You join me mid-way through a troubled night. I am unable to sleep; probably all anxious and stuff about my first day back at work tomorrow. Which is now technically today. How perverse is my stupid, cretinous brain; worsening the anticipation of returning to work by making itself even more tired? Yeah, thanks brain! I’m sure you think this is a hilarious joke, in a kind of neurological sort of way. I hate you. Everybody hates you. In fact judging by all these self-loathing words you’re making me type, you even hate yourself (who’s laughing now then, you grey wrinkly tosser?)
I’ve just taken a couple of them Kalms tablets. Will they work? I’m not quite sure. They can be purchased at reputable chemists, which would imply they have a genuine medicinal value. But they can also be bought at those hippy emporiums which sell dehydrated fruit, obscure vitamins and cows made out of soya and tofu. That’s not to say all the shelves of yer Holland and Barretts are complete rubbish, it’s just that there is some stuff veering towards the exploitatively hairy-fairy, so you have to be a bit careful. Or at least, I need to be a bit careful. Especially being such a hypochondriac – those shops are a minefield. I’m forever discovering new supplements I never knew I needed, packed with nutrients I’ve never heard of, that I need in order to protect myself against ailments I never knew existed. When you are as vulnerable as I, it is better to arm yourself with a degree of cynicism in order to avoid becoming the next Pac Man. That’s why I insist on hard medical evidence before starting to habitually invest in some new tablet or some new ‘spirit strengthening aromatic bracken’.
Kalms are a weird one though, because they do have that one foot in the proper medical world, but I strongly suspect they are more a placebo medicine than anything else. I believe this for two main reasons:-
1) The pills taste all sugar coated and Smarties-esque before you glug them down. Medicines that work aren’t supposed to taste nice; they’re supposed to make you wince like a man anticipating a penal-administered catheterization.
2) The label on the bottle advises “If affected, do not drive or operate machinery”. This is a suitably ambiguous line. On the one hand, you think these must really work if they’re telling you not to drive after taking. But then the preceding words “if affected” make the whole thing seem dubiously uncertain. It’s almost like the even makers lack confidence in the effects of their products. And if they can’t be confident as to whether their product will work, then why the hell should I? I don’t want to hear the “if affected” bollocks, I want to be ORDERED not to drive or operate heavy machinery after taking, by threat of insurance-invalidating catastrophe and probable death.
Anyway, it is getting close to 3am now. Best stop blogging. I’ll let you know tomorrow how the Kalms did.
