Wild nights

Amazing how what you eat can have such a powerful effect on the brain.

Yesterday evening, I grilled a couple of rib-eye steaks for myself and my beloved P, and served them with some roast cauliflower. Neither of us is a huge fan of cauliflower and I doubt we'd buy it, except that we get an organic veg box delivered regularly. And the last box contained a golden cauli of a beautiful shade of yellow. Roasting makes cauliflower edible (and tasty), so I chopped away a few florets that were developing tiny black spores of mould and drizzled the rest with olive oil, crushed garlic, lemon juice and some black pepper and stuck it in the oven for 25 minutes (at 220C if you plan to try this at home).

I slept badly. I had bizarre, intense and vivid dreams and kept waking feeling disturbed. I was also overheating and drenched in sweat. I finally got up at around 5.45 am, feeling unrested and hungover, even though I'd had only 3 small glasses of wine the night before.

P was already up and reported an identical experience. The scientist in him declared that we'd probably consumed some microscopic mould spores, and that these can have a powerful neurological effect.

Probably true but I still feel lousy - disjointed and disoriented. Somehow, I've managed to complete the book, but now I'm going back to bed to try and sleep off the rest of the symptoms.

Work will have to wait.