“Has every day this week felt like it’s lasted 15 hours?” Asked a colleague as we exited the building the first working Friday of the year. Yes it did.
It’s been so cold this month that just getting through the day was enough. At this time of year, the animals are more sensible than us: burrow deep, stay warm. (You want to find a gene that will unlock all the bigger workings of the genome? Find the hibernation gene.)
I hit my seventh (!) session of sports massage at Sports Massage Zone on Throgmorton St. Before Christmas I decided to get the aches, tension and accumulated abuse out of my legs. Whereas you get tense shoulders and back, I know enough not to do that, but I take it out on my legs instead. I had ropey muscles where you don’t even know you have muscles, and the wonderful Maggie has been digging her elbows into all of it. I’m getting there, but it’s painful. And slow. And undoing many, many years of bad habits.
I watched Burn Notice S7 and Inspector de Luca on DVD; Birdman, Whiplash and Wild at the Curzon Soho; Foxcatcher and American Sniper at Cineworld.
I read Philip Kerr’s A German Requim, Elmore Leonard’s Swag, John Bude’s The Cornish Coast Murder, Stanislaw Lem’s The Investigation, Hubert Dreyfus’ Skillful Coping, and the first half of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind.
Saturday lunchtimes, I cooked: Kidneys Turbigo; Ragout of lamb with borlotti beans; Liver venetian. And Sis and I ate at Herefordroad in Bayswater.
Despite all this activity, I’m still haunted by a sense of inactivity. I need to revise my CV and LinkedIn, but just can’t get worked up enough about it. And there’s a mysterious patch on the kitchen wall I really need to talk to the insurance company about.
February is going to be just as cold. And I haven’t bought any tickets for the Sadlers Wells Flamenco festival, which will be the first time in about eight years that I haven’t gone. But then again: do you know how much sports massage costs?
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