Thwarted

Yesterday I went on a shopping expedition with a friend. The aim was to buy summer clothes for me, for work. She had kindly offered to help, knowing how much I hate shopping. I extracted promises from her that we would have frequent stops for refreshments. (These promises were not difficult to extract, I should add.)

I woke up feeling a bit under the weather, and on the train to meet my friend my throat started feeling scratchy. When we met, I told her I was worried I was coming down with something, and asked her if she was ready for a coffee break yet.

She was, so we started our shopping expedition with a very long coffee break.

It was a fantastically successful day considering that I had the beginnings of a cold and wasn't feeling too good. I had a lovely time with my friend. It is true that I only bought one item of clothing, which may or may not be suitable for work, but who cares? We turned out to be excellent shoppers. At the end of the day we popped into a bookstore to see whether they had the new Jasper Fforde book in paperback yet, and they did. I then spotted books by Laurie R. King and Henning Mankell that I hadn't read yet. Realising that things could get out of hand I started to head for the checkout counter, but was snagged by non-fiction on the way. There I picked up Reading Lolita in Tehran, which has been recommended to me by several people, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, which hadn't but which looked irresistible, and Life Along the Silk Road, which I picked up, started reading at random, and was instantly lost in. At this point I had six books in my arms and hadn't been in the bookstore more than about five minutes. My friend was having similar difficulties, and we forced ourselves to leave.

After that we were tired, so we went home.

After I got home the cold took over, and has been dominating ever since.

Today has not been very good. I have not achieved anything, but neither have I slept as much as I wanted (and needed) to, because there is some kind of election happening shortly and sound trucks have been trolling past every ten minutes or so blasting politicians' names at high volume. You just start drifting off and you are jerked awake by
ONEGAISHIMASU! VOTE FOR NAKAMURA-SAN! VOTE FOR NAKAMURA-SAN. ONEGAISHIMASU!

It is impossible to sleep, or even to wallow in misery when you are being aurally assaulted, which is why this bombarding with loudspeakers technique is more commonly used as a torture device. Instead of gently drowning in self-pity I have spent the day fighting off the urge to leap out of bed, run outside, and rip the heads off the people who are making sleep impossible. My wallowing has been thwarted. (I like saying that word. Thwarted. Thwarted. Thwarted.)

Is it really possible that this system of campaigning works? I have been feeling so enraged by the loudspeakers that if I were a voter I would make a point of NOT voting for the people who had disturbed my Sunday so rudely and violently. I would also write to the politicians concerned to tell them so.

So the upshot of all this is that while I had planned to wallow in misery and self-pity today, instead I spent most of it reading Jasper Fforde in between bouts of loudspeaker rage. As a method for getting over a cold this is not ideal. I don't think rage is a very healing emotion, and the more I enjoyed the book the angrier I was at the frequent interruptions.

But I even got angry at Fforde. I love his books, and normally would forgive any little mistakes. He is a competent writer with fantastic and hilarious ideas. I do not expect him to write literary gems. However, I DO expect him to know what belie means. I also get a little irate at sentence fragments. I know sentence fragments can be a style choice (not a style I'm particularly fond of), but they always make me wonder whether the writer was aware of making a choice, or whether he or she just blew it. In this case, I think he blew it.

Both of these problems appeared in the first two pages of the book (the sentence fragment was the second sentence), and I read them as a politician cruised past slowly, blaring something so loud it was distorted and I couldn't make it out. My head pounded. I felt the vein in my forehead swell. "BELIE MEANS CONTRADICT YOU BIG DUMMY!" I shouted, and almost threw the book out the window. Then I had a coughing fit.

But I stuck with the book, and I'm glad I did. I don't think Something Rotten is as good as the first three books in the series (although this judgement may be unfairly influenced by the sound trucks), but still, it is fun, and I am up to page 203. If there were any other mistakes I was too caught up in the story to notice.

After dinner (chicken soup) I got busy devising sick-teacher-friendly lesson plans for the week. My throat doesn't hurt as much as it did but I have developed a painful cough, and speaking hurts. This cold seems to be progressing through its various stages fairly quickly, which is probably a good thing, but I don't think tomorrow is going to be much fun.

I didn't get nearly as much wallowing done as I'd hoped to, today. I'll have to see if I can fit some in tomorrow, after work.

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