Waters

If I didn't see the sea again, I don't think I'd care. It's never been that important or pleasant for me. True, if I walk in the country park here and happen upon a view of the sea from particularly high up, it can be somewhat mystifying at night when the moon shines its long column down from the sky and towards the shore.

However, I don't mind lakes. Lakes and rivers are different. Perhaps it's because I know with more certainty that something lies beyond the lake, and that its dimensions are not so terrifyingly out of scope. Lakes also omit the horrid saltiness that I always associate with the thrashing shores of the seas and oceans.

A lot of people love the sea, and some people from around here claim they wouldn't be able to not live on the coast.

Each to their own. I see it as limiting one's direction. It provides a constant landmark, but you can't go any further once you reach it. It's featureless and treacherous. Just my tuppence on the sea I suppose.

Little bites

The very pleasant Nosferatu at the hospital took blood from me a total of nine times yesterday. Nine. I was there for five hours, first waiting half an hour between samples, then an hour between samples. They took the ninth just for good luck.

The staff were unbelievably nice and friendly; so the duration was made more bearable than it might otherwise have been.

I don't know when I'll get the results, but I'm guessing it'll take a week to get around to processing my samples. Maybe they'll tell me my blood type too.

I picked up a leaflet about becoming a blood donor (because, you know, I was giving enough already). After all, if I can have blood taken from bruised arms almost ten times in half as many hours, why not donate some blood as well? Adam called when I got home and I mentioned thinking about finally becoming a blood donor. He was then kind enough to recall his own experiences as a blood donor. These included needles like knitting needles, arms bruised entirely black from bodged needle insertion, passing out, and all manner of other things.

The leaflet is in the bin.

I was pretty hungry after twenty hours of fasting. I think that is the longest I've ever gone without food. I was pretty tired after the whole ordeal. On the way home there was a group of guys running from a Community Warden Officer because he'd caught them drinking in public. For a moment I considered tripping one of them up, but I don't know if the local wardens appreciate vigilante assistance, and I felt I'd been on the receiving end of a particularly brutal Mortal Kombat move. You know, one of the I just lost eighty pints of blood moves.

I Vant Your Blood

I've got to go to hospital on Thursday morning to have a blood test for glucose intolerance. If it turns out I have glucose intolerance then the doctor's orders will be no chocolate, no extra sugar, and lots of porridge. I think.

I don't remember ever losing a great amount of blood before, so I don't know if I'll be all weak and shaky or completely unaffected by it. I've got to fast for fourteen hours before the test, and then have another test two hours later. So I'll be starving and probably won't take my bike up there in case I'm too wobbly to ride it home. So I'll be an hour's walk from home and really hungry and possibly look like a vampire (pale, squinting, puncture marks, etc.) Biting people has not yet been ruled out. I guess I'll stop at Sainsbury's for breakfast or something. A low-sugar breakfast.

But that is the first day of the summer holidays and I fully intend on putting work off for as long as reasonably possible. Yes I will have to go into the college at some point, but right now it can wait.

Bloodshot

The summer holidays are two weeks too late already. I think my eyes are bloodshot all the time now. Every time I catch myself in the mirror, I see a ring of bright red blood vessels surrounding my iris.

Tell this to most people and they'll insist that working term-time only gives you a ridiculous amount of holiday (five weeks alone in the summer), and that you have no reason to complain.
That is unless, of course, they have worked in a school and know what it's like. Yes, you get more holiday, but you need it! Even in my low-stress position, the holiday is quite necessary.

But a school employee cannot expect a non-school employee to understand this. They will only see the number of days holiday you get per annum, and make a base assumption than you're whining over something that you should be celebrating. Eight weeks is the longest you go without a week off? They'll say. Do you know how long I have to wait until I get a day off? But they cannot understand how it works unless they have already worked in a school.

Anyway, like I said; the summer holiday is overdue. Well, no, that's not entirely true (although it's becoming a shorter and shorter break). More accurately: this term is too long. Eight weeks. Almost double the average length of a term. You can see it in the teaching staff, the support staff, and the students. We were all out of a working mindset about a fortnight ago.

Going... going...

I can feel it slipping away from me: the ability, talent, skill, however you define it, to draw. I just can't do it anymore. I've been trying and trying, but it's just not coming back.

I start the way I always have done: a line of action or direction; an outline circle for the position of the head; then a trapezium for the body, and the circles that mark the pelvis and shoulders; the elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles are circles now; and finally the blocks that function as hands and feet.

Normally I would then start filling in the character. Adding the outline of the body; blocking in muscles on the arms and legs; detailing facial features and hair... but that was before. By the time I've finished the wrists and ankles I can see that the drawing is already flawed. It doesn't look like a person. But I keep trying. Either starting a new skeleton, or trying to fix what I've done wrong.

By the time I've fleshed out a figure, it looks completely crap. I can't get the poses right, the dimensions, the angles, the volume, the proportions, the expressions. A character's face differs every time I draw it. The only way you know it's the same person is because of their hair or clothes.

I used to just pick up whatever was at hand and draw away without any worries. Whatever was in my head just flowed like quicksilver down my arm and into my hand. My pen would glide over the paper and I'd have a drawing there, just how I had imagined it.

My drawings were never priceless works of art; but they weren't supposed to be. They were just supposed to be drawings, sketches, or whatever. They came out just how I wanted them. But now I can't even draw simple things like stick men without it looking like a pile of crap. What the hell happened?

Not only that, but I can only write for a short duration. Reading is totally out. I'm struggling to get a page of reading done per day before my head feels like it's full of electric eels and is about to explode. A lightning storm is going on inside my brain. It's as if I'm waiting for a loud bang or something to come from behind me. Distractions that don't exist; whispered voices not yet heard; disturbances on the edge of hearing.

I feel like there are burning fingers being pressed into the back of my head; something incessantly worming around in my mind. I wonder if it has anything to do with my lack of sleep.

I had a strange dream the other night in which a woman came to me and told me to stop visualising things in my mind. I do a lot of visualisation; it's something I do almost constantly. I'm almost always standing in an alpine meadow, creeping through a forest bathed in sunbeams, talking to a wise and mysterious mage, settling negotiations between humans and extraterrestrials, sprinting over the rooftops of some fantastic city, going over the finer points of philosophy with someone far more experienced, or slaying evil beasts on a sweeping plain.

I don't know why, but (and this might sound crazy) the message in the dream was especially strong. It must have been at a certain point when I was almost conscious or something. But that "...don't even visualise things..." message was like a suggestion. A very strong suggestion. Because it came from inside of me. I've already mentioned my dreams: this one wasn't especially strange, but the message was especially vivid. Like someone taking me aside from the dream for a moment to give me a message before giving me back to the night's illusions.

It's late, getting closer and closer to early; so I'll leave this where it is before I sound like a complete madman. I want to sleep for a hundred years.

Grindelwald

If you've not seen Grindelwald then feast your eyes on its magnificence. I think that if I were to see a landscape so breathtaking in person, then I'd probably implode.

The reason I'm bringing up this fantastic region of the alps is that I was there last night. In a dream at least. It was a terribly odd dream; but one thing that stood out clearly was briefly staying in a cabin on the slopes of that incredible mountain.

There were lots of elements to the dream, including a football match, a unicorn, preparing for hip surgery, Blaine the train (choo-choo and that's the truth), and a selfish old woman. As usual, it didn't make much sense. The alps were great though.

The last part of the dream was a cat stuck in my room and meowing for me to let it out. I instinctively got up out of bed to open my door... then realised I don't have a cat and that it had been a dream. I looked at the clock and found myself awake an hour earlier than necessary. Much grumbling followed.

Call for Extraction

It seems I must have both lower wisdom teeth removed. Not something I'm looking forward to.

My wisdom teeth are growing outward, towards my cheeks, rather than upward and towards my upper jaw. I'm not sure why the dentist didn't say anything about my upper wisdom teeth, because they too are pushing my canines forward. I'll bring it up next week when I go for my follow-up appointment.

My eyelids feel like they are full of cement. I don't know what it is, but they're pulsating and I'm struggling to keep them open. I had plenty of sleep last night, although I was woken at three in the morning as usual. I still don't know what it is that wakes me, but it is most vexing.

I'm too tired to even think of anything else to write. Hastings was flooded this morning, which turned a twenty minute journey into a one-and-a-half hour uphill battle to find a road that was not closed.

That Sinking Feeling

Reminder to self: park in the shade.

I went to Hawkhurst to visit my mum yesterday after work. It was roasting; even hotter than it is today, and today is bloody warm.

So I was glad to be out of my gear and to have a sit down in the shade.

After the sun had set and I was about to set off home, I remarked that my bike was leaned over very far. The angle can't have been far removed from forty-five degrees. I can't sit on it at that angle, surely. I thought, straddling the machine.

I grabbed the handlebars and, sure enough, the position felt very unnatural. I couldn't recall a time my bike had ever been leaned over so far. You'd be barmy to park it on an incline so severe. There must be a depression in the road or something. I thought, tugging and heaving to lift my bike upright.

But the damned thing wouldn't move. It felt like it had doubled in mass. Sure, the Versys weighs some four-hundred-and-fifty pounds when fully fuelled, but I've leaned it up off the ground before, so pulling it upright from a lesser angle would surely be easier. No, there was definitely something wrong here.

No way. Surely not. Bloody hell! The side stand was buried in the damned road! It had been so hot that day, that the tarmac had warmed up; the weight of the bike on the side stand had caused it to sink almost five inches into the ground like a hot knife through butter.

Well, with superhuman effort (or perhaps just more effort) I wrenched the damned thing free. There's a small rise around a crater in the road there now. After my mum and I picked the sticky tarmac off the side stand, I rode off into the night towards home.

I know it's something that most experienced bikers have already had to deal with. But for me, this was the first time I've ever seen such a thing happen. I've heard people describing their bike "eating up the road" when travelling at speed, but I never thought the road would be avenging such velocity by trying to eat my bike!