In which the Rodent gets ready to go to Rochdale.

It's 6:45am and Pol and I are both overwhelmingly enthusiastic about being awake at this hour. Yes indeedy. I'm now dressed, although not booted, coated, scarfed and hatted. Pol is getting into the bath I ran for him and presumably checking out the large cup of tea I made. I can be nice, sometimes.

I breakfasted on wood-smoked Skippers (brisling), which are very small, very delicious fish that will probably turn out to be ethically horrible, but they are so very, very delicious. Moth, when presented with a single fish in tomato sauce, carefully ate all the tomato sauce and left the fish intact. Well, then.

My little weather gadget tells me that outside it's raining, 7C and with the faintest of breezes. My clock says my room is at a massive 20.7C. No wonder Pol is complaining he's been cooked all night. I strongly suspect the heating has been left on, which means we will be short on gas. The landlord has finally agreed to real meters, on receipt of a £250 bond. Frankly, it'll pay for itself within a few months, so we're going for it.

I still have more books to sort than I know how to deal with, and I need to remember to bother Tim for clips and things since at the moment the room is full of what are just boxes until the rest is put together.

I want Rochdale to have a little snow on the hills when we go there. It doesn't have to be much. Then Pol goes off to his interview and I go back to Bolton in a taxi with an unhappy, freshly vaccinated cat.

My head hurts. I know this is not news. I'm pondering aspirin or just having a joyous pain-free day of Tramadol in return for the risk of a worse headache when I am safely tucked in bed, and possible nausea meanwhile. If I take Tramadol, I might be able to go shopping. I am running out of food and Moth's been down to just biscuits for a couple of days. It's a thought, isn't it?

In which the Rodent contemplates life with constant pain.

I can remember a time when a headache like tonight's would have left me completely flattened for days. I woke up feeling dreadful, moaning in pain and wanting only for it to end, by whatever means. These days, it just means I take longer than usual to haul myself out of bed, wash, dress and go downstairs to my daily round of junk telly, snack meals and short bursts of housework. The pain is still bad, even unbearable, but you learn to get your body moving even while you're wanting to throw up.

I did end up raiding Pol's aspirin supply, which I'll try to replace this week, along with the bottle of aspirin I bought and then promptly lost. 900mg of aspirin will actually help the pain, bringing it from an 8 (utterly miserable and retching) down to a 5 or 6 (very much hurting but more or less functional if I don't try to do too much). I had a glass of port when the aspirin wore off and the rest has been a matter of gritting my teeth and getting through it, but it's getting less bad by the hour.

The last couple of days have been unusually headachey. I've also been awake all night and asleep all day. I can't help wondering if the two are connected, but I can't seem to manage to haul my sleep pattern to where it should be. At least today I did manage to get properly dressed and to eat more or less well. Duck pancakes, and tinned curry with peas added because I fancied peas. I peeled and chopped fruit for a smoothie tomorrow, but I can't make it now because it's 3am and Pol might be a little annoyed to be woken up this early.

Frozen peas are an incredible luxury. Back in Regency days, green garden peas were a short-lived seasonal delicacy which could sell for incredibly high prices. Even then, in the city, the peas would have been brought in from the countryside by horse and cart, and would have been losing freshness all the time they were travelling. It's one of those cases where frozen is better than fresh, as peas are delicate. Too much time, too much cooking and they lose that fantastic green sweet flavour. I can well believe that frozen peas, even 'frozen in the field', are not a patch on peas taken straight from the plants in your garden, but they're a very good second.

Some people swear by peas with garden mint. I can't abide mint anyway, and it's a ludicrously strong taste to impose on something as sweet and pleasant as garden peas. Just a little butter, or even nuked in a little hot water and eaten on their own, and peas are delicious.

In which the Rodent recovers from Monday and considers pigs.

It feels like the clearout was two days ago, since I've slept twice since then, finally emerging today at 3pm in an unenthusiastic effort to go back to being productive. I've changed the duvet cover for the sitting room nest, to a nice new embroidered and sequinned one in white and a beige old gold, a horrible colour on its own but one which looks nice with all the 'light oak' panelling all about. I've also put a white load in to wash for clean bedding later, and started folding a red load.

I'm definitely very sore. Since I had a few naproxen left over, I've taken one of them this morning, but what I would really have liked is some basic aspirin. It's sore muscle pain from doing too much while unfit, and it's very, very different from the fluey ache of doing too much while MEish. In my experience, M.E. pain only responds to opiates for some reason. If I want to do things, I can, it just hurts. With M.E., I can want all I want, my muscles aren't going to do as I ask. Trying hard isn't enough and nor is a positive mental attitude. Whereas, by contrast, today I am getting by on bloody mindedness and drugs.

I watched television - mostly what I paid attention to was a Discovery programme from 2005 on Hogzilla, a monster hog killed in the swamps of Georgia. The whole point of the programme was whether or not Hogzilla was really 12 feet long (about 4m) and weighed a thousand pounds (450kg, give or take). Naturally they took an hour to answer this simple question, with lots of scaremongering about packs of wild boar poised to overwhelm Texas and Britain, breeding massively and probably eating children. If they're going to be supersized wild boar, then we're all doomed! Doomed! So, was it as big as claimed?

The answer after digging the corpse up, was no. It's still a very big pig, seven and a half feet (2.3 metres). It's more like Rooter and Tusker from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather than the little piggy that went whee, whee, whee all the way home. It had huge tusks and hair, but features of domestic pigs too. And now it's dead.

Today's foodstuff is pork. Pigs exist almost everywhere humans have been, and the feral ones are a menace to wildlife, eating bird eggs, animals living and dead and digging up plants with their incredibly powerful snouts. If you have feral pigs nearby, introduced animals, not native wild pigs, then it is your solemn duty to eat them.

Pork fillet is very nice sprinkled with some olive oil, with a little black pepper ground on and a sprinkle of sage and very little thyme, and baked in foil in a hot oven for about fifteen minutes.