I see that it’s been
two months since I last blogged. So, time for an update.
I’ve been doing plenty of walking in the mountains and I’ve
been taking my kayak out for runs up and down the coast. It’s not yet been warm
enough for swimming and frankly I haven’t had the energy. The weather here has
been odd: clouds and sunshine interspersed with periods when we have been
swamped by Sahara dust. A few times outdoors it has looked like a sepia
photograph. The stuff gets everywhere and with it continuing there seems hardly
any point in cleaning my car, though occasionally I wash down my terrace to
stop tracking the stuff into the house. Today is windy and cloudy and
everything is covered with that dust. Even my Greek neighbours are now saying, ‘Come
on, it’s the end of May, where’s the sun?’
Though I have been walking and kayaking my energy has been
low. This is due to the panic/anxiety attacks. They now mainly hit me in the
morning as I try to catch an extra forty winks. It is almost as if my mind is
fleeing from something that occurs while I am asleep. I have noticed I’ve been
having more nightmares. Some do involve Caroline but generally they just
involve fear. I had a couple that I used to have decades ago – involving a
flood I am trying to escape and then seeing a mountainous wave approaching and
thinking, ‘Fuck it, I‘m dead.’ Apparently nightmares like these are quite
common. Anyway, since I am of a scientific turn of mind, I started to recording
my ‘bad moments’ and plotting them on a graph. Thankfully the trend is downwards.
About seven weeks ago I got book III of the Transformation
trilogy back from the editor and have, intermittently, been going through that.
I would normally bang through this stuff in a week or so but, for perhaps the
first time ever for me, I saw a deadline looming. However, I’ve finished with
the edits and now there is a just a little wrangling to go through about the
title. Hopefully, after I dispatch this back to Macmillan, I’ll be able to get
back to some writing.
That’s all for now. I’ll try to update this more regularly.
