A very early night yesterday after starting the day at 04.00 am.
After a couple of pages of Wolfgang Streek’s How will capitalism end?”, it feels too earnest and I pick up my Uppsala project and think about how the name of the mounds changed from Aun, Egil and Adlis mound (barrow) to the neutral East, West and Middle mound and the research that must have underlain this change. I dream that I am writing explanatory introductions to a number of short pieces I’ve lifted from the net and I drift through stages of sleep worrying about what creative commons means, how much I am allowed to lift, and checking sources. My sleep feels rather feverish and disturbed. Immediately after I’ve woken up at the impractical hour of 2.30 am. I am sure that I will be running a temperature and that the reaction to my jab has kicked in. But no, once I´m fully awake, I am completely OK and cool as a proverbial cucumber.
I’m disappointed that I have had no reaction to my jab. Perhaps it will come but it was a good few hours ago now and there is nothing, no soreness around the jab site, nothing. I don’t really want a splitting headache or to be running a temperature but I would like to feel that my body was starting to put up a fight, going on the offensive against the virus. But no, my body is like a lazy cat on a summer’s day, opening one eye to observe a passing mouse with a slight flick of the tail but no attempt to pounce. And while I admire this refusal to comply with the other’s expectations of appropriate cattiness, I would like my body to show a bit of the killer instinct and not just lie there inert thinking Oh gawd it’s one of those virus things again.
In fact, I just feel very relaxed. It’s been a long period where the future has been uncertain, where I have been intently focused on myself and my reactions, thinking about what human beings need and how I could fool the one I live in to think that it was getting what it needed in terms of human company and purposeful activity and keeping the focus on getting things done, laying the ground for a better life post-covid (I feel a bit like I’m producing a London County Council housing report in 1943 as I write this…). I know that the danger is not over yet, that it will take a while and another dose and that I still have to take care. But the future is now clearer I know that all being well I will have completed the programme and be as protected as I can be a week or so into June. And that the cards in my hand are improving. I haven’t beaten the virus yet but I can feel that the fortunes of war are changing. And it’s a good feeling.
But, of course, I tinker with my sleeping habits at my peril. It’s 3 in the morning and instead of a gradual return to circadian normality, I’m another hour in the wrong direction. And I am dousing myself in blue light from the computer instead of doing crochet and making some wall hanging with “home is where the heart is”. But writing relaxes me. It feels good to shepherd the stray thoughts in my head into some kind of order. It usually changes my mood so perhaps I can manage another session in the arms of Morpheus before the day dawns in earnest.