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I am a big fan of sitting. I like to sit. Sitting, to me, is vastly more fun than standing, infinitely preferable to walking, and off-the-scale brilliant compared to exercise, or, you know, physical exertion (shudder). All my life, I’ve been a fan of the sit-down. I don’t understand people who say ‘oh I prefer to stand, I’ve been sitting down all day.’ What? You’ve been sitting down all day, and you’re quitting now? You had a good thing going there!
I guess I would be described as lazy. But I kind of resent this word because I don’t think of myself as a lazy person. I work hard when there’s work to be done. I’m not a shirker. I do stuff! I achieve! I just prefer to achieve from a seated position. Is that really so wrong? But I don’t see the appeal of things like going for a walk. What is the point in walking when you aren’t trying to get anywhere except right back where you started from? Just stay put and save yourself the effort! Have a nice sit! And, of course, I doubly don’t see the appeal of going for a run, or doing any other kind of physical exercise as a leisure pursuit. Where is the fun in getting all tired and sweaty? I genuinely don’t get it. These endorphin things that people claim to get a rush of when they exercise? I don’t think I have them. I think somebody forgot to put them in me.
I know I should exercise. I know that I will live longer and be healthier and be generally all-round more saintly if I exercise regularly three times a week. But WHY? I am annoyed with evolution, frankly. Why couldn’t we have evolved in such a way that our bodies need lots of nice fat and chocolate and fried things, and all the other stuff that tastes good? Why does it have to be the crappy tasteless stuff that’s so healthy? I wish vegetables were an illicit treat succumbed to by the weak-willed. I would have no problem resisting vegetables. And bran. I could happily go the rest of my life without bran.
And I am also annoyed that we have evolved in such a way that in order to function the best we have to commit to repeatedly moving our bodies around in some painful and tiring way three times a week, until we get out of breath. What the fuck, evolution? Is that really necessary anymore, now we don’t have to chase mammoths or run away from dinosaurs? (I realise, by the way, that I am butchering natural history there, don’t email me.)
So, yes, 27 years a sitter, and I realise that sooner or later it’s going to catch up with me. It is already getting to the stage where I can’t eat a whole tub of Ben and Jerry’s in one sitting, and not suffer some trouser-tightening consequences as a direct result. Oh why did you have to take that away from me, metabolism? Who was I hurting?
J and I are going to Las Vegas in April. We’re staying at The Mandalay Bay – the one with the fake beach. Which means I’m going to have to appear in public in a bikini, which means I’m going to have to cut down on my lard intake between now and then, and do some exercise. I accept this, but don’t think I’m not pissed off about it. Evolution, you could have done better.
Hurrah! Another room finished! And this one is my favourite so far. OK, well it’s tied as favourite with the kitchen. But this one has more books in it, so it has the edge…
So, this is what we started with:
The spare room shortly after we moved in. At the time I was fairly certain it would never look nice.
But look!
Don’t you all want to come and stay at my place now? A double bed, WITH cat, and floor-to-ceiling books? I’m considering initiating a fight with J just so I can sleep in here.
And this is my study area. Must find more excuses to work from home.
I am delighted to have so much shelf space, that for the first time in living memory I actually have spare room for more books. I have thoroughly indulged my inner (or not so inner) spod as well, because books are shelved alphabetically, by author’s last name, within genre.
This has made me realise that I own a really pitiful amount of poetry books. Must rectify:
The Persephone collection is coming along nicely though. (These shelved in number order, rather than alphabetically, because if you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room):
The travel section speaks to our love of North America, but we are branching out, slowly. (These shelved alphabetically by destination, because that’s the way I roll):
And the reference section makes me look completely mad. Yes I have a Russian dictionary, a Debrett’s Correct Form and a guide to the gay and lesbian literary heritage. It would make an interesting short story challenge, to come up with a scenario in which I might need information from all three:
So, there you have it. Another room down. J’s study is almost all finished too. It’s painted (an alarming shade of green) but he is still tinkering with shelves, and how exactly to position the TV above the treadmill (it’s not so much a study as it is a grown-up playroom) so I will hold off on photos for now.
I have taken to my bed again with tonsillitis. What joy. Man I hate winter, it’s just a never-ending parade of colds and sneezes and puddles and sore throats. I am off to the doctor tomorrow to beg some more antibiotics, but there were no appointments available today so I am in bed feeling sorry for myself and gargling with aspirin – a remedy suggested by our builder, but which seems to be remarkably effective.
I always feel guilty taking time off work for sickness, although I don’t really know why because I only ever do it when I’m genuinely ill, and I go back as soon as I can, but still. I feel bad. I can’t help mentally tallying who has had more sick days than I have, and who has had fewer, and wondering if anybody else is keeping track as well. I think one of the cruellest things about being a grown-up is you only ever get to take a surprise bonus day off work when you’re feeling too ill to enjoy it. And then you enjoy it even less because you spend the whole time feeling bad for not being at work. Oh when will I be a lady of leisure?
I get to feel extra specially guilty today because it’s J’s birthday, and we had made plans to go out for dinner this evening. But this has now been cancelled since I would spend the whole meal struggling to swallow, and nobody wants to sit opposite that. Instead we’re going to stay home and order curry, and we will eat it sitting side by side on the sofa so J is spared the sight of me trying to eat without the food actually touching my throat. It’s not pretty.
Meanwhile I have spent the day in bed reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I am surprised to find myself absolutely loving this book. It’s one I would never have normally picked up because my attitude is very much ‘ugh sci-fi and fantasy I do not think so’, but I’m reading American Gods for an online bookgroup and it is just unbelievably brilliant, so well written and funny and clever and utterly engrossing. I have managed to go whole minutes without thinking about how much my throat hurts.
So, yes, it’s the house that stoicism forgot over here. I hope to be back on form in a day or two, providing the doctor gives up the good drugs. Here’s hoping…
You know how you’re supposed to learn something new every day? Well, here is your thing for today: It is very difficult to photograph your own wrists.
Blinding whiteness! By the way, my skin actually is this pale. I am practically translucent.
My science experiment is completed. I have faithfully taken my homeopathic pills every day, three times a day, between meals. I always thought homeopathy was a load of old nonsense, and I thought so even more after I read this article, helpfully linked to by tsrosenberg, which contains such illuminating facts as:
Many people confuse homeopathy with herbalism and do not realise just how far homeopathic remedies are diluted. The typical dilution is called “30C”: this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their “What is homeopathy?” section, they say that “30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance.” This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 10030, or rather 1 in 1060, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or – let’s be absolutely clear – a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, o00,000,000,000,000.
So, in other words, not only was I taking pills with an active ingredient of the stuff-you-can-scrape-off-the-inside-of-your-kettle, but this active ingredient was so diluted that, to all intents and purposes, it wasn’t even there. In fact it had been diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Needless to say, by the time I’d digested this fact, I didn’t have high hopes for an immediate end to the itchy wrists.
Eczema! Boo! But also, pretty Christmas bracelet from J! Yay!
I wasn’t wrong. There are only two good thing I can say about homeopathy as a cure for eczema and they are, 1) it didn’t make it worse, and 2) the pills taste quite nice. The latter isn’t all that surprising when you consider that they are essentially sugar pills, of the type used in placebo experiments. What do you know, I was doing my own little placebo test after all!
Anyway, I’ve tried the alternative approach, and found it wanting. Which means I am now free and clear to go after the eczema with all the blazing guns of modern medicine. I have made an appointment with a dermatologist. Bring it on itchy wrists. Bring. it. on.
My apologies for being AWOL around these parts lately. Work has been uncharacteristically busy this week, and when I get home all I want to do is disengage my brain and eat ice-cream. But, it is the weekend now! It’s 10 in the morning, I’m still in my pyjamas, and I have no demands on my time for hours to come.
I had big plans to continue my exploration of London today, and next on my list is the entertainingly-named Horniman Museum in South London, which houses the utterly random and enchanting collection of ’stuff that amused me when I travelled the world’, as assembled by endearingly-mad old Victorian, Frederick Horniman, who clearly had too much money and free time on his hands. Still, thank goodness he did, because as a result Londoners can go and see shrunken heads and implements of torture and, I believe, a stuff walrus, whenever they want. What a service to the city! And I am definitely going to go and have a look myself, probably tomorrow. But not today.
Today is the day of irritating but necessary household chores – a trip to the supermarket, a general tidy-up, and, once again, J and I will be performing the apparently Sisyphean task of moving all the furniture from one room into another room. We have just finished having the spare room decorated, so all the spare room furniture is in the study. But now the spare room is finished, so all the furniture has to go back, plus all the study furniture, because the study is being painted next week. And so it goes. But, we are making progress with the decorating. After the study there is only the bathroom to go and the flat will be finished. I am thoroughly dreading having the bathroom done though, because it will be chaotic and messy and we won’t have a shower for a week. I may have to join a gym just so I can wash!
And in other news, I have decided that, after two years, we are going to take away the litter tray. The cats have access to a huge and lovely communal garden, with plentiful places to crap al fresco, and I am sick to death of litter pellets all over the flat and that smell. So, today, the litter tray is going to be rinsed out and hidden under the spare bed. I may live to regret this. I am hoping the cats will take it in their stride and just pop outside without protest. But I suspect, knowing our cats, we will have a few weeks of transition in the form of protest-crapping in unexpected places. What joy!
Anyway, this entry has been rather random hasn’t it? But I think you’re all caught up now. I am going to go and have some breakfast. It may end up being ice-cream.
We currently have a builder working in the spare room, building bookshelves (Bookshelves! Finally!) and doing various other bits and bobs. In order to make sure the cats stay out of his way, we shut them in the study during the day with their litter tray and food and water. Lest you think we are horrible cat parents I would like to point out here that the study is large and currently full of blankets and cat beds, although naturally the capricious little beasts opt to sleep on the hardwood floor.
This morning, I was running late so I quickly scooped Milly up and deposited her in the study, and then I went to find Molly. She had apparently completely vanished, and I spent a good ten minutes wandering the flat and looking for her in improbable places like the bread bin. Eventually, I noticed one small white paw sticking out from under our bed. I got down on my stomach and began negotiations:
Me: Molly! Molly sweetie, come out here!
Molly: Not on your nelly.
Me: But Molly, look, I have treats! (I rustle the treat bag enticingly.)
Molly: Ooooh, treats!
Me: Lovely delicious kitty treats, right here, all for you Molly. All for you!
Molly: Treats! Treats! But no! NO HUMAN! I will not fall for this trickery! You will shut me in the study with that useless bag of fluff you refer to as my sister. I won’t have it! There’s no prison that can hold Molly.
Me: But, treats?
Molly: Do you think I am that weak? That I would sacrifice my freedom, MY FREEDOM! For a treat?
Me: Well, you have done every other morning.
Molly: Not this morning human. I am wise to your ways now.
Me: OK then, you win. I lose. Look, here is a treat anyway, just for you, no strings attached. I will put it just here, right by the bed. Come out and get it.
Molly: Oooh treat! Treat without strings!
Molly pokes her head out from under the bed, I grab her collar and tug.
Molly: UNHAND ME! HOW DARE YOU! I WILL NEVER TRUST YOU AGAIN!
Molly wriggles free and scurries back under the bed.
Me: Alright, sorry. It was worth a try.
Molly: You! YOU! You are on my list now human. On. My. List.
Me: Ooooh, I am so scared. Not.
Molly: You should be. I will be crapping in your shoe the first chance I get.
Me: I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Not if you ever want a treat again.
Molly: You and your treats! I have been held back too long by their delicious meaty crunchiness. Well, not anymore. From now on, I’m not getting out from under the bed for anything less than a whole slice of ham.
Me: I don’t have any ham.
Molly: Too bad for you then human.
Molly curls up under the bed with her back to me, ears back in defiance. I give up and go and tell the builder the cats will be loose in the flat today. I am twenty minutes late for work.
Well, I am a woman of my word, so on Saturday morning I didn’t lie around in bed reading back issues of The New Yorker and scowling at the cats, which is my normal way to celebrate the arrival of the weekend. Instead I got my ass both up and showered and headed out into London for a bit of tourism at home.
It was a lovely sunny day, which helped. I suspect even the slightest hint of rain would have been enough to convince me that I was better off on the sofa. But, since the weather provided no excuse, I got the tube to Lancaster Gate on my mission to find the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery. Hyde Park is the largest of central London’s parks, and I have known for a while that there is a pet cemetery in it somewhere, although I can’t now remember where I heard about it. But I hopped on the trusty internet and discovered that the cemetery is located near Victoria Gate on the northern side of the park. So, I found Victoria Gate, and walked up and down the park in both directions but failed to find the slightest hint of buried pets. I did, however, find what I am willing to bet is the world’s most ornate rain shelter:
I wandered around some more, got in the way of some joggers, marvelled at the amount of squirrels running around the place, and watched a riding lesson in progress:
See, wasn’t it a lovely day? But still no pet cemetery. Discouraged, I headed back out of the park and made plans to find a nice consoling cup of tea and a sit down. But just as I was leaving I glanced to my left through some railings, and realised I was looking at hundreds of tiny headstones!
It’s not a great photo, because I am of the ‘point and press’ school of photography and my camera, in its infinite wisdom, was a lot more interested in focusing on the railings than the headstones. I had words but it remained unrepentant. Anyway, clearly, this was the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery – behind not one, but two sets of iron railings (I stuck my camera through the first set, but couldn’t do anything to avoid the second). I don’t know why it’s fenced off and hidden away like this, I guess to protect the headstones from being trampled on by tourists, but it was so tantalising to see them all sitting there, just out of reach, and not close enough for me to actually read any of them, which I would have loved to have done. The cemetery opened in the late 1800s, and is clearly no longer in use for fresh burials, so these are all lovely old tombs to the long-lost pets of privileged 19th Century Londoners. And they’re all just sitting there, behind railings on the edge of Hyde Park, unsignposted and practically hidden from view.
Anyway, I had to be satisfied with peering at the cemetery through railings. I had a brief look around but there was absolutely no way in and no suitable point to climb over. So I gave up and headed towards Marble Arch with a vague plan in my mind to get back on the tube, although it was such a nice day that I didn’t want to go back underground right away. I was enjoying walking (my Mum just keeled over in shock reading that) so I carried on aimlessly. When I got to Marble Arch (so called because, um, it’s a big old arch made of marble) I was surprised to discover that it was hosting a convention for fans of the high-visibility vest:
After Marble Arch I hit Oxford Street, and Oxford Street (London’s main shopping thoroughfare) on a Saturday is enough to send even the most seasoned walker scurrying underground, so packed is it with slow walkers and window-gazers. So I got on the tube and went all the way up to Stoke Newington to visit Teabelly, and she and I spent a very pleasant afternoon drinking tea, eating Pringles, and watching back-to-back episodes of Season 1 of Beverly Hills 90210, possibly the most unintentionally hilarious television show ever made.
Several hours later, I emerged from Teabelly’s flat in the darkness and began to wend my way home. I did hop off the tube briefly at King’s Cross Station, though, to visit one of my very favourite London landmarks, Platform 9 and 3/4:
There was a girl there just on her way through to the Hogwarts Express, but I decided not to join her. I had officially done my day out in London, it was dark and cold, and the sofa was calling me. But didn’t I do well? I spent a whole day out in London seeing sights. Well, OK, I spent several hours of the day in Teabelly’s flat watching early ’90s television, but, well, Stoke Newington is an area of London I’m not familiar with! It still counts!
Today, to make up for all the nobility and worthiness of yesterday, I have spent mostly in bed watching television. Balance is restored.
You never realise how much you depend on something until it is suddenly and without any apology taken away from you. I was made to realise this most forcefully last night when somebody decided to end it all under a tube train at Barons Court station, and brought all the tube services in West London to a grinding halt.
A word about suicide-by-tube – it happens fairly often, almost always at rush hour, and I must say, sorry as I am that anybody ever feels desperate enough to kill themselves, it must take a certain bloody-minded mischievousness of spirit to do it in a manner that is guaranteed to screw with several thousand strangers who are just trying to get home. In a way I have to applaud the ‘I’m going, but by golly I’m going to make people know about it’ attitude. But I didn’t feel much like applauding it last night.
I am normally quite cavalier about tube delays, mostly because I have the extreme good fortune of living near a station with two tube lines. So if the Piccadilly line is messed up, I just take the District, and vice versa. But since last night’s ‘incident’, as tube authorities so euphemistically refer to it, occurred at my very own station, and since, like I said, my station serves two lines, both lines were immediately taken out of commission.
So, I was sitting on a train in Gloucester Road station, reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and happily pondering what to have for dinner, when the driver announced that we were being held ‘because some bugger’s jumped under a train at Barons Court’ (hah! No gentle euphemisms from the drivers, I note). At first I thought nothing of it. I had a seat, I had a good book, I was in no particular mad rush, and I figured it would only take ten minutes or so for them to sweep the body parts up off the track and we’d be on our way.
Not so much. Ten minutes later we were still being held indefinitely and most people were abandoning ship. So I decided I’d forgo my guaranteed seat on the Piccadilly line and switch to the District line to get home, since, mirabile dictu, Gloucester Road station also serves both of my tube line options. But when I got to the District line platform I realised that it too was suspended due to the ‘incident’ and that as a result I was stranded in West London.
Much cursing and plaintive text-messaging to J ensued. The trouble with where we live is that it’s so well served by the tube that London Transport evidently decided that laying on buses as well was an unnecessary frivolity. So no buses really go anywhere near my neighbourhood. It’s tube or nothing, and last night I was left with nothing.
Eventually I managed to fold myself into a small corner of a packed train heading to a station ever so slightly nearer to my flat than where I was stranded, and from there I had a long and windy (and whiny) walk home. I was accompanied most of the way by several hundred confused and wandering Chelsea fans who were trying to get to the football game and had no idea where they were because they had been unceremoniously jettisoned from the comforts of the tube like the rest of us.
This morning I was especially pleased to find Barons Court station open, fully operational, and free (as far as I could tell) from blood and gore. And even though my morning’s commute was its usual fraught, crowded and silently-hostile self, I appreciated it for at least getting me where I wanted to go in reasonable time and with no unexpected stops. And now I’m almost certainly not going to take the tube for granted again for at least, oh, a couple of days.
This week I am being my own little placebo experiment. You see, I have eczema on my wrists. I’ve had it for ages, it never goes away or gets worse, but it itches fairly regularly and is a general annoyance. The doctor refuses to prescribe prescription-strength hydrocortisone cream because ‘your skin will get dependent on it.’ To which I argue, ‘well right now my skin is itching, so I would rather be dependent on cream that makes it not itch.’ But apparently that is not a valid argument, and I am sent home with a tub of Vaseline and told not to wash too regularly. Which is not very helpful.
I’m probably allergic to dairy products, because when I was little I had eczema behind my knees and my mum took me off dairy and lo, it vanished. But frankly, I would rather eat chocolate and have itchy wrists than the other way around, so I’ve just accepted that I am always going to have patches of eczema on my wrists. And then I tuck into a consoling bar of Dairy Milk to take my mind off it.
But over Christmas, my Mum suggested I try a homeopathic remedy. And I scorned and ridiculed her because, please woman, I do not believe in that homeopathic herbal hippie nonsense. I am not going to bury half a potato at midnight while wearing a frog around my neck, and even if I did, my wrists would still itch.
But, turns out, homeopathy is not so much about interfering with frogs. Mum sent me a little bottle of pills which are, apparently, homeopathy’s answer to eczema. According to the directions on the bottle, all I have to do is take them three times a day, and, magically, not only will my skin clear up, but even if I stop taking the pills, the eczema won’t come back. This is the claim, anyway.
Now, I am still extremely suspicious, because according to the small print, these magical wondrous pills contain nothing but calcium carbonate. Yep, it’s that stuff that furs up your kettle if you don’t descale regularly. That’s ALL. And I am very very unwilling to accept that I could have cured my eczema years ago if I’d just licked the inside of the damn kettle.
But, I promised my Mum I’d give it a fair try, and I have nothing to lose but itchy wrists and a growing dependence on non-prescription-strength hydrocortisone cream, after all. So for the next two weeks I am going to take the pills exactly as directed on the bottle, and we shall just see. I am performing a new twist on the traditional placebo approach, by taking a medicine I absolutely do not believe will work at all. So if it does work, despite my doubts, then it must really be the shit. Watch this space.
