I blame the recession.

The recession does funny things. For one, who would've thought it possible to have discounted airfares in the middle of summer? Well, there were offers galore and I decided to relieve the wife of some of her home sickness and send her to India on a month long holiday. The time for travel came and I soon found myself staring at the lonely end of an entire month home alone, bang in the middle of the British summer. Almost cruelly, the weather was perfect for going out; Wimbledon only suffered a day or so of rain. For those of you who are already squirming thinking this is just another lonely lover post that is a long-winded rant about how much I miss and love my wife, rest easy, this isn't. I did miss her like the dickens and I do love her, but I'm not one to wax lyrical about it. If I was, I'd be a poet, not a bean counter.

This is about the tremendous journey of self discovery that happened during the one month she wasn't around. The loneliness compounded a pre-existing, but unknown medical condition and made it get even worse. Thank heavens for air tight windows and relatively dust free Britain. Had this happened while I was in India, God knows what would have happened to me, I would probably have contracted deadly diseases like Malaria, Dengue and such, simply because this condition worsened.

The amazing part is I didn't need to go to a doctor either to diagnose my condition or to take corrective medication, self medication if you will. The disease began rearing its dark ugly head on the first weekend alone itself. However, it was around week two of this ordeal that I diagnosed it as Extremlitis Buttatis Lazishia (pardon my Latin). Like a bum who is speaking at his first AA meeting, I told myself, "I am butt lazy!" It came to me like an epiphany. Corrective action was extremely easy after that.

Allow me to explain. Wife and parents left on their respective 10 hour flights in different directions on a Thursday. Friday was spent slaving away at the office making up for lost time. Saturday came and I got up at a rather leisurely 10 AM, settled down in my usual place in the drawing room with a few slices of bread and steaming cuppa' and switched on the TV. I must have moved from the place around 10 hours afterwards, to go straight to bed. I got up on Sunday at a more respectable 8 AM and decided to get some work done, came to drawing room and my jaw dropped. What I saw was a semi-circle of assorted junk starting with 3 remote controls, 3 coffee cups, the plate I used to eat the day before, the X Box controller and a laptop. I kid you not; they were in a perfect semi-circle around the place I sat in. I gave myself a mental kicking and excused the action, or lack of it, as the first day of 'freedom' and that things would be back to normal, with the house remaining squeaky clean, just the way I like it. The rest of the day was uneventful, but only because I packed my bags and headed out to a friend's place for lunch and to watch India get hammered by England in the 20Twenty world cup.

The week passed reasonably uneventfully until Friday. The sink was full of dishes, the dustbin was overflowing and stinking to high heavens and I had only opened the fridge to take the milk out and replace it each time I had coffee - once a day. End result, rotting vegetables were stinking the fridge up. Said epiphany struck then. I was uncharacteristically living in squalor. I had become a lazy lump of trash. Before 7/12 happened, I enjoyed living alone, I enjoyed keeping my house very unlike a bachelor pad and I loved cooking alone and experimenting on myself. Now, I hated living alone, while I still enjoyed keeping the house clean, I had no will to do so and I hated cooking alone.

I am a man of knee-jerk reactions and hence I embarked on a zombie-like cleaning spree and chucked out 3 garbage bags of potentially fly, rodent and disease attracting junk. The remaining two weeks of wifey's absence passed off just like the good 'ol days minus the cooking.

I'm happy to report wife is back in town and all is well, the birds are singing, the sun is shining (although occasionally now 'coz when she came back, she brought a classic wet British summer back with her) and I've been cured of Extremlitis Buttatis Lazishia. For now.

Moral of the story: Want to live a happy contended life in a small corner of your world, don't live in a recession.