Tra-la-la-la-la I can't hear-r-r-r-r you

"This," I reflect as the Doctor talks to me, "is deeply depressing."

The Doctor in question (there are so many of them these days) is the original one, who is far and away the maddest of them all (me included). She is lecturing me about my blood pressure. At one point she mentions impotence as a threat; I look unimpressed (why is the todger always considered the ultimate escalation when it comes to men's health?) I zone-out half-way through and ponder whether this would be more or less depressing if this was a surprise.

I am the least healthy person that I know. I don't mean this in the Charles Dickens sense, i.e. not in the consumption / swooning / limping sense that so many of his duller (but always angelic) characters appear to suffer from; in fact in the man-flu / days off work stakes I tend to do fairly well and I rarely swoon at work, however tight my corset. In general though, I disapprove of gyms, exercise, diets and just about everything which this doctor would encourage me into, while I thoroughly approve of cakes, chocolate and, for a while, cigarettes.

What really annoys me is the assumption that my lifestyle is the way it is just because I'm ignorant of the health benefits / defects of exercise / cakes (possibly together, in an exciting and messy spectacle). This leads to nagging. Currently, I'm being nagged to go to the gym.

"Yes, but I don't want to."
"Perhaps a group class?"
[Shudder] "I really don't want to."
"Swimming?"
"Doctor, how can I phrase this ...?"

It's like the whole smoking thing. Who in their right mind could have missed the fact that smoking is bad for your health? Only someone whose intellect is at a level where, let's face, the discussion could be resolved much easier by bribing them with jelly-tots rather than having a debate over the benefits to their health. Yet does this stop anyone pointing this out?

Saying "I don't want to" makes me sound like a five year old and I'm sure that in the middle of a heart-attack my opinion on these matters may well change, but I really don't want to. This is not child-like obstinacy, this is not wanting everything in life without the side-effects, this is making a choice and doing so well aware of the impact on my long-term health. I don't want to exercise for the sake of exercise and I don't want to fundamentally change my lifestyle for an extra ten years at the end of it all.

No-one seems to believe me. They lecture me anyway. I go on a diet to shut them up. I get indigestion. I can't take indigestion remedies because of my epilepsy medication (completely true - I can mix it with cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, alcohol, pretty much anything, except a Rennie - although the medical profession didn't phrase it that way ... obviously). I can't help but feel that my body is trying to tell me something.

Whiz bang wallop

I've got home from watching the fireworks.

I'm a big fan of Guy Fawkes night, partly because I always enjoyed the ambiguity of whether or not we were celebrating his being caught, or the actual act he was attempting. Political sophistication aside, there's always the whizz-bang prettiness of fireworks and besides, I'm a bit of a winter person and nothing encompasses the cosiness of the season better than fireworks night.

Over the past two or three years social anxiety has got the better of me and I've stayed in, resenting all the fun that everyone else seems to be having. But not this year.

All in all it was rather disappointing. Things always are when they're viewed with the rose-tinted lens of childhood. It's interesting watching a tradition change perceptibly in your lifetime. Bonfires are gone, the burning of political caricatures has been copyrighted by certain extremist groups. Also its fireworks night, rather than Guy Fawkes. I'd like to blame political correctness gone mad on this one, or the increasing ignorance of the young, but suspect its one of those more subtle, more complicated shifts in society (a meme, if you like that word, which personally I do not). So really it was just a bunch of flashy lights, a lot of smoke and a lot of good will - in the end it was that last point that made it worth attending.

The streets were so crowded I ended-up walking through a large chunk of East London before I had a realistic chance of getting on a bus. Standing at a bus stop in some out-of-the-way (and allegedly troubled) part of London, iPod caroling me with a deeply moody soundtrack, feeling self-assured and confident, a part of me thought, "I always wanted my life to be like this". Now that is cause for the lights in the sky.