How soon is now?

It's tuesday. And i'm not in the Brompton - i'm at Addenbrookes. Thursday night at 7 in the evening (it was aready dark, depressing eh) the nurse came in, rather shocked, and said I need to go to Cambridge as Addenbrookes decided they want to look after me and my cytomegalavirus. The only rush was they had a bed, and werent sure when they'd next have one available. So dad came to get me and took me to Camb (yes, no hospital transport stingy bastards) and arrived at 10pm.

The deal is, it's doing stuff because i'm on steroids (which as well as an anti-inflammatory for the airways, is also an immuno-supressant), which means i'm super immuno supressed at the moment. And because of this, the little virus is having a mini party. I'm coming off the roids (I'm only on them for my chest), so hopefully the virus will settle down and not do much at all once i'm off them. Drama for nothing. I keep getting told how well I look etc, which I know is because of this steroid face haha. Saying that, I DO feel super well - the IVs seem to have knocked the green gunk to some far flung outer region of the galaxy, my appetite is monstrous, i'm full of energy and to be honest, I feel fab. I'm loving it. It may be the roids, it may be the meropenem IV. It may just be me.

Mum, dad and my brother came up to see me on sunday, and we went out for a sunday lunch in Grantchester, a little village not far from the hospital. It's a beautiful little village, where the intellectual elite of Cambridge have forever flocked to, and we had lunch at a pub called the Rupert Brooke, who was a WW1 poet and lived in the town. His famous poem, 'The Soldier', has the famous line 'If I should die, think only this of me; That there's some corner of a foreign field, That is forever England", yet he wrote a funny and swooning poem about Grantchester, with lines from the poem framed in the loo, as you do. My admiration of the hamlet grew when we went to 'The Orchard' - where they serve tea and cakes in deck chairs under apple trees, bathed in glorious warm sunshine, and the river Cam sweeps by at the bottom of the fields. It was just gorgeous.

"I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur

In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . ."
I'm a city girl through and through, but the tranquility and serenity of such an idyllic place is enough to make me crave the country bumpkin life... for a short time at least. I could just spend endless afternoons there, grazing on cake and drowning in tea.

Since thursday i've been mostly sitting with my headphones on. It sounds terribly banal, yet for some reason i've been loving it. OK yes i'm confused too. But i'm going to roll with it. Ive been trying not to sing a long (i've failed). But dance, yes, i've danced. A sort of bed dance. I've also been disappearing off the ward much to the doctors dismay, as I bumped into the consultant today in the corridor on the way back to the ward who said "Ive been looking for you all weekend!" (He wanted to tell me he doesn't want me anymore and is going to send me back to the Brompton... if they have a bed.) I get back from one aimless wander, stew for a while, then i'm off again. From the gardens to the tenth floor, from the theatres to the concourse, my music fuelled explorations hold no bounds. Late night ones are the best, where it's deathly quiet and hauntingly eerie, and the corridors are mine to fill as I wish. I just have incredibly itchy feet, an explosion of impulsiveness, boundless energy, and a lust for the now - a 'now' that's just out of reach. I just want to be let out and I want to go places and do things... and well, the Smiths, as always, say it perfectly:

"Take me out tonight where there's music and there's people and they're young and alive. Take me out tonight, cause I want to see people and I want to see life. Take me out tonight, take me anywhere I don't care I don't care I don't caaaaaaaare!"