Fifth-week blues, redux reloaded whatever

I got up this morning at eight, walked once around my dim, messy, full-of-dirty-crockery, grey-lit room, and went back to bed. I woke up again around one in the afternoon and haunted the flat for a while, feeling a lot like some sort of solid, cake-eating ghost. The view out of the kitchen window was stunning in a washed-out sort of way - fog creeping over the edges of the Master's Field and smearing bare trees against the sky - and I said later that we should probably take a picture and caption it "Fifth-week Blues."

It's Monday - well, it's three am, it's Tuesday - of fifth week, and I am feeling it. Urrrgh. I seem to have spent the day stumbling around Oxford in the thick, surreal fog and got nothing done. Consequently I had the proverbial essay crisis - I seem to be having them twice a week nowadays - having spent most of the weekend not reading but staring at the wall, and now it is three in the morning and I am feeling sufficiently self-destructive to keep myself awake forever. Which is stupid and ridiculous, because I have about two dozen errands to run tomorrow and a lot of reading to get through before the quiz in the evening, writing it up for Cherwell, and the American midterm elections overnight. I told Pedar that I'd be watching it, and he said to take lots of wine, it would be depressing. That said, Sam has a sort of puppy-dog optimism about him regarding the Democrats' chances. I am steadfastly not getting my hopes up; I'm just going to go with Claire and Sam to the Union and sit there and drink until four, and it'll apparently be American-themed in that they'll be giving out unlimited hot dogs and Budweiser (urgh).

Actually, my whole week is very busy. Hopefully it'll be busy enough for me to forget it's fifth week. This place is pretty hectic because Carousel's first night is tomorrow, and Pat and Ben are frantic. Speaking of which, I'd appreciate some advice from you all. Claire solicited this advice from me, on the grounds that I'm the only one of us who has ever studied moral philosophy at Oxford, but this doesn't help me much. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

This is the problem. Ben is ill. He is really ridiculously ill; he tramped in out of the freezing cold after a full day of dress rehearsal tonight and fell with worrying finality into a chair. Seeing as he always complains mutedly about being fussed over by a bunch of girls - I said, "Make some friends who aren't girls and see how you like it!" - I trotted over to his side of the table and put a hand to his forehead. And realised that he's not just mildly out of it, he's burning up, and should be in bed for a couple of days. But he's in a musical this week! There are five evening performances and two matinées, complete with energetic dance routines and (solo) singing, and he's got to go to nine am lectures and tutes all week as well, which involve tramping about in the sub-zero cold.

And on principle, Ben doesn't take paracetamol, aspirin, ibuprofen, any type of painkiller. If I remember rightly, the rationale is that he doesn't want to mask pain; he'd rather feel it authentically. I don't recall it exactly, but it is there, and he hasn't taken any painkillers in years. I actually quite admire this, because he sticks to it even when very obviously in pain. And right now he looks absolutely miserable.

So here is the problem. He is, at the moment, so far on the other side of lucid that it would be very easy to do what Claire wants to do, which is to accidentally-on-purpose switch his tea for Lemsip and maybe crumble paracetamol tablets into it. I think this would be wrong, even if he does keel over in mid-performance, and Claire thinks it would be wrong not to, for reasons of him keeling over in mid-performance. It is a problem, and I bet fifth week has something to do with the general under-the-weather-ness of it all. I'd appreciate some opinions.

Er, okay. Things could be worse. Fifth week of Trinity, I threw a six-hundred page textbook down the attic stairs and collapsed into tears in Balliol hall. Things could definitely be worse. But still. I am, I think, in the mood for an impromptu love-in to combat the grey. I love you all, flist - you are awesome and clever and funny and all-round fabulous. And I do love my flatmates, because they have collectively decided that the only way to combat the grey is to continuously have something baking, so we have abundant amounts of fairy cakes and flapjacks and rosemary-raisin-bread falling around the kitchen, and I even love Oxford in fifth week, because it will insist on being so damn beautiful about it.

So there, fifth-week blues. Urrrrrrgh.