Heavy Head Cold
9 March

Frankly the rubbish that has come out of my head in the last fortnight would have graced a Hollywood special effects department.

Every glance into a handkerchief revealed a new horror. I did not know that infected mucus could come in such a variety of colours, textures and consistencies. There were lumps of matter which looked as though they had been molded from the inside of my sinuses. And maybe they had. It certainly felt as though I was releasing rubbish that had been trapped inside my head for many a year.

As I have remarked on a previous occasion, it is too easy a trick to find the symbolism in everything. Sometimes a head cold is just a head cold. However, this release of rubbish from my head coincides with an active period of shedding possessions - certainly books, clothes, CDs, etc. But, more potently, I think, I've been jettisoning much of the porn I've accumulated over the years. And, in 30 years, there's a fair few videos, DVDs and computer images.

Well, they mostly now gone. I don't begrudge them. I don't moralise about my need for them or about the young men who gave their services for money. It's just that I've been feeling for a long while now that they've been getting in the way of me being where I need to be. So, as part of this process of shedding that I'm going through, it seemed a natural part of that process to lose the bums and willies.

Throughout the fortnight that I had the cold, I maintained a presence at work. I don't feel as though I was being silly. There have been many times over the past twelve years of this Journal that I have taken a few days off work when I have felt unwell. My body just didn't feel as though it needed to go to bed. I was sensible and paced myself throughout the day but kept up a good output of work.

There were a couple of days when I had little or no voice (but luckily I was not supposed to be in the training room at that time) and I did have a hacking cough for a number of days but otherwise I was OK. I did go to the doctor's and came away with some anti-biotics for a chest infection. But, again, I was sensible and dosed myself with a variety of proprietory and alternative medicines to contain the symptoms and to support my own immune system as it sorted things out.

I guess it's all a reasonable tribute to how fit I actually am.

I've also just finished with Marcel Pagnol's autobiographical novels La Gloire de mon Père and La Chateau de ma Mère. I read them in translation but I read them because I first read the first as a teenager studying for a French A Level in the original French. I can honestly say that I remembered nothing of the subject matter and, as an adult, I can see why. It is charming and it is imbued with a nostalgia for French provincial life at the turn of the twentieth century. But to get a sense of the nostalgia and the accuracy of the descriptions of the life lived, you really need to have a better background knowledge of European social, political and ecclesiastical history than I would have possessed in the early 1970s. So, I read it a little out of a sense of duty and cannot really say that I warmed to it extensively.