I love codeine. It is a marvellous thing. I can now function, albeit at a very low level. I know that were I to stop taking it I would feel ghastly, because it is just taking the edge off, rather than restoring me to normality, but it is enough of an edge that I can stay dressed, and upright and manage my son, in a token fashion.
Mostly I am camping at my mum’s house. This is so that I do not have to drive anywhere until I am sure that both eyes will work together in a co-operative fashion. I also seem to have hideous cramping pain, rather like period pain, except that I am not bleeding. The cramping could be the codeine I suppose. I don’t care. I shall carry on for now.
In other news, my poor mother has now graduated from looking after my children to looking after me, and my children. I was supposed to be taking them away and relieving her of her burden. Instead I am adding to it.
She is very long suffering.
We have not been downhearted though. Mostly we have been gossiping. This is quite nice. We have ranged far and wide in our conversations. I am infecting mother with my Emma Bridgewater addiction. She has started bidding on pieces on Ebay. We are trying not to outbid each other. That would be bad. This leads to complicated discussions about patterns (there are about 2000), and shapes. My father is in despair.
I think she’s only doing it to get back at him for his carnival glass fetish.
We have also discussed super injunctions. That took approximately two minutes. Mum: ‘It’s so bloody boring. Who cares?’ to which I said: ‘I totally agree, and I like gossip. It IS boring. Let us never speak of it again.’
So we didn’t.
We have had an interesting discussion about Time Team. Mum loves Time Team. She watches it religiously every week, and then watches all the repeat shows on The Discovery Channel. I quite like it, and used to want to be an archaeologist before I went to university and met a lot of bedraggled, muddy refugees in the bar, clutching toothbrushes and talking about grid references. This put me off. I wanted pith helmets, cursed golden treasure and my own bedouin tent. It was not to be.
We were talking about how excited the archaeologists get when they discover a body. Mum was telling me about one of the programmes in which they found lots of pairs of people buried in single graves, with a bucket between them. Apparently these bucket burials are very rare, and they found five in the same programme. Nobody knows what the buckets were for.
I posited my theory that they were either a) hangover victims or b) migraine victims.
It could be true.
As true as anything the real archaeologists come up with.
This talk of graves and grave goods led me to thinking. I wonder how many archaeologists go for a full interment when they die as opposed to a cremation?
I would put money on the percentage of interments being much higher than the average man in the street.
I bet they can’t resist it.
I suspect when that Mick, who heads Time Team comes to meet his maker he will have an enormous grave mound, festooned with stripy jumpers and buckets and ornate bejewelled hats. I am sure thatPhil will make him one out of one of his old leather hats, with the help of some re-enactment specialists wearing hosen made of woven nettles and stained with hemp tea bags. Frenzied hemp tea bags.
They will be so excited as they lower him into the grave, thinking of the fun the archaeologists of the future will have working out what the hell we were all doing with sapphire encrusted cowboy hats and jumpers knitted in all the colours of the rainbow.
It will be their gift to the future.
Did you see the Time Team special at Bamburgh Castle? My cousin was on it!! I am totally jealous that she got to meet Phil.
Bev, I just never get to see them at the moment. I never get to see anything.
Time Team, that’s another programme that has, surprisingly, made it Downunder. I love it when they all start squabbling like little boys when things go awry or they can’t find anything
I went to visit friends of a friend on a dig when I was a student. Mostly it was cold, muddy and rather earnest. The pub after they’d knocked off for the day was pretty good though!
PS. The cramps and shorter bleed could be a late ovulation bleed rather than a true period . . . which could explain the lack of PMT. That’s what used to happen to me, I don’t recommend it as conducive to a carefree existence.
xox
Sharon
No. I can’t say I’m feeling terribly carefree.
Archaeologists certainly know how to partay that’s for sure.
Lenin used to belong to the local Young Archaeologists and several years ago got an invitation through them to help on a Time Team dig – but it meant missing a week of school so I said no. She was a bit miffed at that, for several weeks.
Alienne
She will only hold it against you for the rest of your life!
Yeah, that and everything else I have ever done
On my way to a proper museum job I spent quite a few hours as a volunteer scrubbing clean the mud-encrusted bits from recent archaeological digs. It was a useful reminder that it is more fun being a curator, but even meeting real pukka archaeologists (all the ones I met, of either sex, clutched pint beer glasses rather than toothbrushes, often out of the bar as well as in it) didn’t put me off Time Team. It would still be one of the few programmes I would watch but most of the time we can’t get Channel 4, alas.
I loved your description of Mick the Jumper’s grave mound. My friend Neil’s mum says she wants to be buried in her Mini car, rather like a ship burial. I don’t think this sort of stuff is being properly catered for by funeral directors, y’know.
Noreen
They don’t do they? If I weren’t so phobic I would open an alternative undertakers. Really it would go down a storm.