Previously on BJ...

Hail, good to be back (assuming anyone reads this). Thanks for the posts people sent at this time. I have missed this.

Unfortunately, the things I had hoped would have resolved while I didn't write have not resolved themselves.

The bipolar and depressed friend is still bipolar and depressed, we are treating her with episodes of House, frequent BBQs and judo. Things have, in this case, possibly passed their worst. However, with full-blown BPAD, as she has, a gradual easing of the deep-depression-with-nasty-added-features is not unambiguously good news: after the low comes the high, and in her case that can be spectacular.

Her pharmaceutical company (she calls herself a drug pusher) has responded to the precarious state of her mental health by sending her to five different cities in three different time-zones in the next four weeks.

I wonder if I can detain them...

And Burian (sixties, blue eyed, semi-professional playwright and serial monogamist) is still in the Royal. Things move slowly on the cancer ward, in fact it may be that the only thing moving with any rapidity at all is his malignancy. The palliative team will have ward rounds - if not today, definitely Thursday, if they're not called away. There will be radiotherapy - this week, or perhaps the next. A meeting with the social worker - in the fullness of time.

But we are bringing him oysters and red wine and science fiction stories and talking to him, and if he was less confused and more able I would play the game of chess I promised him five years ago, a promise I never found the time to honour.

There is a lot that can be said about this that I am not able to say. I hesitate to try to turn this into a story, although I am pretty sure that is what he would want. He is in a smallish room - large for the Royal - where he spends a lot of time sleeping.

Part of the - I don't know, irony? horror? rage-at-Godness - of the situation is that he is a very terrestrial man, a man who has valued quiet and trees, and now he is on the seventh floor of a building whose window looks out onto a bank.

He is a man who has valued control and precision and a nurse comes in and tells him when to weigh himself and what he will have for dinner tonight. He is a vigorous man who rode his bicycle in the hills in summer and now he hobbles to the toilet. And he is a man of the flesh, who has had a succession of close relationships with a surprising number of women, and I think that's what he misses the most.

Acting out of what seems like the desire to cheer a friend in need but is probably partly motivated by a desire to shove it up the arse of the Royal, I at one stage suggested bringing a "woman of the night" in for a visit, some busty and revealingly dressed nordic goddess. He declined regretfully. This is not my area of expertise, anyway.

Failing that I am going to try to get him a haircut by a nymph of some kind.

Anyhow, enough anger.

The drugs and alcohol job goes well. I have had only one shift in the Ed in the last three weeks. It was one of those "swept off your feet" shifts full of noise and action, where you blunder out at the end of the night shaking your head.

The thing with the ED is you can't do it at all if you don't do it well. It's not really an environment in which you can flap about. If I go back I would want to hit the ground running, do some actual study before-hand, revise the stuff that if I know if I don't use, I'll forget.

Anyway, this was going to be a brief note. More from drugs and alcohol and so forth soon.

I missed this.