Weeknotes 26

Nothing to report this week. I spent nearly all of it feeling unwell — kidney stones, probably, which hurt — so I haven’t done much besides lie in bed and groan. The pain stopped last night and I’m slowly returning to normal, except I’ve now become one of those people who drinks a lot of water.

The NHS is brilliant and precious of course, but it’s also extremely under-resourced. As a result there’s no real continuity of care, which is a posh way of saying that I wasn’t able to find anyone who had the time, energy or remit to care about my problem or tell me what to do about it. It’s understandable but upsetting when you’re already feeling incapable.

Then again, the illness does appear to have eventually gone away by itself, so maybe devoting zero resources to it was perfectly efficient. In hindsight I realise that “extremely painful” and “non-urgent” is an unlucky combination to have landed on.

Like many others, I’m sad that the Shepherdess Cafe has closed. I met the same group of friends for breakfast there on Fridays for many years and had been looking forward to going back once lockdown ended, but now that’s not going to happen. To paraphrase Phil, I don’t think there’s any room in the world in which I’ve cumulatively laughed more, so I’ll miss that.

Goodbye, the Shep. Your food was cheap and scrolling through photos of (mostly) my breakfasts has just made me feel a bit ill again.

I forgot to mention last week that we did eventually watch Doctor Sleep. I liked it a lot. It nicely avoids naff Kubrick knockoff territory by being a different sort of film entirely, much more conventional in tone and structure but still interesting and well-acted. It occasionally can’t resist going a bit “remember The Shining?” but I don’t think it crosses the line too far, plus I’m not immune to gormlessly enjoying things I remember.

Mostly I hope that more sequels follow its lead by casting new actors in iconic parts because it works much better than having half the performers be reanimated CGI ghouls. Spooky!

This week we started rewatching The Thick of It for the umpteenth time. It’s a go-to piece of comfort television and it works almost as well if you can only hear the audio so it was an obvious choice while I was laid up. I enjoy it so much and keep finding more details and new little jokes with every rewatch. It really is a treasure and barely a week goes by without me finding another legitimately insightful use for “we’ve fucking time travelled, yes?”.

I’m on holiday next week. I think it’ll be a staycation this year.