Pace Yourself

I suddenly remembered the last occasion on which I felt like this - heavy, sore head, aching eyes, exhausted body - and looked it up here to discover the circumstances around it. Sure enough, there was the long paragraph listing all my physical accomplishments followed a day later by these now horribly familiar symptoms. With my depleted immune system I obviously can't go at it in the garden the way I do sometimes without paying a high price. I'm wondering now if a nice blood transfusion, red or white cells, can't remember which, would speedily restore me to normal health. I need to be a leech, and drain the blood from a healthy creature to feed my own body. The words 'incubus' and 'succubus' spring to mind, but I think they mean something different. The trouble is that when I'm working, hoeing, for example, as I was last week, I'm enjoying the work so much, and the transformation it brings, that I completely forget to take breaks. And this is the result. QED.

The other night at Snape I bumped into a woman who was in my Italian class a year or so ago. "Buonasera", we both exclaimed, and had a little chat about things, in Italian of course. You can do that when you speak the language. Won't I think about returning to the class, she asked. I miss you. I thought the teacher had given up, gone back to fulltime teaching, I told her. But no, they have a new teacher, a real stickler who pushes them through their paces. No more tea breaks, she said, it's all slog now. Well, this was music to my ears, and I immediately knew I was ready to return. Next morning I rang the people who organise evening classes and asked about enrolling. But only those still on the course got priority booking. I would have to wait until the open booking starts at the end of August. Fair enough, I said, my disappointment apparent. So I was thrilled when they rang the next day and said I could go on the priority list since I'd been in the class before. I'm so excited. You reach a sort of hiatus when you're not actively learning, and though our conversazione afternoons are fun and will continue, this is the boost I need. Hail Wendy well met!