Ma Carrell

Twice in one day! I am clearly hyper and maybe someone should shoot me up with some kinda hypo. Truth is I haven't slept much this week. I have never been a dormouse type even when I am fully relaxed in mind and body, for example on the few occasions that I can recall having a particularly idyllic holiday. Times when I have been as close to at peace with myself as I could reasonable ever hope to be. At such times 5 or 6 hours of sleep seemed both a delicious luxury and also a rather tragic waste of good time.

Mostly I stagger between periods of something I do in a bed under a duvet wondering why I feel the need to to have more of the bed thing even though the bed thing is too often confined to falling asleep only to jerk violently awake too quickly and too soon after losing consciousness because some daft event in dreamland has stirred me to frustrated action.

This week has been almost nightmarish. By yesterday I was too tired to function. My eyes weren't drooping, still less stinging. My cognitive functions were hot and froody. But my head had that swoony feeling ... that sensation that loss of consiousness is imminent. Not a fainting sensation, just unpleasantly, tiredly sleepy. Until I made myself horizontal. Then I wanted to read. I read for an hour or three and then consulted the clock and got up to drink tea and to watch Groundhog Day which had just started on the TV.

Part of the problem I surmised was down to the fact that my medication had run out on Sunday. With my usual sang foid in the face of tasks that require concerted series of actions I postponed the inevitable (and dreary) oddyssey that ends at the pharmacist's counter by ekeing out the weekend capsules. The supply became critically acute on Wednesday evening when I dosed myself with the last of the drugs. I would have to take action ... and a bus first thing on Thursday morning ....

I am that procrastinatory as well as that glibly stupid. I actually believed that I would make the trip. I finally succumbed to sleep at around two a.m. and woke again six. Tea first. Second cup, very useful. Oh look! Two sausages in the fridge. Better cook them .... Yum. Can't bath now. Not on a full stomach. Can't shower either. Hard water has sealed shut every shower head I every tried. Lime scale remover is an oxymoron. I will surf the web, check email. Maybe play a little Sims; just to pass the time for an hour or so ....

Oh my bad! It is 12:30pm. Too late now. It is early closing day. I will have to go tomorrow instead!

I did not do it deliberately. OK I did. I did. I did. An hour or so later my brain decided that psychosomatic punishment for my dilatory antics might be fun. Hence the fun symptoms of extreme tiredness. Hence the insomniac Thursday night. I know that I don't need much sleep. I am over 50 for godssakes and I just know. I also know that I like to have my 'ration' and that when I am deprived of it I feel depressed and morose; well more so than usual, anyway. Last night I had no sleep at all. I fell asleep but immediately woke again thanks to dream interference.

I have always dreamed fantastic and vivid epics. Often I know that my dreams are just that: dreams. Sometimes I even succeed in so-called lucid dreaming. I have rarely had nightmares, though I have scared myself silly with a few dreams. I dream massive Hollywood productions. The detail is tremendous and even a little humbling. The fatal flaws of dreams are the fantastical absurdities; for most of us those are the signs that help us to relax and recognise the dream for what it is: it is so silly that common-sense forces us, even while still asleep, to reject complete acceptance of the seeming reality in which we are immersed. In my dreams the continuity errors are so subtle that I sometimes do not spot them until days later. The trouble is that I then realise that the goof is so damned obvious that I am a total dummy for not realising it earlier ... and so the self criticism goes on.

I can't write (to order) and even my dreams are just the same humdrum nonsense as everyone elses' except that I am crazy enough to believe that each of mine is a masterpiece until I realise belatedly that it isn't.

Anyway. I had to wait 20 minutes while the pharmacist filled my prescription. Why the hell it takes twenty minutes to put three boxes inside a paper bag is a mystery known only to a select few ... it forces the sick to hang around and spend money on false finger nails and vitamins and Sponge Bob bath-time accessories. They also get to share any communicable diseases they might have thus requiring further precriptions and more waiting and more spending. Capitalism is healthier when the capitalists are sick. Doncha just love the irony of that!

So I was feeling sour and hungover (non-alcoholically) and ill-disposed to spend in Jesse Boot's emporium so I wandered out and down the street to share my filthy lucre with Messrs Lloyds & Co. .... All shuttered up. Big pharmacy, two thousand square feet of prime retail space, all vacant and for rent. Is sickness on the wane in my neighbourhood? No chance. The company has relocated to a large local health centre. All the better to capture the script-bearing downtrodden masses before they reach the High Street and a capitalist nightmare: a choice. I sighed and hit Woolworths instead.

I have lived in my house for 8 years. A record for me. I have hardly at all patronised that particular town centre. I have a choice of three. The one with the Woolies is the smallest and nicest and nearest. (It would also be the nicest one to walk to if it wasn't for the fact that it is one and half miles up hill all the way back ... and the hill just keeps getting steeper and steeper. I never want to be that fit!) Anyway I was like a kid all over again in that branch of Woolworth. It was like the store I remember from my childhood in Wellingborough. It sold everything from bicycle brakes to childrens' clothes with the Ladybird trademark. I searched it from left to right and from the street to the back where the paint and nails were but the only thing missing was the toy monkey on a stick. I always wanted one of those, but characteristically I never asked for one. I suppose that I would have been bought one if I had. I am sure that my life would have been utterly successful and incomparably better if I had owned one of those brown-plush simian toys that hung from poles over the Woolies' counters for what seemed an entire childhood. I have no way to prove it and no wish to be disavowed of the notion.

I can only cope with so much failure in one week!

The title? I bought a couple of fresh mackerel in town and I am going to eat both for my supper. They are half the size of the ones I would have bought in the seventies from the little fishmonger in Balsall Heath and they cost more than fillet steak did back then. And I bet they did not come from Cornish water either and if they did I bet they were landed by a Spanish trawler ... maybe I will give them to the cat. She has no scruples at all. A 'carrell' is a study nook in a library by the way ....