DOPAMINE DEAD DIARY NEW YEAR'S DAY January 2018. There's a chill in the air, which is a joke really because it's bloody freezing. Anybody with an ounce of sensibility would stay in bed until the central heating comes on at eight. This is all well and good if you are able-bodied but if you have legs that prefer to dance the tango you can forget it. If you can't keep still in some ways you have no choice. There's a deep blue sky above my head as I peep through the skylight of the room we have built at the back of the house. It's six o'clock in the morning and it's cold and frosty outside and not too much warmer inside as I climb out of bed shivering with my dopamine-dead brain, and the naturally cold air around me. And I'm never quite sure what makes me shake more, the cold air or my Parkinson's. Whichever one it is, I'm getting irritated because I can't do the things I want to do. I'm trying not to wake my wife who sleeps in a bedroom above. We made a conscious decision a few years ago because I was falling at night that the only sensible thing for me to do was sleep downstairs. The trouble is that Jane has such superhuman hearing that she would probably hear a pin drop. So, I try to be as quiet as possible, but trying to be quiet is like trying to ask a steam train to tiptoe down a railway track. Although I have a bedside lamp it's nowhere near bright enough for me to see which results in me bouncing around like a bumping car and bumping into everything possible. I scramble around to find some clothes before I turn into a solid block of ice. On this occasion, I've been lucky because I haven't woken Jane. This scene would actually make a good comedy sketch if it wasn't true. I'm crawling around on my hands and knees in the semi-dark with no clothes on trying to find anything I can put on to keep warm. I feel a sudden painful bump to my head. Ouch! I just manage to muffle my mouth up as I scream with pain. I have just managed to crawl into a very solid piece of wooden furniture in my bedroom. At this point, I still haven't managed to find anything to put over my freezing cold body, and my Parkinson's tremor or is hypothermia getting worse. I put my hand up to my head to assess the painful damage I have just incurred and as I do that I fall over to the side where I have just taken my hand off the floor and painfully bump into another piece of solid wooden furniture to which another but much louder ouch! comes out of my mouth which I can't stifle. Rob, is everything alright? I hear from the bedroom above me. I'm ok I say with gritted teeth as blood slowly starts to drip from my bruised nose. The only positive thing that actually happened in those last incredibly stupid few minutes was that I finally managed to find my pyjamas! And reality suddenly hits me straight in the face. Why didn't I turn the light on? There's nobody else in the room with me. Having survived the hilarious but somewhat painful episode of getting out of bed and trying to find some clothes to put on to stop myself from freezing to death I eventually get my completely bruised and scrambled head together to figure out what to do next without drawing any more unwanted attention to myself. The first and most sensible thought of the morning that had come into my Parkinson's brain was to get a hot cup of tea and a piece of toast to get that rather emaciated and rather bluish-tinted body of mine functioning to some practical level. I managed to accomplish this without any more comical situations occurring. I wheeled my rather squeaky trolley with the toast and tea on it into my new room only to find that I had forgotten to turn the electric storage heater on so it was freezing. I groan as quietly as I can and sit down on a rather cold and squeaky leather-bound Ikea chair, wondering what would happen next. I stared upwards at the skylight. It was still frosted over but at least I had managed to make for myself a hot cup of tea and a piece of warm buttered toast. Unfortunately, the tea that was once hot and the once warm toast had become completely the opposite. While I had just been contemplating my life coping with Parkinson's I had let the two things which I was so looking forward to go cold. So I sat back in my squeaky Ikea chair drinking my cold tea and trying to chew on my hard piece of toast shivering and wondering where would be the best place for us to go for a walk today.