Safety valves

On Monday evening I was watching Channel 4’s ‘Food Unwrapped’. The subject was detoxification and among the features was one on hangovers, where several studenty subjects were encouraged to party and then tested the next day to see what was going on with their bodies. The headaches, nausea and exhaustion, the expert explained, were all signs that their bodies were working efficiently – breaking down the toxins and expelling them.

If you’re a long-term reader of this blog you’ll know that I suffer from regular migraines. I tend to beat myself up about them. They’re my fault, I say to myself. I don’t know how to live properly. I’m still hung up on past events. I kick against them and see them as a waste of time.

But yesterday when I woke up with a migraine and said to Frog, ‘I feel as if I’ve been partying for the last two weeks’, I found that my attitude had changed.

I’m more Aunt Polly than Pollyanna. I race around ‘doing’ things. I fret. I don’t give myself time to rest. When I have a migraine however I have to stop. I can’t read or watch television or write or garden or walk. I can hardly talk. I have to do nothing.

Migraines are a safety valve, I realised. They rid my body of all the nasty hormones I’ve been creating and bring me back to the present, to simply living. If I didn’t get them I might be storing up far more serious health problems.

I’d quite like to blog about this, I thought as I brushed my teeth this morning. But it’s not quite enough. (As my writing sister Emma says, you need at least two ideas to make a story.) What else can I write about? Blogging came the answer.

I’ve always been ambivalent about the value of blogging. Is it self-indulgent? Does it distract me from the serious business of novel-writing?

    ‘Why do I do it?’ I asked Frog the other day.

    ‘Disclosure,’ he said.

    That’s what I write novels for, I thought.

Recently I’ve been working hard on the novel, doing what I hope is a final draft and giving myself until Christmas for it. I’ve almost completely stopped blogging, thinking that I can’t have both blog posts and the novel fermenting in my head at the same time. In the last week or so however I’ve found myself wanting to blog again.

And I think it’s OK to do so. Blogging is light relief. It’s novel-writing in miniature. It keeps me going. It’s another safety valve.

And that was a very long-winded post. Blame the dregs of the migraine.