Fall Down, Get Up Again- a Column by John Connor

Santa refuses to use email! At least letter-sending is a thousand years older than he is! (Via Shutterstock) Well, 2020 was a weird year for everybody. It was even weird for magical creatures, as these days, an awful lot of people believe they exist! It’s tough now to hide.

Don’t be so overdramatic, my wife always tells me. But as I’ve spent 30 years of my life as a pseudo-luvvie, I’ve earned the right to have a good and proper flounce if I want one. It was a weekend of severe illness. A urinary tract infection (UTI) poleaxed…

I’m surprised I get anything done! Luckily, the parent company of Multiple Sclerosis News Today is in the U.S., so I didn’t have to write this column last week, due to Thanksgiving celebrations — even though I’m British. I also got two days off from being an MS News Today…

My travails with MS invariably deal with what it does to me. This week, dear reader, it’s what I did to my jolly old self! I’ve got a daily light exercise routine designed for me by an occupational therapist (OT) and a physiotherapist. Why two professionals? Well, the…

The other day, I was watching an arts documentary instead of another repeat of a movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was about John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” of which I’m a fan. The headline for a column I’d been mulling for some time about MS mouse research…

I have two regular carers at the moment. The first to arrive greets me with her usual efficacious, “Good morning, John!” She’s loud enough to wake the whole street. Luckily, my neighbors should be up anyway, as my carers are booked for 11 a.m. each weekday. I have mentioned in…

Last week’s column, “The Loneliness of the Long-distance UTI Patient,” dealt with my dive into the Eastern (bloc) world of bacteriophages. It would be a fun exercise (and boy, do I need some exercise) to dive into the history of the discovery of bacteriophages and antibiotics. Both fight…

When did I first become aware of the word “phage”? “Star Trek,” of course! It was an episode about a disease that was destroying a race somewhere in the Delta Quadrant. (OK, possibly — even I fade out in the Nerdverse. But it definitely was in the “Voyager” series.)…

OK, you’re not all science fiction nuts, so I’ll explain: The Borg are a cybernetic race and the lead baddies in the “Star Trek” universe — or, the way the latest Netflix iteration is going, the multiverse. Besides trying to take over all life forms, they also have the sneaky…

It was 3 p.m. last Thursday. Things should have been good. I had filed the copy for my previous column the day before. Ultimately, some of my outrageous musings had gone, and some I considered even worse had stayed. It’s an age-old journalism, radio, and TV writer’s trick: If…

Eurgh! Poo is what I fear most at the moment. I thought turning this column into a diary was cool. Following the greats, such as John Diamond, who chronicled his cancer to the end, takes me into some strange quarters. In this case, strained ones! Multiple sclerosis (MS) affects egestion,…

It’s usually best to write with time for reflection. I often feel like a foreign correspondent reporting from the front line of my own bedroom! The shells of multiple sclerosis (MS) explode within me, and I’m suddenly airlifted into new territory. It’s like being yanked from the street troubles in…

I’ve been a moderator at MS News Today Forums for a while. One of my jobs, besides rejecting the interminable bots that try to become members, is to promote interaction. This is the hard part. The bots are amazingly easy — they are so far away from getting near…

There’s always something! As a columnist, that comes in handy, as then I don’t have to think too much. Stop snickering at the back for thinking that I never think. How very dare you? If any of my fellow Brits are reading this, yes, I’m liberally nicking comedy catchphrases. Why…

Albert Einstein proved that the faster you go, the less you’ll age compared with those you left at home. This effect, however, is imperceptible unless you have the ability to approach light speed or hang out near the gravity well of a black hole, which is another part of his…

In June, I wrote a column about accepting I’d have to physically retire from directing and producing my own stand-up stage show, “The Edge.” Now, because of that which cannot be named, the show is also being retired just short of its 30-year anniversary! Our very first…

Helicopters were whirling in my brain. Turns out, it was a solitary police one. Though it was another hot night, my wife closed my windows in case of a prowler. I’m on the ground floor, after all. It was a dark moment in my life. Another relapse had struck…

Maybe I should have called this one “Short and Sharp 2.” Yes, I’ve had another relapse, following my last one in May. I can no longer clean my own tail, and the present regime is literally to “s**t the bed!” I’m using a lot of exclamation points here,…

It all started on the hottest day of the year here in the U.K. My phone said it was 99 F. An old friend was coming over, and my youngest son, Jack, had kindly cleared a route to the garden. So, when she arrived, I took the route. We all…

Strap in: This is not going to be a fun one. Even less so for me — though I’m writing this under the sort of drug load that Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson would have been proud of! Not for fun (or dependence!) but for survival. “Since TN is…

For an espoused leftie, you might be surprised that I’ve always had the brush of the rugged individualist about me. Not quite Bear Grylls, but grabbing a rucksack and hitching across Canada still counts as my own youthful rite of passage. I was used to doing everything! As…

In the U.K., stand-up comedy is currently dead. Like Python’s parrot, it “wouldn’t move if you put 4,000 volts through it!” That’s not strictly true. Our government has just stumped up 1.57 billion pounds ($1.97 billion) to support the arts that were slammed shut by the crisis. Comedy is…

In this case, the woman in question was yet again my wife, Jane. The hour in question was 4 p.m. on my usual day of writing. But on this day, writing had to be forgotten until a stint later at night (yawn). I had an entertainment Zoom call to partake…

Yup, it’s the annual whinge about what heat does to most of us, this time livened up by a headline that includes two Beatles’ song titles. (Yes, I did have to scroll through their discography to find the deeply submerged second — a George Harrison number off “Yellow…

Last Wednesday my days of rest suddenly smashed to a halt. At one point it seemed like the majority of those who work for my local council’s social services (whom I should have also thanked for their immense help over the last few weeks, mea culpa) were squeezed into…

It hasn’t been that quiet in my surrounding world! Last week there was a crow fight so loud in our back garden that it echoed down the chimney into the front room that now is my bedroom. It sounded exactly like being in Hitchcock’s horror film “The Birds.”…

Ah, it’s not the blank page that all writers fear that I’m worried about. Those days have long left me. Now it’s applying the discipline to stop! When I first started with a professional writing commission, I sat in the office all day with that fear freezing me. (Those were…

“At the center of it all” is the dignity of allowing myself to retire with grace. And it only took a world-shattering event to get me to come to my senses! I’d been running, directing, producing, and sometimes writing (usually when comics got desperate with a 15-minute deadline. We…

It was 4 a.m. and a crisis was brewing. I knew that this time, I’d be a nincompoop if I tried to deal with the situation myself, as I’d faced spectacular failures recently with the poop bit. I was still groggy from having taken diazepam to deal with my…

This column will be short as I am quite ill. That’s nothing too unusual for those of us with MS. Oh, the joys of a relapse. A while back, it stopped me from walking. Now it’s stopped me from standing! Transferring anywhere is now a nightmare. I have to use…