A wonderful holiday. Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m in BTL, trapped in my own Bedford Falls, where our beautiful children share their presents and gently wrap each other in their blankets and say please and thank you and make me laugh until I’m choking and reassure me during Stick Man and voluntarily watch at least one hour of a silent reindeer-sleigh documentary before taking it in turns to dance on my head. To add salt to that chocolate ganache, however, I’ve got my book deadline, work worries, money worries, mortality worries, worries about my Aged P, worries about others’ worries, guilt, tiredness, and Pringles overdosing. Talking to someone with their own brain adventures makes me realise that I’ve never let myself be bothered by it for more than a moment, and perhaps that’s not a good thing. I’m so busy reassuring everyone that everything isn’t a big deal - a discovery in my MRI scan; my father’s death; my sister’s emigration; an ultimate inability to google the next few decades of mine and my loved ones’ lives; and always always always money worries - that maybe I don’t find time to work out if any of them are a big deal. Or what to do if they are. How do people hold themselves together in the street, when absolutely everyone is going through some version of this? I’ll occasionally find myself close to tears and thinking, ‘Wait, I don’t have time for this now, I’ll have a good weep later.’ Only later I’ve got a deadline to meet, or a kid to stuff into bed. We all have our row to hoe.
Any kind of introspection momentarily blots out the blistering fear to replace it with a literally paralysing rage: I find myself staring out of windows, teeth and muscles clenched, burning at the potential injustice of my early death, and the hundreds-and-thousands of wrongs sprinkled liberally over the rest of the world. I suspect it’s my seizure meds. But I doubt I’ll take the time to find out.