Good morrow fair reader, for you are most welcome in my little cloud amid the blogosphere. I trust this day finds you full of joy with a spring in your step and the careless gambol of a new-born lamb? No? Drink more water – they say that’s the answer!

I have to report on a development on the FuxTunes front – that “wonder-software” that completely screwed up my iTunes music collection - and there were some tracks in there I’d never be able to replace, I mean, Joe Dulce and “Shaddap You Face”, René and Renato’s timeless “Save Your Love”, Barry Manilow’s “Bermuda Triange” (It’s his birthday today so I DEMAND that you stop what you are doing and sing at least the chorus from Copacobana – and don’t try to tell me you don’t know the words...

• “At the Copa, Copacabana,
• The hottest spot north of Havana,
• At the Copa, Copacbana,
• Music and passion were always the fashion,
• At the Copa....they fell in love”

You’ll be singing that all day now – God I’m a bastard!) Well, true to my word I did write to the company who distribute the software, explaining my grievance and only just falling short of suggesting that I should visit their offices and leave them in a similar state to the post-apocalyptic disaster area that their software seemed to think was appropriate for my music. This is what their website proclaims:

FixTunes is an easy and powerful program that will fix any missing or misspelled song details, add album artwork, remove duplicates songs and organize your music.

Now doesn’t THAT sound fantastic?! I told you yesterday about the reality though and the text should in fact read:

FuxTunes is a difficult and annoying program that will take ages to run, thus slowing down your computer to the point of un-usability, fuck any missing or misspelled song details as well as ones that are perfectly correct, add album artwork but not necessarily for the right album and if you already have the right artwork it will probably remove that too, remove random songs and completely un-organize your music.

But I do pride myself in being able to take the moral high ground. When you’re 5ft 4’ (ish, it fluctuates) you tend to opt for the higher path whenever one is available, as a matter of course, if only for the novelty value of seeing people’s heads instead of being roughly at nipple height, and I will say now, in writing, that Kelly the very nice lady at FuxTunes has actually refunded the cost of the software. Halleluiah. Choirs of over-excited angels sing in praise, like they've each drunk a litre of Sunny-D at the Last Night of the Proms. Triumphant seraphim proclaim the existence of one good soul on Earth. Cherubs are, as I write, swooping around the room, playing flutes and harps. The Angel Gabriel is knocking on the door, which either means proof of divine intervention or possibly I’m due an immaculate conception! (Or maybe that jam I had at breakfast had started to ferment a bit and I’m in the early stages of something akin to an acid trip?) So, well done Kelly at cloudbrain.com and thank you (but no, I won’t be trying your pending new version when it comes out).

Something I will try though is the TweetDeck app for the iPhone – I like twittering twaddle, although half the time I don’t know what I am doing! I’m an unashamed celebrity stalker – follow lots of the lovvies. Just found Sue Perkins (apt I guess as we watched her in Supersize Me the other day), but when I saw her tweet I didn’t recognise her from her username and nearly blocked her. Well, she’s @sueperkins – I misread it completely and thought she was a brand of cigarettes, @superkings! Doh! I must be tea-deficient, need a cuppa. OMG, just had a dreadful thought: we’re off to Hungary on Friday for the weekend – what if they don’t have proper tea there?!? Shit, will have to add tea-bags to my packing list, or we could end up drinking some local concoction made from dried courgette strained through the perforated skin of an Aubergine. Or maybe my preconceptions of Hungarian cuisine will be proved wrong. Well, not wrong, I don’t do wrong, lets just say “in need of an upgrade”.

It’s as black as your hat here at the moment, and hats off to the weather which looks like it’ll pour down at the drop of a hat! Enough to make you throw your hat in. But you don’t need to listen to this old hat; I’m talking through my hat anyway, which is what comes of being as mad as a hatter! (Do you think I ran a bit too far with the hat metaphors? Sorry, I got a bee in my bonnet!) Seriously though, it’s dark, cold, windy and generally very gloomy today; a far cry from the glorious sunshine of yesterday. That is the yesterday that I spent indoors, unable to enjoy the splendid weather, in hospital, hanging around for hours in the sweltering heat waiting for blood test results and to see my oncology consultant. Why couldn’t yesterday have been miserable and today nice and sunny? But hey, this is England and the last thing we should expect is cooperative meteorology! However, despite being baked alive in the hospital waiting room, yesterday’s visit did prove worthwhile.

You may recall that since early February I have been waiting for a PET scan. In simple terms they inject you with glucose laced with radiation. Cancerous cells need more energy than normal cells, so they use more of the glucose and consequently cause concentrations of the radiation – ‘hot spots’ that can then be detected. Most other scans, Ultrasound, MRI, CT etc look for hard tissue mass, but not necessarily active cancer. Because my lymphoma was so widespread, in my soft tissue and my bones, my consultant (who I shall call Dr Dolittle – not for his ability to talk to animals but for reasons that will soon be revealed) said back in February that he thought I should have a PET scan to make sure that the cancer had been eradicated. This had to be done at a different hospital – Christies – as it is a specialised test but, he reassured me, because it is so specialised there is practically no waiting list and he would see me for the results in three weeks time. No appointment arrived, despite me camping out at the letter box each day waiting for the post. I contacted Dr Dolittle and he said he would chase it. Four more weeks passed and still no date from Christies. At my next check-up I (diplomatically and with much sensitivity) suggested that maybe Christies had lost my details and Dr Dolittle went a shade of red best left to very ripe tomatoes, and said that he had in fact not arranged the appointment. Ooops – he’d do that straight away. I shall edit out a few more check-ups for the sake of a jaunty narrative and with absolute faith that you can fill in the blanks yourselves. In the intervening months I have had armfuls of blood taken, several other tests and repeat ultrasound scans – as a reaction to raised enzymes and some damage to my liver which will eventually need treatment but not for a year or so. So at yesterday’s check-up the subject of the PET scan was raised once again. This time Dr Dolittle said that “I don’t think you need to have that now. Your blood test results are looking much better, your white cell production is recovering well [chemo destroys your bone marrow and thus your ability to produce antibodies], your ultrasound was totally clear, there is no evidence of cancer at all, so we’ll not request the PET scan. No need.” Now, this is fantastic news, don’t get me wrong, and I’m over the moon, but does that not rather smack of an admission that four months later and he had still not actually put me forward for the scan? That’s four months of worrying, thinking “He wouldn’t’ be sending me for this ‘specialised’ test if he didn’t think there was a chance that there may still be active cancer on my body” He was effectively saying so much time has passed now that I must be okay because I’ve not got worse! Well, I suppose ‘leave him and see if he dies’ is one diagnostic technique in the NHS arsenal – actually Hugh Laurie uses it all the time in ‘House’ but you kinda don’t want to think that actually happens. Still, the Do Little approach is probably quite cost-effective and I’m sure I have had more than my fair share of NHS expenditure over the last year – and a personal thanks to everyone for paying taxes that has made this possible. You all helped save my life. I mean that. Thank you!