Under the weather.

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I didn't sleep last night. My eyes and head ached and my heart and shoulders were sore. At 4 in the morning I was worried that I had picked up one of the Moscow metro diseases that Lena had warned me about. What made me feel worse was that I went to bed full of dinner, and the heating in our flat is on so high that my room is uncomfortably hot. My chest was burning on the inside.

I didn't feel any better when I got up, but I went to school as usual. As I walked through the door of our corridor Boris Mikhailovich and Valentina Ivanovna noticed straight away that something was wrong. Boris felt my forehead and offered to take me to the poliklinika. I said I would see at lunchtime. Valentina Ivanovna asked me to describe my symptoms; painful heart, shoulders, forearms, eyes. Problems always start with the neck and I wasn't wearing a scarf. She went behind me and gave me a massage - for which she had to stand on tip-toes!

She called it osteo-something but I think I know what is wrong. My body doesn't know what is happening around it: in the last two weeks it's felt both minus 10 degrees in Yaroslavl and plus 25 on the Moscow metropolitan. There's been snow, wind, rain, fog and sunshine. I've done a lot of work, spoken a lot of Russian, stressed over play rehearsals and then performed in the play, then the stabbing, travelled away for four days and it's catching up with me. And I have probably caught something too.

After half of Lena's class my eyes were hurting even more and I asked to go home. As good as it would have been to sleep for hours it only meant that my 'to do' list could begin earlier, but the walk around town did me some good.

I took my laundry to the factory, then I posed for some more passport photos: "Shoulders straight, chin up, a bit to the left, stop smiling." While I was waiting for them to be developed I walked to the post office, which was just what my sore head didn't need. It was my first experience of a 'real' Soviet queue - a small room, a crowd of babushkas in thick boots and purple woolly hats complaining vocally and jostling for position, no room to breathe and heavy metal doors banging shut every minute. In the end sending two letters home took an hour. The act of posting envelopes through a slot has never felt like such an achievement.

Going back to the photo shop also made my head spin. It is still part of post-Communist Russian society to conceal every blemish about yourself that you can; so when I looked at my pictures I found that someone behind the scenes had airbrushed five days of stubble off my face. Why?

I went back to Tolbukhina block 21 early, put on some fresh clothes and tried to get myself healthy.

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Photos

Monastery trip.
Messages from friends when I was ill meant a lot.