For reasons best kept to myself, between supper on Wednesday and lunch on Saturday, no food passed my lips. I know that's not terribly long. Hunger strikers live for weeks and months without food but, for someone who fancies himself a trencherman. it's an eternity. While it may have left me fashionably thin, it weakened me. I had reserves of energy to cope with Thursday and Friday's runs, but when it came to Saturday I had had it; I could not face swimming coaching or running.
I am now eating again, and will try a run this afternoon. I still feel weak and a little dizzy, but I attribute that to two days without food. It's been an odd experience. When ill or in hospital, my imagination takes off. At night I dream the most baroque dreams, while by day I can understand how an invalid like Proust could have been so creative…or I think I can. I know that the reality of illness is less lying in a cork-lined room, dashing off a sonnet here and a novella there while sipping champagne, and more a bleak hospital bed with foul food, the cries of the elderly and demented, and being at the mercy of people who do painful and degrading things to you. I'm a doctor's son and I work in the NHS: I know whereof I speak.
