Sandbagging

I woke up this morning with a harsh, gritty feeling behind my eyes, as if some interloper had snuck into our bedroom last night, and replaced my brain with two pounds of sharp sand. This was not an altogether pleasant sensation. I hauled myself out of bed, and waved my arms and legs in front of the Kinect for half an hour, without really achieving full consciousness, then pottered off to the office.

Today, then, was one of those days where I surprised myself by being capable of anything. When you're exhausted it may not be the best time to make great leaps into the unknown, but it's more suitable for slogging through the mundanities, when your mind is too tired to complain that it's doing something dull. If you don't have the time to acquire this state through jet lag and sleep deprivation, I suggest you just get really, world-endingly drunk and then go to the office the next day.

See, even a hangover can be productive.

I managed ten hours of undifferentiated stuff, then crawled off home.

My wife wanted to go to dinner at Lucha Loca, or the Maniac Mexican, or Quite Disturbed Quetzelcoatl, or whatever the taco joint over the road is called, but it was full so we ended up at the much more sedate Broth, just up the street, where we both ate too much and then struggled home.

The weight of the sand has been hurting my neck and I was glad to be able to get a lie-down, except I had been lazy and not run, so it was back out onto the streets for me. Because it's Chinese New Year in another three weeks, there are people everywhere, aimlessly milling around or buying pieces of bakkwa, the ludicrously named dried pork that seems to be mandatory at this time of year.

I struggled to get past the crowds and then only managed a mile before succumbing to the weariness. Back to the flat, to start on London Falling, which feels like the book Ben Aaronovitch would have written if you'd made him very angry and filled half his head with wet sand.

Perhaps that's because it's set in South London, which automatically makes things a thousand times more unpleasant. Even if you set the whole thing in the Beckenham Recreation Grounds, you'd have a dystopia miserycore horror on your hands. It's how we roll in the Sarf. The Saaaaarrrrffff, innit?

To bed. The sand is getting replaced soon.