joining my local library. Shocking, I know, that it’s taken this long to do it, but when you get sent books to review, given books by friends and family for every birthday and Christmas, the idea of borrowing other people’s books seems a waste when there’s always a crammed bookshelf waiting to be raided at home.

But when it comes to research, a library can’t be beaten, so I skipped down there with my hubla on a sunny afternoon, relishing the sense of purpose and armed with evidence of my abode.

However, as I waited my turn at the members desk I gradually became aware I was losing my own certainty of my abode. Tremors were running through me, ever so slightly, and my brain was beginning to feel squishy.

Being diabetic, I’m well acquainted with my body’s messages, and this one said: Eat Sugar. NOW!

At that moment I found myself at the front of the queue, being invited to fill in a form and read the library’s membership literature.

It may sound weird, if you’ve never experienced it, but sometimes when I go low I find myself prioritising the need to hide what’s happening over actually dealing with the hypoglycaemic attack. So rather than ripping into my tube of fruit pastilles and blatantly disobeying the No Eating sign, I sweated my way through the qestions, tried to get the literature in focus, and politiely (if slightly slurredly) asked where the kids sections was.

Clearly certain she was dealing with a ’special case’, she pointed me in the right direction, which, thank god, was right next to the cafe - a legitimate place to scoff something sweet and get my levels back up.

I know it’s daft - I know that no person in their right mind would forbid a diabetic from eating food anymore than they would confiscate an asthmatic’s inhaler just as they begin to wheeze, but I also know my ability to clarify the situation reduces as my blood sugar drops.

And I did once have a polite but lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful argument with an employee at the Guggenheim Museum in London who was adamant that no food or drink is allowed in the building and therefore I had to leave my hypo supplies in their lockers.

Is it really that hard to grasp that to a type 1 diabetic, candy can be a medicine just as crucial as insulin? The Guggenheim Museum has a lot of stairs, each of which lowers a person’s blood sugar just a little bit, and for a diabetic there’s no knowing just how many stairs will result in blurred vision, shaking limbs and a squishy confused brain.

On the plus side, I do seem to get younger, mentally at least, when my blood sugar drops, which may well help me regain the innocence of my early teenage years and really get inside the head of my protagonist.

© Mustafa Pişirici

I’ve discovered a frustrating glitch on EssentialWriters.com, and now I’m wondering if it’s also affecting the blogs. No comments have appeared on the website since late March, and I thought people were just being a bit sleepy or shy, but then I tried to add a comment myself and it simply slid away into nothingness.

As soon as I typed the gibberish to verify I’m not a spambot, the comment disappeared and hasn’t reappeared since. It’s as though it never was. Sounds like a rather tragic short story for the social media era: The Comment That Never Was.

Spooky! What does this mean? I’ve searched for solutions online but no one seems to have the answers. I’ve examined the entire backend, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I’ve ticked in error (such as DoNotAllowComments), or unticked in error (such as AllowComments).

This is too techy for me. It makes me realise how dependent I am on comments to let me know the world is out there, reading my words. Or some of it reading some of them, at least.

Bristol Harbour © J Darley

So, I’ve survived two entire weeks of proper, full-time employment managing a travel website, and one thing I’ve come to love is the reemergence of evenings and weekends.

If you’ve never worked as a freelance writer, this might sound strange, but working from home means you never really know when your working day ends, let alone your working week.

When your office doubles as your living room, it can be all too easy to be sitting chilling out on the sofa, catch sight of your laptop and think: “Oh, I’ll just check my email/facebook/Twitter, and while I’m online I may as well edit that feature/source that image/upload that news story.

But going to work each day in an office has given some real structure to my life, the like of which I haven’t experienced in over a year, and I sort of enjoy it.

Yes, I’m working long hours in a more consecutive format than I’m used to, but I’m also shutting down my laptop when it’s time to go home and I’m not reopening it till I arrive in work the next day.

To keep EssentialWriters.com bubbling along I’ll still be doing some work on weekends, but I’m also setting aside time for loafing, lying in, and taking long sunny strolls around Bristol harbour with my hubla without the usual underlying guilt about unfinished assignments.

So it appears there are more good things about having a real job than a regular income. Who knew?

My hubla is celebrating his birthday today. Not that it’s his actual birthday. Because why should the commemoration of such a momentous event last just a day? Medical professionals these days recommend that due dates for births are broadened into likely ‘birth weeks’ and I believe birthday celebrations should follow suit.

With our birthdays falling just a week apart, that would mean 14 days of revelry for my hubla and I, which suits me just fine.

But this year there’s more to my demands than sheer self-indulgence. My hubla has been on an NHS waiting list for over a year, desperately waiting to have a painful varicose vein treated (yes, he’s young for that, but a few years ago he had testicular cancer, and there turned out to be some unexpected side effects).

After hobbling around for several months, he thought about going private, but £1,500+ versus free is an easy equation to make, so he waited, and waited, and waited some more.

Then he got a phone call – a cancellation meant that he could be treated in the next few days! The downside? It was to be on his birthday…

On the one hand, a horrible way to spend your most important day; on the other the best birthday present in the world. So at 11am on his birthday he headed off to our local hospital, gowned up and settled down to wait, and wait and wait some more. He finally got treated under local anaesthetic at 5pm, having missed his birthday tea with our niece and nephew, in favour of spending six hours of his birthday in a hospital ward all alone because relatives weren’t allowed in (we take up too much space, apparently).

But now the waiting game is over, he has a pain-free future to look forward to and doctor’s orders to eat cake, drink beer and party. So the celebrations are back on. Hurrah!

© Stock.xchng

However much people tell me that it was invented by greetings card companies, however much I tell myself that it’s a shamelessly sentimental holiday, there’s a big part of me that just adores Valentine’s Day.

I come from a family that like to celebrate every possible occasion, from Christmas to Diwali to the Chinese New Year. As a child I was used to associating Valentine’s Day with receiving cards emblazoned with hearts and signed by mystery suitors with handwritng uncannily similar to my mum’s. It was a day when my parents would sparkle at each other and there would usually be something especially nice for tea.

These days, two years into my marriage, I’m glad to say that romance is still on the agenda, and it really doesn’t have to cost a lot. I’m lucky that my hubla ensures I always have flowers (currently gorgeous purple irises), but our Valentine’s tokens to each other were personal rather than expensive - my hubla graciously accepted wonky homemade card from me, just as he will accept a wonky homemade card for his birthday.

Not being blessed (or cursed) with an overflowing imagination like mine, he buys his cards, avoiding anything padded or sporting a printed poem.

Often we celebrate Valentine’s over a special meal eaten at home, but this evening we’re going out for dinner, partly because January was particularly grim this year and partly because the recession has led to some fab restaurant deals (hurrah for a positive-side to the credit crunch!). We feel in need of an excuse to get dressed up, eat some good food and smile at each other in a candle-lit setting.

Actually, that latter bit is the part I love best about this day. It’s not really about gifts and cards and flowers, its about being given a nudge to devote some time to the person you love, and a candle-lit setting isn’t a bad place to do it.

© Stock.xchng

Ah, Sunday. I do love Sundays. Even though my hubla is slogging away at work today, and I too have spent, oh, maybe an hour working this morning, there’s a gorgeous sense of relaxation hanging over me. Plus I have fun plans for later, which means I actually had a reason to get dressed before midday - hurrah!

It may seem slightly ridiculous (and possibly verging on disturbing) to celebrate having cause to change out of PJs on a Sunday, the one day when most people remain firmly glued to bed-wear, but as any freelance writer knows, when most of your week in spent inside with only a vase of white roses (aw, thanks, hubla!) for company, any activity involving leaving the house becomes a novelty.

Yesterday was very exciting because I had reason to leave the house not once, but twice, and not just to empty the recycling bin! The first time was to got to a lunchtime end-of-show party of my pet photographer’s art exhibition, and the second time was long after nightfall and involved cocktails and lengthy discussions about a friend’s torrid affair with a married man. So a good time was had by all (apart from, perhaps, the married man’s wife).

Today’s adventures involve meeting up with my entire immediate family sans hubla, and attending a local cheese fair. I’m not exactly sure what that entails, though I assume it will have more to do with sampling tiny cubes of locally reared cheeses than riding waltzers made from cheddar.

I’m slightly disappointed that it’s not a chocolate fair, rather than cheese, but, whatever, it’s a reason to go out, talking of which, I’d better go and surgically remove my slippers in order to don more outdoors-worthy footwear.

As a writer I’ve been warned against making too much use of coincidence as a plot device. Early drafts of my stories and novels quite often have characters fortuitously coming across the one piece of information or meeting the one person they needed to move things forward.

I think it’s partly because I see my own life as a series of coincidences. I always have to make sure that in the next draft I make the main character more active, less wafty so that they choose events rather than events choosing them.

But in real life, coincidences often crop up in ways that would never work in a piece of fiction.

Take yesterday, for example. Yesterday afternoon I had the excitement of going to the diabetic clinic to be fitted with a blood testing monitor that will take continuous readings for three days and then, hopefully, present me with a graph to let me know what my body gets up to when I’m not paying attention. Could be interesting!

The weird thing was that while I was waiting for the diabetic specialist nurse to see me I could hear a baby crying and I thought to myself, How funny, all babies sound just like my nephew. I suppose all babies sound the same.

Then when I went into my appointment, the nurse said, “Did you know your sister’s here seeing the other nurse?”

So it was my nephew!

I managed to get linked up to the monitor in time to catch my sis before she left and we went for a coffee afterwards, which was nice as we hadn’t caught up since Christmas. I suppose there are some curious advantages to both of us having diabetes.

The nurse seemed surprised that I hadn’t known she’d be there, but we don’t often discuss such boring things as diabetic appointments, so even if I’d seen her yesterday we probably wouldn’t have known we’d be at the hospital at the same time today.

My plot-lines may have a propensity for swinging from one coincidence to another, but one thing I do know is dialogue, and we have much more interesting things to talk about than that, at least, most of the time.

© J Darley

Unexpectedly, I got my wish. After lamenting the end of the Christmas break and return to reality, snow sailed in and brought most of the UK to a halt.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but if I’d known at that moment that I was to have a wish granted I might have chosen something a bit grander, more life changing, such as, ooh, I don’t know, a nice fat book deal.

The snow has been rather remarkable though. We southerners quail at a few flakes, buses and trains are cancelled, minor roads closed while ambulances howl endlessly along the bigger roads.

I had plans for every night last week, and all but one failed to happen, one because the bus I needed to take to reach a birthday party was cancelled, one because a friend lost her nerve about venturing out onto the ice, another because another friend came down with a cold and lost her nerve. The one that did take place had no excuse not to, as my hubla and I went to the house of our next-door-neighbour-but-one (next-door is a glaciers) for dinner. Even then, I almost slipped and fell, and wore a woolly hat for the two-second journey.

My cousins in Colorado would laugh at so much fuss for a few inches of snow, but I think it’s all about what you’re used to, and, according to the news, to how much grit your council has on standby (not much, it seems).

In desperation, I’ve headed out each day, and lost myself for an hour in the vast Victorian cemetery up the road. It made seem like an eerie place to go, but for the resting place of so many generations of dead people, it boasts more life than any local park. At this time of year the basking adder is hiding away, but there are still plenty of birds flitting from headstone to headstone, and holly and ivy runs more rampantly than on any Christmas card.

In the snow the cemetery was even more impressive than usual, with stone angels sporting fluffy white highlights and tombs encased in glittering shrouds.

With schools closed many local kids were exploring the woods that grow across the cemetery, and as I wandered through one morning, two bobbies marched towards me, each hailing me cheerily. What on earth could they have been guarding there?

Being amongst wildlife always seems to bring out the friendliness in people. While we strike past each other stony faced on the streets, we nod, smile and say hello in parks and, in this case, cemeteries. It’s as though being surrounded by trees prompts inherited memories of earlier times when people really did greet every person they met.

I like to think I’m a relatively intelligent and organised person. I keep my receipts, file my invoices and generally keep an eye on my finances. So filling in my tax return should be a doddle, right?

A few weeks back I registered to complete it online, activated it and filled in half the pages, then, realising I wasn’t sure I was doing it right, saved all the pages and booked myself onto one of the Government’s free Self Assessment courses.

The course was excellent, and with so, reassured that I knew what I was doing I returned to the Government’s online gateway and logged in.

Only, I couldn’t find my way back into the Self Assessment section. In fact, the screen stated I didn’t have access to it and suggested I register for online services.

Which I thought I had already done.

Bewildered, I phone up the online helpdesk, who told me in no uncertain terms that I had clearly de-registered myself and needed to start again from scratch. I was almost in tears by this point, and politely asked how I could have managed that, to which they had no answer.

So, unable to do anything else, I reregistered and am now waiting for another activation code to reach me.

Only, I just received an email with the subject line “Please remember to complete your tax return.”

When I opened it up, it stated: “We note that you have not yet submitted the Self Assessment Tax Return that you started to complete using our online service. Please remember that you must submit your tax return on or before 31 January 2010.”

What?!? When I phoned them to find out what had happened to the form I’d begun to complete, they claimed it had never existed, and now they’re emailing me to ask why I haven’t finished completing it.

Well, the answer is probably because I was told it doesn’t exist.

Turns out it takes a lot more than intelligence and organisation to complete a tax return, especially when the Government who are asking me to do it seem hell-bent on making it as confusing as possible.

Government: 1; Judy: nil