Monday angst and work reviews

This morning seems full of that all-pervading Monday angst, groan. But here’s my 200th meditation poem anyway:

Meditation 200

The heady scent
of spices –
myrrh and aloes –

almost cuts you down
when you walk
for the first time

from the almost-dark
to the light.
The garden

buries your discomfort,
wrapping it
in linen, preparing

for the night.


I’m pleased to have reached my 200th poem in this series – it seems like a kind of milestone, albeit a quiet one. Meanwhile, at work, I’ve been attempting to deal with my emails whilst pretending to act like a normal human being. Never say I don’t know how to multi-task, eh. Why is it that on Mondays it’s soooo much harder to be normal? Really, I just want to run screaming from the building, go home and lie under the duvet for a while. Ah, if only that plan could happen.

Anyway, today I had my annual review. Never something I look forward to, it was made rather worse by being rescheduled over my lunchtime. I should have taken in my lunch of rice and smelly fish, ho ho, but didn’t quite have the courage. Still, it went well, and they might just about keep me on for another year, which is a relief. Phew. I’ve also rung my website provider to try to sort out my direct debit – what lovely people Zen are, I must say. A pleasure to deal with.

Tonight, I need to go shopping – more smelly fish is required, I think – even though I am utterly and absolutely desperate to get home. Where I’m planning to add a few more paragraphs to my current short story (now at 3000 words and growing ever stranger …) and collapse like a beaten jelly in front of Would I Lie to You? on the TV. Sometimes, the only thing that works for me is the glorious David Mitchell being his adorably comic self.

Today’s nice things:

1. Poetry
2. Zen website people
3. Short stories
4. TV.

Anne Brooke – groaning her way through the day
Vulpes Libris: foxtrotting off for the summer but still dreaming of books