It was snowing when I set off, and then the snow turned first to sleet and then to rain. The road was slushy and slippery, and the first hint of it turning into a river again began as the rain took effect. The temperature was hovering around freezing and the stiff breeze was wet. I was constantly reminded that cold, wet winds feel so much colder than cold, dry ones.
The problem for me now is that such conditions engender not only a sense of discomfort, but also make me feel physically ill. I expect it’s the eighteen degrees effect. I’ve read that 18°C is the tipping point at which the vascular system begins to narrow in order to conserve energy, and that’s not particularly helpful to cardiac function. So, since I have both a heart and a vascular condition, it’s bound to be inevitable that I should feel some discomfort if I will insist on taking hour-long walks in cold conditions.
But insist I do because the surgeon who performed my angioplasty procedure said to me: ‘Make sure you walk as much as possible. Doing so will force the deposits in your artery to remain at the periphery – to which position I have just relegated them at no insignificant amount of pain to your good self – rather than returning to where they were before I and my magic tool-with-the-little-balloon-at-the-end corrected the problem.’ (Or something along those lines.) So that’s what I do, come rain or shine, frosts or heat waves, hell or high water. Maybe his advice will finish me off with a heart attack one day. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?
But now I’m off to read some more of The Thirteenth Tale in the sure and certain hope that Ms Setterfield’s prose style will be several leagues better than the one used to write this post. (I'm not really in the mood for writing posts at the moment, but I have faith in Ms Setterfield.)
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