Duvet Daze

I was pleased to learn today that my staying in bed using up boxes of tissues all day yesterday may have inadvertantly helped the planet…

Don’t get me wrong; I am a Bad Patient and hate being horizontal while the world needs more vertically inclined types.  I do not think companies benefit from allowing employees to put their feet up when they feel like it. Self-employed people cannot. Mothers cannot. Carers, charity workers and ministers cannot. Most teachers would not. I do not like being a burden to others, so I am annoyed with myself at having to be waited on by my husband, who quietly and kindly looked after me all day. He is a hero, and I don’t tell him often enough. And he also tries to help the planet, but this often involves driving a triangle on wheels. You can’t win them all.

And I wouldn’t have driven far yesterday, although I had to cancel going to a birthday party with Lily. Now I am sitting up, pretending I am better and waiting for words to crawl into my head. They are mostly avoiding me because I am being moody.

When words avoid me I try and do one of the following things: read, look up things on the internet that might inspire me (for now, this means holidays) or watch TV (often this involves In The Night Garden or Charlie and Lola). I was not up for getting out of bed, even for Makka Pakka yesterday. I did not care about going away: I was more concerned about going to sleep. And the opportunity to read meant finally getting to the end of the latest Alexander McCall Smith page-turner that dad has lent me. It has been keeping me awake in fits of giggles, wondering how Bertie was going to cope with his mother this time and whether people in Edinburgh have very different accents from the ones I hear when I read it. I expect I hear it all wrong, but that is one of the good things about reading in your head. I was told at University that reading silently was invented in the 5th century by a monk called Ambrose. Augustine thought it all very high-tech.

Now that the words are returning a little more, I may crawl off myself and find out who is making noises into the baby monitor. I suspect it is the baby, but like to keep an open mind on these things. Her crawling days are numbered at the moment, and I think she will be walking before long. She does tend to stand unaided when no one is watching and cruise along the furniture like a butler on roller skates. I would like to train her to bring me breakfast in bed, but when I suggest she brings me anything other than Upsy Daisy she gives me a dazed look.