Health and sympathy for horses

Hooh, boy. Miss Eagle sure does feel sorry for the horses. You see, dear and gentle Reader, your correspondent has been, for about the last ten days, battling the 'flu. Way back in April, I had my annual 'flu injection. This is always a good protection and I rarely get a sniffle. This year was different.

Herself, though, tells me to stop grumbling. People have died of the 'flu this year, she reminds me. And this is true. There have been a number of infant deaths in and around Melbourne due to the 'flu. There have been frail and elderly people stricken with it and hospitalised and died. As for me, I have felt just one step away from the hospital door.

I am writing to-day, so I must be feeling better. But you see, there's no telling. How many days have I arisen with optimism in my heart and mind only to be feeling deathly ill by nightfall. I say to Herself that I have done my best to keep going. She replies that she thinks I should have hidden quietly in a darkened room and things might have been better much more quickly.

I look out the window and there is my neighbour across the street on a ladder cleaning her windows on the outside. As I'm looking at this there is the slow heavy whirring of the street-sweeping machine directing its mechanical energy to cleanliness too. Oh, such energy! Where is mine! I feel like inviting my neighbour over for a well-earned coffee break - but she has a baby and young ones. It would not be a fair thing to invite her into my germ-laden presence, now would it?

Over the last six years, my life experience has been one of off-and-on poor health. I have come to loathe the time it consumes from my otherwise active life - time that one never gets back. Upon recovery, one plays catch-up doing the things one would have done if one could have done. Then one tries to pick up what one was doing when so rudely and crudely interrupted. That piece of craft, knitting, cooking, the book which has been too heavy to hold. And all the while rebuilding life's little routines.

At least at the moment we are getting plenty of sunshine. Everything is so much gloomier and depressing when it is day after day of rain and cloud. I hope I feel like eating properly soon. At the moment my comfort foods of Arnott's Scotch Fingers and big glasses of milk are dominating the eating cycle. This cannot continue!