The big plans for la vita nuova had to go on hold, briefly. After I left work I had to fast for three days. I don’t remember ever having been so hungry. I get very tetchy when I’m hungry, very tetchy indeed. I’ve never eaten at set times, just when I’m hungry – always have done. So ignoring the screaming in every cell for nutrition was almost as bad as having to ignore the obligatory screaming child on any Great Western train journey. The result of this preoccupation meant that instead of focusing my new found freedom on spinning out masterpieces or pestering agents, I was unable to do anything other than sit around the house working my way through an entire season of Battlestar Galactica whilst drinking water and more soup than I ever want to see again.
This fasting was not self enforced, though it was a choice, of sorts. I had a hospital appointment on Thursday that I’d been stressing over since late last year, quietly lingering in the background, permeating the anxiety behind every little catastrophe and crisis as all insidious coups to order begin. I found out only after the appointment that the sedation they gave me is from the same family as rohypnol. It’s a weird experience knowing that I was conscious and responsive for half an hour, but have absolutely zero recollection of it. There’s this gap between the doctor telling me he was now administering the sedative, and suddenly ‘waking up’ back on the ward, all hazy like a hangover without the headache. I’ve never had amnesia before, unless you count that time I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at the cinema of course, but that was self-induced.
But, I’m not dead yet. I don’t have cancer (this is a Good Thing™), despite the recent alarming symptoms and its growing momentum as a fashionable way of bowing out in my family as of late. The news wasn’t a great surprise as I didn’t really expect to have it, but what with so many of my family recently, well, sort of dying, my doctor agreed that it was best to get it checked out. As is always the case with my medical melodramas, I was naturally absolutely fine, and they could provide no explanation for my earlier malady. Typical, always happens. Power of the Slayer an’ all that. I’m a medical freak, and I’m not talking about the two hearts and respiratory bypass system (though that did briefly baffle the nurse who was measuring my pulse rate). Just in case however, I had already (and finally) decided on what my last words would be: “Patrick Wolf doesn’t wear any pants.” Ha, I knew it.
But look at these! Look at my little babies:
I feel like a mother blackbird, gently nudging her offspring towards the edge of the nest, anxiously waiting to see if they’ll sink or soar; or a wartime factory owner, surveying his new arsenal of bombs ready to be dropped over some unsuspecting country. I think I prefer the blackbird metaphor, but there’s a quiet potency in the latter about the sheer psychological weight of what I’m about to release into the world.
2007 is The Year. This Is A War, and though I hate ever having to be dependent on anyone, the last few days are just another in a long line of few days that I couldn’t have got through without the tireless love and support of my friends. The Battle Of The Ninety Pages will surely turn the tide one way or another.
If this comes off you’ll have to change the name of the blog.
The boy who could – and did.