Pass the smelling salts, Marlon.

I'm ill again. It's not Covid, not yet. 

I had unusual heart palpitations yesterday while I was out walking and felt like I was going to faint. I sat down at bus stop with my head between my knees, unaware I'd just wandered into the scene of a bomb scare (the only sign of this was the buses were cancelled - Belfast is chill about this sort of thing). 

After five minutes I felt like I could make it home without head-butting the pavement and I did. But I barely slept last night and today I feel as flat as Trump's haemorrhoid cushion. It feels like an unearned hangover, which is the unkindest cut of all. But at least its cheap - I normally have to pay to feel this bad. 

I think its stress. I've been working on a number of projects for months and they're not settling. They're windy, amorphous things - like a first draft. And they take so long. Another fortnight between e-mails, another meandering Zoomcall, another draft of a nebulous contract, another draft of whatever it is I'm supposed to be writing. At this point it feels like a shrew farting in the Outer Hebrides could blow away all traces of what I laughingly call my career. It's written in smoke, etched on water, pissed into fire. This instability is making me unwell. 

Also, you know, the pandemic: the second spike, another six months of lock-down in all but name, the craven ineptitude of the government, the craven invisibility of the opposition, the looming spectre of a no deal Brexit, the recession, America tripping into the fiery chaos of civil war and environmental collapse. And the fact that my computer may explode at any second. That last one aside is it any wonder the whole world feels fractured and fractious and so unstable that horses refuse to live in it.*

Or maybe it isn't instability - maybe its not stress. Maybe I am ill. My symptoms: feeling slightly under the weather, mysterious aches, occasional dizziness, could be the foothills of something devastatingly serious. Or it could just be old age. Perhaps this is what getting older feels like. 

Telling this to Susan I remembered something. As a child I used to faint quite often. In the Catholic faith there used to be things called altar boys: little boys in dresses who would follow the priest, in his dress, around the church ringing bells and opening his books. Nowadays girls can do this too but in my day it was an all boy affair, if that isn't an unfortunate description. There were big candles to be carried and the boys who held a torch for the priest were called acolytes. I was usually an acolyte. I was a short and unremarkable child so being an acolyte can't have been too much of an honour. Every week the priest would swing his perfumed censer about and we boys would trail behind him waving our candlesticks. Odd business. I hope I'm not repressing any more memories. 

During the blessing of the host - the most sacred and mysterious part of the Catholic mass - we knelt in front of the altar and each week I would faint. Sometimes I would just spark out on the carpeted steps of the altar. Other times I would feel it coming - the black fog crowding the periphery of my vision - and I'd leap up and attempt to make it to the sacristy, blacking out along the way. I think it was the strain of keeping my giant head upright on my shortened body, kneeling there with a straight back so as not to disgrace the family. I'm not sure how often this happened - and I'm sure my Mum would now deny it completely - but it did happen and many times. And each Sunday I'd be sent back to stick on my surplus and waggle me candle about until I fell over. 

I haven't thought about that in a long time. Maybe I have a propensity for fainting - certainly my head hasn't got any smaller. Anyway. I'm calling stress/anxiety this time, stress that can be nicely alleviated with the arrival of one of the cheques I'm owed. The alternatives are too hideous to think about. 

*Fuck you. I love this joke. I remember when Dad Jokes were just called jokes. What have you got, millennials? Come at me with your dank memes about doggoes.