Conclusion

I have come to a simple conclusion: I have Hobbits on the brain. Not the little furry fuzzballs themselves, cute and leaf-eared as they may be, but the film and its future fellows.

The primary reason for this, beyond my status as a general all round Tolkien geek, is the fact that I still can't see the damn thing. This post is not about my slowly receding Chicken Pox (you want 'agony' for that), but its lingering effect is that I'm still in isolation. Sitting, with my germs, in a cinema with lots of potential unPoxed people is to be frowned upon, even if some of my scabs look a little like popcorn.

 Instead, I can read reviews, watch clips, try to ignore my friends on Facebook (my only form of regular human contact) as they discuss details. I can read the damn thing (gasp!) but I can't see it. As a result I think it's taking on greater proportions of importance in my mind. Frankly, up until the reviews started coming in I wasn't all that bothered. I had obsessed over every tiny detail of the production of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the extent that by the time I watched it the film was so denuded of surprises that it left me cold. So I have intentionally ignored "An Unexpected Journey", so successfully that I was in danger of being rather ennuish about the whole thing - not like me at all, when it comes to M.E.

So when I find myself musing on a facebook status that someone's "three hours' sleep is catching them up", I end up with Tolkienish imagery entering my head, imagining three hours' sleep as a sort of Grey Rider, hooded and cloaked as if it does not want to be known, slowly gaining on the bad sleeper until it comes upon him, in some dark place, far from help. I shared this idea, much to the horror of the friend who felt that I had added a new terror to exhaustion. So I amended the image in my head from a Grey Rider to a Hot Pink Rider, on the basis that just because I'm starting to lose my marbles I don't need to scatter everyone else's.

Agony

Not having been ill that often, I'd always been particularly twitchy about the fact that I'd never had Chicken Pox. I picked up by osmosis that it was much worse to get it as an adult (not with the same specific horrors as mumps, but...) and the thought of all that itching for days on end, well... I just didn't like the sound of it at all.

I even asked my travel doctor if she thought it was worth getting the varicella vaccine. Sister Mary*, however, was having none of it. "You're almost 40 and have lived in London half your life!" she exclaimed. "There's no way you've never had the pox!"

(looking back, the idea that some people have this without realising it makes me wants to hit them with saucepans, but since they're presumably 5 years old I'll probably let them off)

No matter how many times I insisted that I hadn't, there was no convincing her. And since I wanted to be immune to it, in the end I stopped arguing. This is what people do when they are told something they want to hear.

And, like most things that are what you want to hear, it turned out to be total and utter bollocks.

I knew I'd been exposed (cricket club AGM, of all places - 36 year old fellow sufferer from the more isolated plains of New Zealand). I'd checked the immunity status of my fellow actors (all fine, though worrying about it gave me a reputation as a hypochondriac). The most likely time for me to come down the main illness was right in the middle of show-week, but I made it through to the cast party with nothing worse than fatigue and dizziness, and frankly - being a bit of a wuss -  I don't need to be ill for that to happen.

I didn't drink much at the party and got home just as England were knocking off the winning runs to go 2-1 up against India. Naturally, hangover or not, I expected to spend a lot of Sunday asleep. When I barely woke up at all, the tiny part of me that was conscious had a very bad feeling.

For those who don't know, from what I've read Chicken Pox in adults is nasty for three reasons. Firstly, the flu-like bit of it, where you feel like you've been run over by Boris Johnson's pants, is more severe than it is in children; more drawn out and more painful. This then can lead to complications, like pneumonia or the inflammation of practically every organ going, up to and including the testes (orchitis, the latter is called: I'll never look at Shagrat and Gorbag the same way again). Finally, the pox itself follows less predictable pattern than it apparently does with children, with the spots turning up anywhere on the skin and mucus membranes. And I mean anywhere. I'd rather be struck down by tiny vampires; at least they stay out of places where they're uninvited.

For all the massive whinge of this entry, I seem to have avoided complications of any kind, apart from a couple of infected spots that I'd idly scratched before I'd realised what was happening (one is under my eyebrow - this may be fun). But the whole experience was still truly horrible. What noone tells you (and I feel like I've read every webpage going on the illness, to the extent I was correcting NHS Direct at one point) is that it fucking hurts. It's agony. "Unbearable itchiness" doesn't begin to describe it. I felt like I was being devoured by giant ants or stung by wasps. A further rare complication is necrotising fasciitis , and there were times when it did indeed feel like a million organisms were munching on my skin. Fucking itchy? I think the medical profession is desperately trying to avoid scaring the bejeezus out of the 10% of adults who didn't have the Pox as a child. And the strongest painkiller they'll prescribe for this torment? Paracetamol.

Of course, the intensity of the pain does eventually go and is replaced by the legendary itchiness, though again 'itchy' summons up images of comedy itching powder in a cartoon character's underwear or people desperately rubbing at their hay-fevered eyes. This was just a wave of slightly smaller ants. Not scratching is never an problem - your body instinctively understands that to scratch this would just lead to bits of your own body coming off on your hands.

But you want the relief and sensation of scratching nonetheless. There are no creams, lotions or shampoos that can truly relieve this, and the sleep-depriving intensity of it drove me to drinking whisky and popping ibropufen at the same time. Fortunately, that stage lasted only 24 hours, and - several days in - I finally reached the 'annoying and uncomfortable' stage that - I suspect - is everyone else's default supposition of what having Chicken Pox is like.  

Now I look like Pinhead with aluminium alopecia and have learned that my tendency to buy only skin-tight clothing really does have its drawbacks, but I am essentially on the mend. And this is it, no matter how much of a ranty blog mood something like this puts you in, you do get through it in the end. It's only a week, after all. But poxless adults - do not take anyone's word for your immunity. If someone gives you a sniff of a chance to get the varicella vaccine, bite their hands off, before a thousand fiery ants start biting you. 

Spotty.

PS: If you think you've been exposed, apparently the vaccine still works after exposure and before symptoms, so don't sit back and wait for a week of evil. You do not want this.
 
* she isn't called Sister Mary.  But she really ought to be. 

Curtain

I'm on stage next week. There won't be a curtain, sadly - it's not that kind of theatre. It's a small studio above a very nice pub in Kentish Town, so what it lack in front of stage drapery it makes up for it easily accessed food and drink.

The lack of curtain has led the Director to get awfully excited about format flexibility, so we're doing the play "in the round", with at least some audience on every side. I'm looking forward to the occasional moments where I get confused and start talking to an audience member instead of one of the cast: it really, really, really could happen. 'Intimate' does not begin to describe it.

Hopefully people will not be freaked out by the lack of a veil between them and the actors. The play is a black comedy (or perhaps, for the pretentious amongst you, a "dark farce") about a bunch of self-obsessed, 30-something success-fetishists getting together for a NYE party in a country house in the middle of nowhere. Suffice it to say, it all goes a bit avocado-shaped, given there are hooded figures at the window, myriad lies to be uncovered and something very nasty and sharp lurking in the background. Oh, and Buckaroo. Possibly Twister, too, but that might still be vetoed on the grounds of taste.

Tickets are available here.

Produce

I have a love-hate relationship with avocados.

This is not to be confused with my love-hate relationship with armadillos, who keep hanging around the local bus shelters with their leathery armoured shells scaring the locals but helpfully decimating the troublesome London termite population. Or my love-hate relationship with advocaat which, despite being pleasingly sweet and custardy,  once ran off with a beloved girlfriend of mine and now regularly sends abusive postcards from an expensive holiday home in Mauritius.

No, avocados hold a special place in my heart and my spleen. I love them. I love their distinctive taste, their creamy texture and the fact that - loving them as I do - I then get told by health experts to eat even more of them. This is not something that happens with Irn Bru, and is therefore to be cherished, like a small dog who - although a bit embarassing because he tries to shag your Aunt Betty's leg when she comes to tea and keeps weeing on your CD player - also does your tax returns and forges convincing Jackson Pollocks.

Sadly, however, the Irn Bru analogy can prove useful. Would I like IB so much if when I reached for a bottle and upended it into my mouth, nothing happened? I would lower it, peer into the bottle and sigh. "This Irn Bru isn't ripe", I moan, popping it back into the sunlit window sill to speed the process.

The following day I come back and open the Irn Bru again. Still nothing. This despite the fact it has "ripe and ready" on a sticker across it. I put it back on the shelf.

The next day I'm incredibly busy and get home so late for work I go straight to bed and don't check the bottle.

The next day I reach for the Irn Bru and open it. I pour it into a glass, only to discover it's now gone grey and tastes of dishwater. It goes down the sink.

The avocado: produce that - from my experience - manages to be ripe and edible for about the length of a Peter Jackson movie. Miss this golden window of opportunity in either direction, and you're either crunching a bitter, zombie-green pebble, or a disintegrating, putrid bruise in fruit-form. I've thrown out so many avocados I don't know why I don't just throw them in the skip on the way back from the shops, or better still just beat them to a pulp with a hammer straight after using the self-checkout machine. It would save a lot of heartache.

Of course, trying that on the armadillos gets you nowhere and only annoys them. Hug a Shelly. It's the only way.

Modification

I was very relieved to hear that the Government's badger cull has been delayed for a bit, while highly paid officials decide whether or not it really is a fucking stupid idea. I was not alone in fearing that roving bands of psychopaths with a license to kill things with distinctive streaks of grey hair could lead to a bad end for people of my age.

Of course, unlike the poor old badger, hacking their TB'd lungs into a silk handkerchief as they write poems of loss and despair in their under-siege setts, I can very easily turn to a range of products to disguise myself and throw off the marauding gangs, though I should probably be more careful: a recent habit of going for reddish brown means I put myself at danger of being trampled by horses and eaten by beagles from an illegal hunt.

Dyeing one's hair is a delicate business. As modifications go it's relatively minor - compare painting Just for Men into your stubble to having buttock implants, and suddenly it doesn't seem quite so embarrassing - but I do worry about where it will lead. Assuming my hair doesn't all fall out one day (the genetic jury is out on that one) I don't want to run the risk of ending up like Paul McCartney, looking like my own waxwork replica that's been left to close the radiator overnight. Judging exactly when to stop covering your grey is like to be as complicated as working out when to stop wearing jeans or start becoming a fan of charismatic orchestra conductors.

But at the moment, while I'm relatively confident my skin's elasticity is not such that combining it with dark hair would cause me to look like a victim of a slow-working alien disintegration ray, there's no way I'm allowing grey to have its way. If my hair would just fade respectably, that would be one thing. Instead, my hair is performing some sort of crazy art experiment on my head, a follicular abstract project of uncertain ambition. It's latest triumph is a neat circle of grey just above my right ear, a colourless crop circle that bears no relation to any of the other grey hairs around it. I live in fear that I'll wake up and find that the greys have painted 666 on my hair with impressive neatness.

I might get lucky. Maybe the grand plan is for my hair to delicately outline the location of the unrecovered Brink's-MAT gold bullion. I'll be staring in the mirror with horror, aghast at the salt-and-pepper disaster on my head, when I'll suddenly realise that I'm gazing at a set of coordinates and a crudely drawn picture of Hayward's Heath. I'll race south with a shovel as the coordinates lead me to a Sussex wood, and just as I strike the unmistakable feel of metal buried the soil, I'll be shot and killed by the Government's badger hunters, like the end of Nostromo but with omnivorous mammals.

I think, on balance, I'll keep dyeing it for a while. It's just safer.  

Ladder

I've never worn tights. Well, I say that, when I was 5 my mum concocted what was possibly the most bizarre fancy dress outfit ever to create two "Jubilee Trumpeters", consisting of me and my brother wearing souvenir golden jubilee carrier bags and a pair of white tights (the trumpets were adapted cardboard tinfoil rolls). And I have a vague recollection of there being a pair of yellow tights in the dressing up box in my bedroom when I was little, which would almost certainly have been used to create some sort of superhero get-up at one point. But, APART FROM THAT, I have never worn tights.

They have always struck me as a curiously impractical garment. Any clothing item which breaks the very first time you wear it, and provokes more of a "oh well, that was bad luck" rather than a scream of "fucking bastards, I'm taking these back" might as well be replaced with tissue paper and roll of Sellotape. Or perhaps a form of pasta.

Life, however, throws plenty of tights substitutes at the unwary male. Or at least this unwary male (and there must be few more unwary than I). Most durable to date are my cycling leggings. Well, actually, they're not cycling leggings at all, they're cheap-as-chips running leggings from purveyors of bargain shite Sports Direct. But I wear them when cycling, and thus far they have proved impressively durable, despite my tendency to forget to unzip the ankle looseners when I take them off: I end up hopping around with stretchy leggings attached to my foot as I try to pull them off, like a pixie attached to a piece of chewing gum.

(It's amazing how bothered people can be about how others dress - read this thread as a prime example of hot-under-the-collar-fuckwittery)

Most fragile seems to be the ultimate in male tights-substitute, the skinny jean. Despite clearly being a young persons trouser (and therefore out of bounds to angora wearing oldies)  I can't resist building my entire wardrobe around the Skinny.  Perhaps it's a reaction to spending most of my twenties wearing baggy clothes to hide how skinny I (thought that I) was. Perhaps I secretly just want to wander around in tights for some reason*. Perhaps I'm having a mid-life crisis and can't afford a sports car, a jet-ski or a giant, ceramic replica of Jeremy Clarkson.

But Skinnies, it turns out, are a bit on the tissue-paper-and-pasta side. They don't ladder, as such, but I've never worn through any leg wear as quickly as a work through my tiny jeans. It might be that, despite being determinedly on the slim side, I'm just not quite the right shape for them. They are clearly not - for instance - designed for the frequent cyclist. Not only does wearing them while actually cycling lead to worn-through holes in very embarrassing places (stemming from friction of taut denim against saddle) but if you've got thighs and a bum you're going to have to be careful when bending. There's really not a lot of give. Bending at the knees might look after your back when heavy lifting; it doesn't do much for your trousers, and the subsequent journey home on the tube can be awkward.

Maybe I should look into tights after all. And maybe a carrier bag.

S.

*I'm thinking more from the actory side of things than being a transvestite, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Sake

It is indicative of just how drink obsessed I am at the moment that rather than reading this as 'purpose' or 'benefit' I thought instead of a Japanese rice-based alcohol. But then I got over that and remembered that I don't really drink rice based liquor and wouldn't have anything to say about it other than:
I'd like to go to Japan one day.

It's amazing what you can do with rice. I wonder if you can also build a helicopter out of it?

 Japan suffers in my travel plans because of its determinedly northern hemisphere persuasions. I'm sure it regularly cries with anguish about the missed opportunities of being north of the equator and missing out on visits by cricket-loving Brits. If you're going to have a summer at exactly the same time as my summer, frankly you're just not trying hard enough to get my attention. Who works out your scheduling?

 A friend has just said "this time next week it'll be 4:30". So it's going to be dark at the end of the working day instead of just relentlessly gloomy (and right now there's a strange whispy but vast layer of blackish cloud drifting damply underneath the usual smooth grey shell of the autumn sky, as if someone somewhere has set fire to a whale), and this is the point where my motivation to flee the country comes into sharp focus. But Japan? It's single saving grace for a winter holiday would be going to those hot pools that always feature in David Attenborough shows and watching red-faced monkeys kick the shit out of each other in pursuit of a good bath. So, for my own sake, I need some light, some sunshine and - should I not get them - some rice-based liquor and a slice of cake. I'll take what I can get.