February 2014 Review

I was doing fine right up to Saturday 8th. I got food poisoning. I don’t know what happens when you get food poisoning, but I lost three kilos. Also a night’s sleep. For at least twelve hours I wondered if I would ever be well again. It’s very, very noisy. You do not want the details. All I could do Sunday was drink very small amounts of Dioralyte. I was back at work on Tuesday. I missed Spin class. That was it.

I got a cold on the evening of the 25th. When you get a cold, it creeps up on you, and you spend two weeks being pathetically sniffy and a bit slow. That’s because you have a lousy immune system that can’t get rid of the virus. Step inside my body. At 20:00 I was okay - a little burpy, but that can happen. At 22:00 I was ready to fall asleep, and at 23:00 I was sitting up in bed because my stomach was churning and I was hot and couldn’t breath well if I lay down. You don’t want the recordings of me coughing and retching at 01:00 in the morning, and I’m pretty sure the neighbours didn’t want to hear it either.

When viruses land in your body, you have no beach or air defences worth a damn, and a few guys with pitchforks to fight them off. The virus lands, takes possession and stays there until it gets bored and moves on. When it lands on me, IF it gets past the beach defences and the anti-aircraft missiles, there’s a kinetic response. Drones are launched to provide reconnaissance data. Special forces track the the virus, ready to light it up with lasers. There’s a naval bombardment of Cruise missiles lasting about forty minutes. Every one of those things hits home. Then there’s two hours of air strikes by B2s, F117s and A10’s. The follow the armour and infantry. All this gives me a huge fever. I can’t lie still, sit still, stay awake, fall asleep, or even breathe much. By 04:00, it’s all over. The fever breaks and the virus is DEAD. Expelled. Burned. Trashed. I get a short break while the bodies are burned and the enemy materiel is taken into stores. Then the engineers move in. There is a throat to be soothed, a stomach to be fed - carefully - ribs to be relaxed after all the retching, sleep to be caught up on and waste material to be removed.

I was back at work Thursday 28th. I missed Yoga that evening. That’s all. You would still be whinging about not feeling up to it.

Also, I spent way too long reading Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology by Tamar Szabo Gendler, which I will discuss in an Amazon review at some point. I made good progress with the Comte de Lautremont’s Maldoror, until the fever put a stop to it and gave it some bad associations which will wear off after a while.

So here’s the inventory: I saw Out of the Furnace, Dallas Buyers Club and Monuments Men at Cineworld, Rough Cut on Curzon Online, Only Lovers Left Alive at the Curzon Soho, and Everybody Street at the ICA. Plus some jazz documentaries on You Tube. I saw the Pina Bausch 1980 at Sadlers Wells.

Sis and I had supper at Les Deux Salons, and my friend from Utrecht and I had a pizza at Jamie’s in Richmond and supper at Picture.

I upgraded my iPhone 4S to iOS7 (slow, I know), and my Mountain Lion Air and Snow Leopard MacBook Pro to Mavericks, getting an extra 2GB of RAM in the Pro first. Thanks Mr Cook, I now have two up-to-date Macs. I tried Ubuntu 12.04 on my Asus, which worked okay, but guys! It gave me an error message when I tried to install Chrome. That’s just bad packaging. No. Stop it. I’d love to move to a Linux, but I don’t want to get involved with OS clutter like that.

I had the kitchen planners in to measure up, mutter and give me a quote, which I’ve thought about and will accept as soon as I feel clear enough in the head to trust myself. And I ordered half-a-dozen A1 picture frames, which turned out to be a bit of drama, resolved by the driver offering to leave them in my garden shed.

The advantage of an inventory is that it can dispel the feeling that “last month really sucked, and I was sick all the time”. I wasn’t. I missed one Spin class, one Yoga class and one weight-training session. That’s it. Everything else got done.