Getting back to normal

I've been out of the game for most of the last month with a rather nasty chest infection. It's difficult to keep a music and real ale blog going when you're more or less housebound. Writing my weekly CAMRA column for the local paper hasn't been easy either. The fact that my voice had degenerated into a croak meant that practising songs on my guitar wasn't an option to pass the time. Although the infection has been dealt with by antibiotics, my voice - my singing voice particularly - has yet to return fully. I have spent a lot of the time catching up on all the TV programmes I'd been recording, but this palls after a while. It's quite surprising how much Taggart is shown each week.

The thought has crossed my mind that I've had a mere three weeks of this, while for some people this is their life. I've visited housebound people in the past when I worked for the DSS, and I did what I could within the job's constraints, but the forbearance most of them showed puts my few weeks of confinement into perspective - and not in a way that flatters me!

I'm now pub-going again. Gail, the licensee of my local, the Guest House, has welcomed me back, as have the staff, and it's nice to have that feeling of belonging to a pub. She says that I can resume my monthly gigs there as soon as I can sing again. And there's a point: your voice is something you just take for granted. Most of us don't think about it: it's just there - until it isn't. Still, I'm on the mend, and I hope not to get another chest infection like this one for some time to come.

The good news is that the Phoenix Brewery May Fly was definitely in good nick last night.