Well, I’m back in full flight again after my recent dose of flu-like virus which knocked my head for six for 5 whole days. I was still a bit shaky when I started work on Monday morning but I’ve been very careful not to overdo it. I’m almost back to my full health, but I’m being careful to take my time about things and not get all hot and bothered when things pile up as they have a habit of doing. While work is important, it is not the most important thing by a long shot. But it is easy to forget this in our pressurised society. I had temporarily forgotten this and that is why I was hit by this virus - it was my body’s way of getting me to slow down and stop for a breather.

I’m currently feeling like sh1t with this nasty little virus that has invaded my sinuses and knocked out my finely-tuned thinking processes so essential to programming. So I’ve taken a couple of days off from work - no point in fighting for a lost cause, or indeed in spreading the virus further.

Right now I’m seated in our healing room typing this on the Powerbook G4 while I listen to Coil’s Scatology as it is transferred from cassette tape to mp3 format via the Tape2PC usb tape deck and the XP laptop. I must say the lyrics admirably (I used the word advisedly!) reflect my mood and how I am feeling. “See the black sun rise in the solar lodge” (from Solar Lodge) repeated over and over to cacaphonous drums and guitars does the trick. And the track titles themselves lend to the ambience:

1. Ubu Noir
2. Panic
3. At the heart of it all
4. Tenderness of Wolves
5. The spoiler
6. The clap
7. Solar Lodge
8. The sewage worker’s birthday party
9. Godhead - Deathead
10. Cathedral in Flames

Some of the lyrics in Ubu Noir sound suspiciously like the Klingon “dach mach teach” as uttered by the Klingon captain in the banquet scene on board the Starship Enterprise in The Undiscovered Country.

It was the first anniversary of Walks and Thoughts two days ago, but I’ve been so overworked and tired that I missed it! Better late than never I suppose…

Winter has finally arrived with grey skies, torrential rain and colder weather than we’ve had in quite a while.

This morning’s horrible weather didn’t help in getting into a good groove for the week. It’s currently 10°C in Kilmaley under a sky of solid shades of grey threatening to unleash another deluge.

My subconscious has been working overtime recently, so much so that it woke me up very early this morning - it was still dark - and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Instead the lines from the second pantoum I’m working on started coming to me. I’d made some progress on it recently with a rejig of the beginning but I was not happy with the end of the second line. After a few attempts at finishing it I had it! So I got up and rushed to the kitchen taking out the notebook where I keep it to write down the solution lest it escape again back into the sleep fogged recesses of my brain like a fish in an underground pool. Furthermore the last line of the first stanza which had also been giving trouble, and which I thought I had cracked yesterday afternoon over a coffee in Ennis, also fell into place with the realisation that I had in fact cracked it.
It was 05:55 when I finished so I went back to bed to grab as much of the remaining hour’s sleep as I could.

I’m so busy these days, what with work and all, that I haven’t had a chance to post here since Halloween. I’m having to keep this brief as well, due to pressure of time. Suffice it to say that I’m making progress with a couple of poems I’ve been working on - the new pantoum is coming on nicely, and I’ve added greatly to another poem which I thought finished last year but which I’m now extending. I’ve renamed it “The Best of all Possible Worlds” after Voltaire’s Candide who features in it.