Slowly down that good hill

Clinical update

Temperature: 38 and a bit, rising and falling. Like a yo-yo in treacle

Drug cocktail: codeine, paracetamol, vitamin C and Assam tea

Pathology: blood test results still not in

Demeanour: pale as old ivory in this morning's wintry sunlight (though there's noone here to look at me , of course)

A troubled night. At 2am I was - in one of those moments of piercing clarity you get in the ebb of a fever's tidal flow - painstakingly deleting all the stupid music cluttering up my lap -top. Goodbye, Jamie Cullum; adios, the White Stripes.

The fact that the blood test results still aren't in may mean that the falciparum variant (Haitian sub-genus) is so complex they've had to call in more white coats. Or... What? Did the virus escape when they opened my test tube? Are the entire Royal Infirmary lab staff now lying gibbering on the floor, tearing at their skulls as they scream for intravenous ibrupofen? We'd probably have heard about it on the radio.

I feel too frail to write much more.. But let me say how very buoyed I've been by the expressions of love, suppport and sympathy that have poured in since I started this blog yesterday. So very heartening - do look at the comments. Among the messages these stand out:

• Alex Linklater's promise to sing Nights in White Satin at my funeral



• My mother Alice Renton's sure-fire way to tell whether someone's really ill or not. You ask them these questions: "Have you had a drink recently - I mean a proper one? Did you enjoy it? Or do feel you definitely do not want one tonight?"



• James Fergusson's e-mail with an excerpt from Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat about men talking themselves into thinking they have severe illnesses, like scarlet fever. Hilarious but absurd.
  


• The novelist William Coles's immensely cheering bedroom visit, with two second-hand works of popular fiction. Has anyone not read his The Well-Tempered Clavier, a book that made my wife blush?

Enough. I must gather some strength for lunch.