THE WISE THING TO DO AND THE HYPOTHALAMUS

I drove to work. I know, I know. It's just that my legs were tired, it was going to be 30 degrees today and I have too much to do to spend the first hour of the evening walking home - as pleasant a thing as that would have been.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself what the wise thing to do is.

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And sometimes the wisest thing to do is to get out of the office kitchen when the conversation goes from: "And they had to drill holes in his back with a Black & Decker..." to "I've got a friend who's a midwife and she's told me all sorts of stories ab..."

"See ya later," I said. I can't cope with that. I'm not in the mood for the fascinated-terrified paradox today.

The wise thing to do eh? It's probably different for all of us. We all lead different lives (not all of us are squeamish, for example) and we all have different struggles. Wisdom's a bit subjective like that, I think.

It is hot today - super hot. The air is baking. I find the heat sometimes saps all the energy out of me, and my body reroutes power from the sensible bit of my brain to the bit that controls my temperature - the hypothalamus I guess. It's like a survival switch.

"Think? You don't need to think! You need to be cool. No, I mean properly cool. Get sweating."

While it relays messages to the farthest reaches of me, my brain is left desperately trying to remember how to be clever and somehow still run on empty.

Today there's not enough juice in the tank.

And, like being frugal sort of forces you to be more organised, I think having less energy to budget with forces you to be a bit more wise. The brain has to learn how to do it without the flexibility it normally has.

What would I have done today if I hadn't had a car? What if I couldn't afford one at all? Would I find a way? I don't think the hypothalamus would have liked it very much. But the context would have changed the answer to the question: what's the wise thing to do?

By the way, hypothalamus, where are you when my brain needs to go to sleep, eh? You can have all the energy you want then.