Yesterday was not a good day. My mind would try to replay traumatic memories from my past. Or – just as bad – try to dwell on the saddest memories. To make matters worse, I was woken up by pain in my neck and head. Pain that decided to hang around for the day.
I did my best to keep myself distracted. I watched a lot of YouTube. Then my friend Dave stopped by (thank you, Dave). This helped bring my mood back up to somewhere near “normal”.
Over a couple of cups of tea, Dave convinced me that what I needed was a walk and something nice to eat.
I medicated as much as I could, got my shoes on, and grabbed a jumper (on account of the weather being not great). We took the slowest ever walk to a lovely greasy spoon cafe. For a healthy person, this would be at most a ten-minute walk. For me, this was a marathon-like contest. Could I push past the wall of physical exhaustion and make it to the cafe?
Somehow – very slowly – we did indeed make it. Just about. I’d brought on quite a lot of pain. Fortunately, this was in my legs and hips rather than my back and neck where I normally hurt.
I had the fried breakfast special with extra black pudding. Yes, this was my afternoon meal. Yes, I know it is fatty. It was so yum and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Having more or less ruined my week of relatively healthy eating, I followed that up with a pudding. My first choice was Spotted Dick and Custard. In case you do not know what that is, Spotted Dick is a traditional British steamed fruity sponge pudding with suet, citrus zest and currants. I did not have this however because the fuel and driver shortage meant the cafe did not have half of its usual dissert.
They did have a sticky toffee sponge with custard. I had that. Sticky, hot, full of sugar and so, so, so very good.
If the walk there had been hard, the walk back was harder. I had a stitch, my right hip and upper leg were screaming, and then my left leg joined in. By the time I got home, I did not so much sit as fall into the chair.
The jumper had been a mistake, I was far too hot. I honestly felt like I had been for a run. I used to love running. I miss it. Running is too high an impact on my spine.
I had a hard time standing for the rest of the evening and limped to bed for an early night.
I got a solid eight hours of sleep and woke to a much better mood and surprisingly little pain to pay for pushing myself.
