Been a while

Well it is bad news on the throat front. I went for another laryngoscopy last week, hoping that I would be signed off by the speech therapist and told that I was cured but sadly it was not to be. Instead, after having two endoscopes shoved up my nose (the bulb went the first time!) the consultant told me that I appear to have a paralysed vocal cord - one of them barely moves when I speak, which explains why my voice is always croaky and tired. "Have you had a stroke or a head injury?" he asked. Not the kind of thing I wanted to hear. So I've got to go for a CT scan next week so they can hopefully find why my vocal cord is paralysed. Needless to say I'm a bit worried.

So how has the year been so far? Well it has been extremely busy with lots of courses, covering mainly CRM so far which makes a nice change. Today I was off on my travels doing consultancy and had a fantastic time. As for SQL I'm busy picking up the SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 business intelligence courses alongside my usual delivery.

Sad to hear that Bewrite is closing much of its website down. The community side of things has always been great fun and us writerly types have happily posted to the forums, submitted stories and reviewed each others' work over the last few years, but recently there have been a number of, well, arguments which have sprung up and Neil has been trying to calm things down to no avail, and as a result the actual business of publishing has almost fallen by the wayside and submission lists have grown and grown. So a decision was made to close the community side down (it all ends tomorrow) and the site will be relaunched later this month as a pure publishing venture, which will be for the best. One nice coincidence though: I had the first ever published story on the Bewrite site, and two of mine ("Dinner" and "The Gap") are the last two.

Incidentally I'm definitely going to revamp this site soon. I changed the look and feel of the blog a while ago and the rest of the site will be in the same style - very white, very plain, very accessible (I hope). Any new content I add before the full redesign will have a white background, but I'm still trying to decide how the rest of it will look, such as how the navigation will work.

We've gone mad with concerts again by the way. So far this year we have (in no particular order) Lionel Richie, Low, Nine Inch Nails, James, Arcade Fire and Muse (at Wembley). Hope there will be more added to the list before long.

Think I've said it all now. Will try to remember to post next week to say what a CT scan is like.