April 2003

Where are we? Oh yes, Tuesday. That’s right. I’m all kinda thrown because Sunday, usually a day of surreptitious shopping and pretending to be working, miraculously turned into a day of rest. Yes, that’s right, sitting down somewhere that was not in front of a computer.
By the time Fflwff had dragged me out of bed, the electricity had gone off, and it didn’t come back again until 7pm. Initially, I was at a loss. What would I do? I’d have a nice shower… Oh no, can’t. Um, OK, bath instead. Then I thought I’d kill some time until I could get on the internet by doing something constructive, like ironing. Oh, wait, that’s out too. Well, I really do need to dyson the flat… OK, starting to see a pattern here.
I must admit, I had started to feel a bit twitchy by lunchtime, and actually ended up leaving the house and going to Tescos, where they had electricity but no internet. I had hoped that this masterstroke of timekilling strategy would end with me returning home, laden with goodies, only to find the electricity back and my computer ready and waiting to go online.
It didn’t.
So I faffed.
I rang people I haven’t spoken to in years.
I rang people I’d spoken to last week.
I rediscovered the lost art of reading, devouring most of the New Scientist in one hit. (It lands on my mat every Thursday, and I never have time to read it all. Plus I have several months worth of Scientific American still untouched by human hands).
I fed the cat. Several times. I played with the cat. I let the cat out. I let the cat back in again.
I stared at the heaps of paperwork on my desk and contemplated sorting them out, but found that particular activity quite easy to resist.
I opened the front door and wandered round the garden, killing approximately 28 seconds. (It’s a small garden.)
I flicked through the guide book to South Australia that I bought on Saturday.
I kicked myself for going into town to buy a guide book to South Australia on Saturday instead working because I had assumed I could do it on Sunday.
I kept thinking, oh, well, spare time, I’ll just put the TV on…
The silence was positively deafening.
Obviously I wasn’t the only one faffing, as mid-afternoon, two fire engines came screaming into the close, only to park up and sit bemusedly for five minutes before screaming off into the far distance again. I suspect little Johnny downstream was bored and thought that calling 999 would be a fun jape.
Then… suddenly and without warning, the lounge light came on at about 6.30pm and scared the bejeesus out of me. I’m not quite sure about the mechanism for that – how can something you’re expecting to happen any minute still make you jump? I get that with phone calls, when you ring someone up and they do the ‘Oh, I’ll call you back in a moment’ thing and you put the phone down and a few moments later they ring back and I leap out of my chair like some evil dead zombie dripping blood and gore has just materialised in front of me.
Um, anyway, yes, the lights came back on. And then went off again. And came back on again… For about 10 minutes. I think someone was trying to communicate something really very important in Morse, but unfortunately the only Morse I have is the beebs and bips at the beginning of Barrington Pheloung’s Inspector Morse theme tune, which I could sing to you but not translate.
I prefer to think that it was Douglas Adams telling me that he was right about 42, and forget about the towels.
The thing that surprised me though, apart from the sudden brightness, was how noisy my house is. My cordless phone was bleating like an orphaned lamb, the microwave tooted, the fridge and freezer started humming, the thermostat was clicking like an old granny going for the World Speed Knitting record and the video started whirring like, well a whirry thing.
I think I preferred it when it was quiet.
So, I had my internet and email back, the thing I’d been craving all day, the thing whose absence had caused me jitters and chronic withdrawal anxiety, and guess what? No emails. No private messages. And sweet fanny adams in terms of anything interesting online whatsoever. All that waiting for precisely nothing.
When they launch the Twelve Steps for Internet Dependency, I’m gonna be there. But don't worry. I'll blog about it.

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These are some of the first coherent thoughts to form in my head all day which don’t involve the phrases ‘but it hurts’ or ‘am I going to throw up?’. I spent most of the morning holding my head on with one hand as my migraine blossomed. I’m lucky, I only get them about once or twice a year and usually they don’t involve pain and vomiting – they’re what are called ‘aura only’ migraines, i.e. I just go blind for an hour or so, and then it all clears up and goes away.
Today, for some reason, my migraine started in my right eye (usually it’s my left) and then the pain kinda roved across my face like a tribe of nomads, then up over the left-hand part of my head which I had to then cling on to in order to prevent it from dropping off. I never can figure out why I have to do this, but every time I get a bad headache, I just have to clutch at my head like a crone going after a rat.
After several hours of laying a-bed and not vomiting (quite an achievement, I felt), I finally managed to get one of my icepacks and apply it appropriately.
Which always begs the question – which part of the body is it, exactly, for which these icepacks are designed? They’re long, they’re flat and they don’t bend well. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m mainly built of curves – flat planes are few and far between on me, especially in the head/neck/shoulder area to which these ice pack are usually applied.
Why not make these things curvy and flexible? In fact, why not make them head-shaped or scarf-ishly bendable? That way I would be saved from a) having to wrap the icepack in a thin towel (ok, a teatowel) in order to tie it round my neck or b) trying to sit bolt upright and balancing the thing on my head. To make them as hats, or scarves, would be much more user friendly.
My other quibble is the ignorance of certain doctors as regards the medical issues surrounding migraines. One in ten people get migraines. That’s 10% of the population. That’s six million people, for any doctors reading this who are too stupid to add up.
That’s a lot of people.
Last November I had a rough weekend which featured two migraines and the arrival of a new symptom for me – my skin went numb. Naturally, not being then as well read about migraines as I am now, I decided it would be wise to get it checked out as it’s not every day I lose feeling in my skin. I was struck, however, by the total absence of knowledge displayed by my supposedly well informed doctor. Our conversation went something like:
“I had two migraines over the weekend.”
“Huh.”
“Well, I don’t normally get two together.”
“Huh.”
“They were just aura migraines though, but now I can’t feel my face properly.”
“Huh?”
“Or my arms, or my legs. Or, in fact, any bit of me.”
“Huh.”
“Although there is a sort of strange tingliness to the numbness.”
“Huh.”
“So…”
“Well, if it doesn’t clear up in a week, come back to me.”
And this is what I pay my taxes for? So some jumped-up arrogant jerk can patronise me and fob me off with some pointless platitude in order to cover up her own ignorance? I mean, it’s not like I’m expecting her to wave a magic wand and cure me, but a bit of info would be nice. Instead, I went home and looked it up on the internet, which is what I should have done in the first place, and found out that such symptoms can occur, and are relatively normal and will in fact go away eventually (5 days in my case).
The quack could have told me that though, but she didn’t know. Hell, from the expression on her face it was perfectly clear she had no idea what ‘aura’ was either (that’s the visual disturbances you get as a migraine starts – the flashing lights etc. that essentially stop you seeing a damn thing).
But I do believe that everyone, especially that particular doctor, should have at least one storming migraine, so that they can understand what they are like and how crippling they can be. I would dearly like for her to have one like my first, when I was sixteen. One that involves going almost completely blind, not being able to see your hand in front of your face, not being able to walk through your house because you keep bumping into things that you can’t see. One that involves vomiting chocolate cake down the stairs in a somewhat unpleasant waterfall (vomitfall?), retching so hard that your eyes go black with the prickling bruises of broken blood vessels. One that involves curling up foetally under the duvet in a blacked-out room, unable to cry with pain because there’s too much of it, but able, just, to whimper plaintively “Bring me some painkillers.”
To which I would, of course, reply: “Huh?”
Anyway, that shagged my whole day really. So tomorrow is catch-up day. It would be nice to have a good clean start – put this whole week behind me. Not that nice things haven’t happened this week – I have had a few particularly pleasant experiences such as a phone call to Australia that I shall be grinning about for weeks to come yet. But it has been a frustrating week full of not really getting down to work in any serious manner, not really making the progress I would have liked to have made considering the amount of work to be done.
So I think I might redesignate today the official end of the week, which means that Saturday is now essentially Monday so if I work tomorrow I’ll have Tuesday off which will be Sunday and then next weekend start with Saturday on Thursday unfortunately meaning that I will need Monday and Tuesday off on Saturday and Sunday so I can have the weekend free to go to Dorset.
Makes perfect sense to me.

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I've just realised that I've been sitting at this computer solidly for twelve hours now. No wonder I feel like seven shades of shite.
I really don't know what came over me this morning, but at 5.50am I woke up. Not in that 'ooh, I'll just turn over and go back to sleep’ way, but in that kind of over-alert, over-awake way where after a few minutes of trying to get back to sleep you realise the futility of it all, and just get up. You know how it is, when the sunlight’s seeped through your skull and your pineal gland is screaming for breakfast.
So I got up and did 45 mins of Pilates which resulted in a strained muscle (that’s good! I wasn’t aware I had any!) and a feeling of virtuousness that lasted till, oh, as soon as I turned MSN on at about 12.30.
Anyway, I was surfing by 6.45am, and working by 7.45am. And I’m really not sure why…
Now then… where's that canopic jar?

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Ever tried writing in Welsh after nothing more than half a panini for lunch and far too many Pimms? It gets really tricky after a while. My ‘rhag ofn’s were getting all confused with my ‘rhagor’s. Or maybe it’s just me. Feck, that’s what my translator is for, to fix my typos.
Still, today has been a good day, as birthdays go. People didn’t forget, which is always nice. I had a phone call from my parents who are off gallivanting in Lanzarote. I thought they might call, but they caught me off guard by doing it twelve hours earlier than I expected. Rotters.
I also got four of the CDs I’ve been craving ownership of
– Aqualung’s Aqualung: Matt Hales’s sweet heartbroken voice could make an angel weep
– The Libertines’ Up the Bracket: featuring the best ‘fuck ‘em’ in modern music.
– The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World: James Mercer’s surreal lyrics and pop sensibilities make this a truly wondrous album
– Hot Hot Heat’s Make Up The Breakdown: to say that Hot Hot Heat are Very Very Good, is somewhat of an understatement
I am also now the very proud and excited owner of the Pleasantville DVD. Number Six! Oh yes!! Tonight, once I’ve had my gourmet pasta and the first strawberries and clotted cream of the year, I shall rearrange my furniture in that ritualistic manner to which I have become accustomed, and I shall allow myself to be totally spirited away. I read the script a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been yearning to see the flick ever since. It was a great read – just came to life immediately in my head as I read, in stark contrast to, say, The Ice Storm at the end of which I was left thinking ‘Eh?’.
It’s been unseasonably hot today as well, and I feel with the very moment of my birth rapidly approaching (about 10pm-ish, apparently) that this coming year will be one of huge opportunities, including the chance to tip my life upside down, shake it a bit, and see what interesting things fall out. I haven’t done that for a while, and a birthday is a good opportunity being, as it is, the anniversary of one’s very first Big Shake Up.
This day 32 years ago, in The Firs Maternity Home in Bournemouth, the midwife wrapped a squalling me in a blanket, handed me to my mother and said, ‘Mrs Charman, a beautiful baby girl’. To which my mother replied, ‘Are you sure?’.
Apparently, they’d been expecting a boy, as boys ‘run in the family’. True enough, my brother’s a boy, and so’s my dad. Anyway, they were going to call me Mark, and they had boy’s clothing ready for me, so when I turned up, three weeks early and the wrong gender, my dad had to make a dash for the shops to buy something pink.
Pity they didn’t know at that time that I hate pink. But then, I didn’t know at that time either, so I guess it was a moot point.
Birthdays are good for nice surprises. And I’ve had several today, one of which was quite astonishing. My friend Kate and I had been lamenting only this afternoon about the fact that neither of us had heard in a long time from our American friend JD in a year or more. And what should pop up in my inbox this afternoon but an email from the very same! How’s that for coincidence?
Anyway… I think may be rambling a little, and it’s time for my weekly phone call to Nic so that I can practise my spoken Welsh, so I shall post this, and let you go. But not before I say thank you for the happy birthday to everyone who emailed, PMd, posted and sent me stuff. You’re all adorable!

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Today has been one of those days. I woke at 12.45am with this amazingly loud ringing in my left ear, as if a tuning fork had suddenly materialised in my Eustachian tube. Two hours of laying there trying to back to sleep later and I figured out that I may as well get up and do something useful. So I spent a happy hour or so typesetting until my eyelids were resting on the keyboard. I got back to bed about 3.45am ish.
Hence today has been a vacant day. Mondays are bad at the best of times, just because of the way my week works. Mondays I write the Welsh language worksheet that’s to go out the following week to Get Fluent! subscribers. Sometimes they come out easily, sometimes I find that I would rather be retching my guts up into toilet bowl than be sat in front of this computer writing grammar exercises and reading comprehensions.
Today, I would rather have gnawed my own leg off than try to tackle writing a worksheet. I think I actually spent more time reading Neil Gaiman’s blog and playing on Sweet Addy than I did doing any actual work. I think I got maybe a third of the worksheet done, which pisses me off mightily, because I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday working in order that today I might gain some ground and therefore be able to take tomorrow off. Well, I shouldn’t have bothered because any time I made up yesterday I lost today.
Which means tomorrow morning, the first thing I have to do, after I’ve opened the alluringly mysterious CD-sized packages that have lit upon my doormat over the last few days, is finish that damn worksheet.
Arse.
/rant

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