My office is now effectively at a standstill.  In fact, my office is probably moving slightly backwards.  It has not helped that a five story rack of filed mail collapsed under the weight recently, thus shuffling several thousand documents into new and interesting combinations.  Right now it is a good day if we can answer just those emails that turn up on that day.  Most days are nothing like good days.  Can we please say this:

I very much appreciate all the letters, emails and cards that have come in, many of them recounting personal experiences and quite a few passing on “survival kits”.  There does seem to be some people out there who have managed at least to slow AD, although I have to say that it does appear by taking various supplements, not by milligram, but by grams :o)

Nation has now been line-edited, and in theory I was going to have a month or so off, although a large part of that will now be spent reassembling what passes as our post room.  In reality there are now more calls on my time than there have ever been, to the point where we are simply having to ignore approaches.  I think we must have had more than a dozen approaches from documentary companies alone, and I think we shall now just stop sending out the “You are too late, guys” emails (You may see us around and about being followed by Craig and Charlie, who are making a documentary about me for the BBC which will be broadcast next year.)  I never intended that I would be some kind of AD spokesman, but the world seems to be deciding otherwise.

On a brighter note, I am now firmly ensconced with a specialist, testing last week showed that nothing much had moved since the end of November, except that in situations where I must parallel process I find that serial processing is about as much as I can achieve :o)

There are a number of things planned for the rest of the year, and they include cracking on with Unseen Academicals and also, with any luck, playing a rather larger role in the making of Going Postal.