Monochrome tendencies

Here I am, a day late already, so much for resolve. But in my defence, I've been ill. The kind of ill you get better from, so I don't need any sympathy, but also the kind of ill that sends you falling into to bed with such lassitude that whole days drift past and you've done nothing more strenuous than turn the pillow over looking for a cool bit. Maybe drink a Lemsip and deign to get in a bath that has been run for you. If it'd been left to you it would have overflowed and you'd have found it hard to care. Meetings are missed, emails are unsent, pyjamas are unchanged out of. I already had a policy of avoiding people who cost me energy, but for the last week or so I've just been avoiding people full stop.

I probably had it coming. I had a cold when my mum first went into hospital back in September, but I only remember it because I hovered in the doorway for fear of passing it onto her... it wasn't a showstopper. But apart from that I've been fine for months, through the Big Move, through the days of no broadband, through the long fading of light into a winter of sombre significance and many train journeys. I used to melt into a puddle of blood and tears every month, but that's been under control for over a year now, thanks to the marvels of artificial progestogen (I think I may be a little tougher and less accommodating than I used to be but hey, WORTH IT). I ain't no hippie but I do think when you have to power through, you power through, and then you have a little break from all the powering, and then you fall over. There's probably science that explains that, right?

Anyway, when it comes, it comes, and I'm well brought up enough to know that you can't fight it, all you can do is ride it out. You can go for a little walk in the woods, watch the snow falling on the river, and shed a few tears for all the sadness in the world. You can catch up on all the Nordic Noir you've been missing. You can rediscover the joy of soup. You can read a bit of Tove Jansson, who writes so beautifully about the introspective moods of midwinter. You can spend a lot of time thinking about trees, and a little bit of time talking to them.

This morning the sun rose and shone into my bedroom, and I sat up in bed and saw the heron sitting on his (her? how can you tell?) favourite rock in the river. It was magical. I can do melancholy with the best of them - in Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom I would definitely live in the Green Quarter - but it's good to remember that colour floods back into the world just as surely as it can drain out.

joella

Eternal phlegm

I was supposed to be fixing the toilet at my hairdresser's this morning (now there's a job where I shouldn't have to supply my own old towels...), but instead I am lying on the sofa with a tissue stuffed up each nostril, a bubbly ear and a brain as fuzzy and distorted as a 1970s television with its magnets on the blink.

I am just ill enough not to be able to do anything today apart from get bored, drink Ribena, and generally feel sorry for myself, but just not ill enough to avoid going into the office tomorrow.Short of full-blown influenza, there's no avoiding that To Do list, but I will be grumpy as hell and heavily Lemsip-dependent all the way to the weekend. I've been here before, I know how it goes. It's a waste of sunny term-time... the outdoor pool will soon be full of pesky kids all day long. I am also not painting walls or planting crocosmia. I am just lying here, one day closer to death, producing fluids that serve no purpose in staggering quantities.

The only bright spot on the horizon is The Wire Series 2, which plopped onto the doormat this morning. It was £8 cheaper to buy it online, but the wait nearly killed me. I am wondering what's the earliest time one can decently start watching TV when one is a bit ill? Six o'clock?

joella

No! Sleep! Till 11.30!

This week I looked after baby Tungsten nearly on my own for nearly three hours. He'd been suffering from what my mother calls D&V, *and* he's teething, so he was extremely pissed off.

I did feel for him. I hate throwing up. I had bad D&V once when I was about eight or nine. I remember lying in my turquoise flowery nightdress in my turquoise bed in my turquoise bedroom, looking glumly at the pale blue bucket that my mum had put next to the bed. It was the middle of a school day and it was weird and quiet, and I knew that all I could do was wait, feeling sicker and sicker till I chucked up in the bucket and felt better. And then it would start again. It was one of the longest days of my life.

So when I woke up in the middle of Wednesday night with a slow growing ache in my guts, I knew it wasn't going to end well. And it didn't. I had just enough sequencing between ends to avoid major bathroom disaster, and just enough interval between episodes to reflect on the sad fact that when you're a grown up, you have to clean up after yourself. I am not blaming baby Tungsten, but I did call him a little bastard more than once.

I did get a day in bed to recover though, drinking flat Coca Cola and reading OK magazine (both allowed only when ill). And tonight I am clean and serene, listening to Bob Dylan-as-DJ playing hymns to New York on 6Music and looking forward to an early night with Georgette Heyer.

Tomorrow: sloe hunting and rugby avoidance. Bring it on.

joella

My hey, hey my

A long time ago, when staying in on a Friday night was still the worst thing imaginable but doing a line of speed before heading out the door was no longer viable (that was only a brief phase, mum, honest), I discovered that much under-rated cocktail: vodka and Lemsip. Seriously, if you feel like shit but you need to be out there, it's the business. (If you feel like shit but it's ok to stay in, go straight for a hot toddy.)

A few years later, along came Red Bull. Someone with a cold once dubbed it Party Nurse (and indeed it does taste a bit like medicine), and ever since then I've thought of vodka and Lemsip as Party Nurse Max.

We could have done with some Party Nurse Max tonight, but instead we came home early, which on Cowley Road at this time of year makes you feel like a salmon swimming upstream. We were sitting in the Oxford Thai running low fevers and wondering what to do next, when M said 'I think we should just head back'. Well, I said, it's better to fade out than to burn away.

Vodka, we don't have. But Lemsip, we do.

joella

Muffled snuffles

The doctor gave me a pot to poo in but said I probably had a virus that would go away on its own eventually. I said I thought she was probably right.

But it hasn't gone away yet. Yesterday my temperature started rising while I was driving across Oxford to attend a three hour meeting to develop a shared vision for our open source content management system. Try saying *that* when the thermometer reads 100. (Actually, it reads 38, but I am strictly old money when it comes to fevers).

I sat at the far end of the big boardroom table drinking coffee and shivering while we talked about 'strategic collaboration' and drew lots of circles on flip charts. I remember waving my arms and saying 'poor and intermittent connectivity!' a lot.

I drove home hunched over the steering wheel with the heater blasting, feeling small and vulnerable and having the little anxious 'what if I was homeless?' moments that come out at such times. But I am not, thank heavens, and instead I was soon pyjame-ed under a duvet with Lemsip, which is where I have been ever since.

So I am watching the snow rather than battling it, which is possibly the only sane thing to do if you are not a bus driver, road-gritter or member of the emergency services. I am gutted to be missing plumbing tonight (I am struggling with lead welding and need all the help I can get) and I'd still rather have something short and sharp than this will-it-won't-it business, but sometimes you need to accept that you have to slow down for a while.

joella

Ribena and echinacea

... is what I'm currently drinking, in a rather pathetic childhood-meets-New-Age attempt to sort myself out. Basically, I'm not right, but in a very unspecific way. My guts have been weird ever since we got back from India, moving randomly up and down the Bristol Stool Scale, and I seem to be running a temperature some of the time but not all of the time. When I am not, I feel fine, but if I get drunk, my hangovers feel disproportionately life-threatening.

Today I went for a long walk with round-the-corner S and Sheba the dog, then flaked out under a blanket on the sofa like a fleece-wrapped caterpillar. About half past three I got up to hoover like a mad woman (only mad women hoover, really), sew on buttons, leap around to the Cure a bit, change the bed, attack the cupboard under the sink, demand help (declined on grounds of lack of notice) in emptying the loft, and then coming over a bit funny again. I feel kind of misanthropic, kind of mutinous, kind of morbid. I don't think I can say that to the doctor though. But I think I should probably go and say *something*.

In other news, how the fuck can they call a factory with 159,000 turkeys in it a *farm*? Bootiful my arse. (Yes, I know Ribena is made by GSK, but somehow that doesn't do me in as much as intensive poultry farming.) I wondered towards the end of last year if it wouldn't be better to start eating free range meat and stop eating processed vegetarian alternatives, but no, I don't think so. If I started eating free range meat then sooner or later something from a factory farm like that would find its way into my mouth. I'll stick to the Quorn sausage rolls till the world's a better place.

joella