Forty-four.

Both of you have Parkinson's disease? Oh the humanity. The body or mind. Which one rules within and without. The body is powerless and the mind is relentlessly all conquering.

Another woodpecker and a stiff corpse of a cat, then up into the woods for a last trepidicous climb to the high point on the Via Geb before straight ahead to Le Puy.

Eating must surely be a question of trial and error. The minimum error is sustenance and the maximum is death. Mushrooms ... There is not much room for a mistake there? Is knowledge of danger an inheritance in our genes? But if one individual died as a result of ingesting the wrong grub how would the collect organism know this? Is heredity fully aware? I've read certain lichen is very good eating but, even though I'm sure what I see up here is Icelandic moss or something used in beer preparation and mead construction, I dare not try incase the ergot is present and I'm sent tripping onto another plane of existence?

A drippy nose, tinnitus and a clicking in my ears has followed me every where I go for ten plus years. This morning I realized I'd slept beneath the blanket I used to shove up my nose as a toddler. Dad once saw me doing this, got some tweezers and pulled reams of it from my nasal cavity. I was trying to block up a pain with a cushioning before I could speak of the sensory pain I was clouded with, so very often, I thought it was natural - it was natural to me - and a malady we all had. Oh the innocence of youth; it is me: was it not?