Thursday 25 October 2018

Brain Mush...

...and how my mind reconstructed false news into a reality

Life after Masters has an unpleasant echo to it. Every morning, when I wake up, the realisation seeps into my consciousness that, although there are things to be done, it doesn't really matter if I do them or not. If I'm not careful my brain will start turning to mush.

I have had a taster of brain mush this week and I don't like it. My Facebook friends will know that I'm recovering from a nasty attack of vertigo. The GP gave me pills which are actually very good at alleviating the symptoms but have had a drastic affect on my brain. For a start, my words won't come out of my mouth correctly. Yesterday I called an accountant an academy and went to feed the kettles instead of the cats. The day before I said 'hello' twice to an old neighbour who was sitting at the next table to me in the local cafe. That lunchtime, I burnt the toast and couldn't work out what that awful screeching noise was. It was, of course, the smoke detector - yes, I know, at least I've tested that it's still working. Today I convinced myself that we had already turned back the clocks for the end of British Summer Time.

I need to talk about this most recent error because there was a double whammy to this mistake. I tried googling the date on my phone but the phone said the clocks had already gone back in September. I must have mistyped something but from that moment on I started to reconstruct reality. I talked myself into remembering the event, convincing myself that I had not made such a fuss about it this time and so that was why I had forgotten. I was on the verge of believing myself when I re-googled and sure enough, the clocks have not gone back yet, but they will do this Saturday night/Sunday morning. I was stunned at how quickly my mind had adopted false information and created a reality around it.

So this weekend I will try not to make my usual fuss about gaining an hour or losing an hour or whichever it might be. Meanwhile, I'm off to busy myself once more, to make sure I keep my brain well exercised and keep the mush at bay.