Gut feeling

Confession: my poem-a-day pledge has stuttered. I’ve actually been a bit ill, although there’s little evidence for it, and if I worked a 9 – 5 job I would have gone home happy on Friday evening and turned up fine this morning. So a weekend illness hardly seems to qualify. And yet on Saturday night I was pathetically praying ‘if there is a God, please help me now!’

I’m pretty certain I picked up a Norovirus, and despite the crippling headaches Thursday – Friday it only really got stuck in on Friday evening. But I was a textbook case – 2 days incubation, 2 days of grief and then you feel almost normal (except for my appetite, but I can afford to eat a bit less). If you haven’t experienced the full thrust of this gut-busting bug, all I can say is WASH YOUR HANDS, PEOPLE!

I don’t know if it’s a female thing (the advertisers seem to think so, going by all those ‘friendly bacteria’ ads during ‘This Morning’ or ‘Midsomer Murders’) but I do feel I have a special relationship with my digestive tract. You can’t talk about guts in polite company, and few people want to discuss the details of peristalsis or the production of chyme or whatever in even their own body, let alone others. And yet it’s right there at the centre of us, and its metaphoric links with creativity, freedom from the straightjacket of rational thought and so on are everyday shorthand – gut instinct, gut reaction, a feeling in the pit of the stomach, butterflies in the tummy, etc not to mention all the various uses of the word ‘sick’.

So call me cranky but I do feel some sort of spiritual connection with my guts. I’ve tried writing about it, but the few people I showed my efforts to were unconvinced this was ‘entertainment’. Perhaps the whole point is not to write about it, but to write with it.

I could now really fancy eating a Rich Tea biscuit, if I had one.