Sick Note

Since my last post, I have done virtually no work on anything. Not this new Twelfth Night project, not my stage play, not writing practice, not even morning pages. I was off work for three days with a cold. You would think that, with all the free time, I could spare an hour here or there. But no. It was as much as I could do to put on a couple of James Bond films, and I even nodded off during those.


I haven't been reading, either. There's a stack of books on my bedside cabinet, but whenever I've picked one up I just haven't had the energy to read it.


This scared me. It was only a bit of a cold, wasn't it? And yet I had no energy to do anything, even enjoy myself.


On my last day at work, I felt bad. It was baking hot inside the building - the radiators were on full blast, nobody would open a window even a crack - but freezing outdoors. There were other problems, too, things which made me grit my teeth, clench my fists, moments of intense stupidity, when you feel like you're the last sane person on the planet. It was all I could do to stay at my post until I'd finished my shift, and even then one of my colleagues, God bless him, let me go early. The trains home were packed and stifling. I kept trying to read Feel the fear and do it anyway, but couldn't concentrate. I felt like kissing the ground when I got home to my wife.


I calmed down, bathed, changed. My wife cooked me a lovely meal and then later we watched Naked Gun 33 and a third. The Naked Gun films are sort of milestones for us. Not only do we find them hysterically funny ( even when we know which jokes are coming up ) but we're sentimentally attached to them. We saw the first Naked Gun film when we were courting, and we've seen it so often since then that I even know some of the dialogue off by heart.


My wife is more cultured than I am. She has passions for Tudor history and the paintings of Van Gogh. And yet the films we choose to see to remind us of oour early days include The Untouchables, the Lethal Weapon series and Robin Hood : Prince Of Thieves.


Even as I sat there with a blanket wrapped around me, laughing at lines such as : "Like a midget at a urinal, I knew I was gonna have to keep on my toes" I knew that I wasn't going in tomorrow.


And so three days passed. Three days when I feel like one of the homesteaders in a western murmuring feverishly by a log fire whilst the town's doctor looks over me and says : "He ain't gonna make it." On Saturday, I went back to work and very nearly walked off again. It was only until one o'clock, so I made myself stay ; but the same chaos was in place, and I dreaded to think what the week ahead was going to bring.


But I got an odd surprise. My boss, who is new, and about whom we have mixed feelings, had left me an email with a Stress Assessment form. He had spotted how anxious I was and had made the connection. I hadn't really thought of this myself - and this after years of Stress Management courses. I felt strangely uplifted by this. I was exhausted at one o'clock, and I coughed all the way home, but something made me feel good. I also nipped into the public library and borrowed two books : the complete works of Shakespeare, and Freda Warrington's unofficial Dracula sequel, Dracula : the undead. I started reading them on the trains home, and found myself enjoying them.
I'm not going to feel guilty about the writing I haven't done. I normally write a little bit each day, and there are days when you just can't force it. Things have got to be bad when I fall asleep during a Bond film, because I love those films.
But reading Twelfth Night on the way home, and then again in bed before I went to sleep, reading for pleasure, rediscovering what fiction is, what it does, I began to feel my mojo coming back.