Tuesday

I promise this is the last time I write about the facie horribilis, or the tortoise face of balloon doom.

If I go down that route - creating an online cross-referenced catalogue of what I ate, what I touched, how many antihistamines I can swallow, and the allergen potential of benzoic acid when combined with acetyl salicylic acid - then the lovely gritsday blog would cease to become a wondrous and ever-changing daily source of delight and educational inspiration. It would become a mind-numbing catalogue of medical misery of interest only to other dietary obsessives.

I would be seriously bored by that shit, as any sane person would be, and I need to hang on to sanity.

I have been down this road before, anyhow, and recognise some of the indicators. When I turned overnight into a hippy vegan (1986), hanging around with a lot of organic tie died dread heads, I quickly became bored out of my skull. Lengthy meetings, painfully sat cross-legged, conducted cooperatively over earthenware pitchers of hand-picked chamomile tea, always went the same way: Do bees feel the painful trauma and despairing emptiness of loss when their unique stored sustenance is cruelly stolen from them? Discuss.

I quickly realised that half an hour of that was enough to turn me into a pig-chomping meat-eater again unless I speedily worked out a personal route for myself and stopped attending the happy sharing hippy ring.

So it is with the the tortoise face of balloon doom. I am ditching most of Doctor Internet's advice and resigning myself to a lengthy period of self-experimentation and self-study, the details of which I will not share unless I chance upon the elixir of life, the fountain of eternal youth, or the philosopher's stone. Then you can be sure I will share the answer with you, by bottling it and flogging it for a reasonable price.

Now, in other (educationalish) news, it is Tuesday, which means Shark attends the Woodcraft Folk, a group which she adores.

(I shall have to watch her, and if she picks out a tie-died skirt with bells hanging off it as the key to a lovely summer outfit, I shall whisk her off and join her up to the Pig Fancier's Union.)