Sickness

So, I spent four days running back and forth from the toilet, appalled by the pain of my increasing chafed flesh and sickened by my inability to turn innocent food into rounded nuggets of turdism, instead firing out liquid napalm which tested the strength of the enamel.

Times like these make you question whether the good lord, in his doubtful existence, is on your side. I was pretty much sure by day four that neither Krishna, Mohammed, Jehovah or Budha had my back. Still on the plus side, I was fairly confident that I could blind them with a mist of excrement before hobbling off cursing about cheap toilet paper and raging against the decline of moral standards in both their followers and wider society.

I am one of those annoying people that delight in telling other people that “I never really get ill”. I usually follow this with the time honoured ritual of touching wood, but essentially it’s true. I do not get sick. I refuse to let the little sniffles and minor headaches that push some of my comrades into bed, get me down. I soldier on through blocked nose, earache and sore throat, because that, in my belief is the best way forward. Refuse to acknowledge your human weakness, keep your mind steely and as if by magic, symptoms that seemed taxing, but an hour before, simply drift away in the higher business of pushing things forward. As such, it was a great surprise to me to get laid up in bed for four days this time. It made me think about a great many things. It made me contemplate the nature of age, the possibility of death. Most of all, it made me miss having someone around to give my manly ego sympathy and to supply me with fresh hot water bottles and bowls of steaming chicken soup.

I got ill because of a virilent little virus going around, but also I guess because I was over-working myself in the race to secure some big tenders in the run up to the big jump-off. Work, in and outside of the office has been manic of late and one too many, stay up late drinking cups of tea and proofing a proposal kind of evenings sent my immune system crashing down lower than I kept having to reach to plug in and unplug my usb key. There are lessons in that. Lessons to be learnt to stay well. Bran to be eaten to stay regular. Perhaps most significantly of all though, there are things I need to think about still further. Meditations from days of work-shirking, sofa shivering and toilet frequenting that need more pondering. I feel a shift in the mental firmament again, and that can only be an interesting thing.