Twelve Days in the Year: 27th January 2025

Woke some time around four with a splitting headache, having slept lightly and fitfully; managed to fend off the dark thoughts of failure and inadequacy that always turn up in such circumstances at the moment, but didn’t manage to get back to sleep, not helped by the cats waking up and starting to make various unexplained and occasionally worrying noises – no vomit this morning, but a lot of crashes and rattles. A. woke around five and put the radio on, which helped me doze for a while. The shipping forecast confirms the impression from sounds outside that the weather isn’t getting any better. Get up after the inshore waters report passes St David’s Head to make tea.

The cats are fractious this morning; the younger ones are frustrated that it’s too dark and wet for them to be allowed out – we were away on Saturday, and yesterday was miserable weather, so they’re clearly getting a bit stir-crazy – while Buddy is easily provoked by Olga staring at him and erupts into growls and yowls, which then gets her hackles up. He’s been with us for long enough, and is clearly happy with us and the general set-up – he no longer needs his ‘safe box’, but has various cushions round the sitting room where he spends most of his time – that this is clearly just an intense dislike of other cats and jealousy that they get fuss and attention as well. The perils of adopting an elderly rescue cat… Things are most harmonious while we have tea in bed; he lounges about under my legs under the duvet, Hector snuggles next to me on top of the duvet, Olga fidgets happily. When we get up for breakfast, there’s a lot of prowling and Mexican standoffs.

Things do quieten down once A. has headed off to work – fingers crossed that the floods aren’t too bad on her usual route, as pictures and videos from other parts of the area look pretty dreadful after the solid downpour of the last twenty-four hours – and it gets light enough for the catflap to be opened. Buddy settles proprietorially onto my lap while the the other two goes backwards and forwards, damply. Once I’ve finished my cup of tea I head upstairs to the computer for an hour’s worth of emails and minor admin, mostly to do with journal editing, before returning to allow Buddy to resume occupation as I have to phone the head of a Historical Institute in Germany for whom I’m acting as an external referee. I don’t like phone conversations at the best of times, let alone when tired and headachy; on the other hand, I can take it as a positive that doing it in German is no worse than doing it in English, and efforts to watch a bit more German television over the weekend were not wasted – granted, Biathlon commentary isn’t entirely relevant, but it got me back into the swing of sentence structure…

Time for a hit of espresso to try to kick my brain into life – to Buddy’s vocal displeasure, obviously, as I put him off my lap. We haven’t had a cat who is either so vocal or so well supplied with a range of disgruntled noises. As soon as I sit down again he’s back, curling up and purring, which is pleasurable, as neither of the other two are lap cats (Hector is a weird ‘sit next to you and lie back’ cat, which gives more freedom to move and cross legs but is less warm and comforting). More emails, as it doesn’t entail having to get up, and there are as ever a lot of them. Outside it seems finally to have stopped raining, at least for the moment; checked water gauge and we’ve had 40mm in just the last twenty-four hours. It feels rather optimistic to be ordering seeds and seed potatoes on the assumption that the garden will be less of a swamp by April or May.

There is a plausible case that pressing on with emails, journal admin and reviewing an article submission is basically displacement activity, as I’m currently feeling absolute terror and despondency at the thought of trying to write any of the things I’m supposed to be writing. On the other hand, after last night, and with general feeling of brain fog and fatigue, at least these are things that I can still do to a reasonable level of efficiency and quality, so better to be doing these than doing nothing, and just hope that I sleep better and am in a better place tomorrow. For various reasons this hasn’t been a great month – mainly, I think, because I did have a couple of days (at a conference in London) where I felt a bit more myself, having ideas and thinking of connections between different things, and then went into a complete slump immediately afterwards and have struggled to recover.

I’m honestly not sure whether I should be accepting a state of erratic memory, tiredness and inability to maintain complex networks of ideas clear in my mind in the way I used to do as a new normal, and try to be realistic and resigned about this rather than frustrated and miserable, or keep striving for things to improve and thinking that if I just take the bad days easy then good days will come along in time, at the risk of getting miserable and frustrated when they don’t. And of course maybe I’m just getting old, and picking on Long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome as an alibi for just being a bit rubbish these days.

Finish writing review of article submission (sadly, very very bad indeed) and break for lunch, taking the opportunity to watch another episode of Blake’s 7 for the first time. I missed this completely at the time; a function of my parents not having a television when I was growing up, but also for some reason (scheduling?) I never caught even one episode when visiting friends or grandparents, so my total knowledge up until the point when I bought a second-hand set of DVDs (with Dutch subtitles, oddly enough, but they can be turned off) was based on the attempts of friends to teach me enough to participate in playground re-enactments (or possibly inventing new episodes with the characters). At this remove, I cannot for the life of me recall what character I was asked to play; not impossible, given my obliviousness, that it could have been Jenna or Servalan (in an all-boys school, who better to take on a female role than someone who doesn’t realise that it’s a female role?), but given that there were, I think, just five or six of us, it wouldn’t be a question of every role needing to be filled. If you were type-casting me at that age, it would probably have been Avon, but that’s surely too good a part to give to someone who wouldn’t appreciate it.

Headed out for a short walk, in between downpours, with the idea that this might help with the sleeping; further journal admin, plus updating a short proposal, plus more emails. It starts to rain again. The afternoon passes in a manner that is somehow productive and unproductive at the same time. A. returns home and I switch to preparing supper – which gets earlier and earlier, matching ever earlier bedtimes as we’re both too tired for anything else during the week. As ever, it’s a pleasure to do simple practical things like cooking, even if in this case it’s limited to peeling and sautéing potatoes and making coleslaw. Eating is interrupted by loud banging from upstairs and increasingly anguished cries from Olga, which turn out to be neither a querulous demand for affection nor unspecified angst but an attempt at alerting us to the fact that A. had accidentally shut Hector in the airing cupboard. One doubts that she would have done the same for Buddy – she would probably have shut him in herself.

Listen to news on the radio, wash up the dishes, watch Tagesschau. Both of course put the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz at the top; for multiple reasons, the German story (focused on the testimony of a survivor) feels not just weightier but also more sincere and less performative – it’s not about the feelings of the reporter, emoting for the audience. The fact that it’s followed by a story about Friedrich Merz’s plans for restricting migration and repatriating people is perhaps pointed but deniably so. And they end with a cheery story about the arrival of migrating cranes in the south of the country.

Half an hour or so’s work on music composition – still developing a piece that tries to echo the harmonies of the great Krzysztof Komeda. This isn’t exactly what our homework task is (that’s all about diatonic chord sequences, not strange modal ones) but isn’t totally irrelevant, as the development of interesting harmonic structures that make some sort of sense, without simply doing contrafacts on existing songs, is definitely an area I need to work on. In any case I’ve already prepared a homework piece in case I’m not able to escape scrutiny this week. The muse is upon me this evening – or at any rate the chord sequence I worked out over the weekend still seems to work (even if I couldn’t exactly explain why some of the chords work, which normally means that I’ve spelt some of them wrongly again), and the piano part is more or less worked out. It doesn’t sound much like Komeda, but perhaps that means it sounds more like me.

Back downstairs to turf Buddy out of my chair, for half an hour listening to music – a bit of the classic Bill Evans Trio with Scott LeFaro, as something that meets A.’s criterion of “not too frenetic” – before heading up to bed and hoping to sleep better than last night. Outside it’s still raining…