Enough!
I am thoroughly bored by my bout of bronchitis – it now is glorified by
having a name of a known illness and by my having not one, but two puffers to
do something to it. My coughing is still
at competition level, especially in the mornings and evenings and I am
thoroughly put out.
I do not do illness very well. I am more than prepared to have a day in bed
from time to time to acknowledge that the human frame is prone to illness, but
my tolerance does not really extend further than that. And when the symptoms extend themselves to
ten days then my patience is just about exhausted.
Today was one of those days when anything
more than listless reading was impossible and after a light-ish lunch I took to
my bed for an extended snooze. I think
that this was really quite a sensible idea and I felt both guilty and refreshed
at the end of it. I have convinced
myself that this little jaunt to the land of Nod was necessary payment to get
over the hump and work my way towards full health.
By way of acceptable displacement activity
I have reorganized the spice jars.
When you see that sentence in a paragraph
by itself the full fatuous emptiness of my activity is glaringly obvious. However, I maintain (stoutly) that such
activity is of proven worth.
My spice rack is a three-rack affair which
is not in any way freestanding and therefore rests (the wrong way round)
against a piece of kitchen wall next to the gas stove. The spice jars have been a constant cause of
irritation ever since I found some perfect ones in a local shop, decided to
change everything with the immediate result of the shop instantly ceasing to
stock them - and they have never stocked them since. I did try a different jar with a metal clasp
closure on them which were tiny and inefficient. The time to change was obviously forcing
itself upon me.
The trigger for the change was the opening
of yet another Chinese Supermarket in our little town. This was more of a hypermarket with
furniture, umbrellas, electronics, plastic, artificial flowers and everything
else that you could possibly think of.
You have to understand that in crisis struck Spain the Chinese are
making their move to take over the entire commercial life of the country. Today, Chinese shops are a byword for the
places you go to find the thing that you can’t find anywhere else. You may not get quality, but you do get “it”.
Amazingly I had no small stickers to go on
the jars (which I previously bought from a distinctly “Chinese” everything-for-1€
section in Carrefour) and so was forced to go and shop. The selection was not great but I did get the
stickers and found a metallic something-or-other which I hoped could work as a
spice rack.
It didn’t.
But Toni used a highly honed intelligence and made it work by adding a
delightfully Heath-Robinson dongle to give it stability. I have now made executive decisions about
which spices have pride of place and which are condemned to life in a plastic
box. The area is now neat and cleared.
This is yet another example of a relatively
small change making a huge difference in look and activity. It is like changing the furniture, or just
changing the furniture around which can give a whole new approach to living!
At the same shop as that which provided the
jars I have also got my new notebooks for the new course. The idea of making do with a small quarto
book was simply not sufficient to allow the exercises that the OU demands and
so I have had to get a couple of A4 plain paper books to give opportunity to
keep up with what needs to be done and to have some central area for reference
when the OU asks you to refer to the notebooks to justify you productions. I am sure that it will all make sense in
time.
There are now seven days to go to the
examination and the past couple of days have not helped my plans for
revision. Today I have done very little
(well, none) but I have done some writing for the next course. I have completed my daily haiku; I have done
some Freewriting and I have also used the clustering technique to get ideas
flowing. I am sure that this will soon
become a habit, but it does seem a little artificial at the moment. Still, artifice is what it is all about.
Tomorrow, phlegm permitting, I will crack
on the end of the second book and start the third. There is still plenty of time for me to give
more than adequate attention to all the areas which I will have to explain in
the exam and be able to do some work on the new course. Saturday is the official start of A215
Creative Writing and Sunday will see us in the delayed meal in Irene’s.
We have to visit her soon as our collection
of plastic bottle tops has now outgrown our plastic bottle top container! The collection of these things is part of an
effort to get help to a young child who is suffering from meningitis. I have to say that I have been horrified by
the number of plastic bottles of whatever that we use during a couple of
weeks. Collecting the tops does however
give us a sense of usefulness and there is never anything wrong with hugging
that warm feeling of smugness that we are “doing the right thing”!
And the right thing for tomorrow is getting
stuck in to the work that needs to be done thoroughly before the 10th!
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