This is a blog I did not expect to have to write. It's taken me a while to decide to do so, but as those who follow this site will probably be aware, when the site has ceased being updated in the past, I've always made a point of explaining why. And as you will probably have noticed, that's exactly what has happened over the past couple of weeks, with no new reviews and only two news stories posted since the month began. An explanation of sorts is thus due, and that's what this blog is all about.

The irony is that I had some time ago planned to post a blog anyway outlining why uploads would be a little scattershot for the month ahead, but that was for an altogether different reason. To cite a favourite cliché, I'm not supposed to be here. Indeed, as I write this, my partner and I should be getting our heads down at the Nikko Hotel in Kansai Airport in Ōsaka, the first night of a long-ago planned four-week holiday in Japan. We live for this break every year, and as anyone who knows us will attest, there would have to be a seriously good reason for us to cancel so close to our intended departure. So, what happened here?

Neither my partner nor I are exactly spring chickens, and our bodies are thus far more prone to unexpected malfunctions than they were back when this site first came into being. I've certainly experienced a fair few medical hiccups, which my older but frankly healthier partner has taken in her stride. Then, in January of this year, she began feeling very unwell, which led to a diagnosis of a serious medical condition that, while manageable, was definitely going to have an impact on how she lives her life from this point on. Despite this, we still hoped to get to Japan as originally planned. The condition had been stabilised, I'd arranged for all the necessary assistance at every turn, and we'd been assured that there was no reason why she couldn't make the trip as long as she felt well enough to do so, which at that point she did.

Then, mid-February, things started to go wrong. A chest infection brought new complications that resulted in a day in the Emergency Care Unit at the local hospital to steady a now worryingly unstable condition. The medication had the desired effect and my partner was discharged, but for the first time she asked me to make enquiries about cancelling the holiday and the possibility of refunds. The very next day the condition worsened considerably, and in no time at all we were in an ambulance with its blue lights flashing and heading to Accident and Emergency. Fortunately for my partner, a bay quickly became available in the Resuscitation Unit, not just because of the high level of care she received there, but also because the A&E Department itself was horrifyingly overloaded, with something like 30 people lying on trolleys in corridors, often in pain and with visible injuries. My anger at what this government has done to a health service that was topping world polls before it came to power grew with every step I took.

Kept in hospital while an attempt was made to stabilise her condition once again, my partner was left feeling weak and frightened and alone, and I thus excused myself from my day job in order to visit her as often as I could, which always seemed to have a beneficial effect. Then, on the morning of her third day in hospital, I woke with a cough and wondered if I should really go into a ward wearing the first signs of a cold. Maybe, I reasoned a little recklessly, if I masked-up and kept my distance I could still visit her. I knew even then how tough it would be for her if I couldn't. Then, on the off chance, I thought I'd better do a Covid test, something I've done every time I've had a cough or a runny nose since the Pandemic first hit, always with a negative result. This time it was positive. I could not believe what I was seeing. After all this time and all the precautions that I've taken, I get it now? Are you fucking kidding me? The one plus turned out to be that I somehow had not passed it on to my partner, despite the strong likelihood that I contracted it at the hospital in the first place.

This has resulted in the nightmare scenario – one that I have no doubt several of you reading this will be familiar with – of me being unable to be with my partner when she needed me the most, and prevented from visiting her to take care of her once she was discharged. Never have I been sorrier that we have so few surviving friends between us (fewer still in the immediate area), or more frustrated that she does not have access to the internet. Now, I can only communicate by landline and hear her speak in a voice so weak and worried that it scares me shitless. It's like intermittently hearing someone you love drowning, and despite being able to swim you are forbidden from diving into the water to save them. And forbidden I am, as I've been warned just how serious Covid would be to my partner's current condition. Even after I get a negative test result, I've been advised to leave it several days before going anywhere near her.

So, as I you can probably imagine, reviewing discs has been the last thing on my mind of late, and even when the thought has accosted me, I'm finding it nigh-on impossible to concentrate hard enough to get anything remotely intelligent written. I'm in a state of constant anxiety at the moment, fuelled by a constant worry for my lonely partner's health and wellbeing and the refusal of this bloody virus to bugger off and leave me to deal with the after effects. It's given rise to one of those moments I experience intermittently when I wonder if I really want to keep the site going, but for now I plan to do so, albeit in what you might call low power mode. Camus, who also has his share of far greater priorities at present, has just sent me a film review of Dune, Part 2 which will be posted tomorrow morning, and Gary is currently working on three separate disc reviews, including two Indicator titles that I previously missed. Before things went bad, I had started work on a review of Second Run's recently released Blu-ray of Bill Morrison's The Village Detective:  a song cycle, which I do hope to complete, but don't currently have a timescale on that.