Real-life drama

Well, one of my predictions in the previous post turned out to be definitely wrong. Not one of the bullet-pointed ones about the content of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; I mean the bit where I said "By the time I get back on the Internet again, I guess we'll all know".

I walked down into town with M today, for the purpose of hanging around in bookshops doing what I call "sequential browsing". You pick up one copy, read a few pages, memorize the page number, put it down, go for a wee wander, come back, pick up a different copy and open it to the memorized number. You can easily read an entire book that way without having shop assistants come and make sorrowful remarks at you.

Only it didn't work out that way. Because I was only up to Chapter 3 when M suddenly came over funny and fainted on the bookshop floor — something she assures me has never, ever happened before.

It is distinctly scary to have the person you love lie motionless on the floor, staring into space and not responding to you calling her name. Fortunately, this only lasted a few seconds, but she was still shaky and unwell, so I helped her around the corner to the Urgent Doctor, where they gave her blood-pressure and blood-sugar tests and things and, importantly, let her lie down for an hour and a half. I stayed with her, of course, to hold her hand and bring her drinks of water and generally provide moral support.

She's fine now. We're taking things easy, but it should be OK.