When recovering from an illness, I recognise the beauty of crossing the apex of the complaint's parabola, and the gradual descent back towards normality.
After a bout of sickness, for instance, the flexing and unflexing of the convalescing stomach muscles is practically orgasmic, and the first mouthfuls of scrambled egg more delicious than a Michelin-starred menu.
At such a point, when I declare that I'm feeling better, what I mean is that I'm feeling better than at any other time in my life. In the little window of time marked by the overlapping of illness and complete wellness, as long as I am careful, I outlast my normal self.
Being careful means to do everything in moderation: to eat only a few mouthfuls of egg; to listen more carefully to my body than I normally would - when it demands sleep, I don't this time ignore it, and the fuzzy, kaleidoscopic dreams I have are anyway more enjoyable than the normal ones.
Not, though, that I have been ill, at least not as far as the body is concerned. Since March last year, though, the head has suffered more than it should have done, and it's only now that I feel I'm sliding down the other side of the curve.
The 'illness' in the mind has manifested itself in a lack of interest in the things I love the most - too sad to lie in bed and read, craving sleep too much to get out of bed and catch the three trains needed to travel to Barnsley for the football, visits to the gym slackening off to a total stop, to the extent that I'd feel an utter stranger in there these days.
Yet, suddenly, and inexplicably, I am stronger, and more willing. With the same attention to detail I'd give to my poor, inflamed stomach, though, I tread carefully, allowing things of beauty and pleasure to leak back into my existence only gradually, lest I overdo it and end up feeling worse than ever.
The strains of Soul-Limbo on the radio which mean another night of Ashes cricket is starting takes me back to my teenage years, huddled up in bed with an earphone (scared to death that I'd shout out when a wicket went down and blow my cover), awake all night listening to the commentary from Australia, and aware that I was pissing away any chance of success in the (apparently) crucial O-levels which were only five or six months in front of me.
Nowadays I stay up until four in the morning and turn in to work at 1pm, in no fit state to do my job but enlivened by the few hours I spent listening to the Test Match Special commentary. More tired than is good for me I may be, but I seem to float through the eight hours, the long-gone ghost of something approaching joy fluttering within.
I recognise the flutter: it is passion, it is enjoyment, it is pleasure - I want more of it, but repeat that I don't wish to push my luck. Tentatively, I'll pick up the book on the fall of the Ottomans lent to me by a colleague, and scan its pages for a few minutes; my fingers brush over the porcelain cat which resembles Danny, and I feel neither sadness nor emptiness, but a connection with him which remains unbroken.
The present slow rediscovery of enjoyment and purpose is the pleasure of pleasure, and I feel almost ecstatic. This is the stage prior to landing on the solid ground of wellness, and I tentatively wonder what it'll be like to no longer be travelling, but to have arrived.
