Feb 02 2009
Ups & Downs & French Toast
Today has been a bit of a mixed bag, full of surprises alongside the entirely predictable. Much, I suppose, like any other in the life of an emotionally unstable person.
I arose early, having promised that I would look over someone’s computer that had been updated at the end of last week. Blinking, as usual, I peered out of the kitchen window to see the known universe was coated with a thick blanket of snow. The same snow that had started yesterday and had been predicted a week ago. To check on the nation’s preparedness, I went to the front window to see the main road outside our flat equally deep and crisp and even un-gritted. Checking the news, I found that - due to the unexpected nature of the white stuff descending without warning from an unknown source - the known civilised world, south of the Thames at least, had ground to a halt. I sent a text message to a friend who lives near the station I would need: she said that all was pretty impassable and that no buses were running, so at half past eight I left a message postponing my 10 o’clock visit.
The person I was due to assist seemed more worried that his accounts could not be done, so I assured him that the older machine was still in exactly the same condition, containing exactly the same software and data, as it was on Friday and that the newer machine could safely be ignored until I could tunnel a route to him in the next few days through the snow drifts.
“Wait a moment, ” I thought, “I, who am disabled and mentally ill, seem far more prepared and less worried by this unforeseeable (read “entirely predictable”) calamity than the people in charge of civic and corporate governance.” I suppose that is in part because, in order to cope and to manage my day-to-day life, I have to be prepared for what are - to me, at least - far worse crises occurring without warning: as such can often be spotted a mile off once one learns how to recognise the triggers and portents.
Visits to the local shops were similarly galling: there had been panic buying of bread, milk and eggs*. As I have spent most of the time since the early 1970s living through my own vision of the Cold War, brought about as a consequence of repeated abuses confirming my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the supplies of tinned, powdered and dried goods that have been set aside for such emergencies as daily living should stand us in good stead for some time after the snows have passed.
Who then will be ready for the next crisis? My coping strategies may seem a little odd to many, but they do work in times of “real” emergency as well as as those of mine own perception.
I must admit to an imperfection in all this: I was rather snappy towards my wife late this evening when she suggested that something we have planned for tomorrow might be beyond our collective super-human powers, or at least those borrowed from the Pharaohs. I’m sorry.
* “Perhaps they are offering up sacrifices of French Toast to either assuage a displeased Deity or to provide extra traction” were my particular thoughts on finding bare shelves in the shops.
