What am I doing?

(I.e grab the nearest book, turn to page 45, the first sentence is your sex life in 2012).

The first  book I tried had something like "For a moment he had dared to hope -- what?"

So I decided that didn't count and tried another and got "Suffer the little children to come unto me" (BOOK WAS NOT THE BIBLE).

ACK. GROSS.

Final try, just now.

"But he remained very keen on natural history, especially birds, though he never really had much of a clue what to do about it."

Which seems ripe with innuendo, but discouraging.

There ought to be  A LAW against phoning a person up, earlier than they are expecting and going, "Oh, hey. Your blood test results mean you need to see the doctor but we're absolutely not going to tell you why!" Especially when you don't want to let that person see the doctor for four days and the person is not even in the same city as the doctor any more anyway.

Every surgery I've been with before has let receptionists give results over the phone -- you might need to see the doctor later to discuss what they meant, but at least in the meantime you'd know if it was the test for Bubonic Plague or the test for Mild Sniffles that was the issue. 

I had to pitch a, well, not a fit, in that I was polite and reasonable if somewhat weepy: "But I am in HASTINGS and my grandfather is DYING and thus no I cannot get to London for Friday and awful THINGS are happening to my friends and the world is full of SOUL-CRUSHING SEXISM and I cannot be doing with any of this while also not knowing whether I have RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS."

Because, alongside the coughing, my joints have been ridiculous for the last seven weeks and while the coughing is slowly but surely going away, that doesn't seem to be.


So. This took a  few miserable hours to work but eventually the doctor called me back. And anyway,
I don't have arthritis, instead the blood tests were all like "Ehh, mostly normal but inflammatory weirdness IN YOUR GUT which is not your FINGERS so that doesn't make any sense of your actual SYMPTOMS but whatever let's see if it goes away?" 

Which is pretty much how things were before, but it's preferable to a lot of things. 

There was a new Sherlock Holmes TV series that was sometimes a modern update that was not Sherlock, and sometimes was a new adaptation of the 19^th C original. I was sort of conscious that this didn't make sense, and kept noticing that the men's classic suits worked in either time period. I was always somehow there in the drama, even though I knew it was fiction -- sometimes I was a main character, sometimes a spectator who was following the characters around. Holmes looked something like a cross beween Benedict Cumberbatch and a very young Jeremy Brett, handsome but in a more understated way than either of those gentlemen, and physically slighter, too (he wasn’t quite as tall as he should have been). He lived in the ancestral Holmes home with Mycroft and his parents. The house. Was AMAZING. At this point I knew I was dreaming and I was stunned by all the detail I could see. Holmes had come into the house and drama was starting but I abandoned the characters to go and stare at the wallpaper in trippy bliss, going woooooow. “Is this my natural brain or the Citalopram,” I thought. “Who cares” I decided, promising myself I would remember the Wallpaper of Joy when I woke up, and I totally can  too. It was very old and coming away in rough patches, and the pattern was mostly silvery-blue peacocks and paisley swirls. There were also some excellent carved wooden chairs but where they were concerned I got confused over knowing it was a dream and was convinced I’d seen them in the Granada series and wasn’t it interesting this adaptation was using some of the same locations?

Holmes was required to bow to his parents whenever he entered the house, while they stood there on the stairs being all aloof and regal (and kind of mediaeval). He attempted to kiss his father’s hand, which his father refused to let him do in a  “you are such a disappointment, son” sort of way, so evidently there was Angst in his backstory. However, Holmes had a Mrs-Hudson figure who was his literal nanny. (And I hate that bloody line in the 09 film!) She had excellent O-levels in being a nanny. She said so. I liked her. I spent quite a lot of the dream just watching her pootle about and tidy things up.

Holmes seemed to be suffering from mild amnesia.  I was sort of being him as he went out secretly in the dead of night  and then was all “What am I doing? I don’t have my wallet? I don’t know why I’m here? Should I go back?” Then he/I heard someone shouting “Help, murder!” and then realisation dawned: oh yes, FIGHT CRIME. And fortunately I don’t need my wallet for that.

(He hadn’t worked out the consulting detective thing yet. He just roamed the streets like Batman looking for crimes to solve.)

The shouts turned out to be coming from a playground where a lot of kids were hanging around and someone had got stabbed. The kids were mostly black and I thought, “I don’t know if this should be the first case! It seems kind of racist”. Anyway theoretically Holmes worked out who had actually done the stabbing and I think it was a little white girl in pigtails so as to make it NOT racist, and all the rest of the kids were fine, although in practice the dream kind of lost interest in this storyline.  

Watson wasn’t in it for ages and I was actually wondering if maybe he wasn’t going to be in this adaptation, maybe this female character who was following Holmes around being impressed at how he’d sorted out the stabbing case was going to be the Watson instead. And I was thinking, “Is she a love interest/ Everyone on the internet is going to lose their minds over this, but I like her!” But I think she was from the police, so maybe she was Lestrade, if Lestrade got to be an amazingly hot woman. Anyway she was crisp and competent and blonde and had an excellent taupe shift dress. She was completely modern and stayed that way although sometimes she had a rather Victorian seeming, dark-haired young woman as a sidekick (she bore more than a passing resemblance to Jenny the housemaid from Doctor Who).

Then while Holmes and the crisp competent woman were wandering around looking for more crime to fight, Watson more or less just rolled up in the street and was all “Hi, I’m John Watson! I’m here to join your gang!” He was tall and blond and extremely good looking. But he had no moustache. So we all quasi broke character and screamed at him that he had to grow one or the fans would be furious and we would be furious and the story COULD NOT CARRY ON. He was a bit dubious but came round when I pointed out he could look like Cary Elwes in the Princess Bride (which was more or less exactly what he looked like already, only in a suit and shoulder-length hair), and he obligingly grew one in about five minutes. He was young and goofy and giggly and for a while I was all “I don’t  think I like this Watson! I liked the crisp, competent woman! I’ll be pissed off with the showrunners if she goes away now!” But she didn’t and I started finding Watson rather adorable though it was hard to see how he was ever going to be actually USEFUL.