Not Deep Joy (or Unwinese)

There will one day be a computer to translate English into Unwinese but until then do NOT just add 'bold' onto the end of every third word.

There is definitely no Deep Joy around here at the moment. I hate Excel VBA and consider it an insult to be ordered to work on other people's Damn-awful code. Brain the size of a planet and all that or is that Brain the size of a plant? I am in one of those is this all worth it phases when everything about feels kind of papery and depressing like in this poem by Sylvia Plath though I am not sure her mind was in the same state as mine before you go rushing off to find my IP address and call the emergency services. The bit about the "Papery Feeling" is the main thing. Once when I was about six or seven, I got really ill and the whole world seemed so distant through all the congestion in my head. Walking was like floating and the house seemed full of cotton wool. Funniliy enough, after a while, it wasn't uncomfortable; just strange. Come to think of it, the whole world seems like that in a more abstract way. Is it just that as you become more aware of things in the world other than your own immediate surroundings, you notice the difference between your own sphere of experience and that which you see at a distance? It is more than just sadness or nervousness though I am both sad and nervous at the moment. I am getting to the point where I just want to curl up and hide but of course I can't. The screen is actually beginning to seem distant just because I talked about that particular feeling a few minutes ago.

Right! Something good instead of all this depression. I downloaded "The Railway Children" to the Palm. Of course I have seen the film and I think I saw the TV version (in which Jenny Agutter also starred when she was of an age more suited to playing Bobbie) but I have never read the book and I have to say it was brilliant with even a few touches of self-reference. Of course I raced though it and was at the end during lunch one day. As i knew the ending I was anticipating the arrival of the Children's father out of the steam at the railway station but "My Daddy, my Daddy" is a killer line and sure to have you bawling like the end of "Brief Encounter" (or the last few pages of this biography of Laurie Lee). I am afraid I am retreating into well-loved children's books at the moment. I am near the end of "Swallowdale" at the moment though infortunately not in this binding. One day I will get a full set of Arthur Ransome hardbacks with these covers. There is a wonderful bookshop in Southport which has a whole floor of kids books and they have a full set of the Swallows and Amazons stories in these wonderful covers. (I also got the last copy of "Britains Wonderful Airforce there" and I hold out much hope of them getting "A Child's History of the World". Of course all of this is a desire for a world which never existed.



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Swallows and Amazons Forever.