One for the Road: A day for the house…

Just as there is no feeling more miserable than being housebound by sickness on a sunny day, neither is there any relief as resounding as waking up on the lazy side of the scratcher and hearing the heavens hammering hard upon the roof.

Though the vanguard of scientists, engineers and computer programmers, that nowadays move the carriage of mankind along its tracks, have to a great extent alienated our species from its natural environment, changing, improving, augmenting and perverting our reality in ways most of us scarcely understand, we are still, and always will be, inextricably connected with the world from which we come.

Indeed, this morning, as I sit writing this column in a state of peace and repose that borders on bliss, my heart bears witness to the fact that human beings and our environment remain as eternally entwined as ever.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, not long after landing in a preternaturally sunny Siam, some quite intense digestive disruption was visited upon me in the form of a bad dose of food poisoning.

During my first few days in Thailand, I sampled the manifold local delicacies with such liberality, that some might say I was destined to dine out on something that would not agree with me and my weak, white guts.

Pad Thais, Massaman curries, red curries, green curries, pork and prawn dumplings, spicy chicken noodle soups, sticky duck and cashew nuts, and more pork, rice, garlic and chillies than any self-aware Irishman could ever realistically ever hope to handle gracefully.

(Quick aside: Because of the adventurous and undiscriminating position that my pallet adopted during this whirlwind period of excitement and abandon, isolating the offender that brought about my digestive downfall has proven an impossibility. This, unfortunately, has forced me to take a more discerning approach to dinnertime).

Anyway, during this rather revolting episode, I experienced the full complement of abdominal misery one typically associates with food poisoning, which amounted to a full day of delirium, perpetual perspiring and the blurring – but, thankfully, not loss – of my ability to distinguish bathroom from bedroom and cot from can.

But what made this already unremittingly rotten experience all the worse were the lances of light that slipped through the curtains, like spears sneaking between the ribs of an already wounded animal.

As I lay suffering, the intruding sunshine goaded me into a self-loathing guilt trip, setting my mind against my body.

“You useless lump of dung,” I cursed, staring down at the pale carcass that writhed below me in the bed.

“We should be out there enjoying the day but instead we’re lying in this dungeon of a room, all because you hadn’t the strength to fight off a couple of eastern bugs!”

It was a rough day, and one made all the more painful by the incongruity between my inner world and the one that sparkled and shimmered beyond the window.

But just as the weather can make a bad day worse, so too can it soothe a fragile soul.

An hour ago, when I first woke, the muscles around my eyes strained to pry my lids apart, my stomach gurned like an unhappy wein and I felt the gentle dread of knowing I would have to overcome these obstacles if I were to have yet another action-packed day.

Lying there, coming to, I began to berate myself for feeling like the day that lay before me, one that only a month ago I would have given a limb to be embarking upon, was a bit of a chore.

“Get out of yer bed you ungrateful wee…”

Then I heard it: That old familiar sound of home, beating its righteous rhythm upon the roof, giving licence to the laziness I felt but had not the strength to sanction on my own.

“Yes,” I said, as the gentle rain took a tropical turn, quickly growing into a monsoon. “Now, that’s what ye call a day for the house.”