I am just reaching the final tail-end of the tiresome migraine.
It has been mercifully short, and it is ebbing peacefully away with every passing hour, helped along, I should add, by maximum-dose painkillers.
I have got no scruples whatsoever about the use of these, I have never understood the approach of valiant suffering-in-silence. Whinge a lot and take a bucketful of drugs has been my method of dealing with pain, and actually today it has worked fairly effectively. I have finally managed to banish the worst of this one, apart from during those tiresome interludes when the last handful of drugs has begun to wear off but the new ones have failed to make the energetic leap into their place.
Almost as tiresome as the pain is the peculiar confused dizzy sensation that accompanies the headache, where the world seems to be moving at a speed not quite commensurate with the rotation of my eyeballs. Everything becomes oddly unfocused and distant, as though I am watching a film made in the nineteen sixties which is being played at slightly the wrong speed.
It has made for a difficult sort of day, especially since it is Monday, and has been Clean Sheets Day. I was so distracted this morning that I couldn’t quite wake up from my peculiar dream even though I had got dressed and cleaned my teeth, and I forgot all about the sheets.
I had been dreaming that I was staying in an hotel and thought I was getting in the lift. The lift turned out to be a train and instead of taking me back to my nice hotel bedroom, it whisked me off to somewhere rural and unexpected, so that I could not quite work out where I was nor how I might get back again. It was a pleasant journey, the hotel had courteously laid on boxes of chocolates for the passengers, but it was rather puzzling and anxious all the same, and it refused to be shaken off even though the dogs had bounded into the bedroom and put their paws on the bed and sneezed in my ear.
When Mark is at home we start the day with cups of coffee, which is much gentler and more civilised, even if it does mean wasting a whole hour of day in idle loafing about.
I had to rush back upstairs when I remembered the sheets.
Fortunately the sun shone, and they dried beautifully, much to my massive relief, nothing is more tiresome than a wet Monday and damp sheets dangling about everywhere. Better still, we had a warm and tranquilly undisturbed walk. The fells are covered in wildflowers, and bees were buzzing comfortably among them with that glorious fat, lazy hum of summer.
There were no tourists, which was a secret relief. Tourists can be infuriatingly noisy on the fells, especially in the school holidays.
When we got back I did all of the usual Monday things, like dusting, which is still a thing even on sunny Mondays, because I do not want to put crisply fresh sheets in to a dusty bedroom. That would make me a Slovenly Housewife, and although I do it sometimes I do not tell anybody, but eventually I had finished, and was finally free to dash outside to carry on putting moss around the arches in the garden.
They are almost finished. If I concentrate really hard I might even get them done tomorrow, although I might not because really I ought to go and make some ethical purchases in Booths. Today I was wrapping the last legs with strips of old sheet and compost, which you might remember is forming the base on to which I am trying to stick the moss.
When I ran out of compost I just used soil, and it has rained so much lately that really it was mud.
I got very muddy indeed. Imagine trying to plaster mud on to an unevenly rounded surface several feet above your head whilst balancing on a precariously wobbly stool and you will have a good idea. There was gritty mud in my hair and in my pockets, smeared into my eyebrows and, I discovered later, all down the front of my T shirt and in my underwear.
It involved a lot of clinging on and swearing, much to the interested amusement of passing tourists.
I had to scrub my toenails as well as my fingernails before I went to work.
I am in bed now, scrubbed and fresh, between garden-smelling clean sheets, headache retreated to a vague echo somewhere behind my ear, and feeling rather glad that it is over for the day.
With any luck I will finish the arches tomorrow.
I hope so. I have had enough of mud.
