The Terror Squad Returns

Before my typhoid brain disorder, I had been training quite frequently with the rag-taga-muffin group of footballers known fearfully across the district as the Terror Squad. They train at ridiculous hours of the morning, something like six am, basically the crack of dawn, before going out to farm. In recognition of me starting to turn up and maybe since I’m the only one with two boots of the same pair it was announced, following a proper meeting, with pen and paper and everything, to install me as manager. I plan to drill them in the hallowed traditions of English management. That is, play 4-4-bleedin’-2, ‘hoof it’, ‘if in doubt kick it out’, ‘go in hard’ and, if all goes pear ‘glorious’ failure is always a decent option. I envisage making the patch of stones, gravel and sheep poo that is roughly football field-shaped a bastion of invincibility. I imagine being hoisted aloft and borne through the streets of Humjibre with people chanting my name. Though avoiding a lynching should of course be my first priority.

Typhoid of the brain!?!

I’ve always liked feverish dreams. Their febrile surreality is kindof suffocating when you’re there but quite satisfying since you never normally experience dreams so strange nor remember them so vividly. To be frank, life would be a lot less coherent if every morning you were so aware of the weird cul-de-sacs of the unconscious. But typhoid dreams are something else. Jeeez-us are they odd. I’m not sure whether it was the cocktail of drugs that they’d been pumping me with, but it felt like I'd just downed a dodgy trip from some manc at Glasto and wandered into the hitherto unimagined Gym tent, i.e. sweaty and horrible. I could open and blink my eyes a few times and sure enough the 8ft beetle lying next to me would do one. But then, since my lids weighed about the same as an articulated truck, I closed them again. My noggin would promptly disregard all previous info and concentrate on the fact that those mandibles look skull sized. It was like a Nightmare on Elm St filmed by William Burroughs. All in all, a lot of fun folks.

A lot more fun than being woken at 5.30am to be jabbed by a 6 inch needle in the buttock. It all started three days earlier with a frozen voddy. Followed by another. And then another. We spent Saturday night celebrating the departure of a miner from the local gold mine. Or, in other words, using whatever flimsy excuse available to get free booze from those gits who are raping the land up the road. So, let me remind you again, free booze. At around 8 I was explaining to one miner why 7% of the revenue from Gold mining remaining in Ghanaian hands isn’t such a boss deal. By 9 I was very very drunk and wasn't being quite so polite. In the morning I had the mother of all hangovers and, though I know I’m getting old, I started to worry when three days later it had not cleared up. Then I started to black out.

At the same time as I was laid up, the yellow-gilled I was also having feverish convulsions and shivering under 5 blankets at home. Having helped me to the ozzy, she took one look at the dodgy conditions and made it back to our house where she promptly took to our bed for the next week with Malaria. I got back the next day so that we could suffer together. The system was basically that we agreed to turn over occasionally to check the other was alive. And we didn’t die, so that’s nice.