DIARY 7 - SOUR GRAPES

Overripe grapes hold their external shape whilst inside has passed well beyond any edible form. One moment of direct pressure and the whole skin would collapse like a ripped waterbed. There’s a vivid moment in the film Samson and Delilah, when Samson’s eyes are popped out. I understand the special effect was accomplished by pressing a couple of black seedless grapes into the fevered eyeballs of Victor Mature.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, it’s how my eyeballs currently feel. Painful to the touch, aching like I’ve been reading a turgid and densely written Russian novel. Through extensive sleep loss, I can now understand how keeping someone awake can be a popular form of torture. Not since I saw the recent Terry Gilliam film – Tideland, have I endured being forcible kept awake with such bad grace. I paid good money to see that, more fool me, but this head cold came free of charge.

I remind myself ‘only a couple of days more of feeling my brain is a grape being crushed and there’ll be the blessed release and subsequent glutinous runoff ’. I know these cold cycles like every brain cell in my head currently under duress. I’m not sure those cells are not dying off at a fast rate, they should do tests. They’ve just discovered that arteries in a heart disease sufferer age rapidly by a huge number of decades. Yet they haven’t a clue what a head cold could be doing on the quiet.

What was worse was going to work with weakened centripetal force. I felt like a weeble that wobbled but didn’t fall down. My brain, for no apparent reason, would flop like a bean bag in my cranium. Keeping my eyeballs functioning cooperatively was a major task. Staying open and responsive at work was a task and a half. Fortunately the aching eased off with the afternoons cremation services. Nothing like a sobering reminder of our mortality eh? No one’s died of a head cold have they? Bet they wouldn’t tell us if they had.

By the time I returned home I was feeling on the far shores of normal. As the evening draws in, a hand clamp resumes it’s authoritarian squeeze over my cerebellum. All I need to do now is go to bed. Sometime in the early hours I’ll reawaken because the ache in my head has burgeoned. Here am I ,suffering like a diva in a major operatic aria, with someone elses cold ! As there is the notable absence of God as progenitor these days. I feel I must plonk responsibility where its due, right there in someone's lap. It makes it so much more bearable to know there was a cause, a reason, there is someone who is entirely responsible for your suffering. Even as you read this I’m considering my options for litigation.