‘Blimey!!’
I am standing in the bathroom peering in the mirror with a steri-strip thermometer plastered to my sweaty forehead. I am trying to read my temperature but it looks to me like I am in rigor mortis. Fuzzy and aching I find the magnifier and after a long and complicated thought process manage to turn the thing the right way around. I am not actually cold but boiling. I have a fever. I am sick.
‘Cripes.’
Actually I had a bit of a difficult week. On new sprung foam fuelled feet I have been attempting to run again.. This means, what with rubbish eyes, getting up and out at 6 am and doing laps of my housing estate where there is due to the time and location:
1. no one to bump into
2. no one to stare at my fat ass and sweaty red face
3. no one to out run…
I’ve been tagged. I have no idea what a meme is but I will try to play. The wonderful Doc Susie tagged me, she of ‘Up the Hill Backwards’ fame and I have been told this is how you play. I have lifted the rules directly from her blog as she did to the chap who tagged her…and so it goes:
It is sunny outside but inside the room with the florescent ‘dinky donk dink’ lights is chilly. Training. Doesn’t matter what it is for, the excitement palls in a room like this…and training is always done in rooms like this. I don’t mind the uncomfortable plastic chairs that look as if they could fall apart but are always heavy and difficult to lift (and you know you are going to have to lift them when it comes to those horrifically embarresing exercises that begin with the words ‘Now I want you to get into pairs..’)
On the radio today was a programme called ‘Go For It’, a children’s programme with the presenter Barney Harwood. Today they had several children in talking about grief and loss with the children’s poet laureate, Michael Rosen, who had lost his son to meningitis. I sat with my hands over my face trying not to get tears on my keyboard (a recurring hazard these days) listening to them so sweetly grappling with the intricacies of grief. One child turned to the poet and asked with such sincere worry ‘Are you alright?’ The poet blinked and really, really thought about it. ‘Yes’ he said. ‘Thank you…thank you for asking.’
I have a dark and painful family secret. I finally can take the shame no more . It is time to drag back the blackened curtains and let the light come streaming in and so, with immense (even if I say so myself) strength of will, I take a first step towards releasing myself from the terrible burden…..
OK so no blog for a while..sorry… It has been a combination of having soggy brain and the fact I got wimpy after seeing an interview of Upcoming Handsome Norwegian-English Author in a Sunday paper. In the article the young chap (interesting childhood, overcoming some adversity or other, speaks at least four languages) sat looking moody with the sun streaming through his (slightly receding) golden curls whilst the journalist twittered on about his sexiness, intellect, his ability to articulate humanities something or other. None of this did more then make me hiss with usual defensive silliness, ‘ different if he were a WOman’, but then the journo turned to .. his remarkable collection of books..from Homer to Herrmann Hesse, Chaucer to Zola to Lovelock yadda yadda. At that point I looked at my bookshelf, which resembles a shelf in a youth hostel in Prague or the airport shop downstairs in Lusaka airport. Errr…books are expensive and hard to travel with and ..well I am prone to reading fast scary thrillers for a fast scary thrill and the print is larger and. etc and ad infinitum .(you get the point) I felt small and silly. I haven’t even got a decent TinTin collection yet.
‘Control’ is a film that has been much acclaimed in the past few months. It is about the gifted but tormented lead singer of a band called Joy Division who hanged himself at the age of 23. (Did I conjucate ‘hanged’ correctly? )
Ahh..the sights and smells of the Addenbrookes Eye Unit eh? The first hour’s wait is always the most charming..all those pleasant, relaxed patients chatting amicably, the serene staff, the accessible corridors and comfy seats..oh hang on. Actually that was the second hour when I fell asleep. The first hour was ..well the opposite of that. Plus it was paediatric ophthalmology clinic day. Dozens of toddlers and visual impaired people is not the best mix but it can be pretty funny.
I finish my shift at Citizens Advice Bureau and head out into the wind whipped rain, my head down and all my thoughts on how behind I am on the script writing and then I notice that there is smoke all around me. I step up out of the underpass my heart racing, I can hardly see through the smoke…where’s the fire? I spin around…..it must be massive…..where are the sirens..where are the panicking crowds?