Misery-lit publishers, sod off!

Clinical update
Temp 35.6 degrees at 3am - near hypothermic
Pathology no blood test results till Monday because the GP surgery is closed for the weekend! Like death works a five-day week.
Demeanour angry - so alive
Drug cocktail bacon and nurofen

Ruth (left): losing her interior monologue

Knew it! A mere 36 hours after starting this blog about my punch-up with the big D the first grasping book publisher has waddled up, waving his chequebook. Vulture.

You can't catch a cold these days, without someone bidding for 100,000 words in journal form in time for Xmas '08. Throw in some quirky boarding-school abuse memories (see alexschooldays ) and it's HarperCollins on the email, Random House leaving Comments - like staphylococci in an English casualty ward.

Get this, publishers! My demise is open-source, OK? No more of your dead-wood media tyranny. That's just so over. So Bush.

So is blogging, of course. In the Guardian today Marina Hyde rightly calls for a cull of blogs, with a target of reducing Britain's current 9 million bloggers by 90%. She says this will have to be done through legal sanction up to and including imprisonment, but I think that's too drastic: simply cutting the broadband links to their homes will do the trick.

Too much? I don't think so. Look: my wife (pictured above) has started a blog, too, a full two days after me! It's called wifeofdyingblogger. Thus her gentle bedside solicitude is now as the breezes of summer: where once she was Florence Nightingale, now she's the 3am Girls. The most basic question about my illbeing is charged with steely, profit-sniffing inquisitiveness.

God knows what this will do for my possible recovery.

So if she wants to talk to me she should do so through my agent, Stan, who can set up the neccessary copyright-acknowledging apparatus.

As Marina says - you're risking losing your interior monologue. You're invading your own privacy. Right, Ruth? That means you.