What a week! Challenging for various reasons – the tilt table test, a cardiac outpatient appointment where the results weren’t available, an almighty faint where the dog failed to break my fall and I cracked my head on the wood floor, and I think along with dislocating my shoulder I may have cracked my collar bone. This meant rolling out & covering a 12 inch square cake with icing one handed – tricky!!
But the cake played a pivotal role in my weekend. Earlier this year, not long after being persuaded onto facebook by the younger Sauls (who now regret it, ha, ha, ha), I stumbled upon “The Book Club on facebook” and sent a request to join the closed group. I had no real idea what it involved, who might be a member or the expectations on me, but I have always been an avid reader.
Living with a head full of opiate shaped holes & Ehlers Danlos brain fog has meant that I have struggled to concentrate enough to enjoy reading for a couple of years. This last year has seen me come off of opiates completely and start to read again – joining both a local book group and the facebook group has played a massive part in this. I have discovered authors & genres that I haven’t tried before, I have found netgalley & started writing book reviews again, and I have completely taken over the kindles at home as I have flooded the account with books from the Book Club & netgalley. I have fallen back in love with words.
Back to the cake then…..the Book Club on facebook has just celebrated its second birthday with a party in London. A fantastic opportunity to meet on line friends, stalk & meet some of the many authors who belong and generally have a night out in a swanky London night spot.
This was a big deal for me as it was the first real event using my wheels! I have been to the park and the cinema, but not to a social occasion.
Many of the people who attended were alone and I commented to Duncan that they were pretty brave to attend a big event (about 250 people) like this not knowing a soul. His response, as my carer & chauffeur for the night, was that I would have gone alone in the past and mingled & talked to anyone. The old me….I am still struggling with this! But we had a fantastic evening – don’t get me wrong it was hard, I had to really dig deep and was absolutely shattered by the end. But I managed to wear some of my old clothes – so I have shifted a little of the weight gathered over the last few years of immobility – and with a slick of lipstick nearly passed for the old Claire. We weren’t quite brave enough to attempt the train & tube yet with the wheelchair so drove, but we stayed the night in the student engineer’s flat which is up the road from the party venue, meaning that Duncan was drunk in charge of a wheelchair and hopeless at managing the kerbs around Kings Cross! Of course we completely cramped our son’s style when his flatmate arrived home and we had to be introduced. His friend asked at midnight if we had been to our party yet – how old did that make us feel as we were getting into our PJs??
The cake? you ask. I made the birthday cake for the party – copying the group’s colours and logos, it was my guarantee to myself that I would go to this social if it killed me. The lovely people that we met, the discussions of books, even the student flat, all proved that I am more than my ailments. Oh….not forgetting that the party actually looked pretty good to the student son as he asked me to invite him to join the group the next day! Thank you “The Book Club” admin – you don’t know how much this group has helped me this year x
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