On Being Under the Weather.

I’ve been feeling ill again today – extreme weariness, nausea, thick head, sore chest, pains in various places, and now my sinuses are beginning to get sore. It’s almost certainly due to the change in the weather. It’s turned suddenly warmer today, and sudden changes in temperature have that effect on me. So do sudden changes in barometric pressure, humidity, and even wind direction sometimes. And then there’s the matter of the usual depression, of course

I’m sure that if I went to a doctor and described my daily round of depression and anxiety, he would diagnose mental illness and bury me under half the contents of the pharmacy (which is one of several reasons why I don’t go to a doctor.)

But he would probably be right, you know. I probably do have some mental illness by the modern definition. It’s just that, where I was brought up, the term ‘mental illness’ was reserved for those given to truly mentally ill forms of behaviour, and I’m not. I don’t escape from the attic at dead of night and set fire to people’s bed linen. I don’t run naked along Ashbourne High Street shouting ‘I’ve just slept with a woman from Turkmenistan and this is me lunch break.’ (Lifted and paraphrased from a line in Spike Milligan’s Puckoon which can no longer be quoted verbatim.) I exhibit no psychotic symptoms whatsoever; I’m just scared to get up in the morning because I know it’s going to be another day of feeling anxious and depressed and I’m thoroughly fed up with it.

But at least I had an email from the priestess to excite my interest when I booted the computer up this morning. It seems the fine trade winds carrying her ship of contentment steadily through the sea of life have suddenly backed and driven her off course. Or maybe she threw the rudder hard over and re-set the sails herself. (I don’t know yet. She was economical with the details.) Maybe she’s even mentally ill, though I very much doubt it. Not the type. I expect I’ll find out sooner or later, assuming I make it through the intervening days.

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Today I ordered the DVD of the 2018 movie Mary Magdalene without having been given any firm recommendation. It’s just that I’ve long had some interest in dear old MM, so I thought I’d see what the film made of her. It was a lot more expensive than the used DVDs I usually buy from charity shops, but I still regard charity shops as forbidden territory. All those possibly unwashed strangers milling about, browsing the shelves, picking things up and putting them down again. It doesn’t strike me as a particularly healthy pursuit, and I do so care about the state of my health.