Mark is home.
It is half past seven in the evening, and I am stuffed full of dinner and as intoxicated as if I were planning to get in a taxi later.
The end of my nose has gone numb and I am very glad I am wearing dungarees, because I am feeling as rotund as poor portly Rosie is beginning to look.
This is Mark’s fault. He is a bad influence.
I am not at work. I am going to give up and go to bed soon, and I don’t even care if I have not managed to write seven hundred words to you by then. I am just recklessly drunk.
I have just discovered that we have drunk slightly more than half a bottle of wine between us. Of course neither of us has had anything alcoholic to drink for ages and ages, and hence the effect has been considerably intensified, not least because we had started on it even before the poppadoms.
Half past seven is not too early to go to bed because I had to get up in the middle of the night for the wretched hospital appointment. I set the alarm for seven, in order to take the dogs out for their traditional early-morning fell-side emptying before I left, and it was not even daylight by the time we were trudging sleepily through the woods. It was an odd sort of morning, swathed in thick mist, and very still, in the way of autumn dawns. Even the dogs felt it, and instead of capering about and barging into the beck like idiots, they trotted quietly behind me, no doubt mystified about why we had got out of bed and gone for a walk in the middle of the night.
After that I flapped about and got ready to go, and it turned out that I had plenty of time, so I did not need to rush, so I wrote a bit more of my story whilst I was eating my porridge.
I have not been to Penrith for years and years, and when I got there I remembered why. It is considerably bigger that Windermere, but gave the impression of a town filled with charity shops, betting shops and pawn shops, which is not unusual in the north of Cumbria.
The hospital was the sort of place that would qualify as a doctor’s surgery in somewhere like Manchester. I spent ages circling around trying to find somewhere to park, but all of the car parks said Disc Parking Only. In the end I went in and asked the receptionist what to do, and she smiled and said chirpily: Oh, just park anywhere. Nobody cares about discs, so I did, and indeed it appeared that she was right.
It was tiny, smaller even than Kendal hospital, and I waited for about fifteen minutes. Nurses kept coming through, smiling cheerily and saying to the six of us in the waiting room: Would anybody like an X Ray? until I wondered if I ought to say Yes, just to keep them occupied for a while.
The nurse made me fill in a form about headaches. I get shocking headaches, and had no idea that these would interest the neurologist, so I filled it in enthusiastically, but when I got in she said: Oh, I don’t want to know about headaches, that isn’t why your GP has sent you, and put it in the waste paper basket.
She wanted to look at one of my eyes that is inexplicably closing, which she did, without much interest, and then asked me where the results of my blood tests were. Since I had not had any blood tests I could not be of very much assistance, and she sighed, and explained that she could not make a diagnosis without blood tests, but probably I was all right, and so I was to go back to my GP and ask for another appointment when I had had some blood tests.
I have been on the waiting list for this appointment for two years now.
Since I don’t really think that there is anything wrong, apart from an excess of elderly wrinkliness, I was not troubled by this. It was the GP who looked at my closing eye and decreed that it could be something neurological, and that I must visit a neurologist as soon as Cumbria managed to employ one.
I agreed humbly that I would explain to the GP that I needed a blood test and drove home, where I spent the rest of the afternoon painting Advent calendars.
Until Mark came home, that is.
Then I got drunk.
