Goldfish Boy

I'm sure my memory's deteriorating.

She said she'd do it, and she did: fed me a line in a meeting that gave me my 'in' to use the 'global minky trousers in a chunky monkey autonomous trouser press' phrase (and win a fiver, too). And, like a kipper, I missed it -- the set up went straight over my head. Twonk.

Feeling Sick

I'm feeling a bit queasy this evening. It's nothing to do with all the chocolate I've eaten today, and I don't think it's the after-effects of the week-old curry I dug out of the fridge last night (there were enough chillies in it to preserve a dead dolphin).

The cause of my sickliness is a bout of hysterical chair spinning in the office this afternoon: this was an experiment to test the efficacy of the spin-counterspin (SCS) technique in combating spin-induced dizziness. I was not a participant, only an observer. (As an observer, I have to note -- with some sadness -- that no protective elbow pads or goggles were worn.)

The reason this made me feel a bit dizzy was that it brought to mind a game we used to play in the park when I was a kid: you'd lay on your belly on the roundabout, your head towards the outside, and one of your mates would scoot the roundabout up to high speed before jumping on and taking up a similar position to the rest of you. Typically there'd be four of us, evenly distributed around the roundabout's disc. One of you would have a lolly stick, which you'd set down on the tarmac, half under the spinning roundabout's platform. The game was to pick this up on the next revolution, then put it down again somewhere else. And the cycle kept repeating until the roundabout slowed and stopped. I can't remember if there was any way of winning.

I can remember how it used to make me feel, though: dizzy, sick, wobbly-legged. And all the high frequencies seemed to drop out of my hearing, leaving just a muddy slurring of sounds in my ears.

I can feel a strange swirling behind my eyes, even just thinking about it and remembering it...the horrible dizziness and nausea I only get now when I've had way too much to drink (increasingly rare, thankfully. How does the memory (just synaptic firing patterns) evoke that sense feeling? Odd. It's one of the most vivid memories of my late childhood. I also remember that I didn't want to play that game, because it made me feel so horrible. But I had to play, initially because me fear of being thought a cissy was greater than my fear of vomiting. Later, it was the fear of an intensely bullying 'friend' that forced me to join in -- I couldn't go against his wishes, or something terrible would happen. But that's another story, and not something I can write about while all these spots are circling in front of my eyes. Yech...