The door in the wall

Strange post migraine washed out feeling today, but certainly better than last night. Work tolerable. Our IT sluggish today. Andrew, who sits opposite me, was on the phone to the helpdesk as his computer didn't appear to be starting. The IT guy said: Hold on. Let me wave my magic wand. There must be a bit of purgatory, ringed by perpetually crashing servers, for IT smartasses.

Today finished listening to the HG Wells short stories on my iPod. The story called The Door in the Wall still my favourite. It is one of those stories that haunts you, as indeed the central character, an important politician, is haunted by a green door in a wall.

He sees the door in various locations in his life but fails to pass through it again as he did once as a small child. Through it was a magical with fantastic creatures, and playmates, and his dead mother and so on... It is a garden from which he is exiled all his life and it haunts him. What is the garden? Is it death? Or a kind of paradise? At the end of the story we are told the hero has been found dead. It is my favourite of all of the H.G. Wells stories and I read it first when I was about 12 and I will probably never forget it. It is also full of that desire to step through into something else; it is an archetype of transformation.

HG Wells uses the word "incontinent" too often.

My body covered in strange heat bumps. And so to bed.