Which reminds me, all sorts of fur and fowl and sqiddley diddley, creepy crawly and slithery swimmy things are the happiest they’ve been for years and years and years. Maybe ever since people made the blind and arrogant assumption that this world is here just for us, for our pleasure, to use and abuse and waste and discard.

But, what I wanted to do is look at all the feelings ricocheting around in my house just now. And it’s just me here, so you’d think there would be little chance of conflict. But there is. There is because I cannot seem to stay in the same emotional state for any time at all and so, whenever I’m talking to myself, we disagree! I was going to start by saying, ‘on the one hand...’, but I don’t have sufficient hands for all the candidates in this emotional morass. Neither can I progress by saying, ‘firstly...’, and so on, because one emotion doesn’t seem to have dominion over any other.

And before I can even get to that, I need to share a bit of an embarrassing condition that’s developed very suddenly; lachrymose incontinence. Tears, at the drop of a hat and even when there’s not a hat in sight. There’s absolutely no warning. It can be set off by a voice, a song, a smell, a taste, pretty much anything. Just sudden tears. Not crying. Not sobbing my heart out just tears. I’m hoping it’s just a passing thing, another symptom of condition Bizarre. It’s manageable just now, while we’re all isolating in our little silos, but it’s going to be a bit of an issue if I haven’t got it under control by the time we’re let out of purdah; if I can’t ask the guy on the bacon counter for half a dozen rashers of streaky without crying all over the cooked meats.

But it’s made me think about when I was a kid of about 10 or 11 in the mid sixties, just before I went to senior school, and I was absolutely plagued by gushing nosebleeds. It was such a regular occurrence that I always carried a wadge of paper towels with me throughout the school day and I remember one teacher used to just put the classroom waste bin beside my chair as a matter of course. The GP, an old army doctor long overdue for retirement, brushed the issue aside and told my mother, ‘It’s just a safety valve, nothing to worry about, doesn’t do any harm.’

No idea if that was true from a medical perspective, but it did stop after about nine months and has rarely occurred since. And now, I’m wondering if all these tears are just the same thing, a safety valve that’s nothing to worry about? It isn’t doing any harm and I do wonder if it’s helping me feel less tight within myself. In all of this totally odd time I have that fluttery, slightly held breath, something’s going to happen that’s not within my control, edge of a precipice sort of feeling. So maybe, if the tears are a safety valve to release the build up of tension or emotional pressure, then it is a good thing, which I don’t have to add to the list of things to worry about at the moment. But I do need it to ease up before I need to talk to the chap on the bacon counter.

And then there’s the issue that I cannot seem to concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time and it makes me wonder, am I just going to loose my marbles before condition Bizarre is over? And there we are, tears again!

Patricia

A Moodscope member.