Correcting your mistakes/I love mustard

I’m not a big one for watching TV, but there are some shows I have a weakness for, and I must say that though I usually abhor any phenomenon that crops up, proves popular and becomes foil for coked-up commissioning editors to proliferate - like antiques shows, DIY shows and property shows - I am glad that cooking programmes have proven to have an enduring apeal. I watch Ready Steady Cook and can really wind down to it, something that is rare for me.

I was watching one such on Saturday while taking a break from Checkmate, a story I have had in mind for a good few years and which could form part of a collection, Labour in Vain which could predate Family Fortunes and introduce some of the characters, notably Hippie.

There was a chef on the programme, an ozzie fella I’ve seen before. I can’t remember too well what he was cooking, exept that I think it may have involved salsa verde, something I have seen in more than one such programme recently, and that he said something which struck me as very true.

“A lot of cooking is about learning to correct your mistakes.”

Me and M____ made a Goulash the other day from a recipe her mum sent her by text message. Quite aside from this it was also an example of too many cooks. It didn’t go well. We cooked it in our new pressure cooker and followed the recipe, but of course, it was nothing like her mother’s (she is an excellent cook). Indeed, it was pretty tasteless.

Still, we’d put decent beef in it and however appetising it was it seemed a shame to throw it away. So the other day I fried a few onions with finely chopped red pepper, mustard powder and paprika, with white wine vinegar and a little soy sauce, and added them to the goulash, heating it and reducing it a little to add the flavour. It worked!

I’ve still got plenty to learn, but there are days I can pull something off and still enjoy my food, and eat right too. And when it does, I really feel good. In fact, since recently I have gone running a couple of times before work, I am reminded of John Irving’s Garp, who writes, runs and cooks because when one isn’t going well another is. I’m getting to feel that way.

Oh, and I have discovered how much I love mustard, hence the second title of the post, to offset that negative post a while back about how I love cheese.

I haven’t posted for a while with moving to the new house and having no internet etc. I’ve had my ups and downs. I started having some really angry reveries, particularly after eating some sugary cereals, and couldn’t be around people after trying to reintroduce some yeast-free soda bread, but over the last few days I’ve been feeling great - caffein-free and alcohol-free for a good while now, and following the diet, with very little fruit. Dietician next week, and crossed fingers he won’t be another useless nincompoop!

Trip

I’ve been on another trip with students, and I’ve come back much more settled, and looking forward to my move to new accomodation. I’ve been jokey with M____ again, playing around, and she has sensed that I am looking forward to the move. This could perhaps be taken as proof conclusive of how I am sensitive to changes in my routine.

By and large I was ok there. I took a lot of food with me and for the first time really anticipated the difficulties I would have with food and compliance to my diet. After all, I am away a lot, and came to feel that I was using trips and birthdays and celebrations and the like as excuses for non-compliance. Especially a problem, I am coming to see, was that I was using non-compliance in one often less avoidable sense as an excuse for non-compliance elsewhere, particularly with smoking and caffeine: I am tired from not sleeping from eating cheese and drinking beer, so I need nicotine or caffeine to perk myself up. This despite having proved this logic flawed again and again.

I did have a little caffeine over there, but not as much as I have elsewhere. I had batter with fish, and black pudding which contained oats and wheat flour. And I had flapjacks most days. But otherwise I did better than I often do, and didn’t feel myself drifting off quite so much as I have in the past.

I have been back a couple of days now and I have fallen into the old rationalisations. Yesterday I had a decaf coffee, telling myself I fancied the taste. I had it with sugar, because I had sugar a couple of times in Wales and didn’t feel any real ill-effects (before I have noticed that the effects of sugar are cumulative). I then had another, unconsciously (as I admitted to myself once or twice before repressing it) wanting the caffeine.  This morning I woke very tired, as I tend to do once this caffeine vicious spiral has taken off, and eventualy succumbed to a full-strength coffee with sugar. Soon after (and no less tired) I began to feel that I was drifting while reading Bleak House, I can’t recall the reveries, but they were there.

I have wondered whether I should ditch the idea of full food diaries and simply record days of compliance. Ie. caffeine - 3 days, gluten 4, dairy, 7, beer 3, spirits 5, nicotine 24. This would then simplify the record and all slips would be regarded as such with neither decaf coffee nor flapjacks regarded as somehow borderline cases. It would also help me in interpreting the evidence since I rarely/never look over old diaries and am only able, therefore, to interpret a single day’s reactions. I am sure there could be a good calculation too to record the resultant mood and concentration, perhaps involving the day’s results plus some fraction of the preceeding days. Some months ago I became possessed with the idea of trying to input into Microsoft [reveries of playing guitar for everyone at work, triggered by Blind Melon’s No Rain, but continuing from regular soundchecking reverie] Excel. I couldn’t manage it, and it became just one of the many hundreds of structures I have attempted to impose on my life that have fallen by the wayside, along with the transparencies I was hoping to draw graphs and pictagrams on and all the rest of it. This blog is the most successful so far!

One thing I noticed from Wales was that the sores in the corners of my mouth completely cleared up.

But I’m still rather out of it. I’ve just been reading an interesting article on M.E. and food intolerance http://www.ldmeg.org.uk/jb/food.htm which I found after looking up caffeine intolerance, wondering how much of my problems may stem from this. I intend to follow the writer’s advice regarding sprouted seeds, indeed I’ve just ordered a book she suggests, The Sprouters Handbook by Edward Cairney from E-Bay and I may go and buy a couple of things in a health food shop later when I’ll be dragged to Mardy Hell by M____. Now though, I think I should go and write an article in my other blog that I’ve been meaning o write for a while.

Oh, one piece of news: I have decided to go for a position at work which I’m led to believe would involve cooking with students.

Decaf? You’re having a laugh!

I’ve been sleeping much better of late but today I’m “spiked,” my word for being unable to switch off. And having been very careful today, it looks like decaf coffee is again to blame. Now, I didn’t have any of the reveries I was subject to the other day following my half nescafe, half decaf mix, but still I cannot sleep, and I’m just lying there cuddling up to my life size doggie having sexual fantasies of secretaries in publishing houses and cellists (which I must, incidentally, write up one day).

The rationalisation? That it was something I enjoyed. Fair enough, except that this rationalisation came at the exact time that I was tired, meaning that it related not to the taste at all but to the effects of the little caffeine that remains in decaf coffee (if you have two or three cups it is the same as one ordinary strength coffee, making decaf, in effect, far stronger relatively, than non-alcoholic beer is to the ordinary stuff, and for this reason in many ways quite misleading). I admitted this to myself briefly before repressing the fact. And besides, even though it is important for me to enjoy my food, in and of itself, and because this aids conformity to the diet, which as I have proved again and again is very important for my health and wellbeing, I know that  caffeine, whether it is decaf or not is bad for me and so, should avoid it.

Just as with the struggle to give up smoking, I find that conforming to this diet is as much an intellectual struggle as a battle of will power. Only in anticipating, catching and arguing against these rationalisations can we make it. And of course, with problems such as ADD, this struggle is made much more difficult because of the tendency to impulsivity and obsession; but the more you conform, the more easy it is to conform, not only because you gain habits and knowledge, but because this impulsivity starts to recede.

Still, there will be slips, and through them we learn. Important too, though, not to punish ourselves for them.

I love cheese!

M_____’s working all day and so there’s not so much pressure of time. A friend rang a couple of hours ago seeing if I wanted to go out tonight. I don’t, really, I went out yesterday, haven’t written anything much aside from this damn blog for weeks, I’m going away for a week to camp in rain-drenched Britain with two of the most passive students, and tomorrow will be more shopping for the house. Still, I’ve quite a bit of time today otherwise, and certainly relative to the last few weeks it’s a bit of breathing space. Now, I hate shopping and resent any time spent doing it, and so I forever try to buy a big shop and plan for several dishes. The only problem with that is that whenever I cook something I cook for several days, which means that even if I wanted to - and most often I imagine I would not - I could not cook all of these dishes before the veg I buy goes off. Consequently while I’m still living with my parents they nag me constantly, and all my plans go to waste. I still end up with as much surplus veg as I do when I don’t plan anything at all and just grab whatever comes to mind when I go shopping - this is the story of my life, that attempts at organisation fail. In any case, I ended up with lots of tomatoes this time, having used up whatever veg I had left for various planned-for meals in a Chinese stir fry which went reasonably well yesterday (aside from the fact that as usual, I added too much corn-flour into the marinate and it all looked rather muddy). Consequently I decided to try and make something that M____’s mum makes all the time, that is, what she calls Lecho. This is essentially a sauce made from tomatoes and peppers reduced in their own juice with onions, cumin, and often salami, an egg added at the last moment and stirred in, and served with bread or potatoes. I chose to serve it with quinoa - I have decided recently that I have been eating far too much in terms of carbs, and need to monitor this, especially in terms of potatoes. Mum had gone into town or Mardy Hell or somewhere shopping and promised to pick up some salami. This was several hours before I began to cook but she had not yet appeared - she has done so now and says it was an absolute nightmare. Still, by this time not wanting to settle down to eat something so thin and short on protein and substance, I figured I would try the other item that has been sitting unused in my fridge since I bought it a few weeks ago, that is, Tofu. Now, as a rule I don’t use much soya. It is an immensely overesteemed product, nutritionally speaking, but reading the label and seeing that it recommended it not only for stir frys but also for soups, I took it out, prepared it as per instructions, and added it to the bubbling lecho.

What I was left with after perhaps an hour of chopping while listening to Gary Steyngard’s Absurdistan on my MP3 player, was perhaps nutritionally acceptable, but no feast for the palate.

I used to enjoy cooking and serving up my food, as I did almost every day for the students at work. Even the most demanding students enjoyed my food. It was rich and satisfying. Once or twice I didn’t quite pull it off but it was never bad. Now I have to relearn everything I learned at university pouring over recipe books and trying out different things. nd often I really don’t pull it off. The ingredients I have to work with just don’t seem so inspiring. That and I’m left drinking sparkling water at the pub.

The trouble is I can resign myself to having to work harder than most people, to having to make everything from scratch. I just wonder whether I’ll be consigned with food to an analogue of what I disgussed yesterday, to not making the grade despite all my efforts. Not making the grade of my own palette, and not making the grade in terms of cooking for others and satisfying them, which is a read pleasure - I like being the host.

Maybe those days only a year and a half ago, when I had not yet explored my own problems so much, when I was cooking with expensive organic produce for myself and others, grating blocks of cheese into the mash of a shepherd’s pie with organic baked beans or risotto made with home-made chicken stock, were the peak in terms of my relationship with food.

I hope not. I’ll keep on trying, but it is hard to motivate yourself. Especially when that need to cook for several days means you have to get through a backlog of unappetising schlop.

No coffee, ctd.

My head is feeling pretty clear today so far, and I should note that with all the negativity of the last few posts, because I have had no coffee for a couple of days, and I think I am feeling the effects of that. The upheavals of the last few weeks may have been having their effect but perhaps there is room for a lot of positivity over this diet when followed correctly; it is just that I haven’t been doing much of that, and one of the rationalisations that keeps coming up, and I must learn to contend with, is that if I am unable to follow the diet in one respect, I can let it go in others and treat it as a way of documenting reactions. Really, this is nothing more than defeatism.

08:30 breakfast of GF toast and peanut butter, water and Vit B6/Zinc

Nothing since so far. Clear head. Able to talk. Not restless or angry and no reveries that I can recall.

On not making the grade

I think it was when I was brushing my teeth yesterday that I began to have reveries of, as usual nowadays, being at work and arguing. Of course, most of them have slipped my mind, as usual, but one that remains in my memory was, as is often the case set in one of the meetings.

When I was away in Prague I wrote down some reveries of disagreements enacted in my mind with some of the management here and their philosophy and ways of dealing with students. Much of it stems, actually, I think, from a meeting I alluded to yesterday about music in which one of the managers said that MP3 players are bad because it discourages conversation (I reflected on it when I was listening to rock music in my car, and finding it cathartic). We were for some kind of compromise whereby students could listen to MP3 players at certain alloted times. She was adament that they should not be allowed to listen to MP3 players at all. One of my arguments was that those individuals with autistic spectrum disorders do not have the same inclination towards conversation and that, far from relaxing them, it stresses them out. My take on it was, and is, that yes, we should at all times help students by reducing the anxiety associated with social contact, and that we should indeed encourage social contact and facilitate it, but that we should not enforce it at all times of the day because it is exceptionally fatuiging for ASD individuals to constantly be involved in conversation.

Last night I had a similar reverie. There were several takes, but the mean was that I was in a meeting in which I saw fit to note that in America there are evengelicals who to this day offer electro shock therapy to homosexuals to turn them straight. I made this observation in connection with their way of dealing with Aspergic students. Ah, yes, I remember one thing that came up. I kept on talking about how it is idiotic to say to a student who is about to throw a brick through a window “do you really think that will make you feel better?” because, odds on, it will. I said if I were to throw a brick through a window I would most certainly feel better, and if the police were to come and arrest me, and if I were to shout and swear at them, that would make me feel better too. I went on to explain that all the time I am coming in to work trying to appear to be neurotypical, and in doing so I never, not once, make the grade. I always fall short of the mark. The best I can achieve, day after day, is that people think I am nondescript, borderline incompetent, lack a sense of humour, an easy person to forget. I don’t make the grade. And that is the motivation I have, that is the reward I get for working hard all the time, eating well. And then, of course, I eschew coffee and alcohol and people look at me like I’m some kind of an ascetic so long as I don’t talk at length about my problems - if I don’t talk at length they conclude that I am fussy about my food and perhaps neurotic. [I’ve lost track somewhat with people coming into the office at work. I don’t want them seeing the blog. And then others are having noisy conversations - irritating middle class chatter about dinner parties and the if I’m honest - and I can’t remotely think or follow my train of thought with others talking around me.] If you throw a brick through a window, often you are expressing the noise inside your head far better than by forever trying to be something it’s hard for you to be, and not getting the recognition for the constant energy you’re putting into it because you still don’t make the grade, and nobody can see the turbulance in your head that prevents you making that step, and it is natural for them to think sometimes that with just a little effort you could be normal like anyone else, that you could hold a conversation - you can speak after all - and control yourself - you do sometimes when you are following your own interests after all - when in fact this is not remotely true.

It went round and round in my head. I was tired last night, but there was a lot of noise in my head that was slow to ebb away. I listened to an audiobook for a while, and eventually fell asleep.

Unsettled

I’ve not been myself now for a few weeks. I don’t know how far I follow the typical aspie pattern of needing routine, but I have been back and forth on trips with one still to come - we will be taking a couple of students out on Monday - and I’m in between houses with a real worry about not having time for writing when I move. I have been unsettled, and caught myself too worrying earlier in a real waking sweat (I needed to lie down for a nap after dinner, as I increasingly do) over whether I will become a writer at all, despite the ideas in my head.

I don’t know, perhaps this is typical for me. It’s hard, if not impossible to compare your mindstate with some time in the past. I do hope this is not typical. I have been so unsettled, unable to sit down and do one thing. Constantly angry, restless, distractable and irritable. I have been suffering (and truly suffering) angry reveries in re-run and re-runs throughout the day.

This morning it was unbearable. I didn’t want to be around people. I was depressed, and, there were the most difficult people, one of the cliques, with Jaffa and the others who work with him who I’ve always felt look down on me somehow. I can’t deal with their banter in the mornings and I was particularly gauche in the morning. Helgar, unrelated to the clique, made some unnecessary comment which pissed me off and the others were just giving some with the banter which just goes on all around me making me feel all the time like I’m playing piggie in the middle.

I was angry all morning, and didn’t want to be around people at all. I couldn’t make conversation. Less than usual even. I wanted to eschew coffee, and the clique was all gathering around a percolator and some decent coffee. It smelt good but I went outside. Dave, my immediate boss came in to make a couple of sharp comments as he does - he’s a good bloke, but gets irritable at times - about how we were sitting around, and it was one of those days I couldn’t do anything right, everything I tried to do to help was just that little bit wrong; we all have days like that with him.

There was a new member of staff in the morning meeting and I was stood next to him. I wasn’t able to greet him and make him feel welcome. I wasn’t in that frame of mind. I was feeling belittled, condescended to. That my face doesn’t fit. I was having reveries such as handing my notice in, telling one of the guys who is leaving, and with whom I get on best, that I can’t deal with it anymore, and that two years is generally about my limit in a new place. They were talking about new people who were going to replace him, and a direct boss above us, and I was fearing the worst, and feeling like my time with the place has come to an end.

I was glad to be asked a little later to go out on an errand to a guy called Cal one of the scrappies we’ve got to know. I noticed they went out of their way to describe the items they needed in excruciating detail due to my failures in the past to identify crimp connectors and the like. But I was glad of the walk to the car, and then the drive. First, though, I sat down in the car and cried. I’ve been crying a lot recently. And then I drove, got everything they needed, pretty much, and drove back to Sweet Child of Mine blasting out as load as my speakers could take. I parked up, and then sat and listened until the song was over, switching the engine off to reveries of having a discussion about heavy metal being cathartic as we once had in one meeting, discussing the students taste in music, its place and importance in their lives and our policy towards it.
I walked back along the canal and sat and watched some moorhen chicks barely the height of my thumb, until a couple of students came walking by, at which point I stood up and walked back. I was hoping to be missed. To have people realise the state I was in. I was feeling I was going to crack. That I needed to talk to the nurse.

Things got moving then, and more students were around and I got to feeling a lot better. I got through the day. And got through it with no coffee.

It was the last day and we went for a beer after work. I had one, and then had to shoot off to give my dad a lift to the garage where he had left his car to be MOTed, extortionately as it turns out.

I came back, had some food, and then a tiredness came over me so I had to lie down. This tiredness, and the rest of lying down was intermingled with the anger and frustration of not being able to write, and the fear of what it means to not write, this creeping responsibility and even family I feel from time to time.

It was a kind of tiredness that was all over, but in particular in my legs, completely out of proportion to any exercise I had done. It was similar to when I felt what I came to think of as candida “die-off” when I was taking Caprylic acid every day for a few months. This heaviness in my legs, like the aches of flu.

I lay down and slept a while. Now, I’m tired again.

07:15 no coffee, tagine, vit b6, zinc

13:00 chicken drumstick, coleslaw, waldorf salad

16:30 beer

18:30 toasted GF bread with peanut butter, three slices. tagine, with rice

23:15 no hunger!

ps. I managed little conversation over the beer, just more of my slapstick efforts.

Caffeine - edgy

I’m coping with everything so very very badly today and I’m surprised I haven’t broken the computer. I’ve been sat here grunting at it for the last half an hour or so.

I came back today and had a coffee at around five o’clock. I was so tired. I can’t stand being tired in the little free time I have. I had a stick of nicotine gum a couple of days back so I could wake up to read over something I had written a few years ago. [I am so angry, sitting here swearing and wanting to throw things around. Angry at myself for being so bottled up and unable to express this immense anger inside of myself. I have had a lot of reveries over the last few months, if not years, of how I am angry inside myself, being compared, and comparing myself to a biker at work who is anger down to the bone; I am so constantly frustrated at my own inability to sound off, to get it off my chest.] Yesterday too, possibly from the sunburn I have just posted about, I was tired throughout the day and fell asleep in the new house after taking a few things over, unable to focus for a second on the book I had picked out Self-Editing for writers or some such, in order to reap something from the day.

The rationalisation required to fire me off on a slip that might send me reeling for several hours, if not days, might need to last only a few seconds, and that indeed was what it was. I know caffeine is bad for me and reading this those of you who do not suffer from ADHD must be so frustrated at me and what must seem to be an unbelievable lack of will power. You wouldn’t believe the undercurrents in an ADHD mind! Everything changes in a matter of days. As little as that.

God, I despair to think of how many different projects I have had in the time I’ve been back in England. How each of them has taken possession of me, and then dropped me again. This has happened since going away to stay with M____’s parents. I was taken by a project I last thought of whilst over there, carried it around with me and then was dropped by it again.

I came in from work and settled down to watch a DVD. It was a DVD about Moog synthesizers I got from a mail order DVD scheme. (I tried to cancel my account with this scheme the other day but that I had to ring, and couldn’t spare the time to do so.) These DVDs have been a problem since they are another demand on my time. For a while I would watch a part of a DVD in the morning before going to work, but this didn’t last long. I figured it could be something I would do with M_____ but I kept on making lists of DVDs I want to see and didn’t manage to think of her at all so we always ended up having one DVD from the scheme and then going out to get another from the DVD rental place.

Anyway, I watched it for a while, but then thought of how I had told myself a while back that I should play/practise guitar when I am tired, since it doesn’t require so much mental effort, so I went in and turned on the computer. I had already taken the amp over to the new house so this wasn’t as tempting as it often was. Anyway I settled down for a while watching the documentary and the terrible music that ensued from these machines. I forgot about the computer for a while but then went in and remembered a million things I had to do. Yesterday I was getting incredibly angry with the computer because I had remembered that I had, in addition to Love Film, an account with Audible, a company that deals with audiobooks. I bought a couple of them and then they disappeared somewhere in my system. I had come back yesterday and done a bit of cooking. I have done none for a long while. I have been getting progressively more stressed about the idea of moving into a new house, and having to cook all the time (M____ can’t cook) and so I had bought a lot of stuff the other day trying to turn it all into a positive, that I will cook, and I will learn lots of new recipes for gluten and dairy free cooking and will use cooking as a kind of catharsis. [long series of reveries, some including performing the repetitive gestures and fidgets I found myself performing in front of the screen, and then storming out of a particularly galling meeting smashing doors.] And yesterday I came back and found my MP3 player and started listening to the first audiobook I had downloaded from Audible while I was cooking, enjoying the two things. And ok, so I later felt that I was feeling the tiredness of not having come in and sat down (on reflecting I think it was more likely to be from the sun), but I was starting to think I might actually be able to cope with this new routine I was dreading so much. Audiobooks, I figured would be the way forward, since I have wasted so much time reading what became palimpsests, that is, reading books and drifting off thinking of something else throughout the whole thing. But on trying to download a book or two I felt all the positivity of that hour or so cooking (a positivity in any case tempered by the fact this was a dish I had made already a couple of times) draining away. I became so quickly very angry. Today was a repeat performance. I spent a little time trying to sort out the problem with Audible, getting irate. I then went about trying to sort a present for my brother, something I felt as an additional imposition on the little free time I have - the less I have, the quicker I am to anger when something goes wrong or there is an additional demand on my time. I looked for subscriptions to The Economist, but these were complicated and involved filling in too many on-line forms so I typed in amazon.co.uk and ordered a couple of things he has said he would like. I tracked down Mum for his address, went for a shit when she didn’t come to my aid straight away, typed it in, and then swore angrily when amazon defaulted to the New Card option with amazonmastercard filled in, this all defeating what is usually there, my own default card. Consequently, I almost knocked Mum out storming into the lounge and swinging open the door as she was coming out, going to look for my wallet which I had put there somewhere having found it with a few Fucks thrown in in order to ring my bank and pay off my credit card - my mum, you see, had pointed out the letter she assumed, rightly, to be from Sainsbury’s credit card, telling me to sort it out, a letter that detailed the £12 penalty for late payment, and I had tried to enact the once only rule for correspondence I read in the one third of the ADHD organisation book I had managed to read by ringing my bank and paying off the money. All this, by the way, after I had been all over the house trying to find my cheque book to pay off my dad who had loaned me two hundred pounds cash so I could have some sterling to change in Poland - my tenth debit card, you see, had ceased to work after a mere few months, probably because I always keep it loose in my jeans pocket (where I regularly lose it, of course) and I couldn’t get a new one in the time before I was due to leave.

At some point I gave up on all this and went up to try to read over old versions of a story, provisionally entitled Checkmate that I began working on years and years ago. A good story. A very good story. This story has perhaps now split into two and introduces a character, Hippie, who features in Family Fortunes. I found a little on my laptop, the laptop I brought to Poland when I was first there, and which I replaced by an old G4 after I bought voice recognition software which can only run on a G4 or higher with OS X. But I was very distractable. I wanted to go for a walk and think over structure. And then I wanted to sit down and write. I picked out an A4 jotter and went to our room to write. I wrote a little, not writing but expressions of the various dilemmas I feel that I face in terms of structure and the like before jumping up to find short stories, determining that I do not read enough short stories (because, understand, every single impetuous shift of focus introduces an entire shift of philosophy, purpose and priority, so that this will then entail the dropping of the complicated essays analysing form, the necessity of reading so many novels, and will instead mean reading two short stories a day from a variety of writers; another shift might entail reading no novels, nor indeed any literature at all in English, but everything in Polish, getting up to a standard where I could read any literature in Polish; another would entail dropping the novel I am writing for a play, another for a website, another…) I picked up Dubliners, after all I have a York Notes on Dubliners which I bought from E-bay - I bought a couple, bidding on one and forgetting about it so that I was in Poland for a week and overlooked it in my e-mails before that so that I came back to irate e-mails threatening strikes against me on E-bay etc., all this based on an idea I had that I could write a Yorrick Notes for Family Fortunes in lieu of a synopsis, another idea that changed everything in my life. Dubliners, besides, could, quite apart from being a set of short stories, form as a kind of template for Labour in Vain, a set of stories based around a pub in Blair’s Britain I have been toying with which came up again today on thinking of Checkmate in much the same way that Bleak House and Anna Karenina were to be templates of a kind for Family Fortunes.

I read a page and a half of the first story of Dubliners before I worked out that I had already failed to follow it. I slammed the book down. That made me angry. It was already late. I had done nothing but flit from one thing to another and I could see in front of me so many such days. Tomorrow drinks with work, then soon anther week-long trip with work that I’m dreading. [numerous reveries, some very angry; going back to one, for example, of explaining the difference between the wiring of neurotypicals and aspergics in one of our meetings, talking about how their way of working is adding to the societal pressures aspergics face by making them feel they ought always to want to be sociable in socially acceptable ways rather than allowing them sometimes to embrace their own difference.] I came down. Perhaps I wanted to go on the computer. I looked into the computer room. Mum was on the thing. She felt me lurking and said she would be finished soon. I slumped into the seat in the lounge doing something. Maybe just sitting angrily, I forget now. Dad came in and started talking to Mum, and perhaps trying to talk to me outside the lounge door. This angered me.

Soon, I took to the computer and starting writing this.

I’ve been to get M____ from work, and she’s been talking to Mum and Dad. I just came back and went straight back to the computer where I’ve been typing more or less constantly, give or take drifting off here and there.

I still feel spiked. Angry. Alert. And all this no doubt from one coffee, half decaf, half full-caffeine.

Perhaps my encounter with the doctor yesterday hasn’t helped and maybe that’s all bubbling underneath. But it looks like a bad night’s sleep ahead of me.

Anyway, here we go:

7:15 1 green tea, tagine with rice

11:00 two flapjacks, one with chocolate! I am going for these now more or less every day. A bad habit.

13:00 ratatouille with rice and salad.

17:00 coffee with half spoon decaf, half full strength, with half a spoon of sugar

19:00 Morroccan Tagine with rice, and starting to get edgy

Cheery lobster

We had a kind of end of term sports day yesterday. Everything went pretty well and I enjoyed myself. The weather was just right, since despite being overcast it was a still day, not too hot, and certainly not cold, with occasional sunshine.

On coming back, however, I was told that I was burned. More burned perhaps than I was from a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon at the weekend. And it was true. On looking in the mirror I saw that I was red from the sun, and had a clear t-shirt line up my arm.

I had been outside from around half past eleven. Of course, this is the hottest part of the day, but the level of sunshine was negligible, and on going in to work today and mentioning these freak, albeit mild burns, people at work who had been there, also thought it odd.

What did occur to me was that I have been taking St John’s Wort. I bought it on coming back from the jaunt around the country a few weeks back, after which I had felt pretty down. I had needed it to get me going again at work. St John’s Wort might be considered by some to be a herbal remedy, meaning (to them) that it has none of the side-effects and general chemical nastiness of prescription medications, but logically this is a nonsense since very many medications, including of course aspirin, are derived from plants and from nature. I do get a little annoyed when I go in with students to consultations by our resident homeopath and he says that his medications, unlike others, are natural.

St John’s wort can make the skin more sensitive to sunlight, leading to sunburn. It can also interfere with many medications, including the contraceptive pill. (I have toyed around with the idea of using this fact in the novel I m currently planning, Family Fortunes.)

As it happens, of course, sensitivity to light is a pretty mild side-effect that can be anticipated and, with subtle changes to one’s lifestyle, very easily compensated for by the net effect of the medication. Still, some people could benefit from the insight that the tablets they buy from health stores can act in this way.

Years ago, when the European Union was debating legislation that would regulate, and proscribe certain herbal supplements, I wrote a letter to my MP. The fact that I got the letter finished at all was a near miracle facilitated by a number of supplements including Spirulina and Vitamin B Complex (which, as I explained, turned my urine into something resembling a Cantonese Chicken marinate). At the time I was at pains to say that this market was best regulated by the informed consumer. Yes, I said, some people are not smart enough to do this, and gave the example of a woman who came into a Holland & Barrets or a GNC I was in in Nottingham telling her offspring that one day they could make the same trip and everything there would be good for them, but by and large, I said, this policy of laissez faire could be defended not only relatively, as against say nicotine and alcohol use, but outright, since the information is out there and the benefit to those who are informed is so great and the problems for those less informed far less marked, and less proven than problems for many who have used the products of the pharmaceutical industry who, to a very large extant, had sponsored the act in the EU.

Already not coping

Close to tears. I’ve just come back from Mardy Hell, the huge shopping centre near here built on an old steel works. Ate in Burger King(!) having had little all day, and I’m on a real come-down from a social binge yesterday.

I had a lovely week in Poland with M____’s parents and lots of old friends. Drank a lot and had a good time. I daydreamed a lot, but not as much as I might have. I even started to think again, as in Italy, that perhaps much of my problems have gone away having taken a tablet a month or so, or more, back that time I was searching around for ADHD remedies on the internet. It was an anti-fungal preparation designed to eradicate thrush in women and their partners. Certainly, several times I slept better than I had after beer before, though I had some pretty unpleasant nightmares (one involved a doodlebug-style bomb flying overhead of me and a girl at work I am often most gauche and apergic with, its engine cutting out and then exploding nearby). I didn’t sleep after cheese (or wine, which coincided with eating the cheese and white-bread toast at the wine bar).

Back now I can’t deal with not having time for writing, and with the worry of now moving into this house so imminently where I will have so many more responsibilities, and so much less time for writing. I have also had too little sleep, and, having been invited for a few beers after work yesterday, and then drinking through to one in the morning, haven’t been following my diet well at all. Today I can’t concentrate. M_____ sat with me in Burger King and saw that I was down. I had been a little fractious, taking exception to something she said I believed to be wrong (that Temple Grandin is profoundly autistic as opposed to aspergic, and then drifting off into my own world. She asked me, as she sometimes does, to tell her something, and I couldn’t. I have been back a mere day and we have seen each other for a very short period of time and she said at one point that I already can’t stand to be with her.

I have had no time for myself today and already at one, two o’clock with a friend still here - a guy I call my best friend who I have seen so seldom since coming back from teaching in Poland - I was feeling the weekend slipping away.

Add to that the fact that this stupid blog is becoming another huge distraction in my life. So far zero readers and yet it is, like learning Polish before it, a huge inelastic demand on my time and energy (inelastic because, like Polish, writing it off would mean another completely failed project, something that would depress me hugely).

I will have a large garden in the new house, and I will have to cook in a lovely kitchen. I will have a room of one’s own, but no time to be in it.

I have just logged on to the computer to see my e-mails. An old friend has written to me on Facebook. I haven’t seen her for years, but I resent so much the demand on my time. It may depress me now that I am writing all this pointless crap - this food diary that is supposed to focus a little of my attention on food so that I may stabilise my life and write, but which is taking so much away from that very end, but as a travesty - but once people start writing and demanding my time I’m only going to feel the worse. That’s the paradox of relationships for people like me - and I count Kafka as one of them - we demand love, need love, to be loved and even to love, but feel so often, perhaps for the most part of the time but when we are feeling most wounded, that the best way of expressing this love is to be left alone, forgiven, yes, understood, yes, but left the hell alone.

Yesterday: lots of beer, a little fishpie, coffee with sugar

Morning: a pear, underripe, bananarice milkshake with spirulina, orange juice and water

early afternoon: corn bread with peanut butter

coffee x 2, strong, with sugar

Burger King “Angus meal” with chips and orange juice*

Reveries, impatient, depressed!

*interestingly, one of the house parents who is not usually into the nutritional side of things thinks that orange juice sets off one of his students who also is set off by milk and, as he remembered the other day while I was eating with him, gluten.