Mostly absent

I am sick. And I am sick of it.

This week I finally seem to be shaking of the medical-oddity stomach bug I have had for the last two weeks, only to see my cough blossom into a full-on coughing, sneezing, aching, exhausting, phlegmy, stinking rotten cold.

Yesterday I went home early from work, and today I spent the morning in bed, but I decided to come in to work because I couldn't face another grumpy afternoon of not sleeping and not doing anything else either.

So now I am technically at work, but I am incredibly spaced out. I feel like my brain is floating somewhere slightly outside my body, and my body is floating somewhere slightly out of the normal plane of existence. Everything is quieter than normal, and somehow far away. It would be quite cool, if my head wasn't also aching in a spacey kind of way.

Today itself is conspiring to add to this surreal feeling. The weather is cloudy and chilly, even when I finally made walked into work at midday. The warmth of a hot shower and warm blankets clung on under my clothes, and that feeling felt so familiar, like stepping outside on a winter's day at home. Being at home in the daytime feels like being a student. And then this afternoon, unusually, I went to a lecture being held here on agricultural research. And so I feel like I am not here and now at all, but have slipped back into a winter afternoon in Cambridge. I remember cutting throught the Old Schools, those so-Victorian corridors; ill-heated labs and lecture theatres; the desperate scribble of the pen chasing the voice; the smell of wet wool; busy pre-Christmas streets; the snap of cold air; the pleasure of being wrapped up warm; vague mists rising from the river; gracefully jumbled architecture rising from the mists. Most of my mind is somewhere else entirely, while my autopilot navigates me somehow through the day's interactions.

So I am sick, fed up, and a bit out of my tree. Pass the jelly.