Phil Gyford

Writing

Friday 3 March 2006

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After an enjoyable and unusually sociable weekend I spent the parts of this week I wasn’t battling Movable Type for an impending deadline battling a gang of ruthless flu-like symptoms. That’ll teach me to leave the flat and step out into your germ-infested world.

I began the week as I finished the previous one, cursing Movable Type for not quite letting me do what I needed to make everyone’s lives simpler. As Jones put it, MT is like a jumpy steed that can never quite be tamed, not even by the most dangerous yet infuriatingly attractive rancher. By lunchtime the flu-thing had hit me but that dark mare haunted my dreams all night and I lay awake, sweating, and being unable to think of anything but MT’s input fields and checkboxes. One day my beauty, one day!

But then Tuesday seemed remarkably fine, I got some work done, went to class… and then felt exhausted and lay awake at night seeing a pile of wooden objects — xylophones, abacuses, the backs of broken chairs, all the colour and smooth texture of 1970s G-Plan furniture — and being unable to tell which bits of the shuddering heap was my body. It was in there somewhere, but… ugh, the closest I’ve ever come to hallucinations I think.

Wednesday I was still incapable and moved almost to tears by the kindness of NHS Direct, before I left the bed and propped myself upright in front of John Mills in Waterloo Road in an effort to divert the the molasses waterfall of phlegm away from my chest.

That night my prone and sweaty night hours were spent being unable to think of anything without seeing it through the vicious frame of The Apprentice.

Yesterday and today have seen an improvement, but with another half-sleepless night between them, and a pile of work to do, not to mention the larger ignored pile of non-work stuff I’d hoped to do this week… all I can say is *cough*.

Addendum: At the risk of providing the slimmest of spoilers to Pepys’ Diary readers, I wanted to record this upcoming account of illness:

Thence I went to see my Lord Sandwich, who I found very ill, and by his cold being several nights hindered from sleep, he is hardly able to open his eyes, and is very weak and sad upon it, which troubled me much.

s/sad/mad/

Comments

Damn, those are some major hallucinations, and I know of what you speak. This is usually how you know you have the flu--the fever is baking your brain, buddy.

Get well soon!!

Posted by ted on 3 March 2006, 5:01 pm | Link

Get well soon, or at least furnish your hallucinations with Chippendale and Hepplewhite.

best wishes

Posted by PJK on 3 March 2006, 5:17 pm | Link

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