Do I need to mention jackhammers, demolition balls swinging from side to side inside my head,  a barrage of explosions on the Somme – in fact the whole first world war is replaying right inside my head. Dead neurons littering the battlefield, consciousness just a series of pockmarked craters through a hazy veil of fog. God!, I just want to reach behind my eyes and scratch and itch and soothe and pat that pulsing core. Pulsing with  each squirt of my heart muscle, the constricted blood fighting through the capillaries of my brain. Trapped inside that dome trying to take off like a Saturn rocket but having nowhere to go. 

I take a headache tablet, it sits on my tongue just a little too long, it tastes flat and plain almost makes me want to gag, before I swig a round of soothing water and try to find somewhere to rest and be still and slow my heartbeat down through some meditation, but I can’t find a place to put my head without feeling that white hot pain. Just a slight movement left or right sets off another round of the blitz inside my head. Lying with my nose in the pillow, smelling the sheets that need changing – like my head – and finallly the medicine kicks in. I won’t be doing anything too ambitious tonight, won’t be pushing myself to the limit. Recovery mode, docile, watch TV, do nothing that requires thinking, that requires effort for it may come back again.

Sometimes it might go on for two or three days – never fully disappearing, just lurking like a spy in the shadows and then leaping out with a knife  for a quick stilleto turn in the centre of my brain, then gone again. Once again I wish I could reach inside and disconnect the yellow flashing light that seems to be in there, the sirens and alarms – and maybe that’s what it’s about – What? Too much of everything? Over- indulgence- that’s not me at all is it? And when I look back over the littered trail of obsessive indulgence I realise that yes there’s been too much and I need a disconnect, a time sitting in the railway siding to let the express trains of other thoughts sweep by before I get back on track and do a Thomas the Tank Engine for a time, chug chug chug and then the whirlwind starts again and it’s on. Those little wheels in my mind spinning faster and faster into a crazy blur and the cycle begins – again.