Obsessions

When we were in England a few weeks back, I made a serious tactical error. Jon wanted to buy the third season The West Wing on DVD (he has watched it sporadically on TV), but I discovered that it was a vastly better deal to buy a box set of all seven seasons. Which we did. It turns out this box contains no less than 154 hours of viewing pleasure, and I have hardly seen Jon since he tore the cellophane, he’s been stuck like a limpet to the TV. One-hundred-and-fifty-four hours. That’s actually slightly more than the average month’s work.

His excuse is that he’s had a bout of sciatica, something that troubles him at irregular and (so far) rare intervals. There were several days when moving was clearly pretty painful, so fair enough he spent time immobolized in front of the square nanny.

And I do understand this kind of temporary but engulfing obsession. When I get my hands on a good computer game, I lose control completely. I don’t sleep, I don’t work, I don’t eat (hm, perhaps I should play more often…). And I also appreciate that it’s hard enough to keep active despite Parkinson’s, so when some other insult is added to the PD, fair enough that Jon just wants to curl up and pretend he’s away with the Presidential advisors scoring carefully-scripted points. But I do reserve the right to miss him until it’s over.

Meanwhile, I have had my own little obsession to feed. We had an estate agent round the other day – the first concrete step in what I expect will be a labourisous journey to a stair-free home – and while she was generally kind about our house, she did have a few suggestions. Which essentially, and very sensibly, involved some serious un-messing and re-staging of the three most stuff-stuffed rooms in the house, one of which was Jon’s lair where likes to store the mother (and father and extended multi-generational family) of all messes. It took some doing, but the messes have been banished for now, and Jon has been surprisingly cooperative in the project.

Now we’ll just sit back and wait for hordes of eager buyers to pour through the door. We can but dream…