Cold avoidance techniques

Every now and then the spirit takes hold of the body and walks it to the computer cafe, sure in it's own sense of its need for expression and thereby release. Such a time ... and I sit happed up with my parents' gift of my Woody Allen beige jacket, my aunt Bernadette's gift of a padded overcoat, with Fionnuala's mother's grey knitted scarf around my neck, (feeling love in it's most practical manifestation) and sitting in the only local internet cafe with heating, I feel I am not being remiss to my health to indulge myself with this sabbatical reflection and relief. I like writing like this, constructing sentences which such unnecessary length, hell, just to do it.

I am reading Mansfield Park at the minute and deriving great sympathetic sustaince from the fact that poor old (young) Fanny Price is so slight in her make-up and health that she has to take as much care as I do when going out. It seems quaint to hear her cousin Edmund fly off the handle after hearing that she has been out 'walking!' How could such a think be countenanced?! And yet it has a much more receptive and sympathetic audience in me now that it ever would have done before. How early people died then, and how damaging if not fatal must have been what would today appear innocuous. It seems that it could only have made every day a much more concerning and precarious adventure. Family members and friends must have been all the more solicitous for the care a loved one should take, must take! It could only have made, I think, for closer attachments and nearer relationships, with other things being equal. It is chastening to realise that Jane Austen only had another ten years of life than I've already had, and after all the beauty of her stories, she never found her romantic dream fulfilled in her own life. I wonder if she ever did have it, would she have run out of creative inspiration, too lost in the enjoyment of the real thing to wish to write for it? Anyway, I'm glad Valentine's day is over, as it resembles Jane Austen's type of romantic ideal as forced laughter does happiness.

I made a few trips into the village of Maynooth and found it quite tiring, but rewarding as well. I'm moving back next Thursday, so it would be to there you must repair if you wish to sojourn south, Fer. I'll be fulltime housekeeper, and can show you the house and grounds anytime apart from next weekend, as we're in Ballycastle for Robert's stag do-es. If you have an hour in the afternoon of Friday we could have a coffee in Belfast though? That's only if you have recovered sufficiently. The flu is going around down here too. Anyway, the little cooking I've been doing has tired me out this week, so I'm glad I didn't move back before now. And I'm very glad that I didn't start back to teach this week! That would have been a mistake. I suppose I've changed from being someone who was quite lax with his own health - only at times, because at other times I was supposed to be quite hypochondriacal - to being quite quite careful about the cold. I still find almost everywhere but my own super heated room cold, as it is a big drafty cold house I am presently living in, but also generally out of doors, and so I am now turning up 'my collar to the cold and damp' at times, just to be safe. I find food and rest much more important now that I ever have, and even the good of a little air and a little walking is more present to me now and occupies my thinking in a way it never really has! I was always too warm at home, always wanting the windows opened to let air in, now I ration the times of window opening very strictly! But I'm sure this is all very dull to every one outside of my own particular skin, but of course of deep interest to my few good friends - the sainted, the patient.