Sometimes the very fact people are visiting this blog regularly is enough to compel me to write something a little more intimate than the humdrum mechanics of my life. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens often enough for me to wonder whether there’s a therapeutic value to this mad rambles.
Actually I’ve been surprised by just how sane this whole thing has been. Give me a pen and a piece of paper and I’ll go off-piste faster than a minor royal in Cloisters. Put a computer in front of me and I become a whole lot more constrained. Perhaps by the pressure to keep spell checker happy – perhaps by the feeble rate at which I type or maybe by the format imposed on me by MicroSoft… but it is all rather sensible.
I’m doing lots of health comparison vs. a year ago at the moment. Remembering being laid up in bed, recently biopsied and sore to my very core. I had a very John McCaine couple of weeks – unable to raise my hands above shoulder height and bristling with what felt like righteous but fading indignation. Stoking the flames of discontent has always been one of my specialties. I think, again, that this is a very British thing. Whilst the idea of Thanksgiving is absolutely alien to us (‘You mean, say – out loud - all that I’m thankful for, in front of other people? You must be taking the piss’) yet we love moaners, whingers, complainers (think Victor Meldrew, Alf Garnett) and the terminally depressed but unabashed (every feisty female in Corrie history). And I have to say I feed more on discontent than I do on optimism. There’s a real sense of possibility in the thought ‘it’s only going to get worse.’
Anyway this is going nowhere – it’s neither insightful nor amusing, making it self indulgent and that’s worse even than earnest. So I’ll head back to thinking about pharmaceutical packaging, white goods and caffeinated beverages…
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