Out cold

Today I woke up at 1 o'clock again. I'm hoping this isn't going to be a regular occurrence. This time I didn't stay up and rearrange the contents of our flat, because the flat is now thousands of miles away. Instead, I took another melatonin pill and slept for five hours, and when I woke up again, read the rest of The Bloody Red Baron.

On the way to the office, we stopped at a tiny pharmacy; well, really a kiosk in the concourse, crammed full of medicines and a man in a white coat, who didn't understand when we asked for 'antibistamines' but who did have a laminated sheet of paper that translated 'sneeze' (and other ailments) into Japanese. So then I had some pills, in a blister pack inside a vacuum packed bag inside a cardboard box, that turned off the constant dripping of my nose.

I still carried my enormous box of tissues with me everywhere, which greatly amused everyone in the office. Was it hay fever, they asked? Was it the airbourne fungi of Tokyo?

(Is there an airbourne Tokyo fungus? I'm hoping people were confused and meant pollen, because a giant flying mushroom would be something else. Although since this is Japan, home to Godzilla and a thousand and one crap giant animals like Mothra and The Beast Shaped Like A Head Of Broccoli, it wouldn't be all that surprising.)

I didn't sneeze, but I felt absolutely awful, and though I ploughed through quite a bit of work today, it couldn't distract from how sick I felt: tired, dry mouthed, sore of throat, sniffly, and so on. Were it not for the fact that I'm too busy, I might almost think I was ill.

In the late afternoon we went to a meeting with an external company, and that was when I knew the jig was up. As we talked and talked under fluorescent lighting, the room swum and my colleague's hair changed colour, as my eyes went more and more cross-eyed and began to close. The surface of the table shimmered and his sweater turned from blue and white to bright red and back. I began to hope that this wasn't the start of a psychotic episode, and then I conked out, waking up a second later to realise I'd nodded forward.

Lucky there were three of us in the room so nobody would notice: it's good to be in a crowd sometimes.

Oh. Oops.

That was the cue to leave, so I was put in a taxi and sent back to the hotel, where, irony of frustrating irony, I found I couldn't get to sleep, until my wife returned from her day of hiking across Tokyo, at which point I went out like a light, waking half an hour later to attempt to eat some Italian food for dinner.

Typing this while cross eyed has been rather difficult. I'm hoping tonight I sleep properly.