‘Tomorrow’ I thought to myself yesterday ‘tomorrow, I’ll start blogging again, and stick at it for as long as it takes’. But I found myself over breakfast getting deeply engrossed in a killer su doku (number 53 in the monthly book, which means it is designated as ‘Tricky’, and further into the fiendishness than I usually get).
No danger of running out of killer su doku. A book of 100 is delivered every month, I currently have four on the shelf unopened, and eight which have only been completed as far as the mid-50s, saved because if I keep honing my skills, maybe one day I’ll be able to progress as far as the 60s (Extreme) or even 80s (Deadly). No, I won’t run out of puzzles, though possibly I will eventually run short of pencils and erasers.
Don’t assume this is a joke; I can seriously spend days on end doing one killer su doku after the other. I realised this during my previous period of self-isolation, three years ago. At that time, of course, the rest of the world just carried on as normal, as I sat here in my kitchen (or, when the summer came, in my garden), drinking coffee and scribbling numbers into small printed squares (with a good deal of logical deduction and mental arithmetic going on in the background).
Well, I’m not completely self-isolated yet, though I am arguably in a high-risk category (over 65 with an underlying condition, ie asthma, though that very rarely bothers me these days). I don’t feel ‘at-risk’, though maybe that is naïve of me. I’m not worried about getting sick, and I’m not particularly scared of dying (I went through all that in 2017). What bothers me more is the memory of how I felt after that time of intense medicalisation (well, it felt intense to me, though nowhere near as bad or as long-lasting as many people have to deal with). That sense of: well, I’m still here, for an indeterminate period, so, woo hoo, shouldn’t I be waking up every morning glad to be alive? (Erm, actually, that never happened). Waiting for all that energy, enthusiasm and motivation to come back (though if I’m honest, I haven’t been too hot on any of those for years), when I felt more like: ‘Naah, I know the kitchen needs cleaning/stairs need hoovering/fence needs painting/grass needs mowing, but I can’t be arsed with all that, I’ll just sit here with my coffee and su doku/crochet/weaving’ (the latter two being arguably more constructive, but not all that when you see the piles of blankets and scraps of weaving in my cupboards and drawers).
So here I am at my laptop, spewing out the verbal equivalent of a su doku or an unwearable sparkly shawl, and maybe I’ll just carry on and on and be back here again tomorrow with more of the same – you lucky people! (Who used to say that? Ahh yes, Tommy Trinder. Thanks, Wikipedia.