I do not want to be Ray Mears when I grow up

Plans for Measure for Measure have had to go on hold, despite the trailer yesterday.  I promise it will be done by this time next week even if I have to walk over the shards of hot folios in bare feet to do it.

Yesterday was one of those days.  You know.  The ones where you don’t seem to sit still for very long, and you spend many hours trundling on the hamster wheel of despair, which spits you out at about ten at night leaving you bewildered and not much further forward with anything.  As of ten last night I had a filthy kitchen,  mounds of clean laundry obscuring half the kitchen table, mounds of dirty laundry obscuring half the kitchen floor, teetering piles of paper on every available surface and a lounge which every time I wandered through it left me thinking, ‘hmmm, something smells funny in here.  And not in an amusing way.’

I was supposed to have spent the morning with my friend, at her house, chatting and eating biscuits while my son played with her children’s toys while they were at school.  This would have been delightful.  Instead she texted me at eight o’clock to tell me that she had pleurisy and could we put visits on hold.  This seemed like a reasonable excuse.  Pleurisy does not sound fun does it?  I think it’s a kind of precursor to pneumonia, and is one of those old fashioned, deadly things where you hack up lungs and blood leaks out of your eyeballs.

To assuage Oscar who is not as impressed by pleurisy as me, and was standing at the front door with his coat on demanding to go and raid other children’s toy boxes, I suggested we visited the farm shop where Aunty Squirrel, who comes round to our house every other Friday for her tea, gets her pudding contributions.  I spoke to my dad on the phone, who decided that it was nearer to his house than it was to ours, and so we could pick him up on the way, and he could accompany us on our farm shop adventure.  It turns out that it is no nearer to his house than it is ours, but no matter.   We ricocheted across country, and made with with only minor teeth sucking incidents.

By the time we got there I felt I was entitled to a large cake.  Unfortunately we seem to have caught them on a bad day.  I was not impressed.  The produce was not locally sourced and all far too shiny and supermarket looking, the majority of the rest of the food I could have got at Waitrose cheaper, and the cakes were thin on the ground.  In the end we bought a packet of Jelly Tots, a bar of Green and Blacks chocolate and half a sack of potatoes and vowed never to return.  It was not my idea of a farm shop at all.  A few years ago when I was married to UE and living in Hinckley (which I do not recommend. Either thing.)  I used to get a veg box from a wonderful local farm shop.  Occasionally we would visit them, and they would always give the kids bread to feed the ducks in the idyllic duck pond in front of their shop, and let them ring up the items on the till.  They sourced locally and organically wherever they could and were hugely knowledgeable about every product they stocked.  It was fantastic.  This was not.

We decided to be brave and soldier on.  I took my dad to Ibstock to pick up his mended watch.  Then we went to the garden centre so that he could buy some kindling for the fire.  They had a tea room.  It was lunch time.  Dad treated us to lunch.  It was evil. Truly evil.  The service was slow and Mrs. Overallish.  The home made soup tasted like cabbage water that had been boiled for a hundred years and was inedible.  Oscar had chips which were so disgusting he left most of them.  We tried them.  We didn’t blame him.  The coffee was like water with soil in it.  There was not a single thing to recommend it. 

The soup repeated on me for the whole of the rest of the day, and I only managed about four mouthfuls, so you can only imagine what it must do to someone who had the stamina to finish a whole bowl.  Urgh.

By the end of this abomination it was time to come home and pick up the children from school.  We parked up just as it began to snow. 

Tea time was early because I’d got a session with the hypnotherapist for six.  I was watching the snow falling, thinking that I might get Jason to drive me there (I was planning on going by myself), when I had a phone call from Rainbows.  I had forgotten it was a special celebratory Rainbows meeting for Thinking Day, so the meeting was at six on the other side of Glenfield instead of at six on Thursday round the corner.  Bugger.  This meant I had to go to the hypnotherapist alone so that Jason could drive Tallulah to Rainbows.

I set off at twenty to six, which is normally fine time wise.  I made it there at quarter past six.  I had not taken into account that it was the first time I was driving on my own at night, the fact that the snow was coming down hard, and that it was rush hour.   The hypnotherapist lives in the middle of nowhere, but to get there I had to go by a very popular short cut that people take when the main roads are busy.  It was chocka block with traffic, all moving very fast.  I was extremely unnerved.  So unnerved that at a crucial right hand turn I misjudged where I was and had to carry straight on because I’d got some impatient idiot driving right up my arse.  This necessitated a further ten minute detour to come round in a loop to turn down the right road.

Then I had to sit for ten minutes in the car at the side of the road before I could get out and go and ring the door bell because I was shaking rather much.  It was somewhat of a baptism of fire.

Two hours of reasonably stressful hypnotherapy later I had to do the whole thing in reverse.  The country lane I was parked on did not lend itself to me practicing a three point turn in the pitch dark and the snow, so I merely carried on in the direction in which the car was pointing in the hope that I would eventually hit somewhere I recognised, which I did, thankfully.  The snow was somewhat less fierce, the roads were quieter and the journey home was measurably less stressful, although trying to reverse park into a neat spot on the drive defeated me, and I abandoned the car half on the pavement and made Jason do the rest.

Despite all this I did manage to fit in quite a lot of studying, albeit in a peripatetic manner as I hurled myself about house and home. I also managed to have hideous nightmares and sleep really badly, which is probably why I woke up this morning dog tired, and with a crashing headache, which has annoyingly persisted all day, neither getting worse nor getting better, just lurking about on the periphery making life hard.

I guess you could say that yesterday was a very exploratory style day.  We did new things, we ventured further afield, we definitely shifted out of our comfort zones.  When I do things like that I expect some kind of reward, not a vague feeling that I have been robbed,  with the added privileges of indigestion on a previously unimagined scale and a headache.  I do not want to be an explorer any more.  I have read all of Redmond O’Hanlon’s books and he always seems an optimistic sort of man, who even in the worst situations finds time to contemplate the beauty of his surroundings and his great good fortune to be an adventuring soul.  On reflection I think you must have to be born to it.  Judging by yesterday’s little foray I would merely be irritable, hysterical and entirely unimpressed by the wonders of the natural world, particularly if there were no cakes and I got indigestion on top.