Weeknotes 209

Happy new year!

Twixmas passed in a haze of tissues and Lemsip. I was in principle invited to a New Year’s Eve party for the first time in… years? my life?… but didn’t feel well enough to go. I had one day back at work, felt worse and had to pull a sickie to end the week. 🤧

Did you know that Lemsip is paracetamol + phenylephrine, and oral phenylephrine doesn’t do anything, so you might as well just take a paracetamol? An unpleasant hot drink is comforting though innit.

I did receive genuine relief from squirting xylometazoline up my nose. For me it’s a novelty to use a drug which a) actually works and b) acts so quickly. My usual experience of medication is to take a painkiller for a headache and an hour later the pain has eased off slightly and I wonder whether that would have happened anyway; the nasal spray unblocked my nose almost instantly and I could breathe normally again. Amazing.

For most of the week I couldn’t smell anything, even during the periods when I could breathe through my nose. I usually have a good sense of smell and I’ve never lost it before so psychologically it was disconcerting to have an entire sense deleted, although in practice it didn’t affect my life much (beyond taking most of the pleasure out of coffee) and, you know, I saw it as an opportunity to build empathy with the anosmic community.

What was unpleasant was how it slowly came back: not with a ramping up of intensity, but with different aspects of smell returning at different times, so that for about 24 hours everything smelled disgusting and burned, which was impossible to ignore and therefore much worse than smelling nothing at all. To my relief the constant overpowering gross smells eventually resolved into low-intensity normal smells and I didn’t have to throw my Original Source shower gel away after all.

The second lateral flow test still said no. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I did nothing all weekend and I feel quite a lot better now.

As predicted, the gift card didn’t work. After some back and forth about being physically unable to refund me because gift card refunds are against policy, the manager of Sainsbury’s relented and gave me my money back as cash instead of crediting the card I paid with, which is weird but I suppose fine. I don’t like using cash but I’d rather spend it than go to the hassle of finding somewhere I can deposit it.

Equally predictably it turns out I didn’t escape the car rental unscathed. The loading zone where I stopped at 5pm to safely load my bags into the car is — I now discover — not in effect between 4pm and 7pm, so I got an automated fine plus a generous “admin fee” from the rental company.

This is obviously my fault because I was so harried and focused on avoiding several other classes of mistake that I didn’t even think to check whether I was allowed to do the superficially allowed thing I was doing at the time I was doing it. So, whatever, it’s annoying that I messed up but I’ve now learned that specific lesson about the hours of operation of the loading zone and at least the fine is a smaller amount of money than the ridiculous insurance excess that was stressing me out at the time.

I hate driving.

While I was away over Christmas the Sonos Roam in my flat didn’t get charged and its battery died completely, then when I got home it wouldn’t charge up again. It was two years past its one-year warranty so I assumed I’d just have to throw it away, but when I told Sonos they sent me a replacement that arrived the next day with a prepaid label so I could return the dead one in the same box. Pretty good service!

Another Ember coaster died but I haven’t summoned the enthusiasm to deal with that yet.

I spoke too soon about season three of Slow Horses, which got silly again, trying to make the audience care about the safety of a handful of characters while taking a Nathan Drake / John Wick approach to the expendability of generic goons.

I started watching Barry and, a few episodes in, I’m finding it pretty watchable. It hasn’t blown my mind but it’s an interesting premise and I’m enjoying seeing D’Arcy Carden and Kirby Howell-Baptiste again. I expect it’ll improve over time so I’m sticking with it for now.

Am I watching season two of The Traitors? 100%.

I realise these weeknotes increasingly consist of my inability to comprehend the passage of time, but: thirty years since dubnobasswithmyheadman? Jesus.