on the mend

It's a nice question, the pace at which you resume normal activities after a bout of fever, in the absence of external pressures.  In my City job I wouldn't have dreamed of taking today off.  Indeed, if there had been a sufficiently important meeting I'd have gone in on Monday, even if it meant spending the rest of the week in bed to recover from the effort.  If you are self-employed, or have small children, or don't get sick pay and simply can't afford the time off, you may have to make the effort and get back to work, even if you don't feel up to it.  It's probably not good for you, but my guess is that precious little research has been done on whether it is actually medically bad for you in the long term, or just makes you feel awful for the duration.  The medical profession seems split on whether illnesses like Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome even exist, and there are no profits to be had for pharmaceutical companies in recommending rest.

On the other hand, your muscles start to atrophy almost as soon as you stop exercising, so if you crawl into bed on a Thursday night feeling lousy, stagger out of bed two days later and spend most of your time thereafter sitting down, you are not going to be as fit by the following Tuesday as you were the previous one.  And if a heatwave (English style, modest by Continental standards but hot compared to what we're used to) has started in the meantime, you won't feel as bouncy as you did last week, even if your immune system had fought off every germ going.  So how do you tell whether your residual feelings of exhaustion are your body telling you that it is still convalescent and needs cosseting, or merely that you are hot (as is everybody) and out of shape?

The Systems Administrator had got a reunion lunch in London with some old colleagues, and as I obligingly gave the SA a lift to the local railway station I felt fragile enough to make me think that, since I didn't have to go to work or do anything in particular, another day of doing nothing might be a good idea.  On the other hand, I need to get moving again at some stage, so decided against trying to rearrange tomorrow's Pilates lesson.  Some gentle stretching might be a good idea by then, and as shifting appointments around is a nuisance to the teacher it is better to save her indulgence for the times when I really need it.

Having finished reading about the plant hunters I am now on to Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea by Donovan Hohn.  It is an entertaining account of ocean currents and ocean pollution, told through his investigation into the true story of a consignment of plastic toys lost from a shipping container, and how they began to wash up on beaches all over the place. Donovan Hohn is an American writer, one-time school teacher turned journalist, and I never heard of him until I came across Moby Duck, which I think was mentioned on Radio 4 at some point, but maybe it is simply the sort of thing that Amazon thought I would like.  Hohn's style is breezy and self-deprecating: I find him funny, but can see that some more serious-minded readers might detest him.  Also his initial curiosity about the floating toys expands like the narrative of Tristan Shandy to encompass the blow-moulded plastics industry, the ethics and efficacy of beach litter clearance, the iconography of the toy duck, and anything else that occurs to him along the way, which has upset some reviewers.  He has a little fun at the expense of other, more portentous environmental commentators, which is fair enough.  I clicked on the Kindle edition on my laptop yesterday morning, and so far should say it was £1.79 thoroughly well spent, though I did start off knowing a bit about about container shipping, sailing and the Beaufort scale, and have visited quite a few plastics factories.  If I had approached all of these as a complete novice I might have found his narrative more unmanageable.

Tomorrow normal life will resume, albeit very gently, and I will discover the awful truth about the bees.  In the end one of the ways you know you are getting better is when you actually want to do things, as distinct from feeling you ought to do things.  I think that by tomorrow I will probably want to do something, albeit nothing too strenuous.