I’ve been experiencing a lot of stress lately. And like most people I always assumed that a good holiday shakes it off. I even had a rudimentary holiday maths equation I held to, without thinking it through, that one stressful period can be deleted by one holiday. But it isn’t working. The stuff is fireproof. What do I do about it? I’ve got a short fuse at the moment. My nose actually swelled up with stress. The tip, I mean, and now I have to sit at the table with the tip of my nose in soothing saline. What kind of turmoil must I be experiencing for my nose to actually swell?! It is all this getting life in order. But great news! Our completion date came through and we can move out of our public convenience for mice into a proper house with a garden!
The move reminds me. I’m reading a book on ‘the English’ by Jeremy Paxman off the telly (research for a book I’m writing in about a years time). It is so utterly pedestrian and cliched, I am very disappointed. He writes as if writing books is merely the putting of words onto pages to stand in for a face to face conversation. It basically boils down to the weather, having your own house, and WW2 for him. He called Hobbes a liberal! He’s the closest we had to a fascist! Well we’re not moving so we can have a castle of our own, it will be a hospitable hospital of the soul. We have a revolving door policy. Praise God for a house! We can do so much more with people!
Yesterday I visited the best Zoological Museum I have ever been to, in Tring. They let the animals do the work. An amazing collection of domestic dogs, like the greyhound Mick the Miller who changed hands for £2000 in the 1930s; wolfhounds, deerhounds, puffinhounds, and dachshunds {badgerhounds}, who all hounded their namesakes. An increduble Okapi, a Tapir as high as my chest, and the BIRDS!!! Superb bird of paradise, Magnificent bird of paradise, a manucode, a twelve-wired BOP, and the wonderful King of Saxony’s Bird of Paradise. GO GO GO!!!
