Impressions of Insanity

Impressions

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Thursday, March 08, 2001

22:39

I'm so pleased I finally worked out that the music being used on the Direct Line mortgage advert was originally used as the title music for the Paul Merton Show on BBC2. At least that's where I first heard it. Can't forget that bloke with the rubber dolphin for a head.

Off to Cornwall tomorrow. No updates for a few days. I'm perfectly sure you'll live.

Tuesday, March 06, 2001

17:19

15:53

Why does this thing keep eating my archive files?

15:16

Why is it that, when cleaning Percival, all the oil and grime ends up on me and not in the bucket or on the ground? Hmm? Still, he's all clean and shiny now, although I didn't do a complete strip of the transmission. Hopefully he'll be mollified somewhat and will start speaking to me again and stop sulking. His gears just don't work properly when he's sulking.

13:07

Lot of pain today. Lot of it. Bad dreams last night - more of them. Nothing detailed enough for me to relate here, necessarily, although enough remembered to make me go looking for further information. Just dreams? Maybe. I'm not saying that they're not. But it's an issue of interest to see if anything in them corresponds with anything outside of them. Gym schedule is due to move up to four times a week this week, so I'm just working up the energy to go today for a cardio and lower body session. I'm terribly, terribly tired, though, and the pain is very bad. It's very tempting to stay home this afternoon, do a bit of work on my novel (the recent one), strip down the transmission on Percival and clean it, and maybe do some baking. Domestic, useful things that don't involve dripping all over the floor. There is the option not to up the schedule this week, as I'm going to Cornwall on Friday and that means consecutive days until Friday morning, and up it next week when I'll be able to phase it in more gradually. That would mean just the two consecutive days - Wednesday and Thursday. Still feeling pressured though. All my close friends are on a gym kick now, and there's this feeling of competition that is just silly.

The problem is, I think, that I can't accept that I have an illness that means I can't do the things I think I should be able to. I'm getting competitive with Andy - sibling rivalry there - and not only does he not have FMS (or whatever it is), he's a bloke, and a big one at that. Doesn't stop me feeling I ought to be able to be at least as strong as him (I'm so jealous about those squats) and have as much stamina as him. When I'm in the gym, I see women who have the sort of athletic body and endurance that I would like to have and it is frustrating to the point of reducing me to tears that I can't do what I want to do to be like that as well. I push too hard, do too much, in an attempt to compensate for weakness in my body, and I'm probably going about it in entirely the wrong way.

So every day I feel this urge, this need to get to the gym, get fit, get stronger, get better, and I don't know whether I'm doing the right thing or whether I am over doing it or what. Today, with the pain I have and my right shoulder seized up and incredibly sore, I'm willing to concede that maybe I'm overdoing it a little bit, but I still can't countenance the idea of doing any less. I think the whole thing is getting out of hand. How stupid is it to be jealous of Andy being able to max out the squat machine when we don't even have a squat machine?

Monday, March 05, 2001

12:17

The other big excitement at the weekend was the car. Frood went off to do the laundry first thing Sunday, but when he got there discovered that he didn't have the change for the machines. So he came back. When he went out to go a second time, the car wouldn't start. At all. There was a brief fluster of activity while we tried to determine whether it was the battery, the electrics, or the starter motor - without the use of a multi-meter. Finally, Andy helped us push start it (I'm very good at being the driver in a push start) and we drove down to Halfords, as it's open on a Sunday. The man came out and tested the battery for us. The machine said "replace battery", so we bought a new one and Andy put it in while Frood pretended o try to electrocute him and I sat shivering in the front seat. Thankfully it was just the battery and not anything more serious. Good old Voltaire, obviously getting his break down out of the way before we go to Cornwall.

11:59

Hooray! My Blowzabella CD has arrived. And it looks like I ordered it just in time. The waiting list has gone up again. It's brilliant, because the only copy I had before was a 3rd generation copy, and the sound quality was abysmal. And now I get to find out what all the tracks are called and I get to skip through the ones with Loreena McKennit. Bargain!

Made my own muesli at the weekend. The foot and mouth thing has been getting me into a severe downer on supermarkets and the convenience culture. Besides, nearly all proprietary brand mueslis have hazelnuts in them which means I have to wash my mouth out before I can snog Frood. No good at all. It's quite good, this one I've made. Couldn't tell you what the recipe is, other than that I stick some of each ingredient in until it looks right. I put in too many toasted hemp seeds though, I reckon. I doubled through the other ingredients this morning, and it's much better now than it was yesterday, but it's still got a hefty whack of toasted hemp seed flavour in it. And the husks get stuck in your teeth. Would be jolly nice with some fresh raspberries and goat's milk yoghurt, though. It's completely unsweetened. I was a bit concerned I wouldn't like it as much because of the lack of sweetening, but I have found that it just doesn't need sweetening, and the flavours of all the different things come through very well.

In case you're interested, the ingredients (all organic) are:

Small oats
Bran
Spelt
Dried apricots (chopped)
Raisins
Sunflower seeds
Bashed walnuts
Toasted hemp seeds

Oh cool. This Blowzabella CD has credits for the people who made the instruments, and the hurdy gurdy maker is the player's brother (or sister, its only an initial).

Weird dreams last night, and I woke up more stiff and sore than I have in a couple of days. I remember that there were a group of us on the boat, including E, and a fat American bloke. We were actually heading home after a very tiring mission (the details of which are currently beyond me) and I had reluctantly given up the helm to someone else because I was about ready to drop and had been told that I was needed for something below.

When I came back up the scenery was familiar but it was wrong. To my horror, we had gone straight past the loch were we were suppose to turn in to go back to the mooring and had sailed right into enemy territory. I shoved whoever it was away from the helm and tried to figure out how far we had come. It had been a very long time since I sailed those waters. Comparing the chart to landmarks I worked out that we were in deep trouble, basically, and we were going to have to bluff it if we were spotted.

We were, of course, and ended up in a tactical race. Thankfully the enemy hadn't been in place for very long and my youthful memories knew more about that part of the sea than they did, so I managed to hide us, taking the boat into a disused defence emplacement. All bar one of us went on to this man-made rock of an island, more like a fat lighthouse than anything else, as we thought we had better take the opportunity to check it out.

It was like a maze in there, full of gantries and narrow corridors and narrower stairwells. Some of them were carved roughly out of the rock. E and I managed to get ourselves alone and quickly confirmed our respective fears that the fat American was a double agent. This was confirmed when we discovered he had been following us, at a slight distance, leaving a paper trail so that he could find his way back to where he was supposed to meet the others. We were his targets, more than any of the others. It did seem odd that our assassin/putative nemesis should be someone who was apparently so headblind he couldn't track 5 living pattern signals in a dead space, but that's what he was.

We doubled back, avoiding him easily because we are not headblind, and picked up his paper trail. We were actually very close to him and E and I were holding our hands over our mouths and trying not to giggle like a couple of schoolgirls as we stuffed his paper into our pockets and heard him cursing quietly, sometimes only 8 feet away around a corner.

Then we let him catch up with us, just to confirm his intent. He backed me into the top of a stairwell. The stairs were wire mesh, the stairwell narrow and it was a long drop into inky blackness. Cold came up from below, damp, like the breath of a ghost climbing out of his grave on a winter's night. E allowed herself to be left behind the door to the stairwell, so the fat American would feel able to make an attempt on my life, free from witnesses who could gainsay that it was anything other than a tragic accident. That was when his smile turned cold and reptilian. He got a glint in his eye, but being headblind didn't realise that he had been set up, nor that I could read his every intent as clearly as if I had a head-up display wired to display his thoughts.

He tried to push me over but I twisted just so and he went over the railing. I didn't hear a soft, thudding impact for several seconds, and it was very quiet when it did come.

Of course, we still had to get back into safe waters, so we decided to shadow a big cargo ship that passed by, hoping that no one would notice us so close to the side. That was scary. I really thought we were going to be crushed because boats like that are slow to respond, not like these river jet things. Every movement has a built-in delay and you must account for that.
I kept thinking that it didn't matter if we were seen or not, I was going to get us crushed against this monstrosity of a cargo ship. The hull was a rust red, not unlike the colour of anti-fouling, and it was a good 30m or more to the top deck. I couldn't tell how long she was.

We weren't crushed, and we weren't spotted, and later on that night we sat on the mooring eating beans and corned beef and potatoes, with white wine, chilled in the sea, drunk out of plastic glasses. The stars were very clear and the phosphorescence was gorgeous.

I have to say, though, experiencing hours and days of (stressful and adventurous) living while one's asleep doesn't make for a restful night. Maybe Andy is right - old before my time, but only because two thirds of my life is lived while I'm supposed to be asleep. Man, I'm tired.