Living for Disco

I eventually want children, and my body is beginning to tell me that I’d better get a move on, as I’m getting on a bit, and I do want to be able to play with my kids without the aid of a zimmer frame*.

However, Gordon has said (with increasing firmness, the more time we spend with friends who have more than one child of toddler age) that we should probably check that we’d make good parents first, by getting a kitten and practising on it.

So, we have a kitten. We haven’t named it yet as no names really seem to stick, apart from Kitten. It’s been four days, and I’m wondering whether we would make good parents. For example, is it wise to let your six week old (as yet unnamed) child hurtle up and down the stairs, stick its head through the bannisters, fall backwards off the sofa onto the wooden floor, and play delightedly with a small pile of gravel in which it has just buried its own excrement? I even lost her the other day, only to find she’d got stuck in the cupboard under the sink while investigating our bleach collection.

I admit I’m trying to give her the care and sustenance she needs. She likes to try and suck on my eyeball, which I’m trying to dissuade her from doing, as it is a) uncomfortable and b) unhygenic. I mean, she’s usually just licked her bum clean. Conjunctivitis anyone?
I also let her sleep in our bed, which I understand can be comforting for young children. However, waking up at 5.30 am with a cat on your head isn’t the best way to ease yourself into your day. Particularly when she generally attacks anything that moves, which includes your bleary, blinking eyelid.

She is very, very cute, which is why people get kittens in the first place, I imagine. She’s also completely insane. She stalks us eveywhere we go. Our toes have puncture wounds that would be the envy of a bevy of lorikeets. Nothing is safe.

We bumped into the neighbours from whom we got her yesterday, and he asked us how it was going.

“Bonkers isn’t she?” he said, with a certain degree of schadenfreude. I thought all kittens were bonkers, but he assures us that of the litter of six, this one was particularly nuts. I expect to come home to find her swinging from the light fittings one day very soon, and like most mothers, I like to think that this is merely a reflection of her extraordinary brilliance.

On a weirdly serious note though, it struck me that cats live for 14 or 15 years. I hadn’t really thought about this before. She’s probably going to be our cat for a very long time. For the first time, I’ve actually had to consider the very real nature of our commitment to each other, which has been somewhat overshadowed by the excitement of moving in with Gordon and planning our wedding. It’s bizarre that it’s taken something as tiny as a kitten to bring this home.

Naturally it hasn’t changed anything – just clarified a few things to my satisfaction. However, it’s also made me consider our relationship through a further layer of understanding. It does make me wonder whether anyone really knows what they are getting into when they say ‘I do’, or when they get a kitten together.

Above all, spending time together with the kitten has made me realise that we’re really going to have to do the dusting a bit more often. If anyone sees the amount of fluff on Kitten’s whiskers, we’ll soon be getting a visit from the RSPCA, and I’m not ready to start the recrimination stage of our partnership just yet.

*Although they can do wonders with science these days, so I might just store my eggs and wait til I’m 60.

We are in Singapore. I love Singapore – it’s hot, it’s steamy, it’s full of delicious food (of which we have eaten much) and there are many cool things to do. On our last day, we decided to schedule in a visit to Jurong Bird Park, as it is, as I recall, excellent.

I like birds anyway – I became known for my ability to identify birds while in Namibia. ‘What’s that?’, people would cry as we passed some bizarre avian specimen. ‘It’s an ostrich!’ I would reply confidently, astonishing everyone with my ornithological knowledge.

The main thing I wanted to do was visit the Lory Loft, as I had heard that you could feed the birds and get close to them. ‘How lovely!’ I thought, picturing myself covered with delightful little feathered creatures that would eat demurely from my hand, whilst batting their eyelashes for the camera.

I am now older and wiser. Lorikeets are noisy as fuck, have very sharp claws, defend their food viciously and have thick grey tongues that are, quite frankly, unsettlingly reptilian. But enough of the wordy descriptions. Here, let me show you…

I left the Lory Loft with somewhat depleted hearing, and a number of deep puncture wounds in my arm.

Also I think they had fleas.

Hello! I’m back from my holiday, during which I did not have much opportunity to blog the many marvellous things that happened to me, which included being pecked by lorikeets, seeing possums and wallabies, drinking dirty martinis under the ocean-side palms and watching my little sister get married on a beach. There will be holiday updates soon, and oh my, will they be a hoot. I hope.

In the meantime, the first thing that we had to do when we got back was to visit the registrar to state our intent to marry each other. I had no idea you had to do this kind of thing – get permission from the council to get married? What the fuck have the council got to do with it? Aren’t they responsible for refuse collection and digging up the roads in an inconvenient fashion?

Of course, I realise that there has to be a record of births, deaths and marriages, and that this has to be done by the parish. However, I’d not given much thought to the fact that you have to go and hand over a cheque for £60 and answer questions about your intended in order to prove that you haven’t imported them from a developing nation for tax breaks.

I actually started to get a bit worried when Gordon, having been asked the relatively straightforward question of his age at the current time, had some trouble answering. Would the registrar think that he had failed to memorise his cover properly? I hoped he didn’t sound too Lithuanian.

‘You’re 41′, I hissed, hoping to support him (in a future-wifely fashion) through this mental meltdown.

‘Don’t help him! You’re not allowed to help him!’ said the registrar.

The same thing happened when it came to the answering of questions about his bride, amongst which were details of my age, occupation and length of time lived in Bournemouth. There is only so much information you can convey with your eyebrows, and ’34′, ‘Trust Fundraising Manager’ and ’7 months’ tends to be a little specific. We did get there in the end, although I think my gurning may have alarmed the registrar.

So, we have no officially declared our intention to get hitched, and with any luck, no lunatics (you know who you are) will write in to the council objecting on entirely spurious grounds in the next 15 days.

It feels like I’m practically married already.

During my first wrestling match with depression about ten years ago, my doctor put me on Prozac. Prozac didn’t do much for me except make my hands sweat, and turn me into an emotional zombie. I stopped taking it. Nothing happened. It was as straightforward as that.

During my second wrestling match with depression last year, my doctor put me on Effexor. I wrote about the debilitating initial effects on this blog some time ago, as well as the cavalier attitude of my doctor, who said “I knew I shouldn’t have given you that information leaflet. Just take the bloody pills”.

Effexor has really been a miracle drug for me. It lifted me out of a hole, and made me feel normal. I was able to make rational decisions, and approach daily tasks like food shopping, and washing up, without weeping with stress and confusion. I stopped having fruitless, angry conversations with people in my head. Life improved.

Unfortunately, now that I’m ready to stop taking it, I’m discovering that I am physically dependent on it. I didn’t know when I started that Effexor withdrawal can be a very long, painful and traumatic process, but boy, am I learning now.

It goes like this (and this isn’t from a sudden stop – it’s from a slow tapering of the dose as recommended by the doctor):

Stage 1: Brain Shivers.

I have discovered that someone has given a name to this unsettling sensation. To be honest, though, I don’t think ‘brain shiver’ really describes it. It is more as if you’re going along happily as normal, and you suddenly decide to turn your head to the left. Your brain is not ready for this, goes “Whoah there, cowboy!” and refuses to move. Your eyes feel a bit squiggly, and you are momentarily disoriented. The sensation, which is amusingly ticklish at first, worsens the longer you go without the drug. It usually results in

Stage 2: Nausea

Intense, although never actually followed through by the stomach, so not even throwing up will relieve it. Tends to happen suddenly, in shops or meetings. Inconvenient. Followed quite quickly by

Stage 3: The Shits.

There’s no delicate way of putting it. Suddenly, the contents of your intestinal tract have turned to liquid, and begun to boil. Understandably, your intestinal tract no longer wishes to accommodate this bubbling, toxic mass. On no account should you mistake this feeling for trapped wind, unless you have a change of underwear handy.

And as if these physical manifestations of withdrawal weren’t distressing enough, you also have hideous emotional symptoms.

Imagine, for example, that your perspective shifts suddenly, and you come face to face with your worthlessness. It becomes a logical deduction that anyone who says they love you must be lying, because frankly, why would they when you’re like this? Ergo, they are certain to abandon you unless you start behaving like a rational human being. Unfortunately you no longer have any idea how to behave in a normal fashion. It feels like being trapped in an invisible box.

Fortunately, I have a very understanding fiancé, who listens to me ramble on in tearful lunatic fashion, and when I ask him anxiously what he is thinking, he says things like “I was thinking that I’d like to go base jumping off El Capitan”*, which is just so irrelevant to my personal internal crisis that it is like being offered a firm piece of ground to stand on.

This phenomenon can last between anywhere from ten minutes to (in my case) four hours.

Also, I like to rant, but I’m now occasionally afflicted by brief, but irrational bouts of absolute fury. I can now empathise with screaming, purple faced toddlers in Sainsburys. We are as one. It’s almost zen.

Other, more minor side effects include uncontrollable teeth grinding, sudden bouts of intense apathy, memory loss, time-slips, loss of concentration… the list goes on. At this rate, I’m going to be toothless and temporally confused by the time I’m 35.

This has now become a personal challenge. I simply can’t stomach the idea that this one small pill is causing me so much trouble, even though once it made life so much easier. I’m not belittling the wonderful transformation to my life that Effexor effected, but why does it insist on hanging on in there where it’s not wanted? It’s like the one remaining drunk guest at the end of a really great party, and it’s really objecting to being evicted.

So here I am, stepping into the ring for a battle of wills against my own brain. It doesn’t get better than this.

*I am assuming that this is not necessarily translatable as “I wish to die, now, please”.

Despite a certain over-fondness for commas, I’m not a fan of bad punctuation. Grocer’s who add apostrophe’s to their potato’s deserve to be hauled into the street and pelted with copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves (hardback, naturally). In my opinion. However, I am a coward and will generally not pick people up on their punctuation, because I don’t want people to make faces at me behind my smug, gramatically correct back.

So when walking along a London street last weekend, and spotting a sign on a door that said “No! Junk mail please!”, I simply had to stop.

“What earthly sense does that sign make?” I said to Gordon in disgust, gesticulating wildly at the offending door. “I’m surprised they’re not inundated with pizza leaflets and free ads papers. They’re just asking for junk mail. Why can’t people get it right?”

At that very minute a man with a bag of shopping walks through the gate of the house. I had seen him, but what are the chances that the only other man on a long London street should live in the house at which I am staring as if it is a piece of dog poo on my shoe?

He turned out to be Chinese. And to speak English as most definitely his second language. I discovered this when he explained to me that “We put this sign, no junk, we don’t like – too much paper.”

I think I’ll go back to being a pedant in private.