Foreign Entities

Tuesday 25th January

Day 279

I’m enveloped in a giant squashy arm chair in the office of the homeopath who listens to me with great gentleness. He relays my words that he wrote down two weeks ago from our first meeting. When I was crumbly and coughing. Did I really say that? That I felt paralysed. Poisoned with fear.

Today he prescribes me a remedy for people with cancer who experience an invasion of their body by a foreign entity. It dawns on me like a slow light, how fortunate I am. My entity is an imagined one - a disease I gave myself. I could let it devour me from the inside. Or I could give back - an unwanted gift. But I may unwrap it first to check what’s inside. Now that I am stronger - held up by so many dear and loving hands.

Walking back in the raw cold I drop my gloves. I retrace my steps to where I took them off at the cash point machine but they are gone. The third pair I’ve lost this winter. Luckily I didn’t like them anyway.

At home I cut up potato wedges and put them to simmer in vegetable stock. I mix up a salsa with organic but tasteless tomatoes and cucumber, green peppers and avocado. I smother them with rich hemp seed oil, rings of spring onion, salt and fine chopped parsley to inject some flavour. A bag of oriental salad leaves adds a peppery note. At the last minute I tip a box of raw king prawns into the potatoes which are stickily translucent, and squeeze in several cloves of garlic and scatter more parsley. When the prawns shrink to pink we can eat.

A lunch to keep all foreign entities at bay.