Reasons to be Cheerless

Simon has been pointing out to me, at various points since my return a week ago from visiting my children in England, that it was about time that I wrote something on the blog. And, as always, he is right. So here I sit, fingers poised uselessly above the keys, willing my brain to drag its sorry self from its heavy mattress of malaise, and produce some thoughts worth writing about.

Nope. Nothing doing. My writing brain appears to have hibernated in bottomless blanket of blah. And to what do I owe this incapacitating bout of ennui?

It could be a reaction to the inevitable Missing of My Children, which follows like night follows day, whenever I return from spending time with them on a visit to England.

It could be a delayed reaction to the death of Fatma. The breeding group still feels too small, and somehow a bit empty, and aswell as the loss of a very special member of our lovely llama family, we are also mourning the loss of the cria that would probably have been born to Fatma next August.

It could be the weather. The rain has returned with a mean streak of vengeance. The fields and tracks that were at last beginning to dry out and become remotely passable by stable, upright bipeds are turned once more to rivers of mud. For the first time in our history of owning this house, I can actually hear water flowing in the little stream at the bottom of the valley over which our house keeps watch.

It could be the contemplation of the horrors of our impending move to the Allier. Not just the fact that we will be sad as very sad things to say goodbye to this episode of our life, and to everything, and everyone that we have become attached to in and around Roquetaillade over the last hectic year. But also the logistic and practical difficulties of how to get ourselves, our dog, two llama herds, four chickens, two cars, a motorbike , and the contents of our house and garage, from here to there within a very limited time frame, (and a more limited budget) without leaving any of the animals unattended for more than 12 hours at a time.

It could even be a response to the occasional realisation of the complete and utter pointlessness of human existence which passes through my meandering mind from time to time.

But it is none of these. It is something far more mundane and pathetic and unworthy. It is in fact, quite simply, a symptom of (the possibly soon to be recognized psychiatric disorder) caffeine withdrawal.

On Tuesday, Simon and I decided (for various fairly flimsy reasons, some spurious and some sensible) to stop drinking coffee. What we didn’t do was read anything about it first. If we had, we may have adopted a more gradual approach to the undertaking. But once we’d already started suffering the inevitable consequences of our brains and bodies adjusting to the absence of a drug on which they had inadvertently become truly dependent, it seemed silly to backtrack. ‘Let not this suffering be in vain’, we concluded.

We are not nice people to be around, at the moment. We each have an almost constant headache. We are irritable. We can’t think. We can’t remember. And worst of all, we really, really Can’t Be Arsed. We just want to curl up into our respective balls of self-induced misery and sleep off the caffeine-hangover-from-hell. It would be very easy to attribute this current slough of despond to any one of the deserving causes mentioned above. But, as someone who has experienced the extreme effect of mood altering drugs of various sorts in my past lives, I know only too well that chemicals can create feelings with greater consistency and intensity than can simple emotions. Emotions are like transducers between experiences and feelings. And when a feeling arises, we tend to hang it on an emotion, and cast around to find the something that happened to us, that switched it on.

But sometimes – and probably more often than we conscious, sentient beings would care to admit – a feeling can quite simply be the result of a chemical effect on certain bits our brain circuitry. It is the pre-menstrual hormones that cause our irritability with our men – not our anger at their stupidity! It is the alcohol that induces maudlin melancholy – not our disappointment in our useless lives. And it is the withdrawal of caffeine’s effect on my adenosine receptors and dopamine levels that is making me feel tired and depressed.

And, apart from that, I feel just grrrreat!