May 2013 Review

When I list it all out, May looked like an active month My impression is that May sucked badly. Yet it started with a sunny and warm Bank Holiday, and ended with another one. Now if only the twenty days in between had not been grey, rainy and cold. (Mid-forties Fahrenheit at 07:00 is not warm.)

My family concluded some semi-complicated arrangements to reduce the tax bill on my Mother's estate, and the progress on my pensions crawled along slowly, this time with my own employer playing dumb about addresses and contacts. I should have done that years ago, but good financial advisors are hard to find. Sis and I had a lunchtime in Camden Lock for the first Bank Holiday Monday - photos already posted. I helped gather together some people for a colleague's 30th birthday supper at Mon Plaisir in Covent Garden, and a very pleasant evening that was. Sis and I visited Notting Hill that Saturday lunchtime and I introduced her to Books For Cooks. I visited my friend in Utrecht the next weekend, and we spent Saturday walking around Amsterdam, deciding not to stand in long queues to see the newly-refurbished Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum, opting for a wander round the Steidlijk Museum (modern and contemporary art) instead. I signed up to Air BnB and found our merry band a place in Rome for the end of June, after all of us were blown out by dozens of owners. Yet more involvement with the Internetz and Modern World. I watched series one of Homeland and Justified, Died Young, Stayed Pretty, Who The #$&% Is Jackson Pollock, and The Art of Rap on DVD; Beware of Mr Baker with the Q+A with The Man Himself, as well as Something In The Air at the Curzon Soho, and the Bernadette Corporation show at the ICA. I bought a whole bunch of books on the Kindle and three more noisy guitar band albums for the phone. I added a Creek OBH-11 headphone amp to my hi-fi toys, and just as the man who has the headphone booth in Stables Yard said, it has indeed brought a new lease of life to my Sennheiser HD580s (headphone technology seems to have reached a plateau about ten years ago when these were made. The latest 650's a different, but not better, according to the reviews). And I finally took the car into a Fiat dealership to get the funny noise seen to: this gave me the rare experience of taking the Hounslow loop train at 06:30 on the morning I left the car at the garage. 

Then came The Cold and Fever. The one that knocks me out for three days and leaves me low on the fourth and fifth. The sixth day was the second Bank Holiday. I've had five sick days this year, and it's partly due to the weather. Talk to people and they will agree that, yes, they find this endless grey depressing, and that the pollen is silly this year. My eyes stream at 06:30 in the morning and it's not from the cold. My gym routine was blown, and I'm just getting back into it. My weight is up a bit, and I am convinced that's the effect of the pollen on my metabolism, as well as The Cold and Fever. 

And it was my birthday month, which causes all sorts of stock-taking I've already done. Since then, I've loosened up a bit. Saturday now looks like my new Training and wandering Day, and I may try going in on both days. What made it feel scrappy was the cold grey weather and the pollen, which makes my eyes itch, sneeze at random and also very drowsy in the afternoon. By two o'clock I feel like the life has been drained out of me, and that despite taking glutamine before the gym. Oh yes, I've been trying the supplements. Glutamine (seems to do something), carnitine (supposed to help with fat burning, not noticing) and of course the protein powder (now and again, it does make me feel fuller). But I feel like I've fallen down a snake.