Famine…

And combat…

Benny has experienced in spades.

Not to mention RAGE:

“Aahh,” is all I can manage. I am FREEZING. The UK is cold at the moment. In the minuses, which it almost never is. And, as ever, I am wearing an inappropriate winter outfit.

“Let’s go for dinner,” I say, as we walk back across the road and into the Bullring.

We walk towards China Town, my teeth chattering all the way, and settle down for a ludicrous amount of food half an hour later.

“So what’s the problem with the holiday?” I say.

“Mmm,” MindReader says through a mouthful of crispy duck. “I just think… wouldn’t it be better to save and go on one big holiday not two small ones?”

I sit back and think for a moment. It probably is better to go somewhere we’ve always wanted to go than two holidays to places where everybody goes.

“I always thought I should leave the dream holidays until I can go hiking every day,” I say to MindReader. “But life is too short.”

“Yeah,” he says reaching for another pancake. “Where would we go? If we could go anywhere?”

“God,” I say, picking up some seaweed (I absolutely ADORE seaweed, salty sweet loveliness). “New York? California? Thailand? Japan?”

MindReader leans forwards, his freckly hands clasped.

“It’s a good position to be in, this,” I say.

“What?” MindReader says, his face breaking into a smile showing his even teeth. “Being financial irresponsible?”

I laugh. “You know though. I’m so glad we aren’t shackled by a mortgage or babies. Some of our friends are going to have one last holiday and then ‘settle down’. And that’ll be that. Until the kids are older…”

MindReader smiles. “I know,” he says. “We would’ve been all over by now though… if things had been different.”

“It’s a good position now,” I say, reaching my hand out an entwining my fingers with his. “We can go anywhere we like. Do anything we like. Whenever we like.”

We could hire a car and drive across America. We could go and sit in Japanese gardens, visit Tokyo. We could stay in a Thai beach hut and worry about spiders all night. We could eat this crispy duck somewhere else: overlooking Times Square, or in China itself.

And, even though plenty of people are in our fortunate position – employed in good jobs that they enjoy, not sick, able to save and go on holidays – it is so unusual for us that it feels like a dream.

We pay for the food, step out into the freezing night again. We wait for our taxi, the mist curling around our legs.

Last night, Benny woke us up at midnight tearing around the bedroom, and then woke me up at 6.30 meowing RIGHT in my face. And, as you can imagine, Benny has a very loud meow.

“He’s in a weird mood,” MindReader says. “Earlier he gave a very impassioned plea to be let in the cupboard in the living room.”

I shake my head, roll over and open my book. Almost immediately, I hear Benny get up and go into my wardrobe. He likes to go in there and lie on his back amongst my jumpers, and I don’t really mind that because they are beige and fluffy, too and are resolutely NOT clothes anybody sees me in (although, on that note, MindReader turned to me in mock despair yesterday morning after brushing down his suit again and said “I think I am going to have to get a ginger suit.”)

Benny doesn’t stay in the wardrobe for long, though. He gets out and bounces onto the bed, attacking our feet under the duvet. He comes up between us, crawling on his belly like he’s in some bizarre assault course while MindReader sighs, closes his book and turns his light out. Benny races around the bedroom, goes under the bed (which is quite a difficult thing to do), and ends up sprinting in and out of the en suite, loudly rattling my collection of handbags as he goes.

Cool, mellow MindReader eventually loses it. “Benny,” he bellows. “You are being a DICK.”

It was one of those late-winter days, when everybody was ready for spring but the breeze was colder than ever. We walked out of our criminal lecture, my optimistic skirt flapping around my freezing legs.

“What you doing now?” a young MindReader said to me.

I shrugged. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Our next lecture had been cancelled. The workload of the GDL had waned, dipping between the essays in January and the exams in May. The sun came out, and it was just a touch warmer, slightly higher in the sky than it had been.

“Let’s go to the pub,” another student said, holding her purple folder to her.

On the way, through a patch of daffodils, MindReader and I talked of inconsequential things. We bantered about how I never brought a pen or paper to lectures, how I was always late, but always with a latte in hand. We talked about what I was going to do for my birthday, about my plans to pass any free drinks from me (the crap drinker) to him (the poorest student I knew).

“Ah,” MindReader said. “I’m happy.”

“Hm?” I said, as we rounded the door to the pub, sun in our eyes. For a second – just a second – it felt like summer. Talking to MindReader felt like a summer’s evening; leaving a glass of cool white wine to go and get a cardigan from inside, my skin sore and tanned from the sun. Or sitting in a field in the late afternoon, the sun low and amber, watching the sky fade from bright blue to lilac-pink.

“Not much work to do, Billygean making me laugh…” MindReader said, turning to smile at me.

Five years on, as we booked a holiday together last night, he still feels like summer.

So excuse the poor quality of these. And the fact that they are filmed half in portrait and half in landscape, so whichever way they are rotated (as IF I could figure out how to rotate embedded YouTube videos), half of it is always 90 degrees out.

The first video opens with the conclusion of an explosive action sequence which I did not manage to catch. Therefore it opens with Benny already having caught his tail and pulled it up between his legs, as you do. Then there is a moment when A MAN SPEAKS before the viewer realises it is mere morning Billygean.

The second video is a laugh-a-minute tale of love and friendship, or, Billygean being unable to move her hands without somebody going after them because he is scared. Here are some other things that scare/anger Benny:

• Filing one’s nails
• Cables
• Sleeves which dangle as one folds washing
• Drawstrings
• The kettle boiling

Here are some things which do not bother Benny in the slightest:

• Shouting
• The word ‘no’

Don’t miss the part where he runs off and you can hear his every, thundering step.

The concierge remembers me from an hour ago, and fixes his brown eyes on me. “How’d you get on?”

He is a nice man. I didn’t expect the concierge to the tribunals service to be nice, but he is.

“Which one is it for?” he had said gently to me as I arrived, pink-cheeked from the cold and surprisingly nervous.

“Disability Living Allowance,” I said briefly. I hadn’t told anyone, really; didn’t like telling him. I imagine people to be internally disgusted, for their surprised gazes to travel from my made-up face to my skinny-jeans-clad legs and back again.

The concierge didn’t do this though. He just nodded. “I have to ask you if you can get down those steps,” he said, pointing to four steps with a ghastly chrome banister which was pockmarked with the greasy fingerprints of many nervous people before me.

“I think I can manage that,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I have to ask, health and safety and all that.” As he looked at me, I thought, I bet he is very much aware of the statistic that only 8% of disabled people use or require a wheelchair.

I actually don’t think – or write – about the benefit situation, because 1) it makes me angry and 2) people are weird about benefits and 3) it is more a part of my past now I am a high-flying pencil-skirt-wearing LOY-AH, and all that. I however am not embarrassed that I have tried to get benefits, and nor should I be. If there is a stigma, let there be a stigma. Basically, my benefits situation looks like this:

• Incapacity benefit – I didn’t have enough national insurance contributions because I was only 22 when I got sick, even though I’d worked every summer I could while at university. Two years later, I found out I was assessed incorrectly and I should have received “incapacity in youth,” for which you need no national insurance contributions. I wrote to them, and they told me they did make an error, but they do not consider appeals more than a month out of time. I would have received £100 a week, for three years. That’s £15,000.
• ESA – I applied for ESA as soon as they scrapped incapacity benefit. I was rejected because MindReader works for more than 24 hours a week.
• Housing and council tax benefit – by the time I had moved out and was eligible for these benefits, I was working from home (from my bed) and therefore I had, apparently, eschewed help.
• Job seekers’ allowance – I was rejected for this because I (quite honestly) told them that not only was I not seeking a job, I had a job waiting for me.
• DLA – at the time when I applied, I couldn’t walk for 50 metres or cook a meal, which are the tests. They wrote back (twice) and told me that I could.

Anyway. I didn’t use my legs at all for six months, and can count on one hand the number of outings I had in that year (all in the autumn), and yet, over that year and the next three, I had to use ALL OF MY SAVINGS (£6,000) plus a loan from DoctorSister (£2,000), a £2,000 overdraft from HSBC and a £2,000 overdraft from the Co-Op, most of which I am still paying off. And, while I have a good job now, I work three days a week, not five, and so I am not nice and minted. And also, it takes a lot longer to pay off debt than it does to rack it up. Boy, DOES IT.

So when a letter came in the post in early January saying my DLA appeal (that I confess I had forgotten all about) had come through I decided to attend, because, a) the amount of backdated DLA would have been quite a lot and worth a shot and b) I am much better in-person than on automated forms and I welcomed the chance to have a nice, reasonable and honest talk about how ill I actually was.

Now, in the foyer, as I look back at the concierge and shake my head, I am surprised to find my face wobbling slightly.

“That’s such a shame,” he says. “I like to see people win.”

“You know,” I say now. “I didn’t walk for a year. I was bedridden, and then basically housebound for another year. And I didn’t get a penny. From any of it.”

The man’s mouth opens. “That’s disgraceful.”

I give him a tight smile. “It’s weird,” I say. “To spell out all the embarrassing and shameful parts of an illness to people who weren’t there – who didn’t know – and have them tell you that’s not how it was.”

“I know,” he says, and I think of those strange, summer days when MindReader would bring me my post from the hall, where it had sat all day, and I would have to take a break, exhausted, from opening letters that told me I was well enough to work.

“Anyway,” I say. “Onwards.”

“Are you a bit better now?” he says, standing up and leaning his elbows on the wooden desk.

I don’t like writing – or thinking – about illness, anymore. It feels a little taboo, now, to write about it here, even though I still have the ghosts of all the categories I used to tag my illness posts with right here next to this box. Where once I was analytical, optimistic, a bit obsessed with recovering, now I am nothing about recovery. I don’t think about it. Which is possibly the best thing I’ve ever realised.

I’m not perfect, obviously – I work part-time, after all – but if the recovery journey was a long walk, I spent a really long time planning it, some time plodding along, and now I have arrived at wherever I was walking to. A lilo bobbling in a private, sunlit pool. Or a party with lanterns that we set free into a dusky summer sky. Or a Louboutin sample sale. Whatever.

“Oh yes,” I say to the man. “It was really a matter of principle.”

“I get that,” he says. “Go and earn your millions your way.”

I am a normal-sized woman. However this is complicated somewhat by the skewed and ENORMOUS-LOOKING bottle of deoderant. The quest for a Benny-to-scale picture continues.