Nene Disease and Other Diets

So the previously-mentioned next batch of fencing didn't really materialise for me. About 5am on the morning of the second day, a querelous stomach gave way to a set of ab-crunches that weren't particularly welcome. Nene Disease had struck...

To be fair, I'd had a pretty good run up until then, infirmity-wise. Most other people have come down with an illness or injury of some sort during the first couple of months here, so it wasn't entirely unexpected, not least after Canoe and Kayak Rescues involving deliberate capsizes and the like two days previously. It was the Wednesday in between that was the curveball; why did nothing 'appear' (literally) for a whole 24 hours after the dunking in (and swallowing of) the Nene?

Maybe those bacteria just needed that nice incubation period. Suffice to say, I managed to stagger up to the sports hall for my fencing assessment and then stagger equally inelegantly back to bed, where I stayed for much of the next day and a half, dieting hard.

Thankfully, the rest was genuinely recuperative, and I've been up and about now for a few days, back to fairly near full-strength. I was even able to do my driving lesson on Saturday, although BSM have changed the car for me back again, so revert to Vauxall mode. I was a bit rusty! Test 11th January. Don't panic!

Living in community has proved to be tough - tougher than I thought - during this time. When I was at my interview back in June, I was asked how I thought I would take to living with a whole bunch of other people, and I answered that I thought it would be ok, as I done it before at university.

It was the reply I thought they wanted / needed to hear, and I've found in these eight weeks or so that a life more independent of other people was something I'd got used to (and nicely comfortable with) when in London. It's hard to go back!

I suppose that's been as big a challenge as learning how to set up a climbing rig or rescue a spinal casualty in a pool, if not bigger. Skills can be learned, repeated, tried and tried and tried until they're locked down. People don't work in the same way. They push back, respond awkwardly and have memory, all of which interacts with you in a dynamic and not always smooth manner.

So whether it's washing-up, conversational manners, learning styles or that je ne sais qua that makes it easier to be with some people rather than others, trying to look at the situation here reflectively and constructively, it may be that this is the larger life lesson that God has for me.

I fear that, at the moment, it's more exposing tendencies of impatience or isolationism in me rather than leading me to greater maturity, but, like with skill sets, it will need time to process through my head, organise in my life and become established in my heart. Not a job for me alone, then; but 'with God, all things are possible.' (Matthew 19:26)