5th September 2010 (Sunday)

I have something of the sensation of being a bunyip crawling out of the swamp mud. The haze in my head is finally clearing and I’m looking round at a wasteland of missed blog posts. Dear oh dear. Truth is, what with one thing and another I hadn’t been getting much sleep for well over a month. Now I know that people like the Pie just deal with this on a daily basis but I’m a weakling. Can’t take it. World starts to spin, don’t exactly know what’s going on.

It was all probably caused by an unfortunate convergence of alcohol, urine and snot. To elaborate (not that you want me to, now), the Non hit a ‘wet patch’ of probably a total of 3 months or more, culminating in positive deluge a while back. Among other measures, we instigated the ‘Barbie’ routine – got a Barbie alarm clock which (in staged progression) beeped at 2:30a.m., 3:00 a.m., 3:30 a.m. (you get the jist). At this point we all got colds, but I seemed to keep re-catching it. Final insult to injury, it seems I can no longer drink the regulation quantity of alcohol, due to (I assume) Getting Old. Woke up in the early hours and couldn’t get back to sleep. Ah well, I guess I’m nearly forty, and I’ve probably already drunk my share of vineyard produce for a lifetime… doesn’t stop me wanting more.

Finally, the Non dried up, Barbie became obsolete, the final bouts of my cold seem to ebb off into the distance and I gave up wine completely for a full four days. And voila, this morning was still dreaming when the Non bounced in at 7 a.m. – so all is back to normal. Thanks be to sliced bread, it seems I can drink a glass of wine with impunity now that the initial hurdle is crossed, but the days of simply sitting there of an evening going through gallons of booze as the fancy takes me are already a misty memory. Well what do you expect with that amount of dilution.


There is however one final layer of icing to the cake. I’d been dreading it ever since the Non started school, and finally it came round to us: NITS. Saturday afternoon was spent with all members of the family variously treated and shampoo’d up. Can you imagine trying to get a nit-comb through Lara’s hair? No, I thought not. In fact, it was virtually impossible. Luckily the stuff you put on is meant to kill the buggers anyway, so technically it shouldn’t me necessary, but you know. It’s nice to think there are no corpses lingering in there. Actually I was the worst off, suffering far the most bites. Having read up on the life-cycle of the hair louse, I’ve hatched (haa haa, oh I do love serendipitous puns) a theory that the Non’s hair grows too quickly for them to be able to breed. Technically, I think this may be possible. There was indeed very little to be found on her. It’s also entirely possible I picked it up first directly from the other schoolkids. I go there every week, after all. In any case, pesticides are wonderful and we’re all (fingers crossed) louse-free now.