A-Z Blogging Challenge: Agony and Aura

In which I fall down the neurological rabbit hole.

I’ll never forget my first migraine. Actually, my third or fourth migraine, about four years later, was much worse, but the first one blew my mind and my faith in pharmaceuticals.

It started innocently, a little niggle on the right side of my head when I’d just sat down with a vodka-and-something, expecting a quiet night in. In a very liver-friendly fashion, I popped two paracetamol. The niggle squirrelled deeper into my brain. Even as it worsened, I thought nothing of it. I thought – oh innocence! – that all headaches went away with paracetamol.

About 20 minutes in, a weird dread gripped me. I decided I’d better go and lie down. The pain intensified further a further until I was crying. I still didn’t quite believe it – how could a headache feel so bad?

It’s never actually dark enough.

I didn’t actually know what a migraine was then. It wasn’t until the nightmare migraine of 2014 left me sobbing for two days straight, taking endless pills to no effect whatsoever, that a pharmacist casually let me know what was wrong with me. So that’s what a migraine was. Holy shit.

Fast forward another few years to my first serious aura. I was giving an English lesson, which is obviously the ideal setting to lose the ability to write. Trying to explain neurological symptoms to an 18-year-old with, at best, a pre-intermediate listening level, is also an activity guaranteed to help you relax.

Nowadays I’m practically OK with aura; it’s better than agony and unlikely to outlast an hour in bed. When I’m really lucky, the pain doesn’t show up at all. So when the familiar blind spot showed up in my right eye the day before yesterday, I happily made my way to bed before the WTF tinnitus started. That was new. I felt weak and anxious, also novel. Normally aura annoys me rather than scares me.

Then the best bit: my tongue went completely numb! You’d be surprised how close to death that makes you feel. I thought I was having a stroke. Frantically I googled and discovered that a) tongue symptoms can happen during aura (YAY) and b) migraine sufferers have an increased risk of stroke (FFS).

I must say, I’m not looking forward to whatever my brain decides to foist on me next. With its track record, I’ll probably lose my sense of smell and burn the house down.

This is my A for the A-Z Blogging Challenge. You can find out more and sign up here. My theme is feelings – both sensations and emotions.

3LineTales

Sonya is the host of 3linetales. The aim is to write a three line story based on a picture prompt. Here is this week’s.

Everyone had heard of overground.

Everyone’s grandmother had muttered about it in her sleep.

But when the crash came, and the light, only one of them knew what to do.

Out of Season

The microwave wins the day.

It’s nearly Easter, so today we had a Christmas pudding. It was a perfectly serviceable supermarket one; I am not a snob about the origins of my sweet things. My mother had acquired it somewhere and it had to be eaten by the end of March.

It was a pleasant relief from the looming marmalade tart, which now haunts me.  I am going to have to make it some week, but not this one.  This week I could just microwave.

Drenched in cream, it was a satisfying way to try to say goodbye to winter, which has overstayed its welcome as usual. Judging by the weather forecast, it has still not got the hint.

Yum!

SoCS Saturday 27.03.2021: Run

I’ve never understood people who go running as a hobby. It seems to me that a huge number of human innovations have been thought of as a means to avoid running. Why did we start riding horses or create cars? So we could get places quickly without running. Bows and arrows? So we didn’t have to run after antelopes with spears. Aerobics? So we could exercise without running. You get the picture. Going running is a metaphorical kick in the teeth of our ancestors; running away from progress, if you will.

I never run anywhere. I would rather miss the bus. In a city, this works just fine; in the 17th century, aka the extreme countryside, you might be waiting a while. I get to the stop 5 minutes early.

I once went running. It was very boring, and I spent the whole time worrying about tripping up. It was a very rocky dirt track, because I wouldn’t be seen dead running along the actual road, flat and safe as it may be. I wouldn’t want people to think I was a Luddite.

This is part of Linda G. Hills Stream of Consciousness Saturday. The prompt was ‘run’. For full instructions and to see all contributions, go here.

Middle of the Night Chocolate Slab

An emergency present.

I do seem to have a knack for creating emergencies, don’t I? This time it was my father’s birthday, the kind of date that it takes real talent to turn into a crisis. It’s hardly as though it happens at random.

My brother is a presents genius. He never fails to produce something that suits somebody down to the ground. He is also incredible at sourcing gourmet chocolates. This skill is not genetic; the rest of us are all mediocre gift buyers. We bring neither disappointment nor over-the-moon delight.

I never forget birthdays or special occasions. On the contrary, I love them so much that I have devoted hours of my life to producing a list of obscure holidays to celebrate this April, complete with Safety Pin Day and Cosmonaut cocktails. It’s rather that my haphazard method of approaching, well, everything, does not lend itself to celebrations, especially not in the 17th century, when everything has to be ordered in advance. Things arrive late, or companies do not deliver to the back of beyond. Our local supermarket claims to have a delivery service but no-one I know can get the website to acknowledge the existence of our postcode.

And so it transpired that on the eve of my progenitor’s birthday, I had a mediocre stock of presents and the cats were still waiting for their special cat-dad card, which I had been charged with ordering, to arrive. I needed to magic up something else, but what?

That’s when I remembered reading about chocolate slabs. Basically, you melt some chocolate then chuck a load of other chocolate into it. Couldn’t be that hard, could it? The problem was that it was blowing an absolute gale outside (see – every post I’ve ever written about the weather here), so my father never left the house all day. Also, the same night owl gene that leads me to being awake until 4am every night also powers my father until at least 1am. So tiptoeing around the kitchen at 2am, I made this.

Still at the oozy stage.

It was very easy. I melted about 120g of dark chocolate, poured it into a baking-paper lined dish, waited about 10 minutes and then topped it with some melted milk chocolate. I used a little more of the latter, simply because I had it. Onto the top I gleefully threw a handful of Maltesers, a couple of Hazel in Caramel Cadbury’s Roses and some chopped up Country Fudge. I do love a bit of chaos! After leaving it at room temperature for a few hours, I stuck it in the fridge just to be on the safe side.

At the first just-melted-chocolate stage.

My father seemed happy enough with it, although I don’t think he’s eaten any yet. My mother prepared so much delicious real food that I doubt he has room. No doubt I will get a verdict tomorrow!

Finally, I want to give a shout out to the sellers of the awesome personalised coin-card I got my Dad on Etsy. It’s super cute and he really liked it. Also, it arrived really quickly, which is great for last-minuters like me.

Here’s the link: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/659760600/personalised-70th-birthday-card-with (Not an affiliate link, I just really love it!)

The cats’ card still hasn’t arrived and they are fuming. Luckily for me, they are blaming the postman.

Pennypincher #1minfiction 17th of March

This is my contribution to the one minute fiction challenge hosted by Cyranny. The story was written in one minute, but heavily edited afterwards because I’m a horrendous typist!

The picture prompt.

I was a little taken aback when the bird showed up with a coin in its beak, but to be honest, I’ve met weirder tourists. It dropped the penny on the table and waited. I didn’t know what I could serve it for a penny till I saw its beady eye fixed on the next table’s order.

“One large French fry coming up,” I said.

Always nice to have a satisfied customer.

Cheating At Poached Peaches

In which the Spinstress outdoes herself in laziness once more.

I know, I know, I was going to put some effort in and make a Marmalade Treacle Tart, after being thwarted last week. The thing was that my mother randomly made an almond tart yesterday and half of it was left, so it would just have been rude and usurping to make another one so soon.

So I set about finding some nice fruity thing to serve alongside it, and settled on this wholesome-looking recipe for Caramel Peaches and Blueberries. To be honest, it was the caramel part that did it.

The pie crumbled slightly owing to my manhandling.

It was a risky recipe, because the last time I attempted melting sugar in hot water (for a coffee syrup), it caused some bizarre chemical reaction in which everything turned black and bubbled, would not stop bubbling even after the heat had been turned off, and caused the kitchen to have to be evacuated. I was lucky that I didn’t end up being burnt as a witch.

A more minor problem was that I was in possession of neither fresh peaches nor blueberries, so I had to make do with tinned peaches and frozen mixed summer berries. They worked reasonably well, although I think red currants and blackcurrants probably produced a tarter effect than was intended. Also, I used vanilla essence instead of a vanilla pod, and I have never bothered with lemon zest in my life. I just used extra juice. In consequence, I am confident that I produced the laziest possible variation on this recipe.

Oh, and the sugar did exactly what it was supposed to do. I think I might have forgotten to add the water last time. 😁

There’s more sugar than fruit, I promise – it’s just hiding.

SoCS Saturday 20.03.2021: Calligraphy

When I was a kid, maybe 10 years old, there was a trend for calligraphy. There were sets that you could buy with fancy pens and little guide books that were supposed to teach you how to do it.

I bought my little set, £4.99 in Woolworths – a fortune as far as I was concerned but actually a steal, I think it was on sale – and brought it home. I sat at the desk and “learnt calligraphy” for ages, maybe 20 minutes. I still couldn’t do it.

Handwriting was never my strength. I used to have to rewrite everything in the middle years of primary school. My teacher was obsessed with the issue. Once she made me rewrite the same thing twice. I don’t think my writing was that bad. I think I just finished too quickly for her tastes.

I don’t know why I thought I could do calligraphy. Maybe I could have, if I had some other personality. I think that is when I learned I was a flake.

This was my post for Stream of Consciousness Saturday. The prompt was:

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “starts with cal.” Use a word starting with the letters “cal” as your prompt word. Have fun!

Day/Week/Month/Year: SoCS 13.03.2021

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “day/week/month/year.” Use one, use them all, use them any way you’d like. Enjoy!

For the prompt, rules and to participate, go here. Thank you to Linda Hill for this thought-provoking prompt!

Time, in my experience, doesn’t so much fly as skate along like one of those long-legged bugs in the surface of a lake. For a moment, you’re suspended: heart pounding, minutes that seem to take decades to force their way past. Then whoosh, it’s ten years later. What have you been doing? Who knows?

My work is paid for hourly, so I know that not all sixty minute chunks of life are actually the same length. Sometimes the clock zooms, sometimes it forgets to move at all, like in high school chemistry. Tick, tock, it’s still five minutes ago.

I’ve been alive forever, like everybody else. It’s strange that people born this millennium are old enough to drink, isn’t it? They were just born…oh wait.

It’s stream of consciousness Saturday, but I’m writing on Monday. Tuesday. It’s two minutes past midnight. But what’s a day, or three?

An article I read the other day claimed our subjective time speeds up if we don’t have new experiences. New experiences are nearly illegal now – even old experiences are dodgy – so actually the governments of the world have invented time travel.

I keep booking weeks off work to write, to breathe, to plan, to dream, to Organise My Life, and then they don’t happen. I mean, the week arrives but then it skips. Whoosh, whoosh. Gone.

Emergency Fool

Panic is the mother of puddings.

On Mother’s Day, which was yesterday here, I was going to be so! Organised!

I was going to wake up an hour earlier than usual in plenty of time to make Marmalade Treacle Tart. (If anyone knows why treacle tart is actually made with golden syrup, I’d love to be told. I suspect a minefield of British-American misunderstanding.) As we all know, pastry needs to rest for 30 minutes before you do anything with it, despite the fact that it has done no work whatsoever.

I woke up exactly at my usual time. This was less than fantastic but should still have been doable. Except I’d also lost the magazine the recipe was in. I stomped about looking for it for about 20 minutes, swearing periodically. Nothing! The fates had conspired against me.

By this time, it was too late to start looking for another recipe online, because the poor, tired pastry wouldn’t have had time to recover. I had to do a storecupboard rummage and ended up with a kind of strawberry fool. I served it in teacups because when all else fails, presentation usually tricks people into thinking they must be eating something good.

A fool with biscuits!

It wasn’t bad for four ingredients (cream, yogurt, icing sugar, tinned strawberries, reduced until jammy – all whipped together with a dash of optimism). I splodged some syrup on top to commemorate the pudding we would have enjoyed, if I had a different personality or a louder alarm.

The magazine was in my bed. I have no idea how it got there; I can only assume the cat hid it. It is the kind of thing she would do. She doesn’t read, as far as I know, but she does enjoy sitting on paper. I think my mother found laughing at me over this more enjoyable than either her gifts or her pudding.

The sneaky spy pose tells you everything you need to know.