I have got a headache.
It has been lurking around at the back of my neck and behind my eyes for a day or two, and this morning it exploded into life with a full firework display to announce its manifestation, like the evil genie in the pantomime.
I have put on a warm scarf and taken twice the recommended quantity of drugs and by these means have banished it to squat sulkily beneath my left ear.
It is there now, fidgeting restlessly and grumbling resentfully and breathing its icy breath down the back of my neck, and trying to squeeze my eyes shut.
Of course the presence of a headache does not provide a decent excuse for not doing anything else. There is, for instance, nobody whom I could telephone and merrily advise of my unfitness to work. It would be jolly handy to have a person who would very thoughtfully provide me with an income anyway in order that I could lie in a darkened room and feel sorry for myself.
I wouldn’t want that really. I would have to turn up every day when they said so instead of just when I felt like it. Also if I got bored I wouldn’t just be able to go home. Worse, they would expect me to give them the money that I made and only give me back what they thought they could get away with.
They could jolly well buzz off.
I only feel the lack of that person when I don’t want to go to work.
In consequence of this tiresome absence I supposed that I might just as well get on with the day as usual.
I wasn’t very good at it.
I fully intended to do my tax returns today, today, along with painting the bedroom, but was so busily engaged in subduing the headache that somehow I just didn’t.
On reflection now I don’t quite know what I did do, really, except that it occupied the whole day.
I think what I probably did fairly thoroughly is milled about, feeling mildly self-pitying and distractedly doing things with a special air of incompetence.
I went shopping and cooked a chicken, and made some pasta salad. I washed pots and did the hand washing, and pegged the washing on the line, and wrote some letters. Then I hoovered the living room and went back to the shops for the things I had forgotten the first time, and in the end I went back to bed in preparation for Friday night at work, which is a long one. This was lovely, because the headache instantly gave up and left me alone, and I slept in peaceful bliss for two whole hours.
We have had some early starts lately, and I very badly didn’t want to get out of bed again when it was time to go to work. I discovered to my surprise that Mark was next to me, having come home from the farm and instructed the dogs to tiptoe in order not to disturb me.
We repaired to the taxi rank and he told me about his day. He has cut all of the floor boards for his trailer now, and is busy mending the holes in it.
I told him about my headache and he made sympathetic noises.When he went back to his own taxi I discovered that I had brought a book with me with very small print.
I am going to go away now and try to read it.
Only another few hours to go.
