Hamlet

It has been a strange couple of days, shall we say? Yesterday, I was up until five forty-five am for no terribly good reason, and filled it with EU law (I still know nothing about EU law, alas - but, when I was doing my A-levels, I got into the habit, when revising, of putting one thing at the bottom of each LJ entry that I hadn't known before that day, so I may do this again) and also fic-writing, this time Merlin ("In The Bleak Midwinter", 3500 words of unhappy Merlin/Arthur), because apparently after writing that benighted yuletide fic in two days, I have the sort of ponderous momentum that needs discharging - anyway, fic was had. And then sleep was not had. And then at eleven I prised myself out of bed and went to London, feeling a little bit, unwell, shall we say? ( tmi, dude )

And, also, ill, yes. My ears feel like someone has meticulously poured treacle into both of them. It's not fun.

So, I got off the train at Euston, drifted underground and fully intended to take the Tube to Covent Garden. And, well, I got some of the way there. jacinthsong has been making me recite this at regular intervals today, but yes, what do we not do, children? We don't faint on Underground stations.

In my defence, I did not faint on the train, possibly because the passengers were aware of exactly how horrendous that would be in terms of the continued function of the Northern line, and managed to push me out onto the platform at Leicester Square. Once there, I was thinking to myself in that blurry way, oh, great, now I'm going to faint, on a station platform, and then I'm going to roll five inches to the left and fall on the tracks and die, and then I'm never going to see David Tennant in anything.

I didn't actually faint, as it happens. One of the guys working on the station caught me, walked me down the platform, up the escalators and, with me not quite sure what was happening, into the station control room, which was full of policeman arguing over whether they should get pizza or Burger King. And I sat there for a while and waited for the end, which didn't come. The world only stopped spinning very slowly, so I took some opiates and asked the police if they wouldn't mind going through my phone and trying to phone someone in it while one of them sat next to me and asked me if I were drunk, if I had been drunk, if I was on any medication, if I had any pre-existing conditions, etc., etc. Blurrily, I told him I have depression and chronically disordered sleep, neither of which usually lead to my fainting on Tube stations.

"Did you recently stop your medication?" he asked thoughtfully. "Yeah? That citalopram, it's a bugger."

I sort of grinned inanely at him, and then someone looked up and said, "Your friends are in Aldwych. Does Aldwych have a Tube station?"

"It closed in 1994," I said at that point, dozily, and that thing about my half-conscious brain having perfect trivia recall, yeah.

Shortly after that, sebastienne arrived, having just received a call from British Transport Police. I paused to thank the Underground staff man who got me up there to start with (when I send him a thank you note, it shall be addressed to "Kingsley Shacklebolt, Leicester Square Station" - no, okay, I did actually hear the others calling him 'Kingsley', and on reflection he was a big, burly, almost supernaturally calm man of Afro-Caribbean descent, I mean, really) and she got me into a cab, and I have never been so glad to see anyone, ever.

Dinner was good, as the very first thing that happened was vampire_kitten waving her shopping from Sh! at me, and then I sat back and ate a bit and began to recover, slowly, over pizza and people being cheeringly appalling in my general direction. (I think the waiters got tired of us; at any rate, we were probably "those mad women in the corner who yell "Clit pump!" occasionally.")

And then, Hamlet. ( in which we defy augury )

So that was Hamlet, and afterwards jacinthsong and I crossed Waterloo Bridge, over the water with the city skyline reflected in it, and the London Eye glowing purple stage left, and I still had the speeches jangling around my head (or possibly I was delirious), and it was entirely lovely. In the morning, it took a very long time to wake me up, and jacinthsong was very kind and very firm and very keen to make sure I ate, and got my train, and did not walk into walls, and I can report I did eat, and did not walk into walls, and my train got me home in slightly less than two hours, which is a miracle.

On Tuesday, more travelling! Now, not much but present-wrapping, and yet more writing while I'm remembering how.