Everything is mildly irritating. Do you ever get this? Disgruntlement of the soul? A feeling of psychic itchiness, like being unable to find a comfortable sleeping position? (Sometimes I suspect that most of my exercise can be accounted for by the number of times I turn over in bed.) You pick up a book you were enjoying yesterday and it makes you go, “Ugh.” You look at the weather and even if it’s not particularly bad you still go, “Ugh.” You listen to the news and even the happier stories, the kind they put on just so you don’t kill yourself, make you go, “Ugh.” I opened a bottle of wine the other day and even though it’s a brand I know well and am usually very happy with I went, “Ugh.” Still drank it though. Not that I enjoyed the sensation of getting slightly drunk: it was a bit… ugh.
Part of it is down to physical decrepitude. That gum infection I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is still hanging around, and it’s a lot more than mildly irritating. Ground Zero appeared to be a zit on the side of my tongue but how that manages to make even your lips feel sore I don’t know. A friend suggested it was candida; possible. I was wondering if it was thrush, which apparently is a side-effect of the steroid inhaler I have used for my asthma for decades, but which I’ve never suffered from. Then something about where the teeth joined the gums make me think it might be scurvy so I bought a bottle of fancy orange juice with bits and that seemed to help. I’m not out of the woods yet. That orange juice stung, and so do the Haribo Sour Skeletons – Halloween-themed sweeties – which are, as far as I can see, the only compensation for this dreadful time of year.
The big surprise was the Horlicks. I saw a jar at the supermarket, and even though it cost the thick end of a fiver I thought I could do with a bit of comfort food, a throwback to childhood. I can’t be bothered to make the hot milky drink that the makers officially encourage you to prepare, I just dig it out of the jar with a spoon and pour the powder into my mouth. What I was not expecting it to be was so painful. It was as if every grain had inserted itself into the interstices of my cracked and inflamed buccal membranes and then turned to cayenne. You really don’t expect “Horlicks causes agony” to be on your 2024 bingo card, but here we are.
To make matters deliberately worse for myself I thought I’d grow a beard again. The last time I did this was to impress a woman. But even when I sent her the photos, she remained unimpressed and, more to the point, in London. This time it started off from sheer laziness. I’d also been suffering from some kind of low-level lurgy that made standing up and shaving too much of a faff and before I knew it the beard had become quorate: too much of it to shave off easily any more. The real problem I have with my beard, as I might have mentioned the last time, is how itchy it is. After a while I had enough. Between the gums and the mouth, the boils on each side of the back that made lying on one’s side painful, and the one in the middle that doesn’t make lying on one’s back much better, and the general dissatisfaction with every single aspect of life, it all got a bit much. I realised that, while it might take an hour, this was at least something I could do something about, so I ran a hot bath and shaved off the beard.
That was yesterday (at time of writing) and much as one bangs one’s head against a wall because it is so nice to stop doing it, so I recommend cultivating a highly aggravating beard and then getting rid of it. Of course the other problems remain and others seem to be creeping up – I had my Covid jab earlier today and I am beginning to feel a bit wobbly as a result. I thought of asking my editor if I could file tomorrow but then realised that tomorrow could be even worse so I hope he appreciates my dedication. (The jab itself hurt like hell and so did the taxi fare there and back. For some reason the NHS decided to send me off somewhere an hour away by bus.)
I wonder how much of all this is psychosomatic, the result of a deep underlying anxiety about the US election. It is disturbing to think that by the time you read this, you may well know who the next president will be. I am writing exactly a week before the results start coming through and I don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. I am not optimistic. I recall the twin disasters of 2016 too vividly for any other reaction.
I comfort myself by spooning Horlicks into my raging mouth. “Ow,” I go as I tip it in; but also, “Mmm,” for the taste is not only delicious in itself but takes me back to more innocent times, when US elections were… Well, OK, they offered stark choices then, but not like they do now, you know, between the survival and the collapse of the Western world. Anyway, I have now eaten half a jar at a sitting, and I feel queasy on top of everything else.
Ugh, ugh, ugh.
[See also: Waitrose is a big part of my life]
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America