So… I’ve not been out the house since Wednesday and I got back from hospital. Can’t say the pain in my abdomen’s improved at all. Much of the day I’ve either been reading or finished watching the first season of The X-files. Alice is doing everything – even though she’s tired – and I feel terrible I can’t help out with the boys.

Speaking of The X-files, I’ve been slowly watching the episodes from the start. I haven’t watched them for over 15 years. When the show first aired on BBC2 in the 1990s, it was essential viewing for me. I think the first episode I saw was Squeeze back in October 1994. At the time I didn’t know what the programme was and even thought it was a documentary series a little like Arthur C. Clark’s Mysterious World (which is a whole other delight from my childhood). A

couple of seasons in and I’d bought the first edition of X-treme Possibilities by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping. It was great: an enthusiastic, light-hearted analysis of episodes from the first two seasons of the show. At the time a great deal of the fun of The X-files was speculation on the nature of the actual comspiracy. The writers were great in giving their analysis and suggesting what it all meant. I’m sure I graduated up to About Time, the Doctor Who guides afterwards.

Anyhow, where I’m getting to is that I started re-watching the X-files after pocking up a secondhand copy of X-treme Possibilities (this time with commentary on the first five seasons! whoa!). I didn’t watch the series after the sixth season – except for a couple of episodes – and doubt I will again. Something about the series altered: a mixture of the production moving to California from Vancouver and the change in culture and politics after 911. The sort of conspiracies that the show imagined seemed to prefigure how people felt after the Twin Towers.