THE EDGE OF AN EXCLAMATION MARK

I’m drinking ginger ale out of a fancy wine glass. Don’t knock it. It’s 49p from the Co-Op and it’s nicer than Prosecco.

I know this for a fact, because next to it is a bottle of opened Prosecco, which I decorked on my birthday, and may as well have been a shapely bottle of finest malt vinegar. I stopped it up with the vacuum cork and now I’m afraid of pouring it down the sink in case it contaminates the local water supply.

So ginger ale it is. What a rockstar. It’s like I grew up and got kicked out of the Famous Five.

It’s been a bit of a strange day today. One of the symptoms of suffering with anxiety is that you do feel a bit like you’re about to be hit by a tidal wave all the time. It makes me wonder whether I actually am, and if I were, how would I ever know the difference?

I got a strange text from someone to say they were sorry that their birthday wishes were belated but they had been ‘very distracted!’ I found that exclamation mark significantly worrying - not because they’d forgotten to text me (far from it) but more because it indicates a major event, I think, and possibly one that I ought to already know about, and didn’t.

Swoosh goes the wave over the stones.

Then, I’ve always treated exclamation marks as a bit more serious than they actually are, haven’t I? “Have a nice day!“ is almost certainly more of a suggestion than a formal imperative enforced by midnight McDonald’s staff who pop round just as you’re switching your lights out, to check that indeed a nice day was had by you. Similarly I suppose, ‘We’ll help you get fit!’ isn’t meant to be a terrifying threat from the local gym with the hidden subtext: whether you like it or not. Unless you want it to be, and you do, of course.

I should probably just be thankful that my texter didn’t use two exclamation marks, or worse, the world-ending, apocalyptic level event that inspires the use of three! Then I’d have been really worried about what might have been so cataclysmically distracting.

Anyway, whatever, I do feel like I’m on the edge of something - and not just because of an exclamation mark - something sort of tough, but also that I might just need to go through. I’ve been here before, and if I’m right, then I’m grateful for the anxious warning and the opportunity it gives me to close my eyes, grit my teeth and let the whole thing wash over me.

Of course, I might just be imagining it. It could be all sorts of things going straight to my head; like this 49p ginger ale I’m swigging out of a fancy wine glass.