because of the dark, we see the beauty in the spark...

My #MistletoeMugshot for the MS Trust - pucker up people and share the love! And text MWAH16 £5 to 70070 to donate £5 to support the 100,000 living with MS in the UK this Christmas.

It has to be said that Minou was less than amused to be taking part in this picture. The cat box was down from the attic, so she was already suspicious... and this seemed to confirm all her fears.  And then we took her to cat prison.

Whatever else you're doing during the darkest time of the year, try to spend some time with the ones that you love and who love you.

See you on the other side.

the years go by so fast, let's hope the next beats the last

I really like Christmas.  As Tim Minchin sings, it's sentimental, I know, but I just really like it.

People just seem a bit softer at this time of year, with some of their rougher edges smoothed off a little bit as they prepare to spend a bit of time away from work and with their families, eating and drinking too much and watching crap telly.

I like the cold, dark nights and the warm, convivial atmospheres as people get together with their friends, families and colleagues to bring some light into the darkest part of the year.

What I don't like, though, is "Christmas"... the brightly packaged thing that people -- retailers in particular -- want us to consume in order to make them more money.  This "Christmas" starts to appear around September-time, when shops begin to put out their seasonal offering; earlier and earlier every year because of the apparently logical thought that, if this is their most profitable time of the year, then it can't start soon enough, can it?  I work for a retailer, and it never fails to amaze me how people moan about how Christmas shopping is starting later and later every year... meaning that most people don't really start buying presents until December.  Which is normal, right?

I've been working in-store most of the last week, and it struck me as I was loading shelves on Friday afternoon that I was listening to the same, shoddy seasonal playlist that is played everywhere, and I was unpacking pretty much the same gift sets that we were selling last year... Christmas is about more than this, isn't it? ...and no, I'm not expecting any presents from Jesus.

Don't get me wrong: we sell some pretty good gifts... it's just that if you bought them for your brother and your sister and your mum last year and the year before that, why on earth would we expect you to keep on buying them now? Especially when the internet has opened up a whole world of small, boutique designers just waiting to sell you something interesting and possibly personalised.  Perhaps we think that hearing Wham and Shakin' Stevens on a loop will somehow hypnotise people into auto-pilot, buying this stuff because they always buy this stuff.  It sort of works, but it's diminishing returns, surely?

Or maybe this is the Christmas that people actually want: wearing crappy jumpers and cheap Santa hats and reindeer antlers as we tramp around the shops like zombies listening to the same playlist of fifteen songs everywhere we go and buying Aunty Doris the Soap and Glory gift set for the tenth year in a row. The annual excitement over the big shops' Christmas advertising on the telly would seem to indicate we really like this shit.  Why on earth are we wasting brain space getting excited about the John Lewis advert or whether the Sainsburys one is better?  Who cares? You know they just want you to buy stuff, right?

But, in spite of all of this,  I do love this time of year.  It's the winter solstice tonight, and the night is the longest it will be all year.... but I prefer to look on the bright side and to think about lighter times to come.  The daytime tomorrow will be three seconds longer, and that's a start... isn't it?

Whatever 2016 has been for you, there are lighter days ahead.

---

same old songs, every single year?  Well, my favourite seasonal songs are these ones:

Tracey Thorn - "joy"
Smith & Burrows - "this ain't new jersey"
Emmy the Great & Tim Wheeler - "home for the holidays"
Joni Mitchell - "river"
Tim Minchin - "white wine in the sun"

you lit a torch in the empty night...

Ash @ Rock City, Nottingham – 12th December 2016

When I bought my copy of Ash’s debut album, 1977, in the glorious early summer of 1996, it came with a promotional frisbee. It was bright green and had the band logo printed on it. As far as I know, it’s still in the TV room of that post-graduate hall of residence in York where I left it. If you had the right kind of CD player – and I did – you could wind back past the beginning of the first track and hear “Jack Names the Planets” and it’s b-side in the pre-gap before the album proper began. You don’t get that kind of thing with an MP3 download, eh? Nevermind a frisbee. The band are the same age as my younger brother and I’d been buying their singles through the last couple of years of my undergraduate degree when they seemed ridiculously young (I’ve still got “Kung Fu”, “Angel Interceptor” and “Girl From Mars” on CD single at home). A couple of years later, in 1999, the “A Life Less Ordinary” soundtrack was one of the first pieces of music that my wife ever bought me (I bought her “Scott Sings Jacques Brel”, because I’m highbrow like that. CULTURAL ELITE, Steve…)

Twenty years later and these kids are now pushing 40 and are taking this classic album out on the road to play it in full. My younger brother spotted the gig in the listings and asked if I minded if he made the trip up from Bristol to watch the gig and to stay the night, and did I fancy coming with him? Of course I did. As well as having the chance to watch a band I’ve enjoyed live many times before, it was a chance to spend some time with my little brother and to off-load all the Christmas presents onto him to take down to our parents and our other brother and his family. At this time of year, that’s ideal. My team at work were out for a meal in town too, so they got the chance to have a look at my brother and for me to buy them all a Christmas pint.

Rock City was what you expect: filled with people about my age. A slightly younger crowd than when I saw Therapy? touring Troublegum a little while back, but not by too much. It wasn’t quite sold out, but seemed full enough and had leaking toilets and crap beer, so it was still the Rock City that we know and love. It’s a great venue to watch a band.

The gig was pretty much what you expect too: the band ripped through 1977 from start to finish without too much messing around and without too much chatter with the audience. They sound good and the majority of the material stands up really well too (they started the set with the sound of a screaming TIE-fighter flyby, obviously). I saw an interview with Tim Wheeler the other day where he was talking about how “Goldfinger” is the song he’s most proud of writing, and that he’s not sure that he would be able to write something as sophisticated as that now, all these years later. It sounds great – and given that he must have written it when he was a teenager, the fact that it still sounds so good is a real tribute to how good a song it is. The singles definitely stand out, but they always did… so it’s hardly surprising when “Girl From Mars” and “Angel Interceptor” bring the house down.

With 1977 out of the way, the band settle in to play us out with a set that is mainly made up of their earlier songs – with a “Life Less Ordinary” sounding as good as it always does. It’s one of those songs that feels loose and lacking in production polish, but Tim Wheeler has such a keen ear for a melody that it just soars. They’re back for an encore, of course, but any encore that includes “Orpheus”, “Shining Light” and “Burn Baby Burn” is just fine with me. They’re three very different songs, but each in their own way showcase Wheeler’s enduring talent. take “Burn Baby Burn”: in the harum-scarum of the guitar riff, it’s perhaps easy to lose sight of just how good those lyrics are:

“Tumbling like the leaves
We are spiralling on the breeze…”

Not for nothing was this the first song ever played on BBC 6 Music.  And “Shining Light” won an Ivor Novello songwriting award, for goodness sake.
As for“Orpheus”… well, that just appeals to the heavy metal fan in me, I think.

They’re a good band. Apparently they’ll be back next year with a new album… nostalgia bands are all very well, but it’s even better if they’re trying to keep pushing forwards creatively*

VERDICT: 7 / 10

* the exception to this rule is when Shakin Stevens announced in the middle of his Glastonbury Set that he was going to be playing songs from his new album. There were audible groans. NO Shakey. NO. And he didn’t play Green Door, which must have disappointed the guys who had lugged a full-size wooden door into the festival JUST FOR THAT SONG.

Setlist:

1977:
Lose Control
Goldfinger
Girl From Mars
I'd Give You Anything
Gone the Dream
Kung Fu
Oh Yeah
Let It Flow
Innocent Smile
Angel Interceptor
Lost in You
Darkside Lightside
-
Petrol
Cantina Band (John Williams cover)
Jack Names the Planets
Does Your Mother Know (ABBA cover)
A Life Less Ordinary

Encore:
Orpheus
Let's Ride
Uncle Pat
Shining Light
Burn Baby Burn

...and my course is marked by stars...

James @ Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham 
- 6th December 2016

I think I first watched James play live on a Thursday night at Oxford Poly. I’d been working in Wellingborough, drove across to Oxford to the gig and drove home to Nottingham again afterwards. I was knackered and, at one point on the drive home, I had to stop and get some fresh air lest I fell asleep at the wheel. It was totally worth it though: the band were on a high after the success of their "Whiplash" and their Greatest Hits album, and were playing their last warm-up before a big set at Glastonbury the following night. They were electric: so good that Tim Booth actually wondered aloud to the audience whether they should have kept some of their powder dry for the bigger gig on Friday.

I’ve seen them many times since then: at festivals, at Wembley Arena in a sold out Christmas show, playing “Pleased to Meet You” to a half-full Rock City when it looked like the bubble might have burst, and again at a sold out theatre in Oxford when touring their comeback album,“Hey Ma”, some eight years later…. they were the festival openers at Glastonbury this year, too. Slightly delayed by the weather, they were playing to a massive crowd and did that entirely typically James thing of refusing to just perform as the nostalgia act that their sozzled and damp festival audience might well have expected. It’s not that they don’t play their hits, because they do… and they clearly really relished playing the Festival too and were introduced onstage by Michael Eavis himself… it’s just that they don’t always play the hits you might expect to hear, and they will insist on performing songs from their more recent albums.

Here’s the thing though: James might be best known for “Sit Down”, a song they released in 1990 and for albums like “Seven” (1992) and “Laid” (1992), but the very reason that they are still together as a band today is because they have kept creating new material and haven’t just given up and taken the cash that must surely have been on offer to them to be a nostalgia band cranking out songs that are well over 20 years old.

The simple truth is that they are still recording material now that is every bit as good as anything they’ve done. This show is part of the tour for their most recent (excellent) album, this year’s “Girl at the End of the World”, but “La Petite Morte” (2014) is also brilliant and, in “Moving On”, contains a song that I think might just be my favourite of anything they’ve ever recorded. The band took a hiatus after the relatively poor sales of 2001s “Pleased to Meet You”, but since they got back together in 2008, they’ve been absolutely storming it. Interestingly, “Getting Away with It (All Messed Up)” from “Pleased To Meet You” is played early in the set and sounds absolutely brilliant. Still, it always seemed that this band has a special knack of missing out. That massive selling, double-platinum greatest hits was followed by “Millionaires”, which was brilliant but never seemed to get the recognition it deserved at a time when a band of chancers like Oasis were selling absolute tosh (“Be Here Now”)by the truck load.

The band were actually due to play this gig in May, but were forced to cancel because of Tim Booth’s illness. When he takes to the stage tonight, Tim makes a point of telling us how sorry he is to have inconvenienced everyone and that the band felt they owed us… so get ready and settle in, because this was going to be a long one.

Two hours, as it turns out… but in that time, the band manage to work their way through songs from almost every part of their career. They don’t play “Laid” and they don’t play “Sit Down”, but why would anyone care about that when they’re as good as they are tonight? I’ve never heard them play “Just Like Fred Astaire” before, for starters, or “Vervaceous”, and when they play “Sometimes”, the crowd sings the refrain back at them for so long after they’ve finished playing, that they pick their instruments up again and join back in. “You don’t forget these moments”, Booth tells us, when we finally finish the song (which will always remind me of my friend Oliver and the time we spent together studying in Venice).

As I watch the show, I’m struck by what an interesting band they are: they mostly shun rock posturing and lyrical cliché, and are instead something fairly unique. Tim Booth is, of course, a mesmerising front man with his own absolutely unique way of dancing and – tonight, anyway – a magnificent pair of trousers. They’re interesting; upbeat; thoughtful and engaging; they demand your attention and wrestle with the big, unanswerable questions of love and life and death, usually in a questioning and upbeat, optimistic way. I can’t listen to “Moving On” without welling up because it manages to be so upbeat about a topic as potentially grim as death itself. Tim tells us tonight that he wrote this about his experience of watching his mother dying over a couple of days in a hospital bed in Sheffield. Far from being depressing, he told us, it was beautiful and uplifting and a joy to watch because she was in her 90s, had her children around her and was ready to go. Watch the video, and I think you’ll understand exactly what he’s talking about.

It was a Tuesday night and I’m tired and full of cold as I fight off the dog-end of this bronchitis and it’s a band I’ve seen dozens of times before… but it was just what I needed. I’m not sure they actually make bands like this any more, if they ever really did. James are a one-off and we should cherish them.

VERDICT: 9 / 10

Setlist: To My Surprise, Waking, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Moving On, Five-O, I Wanna Go Home, Interrogation, Move Down South, Tomorrow, Vervaceous, Feet Of Clay, She's a Star, Dear John, Surfer's Song, Curse Curse, Come Home, Attention

Encore: Just Like Fred Astaire, Sometimes, Nothing But Love, Sound

you know you got it...

I see that Theresa May has been talking about the role her faith plays in her life in an interview in the Radio Times (even though this is the extra primo big edition of RT, I still won't be buying it. I still haven't really recovered from the irritation I felt as a teenager when my elder brother felt he would go through the Christmas listings with a pen and circle the things HE wanted to watch.  Imagine!  I read about this in the Guardian, which also loops in a handy summary of things she said in an interview with the Sunday Times).  I expect that the average RT / Sunday Times reader rather likes that nice Theresa May).

I imagine you're expecting me to drop into a rant about May's politics or about her belief in God.  Sorry, to disappoint, but what caught my eye was this bit:

"As the only child of a vicar, Theresa May’s early Christmases inevitably revolved around the parish church. She attended midnight mass on Christmas Eve, and was back in church the following morning, with her mother playing the organ and her father preaching the sermon.... After church, her father often had pastoral visits to make to lonely or bereaved parishioners. Little Theresa – and her presents – had to wait...The religious meaning of Christmas was important to her, she said, adding that she would attend church twice in 24 hours, as well as spending part of Christmas Day at a social event hosted by churches in her constituency. Speaking to the Sunday Times a week earlier, May recalled one Christmas when her father spent most of the day visiting parishioners who had been recently bereaved by a car crash. The faith instilled in her so early on had guided her life, helping her to understand “the right thing” to do. She said: “I suppose there is something in terms of faith, I am a practising member of the Church of England and so forth, that lies behind what I do.”"

My dad is a doctor, and for most of my childhood, he was a GP in a fairly rural practice on the Buckinghamshire/Northamptonshire border.   Reading about how a young Theresa May would have to wait to open her presents as her father visited his parishioners really struck a chord with me.  My dad was the father to three young children, but he was also someone who was selfless enough to always put their hand up to be the on-call doctor in the area so that everyone else could have Christmas off.  This typically meant that, as a family, although we would do all the normal stuff like opening stockings as soon as we woke up on Christmas morning, we wouldn't sit down to open our presents until my dad had finished his rounds... usually around lunchtime.

My friends at school often talked about how they opened all of their presents as soon as they woke up, but funnily enough I don't think I ever really minded having to wait and to open our presents as a family when my father was back.  I probably didn't really appreciate at the time how generous a gesture it was of my dad to put his patients before his family, but it was just the way things were.  My dad was (and is) the kind of person who won't travel anywhere by car without his medical kit and some portable defibrillators.  Why? Because he used to be the doctor responsible for covering that stretch of the M1, and he always says that it was no good having the skills to help someone if you didn't also have the equipment.  He's retired now, but as far as I know, he still carries that stuff around with him.

As it happens, he is religious (more now than he was when I was growing up and living at home, although I think that's purely a coincidence and not entirely down to my modifying influence), but I don't think it was his faith that was driving him to do the right thing... it just was the right thing to do.
If I have a strong moral compass today, then it's not entirely a coincidence and it's nothing to do with God.

...although don't tell him I said that because he's a cantankerous old sod at the best of times*.

*not a hereditary trait, before you ask.

breathe without you...

Ironically, given I have a chronic, incurable medical condition, I’m not very good at being ill. Hmm. Actually, perhaps that’s entirely unsurprising. After all, I doubt that there are many people who become fonder of hospitals the more time they spend in them.

I have a cold. I don’t think that I’m one of those guys who makes a whole song and dance about their terrible “man flu”, but I definitely don’t like being ill and I try my best to let it interfere with my life as little as possible. I think the only sick days I have ever had were 1 day when I had campylobacter and was delirious with a fever and stomach cramps, and I had to have a few days off after my lumbar puncture when the altered pressure in my central nervous system meant I couldn’t stand up for more than about half an hour without getting pounding headaches and breaking into a cold sweat. So yes, this does mean that I’m one of those people who turns up to work and coughs and splutters my way through a day. Yes, as someone with a compromised immune system myself, I could perhaps be a little more considerate… but the plain truth of the matter is that, unless I feel really unwell, I’m going to come to work. I don’t do duvet days.

With this particular cold – which developed nicely into a case of viral bronchitis – I sounded terrible, but always felt basically okay. 85% of normal, maybe – so I just tried to carry on with my life as normal. Sadly for me, this meant that I could work, but once it descended into my lungs and took up residence, exercise is out of the question. I did my last run 12 full days ago and even had to stop cycling to and from work when I started wheezing on the way home a week ago. I don’t particularly feel like exercising at the moment, but as someone who has run over 1000 miles this year and goes out 5 times a week, this is proving to be very difficult. I’ve started cursing the runners I see out on the streets under my breath. The bastards… what a bloody cheek that they’re out enjoying something I want to be doing but currently can’t. I keep setting myself little targets: I’ll start cycling to work again on Wednesday and will maybe do a little jog when I get home… but so far, my lungs just haven’t cleared up enough to make that possible (at one point this week, my wife woke me up at about 3am to rub Vicks onto my chest. It’s a lovely gesture, to be sure, but I think my coughing in my sleep was starting to fray her nerves). I think I’m going a bit crazy. I’m aiming for parkrun this week (and will be there, come hell or high water, even if I have to walk), but I’ll reluctantly have to play it by ear. Annoyingly, I’ve got a half marathon booked on Sunday next week… at this rate, even if my lungs clear up, I’m not sure it would be a very good idea. Dangnabbit. I hate being sensible.

Mind you. That being said, it’s also sort of nice to have all this time on my hands. It’s amazing how much earlier I’m getting home and how I can actually just sit down and watch telly or something like a normal person. It’s weird.

Naturally, I’ve put this time to excellent use by starting to play Skyrim again. I’m trying to make my character run everywhere.

If I can’t flog myself, I don’t really know what else to do.

Oh, and you know that thing where you cough so hard you rupture something in your ribcage and it makes coughing even more miserable?  Yeah.  That.  Good times.

FACTS

This from the New Yorker today.  As brought to my attention by my friend Marissa.

2016 is pretty much this, isn't it?

Post-truth, post-facts, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

I shudder to breathe...

After coughing miserably for most of the last ten days, I was diagnosed yesterday with bronchitis. The doctor also helpfully told me a story about how, when he was at University, he tried to exercise with bronchitis and ended up on his hands and knees on the gym floor coughing up a ball of phlegm the size of a cricket ball.   Hmm.  Cool story, Hansel.

It’s viral, so there’s not much anyone can do about it, but at least we know, eh? (my wife tells me that I’ve even been coughing in my sleep. Sorry about that). What I also know is that my last run was a steady parkrun with C last Saturday and nothing since. I even stopped cycling to work earlier this week when my short ride home reduced me to a wheezing, spluttering wreck.

I’m sure the enforced break is a chance for my body to rest from the 1000-odd mile pounding that I’ve subjected it to so far this year… but at the same time, it’s intensely frustrating. I’m going to parkrun tomorrow to walk around at the back and to hope that a bit of fresh air will do me more good than harm. I’m also – in theory – signed up to do a Turkey Trot half marathon in a couple of weeks. If I’m remotely recovered by then, I’ll probably give it a go with no idea of a time in my head…

Running is the thing that I do that makes me feel better about myself. It can be hard and I’ve been frustrated of late that I haven’t been able to go as fast as I’d like… but I’ve been reminded this week that going slowly is a whole lot better than not going at all.

rolled and rumbled past my door...

Billy Bragg & Joe Henry @ Nottingham Playhouse, 
17th November 2016

So slack has my gig reviewing become that I’ve left it nearly a whole week before getting round to writing up this one. Well, better late than never. If you want to read a proper review of this gig, then you should head over to David Belbin and read the extended version of the write-up he did for the Evening Post (I have Dave to thank for the setlists too).

I’ve been a Billy Bragg fan now for 29 years. That’s a pretty long stretch by almost anyone’s standard, and can only really be matched by the likes of Iron Maiden in my record collection. The somewhat straightforward pleasures of Iron Maiden, bless them, haven’t quite provided the intellectual and emotional stimulation of the Bard of Barking over the years. Tonight, he’s performing with an old friend, Joe Henry, who, as an American abroad, immediately tells us that he feels he needs to say something about the result of the US Election: “It’s where we are. It isn’t who we are”. They’re touring “Shine a Light”, a concept album of railroad songs in the great American tradition. They recorded the songs in waiting rooms and hotel rooms as they travelled the 65 hours and 3000 miles of railroad between Chicago and Los Angeles. The railway, so they told us, is so much more evocative a form of transport than any other; it symbolises dreams and escape in a way that aeroplanes and cars (unless driven by Bruce Springsteen, Bragg quips) never quite have. Trains, of course, played a fundamental part in opening up the USA, but it seems that they are barely used as a means of passenger transportation at all these days, with some of the trains they caught in the South only leaving once per day, or even every other day. It’s all about freight nowadays, and apparently the USA ships more cargo by rail than any other nation in the world.

Of course, the songbook they’ve chosen is deep and rich and resonant. At one point, Joe tells us how these songs are the language of American culture; every bit as rich and relevant as the works of Shakespeare. He grew up with this stuff in his blood, and Bragg is no recent convert. “We’re making Americana great again” he says, to groans of “Too soon” from his American friend.

The Playhouse is a good venue to see a band. I think I’ve only seen one other band perform here (The Duckworth Lewis Method) and Billy Bragg’s more normal habitat in these parts would be Rock City… but there’s something about the packed and attentive audience seated in the auditorium that suits these songs. The two men perform together, then we get a solo set from Joe, an interval, a solo set by Bill and then some more songs from the pair of them. An obvious highlight in the first section is their cover of Leadbelly’s justly famous “In The Pines”, familiar to most people in my generation as the “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” so memorably covered by Nirvana on their Unplugged album. I’m less taken with Joe Henry’s solo stuff. It was my first listen to most of this, so perhaps it’s unfair to judge, but it felt to me as though he didn’t have a very light touch with his lyrics. He’s probably most famous for the work he did as producer to Allen Toussaint, and it’s no coincidence that I thought the best of the songs he performed in his set was his cover of Toussaint’s “Freedom for the Stallion”.

I last saw Billy Bragg at Glastonbury the day after the results of the Referendum. His set that night was electric as we like-minded souls gathered together in the hope that he would make us all feel better. It’s only been a day since Trump’s victory in the Presidential election, and I find myself again looking to Billy for some comfort. He opens with “Between the Wars”, cutting the song short before the line “Sweet moderation, heart of this nation” and seguing straight into “Help Save the Youth of America”. He also plays a cover of Anais Mitchell’s "Why We Build the Wall"... which of course has particular relevance now.

It’s a really good gig. The album is good and the two men are clearly comfortable with each other onstage and their voices dovetail together well. As ever with Billy, it’s the bits between the songs that stand out nearly as much as the songs themselves, and there’s a good story to tell about every one of these songs, both in their history and in where Bragg and Henry were when they recorded them.

It might be an increasingly crazy world, but Billy Bragg continues to provide me with the same anchor of stability that he has since I was thirteen years old and just starting to see beyond a musical world of heavy metal. Long may it continue.

Verdict: 7.5 / 10

Setlist:

Billy Bragg & Joe Henry
Railroad Bill
The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore
John Henry
In the Pines
Waitin’ for a Train
Early Morning Rain

Joe Henry
Trampoline
After The War
God Only Knows
Our Song
Freedom for the Stallion

Billy Bragg
Between the Wars
Help Save the Youth of America
Accident Waiting to Happen
Why We Build the Wall
There Is Power in a Union

Billy Bragg & Joe Henry
Railroading on the Great Divide
Lonesome Whistle
Rock Island Line
Hobo’s Lullaby
Midnight Special

Encore:
Gentle on My Mind
Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You
Ramblin’ Round

wet...

We need to talk about my bladder.

Well.  To be honest, I think there's a pretty good chance that you could probably do without this particular chat...but I'm going to talk about it anyway.  If you're squeamish, it's probably best to look away now.

In some ways, I'm an atypical MS patient: as I'm very aware, there's not all that many of us who are able to run marathons. That's not to say that I don't have any problems at all.  I know that I've talked a lot here about the loss of muscle strength in my left hand side and the challenges that gives me with my running, but I haven't really talked at length about anything else.  I might have mentioned my bladder before, but not surprisingly, it's not something that I particularly care to dwell on.

I've never had a particularly strong bladder.  I've always been one of those people who goes when I can and not when I have to, and I have a certain reputation amongst my friends as having a smaller than average bladder capacity.  Over the last few years, and like many people who suffer from multiple sclerosis, I've noticed some changes... sometimes, my bladder doesn't seem to empty properly when I visit the toilet, and I find myself needing to go back for another visit almost immediately; I experience something of a 'rush bladder' too: this is where you get a sudden, pressing urge to pee and have to stop whatever you're doing and try to get to a toilet as quickly as you can before you have an accident.  Sometimes, at times like these, there can be a little leakage too; I sometimes also need to get up several times during the night. It's not terribly by any means, but it can be a bit awkward and sometimes a little bit embarrassing.

I did see a nurse about this for a bit, but other than trying to discipline myself to only go to the toilet when I really, really needed to go, there didn't seem much point in doing anything else.  I definitely don't want to go onto medication, and to be frank, nothing I was experiencing was really serious enough to pursue any further.

All these things are very common in people with multiple sclerosis.  If you look at the spectrum of possible symptoms (and, frankly, I try not to), then you'll see that bladder problems are very common -- according to the MS Trust, they will affect up to 75 MS patients out of 100. Self-catheterisation might not be something you care to think about, but for lots of people, this is a practical way of managing an issue that might otherwise dominate your life.

I mention all this because this has started happening to me.  Beyond the frequent need to get up in the night and pee, I actually woke up in the small hours of Sunday morning, made a trip to the bathroom and came back to find that I'd actually already wet the bed.  At first I didn't believe that this could have happened - why on earth did I go to the bathroom and pee if I'd already emptied my bladder? Surely that must be something else, right?  Sweat, maybe? Then I was just shocked and embarrassed. What else could it be? My wife was absolutely brilliant and rushed to reassure me and to get things straightened out... but I have to tell you, dear reader, I was appalled and distressed.  We'd been out at a friend's house for a party, but I'd had a couple of beers and a couple of glasses of wine all night... nothing out of the ordinary for a weekend and nothing much for several hours.  Why was this happening to me now?  Why did it happen at all?  I have a bit of a cold and a nasty cough at the moment and spent about 18 hours of the following day asleep in bed: perhaps that was a trigger?  I honestly don't know.

I'm a rational man, and my brain is telling me that, although this might not be a one-off, I really shouldn't start worrying about this until it become a more regular occurrence in my life.  And if it does start happening more often, then I have the support network in place and access to great medical care so that I can do something about it...... but I have to tell you that I'm now living slightly on edge in case it does happen again.  What about when I'm staying round at someone else's house? I've made some practical purchases, but really... I'm 42 years old and this really wasn't where I hoped I'd be at this stage in my life.  Should I stop drinking caffeine and alcohol or what? Are espresso martinis now a thing of the past for me?

Why am I telling you this?  Well, because I think it's important that we talk about these things. If I'm happy enough to trumpet to you about my wonderful achievements running with MS, then I think it's probably only fair that I'm also realistic about the other ways that my multiple sclerosis is affecting me.  It might feel a bit embarrassing, but there's really nothing to be ashamed of here.

Life can certainly throw a lot of shit in your direction, but it only beats you if you let it.

We will endure.