You start a website, a kind of blog, to explain your illness, then after a couple of months you find you’re too sick to keep up with it. The gaps between each post lengthen. It becomes another format in which you can watch life and time pass you by. A diary full of empty spaces. […]

In winter, I miss the outside air. When the cat comes in from the garden, I coax her up onto the bed. Her fur is cool to the touch, and she smells of woodsmoke and frost. Sometimes I lift the window a couple of inches, lean my face against the cold glass, and inhale. This […]

Lately I’ve been wanting to write on the walls. Or, more precisely, lately I’ve been wanting to write on one particular wall, the wall at the foot of my bed. I’ve been lying in this room for more than three years, and that wall has been my constant – what? Companion? Hardly. Backdrop. Foreground. Keeper. […]

Last year I watched autumn for the first time in this small town since we moved here nearly four years ago. A few months before, I’d started, slowly, to let daylight into my room; and now, in those hours when the blinds are lifted, I can look outside. You notice autumn here. The town is […]

Around 25% of people with ME are severely affected by the disease. Typically they’re housebound or bedbound, sometimes for years, unable to carry out the basic tasks of day-to-day living. I’m one of them. When you have ME, the world gets magnified. Things become too far or too heavy or too high or too loud […]