Dear Diary,

It has been some time since I last made an entry. Forgive me.  I have been feeling really tired for weeks and wondering  if it was my age as well as my advancing  anti-social tendencies (which, I feel, are intrinsically linked; wherever you are and whatever you happen to be doing) which has stopped me from joining fellow volunteers for fish brochettes, beer and japes around town.

As further symptoms developed (I’ll spare you the details) I decided that praps something else was afoot (as well).  So I looked up ‘medical services’ in my volunteer handbook (with blue binder, colour coding sections and everything!) and selected the ‘Belgian Doctor’ from the small list of recommended physicians.  “Amoeba’s” he explained.  Naturally, my thoughts drifted back to those days of darkly etched wooden benches in the biology room at Tanbridge House where the truth of life was revealed to us in odorous ways.

This was preferable to the information that greeted me once I fired up Google.  I was given three days of antibiotics and worming tablets (!) and strict instructions to avoid alcohol.  It felt really strange to know that I had been harbouring stowaways who were (literally – no I don’t mean figuratively!) sucking the nutrients out of my body.  In order to deal with this unsavoury reality, I resorted to calling them my ‘pet parasites’ and in order to excuse self from dining/drinking etc. explained that “we’d taken a vote and I had lost and we were going home for a group nap…”

After the copious amount of drugs were completed, I felt much better than I had in weeks.  For about four days.  And then I felt worse than I had the first time round.  I went back to the Belgian Doctor. “Lactose Intolerance” he said.  Excuse me?  Pets harbouring test revealed they had gone so this, he felt, was the reason.  Righto. So I have been laid out for days with the alleged lactose intolerance feeling very very sorry for self.

Being ill when living alone is always rubbish;  as pointed out frequently by me to friends back home, “I could die and nobody would know”.  But being ill and living alone and away from friends to guilt into stopping by with an egg sandwich (with no running water, no bath, no couch) a girl can get to feeling downright miserable.

Happily, I woke up this morning feeling much brighter; both physically and emotionally.  This was actually at 5 a.m. as I could hear the toilet cistern filling up. Water! So I rushed about filling all the buckets and every other vessel I could find and celebrated by having a three kettle bucket bath which includes hair treatment, hair conditioning, body scrub, leg shave and foot soak!  I jumped back into bed and listened to the dawn arrive whilst finishing my book.

A good day already and it was barely light.