Robert Louis Stevenson Day

Today is RLS Day, a celebration of our wonderful Robert Louis Stevenson. I wrote this wee post on him last year. I love this photo in Samoa, and this one too. A remarkable man, I wish I could have met him.  I can relate so much  to the being  in bed writing (though he is playing an instrument here). 

As an aside, was shortlisted for the RLS writing prize, a long time ago.

Blowing your own trumpet

My back is fucked again, really it is getting ridiculous, I shouldn't be at my laptop but there are things to say.

Today is RLS day, wonderful Robert Louis Stevenson. This is the first official celebration.

I was,  many years  ago, shortlisted for the RLS Memorial Award on the strength of a short story. I didn't win, which in a way was good as I would not have been robust enough to go - everyone cycled through the forest to get their groceries - and that would have been  shattering, two stays in France being hijacked, my year abroad in 1982/83 when I first got ill, and this prize, two months in a remote, idyllic retreat.

But at least I was considered, my voice was heard, and that is what is maybe more important.

It strikes me again that here is so much pretense with this illness, you pretend you are more well than you are - for many reasons.

But in the end, you can't pretend, you can't keep up the mask. You can't sustain things.

And when you are in a severe phase, of course there is no pretending. Some people never get out of the severe phase: the wonderful Countess of Mar  in the House of Lords yesterday.

A pack of ME Research UK Christmas cards just arrived,  there are so many charities needing support, I always spread my choices over four or five. It can feel a bit like blowing your own trumpet when you send ME cards. My friends and family support me all year round and here I am reminding them that I am ill, but the money has gone to research so that is fine and dandy. But there are Amnesty International, Down's Syndrome Association,  Alzheimer Scotland, children with terrible diseases, starving children, children with no clean water, you would go mad if you thought about everyone who needed help.

And the abandoned cats in Greece (just saw an ad for them in The Big Issue).

Now I am off to do some cobras and corpse  positions (yoga).

Robert Louis Stevenson

I've been dipping into the collected letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, he makes me smile: Yesterday I had toothache, and today I have a crick in my neck. These are details, but eloquent to me. I like his lack of self-pity (he was ill with TB for most of his life).

I also came across his description of John Sargents' painting of him and his wife Fanny: Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my own dining room, in my own velveteen jacket and twisting, as I go my own moustache; at one corner a glimpse of my wife in an Indian dress and seated in a chair that was once my grandfather's, but since some months goes by the name of Henry James's for it was where the novelist loved to sit...

We did Weir of Hermiston in my final year at school, I really should re-read it. He died before it was finished, he was only forty-four. When I read the book, I had no sense of how tragically early his death was. I was sixteen.