CONTORTED PASTA

Well, I think it's finally happening – after nearly a year of lockdowns and isolation, it might finally be getting to me.

I was supposed to embark on a bikeventure today, to scout out the route to Linton, but I looked at all I had to do before teaching starts on Monday, and went back to sleep instead. My sleep has been undergoing a slow attrition for a couple of weeks now, as I am consistently waking up with the birds and can't seem to get an early night to compensate. I tried to make a go of it this morning but I was shuffling about in a half-doze and could only think about going back to bed, so after breakfast I did, for three whole hours. I can't say I'm good as new but it's slightly better; however it feels like 10:30 and it's already coming up to 3.

In the earliest expeditions to overwinter in the polar regions, there was a phenomenon called 'polar ennui', where people would get listless and disinterested as the winter dragged on. In later expeditions, a rigorous programme of lectures and entertainments was put on through the winter to combat this, and for the most part that seems to have worked, though some people inevitably suffered from SAD and there may have been a dietary component as well. I think I am beginning to understand where that came from, now ... I have a good diet and access to a whole internet's worth of compelling radio and streaming shows, but self-imposed entertainments only go so far when there's no structure to back them up, and self-imposed structure is barely better than no structure at all.

A couple of years ago, I set off to teach, hard on the heels of a demanding animation gig, and was already exhausted at the start of a two-week energy bonanza from which I usually take a week to recover. That wasn't great. This year, I feel like I'm going into it already tired, and I have been doing comparatively nothing. Maybe the stress of packing and catching the plane would have given me a jump start, but no one's allowed off Plague Island or into Denmark unless on 'essential' travel, and not even Steve Bannon could spin an animation dialogue class as essential in any way whatsoever. So I'll be teaching it from the dark little desk in my bedroom where I do pretty much everything else, and not being hammy with a big whiteboard in front of an audience. We'll see if I manage to hold anyone's interest at all ...

The process that connects 'I need to do this' with making your body do it is called Executive Function, and mine has fallen off a cliff. If you remember the Buffy episode where a curse is put on the house so no one can leave, and this takes the form not of an impenetrable force field or doors glued shut but just ... an inability to move towards them, that's exactly what it's like. Standing there looking at a door and thinking 'I need to go through that' but not moving a muscle to do so.

Several times this week I've caught myself just staring at a task, thinking about doing it, but seemingly unable to break through the barrier between thought and action, as if just picturing the task clearly enough will telekinetically cause it to happen. It would take ten seconds to do! Mentally rehearsing it seventeen times takes much longer! It's not even like they're complicated or energetic tasks – one was literally tying sticks into a bundle and making a stack of the bundles. But I just stood there staring at the sticks.

It's been particularly bad this week, but as I've come to peace with myself over the last few years it is definitely something that's worsened generally. I didn't have as much of a problem with it in my 20s and early 30s, when I was a complete mess internally; now my interior is better sorted but the mess has come to the surface. I think, before, my inherent executive dysfunction was bound by hoops and hoops of steely anxiety. Now that I'm unpicking the anxiety, that control is falling away. Would I go back to the anxiety? No. But I need to figure out how to get back on track, now, in a more harmonious way.

Probably it's fatigue causing it this time ... I've been multitasking far more than I wanted to this month, which always takes way more energy than beavering away on one task for days on end. There has been family drama, and emotional energy has a disproportionate exchange rate with motivational energy. And my bastard uterus is being a bastard again. But it's been distinct and significant enough a change that I'm starting to wonder if it's possible to have a depressive episode without any discernible impact on mood – I'm happy as I ever was, I just want to spend a week in bed listening to history documentaries and not have to do anything. That's a feeling I remember well from Disney days, when I'm pretty sure I was low-grade chronically depressed the whole time, with occasional flare-ups bad enough I didn't notice how down I was between. I don't want to be back there, and I've been careful since then to keep up the sort of things that keep me in a good place: nature, intellectual stimulation, being helpful, and indulging my interests, which is literally a full-time job now. But nowadays these feel more like items on the to-do list than genuine pleasures for their own sake. It's a quandary.

It's possibly the mental effects of the pandemic finally reaching me. I remember last spring, not feeling down, but noticing what a tremendous lift came after making communicative contact with another human being – even just waving, and receiving a wave, from across the street. I have been interacting with people plenty online, and even exchanging words with occasional humans in real life, and don't feel the slightest bit lonely or adrift, but maybe something is happening under the radar?

Puzzling over it here isn't getting anything seen to, so I'm going for a walk. The birds are starting to sing their spring songs and it's a sort of milky sunny day, which is the best walking weather we'll get for the next little while. Here we go. Putting my shoes on. Gonna walk out that door. Any minute now.

Well, here it is January again, and we're back in Lockdown ... The birds are starting to sing their spring songs and the bulbs are sprouting (snowdrops and celandine blooming) and it's beginning to feel a lot like no one has learned anything in the last year.

Of course, things are complicated further by the New Variant, which is cooperating with Brits' boredom to drive caseloads steadily upwards. Even South Cambs, which has been on the low end of infections since I started keeping track in the Zoe app, is spiking. Out here in the countryside, we're spread out enough that one is unlikely to catch it just by walking around, and with only one shop offering a limited selection of goods, there aren't many indoor places to catch a bug in the village. The people who aren't in the groups getting their vaccines first either work at home anyway, or work in biotech and therefore have a great deal of common sense when it comes to contagion, so of all places in the country, we're well placed, here. All the same, sometimes it feels like literally everyone is out jogging or walking their dog sometimes, so venturing out for daily exercise can be a bit fraught.

I had anticipated this lockdown by months, and have a very well-stocked pantry and freezer which will see me through it without much, or indeed any, need to step foot in a shop for at least a month, though I could go much longer with some ingenuity. There are two things I wish I'd anticipated, though: I thought I had a spare sachet of turmeric, an essential ingredient for a curry-based diet like mine, but on finishing what was in the spice jar I discovered there was none. I could remedy this at the shop, so it's not a very big deal, but I'm disappointed in myself that I stocked up on ginger, fenugreek, and paprika but didn't even check on the turmeric situation.

The other thing I wish I had is a cabbage. A decent head of cabbage can last me a few months, and I overestimated how much of the last one I had left when I made my last veg shop – the grocer's had cabbages larger than my head, which I looked at and thought, 'no, that'll be too heavy to carry back with everything else, next time.' It's a small shop and one I am happy to keep in business, but not while everything out there is so contagious. There are many, many dishes I can make that don't involve cabbage, so I am not at all put out, yet somehow all I can think to cook are things that do.

Anyway, I am switching modes from stockpiling to consumption; I am, as yet, uncertain where I'll be after May,* and it will take until then to make a serious dent on what I already have, which includes a 16kg bag of bread flour and quite a few jars of apple butter. It'll be April before I anticipate actually needing anything.

So, I'm happy as a clam here in my cold draughty historic hut, with lots to work on and nice places to wander during times when I hope least to meet people. Being well settled in, with an organically generated routine, I'm at much greater personal peace than the start of Lockdown I. The only downside is that there is a surprising amount of traffic noise – the saving grace of Lockdown I was how quiet everything was, but now, even with schools shut and people working from home, the road outside my windows is busy and the M11, about a mile away, still roaring, especially this morning. What is everyone doing?

After living on a 4-lane street in California, I've become very sensitive to traffic noise, but hitherto the sound of the M11 and rush hour on my road have been only disappointing, not necessarily irritating. I hope I'm not sliding down the slope of traffic tolerance, because that will complicate further moves significantly, especially if/when I move back to Canada, a much more car-based civilisation.

But that's a long way down the road, as yet ... for now I have to get back to re-editing my book talk. More cocoa, please!

*I mean, probably still here; none of the work that was supposed to happen last summer has even been started, but my rental agreement is until 1 June

When I moved into this 500-year-old house, I knew it was going to be cold. At the time, daytime highs were in the low teens Celsius, and while that wasn't cold per se, it was cool enough that the draughts – mostly coming from the authentic leaded faux-medieval 1970s windows – were plainly perceptible. The heating had been programmed to go half an hour in the morning and evening to keep the pipes from freezing, and that was ample; I turned it off mid-May and, aside from a particularly chilly week in June, didn't turn it on again until mid-November.

The kitchen is furnished with an Aga, which is essentially a gas update of the old wood- or coal-burning cast iron stove. It takes ages to heat up, but when it gets hot it stays hot for ages. During the summer I would only run it on the coolest day in the 7-day forecast, cooking everything I could and then living off salads and leftovers for the next week. The only downside to this system (aside from spending an entire day on my feet) was that the Aga heats the water, so most of the time I had no hot running water. However, I had been hearing about the health benefits of cold showers for years, and decided I might as well give it a go. To my surprise, after a few weeks I actually got to like them, and the prospect of a hot shower seemed gross and feverish. Maybe the Victorians were on to something.

Now, of course, it is cold – in fact the last few days have been about as cold as it ever gets around here, freak Siberian high pressure systems notwithstanding. The same advice that touted the benefits of cold showers started with 'since central heating means we don't adapt to the changing seasons anymore ...' so I was determined to try doing it the old-fashioned way and see how low I could go. It wasn't just machismo: my house in Cambridge had been kept rather cool as well, and I discovered when I went on my sailing trip that this gave me superpowers of resilience compared to my comfortably-heated crewmates who were miserable all the time. If I could adapt to an even colder house then I could be even more resilient, and British winter would have no power over me at all! (OK, maybe there was a little machismo.)

And, I have to say, it has worked. I have been persuaded to increase the heating to a whole hour in the morning and afternoon, with a short booster late in the evening in case I'm working past 11, which is the case more often than not, but so far I haven't needed more than that. There were a couple of uncomfortable weeks as the nights got longer in October, but then we had a warm spell in November that felt positively balmy, and now that we're back to freezing temps I am finding them no trouble at all. In fact, it was only this morning (foggy, -1°C) that I finally pulled out one of the lighter merino base layers I'd taken to Antarctica, a layer I'd sometimes gone without in the dry cold down there, but wore pretty consistently through March back in the UK. This acclimation thing, it turns out, actually works.

I bang the polar drum a lot, but something I wish I had more opportunity to talk about is how the seemingly superhuman men of the Heroic Age came from a very very different everyday life than we do. The most privileged of them went to ancient stone boarding schools with unheated dormitories, where toughening up was part of the curriculum. They all lived in houses warmed by coal-burning grates which had to be re-lit in the morning, and they all had draughty single-glazed windows. Many of them spent most of their life outdoors, in all weathers. They appeared to be made of different stuff because, well, they kind of were.

I am pleased to discover that some shadow of that physical resilience is still available to us pampered moderns without having to leave the comfort and convenience of home. Having visitors would be complicated – do I tell them to bundle up, or do I pump up the heating to be stiflingly warm? Luckily the pandemic has cut the Gordian knot for me, this year – no visitors! And I don't have to worry about cold depleting my immune system because I don't see anyone to catch a cold from. I can be as mad as I want in my historic hut, unchallenged.

Not gonna lie, though, resilience or no, it's nice to have a hot shower again.

My dreams are usually not very reflective of reality – or at least, not the parts of reality you'd pay any attention to; they frequently involve errands and passports and train timetables, but almost never real people, significant life events, or even actual places. On the rare occasion I do remember them, they are usually so boring I throw them away after first recollection on waking up.

Lately this has shifted, and I'm not entirely sure why. Three dreams in the last couple of weeks have featured real people in real places and even something I'm actually interested in, another rarity. In one, a mostly-online and politically active friend was very excited about a book of 19thC Russian short stories and, at a party, was starting a political conversation with my very Republican dad. (Alas I woke up before I saw how that turned out.) In another, I had Wilson's freeze-dried hands in a paper bag in my actual kitchen – they were beginning to leave grease stains on the paper – but when someone came by to take a look, they turned out to be brown leather gloves. (In fairness, I had been colouring a page with a closeup of his hands the day before, but neither my work nor the Terra Nova Expedition usually make it into dreamspace.)

Last night I had only my second pandemic dream since March: I had gone in to Cambridge for some reason, and it was packed, mostly with rowdy young people, no one wearing a mask. I have made it a point to put a mask in the pocket of every coat because I am a very absent-minded person, but it was a mild day so I hadn't worn a coat and therefore didn't have a mask. I did have three kerchiefs on hand and tried to tie one or another around my face bandana-style, but they kept slipping down and I couldn't figure out a way to get them tighter. My sister, unusually, was there, and offered me her scarf, but it was a very loose weave so not much better than a placebo. I also stopped for an alfresco lunch with my ex-BF (who lives in Vancouver, not Cambridge) who'd just had a proper kitchen sink installed under a panoramic window overlooking Midsummer Common (in Cambridge, not Vancouver).

In marked contrast to the last time I lived alone, I have been remarkably happy rattling around this big house on my own, and never lonely. I do wonder, though, if my nocturnal brain stocking dreams with real people, instead of NPCs as it usually does, might have something to do with not seeing anyone I know most of the time. I have long theorised that the prevalence of boring everyday dreams is compensation for spending most of my waking hours in my imagination; perhaps real people are turning up now to compensate for not appearing during the day?

I came, I bought, I got home again (eventually ...).

It was just as quiet as I had hoped it would be, despite last night's late quasi-announcement that we're likely going into Second Lockdown this coming week, which made me fear people would get an early start on their panic-buying. Bless you and your late-rising ways, Cambridge. I think it was the first time I'd been in the city centre Sainsbury's since I moved ... I used to be in there a few times a week, before, so it was a little nostalgic.

It turned out that I could buy a bikeload of animal products – which is also about as much as I can fit in my freezer – without needing my second voucher. The voucher says it's good for two years; hopefully in that time there will be a moment when redeeming it won't be so fraught or so timely.

We really should have gone into Second Lockdown ages ago. The scientific advisory panel to the government suggested it in September; Labour has been calling for it since mid-October; the government have dragged their feet in the face of all evidence ostensibly because Labour wanted it. So we're back in the same position as in March, where those in charge don't want to take any responsibility, and so put it off and put it off until it gets really bad and much harder to recover from. They had all summer to prepare for this, and now the trends in the nationwide case rate are far worse than their worst-case projections. While the characterisation of the Terra Nova Expedition as doomed by its own bumbling hubris is not at all backed up by the historical record, it is very easy to see how, when suggested, one might suppose it must be true, as this character trait seems to be nailed to the flagstaff of British leadership. 'Lions led by donkeys' is just as true now as it was in WWI. Laden with 20lbs of groceries and cycling into an incoming storm, my trip home was much longer and harder than it ought to have been; the symbolism was really rather clunky.

On my own completely selfish part, I'm looking forward to lockdown. Schools are supposed to be staying open, so traffic won't be as low as it was this spring, but it'll be nice to have it a little quieter again. I've got a massive bag of flour, more apples than I know what to do with, a freezer full of cooked meals and ingredients for more. This afternoon I'll be moving the main parts of my workstation down to my bedroom, so I can keep that warm and abandon this draughty corner of the open-plan first floor until spring. The burrowing therefore is very nearly literal, and lockdown gives me every excuse to keep my burrow to myself.

There's a chance of frost on Wednesday. The bird feeders are full and the garden more or less put to bed. I observed, my first autumn in Britain, how even if one didn't know Halloween/Samhain was a thing, this precise day was perceptible as a turning point from autumn into winter. You can just feel it. This year, the human world is participating in step with the natural and spiritual one. Wherever we are going, we are going together, but where that might be is anyone's guess ...

Just realised it's been nearly a month since I posted ...

I did not, in the end, die of taxes, but it was pretty close and I'm still pretty pissed off about it. For being one of only two countries in the world that requires its citizens to file even when they live and pay taxes in another country, the US is remarkably clod-headed about considering the possibility someone might be filing from abroad. So in case anyone has stumbled across this blog while trying to file via TurboTax because they can't find an accountant who will touch US tax returns, here is my advice:

When they ask you in the opening questionnaire if you are self-employed, DO NOT say yes.

When they ask you if you have any W-2s to report, DO NOT say yes.

Yes, these are lies. But if you answer truthfully they will funnel you into the default income section, and you will be trapped in a maze of numbers not talking to other numbers when they should, and it will not be nice.

All foreign income – which is all your income, whatever the source, if you are legally resident abroad – needs to be reported in the foreign income section, which is an entirely different section from the 'income' section, for some reason, and you only find it after you've gone through (or skipped) everything else. If you fill out the regular income section it will treat you as though you're in the US no matter what address you give it, and the foreign tax exemption will NOT apply no matter how bona fide you are.

I have left a note in my tax documents so that 2021 Tealin does not waste two weeks and tarnish her soul with hatred the way 2020 Tealin did, and have put them away, and am starting to move on with my life, THANK GOD.

Today, for the first time since March, I am getting on a train. I am only going two stops, and rural ones at that, during a time of day when the trains were usually pretty empty even in the Before Times, and will of course be thoroughly masked and alco-gelled, so hopefully this will not be the start of another dark adventure. I am going for a lovely walk through the lovely countryside with a lovely friend, which will scrub off some of that tarnish, I hope. Will I remember to bring my sketchbook? Who knows! It'll be a good day regardless.

In popular culture, the August Bank Holiday is the last hurrah of summer – barbecued sausages, sun on golden hills, children having a last burst of freedom before heading back to school, The Proms on Radio 3.

In reality – at least, in my experience here – you can set your clock by the return of autumn weather just in time to ruin the long weekend. My first summer here, I went to Wales, got a cold on the train between Cardiff and Swansea, and spent the rest of the weekend alternately guzzling ginger tea and throwing myself at the Preseli Hills in defiance (and, having just moved from LA, celebration) of the cold damp wind. Of my six years here, only one August Bank Holiday has been fine, and I remember it mainly for the astonishment that it was so.

The same has happened this year. Friday night saw a blustery, drenching rainstorm, behind which followed a cold damp atmosphere sucked down from Norway. We went from balmy mid-20s to a high of 14°C in one day. Today is sunny again, but cool enough to feel like a warm morning in autumn rather than a cool morning in summer. Happy Bank Holiday Weekend, everybody.

And I have been slammed with a deep desire for Canada. I had been puzzling over why it should be so especially strong all of a sudden, but this morning I remembered that exactly the same thing happens every September, thanks to my habitual pilgrimage back for Canadian Thanksgiving at the start of October every year I was living in LA. The summer starts fading into autumn and I know Canada Time is coming. It may be especially strong this year on account of the extremely Vancouvery weather on Friday, coming hard on the heels of reconnecting with a good friend there and making tentative plans for next summer. In the current circumstances, my annual instincts to stock up for the winter are getting more vindication than usual, and a fantasy of having a house with a large enough garden to fend off starvation has been simmering in the background. I would grow Hubbard squash, enough tomatoes to bottle for a winter's worth of curries, and waxy potatoes. And I wouldn't have to worry quite so much about my society losing its head when the trappings of civilisation draw away, because they've only been the status quo for a couple of generations. Naturally that is exerting a strong pull on me this year especially.

Anyway, I've got another winter here at least, and am in a good place to see it through, both physically and mentally. The second wave that is cresting in Europe will crash on our shores sooner or later; I just have to finish my stock-up before then and will ride it out in splendid isolation. Three more trips to Cambridge for lentils and maple syrup should do it. In a week or so, it will be time to bring in as many blackberries as I can. The ancestral memory of 300 years of subsistence farming will be appeased. It is an odd thing that, in Europe, I am operating as if the New World is the Old Country, but we play the hand we're dealt, and mine is all maple leaves.

According to the internet, this is what might be causing my pumpkin plants to turn yellow:

• too wet
• not enough nitrogen (often caused by above)
• not enough iron (ditto)
• too dry
• too cold
• beetles
• mildew
• infection

Basically, if they are stressed in any way, they throw a canary fit, and leave you to guess which of the mutually contradictory problems it is.

I can't do anything about the cold, or the rain. We haven't been getting excessive amounts of either. I had stopped watering them entirely, but the yellow still advanced. I tried sticking iron tablets in the soil. I have, now, today, fertilised them, but that required watering them. (It's been hot; I hope they needed it.) I have checked for symptoms of various diseases and they don't have any of them beyond the yellow leaves. The most vexing thing is that, aside from the colour, and the yellowest parts eventually dying and crinkling up, they are behaving perfectly fine – blooming up a storm, not wilting, continuing to grow nice and green from the growth ends. In greyscale they would be perfectly happy pumpkin plants. It is a mystery.

I could happily blame the exhausted soil in the pots. I did try to boost it with some potting soil when I planted them, but my supply was limited and I may have stretched it too thin. However, I grew perfectly healthy pumpkin plants in a former sandbox in extremely alkaline Utah, so ... ??

The baked potato squashes are doing OK, though – greener, for some reason, and as of today I have at least three embryonic squashes on the go. They also grow upright, to my surprise, which is something to remember for next year. I have never had a baked potato squash before so this is all an experiment. I hope they make it to adulthood and I get to find out what they're like. Supposedly they taste like potatoes, which is all right by me.

One of the pieces of mail I came home to, after Antarctica, was an appointment notice for my annual checkup to see whether Quasimodo Uterus is up to anything. In January, the June appointment was expected to be just like the previous June appointments, but at the start of June, everything having changed, I phoned to see if the appointment was still on, given the backlog in hospital services. The lady on the phone seemed to think I was getting cold feet about coming in; I emphasised the news of backlogs and she said if that was a problem they'd have cancelled, but as my appointment was still on I should come as planned.

So this morning, this very muggy morning after an hour of drizzle, I biked up to Addenbrooke's. Last summer it felt like I couldn't keep away, with all the procedures required to pass the medical for my Antarctic deployment, so it was a little nostalgic rolling in to the old bike rack under the chimney swift nests again.

I wasn't nervous about a hospital visit because the outpatients clinic is in a completely separate building from Emergency and Intensive Care, so chances of picking up The Virus from an active case are about as low as anywhere else, or perhaps even lower: There's a gauntlet of nurses at a checkpoint just inside the door, checking your mask is on right and you've gelled your hands, and they would redirect anyone showing symptoms, so it might be one of the most Covid-free places to be.

The ultrasound went fine – not only were there no sharp intakes of breath, but the nurse driving the machine was training someone, so I got running commentary on what she was doing and why, a nice treat. The clinic generally was very quiet, compared to last year, so either they've booked fewer appointments, or other people did get cold feet. I came back the long way – slowly, in the heat – and got an iced coffee at the café that has been closed every time I pass it on my way to groceries. They are only doing takeaway, so the chairs are all stacked in a way that would make the place look closed if it weren't for the door propped open. I hope they are finding it worthwhile to be in business again. They didn't look to have had much footfall that morning.

I got home in time to put in a full day's work, much to my surprise, having mentally written off half the day, but it was too muggy so I oiled the terracotta kitchen floor instead. This was a job I started doing at the old place when a former housemate had been overenthusiastic with the bleach and stripped what finish the poor old floor still had; I looked up how to recondition it, and had refreshed it annually on the hottest day of the summer, when prolonged contact with a cool tile floor was most comfortable and, I hoped, the oil would soak in and cure faster. I moved my bottle of linseed oil here with me, where it has already seen a lot of use and will do more.

And so it was that by one o'clock I had accomplished about three times as much as I usually do in such a span, which makes me think I really need to get more organised with my time – shifting the workday later has worked all right, but aimlessly bumping around all morning doing jobs as they occur to me is not as effective as it could be. It's going to be cooler next week so I think I will get out on the bike to explore a new route every morning, and hopefully that will get me in gear for the rest of the day. If not, at least I will see some countryside and get some exercise, which will be no bad thing. Should I cross paths with The Virus, then, I will be in better stead to fight it off.

In recent weeks I have found myself happy to sit and chill and, to my great surprise, not think about anything. This had started to worry me as perhaps a sign of early dementia, as hitherto my brain has been a constantly humming beehive, but now I wonder: is this what Not Anxiety feels like? Is this the appeal of, for example, sunbathing? Such pastimes had always appeared frustratingly dull to me, but if normal people's brains don't need one or more chew toys at any given moment, then I begin to see the appeal.