Phantom

You'll be glad to know that I made it into work the last two days. It was touch and go at times: there were moments in the dispiriting greyness of the morning when it was hard to grasp the importance of getting out of bed. It somehow seemed so unnecessary. I find this often happens in the early hours: your capacity for logical reasoning flies out of the window and instead you fall prey to wild and dangerous thoughts. It is as if some primitive, unfettered version of your normally upright and morally impeccable self has taken over, and all capacity for calm, rational thinking has vanished. So, typically the problems you laughed off during the day return to haunt you: the leaky guttering suddenly threatens to flood the house, your extravagant spending on Christmas presents will send you spiralling into an abyss of personal debt, and the cat, having missed her latest worming tablet, will fall prey to some debilitating tropical disease which will infect your closest family and friends. It is hard to dismiss these spectres: like nightmares, they seem somehow so real. Especially the one about the cat. Perhaps it's all down to some trivial perturbation in brain chemistry: a temporary dip in something important, a slight shift in the normal equilibrium. But that itself is rather scary: that your personality can swing so wildly for no apparent reason, at the mercy of a handful of neurotransmitter molecules here or there. It's enough to give you nightmares.