Apologies for the lack of posts in the last week. I can’t recall ever being felled by two winter bugs in just a few weeks, but as I said last time, my GP assures me this is the ‘new normal’ this winter as we emerge from these lockdowns. These posts will be back to normal in the next few days.
It’s a week since I fell ill and I’m still not quite back yet. Mornings and nights are quite uncomfortable, but I feel better during the day.
After a week of borderline inactivity, I struggled through a 3k run today. Anything below 5k is pointless, I think, for an experienced runner, but considering how unwell I’ve been, I felt it was important to have a little tune-up before getting back to normal next week with the 3 evening runs.
My banking situations remain unresolved but I’m hoping they can be resolved in the next week. I’m pushing for compensation for both banks. They ruined Christmas. They made the New Year extremely difficult and they’ve both behaved unprofessionally.
In other news, sadly cancer has made an unwelcome return to the family. We expected the news and now we just have to wait to see how far advanced it might be. It’s a hard thing to watch those you love fade away and I’ve always maintained, as difficult as it was to lose my parents so early, and the trauma and wrong course my life took as a result of those premature losses, selfishly I think that was better for me than to be one of those people having to watch parents slip into old age, serious illnesses and endless trips to hospitals. Maybe it's not, I don’t know. I didn’t have kids. Maybe when you have children, your focus is elsewhere. You’re protected a bit more emotionally. The kids are your prime concern/responsibility just as you would’ve been for your parents. I never had that barrier between my parents and me. While my relationship with my dad was a difficult one, curiously it remained a close one. But with my mum, she was my life. I’d seen how much she’d suffered in her marriage and how she’d sacrificed her happiness for my sibling and I and I always wanted to repay her. I wonder, right now, had my mum lived, had it been her who got this unwelcome news yesterday, and if I had kids, how would I have dealt with it? Would it have impacted me in the same way it might’ve 20 years ago when I didn’t have kids? A What If? there of no interest to anyone else whatsoever.
Writing of grief, I’m feeling a little down as I approach the end of the final series of Downton Abbey. I always get like that with a TV drama that I come to love. I resisted this show for years and finally came to it. I think of where I was in my life when the show was at its peak and the people that were in my life when it was on. I was having a really difficult time during the early years of Downton Abbey, 2010 – 12, as I often am (basically I’m crap at managing life as an adult) and had I got into the show then, it might’ve given me some comfort, because I really do buy into the shows that I love. In fact, I usually end up half-convinced I’m in the show, though in the case of DA, I still can’t quite work out if I’d be one of the servants or the posh lot. I don’t think I was built to be either. I’ve never been able to do deferential and I drop to many ‘H’s’ to fit comfortably into either camp.
The rewrite on my short film progresses. I need to know how to fund it, if I’m going to need external help, funding as always being a big issue at this level, but it’s attracting good interest from performers.
I got out this afternoon after my run, holing myself up in the back-up café for a couple of hours. It’s always very warm in here. Too warm. Well, if like me you’re wearing four tops when it’s unseasonably warm for this time of year. Climate change. It’s definitely here.
The Waitress brings over my second latte without prompting. That’s nice and impressive too. She’s spotted my empty tall glass from wherever she was in the café, she’s made a mental note and then she’s brought over my second latte.
She knows my ways already.
I’m an easy guy to read.
Not facially.
I mean in terms of expenditure.
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