Tunnel vision

Yesterday I was having a bit of a mare, migraine all bloody day, blazing sunshine with the sun low in the sky and no sunglasses. Even squinting was no use because my eyelashes fell out years ago. When I was a kid, migraine was so unbearable, the pain so excruciating that it's easy to appreciate why sufferers are occasionally discovered with their head in the oven. Happily, the pain hasn't been so much of a problem in adulthood--touch wood, uncomfortable yes but reasonably tolerable. The main practical problems being you just can't flippin' see properly and when your eyes are open, you just want to vomit and you incur the danger of the more severe symptoms, i.e the pain, occurring.

Unfortunately I had to be out and about for a while and it was evident from their reactions, that people thought I was an utter lunatic. Of course they did, a blinking (literally blinking) idiot who kept his eyes covered while he spoke is bound to draw some suspicion. You've probably heard about the weird lights blah blah, one of the most acute problems though, is the tunnel vision, which can really catch you out when it occurs. It's quite hard to describe because there is no actual tunnel, it's just that visual perception becomes confined to what you're focused on. So you're walking along the road and a woman with a pram appears out of nowhere, bang! You get an earful from an irate mother and if you're really unlucky, the threat of assault from some chav, either older son or irate boyfriend, that's accompanying her.

Something sweet is was what cured it yesterday, I grabbed a pecan pastry with treacle and I kid you not, it subsided almost as soon as the pastry hit my stomach and was gone within a few minutes. You know what's odd, the pastry tasted absolutely fantastic. It's as if it were ambrosia born from Olympus on a silken cushion and wafted to the earthly domain by a bevy of nimble, rather scantily clad goddesses. Marvellous what a little deprivation does to enhance the senses.

While recovering from this episode, I cast my mind to the subject of the previous post. Even for a politician of questionable ethical standing, it is possible to feel some sympathy when that person is enduring some physical distress. If that distress should prove to be the as the result of some serious condition, which at the moment I think is quite likely, what questions arise about the role of the media in such circumstances? I've seen enough to indicate that a certain degree of acquiescence, even collusion must be present. I suppose that's hardly a surprise but surely in this instance,  should events take their natural course, they are going to be difficult to reconcile. In a way though, that's already happened, there was no media footage of the incident in New York that brought this issue into the public arena, it was a guy with a phone or some such. So sometime after those shots of her face in the crowd at ground zero, someone must've said, 'No pictures' or something like it. What's interesting there, is that so far it seems they obeyed their instructions, not just one or two of 'em but all of them. Not a single dodgy snap from an agency bod nothing at all, except for what Joe Bloggs caught on his phone.

And there lies the irony, it's the measures taken to keep unbidden attention at bay that are so telling. The men in dark suits that block camera viewfinders so promptly, that faithful attendant who's somewhat evocative of the Nubian eunuch stereotype. He certainly seems to know his job, never flustered or indeed even surprised, he directs his more frantic underlings with an enviable assurance.

There are two things that arouse my curiosity, what kind of memos are the journalists getting in their in boxes and just what is in those handy palm size devices, those attendants are always getting out of their jacket breast pockets too soon.