Everything bad about living alone comes to a head when you are sick. Suddenly the glorious abundance of me-time is not having anyone to fix you a nice simmering pot of porridge with ginger, the freedom to throw my things around and have my place as messy and homey as I like it is helplessly watching the washing pile up and the stains accumulate as I stumble about sleepily, and everything comes to a magnificent standstill in my Sudafed-induced coma. I don’t often feel this, but this morning it hit me anew, this thirsting to have someone else around.

But amid the throb throb throb in my head I’m thankful to have colleagues and a manager who order me to get out and go home when it’s good for me, and who tell me that I should just take Monday off if I’m still ill all weekend and let Monday be my weekend instead. A 12-hour sleep last night and good spell of fresh air this afternoon have put me almost right again; I’ve even regained enough of an appetite to want to bake up another batch of the best peanut butter cookies in the world and hoard them all for myself this time round (having expended a great deal of time and effort baking a birthday cake I don’t even like for colleagues last week; I was told it was delish, but it tasted of walnutty coffee to me, and all I could think of while eating it was dangit why ruin perfectly good coffee cake with walnuts? more importantly, why had this horror been perpetrated at my hands in my very own kitchen? oh the things i do to please the crowd)

Before I go off on another tangent and sound like I bake all the time (I really don’t. I just write about it because it’s the most interesting thing I do which isn’t work, sleep, and watching old anime) – work is really picking up, and I find myself now at the unwelcome yet not wholly dissatisfying point of having so much to accomplish I am unable to keep it all in my head and have to keep very detailed little notes and reminders in Outlook. There is a funny little joy to signing your name to an official letter, to having something you wrote approved, and the perverse writerly part of me thinks I will always enjoy this aspect of marketing most – writing the copy, writing things to be printed, creating the bit of text that will sell the show – it’s silly, I know, but I feel I will never get tired of it, not in the way that I can imagine getting tired of many other things.

But fortunately for all parties concerned, I am too tired to properly wax lyrical about my work right now – so medicine, and bed. (Maybe cookies first.)