... I don't need any help in that department.
One of the interesting side effects of blogging is mining the archives of your life. Like therapy, they allows you to discern patterns in your life that you might otherwise not have identified. I have an annual cycle: broadly speaking I am optimistic in spring, oppressed in summer, reflective in autumn and resigned in winter. I also have a monthly cycle, fairly obviously: I slide into a trough of anxious pessimism around ovulation time, which slowly transforms into a manic furious premenstrual spike, which collapses in an instant into a sharp hit of terror and vulnerability, from which calm is temporarily restored. Never a dull moment.
I have a daily cycle too. I never want to wake up, and I never want to go to sleep. The only thing that could make me a morning person would be a Wallace & Gromit style contraption that would heat up a big vat of hot water at the appointed hour, then pull off the duvet and tip me off the mattress down a slide into it. With some sort of pyjama-removing contraption on the way. 'Seize the afternoon!' is our household motto. It doesn't, as my friend E used to say, get the baby a new bonnet.
So it's early summer, and we're on day 12 of 28. I am splattered in Night Jewels (which sounds rude, but is in fact just the colour that the shower room will be once I have finished painting it). M was home late after his Orpheus rehearsal and we didn't eat till nearly 11. Didn't drink, either (even I know that you don't drink and decorate), but then we watched the last in the series of Mad Men -- which I can't recommend highly enough -- and I got stuck in front of News 24 with a large Manzanilla.
An hour later, I was still there, drinking in the full horror of global political and economic meltdown. There will be no oil. There will be no jobs. We will have no home. Inflation will be a million per cent. The dried beans and bottled water I keep for post-apocalyptic survival will be stolen by marauding child-rapers. I know *this* is part of a cycle, too, but last time we had a recession we didn't have rolling news channels. They are a terrible idea.
At 1.30 M came to get me, at which point I realised that it was raining, and remembered that the roof is leaking over the bed, but unpredictably, and not from anywhere I could spot when I hung precariously out of the skylight to inspect the slates. I sat on the edge of the bed staring gloomily at the place where it leaked last time.
Get into bed, he said.
You have no idea what it's like being me, I replied.
No, he said, but I know what it's like living with you. Get into bed.
When I got into work this morning, there was a bag of sack cloth under my desk. I have no idea who put it there.
joella
2 comments:
Hmmm, for some reason I thought 'Night Jewels' would be a peacock blue/royal purple type colour.
I always used to be the opposite - a morning person who loves going to bed...not so much these days though.
As regards the 'news'... even the regular BBC radio news these days is all people I can't trust repeating what the person before them just said and tagging their own opinion on the end of it. I daren't believe any of it. Especially now China has suddenly become a shining example of How To Deal With A Crisis and all that.
How interesting about cycles. I just spent the whole afternoon mining my own archives in order to write a post looking back at the first four years of Crinklybee... and exactly the same sort of thing occurred to me. For example, it seems for three late Autumns in a row I came out with very similar (almost interchangeable in fact) posts detailing my dissaffection with corporate drudgery.. it wasn't until the fourth summer that I actually did anything about it though...
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