Day 290

I made the mistake, last night, after Frozen Planet II, after BBC 2’s Hans Zimmer doco, after Stanely Tucci’s trekking round Umbria In Search Of Italy, after all that, of a) thinking about composing music again, b) wanting to be (being) Stanley Tucci (such a handsome beast), c) feeling much better and thinking I was (I had, after all, gone for an 18-minute walk earlier in the day), d) really thinking about the climate catastrophe, and therefore e) thinking extensively about work and what I’d need to do today. End result? I went to bed, couldn’t get to sleep, got up again after 10 minutes, and then pottered round the office turning everything electrical off, and then watched Match Of The Day 2 on the stick until it was much too late. I woke up with my alarm at 7 feeling correspondingly rough and tired.

‘I’m the only one who’s testing negative because I’m the only one who’s had a decent rest,’ A said at lunch time. I said M and I had been resting, too. ‘But you’ve both worked every day,’ A said. ‘Yes, but not very hard,’ I said. That’s not a rest, A told me. I suppose it’s true. And messing with this damn door (which we still haven’t fixed) hasn’t helped either, I suppose. This has always been a problem M and I have had – we just tend to try to plough on through. We’ve been like this ever since we met when we worked together – first it was doing very early morning shifts because we were instrumental in launching a breakfast information service, then it was her bringing me food in the office every night for a week because I was busy running information processing and tagging programmes on every PC (286s in those days) in the office after close of play so that we could sell the database into Europe, then it was working all hours because we owned the business, with Oscar in his car seat while we turned the living room of the house in Dunstable into an office with two desks and two PCs – the list goes on. I do sometimes ask myself what damage we’ve inflicted on ourselves and the children with that approach, but I don’t think we ever thought (ever think) we have a different option; the history of our lives is such that we had to make ourselves independent and free of those who thought they controlled us, and working really hard always seemed to be the only answer to that.

I find it vaguely amusing that my blog spelling and grammar checking hates the Oxford Comma, when I am such a stickler for it. Ridiculous – not me loving the Oxford Comma, but that there are still programmes and people out there who don’t and won’t use it.

A last word today on the disease chronicle – I have lost 4kg in weight in just over a week because of it, and that’s not healthy. The sooner I’m fixed, the better. The problem is most things still taste like cardboard. Not much fuel in the tank.

Aggie will be back this week, but not today.