This is one of those boring blog posts that have to be written from time to time. It's not an appeal for sympathy just a statement of facts and a sort of explanation about my life.
Sometimes I am so full of energy. It's a real thrill, and very exciting. Sometimes, for a few hours I can believe that I am normal. I suppose I have always suffered from a surfeit of adrenaline and nervous energy, so even now, I can draw on it to get me through things.
Having CFS is - in some ways a little bit like depression. Mostly in the can't be bothered to do anything' way. A lot of times I plan things and then simply don't have the energy to follow through the commitment. Other times, I start off with energy but end up aching so much that it's really difficult to do things. Sometimes the aches and pains are just the muscular and joint aches that are part-and-parcel of fybromalgia, sometimes they're incidental and indicative of my very low pain threshold. Anything that has pain attached is unbearable. You know, really boring stuff like period pain, which I spent quarter a century shrugging off with a paracetamol and now takes an entire pharmacopoeia. Or silly trivial stuff like being laid low by a mild case of trapped wind.
Or the 'doing stuff' and being laid completely low as a result. Last weekend we did an open top tour of London. To be honest I wouldn't recommend it. It acts as a way to transport one between bus stops close to tourist attractions, rather than a way actually to see them - Whitehall/Westminster Bridge and Tower of London/Tower Bridge excepted. We also did a walk round Westminster Abbey which was kind of interesting. And then we went to China Town (we bumped into Simon; he asked what we were doing in those parts, he laughed when I said "Looking for a Chinese restaurant", I think with a tone on my voice which suggested I wasn't entirely optimistic I would find one!). After dinner home to a feeling of being completely over-tired, whingeing, I don't know what to do, I don't know if I want to play on the internet or have a bath.
I fancied going to the South Bank this weekend to witness the re-opening of the Festival Hall post refurbishment. Jimmy mentioned the seaside, I reckoned I couldn't do both, so I said Seaside Sunday, but Saturday night he said, we were out last weekend, we're out next weekend (guess who scored tickets for Trooping the Colour). I want to fight and say 'let's go out all the time', but he's right. So we spent the weekend combining a modicum of domesticity with general lazing around. I had quite a lot to drink yesterday, five or six glasses of wine, with food, over a considerable number of hours, and it completely knocked me out. Lying on the sofa trying to veg in front of the telly, falling asleep during the most interesting bits of 'Coast' (as I had done during the first episode of Andrew Marr's History of PostWar Britain, which is a really really good series for so very many reasons). And my stated intent for today is to do nothing - and do it in style. Well, not really, but there's never any harm in quoting an Ezio song!
