Thursday 21 April 2011

Allergy joy

One week in England, and I do not feel normal. This is disappointing, because I wanted to feel normal in England very much. You have sunshine! And fantastic bird song! But, after a few days arriving here feeling fantastically energetic, as a woman of thirty and counting backwards, I am now waking slow as a slug, barely can remember what happened yesterday, and looking like a beat up old vagrant maybe two hundred and sixty years on the streets and counting forward. It is very inhibiting and, since I feel like not going out but lying down nursing a headache, not a little depressing.

What is effecting this rapid catapult into miserable malaise I do not know. It is leaving its mark, whatever it is. Never mind about the internal workings, on the outside I look terrible. Red itching panda eyes, neck rash and a headache so big I am sure it is visible, like a growth protruding from my brow.

Of course I have called on Dr Internet. He says he can explain this. It cannot be my ongoing allergic response to my own house, cumulatively worsening as the days pass, and that it's time to sort out the mouldy cellar and buy a hypoallergenic pillow.

No. It cannot be that. Dr Internet says it is a terrible incurable disease which will leave the gritlets motherless within six months. He also adds that inexplicable skin marks, memory loss and feebleness are signs that I may have been abducted by aliens. Even now they may be sucking my life out of my body for their ongoing humanoid experiments.

So it all looks a bit hopeless. In fighting spirit, I am swallowing the cetirizine, trying to ride it out, opening the windows in the mould-filled cellar, and pretending that I am not feeling self conscious about the hunchbacked shoulders, red lumpen face, and general air of defeat while I stand in the inevitable queue at the Co-op with my solitary bottle of beer. Soon I shall conduct my own experiment and observe what happens when I go live on a Suffolk floor for a few days with a dead flat cat and three kids.

If the malaise, facial trauma and red itching panda eyes do not subside at that point, it will be proof, one way or the other, of something.

Maybe Dr Internet will be right after all. I am going to die in a horrible way very soon, but not before I am properly taken over by the aliens from the Planet Vesticular.