I suppose I’m feeling pretty  sorry for myself at the moment. I have quite painful mouth ulcers, so I have not been sleeping well at all. The damn things make my whole body tense up in periods of intense tongue pain where my body becomes momentarily useless. The sooner my mouth has  healed, the better. Another consequence of the ulcers is that it make it nigh-on impossible to suck through a straw, so drinking anything  has become rather excruciating. I have been becoming more and more frustrated, until a few moments ago. Just now, getting rather pissed off that I couldn’t enjoy my morning coffee, I had an idea: years ago,  when I was growing  up, my mum used   to help me to drink by holding a teatowel under my chin and putting the cup up to my mouth. I drank like that throughout my childhood, but the method became redundant once I started to use straws. Obviously straws meant I could be more independent. Today,  however, straws getting nowhere, I thought it might be time to revive it.

The results, needless to say, were mixed: I managed to at last get a good quantity of coffee drunk; but Serkan quickly realised that it would be wise for him to put a pair of rubber  gloves on, and let’s just say that  it’s probably a good thing that I was about to have a shower.