Like, isn’t there just SO MUCH content already? Isn’t everyone out there writing and writing and videoing and putting their story out or… worse, screenshotting someone else’s story and making it their story, or just copying it word for word and posting it as if it was theirs… I feel weird about adding to that world of too-many-words, to be honest. Every time my hands hover over the keyboard I somehow talk myself out of it all. I get bombarded with a rush of bad thoughts about how little the world needs yet another person building their version of the world out loud, creating nostalgia for their own life experience in real time,

And not feeling sure that I want to add to that, I slowly, quietly, carry on living-without-documenting. And it doesn’t make me feel more content, or happier. It just leaves me with twitchy fingers and a head swirling with words that aren’t getting out and end up swirling faster and faster and attacking each other as they run out of space.

So… I come back. I Am Here. I want to make myself write down my stories because NOT writing them doesn’t make anyone else not do it. They still carry on, and I just lose my voice and my sense of who I am in the flood.

Does this sound a little sad? I have been. I am. There’s been a lot of stuff happening in real life that is complicated and hard and that cannot be talked about in a useful way in public. But not wanting to talk about that doesn’t mean that I can’t talk or write about anything.

I think I did, though, just have to write down, to acknowledge that things have been hard, and sad. And leave it there. And then tell a better story, and let the words out of my head, to make room for something else. Or just to make room.

I was at home. I was going to write at home.

Did I write at home? I did not.
Why not?
Because, though I had finished the project I had been working on and knew that this should be, really, a perfect opportunity to sit and do some writing for myself… but the project, while finished, was not *quite* finished, and my brain was finding it difficult to get day release. And also I had the feeling that while I *could* write something joyful and feckless, I should probably, if I was being responsible, concentrate my mind on writing something serious and worky instead, in the cause of Getting More Work, even though I’m not quite sure what that means at the moment.

I got on a plane. I was going to write on the plane.

Did I write while on the plane? No I did not.
Why not?
Because come on. Who actually writes on the plane? We always say we’re going to write on the plane, but then… there’s a movie that we never needed to see before this moment but suddenly desperately want to see. And really we should get some sleep. And we’ll write between sleep and landing but… oh look there’s another movie. Oh are we preparing to land? Already? Well, no matter, if we didn’t write on the plane we can always catch up on writing at the hotel.

I got to a hotel. I was going to write at the hotel.

Did I write at the hotel? No I did not.
Why not?
Because let’s face it, I said I slept on the plane I did not actually sleep on the plane because really, who sleeps on planes? I got to the hotel, and because the hotel was in the uk, I needed to go to the hotel restaurant and find something to eat. Preferably a sausage.

I have become incredibly laser-focused on what I want to eat when I get back to the uk. It’s sausages. So I went in search of a sausage, and took my notebook so I could write… but when I got there, there were too many good conversations to eavesdrop on, and I sat happily, with sausages, listening and gazing out of the window at the cars on the motorway flyover speeding along between my hotel and Glasgow Airport.

I went back to the islands where this blog began. A perfect place to write! 

Did I write while in the islands? No. Of course not.
Why not?
Because I was cleaning, washing, painting, putting furniture together. Also I had no internet. Which is a bit of an impediment. Sadly (but, for my writing, luckily!…) I was only there for five days. And then

I was going to be spending time in airline lounges and hotels and planes and there, there, finally, I would be doing some writing.

Did I do writing in any of those places? No.
Why not?
/shrug.
mumbles.

Honestly I kind of give up on myself at this point.

However… ALL THOSE THINGS DONE, I knew that at the very least, I would be home, and jetlagged, and had nothing else to do… so then, finally then, I would get down to it and do the writing I had been meaning to do all that time.

And then I caught covid on the plane.

sigh.

(…but now I finally have… well, slept, and slept some more, and now have sat down and written out all the places and times I was going to write and failed to… Now I can just give that self-immolating part of my brain some rest, and get on with just letting ideas out instead.

So I guess what I am saying is now? NOW I’m definitely in the right place and time to do writing. And we know how that goes.)

Ask me how I know. ASK ME HOW I KNOW.

It’s like we held our breath, not wanting to say “That was weird right? And hard? Not just me, right?” just in case suddenly someone jumped out from behind a tree and said “What do you mean “was” fools?! Get back in your houses, we’re going full lock-down again!”

But now we’ve reached a full three years later. Or… I mean, it’s not a precise thing. But it’s coming up on three years since San Francisco issued shelter in place orders and we locked ourselves in the house for a bunch of months, then lived cautiously and frustratedly and weirdly for a bunch of a bunch more.

And it’s only recently that people have started to talk about it. Someone asked the other day Doozer and I were walking home with his friend from school and he suddenly said
“Hey, do you remember that day when the sky was red?”
“Oh.” said his friend. “Yeah it was weird. Why?” 

“Oh nothing.” said Doozer. “That’s all it was. That day that felt like we were on Mars. We called it Mars day. Just wondering if you remembered it.”

How weird it is that that’s going to be one of his childhood memories? The day the sun didn’t rise and the birds didn’t sing and the sky was dark red all day. And he’d been unable to attend school for 8 months, and had changed school, and hadn’t yet met any of his new classmates… and not knowing that even when he would meet them, another couple of months later, he wouldn’t get to see the bottom half of their faces for most of another year. Or a whole other year?

Crumbs.

And I realise that was not a universal experience. It was a thing that happened in San Francisco and the Bay Area — a confluence of smoke from wildfires and atmospheric pressure and… stuff? Whatever it was, we all got up one morning and the sun… didn’t.

The light couldn’t get through the clouds. The birds didn’t sing. We all dialled into our zoom meetings from our home offices in different parts of the city and just sort of… stared at each other. We’d been sheltering in place for … I don’t know, six months at that point?

It absolutely, thoroughly broke me. Nothing at that point mattered. I couldn’t talk about work, I couldn’t talk about enterprise software particularly, because I didn’t give a shit and because IT DIDN’T MATTER. How could it possibly matter? There was no sun in the sky! It was pitch dark — well, pitch dark red — at 11am. What could matter anymore.

I tried to take a picture for posterity, but the camera kept correcting the light, like technology was conspiring to make sure we couldn’t quite remember what it was like. And, as previously written, I couldn’t find the words to write about it at the time because to write about it as extraordinary seemed to be tempting fate, and if I did then, well, before we knew it there would be whole weeks like it. Maybe it would just be normal. Like being in our house. Seeing only each other. Having birthday parties on zoom. All of that nonsense.

It wasn’t even the first time my brain had broken that year.
Of course it wasn’t. It was just another in a series of brain breakdowns.

The main one before that had been the Everlasting Tuesday. 

**********************************

I’d been doing personal training with a friend for a long time before the pandemic. We used to go before work, or after work, when the office was nearby. Our trainer was firm enough to make sure we worked out, but lenient enough to be ok with the fact that our jobs were stupid and stressful and we often had to reschedule at the last minute or would sometimes just burst into tears in the middle of a deadlift.

So when the pandemic came, and lots of her clients disappeared, we kept training. But on zoom.

We’d work out on a Tuesday. I’d change into my workout gear, prop the computer on a chair in the spare room at an angle that meant I could see her and she could mainly see me, but she definitely couldn’t see when I was only half doing my hip-dips, and I’d unroll my mat and gather resistance bands and for 45 minutes we’d all remotely work out together… and then close the computer and be on our own again, each in our own spaces, back to the closed doors and the masked interactions and the leaving of delivery food at the front gate before ringing the bell and running away.

One Tuesday, I was there, in the spare room,  with the laptop propped on a chair, with the mat rolled out, wearing my workout clothes, listening to tinny music coming from our trainer’s speakers on the other end of a zoom.

And it must have been that I was wearing the same workout clothes as the Tuesday before. And the laptop was at exactly the same angle as the Tuesday before. And the sun coming through the window blinded me in exactly the same moment of the same exercise as the same song was playing that was playing the Tuesday before.

And suddenly I was whirling inside a deja vu, but it wasn’t a short-circuit deja vu, and it wasn’t a deja vu as in “I was feeling like I was doing the same thing but had never done it before”. I had done it before. I had done all of it before. Exactly the same. Or maybe I hadn’t? No… no, I had. I’d done it on other Tuesdays. In fact, maybe this was the other Tuesdays.

In that moment, I suddenly couldn’t remember which Tuesday I was in.
It was definitely Tuesday, but I felt like I was concurrently in this Tuesday and last Tuesday and maybe the Tuesday before and probably next Tuesday too.
I was in all the Wednesdays at once, and there was also no such thing as Tuesdays… there was only Tuesday. Singular. I was, in that moment, living in The Tuesday.
The Tuesday that stretched in front of me and behind me as far as I could see, and yet was also just here, right here, under me and inside me, being the only Tuesday, and no particular Tuesday.

I asked my friend and our coach to give me a moment, and went downstairs to find my beloved. I asked him if I was really there, in front of him. And whether it was this Tuesday, or next Tuesday, or last Tuesday. And whether, perhaps, our spare room was a time travel portal? Or a tear in the space/time continuum.

And he gave me a hug. And asked whether I was maybe a little bit stoned. And, finding out I was not, told me that maybe, this Tuesday, I should give the exercise a break and have a nap. Or, for that matter, just have a gummy and *be* stoned, because it was probably the only way I was going to enjoy this experience rather than… whatever this was.

*******************************

I don’t know what Doozer will remember from the lost year. I don’t know if he ever had a moment that was equivalent to my Everlasting Tuesday. But if he does, it’s probably Mars Day. And I hope to mars and back that it’s the only one he ever sees.

It means you can’t see pictures in your head. Like, it’s partly not being able to picture people you know and love, which sucks. But when someone describes a picture. Or when you read a description of a scene in a novel — he just doesn’t have the ability to build that image in his head in a way that he can “see”. It’s not a visual thing.

And for a long time I couldn’t quite work out what he meant by that, and then when we discovered it was not completely unusual, I read up about it, and sort of understood it more. But what still completely confuddled me was the fact that he simply couldn’t wrap his head around what it must be like to see pictures in one’s head. Basically: He couldn’t even picture me being able to picture the things I pictured in my head when I picture things. Which makes sense, in that he couldn’t picture things but… I couldn’t step into his shoes and understand his confusion.

Until the moment he revealed that he somehow DOESN’T ever think about being attacked by a squirrel while on the toilet.

And I stopped, aghast, and tried to work out how it might be possible to not think about being attacked by a squirrel while on the toilet. Or a rat. Or a shark.

This has led me to go on a journey of self-interrogation. Like… what OTHER thoughts may not be constantly present for everyone else? What other things does my anxiety-free beloved NEVER think about?!

So: Full disclosure, I have always been a person with anxiety, and that amount of anxiety has gone up and down and been more or less problematic at different times in my life and right now it is not very problematic at all. It is  just a way my brain is wired and I’m now used to observing these thoughts and then working out how to deal with them. It’s when I don’t have the capacity or can’t work out how to deal with them that they become problematic and overwhelming. But that’s not now.

Anyway. I’m just trying to make it ENTIRELY clear this blog post is not a cry for help before anyone emails me all worrity-like. 

SO:

It was when I first watched Jaws with my older brother and sister at too young an age and one of them mentioned that it has been known for sharks to swim up the u-bend from the sewer that this idea first became problematic. I was wary of going for a wee for weeks.

Eventually this wore off, until sometime in my mid-twenties when I realised that rats DO sometimes do this. And from there in my head it became squirrels and… anyway. I have never yet been bitten on the arse by a squirrel mid-poop, but the point is, it crosses my mind as I enter the bathroom at home quite frequently.

I checked with my beloved and, it turns out: No. This hasn’t occurred to him even once. Let alone on a semi-regular basis! Remarkable.

This prompted me to check other things that seem like totally normal run-of-the-mill thoughts to me and see whether they are regular visitors to his brain. I have been keeping a list.

The list of thoughts that have occurred to me that yes should be interrogated and maybe subsequently dismissed, but are definitely TOTALLY NORMAL things to think

1. toilet squirrels. As above.
2. toilet sharks. again.
3. toilet ceiling rats: similar, but the idea that in a commercial building with a false ceiling, one of the roof panels will collapse under the weight of a rodent that will fall on you as you pee.
4. toilet ceiling corpse: same but dead body. not sure how it got up there. that part of the process is not my responsibility,
5. luminolosity: The feeling of walking into a hotel room and casually wondering how many dead people have been found in there.
6. luxury property? schmuschury schmoperty more like: Looking out over a beautiful view of houses along a shoreline and having your first thought be “tsunami?”.
7. more dead bodies? The sense that opening a office supply cupboard in your office will almost certainly reveal a crime scene.
8. priorities: “If I have a heart attack on this exercise bike, will I fall off or slump forward?”
9. “Ouch”: The possibility that potatoes might be sentient.
10. Gravity problems:  Double decker buses should definitely fall over sometimes, but only, almost certainly, when I am on them.
11. gravity problems II: Pilots who use the phrase “we’ll be on the ground in 20 minutes” rather than “landing in 20 minutes” know that “on the ground” in one piece seems unlikely to them in that moment.
12. poison envelope glue:  not, like, maliciously poisoned. Just been peed on by the wrong kind of frog or something while in the manufacturing process.
13. hat required: heavy cloud problems. Also: sudden-bird-confidence-issue problems.

I have more. I may add more. But I may just keep collecting them. I can’t help but keep collecting them.

Point is, my beloved LITERALLY NEVER thinks of these things. Like, has never walked across an open area of parkland and wondered if a seagull is going to suddenly forget how to fly directly above him and land on his head.

He can’t even picture it!

He can’t picture me picturing it.

And yet me? Picturing it all is all I can do. I walk into any situation and the universe unfolds like a complex origami puzzle with each fold containing a possible different version of the picture and my brain is able to scan the whole image and find the most extreme and ridiculous fold and blow it up and flesh it out.

Anxiety-brain is awesome like that.

(honestly it is awesome like that. flipped in a different way it’s my creative brain. but… you don’t need anxiety to be creative. you just need to be able to understand the origami without focussing on the furthest corner of the paper)
(or something?)
(I folded this metaphor in on itself too many times and now can’t remember how to unfold it again)
(also I meant to go to bed an hour ago and got led off thinking about the potential for wolf ghosts in my basement.)

Ok, thank you, yes. It was this evening, around 7pm, at the corner store a couple of blocks from my house? You know, the one run by the  brothers? The older one was was working tonight, he can provide a back-up account if you need one.

Anyway. I was picking up a couple of things — bottle of diet coke, some butter… not important. Though you should know that if you’re hankering after Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut, they have the big bars there. No idea why, no other British things, but those, for some reason? They have them! I know, right?!

Sorry yes. I called you, yes.
The report.

Oh yes it was extremely distressing. Apparently she was from … is this line secure?…ok.

…the Home Counties.

Yes no of course the fact she’s from the Home Counties isn’t problematic in itself. The problem is that I *know* that she is. No! She TOLD me!

Ok. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s how it went down.

I was in the store, at the back of the store, by the fridges. I’d seen someone come in before me. Didn’t pay much mind, they were on their phone. But as I was finishing grabbing my stuff and heading up front, I heard her checking out and making small talk. I heard the flat vowels. A glottal stop. My ear pricked up.

Undeniably British.

I said nothing. As is the rule.

I watched her leave the counter and moved up to put my stuff on there. Noticed that she’d not left, but moved to the ATM machine by the door. I greeted (gret? grote.) the owner. “Hullo!”, I said, in a my more-British accent. “Howzitgoing?”.

I did As We Do. No more no less. I did what I am trained. I slightly increased my volume, and slightly played up my natural accent. So that, AS IS THE CODE OF THE SAN FRANCISCO EX PAT, she would recognise that she was in the presence of a fellow British person, silently. And she did. I saw from the corner of my eye, her posture change a little. She stiffened, her head turned slightly, mid cash-withdrawal.

“Ah, not bad. Could be worse. You?”

I made good smalltalk with the owner, using the great british shibboleth … “could be worse“.
She turned her shoulder this time. Looked more fully at me. I could see from the corner of my eye. I didn’t break.

“Bag? Nah, I’m good. I got my backpack.”

Even as I carried on with polite chit-chat, I knew I didn’t need to double-down on Britishisms. I’d totally nailed it with the could be worse. You know how you know. It’s the key. In this situation, it lets you establish who you are, and lets them know that you’ve recognised who they are, and that you want them to know that you know who they are and that you know they’ll know who you are, and does all this, WITHOUT EVER ACKNOWLEDGING THEM DIRECTLY EVER.

Yes thank you, I’ve studied hard.

Anyway. I paid up, and she finished at the ATM, and we ended up leaving at the same time.

That’s when it happened. We were walking in the same direction. She spoke immediately.

“You’re English, yeah?!” she said, in a pleasant, friendly, breezy way.

“Oh! Yes! You too? Huh I thought I might have heard a familiar accent but didn’t realise it was you” I replied, unconvincingly.

“Yes! I am! Where are you from?!” she enquired, both outrageously and illegally, and charming, earnest, and reasonably.

“London.” I said, trying not to freak out and scream about BUT DON’T YOU KNOW THE RULES! THE RUUUUUUUULES?! … “Well, I’ve lived all over, but London born and bred, Brighton last stop. What about you?”

“Large town in the Home Counties” she said, except she actually said the name of the large town in the Home Counties, but I’ve forgotten the name of it, because I had no idea where it was.

“I have no idea where that is!” I said. “Sorry, typical Inner-London kid, if it’s not a borough, I haven’t a clue where it might be.”

“Home Counties!” she said. “Somewhere in the Home Counties. No worries, I’d rather I didn’t know where it was either.” 

By the end of the short block we’d covered how long we’d been been here (7yrs (her) and 15, on and off (me)), visas, green cards, and, of course, the weather. Because we are, after all, British.

And then we parted ways, and said nothing more. She went up Page, I went up Buchanan, and that was that.

But… I just wanted to call it in.

Because she seemed very lovely, and I’m sure we’ll cross paths again. But before we do, and should one of the San Francisco Ex-Pat Enforcers catch up with her, I just thought maybe they should remind her of thing that we all, somehow, know and have weirdly, silently, stupidly agreed to all this time…

THE CODE

If you hear a British person, do not acknowledge them.
But by any means necessary, let them know that you’ve made them. Speak a little louder, enunciate a little clearer. If in a playground with your child, summon them in clipped tone. If you’re ordering at the bar, ask the barperson if they have any crisps. Or if you’re already eating crisps, say “MMM, SALT AND VINEGAR! BLIMEY, I SAY ETC! SHAME IT’S NOT CHEESE AND ONION THO, WHAT?”

If you fall into conversation with them, talk about literally anything BUT the fact that you are both British.
If you have been in conversation with them with over 20 minutes, you are permitted to ask the question “When did you move out here?“, and receive an answer. That will be the extent of the conversation about being British that you are allowed upon first meeting.

You will not mention being British directly for at least three more social encounters.
Because what are you, gauche or something?

… yes sorry I know you know what the code is. I was just saying that I know what the code is.

I mean… I don’t know WHY the code is, but I know what it is. But not why it exists. Ha haha.

Hahaha.

…Actually, since I have you on the line… if you wouldn’t mind… if it’s not an impolite question…

Why IS the code what it is? There is a reason, right?!

Right?

…Hullo?

But to be honest, it would be really helpful if history wasn’t so interesting, because it is hard to concentrate on the important work things, when there’s all these… details that are shiny and interesting and very VERY hard to ignore.

You need an example. Ok. So: there was a moment in history when America was filled with tension about whether there were people who had too much, and whether they were living life at the expense of others, and at the same time, people were also worried about the increase of immigration, and concerned that there wasn’t enough to go around, and this drove people into the arms of nativist parties who promised that America was for Americans and didn’t have to worry about non-Americans taking their jobs or telling them what to do.
This was the mid-1840s, for reference. And it all kept building up and there were violent skirmishes, in this case some riots, and people died and that’s always bad.

And also some sheep. Apparently some sheep also died. Which is the point I keep getting stuck on when I should be getting more into the class warfare and the cultural contrast of the anti-British sentiment with the pro-Shakespeare nativists.

HERE’S the thing:

There was a feud in the 1840s between two actors, Edwin Forrest, one of the most famous American actors of his time, and William C Macready, his British equivalent. At first they had a friendly rivalry, but it built up over time to the point where they were crossing the Atlantic to piss each other off.

Like, one would go on a tour and the other would follow them from city to city and… you know what, I’ve just had another read of the wikipedia page about it and…

Macready and Forrest each toured the other’s country twice before the riot broke out. On Macready’s second visit to America, Forrest had taken to pursuing him around the country and appearing in the same plays to challenge him. Given the tenor of the time, most newspapers supported the “home-grown” star Forrest. On Forrest’s second visit to London, he was less popular than on his first trip, and he could only explain it to himself by deciding that Macready had maneuvered against him. He went to a performance of Macready playing Hamlet and loudly hissed him. For his part, Macready had announced that Forrest was without “taste.”. The ensuing scandal followed Macready on his third and last trip to America, where half the carcass of a dead sheep was
thrown at him on the stage. The climate worsened when Forrest instigated divorce proceedings against his English wife for immoral conduct, and the verdict came down against Forrest on the day that Macready arrived in New York for his farewell tour.

…Honestly, I’m not just being British about this, but I’m pretty sure that one person in this situation was in more of a feud than the other person. It seems like possibly a 60/40 feud divide. Maybe 80/20. I mean, one person declared the other lacked taste… and the other declared all-out war? Who knows, maybe it was more fair and just being reported weirdly. Maybe this was wiki page was edited by the ghost of William Macready, that definitely seems like it could happen.

LOOK. The whole point is:

T sheep is mentioned in multiple places, and my questions are these:

• How do you sneak half a dead sheep carcass into the theatre in the first place?
• Do you say it is a snack?
• Do you dress it up in an overcoat and say it is your weird-looking son?
• Do you buy it a ticket?
• Or wait: was the sheep dead when it came into the theatre? Or was that something that happened part of the way through. In which case presumably yes, it must have had its own ticket. And overcoat.
• Well then how did it die?
• And at which point of the play? A dramatic point? I mean, it was certainly dramatic for the sheep?
• And at which point was it thrown?
• Did it stop the play?
• Or did they work it into the action somehow (please god yes let this be the case?)
• What was the sheep’s name?

Long story short: this is why I am quitting useful work and becoming a historian, A very specific one, at the precise meeting point of sheep and theatre.

Of course, the main question, the one we all need to know. Did it receive a standing ovision.

Did that work?

Whatever. I’m a sheep theatre historian, I don’t care about writing anymore.

Every day there are new questions. If I had a superpower what would it be. If I could have an intergalactic motorbike OR a teleportation device, which would it be? If I was going to be a magical creature as a pet, which? If I was going to write a musical, what would it be about? Would I rather be the goddess of fire? Or a wizard who could control water? Would I buy a set of portals that could transport me between 4 fixed points, or a teleportation machine that could send me anywhere, but only one way?

I rarely have the correct answer to these questions. I’m not sure there is a right answer, but if there is one, I apparently don’t have it as the questions keep coming back.

Yesterday, Doozer was heading toward me up the hill a couple of blocks from school with a friend. “If, right” said Doozer’s Friend, once they had acknowledged that I was now walking alongside them… “If, right, there was a bed of fire. Like, hot coals, or lava but like solid or… fire basically. But not like fiery flamey fire just really hot, like, ground, but not ground? Like, fire-ground, or…”

“Go on…” I cut in, trying to stop him going on (and on, and on)

“But, like, if you walk across it, you can have your dream job… would you do it?” 

I had a very quick think.

“No.”
“Oh. Ok but it’s, like, your DREAM JOB.”
“Gotcha. Still no.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a job. I’m not doing that for a job. Also that’s a really weird way to get a job. Why is my getting this job dependent on burning my feet? Also if this job I’m so keen on is so close that I could get to it by just running over fiery ground, then I can probably get it some other way, can’t I?”
“No, it’s… like… magic. You magically get your dream job.”
“Oh. OK. Well, still no.”

Doozer’s friend peeled off toward his house. Doozer kept up the questioning.

“But why NOT?”
“Well, I don’t know what my dream job is. Every job I’ve had has been a dream job in some way, so I’ve kind of already done it. Also, I’m old enough and tired enough that my priority isn’t tipping myself headfirst into whatever the next dream job is, it’s you. And our family, and our friend family and…”

“Yeah yeah…” He said, sensing that I was getting far too close to talking about feeeeeeeelings and things, which he’s great at tbh, but this was Not The Time “…but what IF, right, the dream job in question was time traveling detective?”

This was a different proposition. I thought very briefly again.

“Wait so… if I walk across this small amount of fire, I can time travel?”
“You can get a job as a time travelling detective, if that’s your dream job, yeah.”
“So by walking across the fire I’m changing the way that the laws of time and space and physics work because suddenly I can time travel, as my dream job just happens to necessitate that?”
“Yes.”
“Ok well, now I’m in.”
“So you WOULD walk across fire for your dream job!”
“No, I would walk across fire if it meant that I was changing the essential rules of physics and the universe because that seems worth having hot feet.”
“Same difference”, said my child/tiny in-house future lawyer, for whom every conversation has the potential to end in this kind of negotiation. Debate? Negotiation-debate. Negotdebation.

“Would you?” I asked.
“Oh YES, of course!” he replied, as if the very question was foolish. Which, now I think of it, it always was.
“Of course.” I said. “And, what IS your dream job?”
“Well” he said, thoughtfully. “I would have a holographic version of the earth, and I could zoom in on certain bits and change stuff and make awesome things happen.”

“Is your dream job… being God?…”
“Nooooooo!” he exclaimed, too fast and a little too loudly. “There’s no such thing as god.”
“Ok. But still…”
“Well, maybe A god. Like, a minor one.”
“…”
“A nice one, though!”

So! So much for my dream of being well-funded by my offspring in my dotage. I had no idea I was subconsciously relying on that whole future-lawyer thing. I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure that being a minor god, ESPECIALLY a nice one, does not pay well.

Which is good, because if anyone else was living in my mucus that would be weird.

I have a cold. Or flu. Or an RSV? Or something similar with another name but NOT the Thing-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, because I have taken TTSNBN-tests daily and they all say it is not that. Whatever it is, it is a) awful, and b) nothing to complain about really because, as we have all seen, it could be so much worse, and frequently is.

And yet, complain about it I have.
Been…
Doing? Not sure how that sentence should work. But I have been complaining and still I complain. Because context is everything, and it is the worst I, personally, have felt in bloody ages. My family are all bored of me complaining to at them, so I shall complain here instead…

On day one, I woke up with a scratchy throat. Three hours later, while watching television with Doozer, I knocked the remote control onto the floor, slid off the sofa to get it… and then just carried on gently slipping down, down, down, unfurling onto the floor, enjoying its coolness and its bigness and thinking it might just be nice to stay there a while.

I was meant to be doing something that evening, a party I was really looking forward to, so I was determined to be well, and to that end I went for a nap… and woke up feeling like I’d been slapped in the face with a cricket bat. But a hot cricket bat. Covered in misery jam.

I messaged my apologies to the host of the party I was now definitely not attending. I said I wouldn’t be coming, because to do so would make me the unquestionable super-spreader in the room. Also because I couldn’t stand up for more than three minutes without feeling woozy and trying to find and excuse to lie on the floor again and find the coolest spots by rolling gently around on my side, and it wasn’t that kind of party.

While my beloved and Doozer went out to fulfil other social obligations, I slept, fitfully, through several terrible Hallmark holiday movies. I can’t say exactly how many, because, as previously discussed, they are all just the same one  on an endless cycle anyway. I sweated, I shivered, I flitted in and out of consciousness, I shifted uncomfortably, I sweated more, I shivered more, I … somehow in my feverish haze ordered a hawaiian pizza, received and ate at least a slice of it before realising that no, I definitely wasn’t hungry, and putting it in the fridge.

The next two days passed similarly, albeit with fewer hawaiian pizzas. Or rather with the same one, but drawn out, and less attractive by the day.

I crawled out of bed, made honking noises with my mouth when I opened it to get words out, poked at things miserably, tested daily to check I still didn’t have the cov, and crawled back up to bed every two or three hours to sleep, or toss and turn and try to sleep while apparently swallowing invisible razor blades. The glands in my neck, which are very protective and I’m ever so grateful for them, swelled to the size of grapefruit, trying to fight off the lurgy. Swelled so vigorously and so ardently that I could hear my heart throbbing through them in a constant “whoom, whoom, whoom” in my ouchy ears. My head ached and eyes ached to the point where putting reading glasses on was pointedly painful and thus I couldn’t even occupy myself by texting people to tell them how much sympathy they should be giving me, which was terrible. I had to pick up the slack and feel extra sorry for myself instead. Luckily, I am British, so very good at that.

And days passed. Two, three, four. On the fourth I began to come back, got some part of my brain working again. Sadly it was the part that noticed what a mess the house was in, and also remembered where I’d put all the stocking stuffers that I hadn’t thought about two nights before when they were needed. So if Doozer is reading this, yes, that’s why you spent the early part of 2023 getting ridiculous small gifts for achievements like “Did a Tuesday“.

And now I’m writing this at 3.30am the morning of the fifth day. There’s a storm raging outside, which led to some sort of urgent BEEP! BEEP!!!!! from one of the sensors in the house at 2, which woke us all up, but only happened the once, so everyone just lay there waiting until they… well, the other two humans, slipped back into sleep.

But me, no. The cat is going through another of her phases of bopping me on the nose every time she wants petting, which is often, security lights on the outside of houses around kept being switched on by the wind and flickering for a little behind the lids I was trying to keep shut, before disappearing for a second… or two… and then another gust lit something up. Snoring was happening, the garbage trucks are picking up outside.

And my flu, my cold, my illness, my not-TTSNBN (tests said!), has gone into its productive phase. This is from the notes app that I wrote in bed before finally giving up, getting up and coming downstairs.

“It’s now being productive. Or destructive, if you’re a rainforest, or my sleep. The sad mountain of tissues is growing almost as fast as the minutes of night disappear. But at least it’s in its Productive Phase. We love a Productive Phase.

My mother always used to sound weirdly proud and impressed when colds we had entered the really gross part. “Oh yes!” She’d say, admiringly, “ever so productive!”.

I mean I understood as a bunch of super-Protestants our value was entirely wrapped up in being productive members of society, but I honestly did not imagine this was what they meant.

Now, trying to please, different parts of my face are now taking it in turns to show who can be be most productive, like they’re vying for Nostril of the Week or something.

Looks like at this point, Steve is ahead. Well done, Steve the nostril. Can you tell us how it feels to win out as Nostril of the Week once more, beating your coworker on the left Angela the Nostril? Feels great does it? Wonderful. Now tell the people at home, what is it you’ve actually PRODUCED in this highly productive time? … Oh. Oh it’s that is it? Well that’s very … viscous. Yes, you have used a lot of paper, well done.”

At which point I realised I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon and came down to type instead. And now I’m sitting/lying on the sofa, trying to do that thing people do where they’re all like “Oh, can’t sleep lying down? Sleep sitting up!” like I’m some kind of bat gone wrong, or a lazy vampire. My nose has stopped, to be fair, exploding every few minutes and is now just settling into a weird creaking and popping, like an iceberg waiting to collapse. And soon

…

Shit. The weird BEEP! Has just BEEP!!!ed again. I should go and check whether it’s woken everyone again. Probably something to do with brief power outages and the storm, or the moisture combined with some house system we haven’t checked or… or perhaps it’s just some kind of cosmic alarm telling me to stop the fuck typing and try and get some sleep. Yes. Let’s say it’s that.

Honk.
Cough.
Snurt.
[Slides off the sofa, unfurls onto the floor, and rolls off sideways into the darkened house]

It’s after TSA, after security point, and it’s just a name for the benched area where you can put your shoes and belts back on and shove your larger electronic items back into your overpacked hand luggage. Because you have been discombobulated, you need to be recombobulated. This is where that happens. This word, which may have made it into an official dictionary by now, was named as the most creative new word of the year in 2009 by the American Dialect Society. Which, now I’ve discovered is a prize one can win, is destined to be the cornerstone of a new personal goal.

Anyway. They call it in their signage the “Recombobulation Area”, but I think we can all agree that is a typo, because they clearly meant to call it the “Recombobulation Station”, as that is obviously the better name. Because it rhymes.

I have no other information or point to make about this. I learned about it from a lecture series on word origins and the evolution of language I’m listening to, and it came up this morning because I was at therapy and realised that I should have booked in an extra session after a recent experience that left me discombobulated, because I had been in need of this room, this process, as my recombobulation station. Or one of my recombobulation stations.

We all need recombobulation stations. They look different for different people. But they exist for all of us.

It’s just nice to discovered there’s a name for them. I thought you should know.