Yin and Yang would have been good names for these two. They’re utter opposites in temperament yet quite complementary.

Status:

May have overdone it at the allotment yesterday, which is annoying as I was specifically trying not to – Fi did most of the lifting with me just along for the ride. But there I was, awake at 4am with my nervous system on overdrive and my brain conjouring up the weirdest of narratives. A handy data point for Friday’s consult and a reminder that things are not OK.

Was pretty well recovered by the afternoon, which was handy as Fi had arranged for us to go to the Buddhist centre’s introduction to meditation course this evening. She’d checked that I’d be able to duck out if I needed to and along we went. I managed about 10 minutes of the body scan meditation before having to stop and put my earplugs in because it turns out focussing on all the different parts of your body when they all hurt is not much fun. But I get the point of the exercise and it did feel worth trying.

There was also the issue of it being rather oversubscribed (the January resolutions effect, I suppose) and I haven’t been in a room with that many people for over a year. Turns out even a Buddhist centre can be overwhelming. Fi stayed for the rest of the session while I hid out in the quiet room with my earplugs in.

Apparently they’re going to send out some recordings of the meditation instructions, which might be better for me to try in my own controlled space. And again, this was a useful data point to bring up on Friday.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Plague of Justinian - one of those subjects which gets oddly less interesting the more they talk about it. Did the plague have any lasting effects? Not really, given all the other shit that was going on circa 550 CE.

Music:

• Truckin’ on: Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead’s 10 best recordings - is it time for me to finally get into the Dead? I feel like I’ve been putting this off for 40 years.

Reading:

• Garbage Day: We’re all just content for ICE. ‌Four days on the ground in Minneapolis
• Peter Thiel’s New Model Army - make it past Carole Cadwalladr’s depressing reporting about the UK’s capitulation to Trump for a compendium of people fighting back against ICE’s fascism.
• Molly Soda’s Desktop Diary #11 - “Emo Ariel has started making a lot of sense to me lately”

Watching:

• Come and harvest my parsnips with me - growing parsnips in a drain pipe!