Thursday 3 January 2013

Feverishly boring


I spent New Year's Eve having the shaking chills; uncontrolled rigours, probably caused by Norovirus. Three duvets and an electric blanket brought some respite, but it’s no fun.
As a writer, I kept trying to tell myself that there must be some sort of inspiration lurking in the experience; but if your every muscle is shaking, and your teeth chatter when you don't keep your jaw clenched, it’s hard to concentrate on anything like that.
One thing I did notice was that time seemed to slow down. Apparently, I kept asking Lois the time. On each occasion, I thought that a couple of hours must have passed, but it only turned out to be 20 minutes. Unfortunately, what with one thing or another, I did not record the exact times. For a while, I had a theory that my brain must have speeded up because of the fever. I imagined it must work like a slow motion camera, where the frame speed is increased, so when you play it back at normal speed it creates slow motion. In order to make sense of that, my brain would have to be both recording events at a faster frame speed, and playing them back at normal speed, at the same time. It was a while before this struck me as rather unlikely.
 The other thing that didn't make much sense was the speed factor. I appeared to think that time was moving at about six times normal speed, so my brain must have been going at six times it's normal rate.
Chemical reactions roughly double their speed every ten degrees, so to go at six times normal my temperature would have to be something over 60C. At anything over 50C, the thermometer would have broken. As it is still intact, I am forced to abandon my feverish theories and conclude that it was just amazingly boring.
Somehow, feverish and boring don’t work together. If you put feverishly boring into Google, you get no hits, unless of course, it finds this blog.
The good news is, the rest of the year is almost bound to be better. 

1 comment:

  1. So apart from that, how was your New Year's Eve?

    :o)

    ReplyDelete