What the hell happened?

Climbing mountains seems like bloody difficult work doesn't it? All that equipment, the bad weather, the thin air and the clothing which seems to come mostly in colours that are never found in nature and are instead invented in Japan. The calssic reason mountaineers give for clambering up various peaks is "because they're there", which as self-vindication goes is about as lode-numbingly stupid as eating flannels because they sound wet. But still they do it anyway. And if climbing common or garden mountains (though they rarely feature in commons or gardens) is hard enough, conquering Mount Everest must be, all things considering, a bit of a sticky wicket. It's nearly 30,000 ft up at the peak and at that height you can watch the in-flight movies on passing aeroplanes. And there's something even harder than hauling yourself up the tallest mountain in the world- and that's hauling yourself up the second biggest.

K2 is, in technical mountaineers' parlance, "a rum bugger". For a kick off, it's so remote that it doesn't even have a proper name- the 'K' merely refers to the Karakoram range in which it situated and the 2 is there because K1 already had a title. It's 'Masherbrum' if you're interested, which makes it sound like a real ale. Anyway, back to K2- though it could take a while to get back there as it needs a week of trecking just to get to it's base camp from the nearest village. After that, it's 28,000ft and then some to the top over all sort of crevices, spurs, ridges and other such things that Mother Nature designs primarily to kill idiots in Gore-Tex anoraks and cramp-ons. The bold statistics say that if four people make it to the top, one of them will die trying (descents are more dangerous than ascents- ask a mountaineer, they'll tell you).

Yes, all things considered, there can't be many more difficult pursuits in the world than calmbering up to the top of the 'Savage Mountain' (you can probably guess where it gets that nickname from). And yet, for the past few weeks and months, I've been doing something just as difficult, something just as uncompromisingly tough, something just as life-threateningly dangerous.

Nothing.

Doing sod all is, frankly, nails. Since I finished my PGCE course I've made an effort to get a summer job but, understandably, no-one was interested in employing me in the knowledge that come September I'd be heading back to education. Ironically enough, all Blackburn College's promises of work appear to have been empty platitudes and my return to lecturing has suffered the same fate as a quarter of the people who try to climb K2. The upshot of all this is that, since about mid-June, I've had absolutely nothing to do and it's nearly killed me.

Naturally, I started off with plenty of giddy excitement about what I'd be able to get done during these fallow months- but as Robbie Burns told us "the best laid plans of mice and men aft' gan' a'glay"; though I'm loathe to take any guidance from him as he could only make his poems scan by inventing new words. He was on to something here though as my best laid plans for this summer have been gannin' a'glay like nobody's business.

I wanted to tidy the flat and I just sat about as it got messier. I wanted to lose weight and I just sat about getting fat. I wanted to write something but I just sat around watching things someone else had written. I've elevated procrastonation to a somewhere between an artform and a science. If the chaps at CERN had put the same effort into quantum physics as I have to doing sod-all they'd not only have figured out what happened at the Big Bang, but also come up with a way to use it to paint pictures.

And when you do nothing with the same convinction and determination as I have, you tend to find yourself living on the edge. For a start off, the human brain needs stimulation and, if it doesn't get any, it'll go out and find it's own. Therefore, without the distractions of normal working life, a trickle of unguarded thoughts can easily be allowed to meander and build to the Angel Falls of acute psychosis and mental breakdown in about two weeks. Being without a job for the last three months means that I've gone way beyond this stage and can extrapolate a simple idea, like making a sandwich or a passing bus, into a carnival of nightmares in a microsecond. "Just imagine if this sandwich has e-coli in it. Or salmonella. Or SARS (remember that?). It could kill me stone dead. Or make me faint. Out of the window. Into the path of a passing bus. I'd better just have a packet of crisps. Oh dear, that Wotsit doesn't look orange enough. What if it has e-coli in it?". That's what my day has become. Like those staple science-fiction characters, usually with a beard and a croaky voice, who claim to be able to see all of space and time- that's what I've turned into. Though instead of space and time I can see all hells and terrors leading off from a single thought. I guess this must be what cabin fever is.

Then, to make things worse, I got a nosebleed. In fact, I got 3 nosebleeds in six weeks having gone 27 years without ever hanging a single one. Clearly my body had become bored of having nothing to do and decided to liven things up of it's own accord. Or the whirly-gig of horrifying images I'd conjured up from nearly dropping a glass that morning had sent my blood pressure so high that something had to give. Either way, I was worried so I spoke to the missus about it and, God bless her, she comforted me and told me it was probably nothing and that everything was going to fine but I should see the doctor just to be safe. Then she remembered that as well as being my girlfriend she's also a health care professional and pointed out, for some reason, that the nosebleeds could also be a sign of leukaemia.

You can probably be imagine how my cabin-fevered, nightmare-extrapolating, terrified and ill-distracted brain took that, can't you. Not very well- basically. I've got the doctor's appointment tomorrow where I'm not only convinced he'll tell me I've got leukaemia but also that it's a new special kind, that they're going to call 'Matt Taylor's Disease', that is extremely aggressive, excruciatingly painful and makes Ebola look like a coldsore. He'll tell me that my nosebleeds are the start of a torrent of nasal trauma that will soon develop into a regular stream of blood and then a torrent of liquified organs before my body turns itself inside out via my nostrils. He'll tell me that it's utterly incurable and so virulent it instantly transmits to everyone I simply glance at in the street. He'll tell me that it's too late, the infection has spread and that I've doomed the planet. Then he'll call me a "git".

Or maybe it won't be that bad. Maybe he'll just tell me I've got normal leukaemia and not a particularly virulent strain of 'Matt Taylor's Disease'. That won't be too bad as the survival rates for leaukaemia are now are around 9 in 10. So, essentially, it's more than twice as easy to survive as climbing K2.

And at least it'll give me something to do.