THUD! THUD! THUD!

I had a headache last night.

There’s nothing unusual in that, of course. Millions of people get them every day, and I myself used to suffer from the most crippling manifestations of them on an almost daily basis. A few years ago, the need to slam on the dark glasses, grab a few painkillers or even go for a lie down in a darkened room was almost a daily occurrence and huge chunks of my weekend would be spent is such crippling agony from the inevitable blinding migraines that it started to become a real cause for concern.

If you’ve never experienced a full on migraine then you really don’t know how lucky you are. The agonizing throbbing combined with blinding lights in the eye, the nausea and the numbness can truly make you believe for a while that you truly would feel so much better if they’d just let you die. When I was about 18, I had one start at a friend’s wedding once where I was still naïve enough to think it would blow over, failed to go and get any drugs to knock it out, and ended up in bed for three days unable to move. Thankfully, after that experience I learned mow to “manage” such things and actually they went away for so many years I thought that they were well and truly behind me. So much so, in fact, that when I did start getting them again, I’d almost forgotten what they were and so they managed to sneak back into my life and snatch away too many of my weekends before I was able to control them properly again.

However, since the coming of my daily ritual involving the little cocktail of various pills which I’m told are designed to keep my blood pressure at least in the vicinity of something approaching a normal and healthy measure, my headaches have generally become a thing of the past. I assume it is the pills that are making the difference, of course, because there is the slightest of chances that there is some vast conspiracy afoot to keep the masses under control by doping us all up and disguising it as a public health concern, but thinking like that only takes you in the direction of madness and paranoia.

Unless of course they are out to get me…

Of course, my more recent pain-reduced lifestyle might also be due to some lifestyle changes. Cutting out the regular commuter run from my daily routine and keeping myself away from the worst of the traffic snarl-ups might have helped as indeed not having to deal with quite so many annoying and upsetting people on a daily basis might also have made a bit of a difference. It’s so hard to tell, but I’ve definitely had less of the things since I got the hell out of there.

So why did I get a headache last night then?

Could it have been the weather, perhaps? Certainly the black clouds started to gather in the stifling heat of a summer’s afternoon and began bucketing down the sort of vast quantities of rain that you would consider unrealistic if someone created them for a disaster movie just as soon as I got into my car. My sinuses were always traditionally a kind of inbuilt barometer for what the weather was about to do. As soon as the pressure dropped, the balloon in my head would expand and try to pop out my eyeballs whenever the weather was about to take a turn for the worse.

Was it just the worry that our society was heading to hell in a handcart that had started me fretting again? I’ve always been a somewhat sensitive soul when it comes to matters sociological as they unfold in the news media, getting terribly worked up about matters that I consider to be examples of gross injustice or simply too unbelievable to process easily. Perhaps witnessing all those scenes of the society I live in seemingly starting its inexorable decent into chaos and anarchy have troubled me on a level that is too deep for me to yet have come to terms with. After all someone with a life so determinedly fixed on its path that it might as well be on rails (Uncle Mycroft would have been so proud...) is always going to struggle with change and disorder when it starts to happen.

Was it my eyesight failing? I do spend far too many hours sitting too closely to one screen doing my work and then voluntarily spending further hours writing my nonsense, before taking myself off and looking at yet another screen for large chunks of my evening’s entertainment. Recently I noticed that the only way I can read my books comfortably is to actually remove my glasses when I do so, but the dancing letters and images are becoming something I experience far more frequently than I used to do, which can’t be a good thing.

Was it the lack of sleep catching up with me? You really can’t keep on burning the candle at both ends, even if in my case it’s not so much burning as a bit of a glowing ember, but nevertheless I am still waking at ridiculously early hours and I do seem to be parking my buzzing head upon my pillow far later than I used to do. Margaret Thatcher, it is said, used to run the country (into the ground…) on only four hours sleep a night, but I really wouldn’t want that parallel to get out of hand. There is, however, only a limited amount of time you can endure staggering about like a zombie and feeling utterly weary before the body decides that it has had enough. Maybe that incessant throbbing behind the eyeballs is nature’s way of telling me to shut the hell up and get some sleep.

Good idea!

Although the endless thudding might still keep me awake…