Tick-tick-tick-tick… BOOM!

I haven’t really had a freak-out (technical term) on this blog, so far.

So here it is.

AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I want the world to stop for just a couple of days, so I can get off, calmly review my life, remove all clutter, organise all the remaining good bits, put the whole thing back together, give it a wee bit of a dust and polish, and then step back on, ready to continue. Is that too much to ask? Is it? IS IT???

Well, yes, it is. Because that’s not how it works, and in actual fact what you’ve got to do is cling on for dear life and hope your head doesn’t explode. It’s completely true, that gibberish your mother always absent-mindedly comes out with: “It never rains but it pours”, “Everything goes wrong at once”, “These things happen in threes” (fours, fives, dozens – whatever), and “It’s far easier to put the weight on than to get it off again”. That last one is really nothing to do with the freak-out, but it’s something I’ve found to be true all the same, and have been reminded of as I sit here, chewing on what was packaged and sold as a “tasty, low-fat snack” but what has in fact turned out to be a piece of cardboard.

It’s all going to be OK, you tell yourself, as you sit there trying to rationally decide which problem to tackle first, banging your head dismally off the table. Thud – thud – thud, goes your head. And then your porridge explodes.

I kid you not. To add insult to injury and pile multiple unnecessary straws on camels’ backs, my porridge actually exploded this morning. You can’t even press a button on a microwave and trust it to do its job, these days. Well, that’s it. I have had enough. I am going to become a crazed, raving madwoman who lives in a cave on the north coast, alone but for my cat and the ocean. They will speak fondly and sadly of me, back in Ballymena. “She wasn’t a bad wee critter,” they’ll say.

And I will never have to scrub bits of welded-on porridge from a microwave again, for there are no microwaves in the caves.