I am battling the flu, if such a passive activity can be called battling. To mix metaphors, it is the aching flu with a side of severe muscle spasm. I seemed to have beaten back (that old battle image again) the spasms, but when I went to get out of bed, I nearly fell over from dizziness. How is that fair? A new symptom when I’ve already had this flu for a week?

I long to be unconscious. I long for major pain-killers and Gravol, none of which I can take because, if I do, my stomach will kill me. I dream of liquid morphine, but those liquid morphine stores are so hard to find these days.

I was sitting with heat on my lower back, massaging my right shoulder, trying to ease my neck, when suddenly it occurred to me: if not now when.

This now is mine, whether the gift of providence or the hard-won achievement of my own spirit. And it is a precious gift that I should not waste. Moreover now, is all I have.

The past, which I do not long for and dislike revisiting, no longer exists. The future does not even have as much reality as that hazy, disowned past. The future is unpredictable and therefore, unimaginable.

So here’s to now,an unseasonably warm day, given to sudden downpours of window- tapping rain. Now in a well-heated room with a prospect of lunch. Now where my periphery is aching, but my centre is perfectly at peace.