Freckles & Doubt

Whew, one of those half-year blogging hiatuses again, funny how they creep up on me. I think remote working, and the concomitant ability to not leave the house or speak to actual humans for days at a time, is actively reducing my general communication skills. Or, in other words, the pointer on the Isolate-O-Tron has dipped from "Hedgehoggy Hermit" to "Homicidally Misanthropic", a considerable drop from its pre-COVID standard levels of "Awkward at Parties/Disinclined To Leave the House". I always did have to arm-wrestle myself, best of two falls out of three, to force my own attendance at any given social gathering. Now I've apparently kiboshed the wrestle at the outset by stealing my own elbows. Metaphorically speaking. Physically they are still more or less attached. I mean, I can still type, so have no real excuse.

All of the above, incidentally, not to cast any aspersions on the generally much-appreciated virtual presence of anyone who still does drive by this venue occasionally to see if I'm burbling. Virtually you are all lovely and much less likely to make the Isolate-O-Tron's needle quiver, and I really have no excuse for abandoning you.

I am driven to resume blogging, characteristically enough, by the burning need to record for posterity a particular dream I just had. My sleep patterns are a mess again, mostly because I've just had a month-long run-in with a particularly epic case of 'flu, and went off both the antibiotics and the decongestants only a couple of days ago. Since the combination of meds was making me sleep 9-hour nights like a particularly coshed dormouse, going off them has led to those happy evenings lying in bed for hours at a time with eyes wide open like the millstone eyes of the tinder-box dogs in the fairy tale, feeling the sleepless seconds drip by with equal parts horror and despair. Insomnia is a bitch. And when I do actually sleep, it's lightly, and with interruptions, and I wake up earlier. Hating the universe in general and everything in it in particular, see "Homicidal Misanthropy", above. But I do, in all that disruption, remember far more of my dreams.

Said dreams characterised themselves, a few days ago, by degenerating into actual nightmare, with far more gore than I am wont to experience, dream-wise. I blame the Queen, for dying. Because the generally sad and laudatory nature of the media and social media responses are giving me ingrowing postcolonial irritation and the tendency to mutter darkly about hypocrisy and jingoism and denialism about the current parlous state of the British economy, culture, political landscape and royal family (racism, sex scandals, legislative meddling and black-market cash deals, oh lord). Which is all filtering into my dreams, causing me to dream the following:

• a darkly threatening forest setting at night, occupied by:
  
• several small/innocent children, and;
  
• a team of servants, tasked with nobbling the above for the consumption of:
  
• the Queen, characterised for these purposes as:
  
• a Fallout robobrain robot, which looks like:
  
• this:


• except with the Queen's head attached in place of the glass dome, and the additional, horrifying detail of:
  
• an unnaturally large mouth, opening unnaturally wide to reveal:
  
• rows of enormous, long, jagged, horrifying teeth, with which:
  
• she proceeded to bite off some poor child's arm, lots of blood and screaming, and I woke up.

I do not like this monarchy. It is skraaaaatched. As are my sleep cycles. I should add, also for posterity, however, that playing injudicious amounts of Fallout 4 is (a) satisfyingly apposite to the current state of global geo-political meltdown, (b) satisfying to the general state of homicidal misanthropy, as I wander around with a maxed out plasma rifle and sniping skill taking down deathclaws with single headshots, and (c) apparently colonising the dream landscape.

(my subject line, by usual processes of free association, is David Bowie, "Time").

Oo er time has rather crept up on me again, alas. Featureless lockdown days meander past like lazy insomniac sheep-counting sheep, dozens have ambled hypnotically over the fence before you notice. Although I should add for posterity, and jo&stv, who apparently sit in New Zealand and worry that they have relocated my entire social life to another continent, that I had one (1) whole in-person social interaction this weekend, I visited Vi and had gin on the lovely stoep of her nice new house, both of us carefully masked and social distanced and in the fresh air. Apparently I can uncurl from the hedgehoggy ball if prodded sufficiently.

Also, I hired the nice neighbour, who does odd jobs and is suffering worklessness under lockdown, to climb up ladders and replace all my lightbulbs yesterday, as I do not trust my dodgy balance/ineffective left arm combination at dizzy heights when alone in the house, my body would lie there for days, probably gnawed on by unimpressed cats, if I maintained my usual form and fell off. So that's two actual in-person interactions in a week, I am a merry hive of social activity. He also unscrewed the lightbulb cover in the oven, which the landlord tightened so efficiently I haven't been able to budge it, and put up the replacement house number outside (bastards nicked the old ones) so that my deliveries do not wander plaintively up and down the road, apparently unable to interpolate Number 10 from the aggressively labelled Number 12 next door. My house is now Well Lit and Plottable. Next up, when I have recovered from all this socialising, he can come and replace the washers in all the taps, currently you have to turn the hot tap in the sink anything between five and fifteen times before it randomly consents to disgorge actual water. And the shower one falls off.

Jo&stv have actually relocated my entire social life to another continent, but I honestly don't miss it much. I miss them, but not the social life. And not being able to unscrew things or climb up ladders are really very minor and fixable drawbacks to the otherwise wholesale joy of living alone. Even under lockdown. I am still enjoying lockdown. Sorry.

oh, dear, apparently I haven't posted in a month? good heavens. I attribute that variously to (a) still being bloody exhausted from the bloody start to the year, (b) still being bloody exhausted by relentless student enquiries, particularly the noxious upsurge towards the end of term, (c) being overloaded with human interaction by (b), (d) being bloody exhausted by the rush to finish a bunch of stuff before going on leave, and (e) the natural and inevitable physical and mental shut-down which always happens when I go on leave, as my beleaguered bod realises that it's actually allowed to relax and promptly falls over.

Of course, all the frantic rush to finish a bunch of stuff before I went on leave was utterly futile, I didn't finish everything, which meant I spent a day or so of my leave writing budgets and hand-holding my staff writing their own budgets, and another day of my leave finishing the thrice-dratted report I should have written a month ago and forgot about, because exhaustion riddles my brain with holes like a Swiss cheese someone shot up with a shotgun. I was, shall we say, somewhat narked by this necessity. Those were my leave days, dammit.

But I'm on leave! and my mother is out from the UK, calloo callay! and is currently sitting in the living room cruising the internet and permitting Jyn to climb on her head. I am clearly my mother's daughter in more ways than one.

Also, I am catching up on sleep, and thus dreams. Last night I dreamed that I had authorised the wholesale and epic renovation of the house in which I was living (not my current one, something much larger and with a slightly worrying resemblance to the Red Rocket in Fallout 4). The renovation team were enthusiastic and a bit oblivious, and ended up mostly deconstructing the house, to the extent of knocking down most of the walls, squishing the entire contents of the house into one room inaccessible other than by climbing over rubble and squeezing through a narrow gap, and leaving me nowhere to sleep. I also spent a lot of the dream wandering around futilely protesting as they installed various dubious interior decorating features, mostly dreadful kitschy art-work, instead of reconstructing walls. About halfway through the process I suddenly remembered, with a horrible sinking shock, that I didn't actually own the house, and thus shouldn't actually be reconstructing it. I spent the rest of the dream increasingly frantic, trying to chivvy the renovators into fixing everything quickly before the landlady arrived and saw what I'd done.

It is slightly alarming to contemplate the extent to which the above dreamscape neatly replicates my current difficulties with mentally processing the massive life change of trying to find a new job.

My subject line is, of course, Granny Weatherwax. Possibly what I actually need is a new job as senior witch in a Pratchett coven.