“The condition waxes and wanes,” says Mast Cell Action’s useful and informative website. And goodness, how true that is. Since I last posted here, I’ve had a good phase, a bad phase, a good phase, a terrible phase and a period of wild oscillation. I’m now in an in-between phase, which is so weirdly particular it deserves its own post:
The key question in my life at present: “Is it reliably dull?”
My top two websites: BBC weather and the Met Office.
The phrase that irritates me most: sunny intervals.
My most unexpected object of aesthetic appreciation: the wonderful variety of overcast skies – from flat white to puffed and wrinkled grey to ordered stripes stretching into the distance like waves on an upturned sea.
My best recent meeting with old lost friends: the red kites circling over our suburb, giving their long melodious whistling cries. They are nine-to-five birds, and for a while I have been crepuscular again, a creature of dawns and dusks. Our paths have not crossed.
The strangest part of all of this: the need for me to play against type. I am obliged to become wildly spontaneous, to act without delay or deliberation on the promise of a cloudy morning or afternoon. If the weather looks promising, I throw on my coat and hat, bundle my husband into the car, and head out. Sometimes our destination is unglamorous: Boots the Chemists or the big Post Office in the nearby town. But one day, we drive along winding back roads to the Vyne, where, in the walled garden, the daffodils are in bloom.
