Day 208

After two nights of not sleeping very well at all, partly caused by my despair at seeing summer pass so quickly, I slept almost too well last night. Probably because I’d come round to realising during the course of the day yesterday that acceptance was the best way to go, that fighting against the way my world was shaped was a useless waste of energy. My sleep was garlanded with veils of Greek letters and words, a constant stream of words I understood, and some I couldn’t understand, and a desperate reaching out for words that I don’t yet know. So far have I immersed myself in my Greek lessons, and that can’t be a bad thing, to be so suffused by a new language that I dream in it.

A year ago today, I was lying on my bed incapacitated by the worst back injury I’d had for twenty-odd years, plagued by the worst pain that I’d known for a long time. The anniversary is preying on me, because I just want to get through the day without collapsing with a bad back again. I know that sounds superstitious, but that’s how my mind works. And of course this is the day Stradbroke Cricket Club travel across to my old college in Cambridge to play against the Liverpool University Staff who are now on their 62nd annual tour of Cambridge (although the 60th didn’t happen two years ago because of covid-19). And today, more than on any other day, the realisation that I have retired from playing cricket hits home properly. Maybe it’s all these things combined which made me feel panic attacky this morning. M even offered not to go into the office because I was feeling so weird. But that’s passed, I think and hope.

I’m writing this in a very bitty way this morning. I’ve had a call with my GP about my foot injury, and am going in for an appointment on Monday. The practice is stretched very thin – I don’t blame anyone there; I blame the government for underfunding the NHS, and for taking more and more money out of it whilst lying to the public that they’re hiring more doctors and nurses than ever. And that is a lie. We’re 20k doctors light in the NHS, and we have a 50k deficit of nurses in the NHS. Hospitals are falling down due to lack of maintenance funding. The list goes on. And the personnel deficit is down to Brexit (EU nurses and doctors leaving the country), and down to the fact that NHS workers are still not getting a fair wage. The sooner we have a decent government the better. And the sooner the Labour Party stops talking rubbish like “Make Brexit Work,” the better. The UK needs to rejoin the EU if the economy is to have any chance of recovery, and if the country is to have any hope of surviving all the crises which are upon it right now.

Sleep to Greek to anxiety to cricket to politics. There’s a whole life in three paragraphs.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 161