*Hums
in irritating fashion* It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,
everywhere you go.
Or
it is if that everywhere is my daughter’s school and you’ve just
been to the festive fair. If you did, you’d have seen hubby and me
in our nylon nightmare reindeer jumpers looking slightly panicked
while manning the bottle tombola.
We
like doing the bottle tombola, it’s busy and fun and excellent for
spotting (and trying hard not to judge) the people who make one too
many return visits.
It’s
also really interesting to see what gets donated under the guise of
‘bottle’ – this year we had everything from a large bottle of
Famous Grouse to a small one of Peppa Pig bubble bath.
People
had been very generous and we had an army of bottles, homemade
chutneys, jams and bath stuff lined up in logical regimented rows
ordered from lowest number to highest.
I’d spent the day before
with other parents sticking the winning numbers (ends in a 0 or 5 you
know) to the winning bottles and folding up endless, endless amounts
of losing tickets.
When
it came to the pressure of the day, I could cope with the maths (50p
a go, 3 for £1) and managed to match almost all the bottles to the
correct tickets, but like a washing machine and socks, some went
inexplicably astray.
Fortunately
we have planned for this and stashed some spares under the table so
no one went home disappointed (apart from possibly the person who had
a clearly unwanted bottle of Worcester Sauce resplendent with a few month's worth of dust. But that’s the exciting lottery of a tombola.)
So
we survived, and hopefully raised lots of cash for the school, but
good grief I then genuinely couldn’t think for the entire rest of
the day.
One
of the most frustrating things I find about MS is its stealth-like
ability to whip the cognitive rug from under your feet. Or speech. Or
thought processes.
If
I’ve overdone it (either physically, emotionally or
brainpower-wise) my ability to think or speak coherently utterly
deserts me. I feel like the lumbering metal figure of Tik-Tok,
Dorothy’s wind-up guardian in the really quite disturbing land of
Oz.
When
Tik-Tok’s clockwork springs run down, he becomes frozen or mute or,
for one memorable moment in The Road to Oz, continues to speak but
utters absolute gibberish.
And
this was a pretty accurate representation of me after the bottle
bonanza – but without any of the joy of having actually drunk any
of the alcoholic-based donations.
Tik-Tok
is unable to wind himself and can stay mute, immobile and useless for
hours, days, months or years on end. How familiar that sounds.
This
time, fortunately, an afternoon and evening of rest helped rejuvenate
my springs. But as the disease progresses my inner Tik-Tok continues
to wind me up.
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