Mushroom therapy

I am having an enforced break right now, as all my scheduled work keeps being pushed further forward into the future. If I thought I was living from day to day before, I now realise that I did, indeed, have a plan after all. Not much of a plan, but a plan nevertheless.

Just after I left college I was taking dead-end little jobs in ghastly factories and building sites, and in between these I sometimes had brief spells on the dole. During these times, the weekends were the only time that I didn't feel guilty. On Saturdays and Sundays I was on the same level as everyone else, until someone asked me what I did for a living.

I am surprised - and slightly depressed - that I feel the exact same sense of guilt at not working during the week as I did all those years ago, and I look forward to weekends again for the same, furtive reasons. That is silly at my age, but it seems I didn't quite get rid of my work ethic as I thought I had.

I had a dream last night that I heard my client had commissioned a large conservation company to repair and conserve some Egyptian stone artefacts which had been stored badly on the estate and which needed immediate attention. I called up various managers and almost begged them to let me do the work as I desperately needed it (I have actually done this in the recent past).

Having checked with the client, they called back and said that I could do the job after all, so swallowing my pride I went to the estate to take them away for restoration.

What I found when I got there were several life-sized human torsos made from a stone which was so ravaged by the passage of time that I doubted if I could ever repair them at all. I hoped they would not fall apart when I picked them up, but when I went to lift them I found that I did not have the strength to get them even an inch off the ground. I had to give up. For the first time in my life I had failed at a job on all levels. Then I woke up.

As I keep telling everyone else, things can change in an instant. It would only take one well paid job on an important and valuable artefact to make me feel as though I am not, after all, on the scrap-heap, but darkness eccentuates all the little negatives.

Today I am going to drive to a large wood and go on my first mushroom hunt of the season.