Dec. 20

Retrospectively, we should have known it was too good to be true when we woke up feeling more or less okay, bar some congestion.

Turns out the Terrible Lurgy Of Doom only let us off the hook to ease us into slow and agonising cramps. Question for anyone to have a go at; Who do we contact to demand a refund with interest on this last week? We want to know.

The calendar tried to compensate with a gorgeous silk dragon jasmine. That’s expensive stuff – the kind of green tea we dream of but don’t buy because freelancing doesn’t pay that kind of dividends.

Mind you, because we spent more of today in the bath than not, we only sampled a little. It lives up to its name though; it’s beautifully smooth. Here’s to drinking it when we feel human.

Want to start bets on when that is?

Sick Room
Billy Collins

Every time Canaletto painted Venice
he painted her from a different angle,

sometimes from points of view
he must have imagined,

for there is no place in the city
he could have stood to observe such scenes.

How ingenious of him to visualize
a dome or canal from any point in space.

How passionate he was
to delineate Venice from perspectives

that required him to mount the air
and levitate there with his floating brush.

But I have been sick in this bed
for over sixty hours,

and I am not Canaletto,
and this airless little room,

with its broken ceiling fan
and its monstrous wallpaper, is not Venice.