Good moaning, fellow fans of Greg. I greet you well.

You must forgive my long absence. It was not by choice.

Simply put, my left lung collapsed again following yet another infection, and this time the medical team - the best of people, all - decided the only thing to be done was to remove it, as the strain on my system, and particularly my heart, was too great.

They would not operate until the infection was first dealt with, and I spent several days in an oxygenated "bubble" waiting for them to decide when it would be safe to go ahead. Following the op I was returned to the bubble, a drain attached, and kept there for several more days. This time, at least, they did not make the mistake of giving me Fentanyl, with its capacity to transform my normal calm self into some mad conspiracy theorist.

I was discharged last evening, with an oxygen tank in tow. So far I haven't needed to make much use of it, though I do feel tired all the time.

I did have a nice little April Fool lined up for you, but that's by-the-bye now; and I was stopped in my tracks putting the final touches to a piece of work for which I have a professional editor contracted, and hoped to make available gratis to Gutter habituées by the end of May. I am too washed out even to look at it, presently - but never day "die": I'm only going to get better, and I have all the oxygen I need to help.

Heaven alone knows what the news is - I most certainly don't. And I have all those Gutfeld's to catch up on.

But rather than offer you nothing, I proffer a short extract from the work mentioned above. It's set in the English industrial Midlands of 1970, and I hope it will please those who enjoy an older prose style (I don't hold much with today's "every word must work" mentality).

I have got to go to rest, which I do under some duress. In the meantime, it feels good to be back, however tenuously. I hope you are all very well, and enjoying this Easter Sunday.

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Courtleet Textiles sprawled and otherwise dominated a huge district thick with mighty industry, which district touched against the city centre at its north-eastern extremity, and continued outwards, in that general direction and radius, until it got poked at by fingers of red-brick terraces, which were as foothills to towering industrial mountains; and like all foothills so circumstanced, the ill-weather that was manufactured in the mountains fell very liberally upon them. Courtleet Textiles was a very great name, in these times; a very monster of an establishment; a smallish city, in acreage, wherein dwelled, eight hours a shift, all the clock round and again, enough hands, totalled, to elect half a member of parliament. So many hands that there was no knowing them, out of their particular neighbourhoods.

Like all respectable monsters, Courtleet Textiles was fixed to intimidate and alarm. The company’s administration buildings rose tall and drab above a busy, droning highway, straddling it for a half mile and more on either side, and connected together, the one side to the other, by passage-ways built high above the road, to keep the lives of the staff as they shuffled paper between remote departments. With the windows running up the sides taking the place of teeth that wanted for years of cleaning, the effect, withal, was of a great open jaw falling to dinner on the tarmac and traffic.

Beyond these buildings stretched a mysterious labyrinth of loom-houses, dyeing-houses, wash-sheds, drying-houses, and whatnot-sheds and houses. Towering, looming, dingy, noisy, clanking buildings, they were, black with soot, belching steam and smoke to go wreathing round their lofty heads, so much muddled and crowded together that they seemed impenetrable, and got tall in the extremity of their excessive closeness not allowing them to get fat. There ran a canal between these cacophonous grounds and a thoroughfare known as Lockstitch Lane—or that is to say, this particular water-way never ran anywhere, having long ago been put on a diet of dyes and oils and chemicals and general rubbish, that had got it so constipated and violently off colour, that it was quite content to lie about, making a sick-bed of its own banks. Above the whole district coalesced a filthy, steamy, smoky cloud, the issue of many hundred prolific chimneys and steam-vents combined, which kept the air clammy and stinking of acrid chemicals, and steadily drizzled down a fine corrosive mist to go working away at the fabric of the buildings, and render them crumbling and mouldering in appearance. Nowhere presented a more crumbling and mouldering prospect than Courtleet Textiles, which, as if it were engaged in some slow and morose process of committing suicide by raining its own excoriating waste productions back down upon itself, looked to be melting away.

Now, Courtleet Textiles pursued an uncommon line of business in this city noted for the preponderance of the automotive interest in that it produced textiles. Otherwise, Courtleet Textiles was an exact replication of every other overgrown concern in this great industrial city, in that it was badly managed, hopelessly inefficient, kept a truculent work-force, and was never quite sure what any particular part of itself was up to. Courtleet Textiles, then, at the time Miss Tina Ellis came to work there, was a great, lumbering, polluting, incompetent giant of a company, whose day—though it did not know it—was, by little and little, turning to night.

Tina Ellis, as has been noticed at an earlier place, found herself inserted into the Typing Pool, or, more particularly, that fragment of it which serviced the upper jaw of the Administration block. Her place of work was on the third floor—there were six—in a cavernous green-painted chamber, where thirty typing girls together, in rows of ten by three, tapped and clattered the days away. Tina, being the newest and therefore deemed the most junior of their number, was consigned to the least popular spot. She had a desk at the back of the chamber, by a large, sooted-over window, beyond which loomed a fuming, hissing, spitting dyeing-house, and from which issued a pervasive stench, the growling of an enormous electric motor, and the steady chug-chugging of the machinery it drove.

The Typing Pool was always commotion and clatter. Girls who wanted work would raise their hands and wait to be serviced by the Runner, a lazy youth with greasy skin and a swaggering manner, who brought down pages of scrawl and hieroglyphics obtained from some mysterious but fertile source which wanted them got into legible documentation. The Typing Pool was rained on by scrawl and hieroglyphics all day. It pelted down on the girls remorselessly, thickening into storms and squalls, never getting less than a heavy shower, and they relentlessly drained it all away through their platens and keyboards, keeping up a perpetual chattering among themselves to while away the tedium.