The Clockmaker

Ohhh... how long does it take for a body to catch up on missed sleep?! Still tiiiiired!

Speaking of things that drag on, how long does it take to import LJ stuff onto Dreamwidth? It's been sitting in the queue since Sunday morning and it's now Wednesday evening! That's slow!

I think I have two things to talk about today. Let's start with food phobia.

 

But Silver wasn't my second subject. My second was this song:

Well... I was going to embed a video but it's not on YouTube. Have the lyrics instead. The song is bouncy London-accented boyband and it just radiates summer.

 

It's not quite the end but there's nothing new. This is one of my favourite songs ever and yes, I'm aware that my inner music snob should be ashamed. Luckily, I don't have one.

So, the chorus. Honestly, their accent and pronunciation - I know what it says the words are inside the cover but they sing "don't go thinking you've gotta go under the waves". You don't have to do this. Every time I hear this, and I mean every time, I'm taken back to a cave called Swildon's Hole, in Somerset. It's a lovely cave, it goes on for hours, there's literally something for everyone there. It's a brilliant cave.
The classic trip is down to Sump 1, through and then back up, at least for beginners. The sump is a section of flooded passage. It's less than a metre long. You can put your foot through and it comes up into fresh air on the other side. Every fresher that ever went through my club lay in the water, took a deep breath and pulled themself through this thing. Except me. It petrifies me. It's icy cold, it's brown and murky and full of grit, it's flat on your back with your head turned to the side. I know the reality is that I'd be underwater for all of five seconds but I can't do it. Call it a phobia if you must.

 

The second thing that song makes me think of is the second verse:

One day, it barely took a second
You grew up, the big world beckoned and you dived right in

I graduated, I got a job and suddenly - there's a world out there. I've got money now, I've got access to it. I took up snowboarding, I wrote a book, I flew off to Finland, Romania, the French Alps, Lithuania, Norway etc. I dived right in. I have bad days from time to time - rarer than it used to be, but generally I love this world and this life of mine. It would be nice if my friends would play in it occasionally but I'd rather play on my own than sit with my nose against the window looking out at it passing me by. I don't think that's a bad attitude to have to a fairly lonely life.

So umm.... that's what that song means to me. As if anyone actually cared.

This entry was originally posted at http://phantym.dreamwidth.org/1248.html. There are comments there. I prefer Livejournal but feel free to comment at Dreamwidth if you like.

Today is a better day than yesterday, for two reasons which probably should't be but are equally important to me.

1) Following Sunday night's epic tooth pain, I woke up yesterday with a horrible miserable ache throughout the entire left side of my head. Never did work out whether it was in my jaw (and therefore caused by toothache), ear (and therefore possibly caused by underwater attempts at earclearing in the pool on Sunday) or in my entire head. The only thing I was sure about was that it wasn't actually in the teeth anymore. But it was horrible and miserable and hurt and I spent the entire day at work wishing I could put my head down on the desk and groan. We have some so-called "drawing" software at work which contains hundreds of ready-made graphic illustrations of everything from dentistry to sales maps and it includes a section on headaches, with pictures of unhappy-looking heads and grey patches showing where the pain typically is. One of them had a sad-looking person with a big grey patch over one eye and I have never ever felt more like a picture summed me up.
I went to Brownies regardless of the pain - they are an excellent distraction, we should bottle them and sell them as a cure-all but when I got home, I just lay down on the floor in front of the fire and slept for an hour and then went to bed early. I did wake up a couple of times in the night, convinced I couldn't sleep, tossing and turning but considering I was asleep at 9, I stayed asleep remarkably well and joy of joys, woke up headache-free this morning.

2) Woke up late this morning, got up late, didn't even venture downstairs until five minutes before I was supposed to leave for work, to find the post had already arrived. There was an odd-looking letter, covered in strange symbols. Addressed in handwriting - this was no bill or junk mail or anything from a bank. And- and that's my name on it, in handwriting that looks like it belongs to a fourteen-year-old boy. And a very familiar surname in the top corner... it's a reply from Silver in Afghanistan! Cue something between squee attack and panic attack. I told him some far more personal things than I usually would in my last letter to him and I was a little bit concerned about how he might respond to them.

He's glad to hear from me, glad we're going to become BFF again since "it would never work out between us" and thanks for the marshmallows. The rest I haven't managed to decipher yet. I have no idea what they've done to the letter but it looks like it's been written and then photocopied onto a piece of card which is folded and sealed so you rip three edges off to open it and it's difficult to read. I am delighted. I have a letter from my mate Silver! We're going to remain friends! I'm going to see him again! Doesn't mean I'm not still hopelessly in love with him but many years ago I resigned myself to the fact that we could never be more than friends and I'm perfectly satisfied with that - for now.

In other news, the land behind our office has been bought. We've known that for some time and we've always known that someone would built on it eventually, thus blocking out the light from the only windows in the room. No one's really been looking forward to that. I don't know if I'm the only stupid one but it hadn't occurred to me that before the light was blocked out, we'd have a few weeks/months of building work. I am pleased. My inner four-year-old (who wanted to be a digger driver) still loves watching heavy construction vehicles digging and doing whatever work they do. I've got a scene from my imaginary future playing out in front of me every day, so I certainly won't be joining the chorus of "Oh no! It's noisy and it's horrible!" Also, because they're digging up damp earth, they're wafting a delicious smell of... well, damp earth across the estate. It smells like a field just after it's rained and that I like also. So I'm perfectly contented with the building works.

In fact, other than the fact that my Dearly Beloved Boss arrived ten minutes before I came home for lunch and is therefore going to be in the office all afternoon, I'm pretty contented with my entire Tuesday.