poetry pigeon post; or, post-pigeon poetry; or maybe post-poetry pigeons

Amazingly, I slept in yesterday morning! At least, I thought it was amazing at the time. I was woken by a very runny-eyed and rheumy Mlle B croaking from the doorway, "Mummy, it's 10.30... Do we have any of that Nurofen you don't have to swallow?"

Completely disoriented in the manner of, say, Buster Keaton woken from a deep slumber, I threw on some clothes and went up to the ABC pharmacy. (I love the ABC pharmacy at the top of Stamford Hill, with its late hours and its shelves upon shelves of odd bath products and colourful hair things. It feels like a sleepy suburban drugstore in New Jersey in 1980; I realise that this has nothing to do with Buster Keaton.)

So there I was, my hair all over the place, my T shirt (yes, slept-in) a bit too low, my jacket just plain wrong, and I noticed a couple of young Hassidic women staring at me... oh the shame. I'm sure I had raccoon eyes too. Altogether a state of deshabillé which it is hard to imagine the great stonefaced one having to contend with. Anyway, like Florence Nightingale (but with a considerably lower death rate, and without either the owl or the private income) I got the Nurofen and some Strepsils (and some tiny mini-buns from the Sharon Bakery) and arrived home to find the girls tucked up in the living room under two enormous duvets, Kitty announcing cheerfully: "Kate, I'm not feeling well either!" and beaming with joy when I felt her forehead (it was fine). Great fun squirting the Vicks into Mlle B's throat. The girls were delighted with their baby bagels and mini-croissants.

Changed clothes. Made breakfast for them & tea for me, still strangely numb in the manner of someone who is, in fact, still partly sleeping. Went for a long coffee with a friend in the Blue Legume (aka "the end of the world" - as in, it'll be the end of the world if certain people are ever seen in there among the off-road three-wheeled buggies et cetera; Ms B has nothing to lose, of course, having been cheerfully subverting the stereotype from well within for years). In fact, it was a long chat, and very nice, and two black coffees had little impact. There was much rational, interesting, gossipy and even erudite talk of all sorts of matters poetic. I even had an idea about Wallace Stevens! The memory of this is a great comfort, today, when the previously-baroque brain is more derelict than an old poetry warehouse full of pigeon droppings.

Made spinach soup. Made some phone calls. Sorted out some stuff. Hard to say where a day goes, but yesterday was yet another non-writing one, and when I suddenly had to lie down I found my lying-down space full of girls. Girls who were a little hyper from having done nothing all day.

Today I slept in again and was less surprised. I was slightly more surprised when I had an overwhelming need to lie down at around noon, and again when just lying down wasn't enough: I just had to sleep. But when, after waking up once, I felt I had to go back to sleep again at around 2pm, there was no point in doing anything other than taking it in my (as it were) stride. This is just what it's like, now.

Seriously: two operations, three and a half weeks ago. Will it ever end??

Meanwhile, emails and phone calls and bills and essays and poems and household tasks and the grocery shopping are all going unfinished, unrepliedto, unopened, undone.