ZIG ZAG

The working week started with a rather unpleasant surprise as I was sitting around, idly watching breakfast TV and sorting out my little bits and pieces that I have to remember to pack up and take with me these days.

Suddenly I got that blinding zig zag in the middle of my line of sight which meant that, unfortunately, for the first time in quite some considerable time, I was about to be visited by a full-blown migraine. The jagged, ever changing zig zag of dancing lights stays exactly in the same place, no matter where you try to point your eyes and even if you close them, and no matter which eye you try to use, and effectively blinds you even though your peripheral vision can still be working. It’s a localised kind of blindness with an ever changing colour scheme, and can basically make you completely nauseous as you stumble around trying to find the best way to deal with it.

The nearest description I’ve ever managed to find to visualise it for people is that it kind of looks like the Nexus ribbon in “Star Trek: Generations” but I don’t suppose that really means all that much if you’ve never seen that film, and there are fairly few who will admit to it anyway these days, so as similes go it’s probably not one of my finest, but then, well, what do you expect when the brain’s gone all a bit scrambled?

Happily, I was able to get down a couple of the special pink pills designed to deal with the problem, and, by closing my eyes for twenty minutes, was able to drive the zig zag away and see clearly enough to get my morning back on track, drive to work, decide to leave the fluorescent lights resolutely off, and attempt to whip up a restorative cup of coffee, although the strange effect a migraine always has on my taste buds is a little odd, and this time convinced me that the milk was off, even though it patently wasn’t.

Half way to work, of course, the other symptoms started to kick in and I started to get the headaches and the numbness in the fingertips and the face and, all-in-all it all started to get a bit groggy and hazy in much the same way as a hangover does but without any “fun” to pay for, and, because the residual effects remain with you, my short term memory went a little doolally when I was convinced  had left my bag at work as I headed homewards in the evening, even though I had simply put it on the back seat (rather embarrassingly, I turned the car around and headed back before I rediscovered it), and then I completely forgot a phone call that I’d received within twenty minutes of it happening. As it was the phone call telling me which train to meet, that wasn’t at all that great either.

Why this has suddenly started to happen again is unclear. It could be a guilt trip I’m laying upon myself for neglecting my friends at the weekend, or perhaps it’s a sudden burst of high pressure making my head hurt. Equally it could just be due to a lack of decent sleep, or a greater level of stress being triggered by my exciting new professional lifestyle.

Whatever it is, it’s really not like greeting an old friend, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t like it.

Strangely enough, I did recently see a science programme which tried to explain how we react to both natural and artificial light. Apparently artificial light is generally quite rubbish with regards to our general sense of well-being, and natural light can be hundreds of times stronger on even a dull and drab old day. It seems that a burst of natural daylight in the morning (less so in the evening) is necessary to keep our natural rhythms working properly, but too much of it in the evening can throw us completely out of whack.

Reading a computer screen at bedtime will apparently trick the brain and stimulate various braincells into activity at precisely the time of day when they should be shutting down for a nice old doze, and as for our fluorescent and tungsten lightbulbs that we use to light our dwellings, well apparently there’s far too much red light in them and far too  little of the blue which perhaps goes quite a long way towards explaining why we all have this sense of bitter ennui, especially as summer fades into autumn, and perhaps all of our heads are being messed with.

As Jim Bowen might never have said, “Keep into the blue and out of the red. That way you’ll sleep quite sound in your bed.”